The History of Sexuality

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The History of Sexuality is the title of a three-volume series of books by French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault written in 1976. Originally published in French, the volumes are individually titled The Will to Knowledge (Histoire de la sexualité, 1: la volonte de savoir), The Use of Pleasure (Histoire de la sexualite, II: l'usage des plaisirs), and The Care of the Self (Histoire de la sexualité, III: le souci de soi).

The book seems to be influenced, among other works, by Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents and Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization.

Three volumes of The History of Sexuality were published before Foucault's death in 1984. The first and most referenced volume, The Will to Knowledge (previously known as An Introduction in English - Histoire de la sexualité, 1: la volonte 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 a regime of power and related to the emergence of biopower and biopolitics. In this volume he attacks the "repressive hypothesis," the very widespread belief that we have, particularly since the nineteenth century, "repressed" our natural sexual drives and (more importantly) discourse on them.

The second two volumes, The Use of Pleasure (Histoire de la sexualite, 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.

Some believe that a fourth volume, dealing with sexuality during the Christian era, was nearing completion at the time of Foucault's death in 1984, but this has been denied by Arnold Davidson, scholar and friend of Foucault, and any solid evidence to suggest the fourth volume's existence is yet to surface.