Foucault, “History of Sexuality: Volume 2 – Part II on Dietetics”

 

We began with questions:

Restrictive sexual economy – not b/c of evil but b/c of integrity of ethical subject – not good or bad but more or less (136).  Also rel. to temporality.

In the intro he offers a sketch of the arch. (form) and glgcl. (transforming practices) modes or aspects of problematization.  Development of new form of subject and conduct.

How does the individual fit in here and rational mode of behavior (108).

Focus on experience (4) of sexuality; recalling a term he used in BoC.  How these readings bear this notion of experience out vis-à-vis the subject.

Contrast between ancient medical/sexual ethics and modern medical/sexual ethics.  What type of differences are central for Foucault’s argument?  What is the crux of the contrast between ancient ethics and normal/pathological orders of medicine (97)?  What is at stake in this contrast?

What are mastery, strength, and life such that they are not expressed through a moral code but also not through health (or at least medicalized illness)? (125)  Yet Foucault also describes this in terms of taking care of health (108)?

What is a technique of existence as a specifically ethical category? (138)

 

 

We then moved to discussion:

One thing we noted at the outset that Foucault was critical of an excess of self-care and the use of pleasure (104); so he’s not falling int neoliberal hyper-individualism.

Introduction - methodology

Foucault’s intro sketches archlgy and gnlgy as two dimensions of problematization.  Archaeology analyzes “forms” and genealogy analyzes their “formation” (and transformation) out of practices composing/constituting them.

Also in the intro he lays out an analytics of ethics (Foucault’s “ethical fourfold”).  He uses this fourfold to explicate aspects of dietetics in Part II, Ch. 1.

If we read Part II through this methodological apparatus – what do we get?

We get an analysis of the form of problematization of regimen (inclusive of sexuality).  We get a story of the shape and form of the problematization – what it was concerned with.  We also get an analysis of their form on the basis of practices in part because the texts Foucault analyzes are something like “practical manuals”.

Practice is a challenging concept here.  What are practices?  Not ideas, not behaviors, not societies.  There is a contextualism in Foucault’s analysis, too, and this connotes an analytics of practice.

                              These practices are not oriented by an ethical goal (telos) of normalization.

The concern is one that problematizes sexuality with “relation to the body” (102).  The body becomes an explicit part of the ethical substance.

The genealogical dimensions are more to be found across HSv2 and HSv3.

What are the implications of Foucault’s arguments?

How does Foucault position Western modernity vis-à-vis the Greeks?  Contrast between Greeks and Christianity (HSv3, 135).