Why has there been such a veritable explosion of discussion about sex in the West since the seventeenth century? How did we ever come to believe that our increasing talk about it would make us less repressed? In this first volume of his ambitious multi-part study, Michel Foucault offers a dazzling, iconoclastic exploration of why we feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex, and of the social and mental mechanism of power that cause us to direct the question of what we are to what our sexuality is.