The Uses of Pleasure

...Louis Althusser, the aging Marxist theoretician and Foucault's one-time teacher, had been a fading star well before being arrested for the murder of his wife...

...A fourth book, reportedly almost complete in manuscript, deals with sexuality in the first centuries of Christianity, and when eventually published it will bring Foucault's final project to a close...

...The bulk of The Usage of Pleasures is taken up with a detailed account of the regimens, with an additional section devoted to the evolution in Greek thought of asceticism as a privileged pathway to truth...

...Emergency surgery revealed his brain to be covered with a fungal infection similar to the common infant throat and mouth lesions called thrush...

...Such passages are virtually nonexistent in The Usage of Pleasures and Le Souci de soi...

...O NEW PUBLICATIONS on National Security and Foreign Policy INSTITUTE FOR FOREIGN POLICY ANALYSIS, INC...

...In the coming year alone, their number will be exceeded by that of secondary studies devoted solely or in major part to his work...

...BOOK REVIEWS...

...Not long before his death, he remarked that politics were precisely what he wished to call into question: I believe...

...Foucault's was a quintessentially critical sensibility, in the Kantian sense of the word: claiming an absolute right of questioning but conceding no corresponding obligation to provide "responsible alternatives...

...I think that, politically, we have to recognize this, but I think we also agree that, for ethical reasons, we have to raise the problem of Poland in the form of a nonacceptance of what is happening there, and a nonacceptance of the passivity of our own governments...

...it is a stance and a practice...

...Here scrutiny falls mainly upon the transition from antique "problematizations" of sexuality to those that would be the themes of early Christian writers"purity" as embodied in virginity and faithful monogamy, the exclusively reproductive end of sex, lust conceived as trial/temptation and as a hidden, demonically implanted motive in apparently blameless conduct...

...Critics friendly and otherwise were continually at odds over whether he was a philosopher or a historian, a "pure" academic or committed activist-a revolutionary, reactionary, or reformer...

...At times Foucault did sound something like a Marxist, to the point of inquiring rhetorically (in an interview concerning Discipline and Punish), "Taken to an extreme, one could ask what difference there could be between being a Marxist and being a historian...

...Nonetheless, he seems to have been charmed by what, in his last investigations, he took to be the ethical and esthetic energy of the ancient Greeks, elaborated and applied as a distinctive mode of being...

...Leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order...

...One would only have to point out the direct borrowing and strict continuities between the first Christian doctrines and the moral philosophy of antiquity...

...ISBN 0-08-033157-2 softcover $9.95 ETHICS, DETERRENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY By James E. Dougherty, Midge Decter, Pierre Hassner, Laurence Martin, Michael Novak, and Vladimir Bukovsky "Probably no single book can rival Ethics, Deterrence and National Security in bringing international scholars with wisdom and insight together...

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...If we raise the question of Poland in strictly political terms, it's clear we quickly reach the point of saying that there's nothing we can do...

...is the name given to a composite strategic situation in a particular society...

...Yet The Usage of Pleasures and Le Souci de soi will probably assume a central place in Foucault's canon, for reasons both good and bad...

...From the confessional to the high Church...

...This is essentially self control, the self-mastery of enkrateia and sbphrosyrie...

...Georgia) "These essays assess the degree of firmness of moral and physical strengths and the dilemmas of civilized societies in their contests against totalitarian movements, ideas and states in a nuclear contest...

...maritime strategy' that responds to the Soviet buildup...

...Finally, an erotics governed relationships between individuals-and since the Greeks saw only free males as true individuals, erotics was by definition an exclusively homosexual regimen, concerning itself especially with the reputation and future character of young boys taken as lovers...

...power...

...And those who bend his thought the most, who make it groan the loudest, may well be the ones rewarded with a Foucaultian guffaw from beyond the veil-a laugh of ghostly pleasure...

...On the contrary," he said in an interview just before his death, "it was where sexuality was freest that Antique moralists examined themselves most searchingly, and where they came to propose the strictest policies...

...The power that reigned over sex was subjective, the power of individual choice, not the external, coercive power of institutions or the state...

...Michel Foucault believed that since the nineteenth century, the process of social innovation has been confiscated by mass organizations, lumbering parties that seek power by imposing an institutional framework on every aspect of experience...

