Date: Wed, 4 Feb 1998 11:38:00 -0500 From: albright-AT-world.std.com (R.H. Albright) Subject: Continuing... (page 3) I saw that someone in Indonesia is joining us in this reading. I have visited your country, and think Foucault is correct to use Marxist terms like "bourgeois", because I have seen increased homogenization over the world: the disappearance of indigenous cultures, the fascination with what I would call a Pax Americana as free trade breaks down old barriers. People seem more interested in watching American soap operas, for example, than in Wayung Kulit or Gamelon. However, it was indigenous Indonesian "custom",I believe, not just imported from The West, that also had this desire for sex to be compartmentalized, "utilitarian and fertile". If we look pr-17th century, in the West, for example, we do not see sexuality unconfined, but sexuality untalked about. This is a great deal of what Foucault will be discussing: why do we TALK so much about it now? Case in point: Bill Clinton's alleged affairs with various women. What DOES that have to do with presidential duties such as dealing with Iraq, balancing our budget, helping out the International Monetary Fund so that Southeast Asia does not collapse, financially, etc.? Clinton's approval ratings, after his State of the Union address, for example, make it seem like people, despite the media and this Kenneth Starr special prosecutor's attention, do NOT care whether he has blow-jobs with whomever and whether Hillary is a lesbian. Moving on to page four, however, I have some notes where I think Foucault is saying good things: compartmentalizing "non-sanctioned" sex. Yes. And then on page five, a word which will appear over and over again: "repression" as a "fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age"... In general, interesting thoughts to ponder. Certainly people like William Blake were the exception to the rule when he would say "The nakedness of woman is..." beautiful. ("Marriage of Heaven and Hell", 1790). Blake was called a heretic, "insane", and at one point, for unclear reasons, dropped that particular illuminated poem from his repertoire, although I think it is perhaps his best. But to contrast the safe, compartmentalized, "legitimate" sex with the merely OTHER private, hedonistic or "libertine", in Foucault's words, view of someone like Sade, is simplistic. When, on page 7, he proclaims that: "Today it is sex that serves as a support for the ancient form-- so familiar and important in the West-- of preaching." I think of something like D.H. Lawrence's _Lady Chatterley's Lover_, which tried to raise sex to a sacred art. But certainly it has been sacred before "today". And certainly I do not subscribe to the view that "God is dead" or that "man is dead", because either Nietzsche or anyone else proclaims it. The fact is that the vast majority of United States citizen believe in God, of some sort of another. It is this "other" Victorian, perhaps, that does not. By page 9, Foucault is asking an intriguing question: "By what spiral did we come to affirm that sex is negated?" Again, is it? We now live in a post-1960s, AIDS-infected (and there has always been veneral disease, as people like Van Gogh and Nietzsche sadly knew) age. Is it negated, or is it warned to be dangerous? Is it vapid, abusive, or mutually fulfilling? Foucault talks about it in terms of power. But, as Lawrence and others tried to show, it is also a form of *communion* between people. More, later, as I get feedback from these initial pages----- I'm happy to just stay on these or go forward----- Wherever anyone wants to go. ---Randall Albright http://world.std.com/~albright/
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