The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure

The central argument is that ancient Greek ethics did not treat sexual pleasure as a matter of forbidden acts requiring a code of prohibitions, but as a domain of self-mastery and style. The Greek ethical question was not 'which acts are permitted?' but 'how does one govern oneself in the use of pleasures?' Foucault calls this practice enkrateia—an active relation of the self to itself, a struggle for mastery rather than a conformity to law. This revises Volume One's focus on the modern 'dispositif of sexuality' by showing that the Christian hermeneutics of desire, which Foucault identifies as the precondition of modern sexual identity, was a later invention. The Greeks problematized pleasure, but they did not interpret it as a hidden truth of the self.

Foucault originally planned a six-volume history of sexuality from the sixteenth century onward, with a volume titled 'The Flesh and the Body' as the second installment . After an eight-year silence following Volume One's publication in 1976, he radically reoriented the project toward antiquity. Draft manuscripts show that Foucault initially set out to write a single book on the sexuality of the Ancients in the first two centuries CE, but the project gradually split into two volumes—one on classical Greece, one on the Hellenistic and Roman period—each with the same three-part structure: dietetics, conjugal relations, and erotics . The published volume therefore represents a departure not only from the original plan but from the theoretical framework of Volume One.

Reception was sharply divided. Martha Nussbaum, reviewing in The New York Times, called the book 'both mediocre and a departure' from Foucault's most valuable legacy, criticizing his lack of Greek and Latin and his reliance on secondary sources . She acknowledged his debt to Kenneth Dover's Greek Homosexuality but argued that a philosophical engagement with the texts required linguistic competence Foucault did not possess. Other reviewers were more generous, recognizing the book's originality in shifting from power to subjectivation. The first French reception noted a 'double astonishment': the discovery of a new register in Foucault's thought centered on the self, and the recognition that ancient societies did not possess a concept of 'sexuality' as a set of practices defining homosexual or heterosexual identity .

The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self are the only books by Foucault for which early drafts were preserved, since his systematic practice was to destroy preparatory materials once a book was published . This makes it possible to trace the project's evolution. The French original, L'usage des plaisirs, was published by Gallimard in 1984, the year of Foucault's death. The first English translation, by Robert Hurley, was published by Pantheon in 1985, with a Viking edition in London in 1986 . Foucault wrote the volumes while already dying, and it is widely agreed that they do not fully represent his original intentions . Readers should treat the book as the work of a thinker revising his project under conditions of urgency.

The shift is significant but not a break. In Discipline and Punish and Volume One, Foucault analyzed how power constitutes subjects through external mechanisms—discipline, confession, the dispositif of sexuality. In The Use of Pleasure, he turns to the techniques by which individuals constitute themselves as ethical subjects through their own practices. This is not an abandonment of power analysis but a complement to it: Foucault is asking how subjects actively form themselves within and against the frameworks that shape them. The Greek practice of self-mastery is not a form of freedom from power but a stylization of conduct that operates within a field of social expectations and norms. The later volumes thus add a dimension of self-formation that the earlier work had bracketed.

Foucault's claim is that the Greeks did not organize their experience of erotic pleasure around a binary of homosexual and heterosexual identity. What mattered was the active/passive distinction and the mastery of desire, not the gender of one's partner. The ethical problem was whether one governed one's pleasures well, not whether one desired the 'right' object. This claim accomplishes a critical defamiliarization: by showing that a society could treat erotic pleasure as a domain of ethical style without a hermeneutics of identity, Foucault suggests that modern sexual identity—the idea that one's desires reveal a hidden truth about oneself—is a historical formation, not a natural fact. The Greeks serve as a counter-example that makes the modern configuration visible as contingent.