The History of Sexuality Part Three Concern for the Self

The initial project of this series of studies, presented in The Will to Know (1976), was not to reconstruct the history of sexual behaviors and practices, nor to analyze the ideas (scientific, religious, or philosophical) through which these behaviors were represented. Rather, it was to understand how, in modern Western societies, something like an “experience” of “sexuality” has emerged. This is a familiar concept, but it did not appear before the beginning of the nineteenth century.
To speak of sexuality as a historically unique experience presupposes writing a genealogy of the desiring subject, and thus returning not only to the beginnings of the Christian tradition but also to ancient Greek philosophy.
Thus, starting from the modern period and going back, beyond Christianity, to the Old Testament, Michel Foucault was confronted with a question that was both very simple and very general: Why is sexual behavior, and the activities and pleasures associated with it, the subject of moral concern? Why did this ethical concern, which appeared at different moments, appear more or less important than the ethical preoccupation focused on other areas of individual or collective life, such as dietary behavior or the performance of civic duties?
These forms of existence, applied to Greco-Latin culture, and which in turn emerged in connection with a set of practices that could be called the “arts of existence” or “technologies of the self,” were of such extreme importance that they deserved a full study.
Hence, ultimately, the reorientation and focus of this comprehensive study on the genealogy of human desire from classical Greece to the first centuries of Christianity, divided into three parts that form a single whole:
– “The Use of Pleasure” examines how sexual behavior was conceived in classical Greek thought as a field of moral evaluations and choices, and the patterns of subjectivity to which this thought referred. Moral matter, patterns of subjection, forms of self-construction, and moral purpose, and how medical and philosophical thought crystallized this “use of pleasure” and formulated, in this regard, certain rigorous themes that would later become recurrent around four axes of experience: the relationship with the body, the relationship with marriage, the relationship with boys, and the relationship with truth.
– “The Preoccupation with the Self,” which analyzes these problems in Greek and Latin texts of the first two centuries of the Christian era, and the change in direction they experienced within the art of living, dominated by the preoccupation with the self itself.
– “Confessions of the Flesh,” which finally addresses the experience of carnal desire in the early Christian centuries and the role it played in the hermeneutics and cathartic revelation of desire.
Michel Foucault died before being able to publish this final volume. He left a will strictly prohibiting the publication of any subsequent writings that he did not approve of. Therefore, the reader will find only the first two volumes here. “The Use of Pleasures” and “Self-Concern,” with the general introduction “The Will to Know.”