Although it has since endured as one of the most impactful works on human sex and sexuality, the production of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality series was fraught with roadblocks, complications, and controversies. Conceived as a companion to his 1961 Madness and Civilization, volume one of The History of Sexuality (entitled La volonté de savoir or “The Will to Knowledge”) promised in its back cover five more forthcoming installments in the series. 

However, none of these titles would appear, as Foucault instead pivoted his scholarship on sexuality towards classical Greek culture and early Christian societies. It would take him almost a decade to publish the next two volumes in the series. In fact, his close friend Hervé Guibert remarked that Foucault “...was tempted to destroy it forever and to offer his enemies their idiotic victory, so they could spread the rumor that he was no longer able to write a book, that his mind had been dead for a long time, that his silence was only an admission of failure.”

While The History of Sexuality, Vol. One remains one of Foucault’s most commercially successful works—with 100,000 copies printed after almost a decade of its original publication—it also attracted fierce criticism, the most notable of which is French sociologist Jean Baudrillard’s essay “Forget Foucault.” Despite this, what bothered the author most was his apparent success, as he felt that he had been misunderstood and his thesis watered down for public consumption:

It took fifteen years to convert my book about madness into a slogan: all mad people were confined in the eighteenth century. But it did not even take fifteen months–it only took three weeks–to convert my book Will to Knowledge into the slogan “Sexuality has never been repressed.”

In fact, he opened the 1983 edition with the admission that it was perhaps imprudent of him to relegate so much weight to his forthcoming scholarly works—as the hypotheses he had laid down were misapprehended by critics. Foucault maintained that he did not claim sexuality had never been repressed, only that repression was an inefficient concept on its own in deciphering the relations among power, knowledge, and sex. At the time, he associated this “repressive hypothesis” with Austrian doctor Wilhelm Reich and the 1930s Sex-Pol movement, which combined the ideas of Marx and Freud to conceive of a sexual revolution—one in which revolutionary change necessitated liberation from sexual repression. The History of Sexuality went against this view, arguing that power produces rather than suppresses desire.

As a few of his biographers have speculated, Foucault’s brief stint as a visiting professor at the University of Berkeley greatly influenced his views on sex and pleasure. As it was his first time in California, Foucault was delighted with its sexual openness and experimentation—particularly in its gay communities. It was there that he was inducted into the subculture of sado-masochism, which he subsequently praised as a method with which one invents new possibilities of pleasure through “the eroticization of power, the eroticization of strategic relations.” This observation is in keeping with the motivation behind his writing, inspired not by hedonism but “curiosity.” To Foucault, sexuality is not the affirmation of some secret desire but a freedom that must be exercised through the act of creation:

We have to understand that with our desires go new forms of relationships, new forms of love, new forms of creation. Sex is not a fatality; it’s a possibility for creative life. It is not enough to affirm that we are gay but we must also create a gay life.

One year after his visit to California, Foucault...