Foucault on 'the pleasures of analysis'. Could this explain why self-help books are so incredibly popular these days? Could it go some way towards helping us to understand why we think we are born in need of assistance in some area or another? Maybe the life-support system in to which some children immediately, and tragically, placed at birth, has become something of a metaphor of us all. Or maybe, with our loyalty cards in our pockets, perusing the shelves (Water-stoned), we simply somehow desire to feel insufficient (yet striving, bravely and capably, towards self-sufficiency). Dylan's grandmother said that happiness is not something you find along the road to success - happiness is the road. Happiness (something W.Benjamin also talks about) is something ought to work with, not towards.
'The most important elements of an erotic art linked to our knowledge about sexuality are not to be sought in the ideal, promised to us by medicine, of a healthy sexuality, nor in the humanist dream of a complete and flourishing sexuality, and certainly not in the lyricism of orgasm and the good feelings of bio-energy (these are but aspects of its normalizing utilization), but in this multiplication and intensification of pleasures connected to the production of the truth about sex. The learned volumes, written and read; the consultations and examinations; the anguish of all the stories told to oneself and to others, so much curiosity, so many confidences offered in the face of scandal, sustained - but not without trembling a little - by the obligation of truth; the profusion of secret fantasies and the dearly paid right to whisper them to whoever is able to hear them; in short, the formidable 'pleasure of analysis' (in the widest sense of the latter term) which the West has cleverly been fostering for several centuries: all this constitutes something like the errant fragments of erotic art that is secretly transmitted by confession and the science of sex'
From The History of Sexuality (1978), Michel Foucault