...For the Greeks, few sexual acts other than incest carried any special stigma...

...pocrates, Xenophon, Demosthenes, and others...

...It would be easy to blame the translator, of whose work the kindest thing that can be said is that it is serviceable...

...Both books are in some ways curiously atypical of Foucault...

...it prescribed right conduct among husbands and wives, concubines, slaves, and other members of households, as regards both sex and work, status and inheritance, property and- propriety...

...But in point of fact, Foucault's history is about sexual "liberation" of any kind less than just the oppositesex as a privileged target for power: Taking a very schematic, bird's-eye view...

...The Honorable Alexander M. Haig, Jr., former Secretary of State xv, 125 pp...

...Fluid, tactical, often self-contradictory, Foucault's views in fact cut across conventional political and ideological categories...

...Indeed, it is tempting to say that if Marxism was for the later Sartre that thought which "could not be transcended," for Foucault it was, like the Hegelian historicism that fathered it, a system of thought that must be transcended-neurotic in its orthodoxies, calcified in its institutions, and tyrannical in its pretensions to universal truth...

...personnel in Spanish, I French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Greek, Hebrew, more- foreign I 1 language on I your own...

...He was a thinker who hated being categorized and who systematically avoided creating his own system...

...I am attempting, on the contrary, apart from any totalization-which would be at once abstract and limiting-to open up problems that are as concrete and general as possible, problems that approach politics from behind and cut across societies on the diagonal...

...If there was something Foucault found attractive about the Greeks, it was not their attitude toward homosexuality (which, he suggests, was at least as convoluted as the modern attitude, though on different particulars), but rather the nature of control exercised over the spectrum of human appetites and daily behavior...

...policy...

...Senator John W. Warner, Chairman, Senate Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources . well-integrated contributions by leading experts...

...Foucault died without any other formal diagnosis, and the effort put into dissimulating the AIDS issue was considerable on both sides of the Atlantic...

...So too he had come to value much of what happened in our own sixties and seventies, when the lives of individuals and society itself changed as a result of movements that vehemently proclaimed themselves outside formal political channels...

...Later, conservatives would be heard to grumble that Foucault's work resurrected the credibility of a leftism that, left to solely Marxist devices, might have expired from intellectual exhaustion...

...Like Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, The Usage of Pleasures elaborates a theory of power that ap proaches politics "from behind' power conceived as fragmented, pluralistic, dispersed from top to bot tom and across the entire breadth of society...

...Ethics, he pointed out, in volves not only contemplation...

...ISBN 0-08-033160-2 softcover $9.95 STRATEGIC MINERALS AND INTERNATIONAL SECURITY Edited by Uri Ra'anan and Charles M. Perry...

...In his dialectical phase, Sartre lambasted The Order of Things as the "last gasp of the bourgeoisie...

...The prose itself is lacklusterhurried, colorless, repetitive...

...Congressman Newt Gingrich (R...

...Now Foucault, who was nothing like an existentialist, will suffer an existential fate, becoming the uses his present and future readers make of him...

...Policy By Uri Ra'anan, Francis Fukuyama, Mark Falcoff, Sam C. Sarkesian, and Richard H. Shultz, Jr...

...His Anglo-American following had grown steadily since the middle 1960s, propelling him beyond cult figureship to academic respectability, if not exactly the mainstream of domestic scholarship...

...ISBN 0-08-033171-8 softcover $9.95 BRAS SE Y'S Published for IFPA by PERGAMON • BRASSEY'S International Defense Publishers Maxwell House, Fairview Park, Elmsford NY 10523 Telephone (914) 592-7700 41 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985...

...In Foucault's lifetime his oeuvre would grow by only two additional books...

...r HE SPEECH" The 19 ;4 :elev s or address for 1' c: Goirl.va!er ca can...

...This is a far cry from his ordinarily contrarian research, in which an epoch's especially revealing facets are sought in its most marginal traces-mystic treatises of alchemists, confessions of murderers, diaries of hermaphrodites, rather than the learned disquisition of philosophers or the official pronouncements of scientists, jurists, and statesmen...

...As a result, problems of comprehension often arise more from poor wording than from any intrinsic subtlety of analysis...

...Even so, in the last few years his posi tion seemed to be coalescing into a kind of radical European libertarianism...

