Foucault, Gill, and Butler: Erotic Experience, Selfhood,

In the introduction to the second volume of Histoire de la sexualité, Foucault writes about the subject of the first volume of Histoire: “What I planned, therefore, was a history of the experience of sexuality, where experience is understood as the correlation between fields of knowledge, types of normativity, and forms of subjectivity in a particular culture.”²⁷⁶ The first two of these three axes, the

“formation of sciences (savoirs) that refer to it,” and “the systems of power that regulate its practice,” Foucault had analyzed as discourses and open-ended

276 Foucault 1985, 4. Foucault 1984a, 10: “Le projet était donc d’une histoire de la sexualité comme expérience, – si on entend par expérience la corrélation, dans une culture, entre domaines de savoir, types de normativité at formes de subjectivité.”

strategies which have the power to produce the subjects they recognize and control.²⁷⁷ However, the third axis, “the forms within which individuals are able, are obliged, to recognize themselves as subjects of this sexuality,” he notes, could not be fully theorized without going much further into the “genealogy” of the desiring subject, into studying “how individuals were led to practice, on themselves and on others, a hermeneutics of desire, a hermeneutics of which their sexual behavior was doubtless the occasion, but certainly not the exclusive domain.”²⁷⁸ L’usage des plaisirs (The Use of Pleasure) and Le souci de soi (The Care of the Self), the second and third volume of Histoire both published in 1984, were written to provide a basis for this genealogy. What Foucault notices is that:

Now, it seems clear, from a first approach at least, that moral conceptions in Greek and Greco-Roman antiquity were much more oriented toward practices of the self and questions of askēsis than toward codifications of conducts and the strict definition of what is permitted and what is forbidden. [...] Although the necessity of respecting the law and the customs – the nomoi – was very often underscored, more important that the content of the law and its conditions of application was the attitude that caused one to respect them. The accent was placed on the relationship with the self that enabled a person to keep from being carried away by the appetites and pleasures, to maintain mastery and superiority over them, to keep his senses in a state of tranquility, to remain free from interior bondage to the passions, and to achieve a mode of being that could be defined by the full enjoyment of oneself, or the perfect supremacy of oneself over oneself.²⁷⁹

277 Foucault 1985, 4. Foucault 1984a, 10: “Parler de la “sexualité” comme d’une expérience historiquement singulière supposait aussi qu’on puisse disposer d’instruments susceptibles d’analyser, dans leur caractère propre et dans leurs corrélations, les trois axes qui la constituent: la formation des savoirs qui se référent à elle, les systèmes de pouvoir qui en règlent le pratique [...].”

278 Foucault 1985, 4-5. Foucault 1984a: 10-11: “[...] et les formes dans lesquelles les individus peuvent et doivent se reconnaître comme sujets de cette sexualité. [...] Bref, l’idée était, dans cette généalogie, de chercher comment les individus ont été amenés à exercer sur eux-mêmes, et sur les autres, une herméneutique du désir dont leur comportement sexuel a bien été sans doute l’occasion, mais n’a certainement pas été le domaine exclusif.”

279 Foucault 1985, 30-31. Foucault 1984a, 37-38: “Or, il semble bien, du moins en première approche, que les réflexions morales dans l’Antiquité grecque ou gréco-romaine aient été beaucoup plus orientées vers les pratiques de soi et la question de l’askesis, que vers les codifications de conduites et la définition stricte du permis et du défendu. [...] Même si la nécessité de respecter la loi et des coutumes – les nomoi – est très souvent soulignée, l’important est moins dans le contenu de la loi et ses conditions d’application que l’attitude qui fait qu’on les respecte. L’accent est mis sur le rapport à soi qui permet de ne pas se laisser emporter par les appétits et les plaisirs, de garder vis-à-vis d’eux maîtrise et supériorité, de maintenir ses sens dans un état de tranquillité, de demeurer libre de tout esclavage intérieur à l’égard des passions, et d’atteindre à un mode d’être qui peut être défini par la pleine jouissance de soi-même ou la parfaite souveraineté de soi sur soi.”

