The Repressive Hypothesis

"The grand aim of all science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses." -- Albert Einstein

“Without even having to pronounce the word, modern prudishness was able to ensure that one did not speak of sex, merely through the interplay of prohibitions that referred back to one another: instances of muteness which, by dint of saying nothing, imposed silence: Censorship” (301)—where desire was changed into discourse, where one could talk about sex, where sex was policed, where sex was located. Discourse traces the meeting line of the body and the soul, following its movements: beneath the surface of sins. All the censorships of vocabulary are secondary devices compared to ways of rendering it morally acceptable and technically useful. Boundaries of what one could say about sex were enlarged, discourse was connected to sex. Toward the beginning of the eighteenth century, a political, economic and technical incitement to talk about sex emerged. Sex was not something to be judged, it was something to be administered. Sex became something to be “policed,” not the repression of disorder, but a maximized collective and individual force—a policing of sex, not the rigor of a taboo, but the necessity of regulating sex through useful and public discourses. It was at the heart of this economic and political problem of population that one finds sex—moral and religious exhortations, fiscal measures tried to transform the sexual conduct of individuals into a concerted economic and political behavior. Silence itself is less the absolute limit of discourse than it is an element that “functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within overall strategies” (309). Sex was hardly ever spoken about, yet it was a constant preoccupation, a public problem. It may well be that we talk about sex more than anything else, but we are dealing less with a discourse on sex than with a multiplicity of discourses produced by a whole series of mechanisms operating in different institutions. Around sex, a whole network of coercive transpositions have been changed into discourse