How it became possible to understand ourselves in the mode and manner that we do today, and  of course the sex.  They talk on politics, sexuality, and thought.  Once upon a time one was a subject to a sovereign, the sovereign who wields the twin powers of  life and death as a mirror of another celestial world.  Jesus is reported to have said, Do not fear the one who can destroy the body on earth,  but fear the one who can destroy both body and soul and hell.  What is significant here?  It is that death here in the pre-modern relation between sovereign and subject functions as  a door which one passes through in order to find essentially the same relation on the other  side.  The subject is juridical, legal, a subject to a judge and executioner who has the power  to destroy and kill you but also enslave and subjugate you.  Now again Jesus has said, To have said, Render unto Caesar's what is Caesar's,  but what is Caesar's?  Using this side of the world, Caesar has the power to seize anything, any body, any amount  of time.  Life in the pre-modern period, wracked as it is by disease and famine, can only be  wielded by the sovereign negatively.  The sovereign does not make one die, and so lets one live.  In modern times however, or rather in the modern period, things have become nearly  inverted.  In the modern period, the sovereign takes a different form and its subjects likewise  take new forms.  But what are these forms?  How do they implicate themselves?  Where did they come from?  And further how does something which I will call the discursive field determine the  rules for the generation of statements by endowing them with sense or nonsense  come about?  To answer these questions so we may know how we came to understand ourselves  today, and of course sex will be the topic of our talk today.  Today to put it very simply, the sovereign invests its power into the  management of life and no longer lets live and intervenes in it and into it.  This is not to say modernity forgets death.  Given the world war's quantity of blood, the sheer volume of blood spilled,  this would be ridiculous.  Additionally, the systematicity of the holocaust would equally make such a  claim ridiculous.  But because the sovereign has now made life its object, its objective  and its responsibility in the form of optimizing it, which is not the  same as saying to make it better, death becomes a scandal for it.  Consider the death penalty which acted as a rejoinder to offenses against  the sovereign's singular existence.  Today the people, the we, is sovereign.  So the death penalty is reserved for only the most monstrous of  beings, not humans, not those who belong to the group, but it is reserved  for those who have become singular in their action, have become excluded.  Death is the limit point of the people, the sovereign.  The sovereign is the everyone, the we, the people, the ones that  know Rembrandt is a good painter, regardless of anyone actually thinks this.  The sovereign as everyone is invested in the management of life.  It's monitoring and surveillance, it's development and death.  Being the limit of the sovereign no longer doubles as the door to which  more of the same exists, but rather provides the condition  for someone to say God and his kingdom are superfluous.  Hence God is dead.  It thus becomes possible to think of one's own death, which one must take responsibility for,  to speak of a being towards death as an Heidegger, because death is not  the property of the sovereign. Thus suicide is no longer a crime.  Not a crime against the sovereign, but a release from the pressure, constant  monotonous of the sovereign. That is why the sovereign has decriminalized it,  but at the same time medicalized it. It is now a symptom of an illness,  a category of life, one which is like those incurable illnesses,  one that is constantly threatened to reemerge out of its remission.  One must constantly self-examine if afflicted and must be analyzed for signs.  By means of this process of endless examination, one develops  the consciousness required so that the prisoner, that is the afflicted,  becomes their own watcher. The death of God was invoked,  but it has become customary to see the development of modernity  as an outgrowth of capitalism itself helped along with the work  ethic of Protestantism. And since this work ethic is  as form of subjectivity, it seems God is still with us.  However, rather than look to humanistic feelings for the explanation,  as in the cause and not the effects of transformations with respect  to the question of suicide, likewise we will look elsewhere than an ethic.  Since wouldn't it be simpler to note that life was fully allowed to breathe,  that it is allowed respite from famine and death due to  development in agriculture and medicine. But in any case,  whatever we think, the sovereign no longer deals with the legal,  juridical, political animal of Aristotle because humanity in modernity  is the animal whose politics puts all life into question.  As an easy example, consider the atomic weapon.  This putting life into question began before the atomic weapon, however.  