THE CARE OF THE SELF: Vol. III of The History of Sexuality

by Michel Foucault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 1986

Third and perhaps concluding volume (although a fourth has been published in France) by the late Foucault of a genealogy of desire. As translated by Hurley, Foucault's refined (some might say obsessively nit-picking) style has its alternating passages of clear speech and mind-wearying debate. It turns out that a genealogy of desire--of lust and libido as experienced in early Western societies--is a legitimate and provocative type of ethical analysis. Sexual behavior as social expression is as reliable a prism of individual societies as their art or polemics. At times Foucault's verbal microscope is even imaginative, giving us a kind of medical vision of daily life in Greece and Rome, a picture of early fitness fads based on moral reflection on sexual activity. It's like reading Aristotle on Running or On the Charm of Girls and the Beauty of Boys. Foucault finds that various late Greco-Roman sexual ideals for physical, moral and spiritual health led to austere Christian proscriptions that essentially view sexual pleasure as evil, especially any relation that might take place outside marriage, with strict fidelity between spouses. ""Furthermore, a certain doctrinal disqualification seems to bear on the love for boys."" This is all part of the care of the self, the new theme that dominates the current volume. ""The art of the self no longer focuses so much on the excesses that one can indulge in and that need to be mastered in order to exercise one's domination over others."" Instead, self-care strives for the avoidance of ills, for ideals ""grounded in both nature and reason, and valid for all human beings."" Foucault studies early dream analysis, the cultivation of the self, the writing of Galen and others on the body, aphrodisia and the wife and the marriage tie, and Plutarch and other thinkers on the care of the self regarding boy-love. All too often these paragraphs come packed in sawdust, and yet ancient men and women are seen wriggling with life beneath the academic tone. Foucault's learnedness about desire seems boxed for cold storage on a library shelf for time-proof, unreadable sociological tomes. It is really odd to have the most piercing human feelings revealed, then baled like hay.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1986

Categories: NONFICTION