Foucault, Sexuality, Antiquity

Sandra Boehringer, Daniele Lorenzini, Sandra Boehringer, Daniele Lorenzini

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000601770
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Geschichte der griechischen Antike

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.

PART I

Before Sexuality

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178736-4

3

To Refuse Universals

A Foucauldian History of Ancient Sexuality, History in the Present Tense¹

Sandra Boehringer

TRANSLATED BY MERYL ALTMAN

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178736-5

“To sift history through a way of thinking that refuses universals”: this was the goal Michel Foucault clearly laid out for himself at the end of the 1970s.² As Foucault shows in his History of Sexuality, sexuality is a singular historical experience, and a recent one. While the study of ancient cultures was central to his analysis of the processes by which the individual is led to recognize himself as the subject of his desire and of his own existence, Foucault’s inquiry always observes this methodological injunction: to presuppose neither the continuity, nor the invariability, of concepts and concerns. One wonders what response might greet the first three volumes of the History of Sexuality – books which show that “identities” are the products of a culture that invented the need for them and outlined the shape they would take, books which reveal the “natural order” to be a discursive fiction – if they were published today, at a time when fiery debates about the “natural” dimension of gender and a supposedly “normal” and “primary” (hetero)sexuality are once more breaking out, in Europe and around the world. To put categories that are commonly seen as natural back into the frame of history, and to accomplish this by studying the very Greek and Roman cultures that for centuries have provided conservatives invested in the (supposed) origins of our “Western” civilization³ with a treasure-trove of the arguments from authority they delight to use: this would probably strike some of them as yet one more provocation.

It is precisely because Foucault’s thinking has remained so timely, because it continues to work against the grain of what is fashionable and to challenge ready-made ways of thinking, that intellectuals from a wide range of fields including history, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and anthropology still read and reread his History of Sexuality and, more recently, his 1980–1981 lectures at the Collège de France, Subjectivité et vérité (Subjectivity and Truth).⁴ How should we understand what impelled Foucault, at a time when scholarship on ancient eroticism was just beginning to be accessible to a broad audience, to undertake what he jokingly referred to as his “Greco-Latin ‘trip’”?⁵ What was the context, the state of ongoing research, in the field of Classics at that time?⁶ And how can we explain what enables us, almost forty years later, to move forward, once again, in Foucault’s company?

The Road to Antiquity: The Influence of a Sociology of the Present

Foucault began the research that would lead him to write The Will To Knowledge at a time when sexual matters were very much in the news. In the aftermath of 1968, new voices were making themselves heard, the voices of feminists and militants for the rights of homosexuals and also the new movement of anti-psychiatric institutional psychotherapy. In 1972, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari published L’Anti-Œdipe (Anti-Oedipus) and Guy Hocquenghem Le Désir homosexuel (Homosexual Desire); at the same time, Lacan began his seminar Encore on what he called “la jouissance.” Monique Wittig’s Le Corps lesbien (The Lesbian Body) appeared in 1973.⁷ Amid this atmosphere of self-described “sexual revolution,” Foucault undertook to contest the very idea of “liberation” and to describe modern sexuality as a normative apparatus.

At first, the context that interested him was the period at the end of the eighteenth century when new forms of power appeared, the turning point when “something inaugurated the society of the norm, of health, of medicine, of normalization, which is now our basic way of functioning.”⁸ Antiquity was not on the agenda. At this stage of the philosopher’s trajectory, the point was to historicize an experience which science, technology, and religion presented as the ahistorical, universal object of a scientific form of knowledge (scientia sexualis), and to show how these discourses had come to draw the boundary-lines that separate normal from abnormal, health from pathology.

