"Catching, not pitching?", asks Carlo Gervasi when Vito Spatafore is outed as a homosexual. The outrage at Vito's passivity during a fellatio act serves a comedic purpose. We might laugh at the bigoted wise guys of the Sopranos universe, but in reality we laugh at our own prejudices, still quite frequent in many social settings. The active, the dominant ones are treated with more leniency than 'gimps', 'bottoms', or in general, those who are submissive. What is probably not common knowledge is how this line of thinking has ancient roots dating back to the Greeks.

The relationship of man with boy is one of the points of focus for Foucault in the second volume of his History of Sexuality. Of course, times have changed and certain theories of the Greeks are no longer acceptable from an ethical standpoint. Foucault vehemently opposed many modern precepts, he was at loggerheads with the juridical system of the 1970s and 1980s, and he would probably be even more so these days. Given his biography, the sympathetic approach towards pederasty (be careful about using that word!) on the pages of the volume is not shocking.

It can be forgiven, though, because the Use of Pleasure is an intellectual delight. Foucault admits to straying from the self-imposed structure he anticipated in the first book. He goes back in time as far as ancient Greece, and it's this place and time that the volume is devoted to. His change of mind, fortunately, makes his work more complete.

A repeating theme of the book is related to a perceived (lack of) continuity between Greece and further epochs in Western history. In some respects, there is some overlap between the ancient thought and Christianity, but despite multiple areas of concordance, the rules prescribed in both cases stem from different motives, ultimately making them quite divergent.

Perhaps the main difference lies in the concept of temperance. Sex was not something evil or forbidden; in ancient Greece it didn't yet belong to the process of expanding, authoritarian codification. And yet concupiscence wasn't considered to be completely neutral either. Immoderation could negatively affect the man's impact on both oikos and polis, places that were crucial in building prosperity and maintaining peace.

Foucault goes through a plethora of ancient texts, including those of Plato and Aristotle, and focuses on different aspects of temperance, as considered in dietetics, economics, and erotics. Unlike the first volume which had a more philosophical tone, the Use of Pleasure is more about historical and literary analysis. It's still a great read, different in flavor, but fulfilling and whetting one's appetite for more.

This is some deep genealogy, something that is a far cry from the more wild, theoretical-level writings of the young Foucault. He turns his attentions to the Greeks, arguing that they viewed sexuality more in terms of dietetic regimen, one to be conformed with for maximum health. A point which he repeats ad nauseam. Now, I enjoyed the examples given but -- and this shouldn’t be a surprise given Foucault's rather androcentric view of sex -- he seems to leave female desire almost completely out of the equation. One could argue that the heavily patriarchal nature of Greek society made this an inevitability in terms of the available sources, but that's no excuse for a researcher of Foucault's caliber. Onward, a bit more cautiously this time, to Volume 3.

لا أشعر بجدوى المراجعة بسبب عدم قدرتي على تخيّل مراجعة مختصرة و الاختصار عندي شرط صحة لا شرط كمال..فإذن أقول :إن فوكو اقتصر هنا على أدب اليونان في الافروديسا "متع الحب" و الغذائي و الاقتصادي بما هو إدارة البيت و حكمة الزواج و فرّق بين مبدأ الاعتدال- في متع الحب- عند اليونان ومبدأ التنقيص و التطهير عند المسيحية حول الافروديسا.
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ينقل فوكو عن سقراط هذا المعنى : "إن الاعتدال في استعمال المتع هو ثمرة نظام أنطولوجي تنتجه علاقة الفرد مع الحقيقة ". هذا والسلام.

In "The use of pleasures", Michel Foucault explores how ancient Greek and Roman societies conceived their relationship with pleasure and desire, breaking with the mechanisms of power and repression analyzed in the first volume of " The history of sexuality. He shows that, in these contexts, sexuality was not approached as a moral fault or taboo subject, but as an area for ethical reflection. Pleasure was measured against an ideal of self-mastery and balance, in a quest for personal and social excellence. This historical shift enabled Foucault to develop his notion of 'technologies of the self': practices by which individuals work to transform their conduct, not under the constraint of an external authority, but in relation to adaptive norms linked to their status and role.

Foucault thus reveals that ancient discourses on sexuality, far from being uniform, were deeply contextual. Expectations of moderation or use of pleasures varied according to gender, age or social rank, but always as a function of an ethos in which the control of desire was linked to self-governance and, by extension, to the stability of the social order. This framework, based on contextual ethics rather than universal prohibitions, contrasts sharply with modern norms, which are often more rigid and pathologizing.

By revisiting Antiquity, Foucault goes beyond a simple historical analysis: he proposes a reflection on freedom and autonomy, where ethics becomes a personal invention rather than a submission to external injunctions. This second volume helps to understand how subjectivity can be shaped by thoughtful, conscious practices. It questions our own conceptions of pleasure and our relationship with the body, while inviting us to reassess contemporary norms in the light of these historical alternatives.

however this narrow focus gives a pretty homogeneous view of antiquity and Foucault doesn’t explore the evolution of sexual norms beyond ancient greece etc

O sea, no voy a hacer un review crítico de un libro de Foucault. Es un placer de leer y ya fue.

