Michel Foucault (1926–1984) conceived the *History of Sexuality* project in the early 1970s as a continuation of his research into the history of medicine—the subject of his lectures at the Collège de France during that period—and as an extension of his archaeology of discursive formations toward a description of the knowledge-power apparatuses that defined the historical mechanics of early modern Europe. Although originally envisioned as a multi-volume series, the project later underwent a fundamental shift: its focus moved from the formation of the modern concept of sexuality to a genealogy of subjectivity rooted in classical and Christian thought.

The first volume of the *History of Sexuality*—*The Will to Knowledge* (1976)—serves as a methodological introduction to the series' initial problematic. Its rhetorical core is formed by two strands: a critique of the "repressive hypothesis"—which views sexuality as an object of suppression and silence—and a counter-narrative tracing the unified development of a sexuality apparatus aimed at the mutual amplification of knowledge and power, extending from Christian confessional practices and the medicalization of "deviations" and "perversions" to psychoanalysis and the modern "concern with sex."