The History of Sexuality, Volume 3: The Care of the Self

Un ottimo excursus sul periodo romano. La cultura genera la sessualità, cioè conferisce spazio ad un'esogenza sociale e psicologica, e analizzare le modalità con cui si pone la sessualità classica ed i problemi che porta è senza dubbio illuminante.
Peccato non aver potuto leggere una genealogia della sessualità: fermarsi alle porte del medioevo è stato come annusare un piatto e non poterlo gustare.

Ethicosophy

This series was the most difficult for me to read of all Foucault topics but I endured through it.

Like volume two, repetitive, debatable, and digested with a grain of salt. This passage from Seneca though:

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“Disce gaudere, learn how to feel joy,” says Seneca to Lucilius: “I do not wish you ever to be deprived of gladness. I would have it born in your house; and it is born there, if only it is inside of you… for it will never fail you when once you have found its source.”

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Or this Pseudo-Lucian pledge:

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“To unite my bones with his and not to keep even our dumb ashes apart.”

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Fantastic book. As a NT scholar, Foucault goes a long way to help situate the sexual ethics one finds in early Christianity (and even beyond). I kept a running list of primary texts that Foucault engages, which should keep me occupied for quite some time.

Γενικά έχει ενδιαφέρον ειδικά αν είσαι λάτρης της αρχαίας ελληνικής σκέψης (και λατινικής) .
Προσπαθώ να καταλάβω αν έχει κάποια αποδεικτική ή κάποια ιδέα που θέλει να περάσει ή είναι απλά μια ιστορία.
Σίγουρα φαίνεται ότι έχει και άλλο μέρος και αυτό μαρτυρείται και από το χειρόγραφο που δημοσιεύτηκε μετά τον θάνατο του που αναφέρεται στην χριστιανική θεωρία και τον έρωτα.
Το θέμα μου είναι ότι δεν μπορείς να ξεχωρίσεις ιδιαίτερα τις σκέψεις του Φουκώ με τις σκέψεις των συγγραφέων που αναφέρεται

The third volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality charts the changes in discourse from the ancient Greece to imperial Rome. Again examining the three fields of the body, the wife, and boys, he observes a strengthening of principles of sexual austerity. In dietetics, the shift is characterized by broader “correlations between the sexual act and the body” (238) and greater apprehension regarding the ambivalence of its effects. In economics, the conjugal bond becomes dual and reciprocal, and is valorized as a universal good. Finally, in erotics, abstinence shifts away from being a way of emphasizing the spiritual nature of love, and “a sign of an imperfection that is specific to sexual activity” (238). In all three areas, “sexual activity is linked to evil by its form and effects, but in itself… is not an evil” (239), as it will eventually become.

This installment advances historically beyond the ancient Athenian polis to the writings of the late Roman Republic and early Empire, developing from the chresis aphrodision to the epimeleia heautou, and their consequent romanization.

He opens with a discussion of the Oneirokritikon of Artemidorus Ephesius, which involve a hermeneutics of dreams, and which has much to say about erotic dreams (4 ff). Much typology here—dreams of sex in conformity with law, against the law, against nature—it reminds one of the typology of passions in de Sade’s 120 Days, there the erotic dreams of the French aristocracy. For Foucault, the importance of Artemidorus is that his “interpretation quite regularly discovers a social signification in sexual dreams” (27)—there are reasons for this, such as the linguistic ambivalence in key Greek terms that can be sexual or political, depending on context, but more salient is that Artemidorus wrote his oneirics “mainly to men in order to help them lead their lives as men” (28)—so, an impossibility of disentangling, as in Volume II, sex and gender from sexuality, orientation, and identity, on the one hand, and one’s life in the oikos from life in the polis, on the other.

Artemidorus’ presentation itself is a model of “restraint”: “no caresses, no complicated combinations, no phantasmagoria; just a few simple variations around one basic form—penetration” (29). This is because his interest is “the male organ—the one called anagkaion (the ‘necessary’ part, whose needs compel us and by whose force others are compelled” (33). The important Greek concept is Anagke, 'necessity'--it is the force that requires Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter, the force that compels Odysseus to cast infant Astyanax from the walls of Troy--it is the ultimate engine of Greek tragedy and its inevitable dilemmas, what brings into confrontation the equal rights of the agonists, between whom force must ultimately decide.

So follows the Romanization of the ancient epimeleia heautou as the cura sui (45 et seq.), working through the Roman philosophical schools, with attention to Stoics, Epicureans, and so on. Roman marriages (70 et seq.)—“love is carefully differentiated from the habitual sharing of existence” (79). The analysis of the ‘body’ is informed by Galen and the Roman physicians (105 ff). Sex is medicalized in this context as both “an involuntary violence of tension and an indefinite, exhausting expenditure” (113). Nevertheless, “sexual abstinence was not regarded as a duty, certainly, nor was the sexual act represented as an evil”—though this medical literature’s emphasis on health risks helped create later moralisms through “an insistence on the ambiguity of the effects of sexual activity” (122). Ultimately, the physicians proposed “a sort of animalization of the epithumia; that is, a subordination, as strict as possible, of the soul’s desire to the body’s needs; an ethics of desire that is modeled on a natural philosophy of excretions” (136). (This is not the belief of the Stoics, on the one hand, or Diogenes, on the other, of course.)

The argument regarding the Roman proprietor’s relation to his wife follows the trajectory of “a stylistics of living as a couple”: “in an art of conjugal relationship, in a doctrine of sexual monopoly, and in an aesthetics of shared pleasures” (149), which would have been innovative at the time, we must note. Marriage itself is not considered an aesthetic beneficence, but is rather a “duty” (155). Later a “Christian pastoral ministry” will “attempt to regulate everything—positions, frequency, gestures, each partner’s state of mind, knowledge by one of the intentions of the other, signs of desire on one side, tokens of acceptance on the other” (165); Greek and Roman writings are not concerned with this sort of totalitarian control. But, we did see some writers discuss the aphrodisia dikaia, “legitimate pleasures,” which concerns “pleasures that the partners enjoy together in marriage and for the purpose of begetting children” (168-69). Though that seems thuggish to me, there are subtleties:

In the same way, and just as the task of Dionysus is not in the fact of drinking intoxicating wine, the task of Aphrodite (ergon Aphrodites) is not in the mere relating and conjoining of bodies (synousia, meixis); it is in the feeling of friendship (philosophrosyne), the longing (pothos), the association (homilia), and the intimacy (synetheia) between two people. (182)

This leads inexorably to “the monopolistic principle, however: no sexual relations outside marriage. A requirement of ‘dehedonization’: sexual intercourse between spouses should not be governed by an economy of pleasure. A procreative finalizations: its goal should be the birth of offspring” (id.)

The final chapter concerns the significance of the pederasty and ephebophilia (190 et seq.). As in Volume II, plenty more of interest. Very precise local readings of the writers at issue. Bring on the English translation of recently discovered Volume IV.

Recommended for readers who approach cum multa modestia et timore.