The main theme of Michel Foucault’s 1980–1981 Collège de France lectures focuses primarily on the relationship among the subject, truth, and discourses.1 In a series of twelve lectures, Foucault investigates how and under what conditions subjects interact with and navigate through various discourses of truth that produce subjective experiences. He traces the genealogical threads that inform the essentialization of truth and the subjectivities of the subject in order to illustrate the historical contingencies of sexual practices and the construction of “regimes of truth.” Furthermore, he questions the relationship that subjects develop with themselves as they learn about truth—meaning, how does one relate to oneself as one interacts with discourses of truth? His lectures trace the emergence of the techniques for the art of living in conjugal relationships and the hierarchical status of marriage relative to other forms of sexual practices. In the final lecture, given on April 1, 1981, Foucault argues that techniques of the self conformed to specific ways of relating to oneself based on strict conjugal relationships—and pleasure was completely linked to monogamy. Thus, the subjective relationship one had with oneself had to be based on self-mastery. Self-mastery produced pleasure. More importantly, the final lecture demonstrates that the development of desire, as a form of subjectivism and objectivism, historically emerged. Foucault’s critiques of desire as an instrument of power/knowledge are fairly pervasive throughout his later works, and specifically in The History of Sexuality series. He argues that forms of power/knowledge coopted desire, even produced desire as a tool to determine the truth about a person: Tell me your desires, and I’ll tell you who you are. Various strategies of confessional technology induced subjects to speak their (sexual) desire. In the final lecture of the 1980–1981 series, he spells out historically how that happened.
At about this time, Foucault granted an interview with Le Gai Pied, a newly formed French gay magazine. Le Gai Pied was established to move gay social life out of the salons and bars and into the streets. Foucault composed a piece for the magazine’s first issue in which he extols the virtues of suicide, but in 1981 he gave an interview, which was later published as “Friendship as a Way of Life.”2 Our collection, Michel Foucault and Sexualities and Genders in Education: Friendship as Ascesis, is framed around Foucault’s reflections on friendship in that interview. It’s important to note, however, that Foucault had become quite involved politically and personally in the gay scene in Paris and in the United States. He had also written and spoken extensively about how he viewed the gay rights movement and what he thought being queer could mean for both gays and straight people, noting for instance that “we should consider the battle for gay rights as an episode that cannot be the final stage” (Foucault 1997b, p. 157). In 1979, furthermore, he spoke at the Congress of Arcade, which was a Paris-based group founded in 1957 to help “homophiles” live better lives and to become more accepted in heterosexual culture. It was France’s oldest gay organization and was a members-only organization. Foucault gave a talk about the historical contingencies of gender and sex. He argued that pleasure needed to be liberated from the normalized gender constraints, even within the gay community (e.g., active/passive), and he explained that pleasure is “… something which passes from one individual to another; it is not secreted by identity. Pleasure has no passport, no identity” (cited in Macey 1993, p. 364). This point clearly echoes his main conclusion in volume 1 of The History of Sexuality that the antidote to the power arrangements of sex and sexuality is not normalization or hierarchicalization or bio-politics, but bodies and pleasure. As Foucault (1997a) states in the interview:
What we must work on, it seems to me, is not so much to liberate our desires but to make ourselves infinitely more susceptible to pleasure [plaisirs]. We must escape and help others to escape the two readymade formulas of the pure sexual encounter and the lovers’ fusion of identities. (p. 137)
For Foucault, pleasure, unlike desire, could not be coopted by power/knowledge simply because it has no “passport.” As Halperin (1995) explains: “Unlike desire, which expresses the subject’s individuality, history, and identity as a subject, pleasure is desubjectivating, impersonal: it shatters identity, subjectivity, and dissolves the subject, however fleetingly, into the sensorial continuum of the body” (p. 95).3 Sex itself and gender had been produced, according to Foucault, by the dispositif of sexuality, or Scientia Sexualis, and the body endured the marks of the dispositif of sexuality that governed it under the pervading forms of power/knowledge. For this reason, Foucault advocated “for the decentralisation, the regionalisation of all pleasures” (cited in Macey 1993, p. 364).
Decentralization and regionalization are not about rediscovering one’s sexuality, nor liberating it as in “coming out,” but rather involves taking risks to manufacture, create, and invent other forms of pleasures and of relating to each other that defy the dispositif of Scientia Sexualis. From this perspective, Foucault admonishes gays to use their bodies as a resource for numerous pleasures, ones that exceed the “Always drinking, eating, and fucking that seems to be the limit of our understanding of our body, our pleasure” (cited in Macey 1993, pp. 368–369). Indeed, Foucault advocates in “Friendship as a Way of Life” that gays need to exist in a continual state of creation, invention, experimentation and, hence, self-transformation. This is what Foucault means by “ascesis,” as opposed to asceticism. As he explains:
Asceticism as the renunciation of pleasure has bad connotations. But ascesis is something else: it’s the work that one performs on oneself in order to transform oneself or make the self appear which, happily, one never attains. Can that be our problem today? We’ve rid ourselves of asceticism. Yet it’s up to us to advance into a homosexual ascesis that would make us work on ourselves and invent—I do not say discover—a manner of being that is still improbable. (Foucault 1997a, p. 137)
Foucault’s notion of advancing into a homosexual ascesis also constitutes an ethical practice in that he envisions “gay becoming” (Halperin 1995, p. 79) as a collaborative endeavor, a relation to oneself in relation to others. Thus, his conception of ascesis is “not simply a matter of self-transformation. Rather, it also involves the transformation of others through a negotiable and collaborative process of relationship construction… a move from a solitary aesthetics of existence toward a more collaborative aesthetics of existence” (Kingston 2009, pp. 16–17). It is this collaborative, experimental process that Foucault frames as “friendship” and that helps to explain what he means in the interview when he states that “The deve...