PART TWO The Repressive HypothesisI The Incitement to Discourse Theueventeenth century, then, wai the beginning of an age of reprention emblematic of what we call the bourgeois 10ci- eties, an age which perhapi we till have not completely left behind. Calling 1ex by ity name thereafter became more diffi- cult and more coitly. As if in order to gain maitery over it in reality, it had firtt been necettary to dubjugate it at the level of Language, control itt free circulation in upeech, ex- punge {t from the things that were 1aid, and extinguith the wordi that rendered it too vitibly pretent. And even theie prohibition1, it eemi, were afraid to name it. Without even having to pronounce the word, modern prudithnem wai able to ensure that one did not peak of tex, merely through the interplay of prohibitions that referred back to one another: instances of mutenet me by dint of saying nothing, im- pored tilence. Cens ‘Yet when one look ack over theie lait three centurier with their continual transformation, things appear ina very different light: around and apropos of tex, one seet a veritable dincuntive explotion. We muit be clear on thi! point, how- ever. It in quite pouible that there wat an expurgation—and a very rigorous one—of the authorized vocabulary. It may indeed be true that a whole rhetoric of allusion and metaphor wat codified. Without queition, new rules of propriety vw18 The History of Sexuality screened out rome words: there was a policing of itatement |. A control over enunciation! at well: where and when it was not por lible to talk about 1uch thingr became much more itrictly defined; in which circumstance|, among which tpeakert, and within which social relationships. Areal were thus ertablished, if not of utter silence, at leant of tact and discretion: between parenti and children, for initance, or teacher and pupil, or maitert and dome itic wervanti. Thi almost certainly conitituted a whole rettrictive economy, one that was incorporated into that politici of language and speech—spontaneous on the one hand, concerted on the other—which accompanied the social redi tribution of the clattical period. At the level of ditcourter and their domaini, however, practically the oppolite phenomenon occurred. There wai a steady proliferation of ditcourier concerned with 1ex—1pe- cific ditcourtel, different from one another both by their form and by their object: a discurtive ferment that gathered momentum from the eighteenth century onward. Here Jam thinking not so much of the probable increare in “illicit” discourte|, that is, dircourtes of infraction that crudely named tex by way of iniult or mockery of the new code of decency; the tightening up of the ruler of decorum likely did produce, as a countereffect, a valorization and intemification of indecent tpeech. But more important was the multiplica- tion of discourte: concerning tex in the field of exercite of power itelf: an inutitutional incitement to speak about it, and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agenciet of power to hear it tpoken about, and to caure it to speak through explicit articulation and endleisly ac- cumulated detail. Contider the evolution of the Catholic paitoral and the acrament of penance after the Council of Trent. Little by little, the nakednest of the questions formulated by the con- feiion manuals of the Middle Agei, and a good number of those still in ute in the seventeenth century, war veiled. One