...Instead, he argues that the valorization of the sexual act, of marital fidelity, of homosexual liaisons and chastity were all contested issues for the Greeks...

...In May he went into the hospital, where he managed to read the reviews of L'Usage des plaisirs and Le Souci de soi before lapsing into a coma...

...But readers who consult the original will find that the author must bear most of the onus...

...In the prevailing view, Foucault explains, the Greeks of the classical era are presumed to have been much more tolerant, far less anxious about certain aspects of sexuality than the later Christians (or for that matter, than we today...

...Ideologues of all persuasions found him infuriating...

...Dietetics regulated the body, based upon mandates of sound health...

...Undoubtedly they will be widely regarded as works of "gay liberation," aimed at historically legitimating homosexual eroticism and life-styles, although this was at best incidental to the author's real purpose...

...Up to a few years before his death, Foucault had been reticent to the point of secretiveness about his own homosexuality...

...Sheridan rightly called his language "sumptuous," using the word more admiringly than would most...

...A few years ago Alan Sheridan concluded a critical survey of the books of Michel Foucault by noting that the controversial French philosopherhistorian was then in his early fifties"the complete works may not be even half written...

...The passing of Jean-Paul Sartre, long out of favor with the avant-garde, had more in it of cultural valedictory than real impact among up-to-the-minute penseurs...

...Foucault's last two books continue his "archaeological" or "genealogical" analysis of power...

...American Sea Power and Global Strategy is a well written and masterful account of the importance of sea power in maritime nations such as the United States...

...On June 25, 1984, only weeks after the simultaneous publication in Paris of two new volumes in his history of sexuality series, Michel Foucault died in the hSpital PitieSalpetriere, the victim of a mysteriously unspecified disease of the nervous system...

...One already notes a certain association of sexual activity with evil, along with the rule of procreative monogamy, a condemnation of relations between individuals of the same sex, and a glorification of self-restraint...

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...Box 177 Great Falls, VA 22066 0 .AMERICAN ~r HERITAGE I In r1kr Aft V aara.v Send $29.95 + $200 for postage and handling I D Check Q Money Order enclosed , ----------------------------44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985 "focus of problematizations" shifted, so too would the nature of philosophic reflection on sex and the mechanisms for the regulation of sexual acts...

...That Foucault's thought can be used equally easily, perhaps, to add philosophic or theoretical dimension to the work of Charles Murray or George Konrad, Band Aid or the Red Brigades, is something that the author himself would surely have dismissed with a graceful Gallic shrug...

...Odder still (and perhaps betraying some uneasiness over his credentials as a classicist), Foucault has based his generalizations upon precisely those authors that orthodox scholarship would designate as the period's noblest representatives...

...Furthermore, given a longer historical frame to con sider, one could trace the persistence of themes, anxieties, and exigencies that no doubt marked the Christian ethic and the morality of modern European societies...

...Foucault was adamant that history offers no models suitable for borrowing, no keys to the troubled kingdom of today...

...more freely, perhaps "self-awareness") charts historical and conceptual transformations embodied in Greek and Latin writings of the first and second centuries B.C...

...from the interventions of medical and psychiatric "disciplines" to those anonymous administrative manipulations of political systems, demography and eugenics...

...it ruled over not only masturbation and intercourse, but also eating, sleeping, athletics, and other physical activities...

...Concretely, antique morality took the form of three regimens...

...Admiral E. R. Zumwalt...

...At his best, however, Foucault could produce extended passages both sweeping and lyrical, with a simultaneous specificity and breadth of allusion that were remarkable...

...L'Usage des plaisirs, whose title Pantheon's translator has rendered peculiarly as The Uses of Pleasure, focuses on texts of the classical period-Plato, Aristotle, Hip 'In La Volontide savoir, translated as The History of Sexuality, Volume 1(1977...

...Conceived as an art of living, classical Greek morality consisted not in conformity to code or custom, not in obedience to God's command or natural law, but in personal self THE USES OF PLEASURE Michel Foucault, translated by Robert Hurley/Pantheon Books/$17.95 James Harkness 39 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985 mastery, conscious choice mediated by the universal principle of moderation...

...United States Navy (Ret...

...The discussion of Soviet resource diplomacy [is] particularly thought-provoking...

