The sequel to a delightful tale. Foucault takes sexuality in Ancient Greece as his subject here. It's a genuinely piercing study ! What we'd expect from the big MF.

I found the discussion and destruction of the 'bisexual Greek' figure to be quite remarkable and I enjoyed that. A clever and self-aware distinction there, conscientiously taking Fleshly retroactive chromatography-stains away from the Grecian concepts.

There's a lot of Plato here, unsurprisingly. Phaedrus, Philebus, Symposium, Laws, Timaeus and so forth. It's nice to see him dealt with this sensibly though I wish I was better acquainted with Aristotle for a lot of this. In the new year, I'm sure. The closing remarks about the relationship between love and truth w/r/t the boys adoring Socrates in Symposium felt a genuinely remarkable step forward in both Plato studies and the constitution of Greek sexuality.

MF admits it's a restricted piece insofar as he runs from the philosophical and dietetic pieces of the era that wander into prescriptive veins. As keen as he is to emphasise that these pieces were written for and by a minority of free adult males, one can't help but feel the sexual practices of women in the period are rather underserved by Foucault here, beyond the attitudes and prescriptions of what the familiar heavy hitters say, malely. The neglect of the obvious Sappho is quite bizarre, and while I do understand that this develops through the discursive-authority vein, I couldn't help wanting more in that area.

In a sense I read this to get to Volume 4, eventually. But it was a worthwhile read and a good one for Classicists to take a look at. Volume 1 is the superior piece but I still appreciate the LSD-induced revitalisation of the project as it regards the subject. Was crucial.

A meditation on the problematization of desire in Ancient Greece. Foucault presents the era's ethics of pleasure in stark contrast to the hermeneutics of desire that emerged with early Christian doctrine.

Foucault cautions the reader of this volume right in the beginning that he is not a classicist and neither trained in the classical Greek nor Latin canon; unfortunately, this also seems quite apparent through larger parts of his textual analysis. Often times, the sources consulted for his argument seem rather random, and he gives little to no contextualization. To be fair, Foucault was never known as an acute historian but rather as an influential philosopher. Conceptually then, the volume at hand is again highly valuable and well laid out: Foucault here traces the emergence of morality, moral codes, and ethics governing sexual behavior in ancient Greece. He then investigates the interrelationship between those ethics and certain modes of subjection and subject creation. All in all a sometimes a bit tiring yet interesting read, not Foucault at his best, yet still conceptually widely relevant.

"الرحيل يُجدد شباب الأمور، كما يُشيخ العلاقة مع الذات"

تاريخ الجنسانية: استعمال اللذات – ميشيل فوكو

يعود فوكو إلى تحليل المجتمع الأوروبي القديم (الأثيني والإغريقي) وطبيعة حياته الاجتماعية التي قننت اللذة ورسمت لها أوجه الاعتدال المتناسبة مع ظروف حياتهم وسياستهم وطبائعهم الاجتماعية، وفي مجلده الثاني من هذه السلسلة، يناقش السؤال الأخلاقي الذي يحيط بنظرة الإغريقي حول المتع واللذات، وارتباطه بالقيم التي رسمها الأثينيون لأنفسهم، وتعاملهم مع الغلمانية بالطريقة المتوائمة مع جنسانيتهم التي سمحت لهم بقدر من الحرية، ربطوها بدورهم بالاعتدال الذي ينطوي على تحكم المرء بذاته وطباعه.
يُعد هذا المجلد أكثر ثراء من المجلد الأول وأكثر بساطة في طرح المواضيع، ويدور في معظمه حول القانون الأخلاقي لاستعمال اللذات في المجتمع اليوناني القديم، لذلك يعد مرجعاً ثرياً للباحثين، وصورة شبه مكتملة حول الأخلاق الأثينية.

A VERY dense book concerning the problematics of sex, desire, pleasure, and it’s relation to Archaic and Classical Greek perceptions of self, aestheticism, asceticism, power and influence, and truth prescribed by nature. I found Foucault’s work to be extremely helpful in breaking down the commonly held myth that pagan/ ancient societies were any more sexually liberated than we are today. That is not to say that modern self-perceptions of being are in any way connected to that of antiquity, but simply that problematics seem to occupy human thought across space and time. I appreciate Foucault’s attempt at providing modern readers with an alternative framework for considering love, desire, and it’s relation to perception of the self. Very enlightening.

It does indeed seem to be the case that many of the ancient Greeks and Romans were oblivious to what we see as the ethical issues pertaining to human sexuality. Of course, given our limited sources, it is difficult to generalize with a high degree of certainty. What we have was written by elites and filtered through elites over centuries when women were regarded as inferior, adulthood started earlier, marriages were frequently arranged and various forms of slavery (often including a sexual component) were taken for granted. Yet within this milieu existed Judaism and arose Christianity, both of which did promulgate ethics of sexuality.

Foucault daría cursos enteros basados en fan fictions.

extremely lucid and eye-opening. I will return to a lot, similar to the previous book.

bought it in a used bookstore. looking forward to finding the other volumes.

Greeks are cool in someways but also a lot of boy fucking...so, mixed bag

L'étude est intéressante mais la rédaction se répète et, par moment, tourne en rond. L'oeuvre aurait pu être plus succinte et ainsi plus impactante.

Lo

Less theoretically dense than the first volume, volume two really shines in how it shows Foucault’s ability to regard the nuance in discursive formations.