Abstract
Foucault considers that the 17th century was the beginning of an age of repression, where calling sex by its name was difficult. It first started in religion, through the Christian pastoral. Foucault argues that to master it in reality, it was necessary to control it in language. Nevertheless, Foucault states that there was an explosion of discourses concerned with sex, especially in the field of power itself. The part of sex in the confession continually increased, as its new prohibition made the sin of flesh even more important: if sex wasn't to be named, everything that constituted it was to be pursued in its deepest ramifications. It was an obligation to transform desire into discourse through the process of confession. One example of such discourse, pushed to the extreme, can be found in the Marquis de Sade's writings. Foucault argues that instead of a prohibition, these measures established an apparatus for producing discourse about sex.
It has been relayed by other factors, such as public interest: power mechanisms that functioned in a way that made the discourse on sex essential. There was around the 18th century a political, economic, and technical incitement to talk about sex, through social studies. There was a need to overcome the repulsion and to turn sex into a manageable thing. Sex became a "police" matter in the sense of an ordered maximization of collective and individual force. There was a need to make it serve the public welfare.
This was linked with the emergence of the concept of population as a specific category of study (birth and death rates, etc) i.e. through the production of knowledge of people. This led to the conclusion that states are not populated according to the natural growth of their population but to the virtue of their industry and their different institutions. Sex is the central problem of the population question.