It haunted modernity as a sovereign desire to reabsorb death until  it at last could say, I am become death. This haunting  did it not provoke the question of man as much as man provoked his own  existence. Amid and in the modern period, if such a  question was provoked, it would be in the form of the biological category  of population and species. Biology and history intersect  in the origin of species, since it has now become possible or rather imperative  to ask about their interrelation.  It was in the name of the newly christened life, too, that political struggles  were waged. This life, as opposed to the  king of the poor, the king at the end of the age, or the return  in the cycles of time to a great golden age, is what it's hoped for.  Life as basic needs, one's concrete essence.  On the horizon of possibilities, that  was what was fought for. Life as liberty, property, happiness.  Thus, sex as the axis of the individual body,  this life and the collective health of the population became  the battleground for politics. Surveillance, orderings of living  spaces, medical and psychological examinations and discourse.  All of this manifests in order to do what? The answer is  well known, to suppress sex, but is that true?  Undoubtedly, sex becomes the reservoir from which behavior flows, becomes the secret  of dreams, it even becomes the reason for jokes and slips of the tongue as it  was for Freud. It is the surplus in lack in reality,  but there is nothing beyond the surplus or lack, so it becomes everything.  It is traced back to the earliest years of childhood. Its  precariousness in children becomes a national emergency in the sense that their  oneness becomes reflective on the future health of society.  Hysteria in women becomes pinpointed by medicine and psychiatry  because it is now understood that women are  to be the suppliers of the folk. The  caretakers of the house, the children and thus the future of society  to manage life rather than to commit  to death. This is the essential shift. In the formal order of things  power spoke through blood because blood had a symbolic function.  Systems of alliances were done on the basis of this symbolism.  One died for one's own blood, one paid in blood, one was  either of or not of another's blood. If power spoke through blood and if it  did so every day, then today in the modern period sex is speaking  every day, being spoken of and most importantly perhaps being spoken  to. And naturally, all through naturally, we know what we must do.  We must liberate ourselves, but how? If not through the fusion of Marxism  and psychoanalysis. Should we not first thank Freud for finally  undoing the seal of repression of silence and censorship  of absolute denial of sex existence? Did Freud  not uncover the truth after centuries of burial? Should we  not conceive the problem? Should we not ask the question in the following manner?  Why were we so long repressed? Should our answer not be the Marxist  one? Namely that capitalism imposed the heterosexual couple  on their procreative capacity as the only allowable form  of relation. And this, because capitalism exists to exploit the world classes  requires as a basic minimum the replenishment of worker stock  neither more nor nothing less.  There were allowable exceptions of course, but only in certain areas of  profit such as in the brothels. Even further, would it not be an instance  of critical thought to suspect Freud of not going far enough,  or even of a certain complicity with the repressive  apparatus? And additionally, the new sexologists  have either intermingled into  the repressive apparatus too quickly, or have even directly  come from it. But there is a naive and almost blasphemous question  to ask in response to all this. Are we in fact  repressed, and were we ever? But we must  have been, and must still be. Surely Disney, the NFL, Apple  and Coca-Cola are making great strides, or perhaps not  on the front of sexual liberation. Whether we identify  with the brands or suspect they are just going along with the ride, there is a consciousness that  many are today joined together to fight for sexual liberation.  We do this in part by speaking of sex without shame.  Even proud, because after all, everyone knows that  enlightenment regarding sex is where revolution and pleasure intersect.  Are this a strange civilization?  One can get a doctorate and be paid to listen to someone talk about their  sexual issues. Friends, Romans,  psychoanalysts, lend me your ears. I have something interesting to say  about sex. I will even pay you to listen.  Do we not make sex our principle of individuation with respect to our soul?  That which makes us, us, sex is  a secret, and a hope, and on the basis  of uncovering it and speaking it many dreams, many  forms of subjectivity are made possible. The subject  who cherishes the repressive order, I'm sorry  the subject who chastises the repressive order. The one who  spots its hypocrisies and delivers a sermon concerning it. The one who  dreams of a new freedom with respect to sex  who writes songs or develops media to transgress the order of repression.  