some of the contents of biology and physiology were able to serve as a principle of normality fo r human sexuality.

Hysteria was interpreted in this strategy as the movement of sex insofar as it was the "one" and the "other," whole and part, principle and lack.

People are going to say that I am dealing in a historicism which is more careless than radical

Broadly speaking, at the juncture of the "body" and the "population," sex became a crucial target of a power organized around the management of life rather than the menace of death.

it became the stamp of individuality

it testified to the individual and private right to die, at the borders and in the interstices of power that was exercised over life. This determination to die, strange and yet so persistent and constant in its manifestations, and consequently so difficult to explain as being due to particular circumstances or individual accidents, was one of the first astonishments of a society in which political power had as­signed itself the task of administering life.

Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire popula­tions are mobilized fo r the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital.

the natural right possessed by every individual to defend his life even if this meant the death of others

the theory would justify its authoritarian and constraining influence by postulating that all sexuality must be subject to the law; more precisely, that sexuality owes its very definition to the action of the law: not only will you submit your sexuality to the law, but you will have no sexual­ity except by subjecting yourself to the law.

And this was fa r fr om being a matter of the class which in the eighteenth century became hegemonic believing itself obliged to amputate fr om its body a sex that was useless, expensive, and dangerous as soon as it was no longer given over exclusively to reproduction; we can assert on the con­trary that it provided itself with a body to be cared fo r, protected, cultivated, and preserved fr om the many dangers and contacts, to be isolated fr om others so that it would retain its differential value; and this, by equipping itself with -among other resources-a technology of sex.

This was the purpose for which the deployment of sexuality was first established, as a new distri­bution of pleasures, discourses, truths, and powers; it has to be seen as the self-affirmation of one class rather than the enslavement of another: a defense, a protection, a strengthen­ing, and an exaltation that were eventually extended to oth­ers-at the cost of different transformations-as a means of social control and political subjugation

The same can be said of the fa mily as an agency of control and a point of sexual saturation: it was in the "bourgeois" or "aristocratic" fa mily that the sexuality of children and adolescents was first problematized, and fe minine sexuality medicalized; it was the first to be alerted to the potential pathology of sex, the urgent need to keep it under close watch and to devise a rational technology of correction.

if it was not controlled, transmit diseases or create others that would afflict fu ture generations. Thus it appeared to be the source of an entire capital fo r the species to draw fr om. Whence the medical-but also political-project fo r organizing a state management of marriages, births, and life expectancies; sex and its fe rtility had to be administered.

mutation

Through pedagogy, medicine; and economics, it made sex not only a secular concern but a concern of the state as well; to be more exact, sex became a matter that required the social body as a whole, and virtually all of its individuals, to place themselves under surveillance.

There was no risk that sexuality would appear to be, by nature, alien to the law: it was constituted only through the law.

The fa mily was the crystal in the de­ployment of sexuality: it seemed to be the source of a sex­uality which it actually only reflected and diffracted. By virtue of its permeability, and through that process of re­flections to the outside, it became one of the most valu­able tactical components of the deployment.

ccupies a central place; it is constantly being solicited and refused; it is an object of obsession and attraction, a dreadful secret and an indispens­able pivot. It is manifested as a thing that is strictly fo rbidden in the fa mily insofar as the latter fu nctions as a deployment of alliance; but it is also a thing that is continuously de­manded in order fo r the fa mily to be a hotbed of constant sexual incitement.

On the contrary, its role is to anchor sexuality and provide it with a permanent support. It ensures the produc­tion of a sexuality that is not homogeneous with the privi­leges of alliance, while making it possible fo r the systems of alliance to be imbued with a new tactic of power which they would otherwise be impervious to. The fa mily is the inter­change of sexuality and alliance: it conveys the law and the juridical dimension in the deployment of sexuality; and it conveys the economy of pleasure and the intensity of sensa­tions in the regime of alliance.

corrective technology

It appears rather as an especially dense transfer point fo r relations of power: between men and women, young people and old people, parents and offspring, teachers and students, priests and laity, an administration and a popula­tion.

power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attrib­utes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.

All the modes of domination, submission, and subju­gation are ultimately reduced to an effect of obedience.

use.

What must nature, including man, be like in order that science be possible at all?

More important, the solutions that satisfy him may not be merely personal but must instead be accepted as solutions by many.

But so long as somebody appears with a new candidate for paradigm—usually a young man or one new to the field—the loss due to rigidity accrues only to the individual.

freed

elderly

He must, that is, have faith that the new paradigm will succeed with the many large problems that confront it, knowing only that the older paradigm has failed with a few. A decision of that kind can only be made on faith.

the defenders of traditional theory and procedure can almost always point to problems that its new rival has not solved but that for their view are no problems at all

Furthermore, these conversions occur not despite the fact that scientists are human but because they are.

a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Verification is like natural selection: it picks out the most viable among the actual alternatives in a particular historical situation. Whether that choice is the best that could have been made if still other alternatives had been available or if the data had been of another sort is not a question that can usefully be asked. There are no tools to employ in seeking answers to it.

properly parts of science

these are the men who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them.

Often a paradigm developed for one set of phenomena is ambiguous in its application to other closely related ones.

a new theory, however special its range of application, is seldom or never just an increment to what is already known. Its assimilation requires the reconstruction of prior theory and the re-evaluation of prior fact, an intrinsically revolutionary process that is seldom completed by a single man and never overnight.

Normal science, for example, often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments. Nevertheless, so long as those commitments retain an element of the arbitrary, the very nature of normal research ensures that novelty shall not be suppressed for very long. Sometimes a normal problem, one that ought to be solvable by known rules and procedures, resists the reiterated onslaught of the ablest members of the group within whose competence it falls. On other occasions a piece of equipment designed and constructed for the purpose of normal research fails

esearch as a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education. Simultaneously, we shall wonder whether research could proceed without such boxes, whatever the element of arbitrariness in their historic origins and, occasionally, in their subsequent development.