The emergence of the man of desire: on the Subjectivité et vérité course, by Michel Foucault

Abstract

The main object of this article is Michel Foucault’s course at Collège de France, Subjectivité et vérité, taught in 1980-1981 and edited in 2014. The idea is to show how and through which arguments Foucault states that the relationship between subject and truth in the old experience of the aphrodisia is from the order of incompatibility. In Greek pederasty, sexual acts and their pleasures were considered obstacles to access truth and to constitute the active subject. However, the confiscation of legitimate sexual experience within the reconfiguration of Roman marriage, as well as the growing suspicion about acts and pleasures, two processes emerged: the subjectivity of the aphrodisia, resulting in a constant relationship of the subject/self with its own sexual experience; and the objectification of desire, in the sense that it is no longer only an untimely and uncontrollable element located next to nature and it becomes something problematic, the object of knowledge. Even if in the Introduction to the last two books of Histoire de la Sexualité Foucault states that he intends to write the history of the man of desire in ancient pagan culture, the article suggests that it is not exactly in this historical formation that its emergence can be identified, but in the Christian monasticism in the fourth and fifth centuries, the topic of his unfinished book Les confessions de la chair. At least in the field of sexual experience, the man of desire did not appear in the Greek male erotic or in the Roman marriage, but in the solitary sexuality of the Christian monasticism.