The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1

Publication history

Three volumes of The History of Sexuality were published before Foucault's death in 1984. The first volume, The Will to Knowledge (previously known as An Introduction in English—Histoire de la sexualité, 1: la volonté de savoir in French) was published in France in 1976, and translated in 1977, focusing primarily on the last two centuries, and the functioning of sexuality as an analytics of power related to the emergence of a science of sexuality, and the emergence of biopower in the West. The work was a further development of the account of the interaction of knowledge and power Foucault provided in Discipline and Punish (1975).[14]

According to Arnold Davidson, the back cover of the first volume announced that there would be five forthcoming volumes: Volume 2, The Flesh and the Body, would "concern the prehistory of our modern experience of sexuality, concentrating on the problematization of sex in early Christianity"; Volume 3, The Children's Crusade, would discuss "the sexuality of children, especially the problem of childhood masturbation"; Volume 4, Woman, Mother, Hysteric, would discuss "the specific ways in which sexuality had been invested in the female body"; Volume 5, Perverts, was "planned to investigate exactly what the title named"; and Volume 6, Population and Races, was to examine "the way in which treatises, both theoretical and practical, on the topics of population and race were linked to the history" of "biopolitics." Foucault subsequently abandoned this plan, with only the second volume of this original plan emerging as posthumous volume four.[15]

The second two volumes, The Use of Pleasure (Histoire de la sexualité, II: l'usage des plaisirs) and The Care of the Self (Histoire de la sexualité, III: le souci de soi) dealt with the role of sex in Greek and Roman antiquity. The latter volume deals considerably with the ancient technological development of the hypomnema which was used to establish a permanent relationship to oneself. Both were published in 1984, the year of Foucault's death, the second volume being translated in 1985, and the third in 1986.

The fourth volume, Confessions of the Flesh was published posthumously in 2018. Emerging from the planned second volume of his original scheme for the Histoire, the theme of the book were developed in his lecture series from 1979 to 1980 where Foucault extended his analysis of government and biopolitics to its "...wider sense of techniques and procedures designed to direct the behaviour of men", which involved a new consideration of the "...examination of conscience" and confession in early Christian literature. These themes of early Christian literature seemed to dominate Foucault's work, alongside his study of Greek and Roman literature, until the end of his life. The planned fourth volume of The History of Sexuality was accordingly entitled Confessions of the Flesh (Les aveux de la chair), addressing Christianity.

Foucault's death in 1984 left the work incomplete, and the publication was delayed due to the restrictions of Foucault's estate.[16] The volume was almost finished at the time of his death, and a copy was held in the Foucault archive. The work first became available to researchers when both handwritten and typed manuscripts of Confessions of the Flesh were sold by Daniel Defert, Foucault's partner, to the National Library of France in 2013 as part of the Foucault archive. Foucault's family decided that as the material was already partially accessible, it should be published for everyone to read.[17] It was edited and finally published in February 2018,[18] despite Foucault explicitly disallowing posthumous publication of his works,[19] and was published in English for the first time by Penguin in Feb 2021, translated by Robert Hurley who had translated Penguin's earlier volumes in the series, and was released straight into their Penguin Classics imprint.


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