The Works of Aphrodite
Reading Michel Foucault's 'The History of Sexuality,' part two.
This is Part 2 of my series on Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. Part 1 is here. For an overview The History of Sexuality as a whole and its place in Foucault’s work, start with my introduction.
In the last post, we covered the introductory section of The Use of Pleasure. Part I is called “The Moral Problematization of Pleasures,” and is about the logic with which the ancient Greeks approached pleasures as a moral problem. This post is about aphrodisia (“the works of Aphrodite”), the Greek equivalent—but as we will see, it is not equivalent!—of our concept of “sexuality.” The next will cover what Foucault argues were the concepts they used to talk about the right ways to enjoy sexual pleasures: proper use (chrēsis), self-mastery (enkrateia) and moderation (sophrosynē). These terms set up how Greek moral thought is recognizable to us in some ways, and very strange in others.
A note on Foucault’s ancient sources
I didn’t say much up front about the kinds of sources Foucault is using to make his argument, but they are important for evaluating his “reading” of ancient sexuality and moral thought. He uses a wide variety of sources, but so far he is principally drawing on philosophical texts from classical Athens (roughly the 500-300s BC), especially Plato, Aristotle and Xenophon.
Athenian philosophy articulated a particular view of sexuality that did not encompass Greek behavior in general, nor even all of the minority of Athenians who were interested in philosophy. Plato himself was not necessarily representative of Athenian philosophy: as K.J. Dover notes, “Plato differed from most Athenians of his time in possession of wealth and leisure, in boundless zeal for the study of philosophy and mathematics, in a suspicious and censorious attitude to the arts, and in contempt for democracy.”1 Philosophy was modest and circumspect, whereas other literary genres, like poetry—Aristophanes’ plays, for example—presented sexuality in a much more graphic, bawdy fashion. But Foucault’s choice of sources makes sense, because unlike Dover’s Greek Homosexuality, which makes much of legal texts and vase paintings, he is not primarily interested in what Greeks did in bed, but their moral reflection about it. The important thing to keep in mind—important for Foucault’s later arguments about Romans and Christians—is that there were competing schools of thought even in Athens, and especially in “Greece” over time.
Aphrodisia, or the works of Aphrodite
The Greeks did not have a concept of “sexuality” that corresponded to all of the things people today group under that category, nor did they have a concept of the “flesh” in the Christian sense, an inherently “fallen” part of the whole. Foucault makes constant comparisons between Greek thought and those later concepts, warning against conflating them and refuting the “clichés” he himself operated with earlier in his work.2
What the Greeks did have was the goddess Aphrodite.
One of the twelve Olympians, Aphrodite was allegedly born from the sea foam near Crete. (Aphros means “foam” and, according to the poet Hesiod, Aphrodite emerged from the white foam of Uranus’ severed genitals. Don’t forget that part.) Aphrodite was the goddess of love, desire, passion and beauty; she played a central role in starting the Trojan War, in which she supported the Trojan prince Paris, whom she had promised Helen of Sparta in exchange for voting her the most beautiful goddess. She also famously destroyed Hippolytus for being chastely devoted to her rival, the hunting goddess Artemis (a tragedy told differently in Euripides’ Hippolytus, Seneca’s Phaedra, and in the early modern French poet Jean Racine’s Phèdre.)
In place of a concept of sexuality, the Greeks spoke of the aphrodisia, which they defined—very specifically and helpfully!—as “the works, the acts of Aphrodite.” (This catégorie d’ensemble, “blanket category,” Foucault says, could be translated as “pleasures of love,” “sexual relations,” “carnal acts,” “sensual pleasures,” but since no precise translation is possible he decides to leave aphrodisia untranslated.) Here we immediately get a sense of the ride we’re in for; we are not used to concepts being personified by goddesses! Ancient Greek language and thinking are strange to us, and so is the “logic” that holds together their thinking about acts, desires, and pleasures.