This book broke the spell of Foucault for me. In works like n  n he wove a net from works that were unknown to me. Who was I to question his readings?

Here I finally saw him at work on an author and text I knew, and when I looked at what he did with Xenophon, I found his reading of the Oeconomicus was bizarre and tendentious.

Fully escaping from Foucault would take me until n  n but this was the start.

cool survey of the greek conception of sexuality love and erotics, which were all considered under the same category of "aphrodisia". foucault goes over sexual prescriptions and health, the "economics" or the rules/organization of a household (i.e. the relationship between husband and wife), and the socio-sexual dynamics of what we call homosexuality today. the thesis at the end is that control/rules regarding sexual relations between men and boys as they relate to virility, truth, vitality, and the attention paid to homo-philia shifted, after antiquity, to women with new attention paid to virginity, marital conduct, and husband-wife reciprocity

"The principle according to which this activity was meant to be regulated, the "mode of subjection," was not defined by a universal legislation determining permitted and forbidden acts; but rather by a savoir-faire, an art that prescribed the modalities of a use that depended on different variables (need, time, status). The effort that the individual was urged to bring to bear on himself, the necessary ascesis, had the form of a battle to be fought, a victory to be won in establishing a dominion of self over self, modeled after domestic or political authority. Finally, the mode of being to which this self-mastery gave access was characterized as an active freedom, a freedom that was indissociable from a structural, instrumental, and ontological relation to truth" (p.91).

I enjoyed this book more than the first volume of the series. The most I think it could be criticized for is that it is not so clear what Foucault is trying to say. The prescriptive aspect is less pronounced than in the previous volume and without the first volume it might not be clear what "The Use of Pleasure" really means or why it is in the title. The introduction gives an overview of the covered material before going all the way back to ancient Greece to give us the actual start of the history of sexuality. However, the descriptive part that is most of the book is where Foucault shines and it stands as a nice contrast to the popular image of Foucault as this passionate progressive relativist. I have seen people talking about how the book is about discrimination and its origins, but it's really about the ancient views on sexuality and how those views were drastically different from our own. Foucault manages to immerse the reader in this foreign land while at the same time explaining why it is the way it is. I didn't see moral statements here, just objective descriptions and really good ones. The book deals with the dietetic, the economic and the erotic aspects of ancient sexuality with ancient works from Plato to different comedians referenced throughout and all of it being unified into a whole by the end.

“If one wanted to assign an origin to those few great themes that shaped our sexual morality (the idea that pleasure belongs to the dangerous domain of evil, the obligation to practice monogamous fidelity, the exclusion of partners of the same sex), not only would it be a mistake to attribute them to that fiction called ‘Judeo-Christian’ morality, it would be a bigger mistake to look behind them for the timeless operation of prohibition, or the permanent form of law. The sexual austerity that was prematurely recommended by Greek philosophy is not rooted in the timelessness of a law that would take the historically diverse forms of repression, one after the other. It belongs to a history that is more decisive for comprehending the transformations of moral experience than the history of codes: a history of ‘ethics’, understood as the elaboration of a form of relation to the self that enables an individual to fashion himself into a subject of ethical conduct."

genuinamente interessante e engajante! aprendi muitas coisas aqui mas o conhecimento principal é o quão estranho era o povo grego em relação à alimentação (e na verdade sobre todas as coisas que envolviam o corpo e a propriedade). a estilização da experiência, como foucault a define, em contraponto à hermenêutica do desejo, é algo muito inerente à sociedade grega e que se constituia como uma verdadeira ritualização do dia a dia.
também não sei se é crédito do autor ou do tradutor mas a leitura foi mil vezes mais fluida do que eu imaginava!

4/5

Brief thoughts: This is a solid second volume. But one needs to understand Foucault’s scope and objective going into it. If you’re looking forward to broad analysis of various non-normative forms of sexuality, like homosexuality; or if you’re hoping to see any discussion of the sexuality of women or girls, you’re going to be very disappointed. Foucault only focussed on a few centuries BCE, only in Ancient Greece, and only on a small number of lasting writings. The latter of these is, as far as I can tell, not Foucault’s fault. A lot of Ancient Greek works haven’t survived, and whether works by or about women were suppressed or non-existent, either way this reflects the patriarchal bias of the place and period.

On the other hand, this may be the easiest, most readable of Foucault’s monographs, and for this reason at least it’s somewhat more favourable to those unacquainted with his work. It’s not all that captivating, but it’s well-researched and occasionally insightful. One really needs to read all four volumes to grasp the significance and relations at work in each one.

Anybody have opinions on whether I should read these in order? Because I kinda want to read the one about the Greeks asap.