The Use of Pleasure Volume 2 of The History of Sexuality Michel Foucault Translated from the French by Robert Hurley Vintage Books . A Division of Random House, Inc. New York The Use of Pleasure Books by Michel Foucault Madness and Civilization: A History oflnsanity in the Age of Reason The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences The Archaeology of Knowledge (and The Discourse on Language) The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother. ... A Case of Parricide in the Nineteenth Century Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison The History of Sexuality, Volumes I, 2, and 3 Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth­ Century French Hermaphrodite Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 VINTAGE BOOKS EDlTlON, MARCH 1990 Translation copyright © 1985 by Random House, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in France as L' Usage des piaisirs by Editions Gallimard. Copyright © 1984 by Editions Gallimard. First American edition published by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., in October 1985. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Foucault, Michel. The history of sexuality. Translation of Histoire de la sexualite. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. Contents: v. I. An introduction-v. 2. The use of pleasure. I. Sex customs-History-Collected works. I. Title. HQ 12.F68131980 301.41'7 79- 460 ISBN 0-394-75122-1 Manufactured in the United States of America to 9 8 Contents Translator's Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Modifications 3 Chapter 2 Forms of Problematization 14 Chapter 3 Morality and Practice of the Self 25 PART ONE The Moral Problematization of Pleasures 33 Chapter 1 Aphrodisia 38 Chapter 2 Chresis 53 Chapter 3 Enkrateia 63 Chapter 4 Freedom and Truth 78 PART TWO Dietetics 95 Chapter 1 Regimen in General 99 Chapter 2 The Diet of Pleasures 109 Chapter 3 Risks and Dangers 117 Chapter 4 Act, Expenditure, Death 125 PART THREE Economics 141 Chapter 1 The Wisdom of Marriage 143 Chapter 2 Ischomachus' Household 152 Chapter 3 Three Policies of Moderation 166 PART FOUR Erotics 185 Chapter 1 A Problematic Relation 187 Chapter 2 A Boy's Honor 204 Chapter 3 The Object of Pleasure 215 PART FIVE True Love 227 Conclusion 247 Notes 255 Bibliography 273 Index 281 Translator's Acknowledgments A number of people contributed to this translation, at Berkeley and elsewhere. Out of respect for the author's work, they made an occasion of community for which I am grateful. Peter Brown generously shared his knowledge of classical matters and his familiarity with the author's project. His criti­ cal comments were an invaluable service. Stephen W. Foster reviewed the translation with a practiced eye and suggested many changes of phraseology, virtually all of which I incorporated into the text. Denis Hollier answered several questions that cropped up when my reading did not quite match the sophistication of the author's prose. James Faubion drew up a list of reliable English versions of the major Greek texts. Without his recommendations, I would have risked many inaccuracies. Marie-Claude Perigon, my wife, helped me with various problems of micro-interpretation, that is, with the kind of difficulties every reader encounters but only translators have to resolve. I am indebted most to Paul Rabinow. He offered advice and encouragement-moral support-at every stage. I wish to dedicate this English version to the memory of Michel Foucault. R.H. May 1985 vii Introduction 1 Modifications This series of studies is being published later than I had anticipated, and in a form that is altogether different. I will explain why. It was intended to be neither a history of sexual behaviors nor a history of representations, but a history of "sexuality" -the quotation marks have a certain importance. My aim was not to write a history of sexual behaviors and practices, tracing their successive forms, their evolution, and their dissemina­ tion; nor was it to analyze the scientific, religious, or philo­ sophical ideas through which these behaviors have been represented. I wanted first to dwell on that quite recent and banal notion of "sexuality": to stand detached from it, brack­ eting its familiarity, in order to analyze the theoretical and practical context with which it has been associated. The term itself did not appear until the beginning of the nineteenth century, a fact that should be neither underestimated nor overinterpreted. It does point to something other than a sim­ ple recasting of vocabulary, but obviously it does not mark the sudden emergence of that to which "sexuality" refers. The use of the word was established in connection with other phenomena: the development of diverse fields of knowledge (embracing the biological