A Genealogy of Appetite in the Sexual Sciences

Jacinthe Flore

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030394226
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030394233
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This book offers a genealogy of the medicalisation of sexual appetite in Europe and the United States from the nineteenth to twenty-first century. Histories of sexuality have predominantly focused on the emergence of sexual identities and categories of desire. They have marginalised questions of excess and lack, the appearance of a libido that dwindles or intensifies, which became a pathological object in Europe by the nineteenth century. Through a genealogical approach that draws on the writings of Michel Foucault, A Genealogy of Appetite in the Sexual Sciences examines key 'moments' in the pathologisation of sexuality and demonstrates how medical techniques assumed critical roles in shaping modern understandings of the problem of appetite. It examines how techniques of the patient case history, elixirs and devices, measurement, diagnostic manuals and pharmaceuticals were central to the medicalisation of sexual appetite. Jacinthe Flore argues that these techniques are significant for understanding how a concern with 'how much?' has transformed medical knowledge of sexuality since the nineteenth century. The questions of 'how much?', 'how often?' and 'how intense?' thus require a genealogical investigation that pays attention to the emergence of medical techniques, the transformation of forms of knowledge and their effects on the problematisations of sexual appetite.

© The Author(s) 2020

J. FloreA Genealogy of Appetite in the Sexual Scienceshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39423-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. A Cartography of Appetites

Jacinthe Flore¹

(1)

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Jacinthe Flore

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

This book offers a genealogy of the medicalisation of sexual appetite in Europe and the United States from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. Histories of sexuality have predominantly focused on the emergence of sexual identities and categories of desire. They have marginalised questions of excess and lack, the appearance of a libido that dwindles or intensifies, which became a pathological object in Europe by the nineteenth century. Through a genealogical approach that draws on the writings of Michel Foucault, A Genealogy of Appetite in the Sexual Sciences examines key “moments” in the pathologisation of sexuality and demonstrates how medical techniques assumed critical roles in shaping modern understandings of the problem of appetite. It examines how techniques of the patient case history, elixirs and devices, measurement, diagnostic manuals and pharmaceuticals were central to the medicalisation of sexual appetite. The book argues that these techniques are significant for understanding how a concern with “how much?” has transformed medical knowledge of sexuality since the nineteenth century. The questions of “how much?,” “how often?” and “how intense?” thus require a genealogical investigation that pays attention to the emergence of medical techniques, the transformation of forms of knowledge and their effects on the problematisations of sexual appetite.

The Problem of Appetite

In the opening pages of The Will to Knowledge (1978), Michel Foucault remarks that speaking about sexuality as repressed has a seductive appeal. It enables one to believe they are subverting the social and political order with the inflammatory discourse of revolution. However, The Will to Knowledge was written in part to critique ideas of sexual liberation.¹ Foucault famously refutes the hypothesis that bourgeois societies had been governed by a regime of repression until the twentieth century. Instead, he suggests that there were two different procedures for expanding knowledge on sexuality in the West. The first, scientia sexualis , had at its centre the classification of types of pathologies and the professionalisation of a field of knowledge on sexuality. The second procedure, which Foucault attributes to “China, Japan, India, Rome, [and] the Arabo-Moslem societies,” was ars erotica.² Erotic art was a creative, aesthetic and relational activity and a technique for the experiential transmission of knowledge of sensuality. Knowledge was communicated not through doctrine, but “in an esoteric manner and as the culmination of an initiation in which [the master] guides the disciple’s progress with unfailing skill and severity.”³ While the erotic arts were certainly taught and learnt, there was no established institution governing the practice. It was an embodied experience transmitting the knowledge of a somatic relation through ritual and initiation.

Foucault conceives of ars erotica in terms of “unregulated” sensuality: “truth is drawn from pleasure itself, understood as a practice and accumulated as experience.”⁴ In other words, ars erotica is irreducible to “sexuality,” and it cannot be constrained by the classificatory functions of scientia sexualis . In The Will to Knowledge , Foucault writes that the erotic arts did not conceptualise pleasure in medical, juridical or prohibitive terms. The identity of objects was less important than the experience of pleasure, an experience that could be enhanced and prolonged, augmented and stymied. If pleasure needed to be controlled, the purpose was always to intensify the experience.

The ars erotica/scientia sexualis dichotomy has had a profound influence on constructivist histories of gender and sexuality. Contemporary scholars have been particularly interested in the genealogy of scientia sexualis in the West and its continued manifestations.⁵ Criticism of Foucault’s conceptual manoeuvre has centred on the purported distinction between art and science,⁶ Foucault’s “orientalism” of the East⁷ and the question of whether Western societies ever possessed traditions akin to ars erotica.⁸ Few works, however, have questioned the purported disappearance of ars erotica from Western discourses of sexuality. Furthermore, there has been scarce commentary on how Foucault further complicates the ars erotica/scientia sexualis disjunction in The Will to Knowledge :

ars erotica did not disappear altogether from Western civilization; nor has it always been absent from the movement by which one sought to produce a science of sexuality… we must ask whether, since the nineteenth century, the scientia sexualis — under the guise of its decent positivism—has not functioned, at least to a certain extent, as an ars erotica. Perhaps this production of truth, intimidated though it was by the scientific model, multiplied, intensified, and even created its own intrinsic pleasures … We have at least invented a different kind of pleasure: pleasure in the truth of pleasure, the pleasure of knowing that truth … all this constitutes something like the errant fragments of an erotic art that is secretly transmitted by confession and the science of sex.⁹

Foucault identifies a form of ars erotica in the relentless production of truth central to scientia sexualis . He does not provide a more detailed explanation of how ars erotica might have continued to exist in Western discourses of sexuality; however, this excerpt sheds light on the importance of pleasure in Foucault’s genealogy of the science of sexuality. Therein lies the critical relevance of ars erotica for a genealogy of sexual appetite. In this book, I suggest that ars erotica, in the form of the problematisation of appetite,¹⁰ endures within the science of sexuality itself. Indeed, one of the main arguments of this book is that appetite has structured, to various degrees, the science of sexuality, from its inception to contemporary times.

In an interview conducted in 1977, Foucault acknowledges that the erotic arts were, to a certain extent, medicalised in so far as they utilised “the means (pharmaceutical or somatic) which serve to intensify pleasure.”¹¹ Medicalisation in ars erotica focused on methods for maximising pleasures, while in scientia sexualis , it deployed an apparatus of sexuality where identity became articulated with reference to objects of desire. The chapters that follow will problematise this disjuncture by demonstrating how the management of pleasure is deeply enmeshed in the science of sexuality. As histories of sexualities have demonstrated since the 1970s, object choice became the privileged focus of sexual science in the West. The medicalisation of sexuality produced a “precise categorization of a sexual behavior linked to psychology, linked to a desire.”¹²

In The Use of Pleasure (1984), Foucault argues that pleasure emerged as a problem of ethical conduct for the Ancient Greeks and Romans. It was “a matter of regimen aimed at regulating an activity that was recognized as being important for health.”¹³ The question of pleasure turned its use into an ethical task and an exercise in moderation . Prudence was advised against an excessive e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. A Cartography of Appetites
• 2. Scientia Sexualis and the Patient Case History
• 3. Elixirs of Vigour
• 4. Measuring Sex
• 5. The Diagnostic Manual and Technologies of Psychiatry
• 6. The Sexual Pharmacy
• 7. Coda
• Back Matter