The Uses of Foucault's History of Sexuality in the Visual Arts

Abstract

This is philosophy not as thought, but as theater. -a different thought, the thought of difference-a In these two passages of his essay Theatrum Philosophicum, Michel Foucault characterized what he believed to be an important achievement of Gilles Deleuze's book Difference and Repetition.' The achievement was to write a philosophical work that broke with existing forms in life and thought, and therefore was a creative act-was theater or pure event. It was an achievement to which Foucault himself continually aspired. Like his other books, the first volume of Foucault's History of Sexuality, published in 1976 (six years after the essay on Deleuze), is meant to be such a creative act. The creative act was Foucault's alternative to theory, to which he objected because he felt it was reductionist and abstract.2 As a creative act, The History of Sexuality is best understood if examined in its entirety, taking into account how its form and its content interact with each other to produce meaning. If we focus on certain parts of the book at the expense of others, we risk seriously distorting what Foucault is saying. It would be like analyzing a painting through looking at only one detail of the composition. Given his complex approach to producing meaning, and given his avoidance of theory, applying Foucault's thoughts to studies in particular disciplines is a difficult challenge. Yet so compelling is The History of Sexuality-for what it says but also, for some scholars, because it is hip or at least in wide circulation that thinkers in virtually every field of the humanities and social studies have found occasion to use it to either support their own arguments or, contrarily, in order to disagree with it. In the field of study with which I am affiliated, art history, uses of The History of Sexuality, which are plentiful, have their own history in addition to the history they share with other fields. Foucault had a strong interest in visual art, and incorporated discussions of art into several of his writings, the two best known of these being a provocative analysis of Diego Velazquez's famous painting Las Meninas, in The Order of Things, and a consideration of the relationship between words and images in Rene Magritte's paintings, in the slim volume This Is Not a Pipe. The discussion of Las Meninas, especially, prompted passionate debates among art historians from around 1980 onward about the meaning of Velazquez's painting, and, more importantly, about what art history is.3 Therefore, when art historians in England and the United States began in the mid1980s to cite The History of Sexuality--it was translated into English in 1978-there already existed within the field a tradition of taking into account Foucault's work, and his work for many art historians had come to represent an alternative to conventional art history. Thus, when I enthusiastically set out to research the present overview of the ways art historians have cited Foucault's book, I was initially surprised-and disappointed-to discover two separate but in some cases related phenomena. First, I found that fairly often art historians had misunderstood Foucault's book due in large part to their failure to comprehend the book in its totality, as a creative act. Second, I realized that some art historians whom I had expected to make fruitful positive use of the book instead attacked sections of it forcefully. For a while, these two realizations upset me, because I did not anticipate writing, nor want to write, an essay that focuses on my disagreements with the thought processes of other art historians. I am still not pleased with this predicament, but at least I can make clear from the outset that my disagreements usually are with the authors' interpretations of Foucault, and not with what they say about the visual imagery about which they write; this point will be evident in my discussions of specific art-historical writings. …