From flesh to virtue

Sojourner in Sidi Bou Said, Uppsala, Warsaw, San Francisco, Michel Foucault to my knowledge never visited Athens even for a day. Nor is there anything in the first volume of The History of Sexuality (Foucault 1978) that anticipated so long a stay as he passed in the ancient world in the last years of his life. In Foucault's initial conception of it, the genealogy of the ethico-medical and biopolitical inscription of sexual desire as and at the heart of our modern being was not historically deep. It was instead a largely nineteenth-century affair. It involved the secularization and psychiatrization of the confessional, the pathologization of masturbation and other putatively wasteful and enervating sexual practices, the development of the diagnostics and theory of female hysteria, the elaboration of a constellation of perversions and, informing it all, the gradual elaboration of an apologia discrediting the “peculiarity” of aristocratic blood in favor of the vitality and fecundity of an ascendant bourgeoisie (1978: 126). The second (1985) and the third (1986) volumes of The History are testaments to Foucault's recognition that certain strands of the genealogical fabric of sexuality were in fact historically woven at much greater length than he had at first considered. Even in its earliest establishment, the confession establishes that talk of sex which the scientia sexualis of the nineteenth century will codify into genera, species and sub-species of healthy and unhealthy, normal and abnormal pleasures and their correlative types of character.