The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure: 002 by Michel Foucault
Author:Michel Foucault [Foucault, Michel]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780307819277
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-04-18T04:00:00+00:00
*These three “arts of governing” were often likened to one another, as arts that demanded a knowledge and prudence attuned to circumstances; they were also comparable because they were knowledges that were associated with an ability to command. They were frequently referred to where it was a question of an individual’s search for the principles or the authority that would help him to “conduct himself.”
PART THREE
Economics
1
The Wisdom of
Marriage
How, in what form, and why were sexual relations between husband and wife “problematical” in Greek thought? What reason was there to be worried about them? And above all, what reason was there to question the husband’s behavior, to reflect on the moderation it necessitated, and—in a society so strongly marked by the rule of “free men”—to make it a theme of moral preoccupation? It looks as if there were none, or in any case very little. At the end of the legal argument Against Neaera, attributed to Demosthenes, the author delivers a sort of aphorism that has remained famous: “Mistresses we keep for the sake of pleasure, concubines for the daily care of our persons, but wives to bear us legitimate children and to be faithful guardians of our households.”1
With a formula like this one, which seems to speak of a strict distribution of roles, we could not be further from the arts of conjugal pleasure such as one finds, according to Van Gulik, in ancient China. There, prescriptions concerning the woman’s obedience, her respect, and her devotion were closely linked with advice on the correct erotic behavior to manifest in order to increase the partners’ pleasure, or at least that of the man, and with opinions on the right conditions for obtaining the best possible progeny.2 This was because, in that polygamous society, the wife found herself in a competitive situation where her status was tied directly to her ability to give pleasure; questions concerning sexual behavior and the forms of its possible improvement formed part of the society’s reflection about existence; the skillful practice of pleasures and the equilibrium of married life belonged to the same set of concerns.
The Against Neaera formula is also far removed from what one finds in the Christian doctrine and its pastoral application, but for entirely different reasons. In that strictly monogamous situation, the man was to be prohibited from going in pursuit of any other form of pleasure beyond the pleasure he was allowed to take with his lawful wife; and even that pleasure was to pose a number of problems, seeing that the stated goal of sexual relations was not in sensual delight but in procreation. Around this central cluster of themes, a whole inquiry was to develop regarding the status of pleasures within the conjugal relationship. In this case, the problematization did not grow out of a polygamous structure but out of a monogamous obligation; and it did not seek to tie the quality of the relationship to the intensity of pleasure and the variety of partners, but on the contrary it
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