In its first volume of history of sexuality (21st century), the French philosopher Michel Foucault tells us how the love of carnal pleasure is examined scientifically from medicine, whether from psychology, psychiatry or urology. Because it will be from the 19th century onwards that sex is articulated with the discourse of science.
In one of his passages, Foucault tells us about Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893), the renowned French neurologist who, in 1862, was appointed director of La Salpêtrière, the hospital located in the southeast corner of Paris, famous for confining women. of the so-called problematic ones. It was here, in this enclosure, “great asylum of human misery” as Charcot himself called it, where he launched his experiments to study what he came to call the great disease of the century, that is, hysteria.
In one of his footnotes, Foucault tells us about the unpublished documents of Charcot’s lessons where it is narrated that on November 25, 1877, a session took place where a patient had a hysterical contraction that Charcot suspended by placing a cane on her. the ovaries. When the cane is removed, the crisis flares up again and Charcot accelerates it by giving the patient amyl nitrite to inhale. It is then that the patient asks for “the cane” again.
There is a famous painting by Pierre Andre Brouillet (1857-1914), titled A clinical lesson from Docter Charcot at La Salpêtrière, where we can see the doctor in one of his classes, surrounded by students and explaining Blanche Wittman’s hysterical attack. The aforementioned patient became deaf and mute at two years of age. Although she regained speech and hearing years later, she suffered progressive nervous attacks and convulsions. Her evil became a spectacle. She arrived at La Salpêtrièrey at the age of 18, where she was immediately admitted. When she was confined, organic communication with the social body was cut off, to put it in Foucault’s way, and, very soon, she became Charcot’s favorite “hysteric.”
Brouillet’s painting exudes sexism everywhere you look and is faithful to a reality that existed in those times that Foucault talks about in his first volume of history of sexuality, when sexual repression manifested itself as a secret forced to be hidden to allow science to discover it. Charcot became a true showman, his staging seduced the people who came in droves to witness the demonstrations. What was unprecedented, what was most striking, was that the patients competed among themselves to see who could outshine all the others.
In this way, the contortions and spasms were exaggerated to the limit, giving rise to a theatrical performance rather than a medical class. The spectacular society that Guy Debord would talk about a hundred years later was underway, the society rooted in economics where relationships are falsified and simulation contaminates daily life. What happens is that, for Foucault, unlike Debord, our society is not about spectacle, but about “surveillance.”
For this reason, his historical work on sexuality underlies power relations and, with it, relations of order and defense that monitor the nature of desire. Foucault’s History of Sexuality is essential reading.
The stone ax It is a section where Montero Glezwith a desire for prose, exerts its particular siege on scientific reality to demonstrate that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.
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