The three-volume History of Sexuality (`The Will to Knowledge`, `The Use of Pleasures`, `The Care of the Self`) extends the investigations of the books `The Archaeology of Knowledge` and `Discipline and Punish`. The first volume focuses on the constellation of phenomena that are generally described with the terms `sexuality` and `sex`.

It does not attempt to demonstrate a supposed `repression` of sexuality in order to contribute to its `liberation`, but to analyze how a will for comprehensive knowledge of sex was formed, which took the form of a `science of sexuality`, which in turn allows for an increasingly global management of social and sexual life.

Michel Foucault presents an archaeology of discourses on sexuality (erotic literature, confession, medicine, pedagogy, psychoanalysis, law, etc.) from the 17th and primarily the 19th century, and raises some crucial questions for a `political history of bodies`: Are we living in a society that represses sexuality? Is sexuality and the discourses surrounding it subjected to censorship or, on the contrary, increasingly encouraged? What role does sexuality play within the framework of contemporary bio-power? How could a resistance to this bio-power be defined, at the level of bodies?

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]