In the first volume of his work on sexuality, Foucault has proposed that sexuality could be studied as a "'political economy' of a will to knowledge" (73). Hopefully, such an analysis would account for the deployment of pleasure across a differential matrix of social sites without relying on what he perceives as the central fallacy in prior theories dealing with the relationship between power and pleasure: what he terms "the repressive hypothesis." Foucault's critique of the repressive hypothesis is a corollary of his antihumanism, which, in turn, is a crucial feature of the anti-imperialist and antitotalitarian politics that motivates his work. Foucault needs to free pleasure from any notion of a repressed nature that might be liberated by an external and totalizing force. This brings him instead to see pleasure as "the positive product of power" (Power/Knowledge 120). This essay will not attempt to judge Foucault's success in balancing his political responsibilities with the determinism that seems to accompany the abandonment of the politically useful notion of repression, nor will it look at the specific strategies of resistance to power Foucault employs, which range from the pro-

Jamie Hysjulien

Papers

Pleasure and the Economy of the Subject