cept it in its reality is so alien to a historical sequence that has gone unbroken for a thousand years now, and so inimical chooses to understand this process, will appear either as a to the intrinsic mechanisms of power, that it is bound to new episode in the lessening of prohibitions, or as a more make little headway for a long time before succeeding in its devious and discreet form of power ld like to oppose to the repressive One can raise three serious doubts concerning what I shall pothesis are aimed less at showing it to be mistaken than at term the "repressive hypothesis. First doubt: Is sexual re- putting it back within a general economy of discourses on sex pression truly an established historical fact? Is what first n modern societies since the seventeenth century. Why has sexuality been so widely discussed, and what has been said comes into view--and consequently permits one to advance an initial hypothesis--really the accentuation or even the about it? What were the effects of power generated by what was said? What are the links between these discourses. these establishment of a regime of sexual repression beginning in the seventeenth century? This is a properly historical ques effects of power, and the pleasures that were invested by tion. Second doubt: Do the workings of power, and in partic- them? What knowledge(savoir)was formed as a result of this ular those mechanisms that are brought into play in societies nkage? The object, in short, is to define the regime of power- such as ours, really belong primarily to the category of re- knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human pression? Are prohibition, censorship, and denial truly the sexuality in our part of the world. The central issue, then(at least in the first instance), is not to determine whether one forms through which power is exercised in a general way, if not in every society, most certainly in our own? This is a ays yes or no to sex, whether one formulates prohibitions or historico-theoretical question. A third and final doubt: Did permissions, whether one asserts its importance or denies its the critical discourse that addresses itself to repression come effects,or whether one refines the words one uses to designate to act as a roadblock to a power mechanism that had ope it; but to account for the fact that it is spoken about, to rated unchallenged up to that point, or is it not in fact part discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints of the same historical network as the thing it denounces(and rom which they speak, the institutions which prompt people doubtless misrepresents) by calling it"repression"? Was to speak about it and which store and distribute the things there really a historical rupture between the age of repression that are said. What is at issue, briefly, is the over-all"discur- and the critical analysis of repression? This is a historico- sive fact, "the way in which sex is"put into discourse political question. My purpose in introducing these three Hence, too, my main concern will be to locate the forms of doubts is not merely to construct counterarguments that are ower,the channels it takes, and the discourses it permeates symmetrical and contrary to those outlined above; it is not order to reach the most tenuous and individual modes of a matter of saying that sexuality, far from being repressed in behavior, the paths that give it access to the rare or scarcely capitalist and bourgeois societies, has on the contrary benefit perceivable forms of desire, how it penetrates and controls veryday pleasure-all this entailing effects that may be ted from a regime of unchanging liberty; nor is it a matter those of refusal, blockage, and invalidation, but also incite of saying that power in societies such as ours is more tolerant than repressive, and that the critique of repression, while it ment and intensification: in short, the"polymorphous tech ay give itself airs of a rupture with the past, actually forms niques of power. And finally, the essential aim will not be part of a much older process and, depending on how one to determine whether these discursive productions and these effects of power lead one to formulate the truth about sex, or