Pleasure and the Economy of the Subject

Abstract

In first volume of his work on sexuality, Foucault has proposed that sexuality could be studied as a 'political economy' of a will to knowledge (73). Hopefully, such an analysis would account for deployment of pleasure across a differential matrix of social sites without relying on what he perceives as central fallacy in prior theories dealing with relationship between and pleasure: what he terms the repressive hypothesis. Foucault's critique of repressive hypothesis is a corollary of his antihumanism, which, in turn, is a crucial feature of anti-imperialist and antitotalitarian politics that motivates his work. Foucault needs to free pleasure from any notion of a repressed nature that might be liberated by an external and totalizing force. This brings him instead to see pleasure as the positive product of power (Power/Knowledge 120). This essay will not attempt to judge Foucault's success in balancing his political responsibilities with determinism that seems to accompany abandonment of politically useful notion of repression, nor will it look at specific strategies of resistance to Foucault employs, which range from pro-