Volume 33, Number 4 · March 13, 1986

The Mind on Sex

By G.E.R. Lloyd
The Use of Pleasure: Volume II of The History of Sexuality
by Michel Foucault, translated by Robert Hurley

Pantheon, 293 pp., $17.95

The original French edition of the first, introductory, volume of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality appeared as long ago as 1976 and the expectations it generated were very high. Here was one of the most distinguished and sophisticated practitioners of the history of ideas and institutions turning his attention to yet another fundamental issue in the development of modern European sensibility. What he had already done for such subjects as madness, the clinic, and the prison, he was now to attempt to do also for 'sexuality,' a notion which may seem utterly familiar, but which only becomes explicit for the first time in the nineteenth century.



Review, 5448 words

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