Political Power Goes Much Deeper Than One

One Should Try To Locate Power At The Extreme Of Its Exercise, Where It Is Always Less Legal In Character.

Madness Designates The Equinox Between The Vanity Of Night's Hallucinations And The Non-being Of Light's Judgments.

The Appearance In Nineteenth-century Psychiatry, Jurisprudence, And Literature Of A Whole Series Of Discourses On The Species And Subspecies Of Homosexuality, Inversion, Pederasty, And "psychic Hermaphroditism" Made Possible A Strong Advance Of Social Controls Into This Area Of "perversity"; But It Also Made Possible The Formation Of A "reverse" Discourse: Homosexuality Began To Speak In Its Own Behalf, To Demand That Its Legitimacy Or "naturality" Be Acknowledged, Often In The Same Vocabulary, Using The Same Categories By Which It Was Medically Disqualified.

[john Boswell] Introduction Of The Concept Of "gay" (in The Way He Defines It) Provides Us Both With A Useful Instrument Of Research And At The Same Time A Better Comprehension Of How People Actually Conceive Of Themselves And Their Sexual Behavior.

Confession Frees, But Power Reduces One To Silence; Truth Does Not Belong To The Order Of Power, But Shares An Origincal Affinity With Freedom: Traditional Themes In Philosophy, Which A Political History Of Truth Would Have To Overturn By Showing That Truth Is Not By Nature Free--nor Error Servile--but That Its Production Is Thoroughly Imbued With Relations Of Power. The Confession Is An Example Of This.