I The incitement to discourse The seventeenth century, then, was the beginning of repression emblematic of what we call the bourgeois soci eties, an age which perhaps we still have not completely left behind. Calling sex by its name thereafter became more diff cult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery over it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, ex punge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the ds that rendered prohibitions, it seems, were afraid to name it. Without even having to pronounce the word, modern prudishness was able interplay of prohibitions that referred back to one anotha to ensure the did not spe of sex, merely through th Yet when one looks back over these last three centuries ith their continual transformations, things appear in a very diferent light: around and apropos of sex, one sees a veritable ever. It is quite possible that there was an expurgation-and bulary It indeed be true that a whole rhetoric of allusion and metaphor was codified. Without question, new rules of propriet