On the Unsteadiness of Sexual Truth in Eighteenth-Century France

Abstract

This chapter will seek to contribute to an intellectual history of ‘sexuality’. The key word is marked with inverted commas since I shall not be speaking of sexuality as if it were something that transcended historical circumstance. My aim here is to contribute to a history of thought in the sense in which Foucault and others use that term. A history of thought entails identifying the assumptions which, in a given period, helped to establish what questions were worth asking, and what things counted as knowledge. The time and place I shall focus on is eighteenth-century France, and I shall in fact find myself talking about eighteenth-century notions that bear a resemblance to modern sexual pathologies such as frigidity and impotence. But my aim throughout will be to hold those notions apart from modern ways of thinking. in order to mark their historical distinctiveness.