1 am well aware, have met with increasing difficulties, both for you and for myself. Though these researches were very closely related to each other, they have failed to develop into any continuous or coherent whole. They are fragmen-
tary researches, none of which in the last analysis can be said to have proved definitive, nor even to have led ~y where. Diffused and at the same time repetitive, they have continually re-trod the same ground, invoked the same themes, the same concepts etc.
You will recall my work here, such as it has been: some brief notes on the history of penal procedure, a chapter or so on the evolution and institutionalisation of psychiatry in the nineteenth century, some observations on sophistry, on Greek money, on the medieval Inquisition. I have sketched a history of sexuality or at least a history of knowledge of
sexuality on the basis of the confessional practice of the seventeenth century or the forms of control of infantile sexuality in the eighteenth to nineteenth century. I have sketched a genealogical history of the origins of a theory and a knowledge of anomaly and of the various techniq"e~that
relate to it. None of it does more than mark time. Repetitive and disconnected, it advances nowhere. Since indeed it never ceases to say the same thing, it perhaps says nothing. It is tangled up into an indecipherable, disorganised
muddle. In a nutshell, it is inconclusive.
Still, I could claim that after all these were only trails to
be followed, it mattered little where they led; indeed, it was important that they did not have a prede.termi~ed starting point and destination. They were merely hnes laid down for you to pursue or to divert elsewhere, for me to extend upon
5 TWO LECfURES
Lecture One: 7 January 1976
or re-~es~gn as the case might be. They are, in the final
analySIS, Just fragments, and it is up to you or me to see .what we can make of them. For my part, it has struck me that I might have seemed a bit like a whale that leaps to the surface of the water disturbing it momentarily with a tiny jet of spray and lets it be believed, or pretends to believe or wants to believe, or himself does in fact indeed believe ;hat
do,,:n in the depths where no one sees him any more; ~here he IS no longer witnessed nor controlled by anyone, he follows a more profound, coherent and reasoned trajectory. Well, anyway, that was more or less how I at least conceived the situation; it could be that you perceived it differently.
After all, the fact that the character of the work I have prese~~ed to Y0':l has ~een at the same time fragmentary, repetlttve and dlscontmuous could well be a reflection of something one might describe as a febrile indolence-a typical affliction of those enamoured of libraries, docu- ments, reference works, dusty tomes, texts that are never r~ad, books that are no sooner printed than they are con- Signed to the shelves of libraries where they thereafter lie dormant to be taken up only some centuries later. It would acc?rd all too well with the busy inertia of those who profess an Idle knowledge, a species of luxuriant sagacity, the rich hmud of the parVenus whose only outward signs are dis- played i~ footnotes at the bottom of the page. It would accord With all those who feel themselves to be associates of
one of the more ancient or more typical secret societies of the West, those oddly indestructible societies unknown it wou.ld. se.em to A~tiquity, which came into being with Chn~t1anlty, most hkely at the time of the first monasteries, at the periphery of the invasions, the fires and the forests: I mean to speak of the great warm and tender Freemasonry of useless erudition.
Howeyer,.it is not simply a taste for such Freemasonry that has msplred my course of action. It seems to me that the work we have done could be justified by the claim that it is adeqlate to a restricted period, that of the last ten, fifteen, at most twenty years, a period notable for two events which for all they may not be really important are nonetheless to my mind quite interesting.
On the one hand, it has been a period characterised by