mechanisms of reproduction as well as the individual or social variants of behavior); the establish­ ment of a set of rules and norms-in part traditional, in part new-which found support in religious, judicial, pedagogical, 3 4 The Use of Pleasure and medical institutions; and changes in the way individuals were led to assign meaning and value to their conduct, their duties, their pleasures, their feelings and sensations, their dreams. In short, it was a matter of seeing how an "experi­ ence" came to be constituted in modern Western societies, an experience that caused individuals to recognize themselves as subjects of a "sexuality," which was accessible to very diverse fields of knowledge and linked to a system of rules and con­ straints. What I planned, therefore, was a history of the expe­ rience of sexuality, where experience is understood as the correlation between fields of knowledge, types of normativity, and forms of subjectivity in a particular culture. To speak of sexuality in this way, I had to break with a conception that was rather common. Sexuality was conceived of as a constant. The hypothesis was that where it was mani­ fested in historically singular forms, this was through various mechanisms of repression to which it was bound to be sub­ jected in every society. What this amounted to, in effect, was that desire and the subject of desire were withdrawn from the historical field, and interdiction as a general form was made to account for anything historical in sexuality. But rejection of this hypothesis was not sufficient by itself. To speak of "sexuality" as a historically singular experience also presup­ posed the availability of tools capable of analyzing the peculiar characteristics and interrelations of the three axes that consti­ tute it: (1) the fo rmation of sciences (sa voirs) that refer to it, (2) the systems of power that regulate its practice, (3) the forms within which individuals are able, are obliged, to recog­ nize themselves as subjects of this sexuality. Now, as to the first two points, the work I had undertaken previously-hav­ ing to do first with medicine and psychiatry, and then with punitive power and disciplinary practices-provided me with the tools I needed. The analysis of discursive practices made it possible to trace the formation of disciplines (savoirs) while escaping the dilemma of science versus ideology. And the analysis of power relations and their technologies made it In troduction 5 possible to view them as open strategies, while escaping the alternative of a power conceived of as domination or exposed as a simulacrum. But when I came to study the modes according to which individuals are given to recognize themselves as sexual sub­ jects, the problems were much greater. At the time the notion of desire, or of the desiring subject, constituted if not a theory, then at least a generally accepted theoretical theme. This very acceptance was odd: it was this same theme, in fact, or varia­ tions thereof, that was found not only at the very center of the traditional theory, but also in the conceptions that sought to detach themselves from it. It was this theme, too, that ap­ peared to have been inherited, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from a long Christian tradition. While the experi­ ence of sexuality, as a singular historical figure, is perhaps quite distinct from the Christian experience of the "flesh," both appear nonetheless to be dominated by the principle of "desiring man." In any case, it seemed to me that one could not very well analyze the formation and development of the experience of sexuality from the eighteenth century onward, without doing a historical and critical study dealing with de­ sire and the desiring subject. In other words, without under­ taking a "genealogy." This does not mean that I proposed to write a history of the successive conceptions of desire, of. concupiscence, or of libido, but rather to analyze the practices by which individuals were led to focus their attention on themselves, to decipher, recognize, and acknowledge them­ selves as subjects of desire, bringing into play between them­ selves and themselves a certain relationship that allows them to discover, in desire, the truth of their being, be it natural or fallen. In short, with this genealogy the idea was to investigate how individuals were led to practice, on themselves and on others, a hermeneutics of desire, a hermeneutics of which their sexual behavior was doubtless the occasion, but certainly not the exclusive domain. Thus, in order to understand how the modern individual could experience himself as a subject of a 6 The Use of Pleasure "sexuality," it was essential first to determine how, for centu­ ries, Western man had been brought to recognize himself as a subject of desire.