Paperback
English language
Published April 14, 1990 by Vintage.
In this sequel to The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, the brilliantly original French thinker who died in 1984 gives an analysis of how the ancient Greeks perceived sexuality.
Throughout The Use of Pleasure Foucault analyzes an irresistible array of ancient Greek texts on eroticism as he tries to answer basic questions: How in the West did sexual experience become a moral issue? And why were other appetites of the body, such as hunger, and collective concerns, such as civic duty, not subjected to the numberless rules and regulations and judgments that have defined, if not confined, sexual behavior?
A reconstruction of the patterns that governed sexuality in the ancient world, through a careful analysis of the sources. The comparison between our mental schemes and those of the ancients reveals the transience of many certainties, which give meaning to our reality.