Foucault, thus, treats the experience of sexual subjectivity as an outcome of discourses that enable people to recognize and know themselves as sexual agents, discourses that are normative and regulative. But in antiquity these discourses are less concerned with specific acts than the wholesale ethical constitution of the person. The experience of subjectivity that the ancient discourse on sexual behavior enabled people to have was not merely sexual but regarded the person’s entire being – their conception of themselves as an eligible person. This conception was not rooted in Cartesian ideas about self-consciousness and Kantian thinking on autonomy. Instead, the ancient model of subjectivity, found by Foucault, was based on the self’s understanding of itself as a comprehensive ethical project, not apparently autonomous from and subjected to, but fully involved with the discourse of the correct way of being (a male) human.

Christopher Gill’s thesis, though apparently independent of Foucault’s work, is in broad lines very similar, but it arises from a different goal. Gill begins with the ancient conception of the self and contrasts it to the modern Cartesian, post-Kantian conception by way of a penetrating critique of modern interpretations of the ancient conception. Gill’s project, then, is not genealogic – looking back to trace the development of a phenomenon as we see it now. Instead, it seeks to understand the studied phenomenon carefully in its historical specificity, yet acknowledging, that we need to use our modern concepts while discussing it and insisting that we choose these concepts wisely to best translate the studied phenomenon in its specificity.

Whereas Foucault thought he could find a novel, more introspective and self-reflective idea of the self in writers of the imperial Roman period, Gill argues for the consistent role of interpersonal dialogue and the shared beliefs of one’s philosophical community – one’s normative framework – in determining the subjectivity of ancient persons. Gill suggests (referring to other parallel criticisms) that Foucault’s argument about Hellenistic-Roman thought relating to self-management, particularly as expressed in the third volume of Histoire, Le souci de soi (The Care of the Self), gives a greater role than is tenable to individual preference and eclecticism.²⁸⁰ According to Gill, “Foucault’s account of the care of the self in Hellenistic-Roman philosophy seems, at least, to reflect a subjective-individualist approach to personality. This is so even though Foucault himself is far from endorsing the ideas of the post-Cartesian and post-Kantian tradition from which this approach typically derives.”²⁸¹

Judith Butler’s theory about the discursive production and performative adoption of sex/gender is greatly indebted to Foucault’s interest in the sexual

280 Gill 2006, 335. See also Inwood 2009.

281 Gill 2006, 335. Italics in the original.

subject and its experience. Foucault’s idea of “subjection” (assujettissement), read by Butler as more precisely “subjectivation” – “not only a subordination but a securing and maintaining, a putting into place of a subject”²⁸² – is one of the main incentives of Butler’s thinking. Subjectivation means, in short, the process by which a person becomes a subject as a result of his or her internalization of the normative categories that enable one to consider oneself a “subject.” These categories include “sex,” “gender,” and “sexuality.” In Gender Trouble (1990), Butler writes about Foucault’s view of corporeal sex: “For Foucault, the body is not ‘sexed’

in any significant sense prior to its determination within a discourse through which it becomes invested with an ‘idea’ of natural or essential sex.”²⁸³ In Bodies That Matter, Butler further emphasizes the material implications of this view by drawing an analogy with Aristotle’s idea of generation (see above section 2.3):

“[...] not fully unlike Aristotle, the soul described by Foucault as an instrument of [normative] power, forms and frames the body, stamps it, and in stamping it, brings it into being.”²⁸⁴

Whereas Foucault turns the course of explanation upside down treating “sex” as an effect rather than the original cause of sexual discourse and regulation, in Bodies That Matter, Butler turns the course of identification upside down. According to Butler, gender and sexuality are not the origin of people’s identifications and gender-related actions. On the contrary, people’s actions produce gender and sexuality in a constant chain of citing preceding actions, which claim to originate from an essential, unquestionable core of gender. This core, however, can never be found underneath the acts that define it. Butler uses the example of a newborn baby, of whom the nurse or the doctor declares: “It’s a girl!” This act first constitutes the baby’s gender. The biological observations preceding or following this recognition would make little sense if they were not grounded in and motivated by a prior understanding of the binary gender system. The declaration actually assigns a sex and a gender to a body that can have no existence outside discourse. Similarly, a person bases their idea of themselves on an incessant repetition of acts that the socio-temporal continuation of the acts has loaded with gendered significance and that are understandable only as far as they conform to this normative matrix.

