Lady Chatterley's Postmodern Lover

Contrary to Lawrence, to whose writings he makes direct reference, Foucault argues that the metaphysical notion of sex as the great clue to being cannot be allowed to pass without close critical examination.

For rather than simply being an ideal anchorage point that supports the various manifestations of what we term sexuality, sex, says Foucault, is a complex and tyrannical type of agency formed by regimes of power. The belief that it somehow eludes and resists power and resides deep within us over and above the material reality of bodies and possessing its own intrinsic properties and laws, is simply a piece of modern romance. 

Of course, this isn't to deny that the convenient fiction of sex hasn't proved to be extremely useful; or that it will cease to function in the immediate future. As Nietzsche pointed out, God's shadow is still to be seen long after his death. Thus, likewise, sex will continue to be thought of as a great causal principle long after novelists and lovers have abandoned older ideas of the soul as mere superstition.

For the fact is, a very great number of men and women have made their very intelligibility dependent upon their sex and it provides them with their most precious forms of identity. To such people, sex is something sacred and worthy of sacrifice. We find this form of sex worship in Lawrence; not least in his final novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover.

But it gets tedious, does it not? One is tired of having to treat sex with reverence and bored of the austere monarchy of sex ruling over all our thoughts and actions. Even Lawrence admits in an essay written shortly after the above novel, that there has been so much repetitious sexual activity that he longs for the peace that comes of fucking and the accomplishment of chastity.

And yet, having said that, he still can't help insisting that the vital task for a people to come is to realize sex in full consciousness. But what would that mean other than an acceleration of one of the most effective operating principles established by the deployment of sexuality; namely, the great desire for sex-in-the-head: "to have access to it, to discover it, to liberate it, to articulate it, to formulate it in truth" [156].

Despite the popular belief that there have been centuries of repressive silence and shame surrounding the subject, sex has in fact been the most obsessively talked about thing of all. What is peculiar about modern societies, suggests Foucault, is not that they kept sex locked away in darkness, "but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret" [35]. 

In other words, what really distinguishes the world we live in is a polymorphous and increasingly pornographic incitement to discourse about sex. Those who are genuinely interested in libidinal pleasures might do best not to naively call for freedom or vainly attempt to extract further confessions from a shadow, but show how sex is - and has always been - a purely speculative element within the historical process of human subjectification.  

In a postmodern future - that is to say, in a time after the orgy - people will be unable to fathom our sex mania. And they will smile, says Foucault, when they recall that there were once a people who believed that in sex resided a truth "every bit as precious as the one they had already demanded from the earth, the stars, and the pure forms of their thought" [159].


See Michel Foucault; The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (Penguin Books, 1998).