ABSTRACT
La Volonte de savoir is in part designed to provide a preliminary insight into Michel Foucault's views on the historical development of sexual thinking. Foucault traces an increasingly discursive attitude to sexuality and the body, contrasting the ancient form of what he terms the ars erotica with what he refers to as the modern scientia sexualis. As the ars erotica is primarily a physical phenomenon, communicated from body to body, it is largely free of the discursive order that is to be found in formations such as the law, with their reliance on division, regulation and interdiction. The case of Venus in Furs can be interpreted as a modern example of a work of erotic art being crushed by the reductive intrusions of the forces of the scientia sexualis. Ironically, and perhaps appropriately, the discourses of nineteenth-century psychiatry ultimately prove as resistant to firm categorization as did the patients whom its practitioners were treating.
