Approaching sexuality as a historically singular experience requires unraveling the knowledge that refers to it, diving into the systems of power that regulate its practice and, above all, understanding the ways in which individuals conceive and declare themselves as subjects of that sexuality. The History of Sexuality, the most ambitious project in the work of Michel Foucault -of which he only managed to publish the first three volumes-, is a dazzling and iconoclastic exploration of the games of truth through which the human being has recognized himself as a man of desire. His first volume, The Will to Know, is devoted to defining the power-know-pleasure regime that sustains the discourse on human sexuality and to showing that, rather than through the repression of sex, power operates through the discursive production of sexuality and subjects of "sexual nature."

The essential point is not to know whether sex is said yes or no, whether or not the words that designate it are punished, but to determine in what forms, through what channels, slipping along which discourses power reaches to the most tenuous and most individual behaviors, which paths allow it to reach the infrequent or barely perceptible forms of desire, how it infiltrates and controls everyday pleasure. I do not intend to affirm that the prohibition of sex is a deception, but that it is to make it the fundamental and constituent element from which the history of what has been said about sex in modern times could be written.