Foucault vs. Freud

In this episode, I explain Foucault's criticism of Freud in The History of Sexuality.
If you want to support me, you can do that with these links:
Patreon: / theoryandphilosophy
paypal.me/theoryphilosophy
Twitter: @DavidGuignion
TikTok: @theoryphilosophy
IG: @theory_and_philosophy
Podbean: theoretician.p...

[@ReynaSingh]

Excellent channel, keep it up

[@whereisawesomeness]

It might be interesting to note that Foucault discussed Freud quite a lot in the 1950s. For those who are interested there are the first three texts in Dits et écrits, there is Maladie mentale et personnalité, there is Binswanger et l’analyse existentielle, and there is ‘ manuscrit de Michel Foucault sur la psychanalyse’ (published in the journal Asterion). The OMECAPHES website also has Gérard Simon’s notes on a lecture course Foucault gave concerning psychological causality, which discusses Freud quite a bit. As for my own thoughts, I find it a complex interaction. Foucault was primarily addressing a Freudo-Marxist tradition rather than Freud directly, and we don’t get much of an insight into what Foucault might have said in the volumes of the History of Sexuality that he abandoned. I agree that, for Foucault, it’s not a matter of claiming that we need to return to some free, authentic, true, pre-existing experience of sexuality; his goal, and this remains the case in the later volumes, is to examine how the experiences we have are necessarily produced, there is no authentic sexuality. In that regard, I think Foucault would disagree with Freud on the essential aspect, which is whether sexuality pre-exists the influence of the external world. For Freud, sexuality is an innate, biological drive, and it is through the demands of sexuality that we learn to inhabit our bodies and the world. Repression only occurs on the basis of a prior investment. Foucault, on the contrary, holds that the social influences (including repression, but in a relatively minor role) determine sexuality. Despite the enormous shifts that occur after Foucault’s writings from the 1950s (primarily because he discovered Nietzsche around about 1954), the critique that Freud overlooks the philosophical problem of the world remains quite significant even this late.

[@lowellfountain8544]

The last part of the video where you mentioned the imposition of sexual labels onto groups versus the subsequent reclamation of those labels by those groups is exemplary of Foucault's notion of how power morphs and creates its own internal resistances that are constitutive of its movement. It's an interesting paradox of his ontology and a good example of how he subverts the traditional "juridico-discursive" notion of power.

[@bravovince3070]

Unrelated to this video but do you remember in which one of his works Baudrillard talks about Jesus paying everybodys debt, leaving humanity with the shame of not being able to pay their debt themselves, an irredeemable debt of sorts? I remeber you mentioning it in a video but I cant find it.

[@animeshkumar1684]

Excellent channel, glad I found it!

[@hillsandbeaches7662]

The difference between the two great F s , starts from the level of constituents or molecules of cognition and utterance: for Freud, it is drives ( including drives getting fixated, resolved, vaulted and/or related to substitute objects); while for Foucault, the constituent or the raw material is utterance, discourses , the nett totality of all sayable and unsayable. It's primarily like a difference between locating what MAKES the processes

[@vitorboldrini6337]

This discussion seems to miss how most sexual desire will not be corresponded, or they would be harmful to be acted upon due to time, place or social circumstance, and the consequence to this is still the repression of sexuality. This should be a top-of-mind concept regarding Freud due to the weight the Oedipus complex and the repression of incest has had in psychoanalysis.

[@Lastrevio]

I think Deleuze & Guattari should be mentioned here. They think that capitalism deterritorializes with one hand and reterritorializes with the other. Can we go as far as to say that capitalism de-sexualizes with one hand and re-sexualizing with the other? This could be consistent with Lacan and Zizek/Zupancic as well.

[@jasoncrow6048]

I feel this opposition misses the point that when Freud states that sexuality is getting repressed, is that it creates new forms of sexuality to be inacted. Repression never happens without a repercussion.

[@robtherub]

Freud was a lying coke head trying to intellectualise himself into other mens wives knickers. Pseudo academic fraud hiding the most rapey toxic masculinity the world has known, he mugged you all

[@emiliaerle6030]

Inventing norms which regulate pleasure is a form of repression

[@jeremyjames7899]

Great channel

[@spuds5379]

hey! is the ultimate thesis here that the Victorian era was only "repressive" towards sexuality because they were developing the tools to understand it? And it follows that understanding necessitates categorization and creates opportunities for control?

