Michel Foucault is the world's most cited author. In recent years, his work on antiquity has come under renewed focus. Of course, in Classics Foucault is best known for his multi-volume History of Sexuality, volumes 2 and 3 of which are concerned with antiquity. The long-awaited posthumous volume 4 on early Christianity was only recently published. These books, while controversial and sometimes contested, fundamentally reshaped the way in which ancient sexual practices and erotic norms are being discussed. One may agree or disagree with Foucault's theses, but he is impossible to ignore.
The last 25 years have also seen the publication of his annual lectures at the Collège de France, the final five years of which were devoted almost exclusively to topics in ancient philosophy. In addition, Foucault's archives held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France have been opened to researchers, and new editions of his works have been produced, various sets of lectures given round the world have been published, and drafts of early works such as Discours philosophique (publ. 2023) have seen the light of day. The result is that we now have a much fuller picture of Foucault's overall project than we did at the time of his death. His engagement with antiquity can now be seen less as an eccentric divagation on the part of a postmodern theorist and more as part of a long-running and deep engagement not only with questions of sexual discourses and the norms of ancient erotic practice but also with basic philosophical questions concerning truth, the formation of the subject and how individuals came to take themselves as objects of knowledge. In the wake of these publications there have been numerous conferences and edited volumes as well as monographs.
The present volume is edited by two of the scholars leading this reconsideration of Foucault's relation with antiquity. Boehringer is the author of the first full history of female homosexuality in the ancient world (2007), which is now available in English (2021). She is the author and editor of numerous works both on Foucault and using Foucault to examine ancient sexual norms, discourses and practices. Lorenzini is the author and editor of many books on Foucault and modern philosophy. In collaboration with H.-P. Fruchaud, he is responsible for the publication of a number of Foucault's previously unpublished works. Together, Boehringer and Lorenzini have the philological, philosophical and archival expertise necessary to situate what we might term the ‘new Foucault’ and to reassess, in light of this recently published work, what we thought we knew about the History of Sexuality and Foucault's understanding of antiquity. The present book was published in French in 2016. The translation has been updated to acknowledge the publication of volume 4 of the History, Confessions of the Flesh (2018 in French, 2021 in English).
Boehringer and Lorenzini have brought together a diverse and highly credentialed group of contributors. They range from F. Gros, who, as the editor of the last four years of Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France, is well placed to give a synopsis of what the archives teach us about the genealogy and purpose of volumes 2 and 3 of History of Sexuality, to the recently deceased J. Allouch, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, who, far from arguing that Freud and Foucault must be opposed, has instead contended that, if analysis is to survive, it must become Foucauldian, to K. Ormand, who has done as much as anyone in American Classics to demonstrate the importance of a Foucauldian understanding of the history of sexuality. Indeed, I would recommend his and R. Blondell's Ancient Sex: New Essays (2015) as an excellent companion to the present book. In addition, the editors themselves have important essays, and there are significant contributions from such figures as philologist C. Calame, ancient philosopher O. Renaut, philosopher A. Sforzini and psychoanalyst T. Ayouch. While space limitations do not permit me to do justice to the richness and variety of these ten essays, I will touch on some of the most significant points in what follows.
As Gros makes clear, and as is further developed by several contributors throughout the volume, one of Foucault's major contributions is to help us rethink the perceived opposition between what we once called ‘pagan’ and Christian sexual ethics. Antiquity for Foucault was not a period of sexual freedom to which he longed to return (as he makes clear on more than one occasion). Likewise, Christianity did not institute a new regime of sexual repression. As Foucault documents (and as P. Veyne had shown before), there was already among the elite of the Roman empire a growing emphasis on marital fidelity between partners, and for thinkers like Musonius Rufus the compatibility of marriage with a philosophical vocation was a live question. What changes with the spread of Christianity is not the value of the erotic per se, but the ethical subject's relation to itself and to the truth. While certainly the Stoics and other philosophical schools developed techniques of introspection, and they valued relationships to directors of conscience (such as Seneca with Lucilius), the forms of confession that grew in monastic contexts were fundamentally different. Desire had already become more and more problematic for ancient erotic ethics as there was an increased emphasis on the conjugal couple and their mutual fidelity. These developments led to anxiety concerning the possibility of temptation. With Christianity in general and with monastic institutions of confession in particular, that desire came increasingly to figure as the truth of the subject, as that which must be confessed (Lorenzini). Moreover, this was not a truth that simply lay on the surface, but it was hidden within. It needed to be surfaced, excavated, expressed. It was deceitful, wily. It was the secret that lay within the confessing subject, often hidden beneath what seemed the most pious thoughts. And it was only through the uncovering of this secret, one's own inner truth, that one could be ready to receive the greater transcendental truth of the divine and hence salvation (Sforzini; Ayouch).