Foucault notes that while Christian moral thinking will (eventually) be full of precise descriptions of which sexual acts are acceptable, Greek moralists said almost nothing about specific positions or sex acts. This might have been due to “modesty,” as the Greek “representation of sexual acts they suggest in their written works…seems to have been characterized by a good deal of reserve, despite the impression one gets from the entertainments they staged and from certain iconographic representations that have been discovered.”3 But a better explanation, he says, is because of the way they understood the aphrodisia. While Aristotle’s zoology treatise History of Animals goes into detail about animal copulation, the Greeks did not see the need to do the same for humans, because sex acts were not the core of the issue.
The unit of analysis relevant to Greek ethical thinking was a whole made up of three parts: “In the experience of the aphrodisia…act, desire and pleasure formed an ensemble whose elements were distinguishable, certainly, but closely bound to one another.” (42) These elements had a kind of circular relationship: an act produces a certain kind of pleasure, which then produces desire to repeat the pleasurable act, since, according to Aristotle, we are naturally driven by “desire for the agreeable thing.” But the Greeks were not concerned with any of the three elements by themselves. Foucault: “The ethical question that was raised was not: which desires? Which acts? Which pleasures? But rather: with what force is one transported ‘by the pleasures and desires’?” (43) In other words, they were more interested in the animating movement of pleasures and desire than the precise physical form that was taken to satisfy them.
Foucault says that there were two variables according to which Greek ethics conducted moral inquiry into the aphrodisia. The first was quantitative: “not so much the type of objects toward which [men] are oriented, nor the mode of sexual practice they prefer,” but the “intensity of that practice. The division is between lesser and greater: moderation or excess” (44). In Plato’s Laws, what goes “against nature” is not a specific type of act but “a lack of restraint with regard to pleasure” (akrateia hēdonēs). In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, “immorality in the pleasures of sex is always connected with exaggeration, surplus and excess” (45).
The second variable was active and passive sexual roles. Here’s where we get back to “foam.” Foucault introduces the verb form of aphrodisia—aphrodisiazein—which meant more narrowly, to have sex or even to come. (Here’s where we get back to aphros meaning “foam”: according to the Loeb Classical Library’s glossary, the Greek poet Hesiod related aphrodisiazein to “foam” in the sense of semen.) If to aphrodisiazein meant to fuck, then its passive form, aphrodisiathēnai, meant to receive the action of the active partner, to be fucked, which, of course, free male citizens were not supposed to like. The point of this terminology is to demonstrate that, unlike Christians, Greeks did not have a general sexual morality that applied to both males and females; immorality had to do with roles, not genders. The two ways to commit sexual immorality were thus 1) by being excessive, and 2) by abandoning one’s proper role—which, for the free adult men these texts address, meant the role of the active partner.
There is one final point to make about the aphrodisia before moving on to the Greek ethic of struggling against them. The reason the Greeks considered the aphrodisia to be potentially dangerous was not because they were evil or unnatural, but because they were so natural that they had an exceptional power. Sexual pleasure was an inferior kind of pleasure because it was shared by humans and animals. Because it was so important for the propagation of the species, nature made it an especially intense pleasure, as Plato says in his Laws. It was for that reason, Foucault says, “people were induced to overturn the hierarchy, placing these appetites and their satisfaction uppermost, and giving them absolute power over the soul” (49). The Greeks frequently related sexual pleasure to the pleasure of food and wine: all of these bodily pleasures were so intense that they naturally tend toward excess—and thus called for a particular kind of struggle for self-mastery and moderation.
Read the previous entry in this series:
Note: I use Amazon affiliate links, and may earn a commission when you purchase books and other products through this site.
K.J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (1972/1989), 13-14.
Stuart Elden, Foucault’s Last Decade (2016), 134. Foucault did most of his work on Christian thought before he turned to the Greeks and Romans, moving backward in time as he became aware of his own simplistic understanding of the ancients. He first talked about aphrodisia in his (now-published) 1980-1981 lecture course at the Collège de France, “Subjectivity and Truth.” There, Elden argues, “he was already setting up an opposition between aphrodisia and the Christian experience of the ‘flesh.’” But he continued to refine his analysis until it eventually appeared in the published version of The Use of Pleasure in 1984.
Here he is specifically referring to Dover’s groundbreaking study of vase paintings.