...The Usage of Pleasures (there is no point in embracing the mistranslation) begins by way of a familiar Foucaultian device: innocently setting forth the conventional wisdom, then abruptly and rather gleefully turning it upside down...

...Senator James A. McClure, Chairman, Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources viii, 85 pp...

...Embodied in "techniques of the self" and an "art of living," l'usage des plaisirs imposed shapeliness on sensitive, highly charged areas of life, an order independent of intrusive legal or political enforcement...

...in strategic minerals policy...

...a profoundly honest contribution to current debates...

...but not only, since they were already present at the core of Greek and Greco-Roman thought...

...We can't dispatch a team of paratroopers, and we can't send armored cars to liberate Warsaw...

...I think this attitude is an ethical one, but it is also political...

...It was often asked, never directly answered...

...What particularly interests Foucault about the areas of contestation of antique sexuality is that they were not, on the whole, the object of juridical codes or rigorous, encompassing taboos...

...In studying the classical Greeks, Foucault turned from politics to ethics and esthetics-but only, to borrow one of his own favorite phrases, en apparence...

...Between 1965 and 1984, U.S...

...Largely ignored by formal law, sexual behavior nonetheless raised questions for the Greeks because of its effect on health, on household management (and by extension, civic leadership), on the status of young men destined to become citizens, and on the individual's access to truth...

...An editor at Pantheon Books would "neither confirm nor deny" the reports but admitted that "it was bruited about at the time of his death...

...In their place is an abstract pedanticism and a relentless hammering, page after page and chapter after chapter, at the same points, often in nearly identical language from one section to the next...

...Relatively young, increasingly visible beyond the academy as a human rights activist, Foucault was at his death arguably Europe's most influential philosopher...

...Now, surveying the course of a very slow evolution, we can see this focus move elsewhere: it is around women, little by little, the problems come to be centered...

...The question was one of knowing how to shape your ,own life to make it as fine as possible (to your own eyes, those of others, and those of generations to come, for whom it might serve as an example...

...Within a brief span, he had been preceded in death by the critic Roland Barthes and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan...

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...According to a University of California anthropologist who worked as closely with him as any American scholar, Foucault had exhibited bronchitis- and influenza-like symptoms in Berkeley throughout the winter of 1984...

...Foucault's sudden demise stunned intellectual France, where he had emerged as the leading figure of "poststructuralist" thought-partially in his own right, partially because of the brief vogue of les philosopher nouveaux, and partially by simple attrition...

...Do not ask me who I am," he wrote at the end of The Archaeology of Knowledge...

...They do not conform to the blueprint Foucault initially drew up' for a history that would, in six volumes, trace the different ways in which individual and social life have been "sexualized" from the days of pastoral Christianity up to roughly the present...

...His admirers on this side of the Atlantic included historians (e.g., Hayden White), literary critics (Richard Poirer), anthropologists (Clifford Geertz), polemicists (Edward Said, Christopher Lasch), psychiatrists (Thomas S. Szasz), and even novelists (Samuel R. Delaney, Jr...

...Admiral Hanks compresses into one succinct and well-articulated volume all that is needed to understand both the unprecedented post-World War it growth of Soviet sea power and the urgent necessity for the current U.S...

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...it was here that the problematization called for the most subtle forms of austerity...

...Moreover, it is a particularly timely contribution to the ongoing debate over the kind of navy this country should be acquiring...

...As he once said apropos his beloved Nietzsche, he liked to bend the thought of his favorite writers to his own purposes-'to make it groan" with the strain...

...It was an unhappy antiprophecy...

...that the forms of politics are always, in fact, very limited...

...As a result, there grew up around each and all these "points of problematization" a complex of ethical and esthetic discourses: "practices of the self" and "usages of pleasures" by which free Greek males sought to integrate their sexuality into the larger fabric of life...

...James D. Hessman, Editor-in-Chief, Sea Power Magazine viii, 92 pp...

...Instead, for reasons explained in a preface called "Modifications," the author's gaze has been deflected onto the rise of an "art of living" around the sexual practices of antique Greece and Rome...

...Abstinence had no innate merit, and homosexuality was not merely accepted but, under the right conditions, celebrated...

...Every citizen concerned with the questions of morality, peace, and freedom in an age in which totalitarianism threatens all of these areas should look at this study...