However, what is open to our view does not come out of the Marxist psychoanalytic  handshake. What is excluded today is the enduring attitude  of resentment of the present order no matter how  queer it has become. It is not yet liberated  enough. We spake agnazium  of how sex is not yet been talked of enough, otherwise we would  feel liberated, as long as we must continue to speak about it.  Because after everything we have done in its name has not yet  given us the pleasure  of liberation, it follows that we have not yet done it justice.  That we have not yet spoken the truth concerning it, our truth concerning it.  While it may well have been true that sex  was considered a sin, which is not to say it was condemned, but only that it functioned  in an economy of penance as its chief element, what is manifestly  evident is that today one must be made to feel  that they have sinned against sex. In order for it to be a fact  that sexual oppression has existed and continues to exist as part of the modern  experience, it must also be the case that power expresses its function in the mode of repression,  denial, and censorship. And since so the story goes,  it manifestly does just that. Liberation must come through speaking  openly and defiantly about sex, even of freeing the nipple.  Must we not join with those who put into the words of Moses  let my people fuck? One must account  for how this narrative of oppression functions to  free us from the consciousness of sex as sin, only by installing  a consciousness of having sinned against sex for having once thought it a sin.  We can't simply flagellate ourselves with a sin  before proceeding on to our critique.  Some clarificatory points need to be made. The counter thesis  is not that sexuality was historically free, whatever that would mean.  One that power is tolerant was neither  than neither. Is it repressive?  But rather to explain why we constitute ourselves as beings whose persons  is tied to a sexuality, or if you prefer a persona  is also not about saying yay or nay to sex, or  permissiveness, or prohibitions, but to account for why we feel  this inessential  injunction to speak and think about it. To say that it is simply our nature  that we are beyond all other modalities, fundamentally sexual beings  is to beg the question. There may have well been  an expurgation of vocabulary from everyday discourse.  A shift  in illusion and rhetoric concerning sex  in the beginning of the modern period. Roughly what is called the Victorian  age. However, does it immediately follow that power's primary function is  censorship and repression? Or does it mean that in order to extend the sovereign's power  first the language needed to be destroyed in order to be rebuilt in a new form?  Let us take an example from  Paul O'Signori in the Institution and Instructions for the Penitent.  He says, sins against purity are like  pitch because they are handled even when they are handled  sorry, they are like pitch because however they are handled  even if thrown far from oneself it clings  and sticks nonetheless and therefore soils  these sins against purity are not explicitly named so it seems that  perhaps the attitude is one of censorship. However  it goes on to say that one must examine  every thought, every desire, act of will  and imagination in detail. The putting into language of sex becomes  an imperative as the confession of the flesh. The flesh being  the ethical substance, substance in Aristotle's sense  becomes scrutinized more and more intensely. A daydream  and imagination not quickly dispelled the complicity of the bodily  mechanics and the minds consent  that all this and more  becomes put under a microscope.  Sex was no longer  sorry, sex was no longer named  and yet discourse proliferated about it because  it became obligatory for it. The same Paul O'Signori says, you don't think that  in a so sensitive and perilous matter as this, there is anything that is  without significance. He even  says to examine one's dreams to see if one  did not give them one's consent, the herald of  Freud. Anything that might have an affinity  with sex is becoming sexual and is becoming put into language.  If aesthetic morality made this standard for monks in the 17th century  it became even more the rule for everyone later.  Notice the complicity between the post  pastoral and the scandalous literature of the Marquis de Sade  from whom we got the name Sadism, or the term  Sadism, and the anonymous culture and the writer  of my sexual life. From de Sade's work 120 days of Sodom  your narrations must be discovered  with the most numerous and searching details, the precise  way, manner, and extent to what we may  so that we may judge how the passion you describe relates to human character  is determined by your willingness to disguise no circumstance.  And at the end of the 19th century the anonymous author of  My Secret Life says, I recovered the facts  just as they happened so far as I am able to recall them. This man  who had 11 volumes published says curiously, this is all that I  can do. Since as he says later, a secret life  must not leave out anything, there is nothing to be ashamed of.  One can never know enough about human nature. So how is one  to know about human nature? For this author it is to put  into language 11 volumes of sexuality.  