Meanwhile, the disciplines of ethnology and then anthropology, from their earliest days, had always included the question of sexual practice in their analyses and observations of human societies. This was the case for Bronislaw Malinowski,⁹ who carried out fieldwork during the First World War in the archipelago of the Trobriand Islands, situated at the eastern tip of what is now Papua New Guinea; it was also the case for Margaret Mead, whose studies, conducted from the 1920s to the 1940s, dealt with a range of groups in Oceania.¹⁰ However, ethnographers and anthropologists usually linked their observations to two major areas that were still the hallmark of anthropology: the study of kinship (that is to say, the study of descent and marriage, with its attendant rules and prescriptions regarding sexual matters and patterns of residence), and the study of rites of passage. Sexual behavior as such was not their focus, and was usually studied only as it bore upon the issues already conceptualized by those fields in the course of the 20th century.

It was thus an important turning-point for the discipline of anthropology when feminist anthropologists in the 1970s began to explicitly link gender and sexuality, as part of theorizing the oppression of women: this can be seen from early work collected in Women, Culture, and Society (1974, edited by Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere), Toward an Anthropology of Women (1975, edited by Rayna Reiter), and Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality (1981, edited by Sherry Ortner and Harriet Whitehead). With a few exceptions, however, these researchers were interested in studying sex roles and practices, not in sexuality considered as an apparatus; Ortner and Whitehead’s book, which appeared in 1981, makes no mention of the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, published in 1976 and translated into English in 1978.¹¹

In the few scholarly works that took up the question of Greek and Roman love and sexuality before the 1970s, the motif of rites de passage was a recurring one: the “homosexuality” of the Ancients was mainly approached through this lens. In his vast study on the Dorian peoples (1824), which left its mark on historians for generations, Karl Otfried Müller had described pederastic initiation rituals in Sparta and Crete as intended to reinforce companionship between warriors. In 1907, Erich Bethe’s “Die dorische Knabenliebe: ihre Ethik und ihre Idee”¹² proposed a parallel between the customs of the Dorians and initiation in Papua New Guinea. Jan Bremmer, in his article “An Enigmatic Indo-European Rite: Paederasty,”¹³ and Harald Patzer, in Die griechische Knabenliebe,¹⁴ both picked up this paradigm, though their readings were very different: where Bremmer saw a stage of ritual humiliation, Patzer saw a positive, though temporary, social act.

Generally speaking, classicists saw the anthropologists’ “rites of passage” as the proper way to understand the homoerotic relations of the Ancients.¹⁵ However, even though these were the rare studies to even mention the subject of ancient sexuality, they do not appear among the works consulted by Foucault for The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self. For the most part, interpretations of pederastic relations in terms of rites of passage – whether produced by ethnologists visiting distant societies or the fruit of reflection by eminent Hellenists – are not relevant to his thinking.¹⁶ Paradoxically, one of the factors that influenced Foucault to begin looking at ancient societies was contemporary sociology.

Within the field of sociology, sexual issues, which began to be more widely studied in the US in the 1960s, were formulated from the general perspective that came to be called “social constructionist.”¹⁷ Scholars analyzed the social and cultural construction of sex roles and hierarchies through the framework of ideas developed by the Chicago School. For instance, British sociologist Mary McIntosh, who had studied at Berkeley, explored hypotheses close to those Foucault would develop; she was among the first to explicitly historicize the category “homosexuality” in her article “The Homosexual Role,” which dealt with modern and contemporary times.¹⁸ Beginning in the 1970s, field studies were conducted at various sites where different sexual forms were expressed; the work of Gayle Rubin, investigating practices less for their own sake than for the forms of sociability they produced, illustrates the richness of this field.¹⁹

David Halperin offers the following analysis in Saint Foucault:

Foucault’s growing exposure, in the same period of his life, to the burgeoning political, social, and sexual cultures of the new lesbian and gay communities in the United States significantly shaped the interpretative lenses he brought to bear on the ancient ethical texts and provided a framework for his deepening inquiries into ethical self-fashioning.²⁰

After 1976, Foucault effectively left behind the archives and the discourses produced “in religious institutions, in pedagogical forms, in medical practices, in family structures”²¹ which he had explored in The Will to Knowledge, and devoted his attention to a new issue, one broader than the question of sexuality. From then on, he would draw upon medical, moral, and philosophical texts to understand how, in Greece at the beginning of the Hellenistic era, the link between subjectivity, desire, and pleasure was conceived and elaborated through tech...