A review by lawrenceevalyn
The History of Sexuality, Volume 3: The Care of the Self by Michel Foucault

4.0

The third volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality charts the changes in discourse from the ancient Greece to imperial Rome. Again examining the three fields of the body, the wife, and boys, he observes a strengthening of principles of sexual austerity. In dietetics, the shift is characterized by broader “correlations between the sexual act and the body” (238) and greater apprehension regarding the ambivalence of its effects. In economics, the conjugal bond becomes dual and reciprocal, and is valorized as a universal good. Finally, in erotics, abstinence shifts away from being a way of emphasizing the spiritual nature of love, and “a sign of an imperfection that is specific to sexual activity” (238). In all three areas, “sexual activity is linked to evil by its form and effects, but in itself… is not an evil” (239), as it will eventually become.