Name: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Greco-Roman Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)
Item: The care of the self
Author: jdkafka

The care of the self →

by Michel Foucault

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Greco-Roman Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)

jdkafka

Apr 02, 2026

I have an odd relationship to Foucault. I'm not a Foucauldian, and I dislike how he and Laclau are used as a battering ram against Marxism in the academy, but the people who hate him the most all end up talking like Jordan Peterson jacking himself off by endlessly retelling the story about how the dragon of postmodernism/identity politics killed the noble knight of Real Marxism in the sixties. Obviously, I think that's a stupid narrative/framework, but the relevant point in this case is just that I came to this book more or less disinterestedly: take what's valuable and leave the rest.

I picked it up because I was interested in this idea of the "care of the self" that Foucault apparently got into in his later life. But actually this idea--a particular ethic focusing on cultivating "a whole set of occupations" around your body--is presented here as a late-Greek, early-Roman invention, not given any particular contemporary relevance (for instance, as something we should learn from). In general, Foucault's approach is one of close reading, very minute attention to nuances and distinctions rather than ambitious conceptualizations, which is both his strength and his danger.

A mistrust of the pleasures, an emphasis on the consequences of their abuse for the body and the soul, a valorization of marriage and marital obligations, a disaffection with regard to the spiritual meanings imputed to the love of boys: a whole attitude of severity was manifested in the thinking of philosophers and physicians in the course of the first two centuries.

I think this is clearly supposed to make us think about our own modern Christian approach to sex, but actually throughout the rest of the book Foucault will consistently underline how all these characteristics acquire and lose different meanings in the periods under review--so he's teasing us here. The point is that our own preconceptions of "same" and "different" influence how we at first conceptualize other, or older, cultures; in order to get out of that narrow view, we need to engage in the kind of highly nuanced close reading Foucault engages in here, which helps show how truly various our ways of thinking about sexuality and the body have been/can be, instead of the simplistic way we narrate that history today.

This book also sensitizes you to the dilemmeas of theorizing historical change vs. continuity. How does one period transition into the next? This doesn't seem problematic to us ordinarily--we can easily narrate to ourselves the roaring twenties into the Great Depression and WWI and WWII, then the postwar years, then neoliberalism and so on--but Foucault's way of arranging the material, focusing on differences while also ending each chapter by teeing up how it dovetails with some new twist in sexual ideology, presents the whole change vs. continuity dichotomy as a genuine, possibly irresolvable intellectual dilemma.