Butler writes:

To the extent that the naming of the “girl” is transitive, that is, initiates the process by which a certain “girling” is compelled, the term or, rather, its symbolic power, governs the formation of a corporeally enacted femininity

282 Butler 1993, 32-36.

283 Butler 1990, 92.

284 Butler 1993, 34.

that never fully approximates the norm. This is a “girl,” however, who is compelled to “cite” the norm in order to qualify and remain a viable subject. Femininity is thus not the product of a choice, but the forcible citation of a norm, one whose complex historicity is indissociable from relations of discipline, regulation, punishment. Indeed, there is no “one”

who takes on a gender norm. On the contrary, this citation of the gender norm is necessary in order to qualify as a “one,” to become viable as a

“one,” where subject-formation is dependent on the prior operation of legitimating gender norms.²⁸⁵

Thus, Butler’s theory questions the idea of a self that makes independent decisions about its actions based on its essential, inborn identity. It actually seems to suggest that we have no such power, that the norms of the binary gender system define our experience and identity even when we try to challenge them. The subject, the self behind one’s gendered and sexualized actions, therefore appears an illusion which is maintained by citing the normative ideal of a gender identity. This ideal, in turn, is linked to the normative ideal of sexual behavior: “Gender norms operate by requiring the embodiment of certain ideals of femininity and masculinity, ones that are almost always related to the idealization of the heterosexual bond. In this sense, the initiatory performative, ‘It’s a girl!’ anticipates the eventual arrival of the sanction, ‘I pronounce you man and wife.’”²⁸⁶ Butler’s ideas continue Foucault’s, but are more pronouncedly skeptical about the possibility of having a sphere of subjectivity or a way of being outside of the normative discourse.²⁸⁷

Gill’s revision of Foucault’s perspective proceeds from another angle, that of Foucault’s representation of the ancient conception of selfhood. However, Gill’s wider thesis, in which this criticism is embedded, is analogous in important aspects with Butler’s thinking. Gill, like Butler, emphasizes the construction of subjectivity or selfhood in terms of a continuous process within normative discourse. Whereas Gill argues this to be the only straightforwardly available model in ancient texts, obscured by modern interpretations based on the modern

“subjective-individualist” conception of selfhood, Butler argues that this is the correct model of understanding even the modern subject. Consequently, what we have in Gill’s “objective-participant self” and in Butler’s performative self is a parallel conceptualization or definition of the underlying dynamics of the formation

285 Butler 1993, 232.

286 Butler 1993, 231-232.

287 In Gender Trouble (1990, 96-101) Butler takes issue with what she sees as Foucault’s idealization of a hypothetical field of bodily pleasures that awaits outside the restrictive discourse of sexuality. In Bodies That Matter (1993, 33) she notes that at times Foucault’s idea of the body seems to have “a materiality that is ontologically distinct from the power relations that take the body as a site of investments,” making his relationship with materiality not entirely coherent.

and structure of one’s personal identity. Gill demonstrates this structure to be consistent throughout ancient sources. Its formulations change as do the ways it is applied in varying circumstances in different historical periods, but the basic understanding of the self in Plato’s, Aristotle’s, and Seneca’s thinking is ultimately similar.

Long makes a distinction between “occurrent subjectivity” (a person’s present and particular mindset and consciousness) and “normative identity” (what the person would like to be or, according to specific social norms, should aspire to be) regarding both Greek and Roman antiquity. The differences between different philosophical schools would seem to arise largely from different degrees of internalization of the normative self.²⁸⁸ However, Gill shows that even the “occurrent subjectivity”

is, in ancient texts, ultimately a product of the person’s social circumstances (see below). Butler’s performative self is a similarly fundamental substructure covered by modern subjective-individualist thinking of selfhood. This match between Gill and Butler helps us understand ancient thinking from a modern perspective, to make ancient thinking converse with modern thinking. It also helps bring gender and sexuality into the focus within the ancient framework.