Abstract

This dissertation turns around two questions: Do the three completed volumes of Foucault's "History of Sexuality" actually constitute one project--and if not, why not? If it is accepted that Foucault was correct in viewing "sexuality," not as a natural given which is best understood in the language of a Freudian economy, but rather as a modern construct, and if the shift in Foucault's "History of Sexuality" resulted from the abandonment of the power model that would have allowed for a micro-political challenge to "sexuality," then what possibilities are left with regard to the domain that we organize under that suspicious title, "sexuality?" ;To investigate the first question, this dissertation examines Baudrillard's critique of Foucault, and investigates the importance of Foucault's veiled philosophical encounters with Heidegger and Nietzsche, as ways of understanding the extent and nature of the shift that occurs between The History of Sexuality I: An Introduction and The Use of Pleasure. To examine the second question, an attempt is made to separate out the aesthetic possibilities opened up by Foucault's "denaturalization" of sexuality from the post-Marxist political framework within which that denaturalization had arisen, and to link erotic possibilities to the open question, a rigorously logical question, that Nietzsche bequeathed to our waning century: Supposing truth is a woman, what then?