Nevertheless, what is “lurking” beneath our “infamous liberalism” is a kind of conservatism that takes on an outdated and obsolete approach towards sex which the Dutch have deconstructed and undermined. And only when we get to the issue of sex can we then claim that we have reached the truth. As Foucault wrote:
“The essential point is that sex was not only a matter of sensation and pleasure, of law and taboo, but also of truth and falsehood, that the truth of sex became something fundamental, useful, or dangerous, precious or formidable: in short, that sex was constituted as a problem of truth. What needs to be situated, therefore, is not the threshold of a new rationality whose discovery was marked by Freud – or someone else – but the progressive formation (and also the transformations) of that ‘interplay of truth and sex’ which was bequeathed to us by the nineteenth century, and which we may have modified, but, lacking evidence to the contrary, have not rid ourselves of.”
The background or the backdrop behind everything that goes on in “international affairs” is an evasion of the truth as it pertains to sex. Foucault added: “Misunderstandings, avoidances, and evasions were only possible, and only had their effects, against the background of this strange endeavor: to tell the truth of sex.”
Discourse on one hand and knowledge or the truth about sex on the other hand “strayed” from one another for the longest time and continues to stray from one another. Whereas Eastern civilization possessed an ars erotica aimed at making the best out of the sexual experience, the West is all about “confessions.” As Foucault wrote: “One confesses – or is forced to confess.” He added:
“When it is not spontaneous or dictated by some internal imperative, the confession is wrung from a person by violence or threat; it is driven from its hiding place in the soul, or extracted from the body. Since the Middle Ages, torture has accompanied it like a shadow, and supported it when it could go no further: the dark twins. The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.”
Out of this confessional culture in the West and rooted in the Medieval Age, it follows that “a great archive of the pleasures of sex was gradually constituted” in the form of medicine, psychiatry, and pedagogy, as Foucault contended. On a deeper level, the point was to make sure that nothing could remain hidden and then render sex as a kind of scientific discourse rather than an art that seeks to maximize pleasure. To borrow from Foucault: “The limitless dangers that sex carried with it justified the exhaustive character of the inquisition to which it was subjected.”
And in a sense, a general discourse on sex emerged from the very top in the West not because of the scientism behind the development of such a discourse, but rather, a general discourse on sex was formulated from the very top “by virtue of the tactics of power immanent in this discourse.” The truth which is elicited from individuals in regards to sex intersects with power itself. Power wants to know everything about this subject of sexuality. One must then “define the strategies of power that are immanent in this will to knowledge” on the part of power. In essence, sexuality forms the basis of a “political economy” belonging to power which is aimed solely towards mustering the will to know everything about sex from any angle or direction.
Adam A. Azim 