Sexuality in the networks of discourse: from Freud to Foucault

Abstract

The article is devoted to the topic which relevance is determined by the socio-cultural revolution that from the beginning of the 20th century catchеd the family — the most fundamental institution of society as such and the only social institution of human reproduction. The author turns to the study of the phenomenon of sexuality in the Foucault’s project of “History of Sexuality” in those aspects that are associated with the reception of Freud’s legacy by Foucault’s philosophical thinking, favorably differing from the “return to Freud”, programs formulated by J. Lacan and J. Laplanche. The “genealogical method” of Foucault gave the historical study of sexuality a philosophically grounded character. Responding to Foucault’s appeal to translate sexuality into discourse, the author  of the article considers discourse and discursive practices as an instrument of historical research, shows the complexity of the study of sexuality, based on the urgency of the present, is determined by the ordinary non-intelligible assimilation and use of language: the desire for social recognition, the psychological temptation of simplicity of attitudes agreement and denial, the intentional indefiniteness of possessive pronouns, sounded in the voice and masked by the text. The idea of discourse, anthropological practices that unite the language with the specific circumstances of its use, serve as a fruitful cognitive tool for historical research. Psychoanalytic philosophical anthropology, or metapsychology, is not only a way of thinking, that revolutionized humanitarian knowledge in the 20th century, but is also implicitly associated with the figure of the psychoanalyst as a conceptual character whose attitude to the client’s language serves as a paradigm for exploring discourse practices in their historical existence and development. The reference to the conceptual interrelationship between Freud’s metapsychology and Foucault’s philosophy opens the prospects for a concrete study of sexuality in the context of traditional family values, the family as a mechanism for the reproduction of man and society.

Keywords:

psychoanalysis, sexuality, discourse, language, attitude to language, Freud, Foucault