sofaconfessions

Zizek on Foucault:

Foucault’s rejection of what he calls the Freudian “repression hypothesis” - his notion of regulatory power discourses which generate sexuality in the very act of describing and regulating it - misses the (Freudian) point. Freud and Lacan were well aware that there is no repression without the return of the repressed, they were well aware that the repressive discourse generates what it represses. However, what this discourse represses is not what it appears to repress, not what it itself takes to be the threatening X it seeks to control. The figures of ‘sexuality’ it portrays as the threat to be controlled - such as the figure of the Woman, whose uncontrolled sexuality is a threat to the masculine order - are themselves fantasmatic mystifications. Rather, what this discourse ‘represses’ is (among other things) its own contamination by what it tries to control - say, the way the sacrifice of sexuality sexualizes sacrifice itself, or the manner in which the effort to control sexuality sexualizes this controlling activity itself. Sexuality is thus, of course, not “invisible” - it is controlled and regulated. What is “invisible” is the sexualization of this very work of control: not the elusive object we try to control, but the mode of our participation within it.