[@arunmotianey73]

David has an amiable manner and is good at boiling theories down to their essentials. But I suspect he has badly misunderstood Freud on the pleasure principle. He may wish to go back and reread what Freud had to say about the ego and superego

[@enlightenedanalysis]

Thanks for the video David. Foucault is correct. In Britain where I live, for decades there has been a culture of sexual innuendo and double-entendre about sex - while never directly mentioning sex at all. Many jokes and comedy films (such as the “Carry On” films) do not mention sex expressly but they refer to it through “wink wink nudge nudge, know what I mean?” type of humour. It’s like the “that’s what she said” jokes in America. I love this humour by the way. So as Foucault says, we have been talking about sex the whole time without ever mentioning it directly.

[@shahradghaffari3666]

The main thing that comes to my mind whenever we talk about government policies and Sexuality is that for an institution, every information needs to be documented in a practical manner. This means that the whole narrative of "legitimate marriage" or any form of accepted sexual behaviour is to be documented for surveiling purposes and nothing more. That could be seen as a repressive act by the government to coerce people or at least label them with a panoptic eye always present whenever a sexual act has been legitimised. It might sound pessimistic, but I do not see any other purpose for the institutions to be interested in our private lives. Yeah, most of us are fanatically obsessed with sex but the motives of publicity of your sexual identity haven't lost its function since Bishop attended chamber beds to see the copulation confirmed. I do like to know your own view about this matter.

[@hillsandbeaches7662]

Lovely and lucid

[@Trionanabanriona]

ah yes a friendly discussion

[@Elzenberg]

Thanks

[@TheoryPhilosophy]

Thank YOU!

[@Firmus777]

Foucault is right, but you are not. There's nothing wrong in trying to understand sex, every society throughout history had a certain understanding of sex that it then imposed on its members in order to function a certain way. The modern way of understanding sexuality which Freud saw, which Foucault wrote about in the first volume of his History of Sexuality and which is possibly outdated is just one way of understanding sexuality. Subsequent volumes of the History of Sexuality describe other historical ways of understanding sexuality or what we might call sexuality, premodern or traditional ways of understanding it and living it. All of those had specific rules, specific rules of conduct. The problem of modern sexuality is that everything is rationalized, patholigized, organised, put in the matrix of biopower. What's the solution? Foucault didn't really offer any solutions in his works. And while he always enjoyed living among the pathologized and was gay, he also was always suspicious of identities. Reclaiming identity markers is an option, but it is probably not the solution. What it results in is just a formulation of a different matrix, of different categories, of assimilating into biopower to be even more exploited. And should we aim sexuality in the direction to maximize pleasure? That's doubtful. For one, it implies utilitarianism and hedonism. Furthermore, do you really think classrooms teaching students how to maximize pleasures are a good idea? On the one side you have moral concerns on the other side you're not changing the basic nature of classrooms, they are still analogous to prisons, you are just making them more effective by leting them use a carrot alongside the stick. Finally, alternatives you can find in history never merely tried to find a way of maximizing pleasures. In ancient Greece and other cultures there were erotic arts, but that is still something different then what you might have in mind and it was balanced out by the dietetic and economic aspects of sexuality. If we are to strive for some kind of an alternative, it is not some kind of liberal utopia, it is not the same enlightenment ideals except expanded to include more people. A true alternative is to be a different way of organizing and one as different from us as we are from the premoderns. And it will not be implemented consciously or intentionally, it is going to arise out of new material conditions after the fall of capitalism and will probably be something like what we had before the rise of capitalism. If you're looking for realistic utopias, don't look for them in the heads of people like Judith Butler, look for them in societies most resisting the hegemony of the global liberal capitalist order led by American imperialism, in the DPR Korea, in China, in Afghanistan, in Iran, in Eritrea, in Venezuela, in Syria...

[@goodname5920]

Could you expand a little on the last point about these specific states being utopian please

[@Firmus777]

@@goodname5920 I didn't call them utopian, God forbid. I said they're examples if you're looking for realistic utopias. Basically I just said they are good or admireable.