The Sacrament of Penance in Sade’s Writing: A Practice between Hell and Apathy
Muriel Schmid, Université de Neuchâtel
Volume 15, no. 3-4, April-July 2003
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
In Histoire de la Sexualité, Michel Foucault traces the emergence of “sexuality” as a scientific and medical discourse on human behaviour back to the practice of the sacrament of penance. According to Foucault, Western culture constructed its knowledge of sexuality by gathering data from sexual sins that needed to be confessed to the priests. In the nineteenth century, this knowledge became the ultimate truth about sexuality and was organized into an elaborate scientific discourse. Western sexual discourse, thus entangled in moral categories, ascribed to sexual pleasure the potential of becoming evil. Foucault’s opposition between ars erotica and scientia sexualis summarizes this perspective: whereas, in the former, initiation to pleasure is the basis for sexual apprenticeship, in the latter, sexuality is defined by the avowal and the classification of so-called deviant sexual behaviours. …
Other ECF articles on the topic of “sexuality” include:
Shocked Sensibility: The Nerves, the Will, and Altered States in Sade’s L’Histoire de Juliette
by SEAN QUINLAN (ECF 25.3, Spring 2013)
Rétif, Sade, and the Origins of Pornography: Le Pornographe as Anti-Text of La Philosophie dans le boudoir
by AMY S. WYNGAARD (ECF 25.2, Winter 2012-13)
Communal Sexuality: Mutual Pleasure in Sade’s La Philosophie dans le boudoir
by KATE PARKER (ECF 25.2, Winter 2012-13)
©McMaster University, 2015. This copyright covers the exclusive rights to reproduce and distribute the article, including in electronic forms, reprints, translations, photographic reproductions, or similar. While reading for personal use is encouraged, Eighteenth-Century Fiction articles may not be reproduced, broadcast, published, or re-disseminated without the prior written permission of Eighteenth-Century Fiction at McMaster University. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form, such as on a web site or in a searchable database, or other uses of this material is not allowed. The copyright in this website includes without limitation the text, computer code, artwork, photographs, images, music, audio, video, and audio-visual material on this website and is owned by McMaster University. ©McMaster University 2015.