...The Will to 7Iuth includes a bare handful of very oblique references, clearly in deference to Foucault's privacy...

...As the social 'Foucault's ambivalence, if that is what it was, toward his homosexuality adds irony to the tragedy of his death, since it is almost certain that the so-called "disease of the nervous system" that killed him was made possible by the breakdown of his immune system as a result of having contracted AIDS...

...it does not consist in saying merely, "I protest," but in making of that attitude a political phenomenon that is as substantial as possible, and one which those who govern, here or there, will sooner or later be obliged to take into account...

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...What would he have put in their place...

...Only Claude Levi-Strauss (and perhaps the unreconstructed deconstructionist Jacques Derrida) could oonceivably have claimed celebrity on a par with Foucault's...

...Liberals accused him of being a technocrat, Communists of being a Gaullist agent, socialists of being a dangerous left-wing anarchist...

...Professor Paul Seabury, University of California at Berkeley xvi, 91 pp...

...Foucault's writing was too often self-indulgently poetic, a sometimes indiscriminate brew of jargon, neologisms, and ornate if not surreal images that obscured his meaning at least as often as they enhanced it...

...trade and university presses issued nine books by Foucault and two col James Harkness translated This Is Not a Pipe, Michel Foucault's study of Rene Magritte (University of California Press, 1983...

...Mention of economic systems is almost nonexistent in his work, and there is no one for whom traditional oppositions like "left" and "right" are less satisfactory...

...It is not enough to decry the emergence of such regimes or to pretend that military means alone will protect our vital interests...

...lections of his essays...

...There is also a rarefaction of vocabulary, in which controversial issues, touchy subjects, and areas of philosophical debate are inflated into "contestations," "problematics," or "points of problematization...

...While each contains a good deal of the author's wonted methodological finickiness, neither is much more than a series of close readings of texts, not needing or justifying the Nietzschean overtones of their "genealogical" claims...

...From the agora, to Masters and Johnson, to the decennial Census...

...Elsewhere, however, Foucault left little doubt that he considered Marx entirely a product of his milieu...

...As recently as 1980, Sheridan's Michel Foucault...

...Le Souci de soi (literally, "the concern for the self...

...A Time for Cl-: )g...

...Sovereignty does not arise from the means of production, as Marxists insist, or from the terms of a social contract, as in Rousseau and classical liberalism...

...Only in the eighties did he begin to speak out on behalf of gay rights, and then rather perfunctorily, with little of the energy and eloquence evident in his writings against oppression in Iran, Afghanistan, Poland, and Latin America...

...Treated with antibiotics, he was able to return to Paris...

...Power is not a "thing" at all, but rather a relationship-imperfect, provisional, a positioning that creates as well as denies...

...Americans, exposed to the empiricist tradition in sociology and long accustomed to thinking of psychology, medicine, penology, sex, and similar matters as having their "political" ramifications, have had far less trouble with this idea than Europeans, who tend to remain preoccupied by statism and the monarchical image of power who are still, as Foucault put it elsewhere, "trying to cut off the head of the king...

...But in reality, says Foucault, the conventional view distorts or grossly oversimplifies on every point...

...important reading for anyone interested in strategic and national security dimensions of resource dependency...

...For that if no other reason, it seems fair to sug gest that in the last decade of his life he was trying, among other things, to pour the foundations for a counterpolitics, an ethical activism stripped bare of naivete, ideology, and "programs...

...Doubtless one needs to be nominalistic...

...A welcome addition to the literature on economics and international security, and an excellent base for the development of policy...

...An informed understanding of what makes these governments work, where they are strong and where they are weak, is a prerequisite to a successful U.S...

...Fewer restrictions were placed on premarital or extramarital adven tures...

...in classical Greek thought it was the relationship with boys that constituted the most delicate point and the most active focus of reflection and elaboration...

...The Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis has performed a major public service in this Special Report on Third World Marxist-Leninist regimes...

...And we can see a new shift of the focus of problematization (this time from women to the body) in the interest that was shown, starting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the sexuality of children and, generally speaking, in the relationships between sexual behavior, normality, and health...

...Le Souci de soi, a translation of which (also from Pantheon) is due next spring, extends the investigation to Hellenistic and Roman writers of the imperial period...

...Let's take an example that touches us all...