The History of Sexuality We“ Other victoria on the contrary falsehoods designed to conceal that truth ing-despite many mistakes, of course-a science of sexual but rather to bring out the"will to knowledge"that serve ity. It is these movements that I will now attempt to bring as both their support and their instrument into focus in a schematic way, bypassing as it were the repres Let there be no misunderstanding: I do not claim that sex sive hypothesis and the facts of interdiction or exclusion it as not been prohibited or barred or masked or misap invokes, and starting from certain historical facts that serve prehended since the classical age; nor do I even assert that as guidelines for research it has suffered these things any less from that period on than before. I do not maintain that the prohibition of sex is a ruse but it is a ruse to make prohibition into the basic and con stitutive element from which one would be able to write the history of what has been said concerning sex starting from the modern epoch. All these negative elements-defenses censorships, denials-which the repressive hypothesis groups together in one great central mechanism destined to y no, are doubtless only component parts that have a local and tactical role to play in a transformation into discourse a technology of power, and a will to knowledge that are far from being reducible to the former In short, I would like to disengage my analysis from the privileges generally accorded the economy of scarcity and the principles of rarefaction, to search instead for instances of discursive production(which also administer silences, to be sure), of the production of power(whic the function of prohibiting), of the propagation of knowledge (which often cause mistaken beliefs or systematic misconcep tions to circulate); I would like to write the history of these instances and their transformations. A first survey made from this viewpoint seems to indicate that since the end of the sixteenth century, the "putting into discourse of sex,"far going a process of restriction, on the contr rary has been subjected to a mechanism of increasing incitement; that the techniques of power exercised over sex have not obeyed a principle of rigorous selection, but rather one of dissemina- tion and implantation of polymorphous sexualities; and that the will to knowledge has not come to a halt in the face of a taboo that must not be lifted, but has persisted in constitut