Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Citizenship and the Good Life
- 2 Spaces of the Prudent Self
- 3 The Biopolitics of Sexuality and the Hypothesis of an Erotic Art: Foucault and Psychoanalysis
- 4 Elective Spaces: Creating Space to Care
- 5 Interpreting Dao (道) between ‘Way-making’ and ‘Be-wëgen’
- 6 Constructing Each Other: Contemporary Travel of Urban-Design Ideas between China and the West
- 7 A Tale of Two Courts: The Interactions of the Dutch and Chinese Political Elites with their Cities
- 8 Urban Acupuncture: Care and Ideology in the Writing of the City in Eleventh-Century China
- 9 The Value and Meaning of Temporality and its Relationship to Identity in Kunming City, China
- 10 Junzi (君子), the Confucian Concept of the ‘Gentleman’, and its Influence on South Korean Land-Use Planning
- 11 Home Within Movement: The Japanese Concept of Ma (間): Sensing Space-time Intensity in Aesthetics of Movement
- 12 The Concept of ‘Home’: The Javanese Creative Interpretation of Omah Bhetari Sri: A Dialogue between Tradition and Modernity
- Afterword
- Index
- Publications / Asian Cities
3 - The Biopolitics of Sexuality and the Hypothesis of an Erotic Art: Foucault and Psychoanalysis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 February 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Citizenship and the Good Life
- 2 Spaces of the Prudent Self
- 3 The Biopolitics of Sexuality and the Hypothesis of an Erotic Art: Foucault and Psychoanalysis
- 4 Elective Spaces: Creating Space to Care
- 5 Interpreting Dao (道) between ‘Way-making’ and ‘Be-wëgen’
- 6 Constructing Each Other: Contemporary Travel of Urban-Design Ideas between China and the West
- 7 A Tale of Two Courts: The Interactions of the Dutch and Chinese Political Elites with their Cities
- 8 Urban Acupuncture: Care and Ideology in the Writing of the City in Eleventh-Century China
- 9 The Value and Meaning of Temporality and its Relationship to Identity in Kunming City, China
- 10 Junzi (君子), the Confucian Concept of the ‘Gentleman’, and its Influence on South Korean Land-Use Planning
- 11 Home Within Movement: The Japanese Concept of Ma (間): Sensing Space-time Intensity in Aesthetics of Movement
- 12 The Concept of ‘Home’: The Javanese Creative Interpretation of Omah Bhetari Sri: A Dialogue between Tradition and Modernity
- Afterword
- Index
- Publications / Asian Cities
Summary
Abstract
This chapter discusses Michel Foucault's interpretation of the biopolitics of power and of the device of sexuality in Western society, taking into account the possibility of an ars erotica (‘erotic art’) that is both detached from the scientific model of knowledge and truth and related to the use of pleasures and to the practice of the care of the self. If we consider that this contrast is developed in The Will to Knowledge, we must also recognize that Freud, together with Jacques Lacan, is Foucault's main interlocutor, since psychoanalysis is the point of arrival of this modern device that leads one to formulate the truth about sex. Within a genealogical sequence that dates back to psychiatry's disciplinary practices and to the deployment of the examination of consciousness and the direction of pastoral power, the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure in the psychoanalytic experience is reduced to a knowledge of sexuality. Whether by transference into the clinical setting or by the adoption of the repressive hypothesis, Freud’s theory is understood as the development of a social normalization project through the classification of individuals as somewhere between normal and pathological and the constitution of a qualified population. Opposed to this psychoanalytic perspective, Foucault's hypothesis concerns the possibility of a sexual practice that is not reducible to the biopolitics of sexuality. The pursuit of pleasures in such eroticism would be less related to the scientific model of self-knowledge and more related to both the perspective of the care of the self and the conception of an aesthetic experience, as in some examples presented by Foucault from ancient Greece and certain societies in the East.
Keywords: biopolitics, sexuality, society, subject, ars erotica (‘erotic art’)
Introduction
This chapter presents a critical view on the sexuality practices of modern societies and discusses the question of the production of subjectivity using Michel Foucault's concept of techniques of the self. What I propose is a new approach to a very important topic in Foucault's work, which arises first in some of his courses at the Collège de France and later, more systematically and better organized, in his book The Will to Knowledge originally published in France in 1976.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the WestCare of the Self, pp. 63 - 78Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2018