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A review by inept_scholar
The History of Sexuality, Volume 3: The Care of the Self by Michel Foucault
4.0
So I am actually glad that I read the entire three volumes of History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault. And though I enjoyed reading Foucault's dissemination of the discourse on sexuality through ancient Greek texts, God only knows how much I actually understood! Also would it be weird if I said that the second and third books felt many times like a self-help book? But in a manner of speaking, this is exactly the sort of idea of the self that Foucault examines through Aristotelian and Platonic texts. .
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Perceiving the care of the self as one that is to be achieved through abstinence from physical desires/ aphrodisia, this view is further extended by Foucault to show how this model behavior was considered an ideal for those men responsible for management of a household or a city, as well as framing of different kinds of relationships such as through marriage or through the pursuit of one's male lover. With this view, Foucault also argues that later discourses on sexuality after the spread of Christianity sought to associate it with sin and to construct new categories of the self, that sought to contain as well as to expose 'deviant' variations of sexuality in order to define and control these repurposed ideas of sexuality.
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A lot of these ideas on construct of the self, power and surveillance, are frequent themes in Foucault's book. The first book in the volume is short but utterly intriguing to read. But you do feel bogged down by the time you reach the third! And sometimes there is just too much repetition and excessive verbosity that tends to make Foucault's works a little hard to digest. Still I would say, it is definitely worth reading more than once, since these are those kind of books where you learn something new every time you go back them.
#michelfoucault #historyofsexuality #threevolumes #ancientgreektexts #readinglistforhistory #readinglist2019
.
Perceiving the care of the self as one that is to be achieved through abstinence from physical desires/ aphrodisia, this view is further extended by Foucault to show how this model behavior was considered an ideal for those men responsible for management of a household or a city, as well as framing of different kinds of relationships such as through marriage or through the pursuit of one's male lover. With this view, Foucault also argues that later discourses on sexuality after the spread of Christianity sought to associate it with sin and to construct new categories of the self, that sought to contain as well as to expose 'deviant' variations of sexuality in order to define and control these repurposed ideas of sexuality.
.
.
A lot of these ideas on construct of the self, power and surveillance, are frequent themes in Foucault's book. The first book in the volume is short but utterly intriguing to read. But you do feel bogged down by the time you reach the third! And sometimes there is just too much repetition and excessive verbosity that tends to make Foucault's works a little hard to digest. Still I would say, it is definitely worth reading more than once, since these are those kind of books where you learn something new every time you go back them.
#michelfoucault #historyofsexuality #threevolumes #ancientgreektexts #readinglistforhistory #readinglist2019