Just true, these authors, the pastoral and the libertines  wrote four different reasons about sex. The pastoral for the  mastery of and detachment from sexuality, yes, but also the singular pleasure of the return  to the warm embrace of God after suffering the passion of temptation and the resistance  to it. Libertines who wrote for their pleasure alone, allegedly,  who were the subject of scandal, yet both wrote to transform  their relation to sexuality, unless they wrote concerning it.  But there were not only ecclesiastical  and scandalous literatures, there were also scientific discourses.  The medical treatise which one should expect to not stumble  before the facts begins thus. The darkness that envelopes  these facts writes Auguste Tardoux, the shame  and disgust they inspire have always repelled  have always repelled the observer's gaze.  For a long time  I hesitated to introduce the bothersome picture  this study supplies.  And yet Tardoux does it anyway because there is a silent  imperative demand, by reason no doubt, here  to articulate sex.  To articulate publicly for the greater good, for public good  and to begin the optimization of health through  science. Sex was not so much judged as it was  in  sex was not so much judged as it was charged  because I cannot read my own writing. For the state  John von Just explains most consolidate and  augment that is optimize the power of the republic and how does it do this  except through its critiques.  And how does it do this except through its citizens, their faculties  so that the police must concern themselves with these faculties  and make them serve the public welfare. It will obtain  this result he writes further only through the knowledge they have of these different  assets. Let's put emphasis here on knowledge.  It is not a stretch then to say there was a will to knowledge concerning  sexuality. Sex is not police through repression through the provision  of useful and from a proliferation of  useful discourses concerning it. Population had always been a concern of the  state for it always required citizens. Now however the future of society  depended not only on our legal status as subjects of obedience  but also their sexuality and its use.  This result began moral religious  and fiscal measures not to mention scientific means  and they began to transform the sexual conduct of the couples. Racism of course  existed before this shift but its modern form was born with the emphasis  on populations, peoples, the volk, blood, yes but blood without a name  the blood of the demos, the white race  individuals who are being despised by kings or kings.  But would someone please think of the children.  Freud's three studies on our  psychologist little Hans for  thought to liberate us from silence and repression. Now it is true  that adults and children, teachers and  peoples sex no longer was explicitly talked about  between adults and children, teachers and future people sex no longer was explicitly talked about.  Gone were the days when Erasmus advised his people  on the good choice of prostitute. Silence however is not the same  thing as the opposite of speech. It is an element of  speech. It is strategically placed for example the silent treatment.  As it is this silence was again necessary  a clearing of ground so that the other discourses could take its place  this ground sprouted new forms of discourse  medicine with its nervous disorders. Psychiatry which sought  the cause of mental illness first in excesses then  inonism, then frustration, then  fronds against procreation while also annexing all perversions to itself  and the juridical system brought in its jurisdiction over  minor indecencies. Gone were the days  of diogenes in the town square.  Couples, parents and children, dangerous and endangered in  adolescence all were made to be on high alert to the new danger of sex  protection, separation  diagnoses, reports, therapeutic interventions could be brought  into being. All the new discoveries and practices  which intensified the awareness of sex as a danger rather than  silencing it provided further  incentives to talk about it. Silence was placed strategically so that sex  could be talked about and not ad nauseam in places of authority  or the middle ages had spoken singularly of the flesh  now a multiplicity of discourses arose.  Demography, biology, medicine, psychiatry,  psychology, ethics, pedagogy and political science all had something to say  about the sex  about sex. Obliterate was the simple formula  of the flesh transgression confession. Now  there were numerous ways to retranscribe the  problematical real of sexuality.  Thus the phenomenon supposedly historically condemned  of an omni confined to  thus the phenomenon supposedly historically confined  to an omni-prohibition sex is rather the manner in which  as  Mao would say, yeah I got it  as Mao would say a thousand schools on sexuality, let a thousand schools on sexuality  bloom. Now new ways of speaking about it  for inducing it to speak about itself, for listening, recording and monitoring  translating and describing it emerged  sexuality is not to be found at the limit of discourse or in between the lines  of such notions that of limit or minute is always  oh the removal of some obstacle  in order to say the truth about  sex as if there were some secret to it. But this is precisely  what needs to be challenged with a dose of fresh air and laughter.  