What becomes clear in this narrative is that we have largely misperceived the aims and purpose of the History of Sexuality. Volumes 2 and 3 were not originally intended to stand alone. Indeed, volume 4 was completely drafted and sent to Foucault's editor before the other volumes were written. The question that the History of Sexuality tries to answer is: how did we come to define ourselves as sexual beings, how did we come to see ourselves as possessed of an inner essence that was our sexuality – homo-, hetero-, polymorphic or perverse –, which needed to be surfaced, controlled and therapeutically confessed? Those volumes, which have been the focus of so much debate among Classicists, were never intended to be a comprehensive accounting of sexual behaviours in the ancient Mediterranean nor even of discourses on the erotic, but they were a genealogy of the modern sexual subject (Calame). Foucault says this plainly in the introduction to volume 2, but without volume 4 the intent remained cryptic; and while it was Foucault's intention to publish that volume later the same year (1984), he did not live to make the final corrections. Nonetheless, as several essays in this volume make clear, the overall architecture of the revised history was already articulated in the series of lectures he gave at the Collège de France in 1981, entitled Subjectivity and Truth, which were published in 2014 and appeared in English in 2017 (Boehringer and Lorenzini; Gros; Renaut; Lorenzini).
Within this broader architecture, each essay makes a particular contribution. Boehringer, in ‘To Refuse Universals’, argues that Foucault's history is revolutionary precisely because it rejects any universal framework for understanding sexual experience. She traces how Foucault's work is differentiated from the philological, anthropological and sociological work that came before it, even while showing evidence of profound influences from that work. She concludes that in the study of ancient erotics, whether one accepts Foucault's findings or contests them, ‘there are two eras: before Foucault and after’ (p. 36).
Ormand's ‘Perversion in Antiquity? Foucault, Seneca, and Psychiatric Reasoning’ makes a similar argument, but grounds it in a more ontological perspective. Where psychiatric reasoning posits the existence of certain universals within the human psyche, such as sex, sexuality and gender, and then deduces putative norms of behaviour and discourse therefrom, what Foucault's examination of the ancient record shows is that these universal categories are in fact historical constructions. This is not to say that there are not certain historical continuities in behaviours or that human anatomy itself has radically changed, but rather the valences given these things, the borders between them and the unities constituted around them are not fixed. Did Seneca or the target of his criticism, Hostius, have a sex? They presumably had penises, but the modern understanding of the word ‘sex’ in English and French goes far beyond a certain expandable appendage to encompass behaviours, sensations, erogenous zones and elaborate schedules of taboos and satisfactions that, as Ormand shows, were simply not grouped together in the same way for members of the elite in the empire as they are for us.
Allouch, in ‘The Sexual Scene Concerns a Single Character’, continues the advocacy for an expanded psychoanalytic understanding that, rather than rejecting the historical contingency of given configurations of the desiring self, embraces it. This perspective is further elaborated by Ayouch in his essay. Calame, in turn, gives this mandate concrete form in a reading of the often collective and performative ‘subject of discourse’ in Sappho. Renaut, in ‘Ancient Sexuality and the Principle of Activity’, argues that the charge that Foucault reduces ancient sexual practices to the ‘penetrative model’ derived from Dover is an oversimplification. It is not that the ancient subject's focus on activity rather than passivity derives from the paradigm of who inserts and who receives the phallus, but rather that ancient sexual practices are themselves understood through a matrix that prizes activity and control and stigmatises passivity and the loss of autonomy. What we are looking at then, as Lorenzini and Sforzini make clear, is less a reduction of complex psychic and social phenomena to a shadow calc of the sexual act, and instead a complex game of truth in the formation of the self, in which erotic acts play a central role, but one which is as constructed as it is constructing.
This is a rich set of essays, put together by expert hands. Not everyone will agree with every position. But if you want to understand the continuing importance of Foucault's work almost 40 years after the publication of volumes 2 and 3 of the History of Sexuality, this is an excellent place to start.
