1st Edition
Foucault, Sexuality, Antiquity
Foucault, Sexuality, Antiquity, published for the first time in English, takes an interdisciplinary approach to exploring how the work of Michel Foucault has influenced studies of ancient Greece and Rome.
Foucault’s The History of Sexuality has had a profound and lasting impact across the humanities and social sciences. In the two volumes dedicated to pagan antiquity, Foucault provided scholars with new questions for addressing ancient Greek and Roman societies, and an original epistemological framework for thinking about eroticism and about the processes by which individuals are led to recognize themselves as the subjects of their desires. Now, decades later, the scholars in this volume explore Foucault’s role in shaping and reorienting discussions of antiquity in the fields of philosophy, gender studies, and psychoanalysis, among others.
A multidisciplinary exploration of Foucault’s work and its relationship to our understanding of ancient Greco-Roman societies, Foucault, Sexuality, Antiquity will be of interest to students and scholars in classical studies, philosophy, gender studies, and ancient history.
1. To Problematize Sexuality: Foucault, the Ancients, and Us
Sandra Boehringer and Daniele Lorenzini
Translated by Meryl Altman
2. The Use of Pleasure and Care of the Self: Genealogy of a Text
Frédéric Gros
Translated by Meryl Altman
3. To Refuse Universals: A Foucauldian History of Ancient Sexuality, History in the Present Tense
Sandra Boehringer
Translated by Meryl Altman
4. Perversion in Antiquity? Foucault, Seneca, and Psychiatric Reasoning
Kirk Ormand
5. "The Sexual Scene Concerns a Single Character"
Jean Allouch
Translated by Kirsten Ellerby
6. Subject of Desire and Subject of Discourse in Foucault: Sexuality and the Erotic Relations of Greek Women and Men
Claude Calame
Translated by Meryl Altman
7. Ancient Sexuality and the Principle of Activity: Foucauldian Paradoxes About Pederasty
Olivier Renaut
Translated by Meryl Altman
8. Desire As the "Historical Transcendental" of the History of Sexuality
Daniele Lorenzini
Translated by Meryl Altman
9. Body of Pleasure, Body of Desire: Augustine’s Theory of Marriage as Reread by Michel Foucault
Arianna Sforzini
Translated by Meryl Altman
10. From Hermeneutics to Strategics: Gender, Sexualities, Norms, and Psychoanalysis
Thamy Ayouch
Translated by Kirsten Ellerby
Biography
Sandra Boehringer is Associate Professor of Greek History at the University of Strasbourg, France. She is the author of Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome (Routledge, 2021) and has edited, with Laurie Laufer, Après Les Aveux de la chair: Généalogie du sujet chez Michel Foucault (Epel, 2020).
Daniele Lorenzini is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK, where he co-chairs the Centre for Research in Post-Kantian European Philosophy. He is the author, most recently, of The Force of Truth: Critique, Genealogy, and Truth-Telling in Michel Foucault (Chicago, forthcoming), and the co-editor of The Chicago Foucault Project.
Praise for the original French edition, Foucault, la sexualité, l'Antiquité (Éditions Kimé, 2016):
"The present book will remain a highly stimulating work for anyone wishing to go beyond well-worn paths, by making use of the new epistemological framework Foucault provides for approaching the question of ancient sexuality." Arnaud Paturet, Bryn Mawr Classical Review
"Foucault, Sexuality, Antiquity sets out to provide an update on Foucauldian thought regarding sexuality.… The book is a success, both at the level of the quality of the individual contributions, the clarity of their discussions, but also in the ways they complement one another." Jan Nelis, Anabases
