Fourier, Reich, Foucault – seksualność w okowach władzy?
Fourier, Reich, Foucault – Sexuality in the Shackles of Power?

Summary/Abstract: What is the relationship between sexuality and power? The three philosophers analyzed in the paper are among the most important contributors in this area. Fourier conceives sexuality as an aspect of sovereign drives of desire, which are oppressed by Civilization. The antidote takes the form of a full deliverance of passions, realized as Harmony projected by Fourier. Reich perceives sexuality as oppressed by the united forces of patriarchy, authoritarian religion and capitalist production. In his principal polemics with the more conservative Freud he postulates the sexual emancipation, that in Reich is more significant than in Feuerbach and Marx. Foucault contests the repression hypothesis popular in Western discourse and replaces the classical definition of power as a negative dispositive with his idea of the positive power, verbalizing the sexuality. His conception appears to be conciliatory but remains in the horizon of the critique of power. Although socialized, it does not separate itself from the repression, but pacifies and perverize it, making it more transparent, useful and efficient.

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