On sexuality and the self – Foucault en Sennett in LRB in 1981:

Sennett:

“I myself did not set out to study sexuality at all. I set out to study the history of solitude in modern society. I wanted to understand the evolution of experiences of solitude because it seemed to be a good way to study a vast but amorphous subject, the development of subjectivity in modern culture. How has the concept of ‘I’ changed in the last two centuries?”

(…)

“Part of the modern technology of the self consists in using bodily desire to measure whether or not a person is being truthful. ‘Do you really mean it?’ ‘Are you being honest with yourself?’ These are questions people have come to answer through trying to chart what the body desires: if your body doesn’t desire it, then you aren’t being honest with yourself. Subjectivity has become yoked to sexuality: the truth of subjective self-consciousness is conceived in terms of measured bodily stimulation. The notion in American speech of asking whether ‘you really feel what I am saying,’ that idea of using the word ‘feeling’ as a measure of truth between people, is a consequence of this yoking of sexuality to subjectivity, and carries with it the connotation that if something isn’t felt it isn’t true.”

(…)

“There is a direct relationship between solitude and sociability: unless a human being can be comfortable alone, he or she cannot be comfortable with others.”

(…)

Foucault:

“Now, what about truth as a duty in our Christian societies? As everybody knows, Christianity is a confession. This means that Christianity belongs to a very special type of religion – those which impose obligations of truth on those who practise them. Such obligations in Christianity are numerous. For instance, there is the obligation to hold as truth a set of propositions which constitute dogma, the obligation to hold certain books as a permanent source of truth and obligations to accept the decisions of certain authorities in matters of truth. But Christianity requires another form of truth obligation. Everyone in Christianity has the duty to explore who he is, what is happening within himself, the faults he may have committed, the temptations to which he is exposed. Moreover everyone is obliged to tell these things to other people, and hence to bear witness against himself.”

(…)

“Secondly, one has to get free from any attachment to this self, not because the self is an illusion, but because the self is much too real.”

Sennett:

“Desire was thought to be normally experienced as a secret. That is, if desire belongs to the body in and of itself, it’s something prior to desiring anyone else, and is strongest when kept a secret. This sexual desire belongs to the individual: it is satisfied rather than created by the attraction to another human being. The problem for the doctor or teacher was to find out about this desire, since it was hidden within the individual. We are all aware of the bizarre symptoms Victorian medicine had to invent for the masturbator: hair suddenly growing on the palms of the masturbating hand, the tongue swelling up, the eyes distending, or, in the case of women, the radically distended clitoris. Victorian doctors had a reason for inventing these symptoms: since sexual desire itself was secret, hidden within the individual, the doctor or other authority could get control over the individual only by creating symptoms which would give sexual desire away.”

(…)

“There is a basic antagonism between fantasy, and social order.”

(…)

“Everyone makes love,’ said one of Krafft-Ebings’s subjects, ‘but each person is thinking of something special when they do.’ It is in point of fact difficult, if not impossible, to deduce from private sexual desires a person’s capacity for loyalty, courage, or truthfulness with others. That these thoughts, these desires, these fantasies should be seen as privileged, as of importance in defining the whole of an individual personality, is what creates such a mystery about individual difference. The privilege accorded to desire is a Christian heritage. We are today far from being able to cope with what we have inherited.”

Read the complete exchange here.

The modern technology of the self is a technology of sexuality.

The fantasy and the social order are natural enemies.

Perhaps is what we call populism just another sexual fantasy that must be by nature a danger to the social order.

The so-called disclosure of desire wasn’t a solution at all, the idea that a forced or not so forced confession would be liberating turned out to be just another example of man bearing witness against himself.

That’s proof of existence: we bear witness against ourselves; therefore we exist.