Michel Foucault had taken on the project of a history of sexuality as early as the 1960s, dedicating mainly two lectures, unpublished until now. The first, delivered in Clermont-Ferrand in 1964, deals with the conditions of the emergence in the West of a problematic consciousness and a tragic experience of sexuality, as well as the cognitive branches that set it as their object.

Starting from a reflection on the evolution of the woman's position and the rights of marriage, these lectures approach the entirety of knowledge about sexuality, from biology or ethology to psychoanalysis. The second, given in Vincennes in 1969, extends and simultaneously shifts these inquiries.

Foucault is more specifically interested in the emergence of a biological knowledge regarding sexuality and the way it has been invested in a set of utopias during the 19th and 20th centuries: transgressive utopias, from Sade to the History of O., and integration utopias, aimed at reconciling society and the sexual nature of man, from Fourier to Marcuse.

This is an opportunity for Foucault to deepen his critical genealogy on the dual theme of natural sexuality and sexual liberation, which he inaugurated in 1964, but which acquires a new meaning after May 1968. These lectures represent a radical clearing of the ground for an archaeology of sexuality as a modern experience.

We discover a Foucault who does not hesitate to use the data of biology for sexuality against a shortsighted notion of the human subject; it is a Foucault attentive to preserving the transgressive potential contained in the sexual experience and to analyzing the economic, social, and epistemological conditions within which this experience has recently been established as a cognitive object and political stake.