Whatever else is true -- everyone has been shaped as a
sexual being by centuries of teachings in the societies in which we grow up.
F: “It is through a process of designation or
self-designation as a particular sexual identity that we are led to believe
that we know ourselves, that we have
discovered the truth of our being.”
F: “What needs to be examined is the oft-stated theme that
sex is outside of discourse and that the only way to clear a path to it is by
removing an obstacle and breaking a secret.”
F: “There is a significant difference between prohibitions
about sexuality and other forms of prohibition.
Unlike other prohibitions, sexual prohibitions are constantly connected
with the obligation to tell the truth about oneself.”
Foucault shows how official knowledges about sexuality begin
to infiltrate daily life.
One of his claims is that sexual scientists of the nineteenth
century did not invent techniques and
methods for uncovering hidden truths about sex, but instead they produced sexuality in its new
incarnation as an official category of knowledge.
The compulsion to confess creates the confession; and the
edict to reveal the truth creates the unrevealed secret.
Sexuality is a discourse in this sense (it creates a discourse -- it reaches out to
this)
Eros poetes logoi
Love gives us a tongue, love speaks itself via us, erotic
impulse verbalizes itself in the yawning, crying, singing, howling voices of
the forest and, finally, among humans
Sexuality is a discourse because sexuality creates discourse
-- makes us talk
Culture demands us to speak the truth about our sexual
encounters, secrets and acts
When we examine the way power has evolved in Western history
from tyranny to democracy we begin to ask the question whether we have still
not cut off the head of the king -- in politics, the hierarchy lives on --
Foucault is asking: what about in sex?
“What I am arguing for is sex without the law and power
without the king.”
Foucault becomes convinced that Western culture in its
Christian tradition leads its subjects to conceive of themselves in
relationship to desire. Studying this
history helps us see how individuals were led to focus their attention on themselves
and decipher and recognize and acknowledge themselves in relationship to
desire.
Foucault’s early work describes the self as the product of
the structures of society and downplays any sense of individual agency. In later works he talks about the agency of
the subject. His approach to these problems is practical:
“The ethics of the concern for self is a practice of
freedom.”
“I would say that if I am now interested in how the subject
constitutes himself in an active fashion, by the practices of the self, these
practices are however not simply invented
by the individual himself. They are
models that he finds it is culture and are proposed, suggested, imposed upon
him by his culture, society, and his cultural group.”
So he seems to be talking about a constructed subject and is
not talking about an essential subject, and the subject is not
operating autonomously but relatedly … responding to, rather than in isolation
from, the society … and the subject has a body also and his species an
evolutionary past, and he is alive ...
The point is to see how the self has been taught to see
itself in the midst of power relations and then to seize this power dynamic for
oneself and wrestle with limits and thus try to live-make the self
What we see in the past is not a utopian template for
restructuring our society or discovering ourselves. Old models offer ideas and heuristic guides
for questioning the limits and possibilities of projects for self-creation
today. We are studying history to be
free in the present -- to help liberate ourselves
The pleasures of the body were seen as natural but also
dangerous because they appealed to man's lower or animal side and because their
intensity could lead to overindulgence and thereby to a failure of mastery (enkrateia). A certain amount of privation was felt to be
good and to intensify desire such that austerity became a means of refining and
increasing the pleasure when one finally indulged (hedone).
“The achievement of self-mastery through the acetic ideal
assured for the Greeks a form of wisdom that brought them into direct contact
with some superior element in human nature and gave them access to the very
essence of truth.”
“An essence of the Greek understanding of ethos is that it is a mode of behavior
in which humanizing mastery of the self is not a denial of our earthly
condition but is understood and even appreciated as pleasurable and beneficial both to the self and
the other.”
“Ethos was a way
of being and of behavior. It was a way
of being for the subject along with a certain way of acting, visible to
others. Its presence was visible in his
clothing, appearance, gait, in the calm with which he responded to every event.”
“For the Greeks, this was the concrete form of freedom. This
was the way they problematized their
freedom.” To keep something alive we must find a way to problematize it while we live it
Whatever the perceived benefits of austerity, many free
citizens in the Greek culture enjoyed a full range of bodily pleasures --
austerity was not an authoritarian demand, an imposition or requirement, but a
supplement, a guide to good living.
“The theme of sexual austerity should be understood not as
an expression of, or a commentary on, deep and essential prohibitions -- but as
the elaboration and stylization of an activity in the exercise of its power and
the practice of its liberty.”
The externalization of erotic conflict within Christianity,
in which temptation comes from Satan and redemption is given by God, led to the
subject seeking a new understanding of itself by means of renouncing mastery (self-control, moderation, balance), that turns
the self, devoid of all of its passions, over to the will of God.
Beginning with the Greek erotics -- then in Christianity
there is a new erotics -- ultimately in our own time we see several series of
erotics developing serially -- histories make us think of possibilities
Although the discourse of absolute sin and evil did not make
itself manifest until Christianity was firmly established, Foucault traces
episodes in Roman history in which a line was crossed between austerity as a
practice of individual freedom, and this new austerity as obedience to a
prescriptive code of moral conduct. This
is a huge transition point in history -- it is also one of Foucault’s most powerful insights
Stoicism is a kind of midpoint: mastery over desire
ultimately becomes insensitivity -- life without enjoyment of life -- mastery that has crushed the life out of life -- a victory that is no longer a victory
In one case a person sees the moral codes of his culture and
is free to adapt them creatively to his own conduct -- in another there is a
system in which an externally imposed series of moral rules governs the
individual’s conduct via a regime of fear
Question: is there an ethics of the self that does not
construct an ‘other’ as abnormal -- one that would be compatible with democracy
-- with these various ‘erotics’ of the past, where are we going now -- we have
to go on with the critical project and with questioning -- the project of self-creation today --
reminders and inspirations
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