Michel Foucault e A vontade de saber

Abstract

This is a study on The Will to Knowledge, the first volume of Michel Foucault s The History of Sexuality. By means of a genealogical analysis, Foucault approaches the history of sexuality, in Western societies, so as to understand the motivations that supported, along the centuries, the hypothesis of sexuality as the object of repressive mechanisms, thus speaking of the repressive hypothesis . In this sense, this study will highlight, in its first chapter, how Foucault fought against the repressive hypothesis to the extent that he grounded himself upon another hypothesis: the one of the development, in these societies, of proceedings, techniques and strategies of power whose main characteristic was to produce and intensify thruths, knowledges, discourses. In this case, we will observe the production of knowledge about sex, which became noteworthy through the development of a sexual science. Thus, we will notice that there has not been a search for methods to intensify sexual pleasure, but of methods to find the truth that the mechanisms of power made one believe, through scientific discourses, that existed in sex. Through this course, we will perceive that the history of sexuality, conceived by Foucault, is the history of the will to knowledge about sex, in which the discourses with effects of truth have had a fundamental role. One can say that to highlight the importance held by discourses on the sex issue, Foucault resorted, inclusively, to the literary discourse through Diderot s fable, The Indiscreet Jewels. Thus, in the second chapter, we will briefly reconstruct the fable and list the considerations made by Foucault on the notion of fiction, so we may reflect on fictional discourse. Besides that, the understanding of some aspects of Diderot s writing will allow us to relate the insertion of this fiction discourse within a historic study. Finally, we will show that sex, whether linked to reality or fiction, has been used, historically, in discourse