Foucault, Sexuality, Antiquity

Book excerpt: Foucault, Sexuality, Antiquity, published for the first time in English, takes an interdisciplinary approach to exploring how the work of Michel Foucault has influenced studies of ancient Greece and Rome. Foucault’s The History of Sexuality has had a profound and lasting impact across the humanities and social sciences. In the two volumes dedicated to pagan antiquity, Foucault provided scholars with new questions for addressing ancient Greek and Roman societies, and an original epistemological framework for thinking about eroticism and about the processes by which individuals are led to recognize themselves as the subjects of their desires. Now, decades later, the scholars in this volume explore Foucault’s role in shaping and reorienting discussions of antiquity in the fields of philosophy, gender studies, and psychoanalysis, among others. A multidisciplinary exploration of Foucault’s work and its relationship to our understanding of ancient Greco-Roman societies, Foucault, Sexuality, Antiquity will be of interest to students and scholars in classical studies, philosophy, gender studies, and ancient history.