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The History of Sexuality. Book 2. The Uses of Pleasure

14.99 €
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The History of Sexuality. Book 2. The Uses of Pleasure
14.99 €
In basket
The second volume of The History of Sexuality marks a fundamental shift in Michel Foucault's work. Published eight years after the first volume, The Uses of Pleasure (1984) opens a new field of inquiry—the study of the practices through which people shape themselves as moral subjects of their own actions. Foucault analyzes how the Greeks of the fourth century BCE problematized the pleasures associated with sexual relations—in Dietetics, Eroticism, Economics, and Philosophy (in the Platonic tradition)—not through prohibitions, but through the principles of a particular aesthetics of existence, where the experience of aphrodisia (in contrast to the Christian experience of the "flesh" and modern sexuality) becomes part of a voluntary and deliberate "art of the self," a stylization of one's own subjectivity. Drawing on the writings of Greek physicians, philosophers, educators, and moralists, Foucault demonstrates that in classical antiquity, the enjoyment of pleasure was subordinated not so much to coercive rules purporting to correspond to some universal human nature, but rather to the principle of "self-mastery," or self-control, and the task of transforming one's life into a work worthy of memory. Foucault integrates this analysis into a general genealogy of forms of subjectivity in the European tradition, based on an understanding of ethics as a "deliberate practice of freedom."
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