Sex and Truth: Foucault's History of Sexuality as History of Truth

Abstract

The question of truth stands at the core of Foucault's philosophy. He was interested in how different pieces of knowledge had attained truth status over the course of history, how power had legitimated itself through truth, how people had shaped themselves via producing truth. The multivolume History of Sexuality, conceived in the 1970s, was originally intended as a study of the relationship between sex and truth. This project that spread over almost ten years constituted Foucault's main laboratory of the history of truth, where he could test new concepts, ideas, and materials. The project went through a very important transformation in time: while in 1970s, Foucault was primarily interested in the relations between truth, sex and power, in the 1980s he mainly studies the relations between truth, sex and the subject. Looking back at the evolution of his thought in the second volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault admits to realising that all of his work has in fact been dealing with the history of truth: “I seem to have gained a better perspective on the way I worked – gropingly, and by means of different or successive fragments – on this project, whose goal is a history of truth.”