Foucault: Why Have We Made Sex Our God?

I just finished vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality – my first Foucault book, huzzah! A personal reflection: I am convinced of the good intentions of the furor over sexual purity that was prevalent in two of the three main discourses of my childhood and adolescence (home and church – definitely not public school). However, I am coming to suspect that a hidden motivation of the warnings against sexual immorality was a concession to the lordship of sexuality; an implicit (sometimes not so) assumption that sex holds the key to my being, is the secret heart of my life, the prime mover of my existence. Whether the shoe fits or not, the fact is that Christians can never except this. However fine, important, and even dangerous as sex may be, it is not Lord, it does not define us, and it is not a priveledged mode of connection with others. Jesus is Lord, Jesus defines us, and the sharing in his supper is the only priveledged mode of connection with other human beings. God forbid I try to use Foucault to make a theological argument (I do mean that), but this quote is well worth reading nonetheless.

Hence the fact that over the centuries it has become more important than our soul, more important almost than our life; and so it is that all the world’s enigmas appear frivolous to us compared to this secret, minuscule in each of us, but of a density that makes it more serious than any other. The Faustian pact, whose temptation has been instilled in us by the deployment of sexuality, is now as follows: to exchange life in its entirety for sex itself, for the truth and the sovereignty of sex. Sex is worth dying for. It is in this (strictly historical) sense that sex is indeed imbued with the death instinct. When a long while ago the West discovered love, it bestowed on it a value high enough to make death acceptable; nowadays it is sex that claims this equivalence, the highest of all. And while the deployment of sexuality permits the techniques of power to invest life, the ficticious point of sex, itself marked by that deployment, exerts enough charm on everyone for them to accept hearing the grumble of death within it.

By creating the imaginary element that is “sex,” the deployment of sexuality established one of its most essential internal operating principles: the desire for sex – the desire to have it, to have access to it, to discover it, to liverate it, to articulate it in discourse, to formulate it in truth. It constituted “sex” itself as something desirable. And it is this desirability of sex that attaches each one of us to the injunction to know it, to reveal its law and its power; it is this desirability that makes us think we are affirming the rights of our sex against all power, when in fact we are fastened to the deployment of sexuality that has lifted up from deep within us a sort of mirage in which we think we see ourselves reflected—the dark shimmer of sex. (156-7)