Let us realize the game not at any place  with respect to sex. Sex appears as a secret thing which must be discovered  all the more because it has been rebuked  to silence. We are solemn in grave  but given its difficulty and necessary it is also dangerous  and necessary to divulge. It is modernity's  golden banana par excellence having all the errors  and trappings of something most desired. The will to truth, sexuality  is truth and the will to knowledge discourse concerning it is a link  not easily broken. Central Link was given to us by Christianity  between sexuality and enigma. Sexuality always hiding  in insidious presence at specter  and a voice so quiet and disguised that one  is deaf to it without learning its secrets.  Modernity makes sex the secret par excellence  while speaking of it as an infant item generating the  endless hermeneutics of sex since the secret is  limitlessly inexhaustible.  Hermaphroditism, hermaphroditism of the body was once  criminal since what confounds the law these categories  must be condemned. In modernity such confoundings are  handed over to medicine and other sciences of the human being.  From the end of the 18th century to today a new  taxonomic grid upon sexuality  caused strange actors to emerge. They who were  locked up but not always in a prison suffered from illnesses which bordered  on vice and crime. They were children wise beyond their years, ambiguous  boys, cruel maniacal husbands, those with bizarre impulses, numberless perverts  diagnosed with degenerations  of the genetic instinct, physical imbalances.  Here in the instinctual  here and there instinctual disturbances  and underdevelopments began to emerge and medicine was there to manage them.  As knowledge began to out all the joints  as knowledge began to cut at the joints of sexuality  to separate out various forms of sexuality it did so in order to  outfit them, to reinforce them, to include them within an economy  of production. This is why modern modern society  is directly and quite literally perverse. For example,  educators and doctors once interested in combating oninism in  children like it was a plague to eradicate.  It may be different only very recently in that they now promote a healthy  relationship to oninism presenting times  and frequencies for it. The essential form of the  sovereign has not changed by analogy if the sovereign demands a curbing  population or increase in it is still interested in the management of life.  Consequently in response to this plague teachers and  parents have been taught an entire  language of science to look out for to be on constant alert  for. Today it could be development of a well  adjusted sexuality. In such  scenarios the failure is part of the decision and design of the process.  The evil to be eliminated is a prompt by which perverse power extends.  The incarnation of perversion and a new  specter of individuals  I'm never going to get through this. The incarnation of  perversion and a new speciation of individuals takes  out of me for example. Always a forbidden act to be sure since it was against the  laws inherent in things. We are still dealing with a pre-modern  subject in such a relation. For a modern subject so to me becomes an entire  persona. A past. A childhood. A type and form of life.  A distinct morphology. Anatomy. Possibly a different  physiology. They even say gays have higher IQs nowadays.  Not a soul incarnated in a sexualized body  but a hermaphroditism of the soul incarnated in a truth telling body  admitting signs constantly of this truth. What was for  co-rights? A temporary aberration of nature has now become  a species. The medical and psychiatric  examinations, endless as they were,  were instances of making visible to factual. The family too had its own dynamics.  The pleasure in being the one who asks questions, monitors, watches out for  and finds out or brings to light. And at the other end  finds pleasure in resisting or showing off. In hiding and being found  a game of hide and seek and scandalizing and making a travesty of  capture and seduction between all the further taboo  capture and seduction between all the  familiar taboos lives not lines not  capture and seduction between all the familiar taboo lines  not boundaries to be crossed but revolving spirals of power and  pleasure. Rather than see pleasure as the counter to  power that which resisted it is inculcated  by it. We have thus  seen how the utilitarian management of life, the Darwinist response  to the intersection of biology and  history. The narrative of sexual oppression and the psychoanalytic Marxist handshake  the emergence of a new form of racism which had  disastrous results in the 20th century and the transition  between pre-modern and modern society. That however  was a general overview from a global perspective and I'd like to move on  to specifically arguing how it is that the subject  of modernity comes to be. Before doing this however a brief  word on some general principles which will outline and consolidate  the former information and correlate it with the latter.