By Michel Foucault
During this sequel to The historical past of Sexuality, quantity I: An creation, the brilliantly unique French philosopher who died in 1984 supplies an research of the way the traditional Greeks perceived sexuality.Throughout The makes use of of delight Foucault analyzes an impossible to resist array of historical Greek texts on eroticism as he attempts to reply to uncomplicated questions: How within the West did sexual adventure develop into an ethical factor? And why have been different appetites of the physique, resembling starvation, and collective matters, equivalent to civic accountability, no longer subjected to the numberless principles and laws and judgments that experience outlined, if no longer constrained, sexual habit?
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Additional info for The History of Sexuality, Volume II: The Use of Pleasure
Sample text
The strategy made possible an equilibrium in the dynamics of pleasure and desire: it kept this dynamics from "running away," from becoming excessive, by setting the satisfaction of a need as its internal limit; and it prevented this natural force from revolting, from usurping a place that was not its own, because it provided only for what was necessary to the body and was intended by nature, and nothing more. At the same time it enabled one to avoid immoderation, which was, strictly speaking, a behavior that did not have its basis in nature.
1 Aphrodisia The Suda gives a definition of aphrodisia that will be repeated by Hesychius: aphrodisia are "the works, the acts of Aphrodite" (erga Aphrodites). Doubtless one should not expect to see a very rigorous attempt at conceptualization in such a work as the one mentioned, but it is a fact that the Greeks had not evinced, either in their theoretical reflection or in their practical thinking, a very insistent concern for defining precisely what they meant by aphrodisia-whether it was a question of determining the nature of the thing designated, of delimiting its scope, or of drawing up an inventory of its elements.
And in the part of Book VI of the History of Animals that deals more specifically with viviparous animals, he describes the different forms of copulation that can be observed: they vary according to the form and location of the organs, the position taken by the partners, and the duration of the act. But he also evokes the types of behavior that characterize the mating season: wild of lhe gaze is self-indulgent; rather. ln this connection, see Xenophon's Memorabilia. • As for the kiss, it was very highly valued as a physical pleasure and a communication of souls despite the danger il carried.
