Abstract:
The question of pleasure is central to the later work of Michel Foucault. In setting up this question of pleasure Foucault makes an opposition between the erotic and sexuality. This thesis is a response to that opposition. It challenges some of his philosophical assumptions about and ethical investments in the erotic and sexuality. Engaging with the deconstructive strategies of Jacques Derrida and Luce lrigaray it contests his conceptual oppositions and unthought gaps and examines what the costs of these are for an erotics for women.
This thesis argues that there is no access to the question of pleasure other than through reason. We cannot 'know' the erotic except by resort to the discourses of sexuality. Rather than a lost paradise prior to sexuality, the erotic is internal to and makes possible the temporal and spatial power/knowledge network that infuses sexuality. The question of pleasure includes an erotics and an ethics. While Foucault argues for a desexualisation of the erotic, sexual difference is central to a notion of pleasure that is inclusive of women. An ethics of sexual difference offers to the erotic a recognition of the other as sexually different from itself.
