Foucault's Virginity

Foucault's Virginity PDF Author: Simon Goldhill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521479349
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
The sexy, witty and often bizarre novels, poetry and dialogues of the first centuries of this era (works such as Longus' Daphnis and Chloe, Achilles Tatius' Leukippe and Cleitophon and Plutarch's Amatorius) were being composed at the same time as fundamental ideas about the body, gender and sexuality were being set in place with the rise of Christianity and the Church to dominate the pagan world. Modern writers on the history of sexuality have largely ignored this literature in favour of prose treatises, philosophy and Christian homilies. Simon Goldhill, writing with the same wit and verve as the ancient writers with whom he engages, sets out to put these texts back into the history of sexuality. The result is a dazzling celebration of sex and sexuality in the Greek literature of the first centuries CE.

Foucault's Virginity

Foucault's Virginity PDF Author: Simon Goldhill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521479349
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description
The sexy, witty and often bizarre novels, poetry and dialogues of the first centuries of this era (works such as Longus' Daphnis and Chloe, Achilles Tatius' Leukippe and Cleitophon and Plutarch's Amatorius) were being composed at the same time as fundamental ideas about the body, gender and sexuality were being set in place with the rise of Christianity and the Church to dominate the pagan world. Modern writers on the history of sexuality have largely ignored this literature in favour of prose treatises, philosophy and Christian homilies. Simon Goldhill, writing with the same wit and verve as the ancient writers with whom he engages, sets out to put these texts back into the history of sexuality. The result is a dazzling celebration of sex and sexuality in the Greek literature of the first centuries CE.

Confessions of the Flesh

Confessions of the Flesh PDF Author: Michel Foucault
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 152474803X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
"Brought to light at last--the fourth volume in the famous History of Sexuality series by one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, his final work, which he had completed, but not yet published, upon his death in 1984 Michel Foucault's philosophy has made an indelible impact on Western thought, and his History of Sexuality series--which traces cultural and intellectual notions of sexuality, arguing that it is profoundly shaped by the power structures applied to it--is one of his most influential works. At the time of his death in 1984, he had completed--but not yet edited or published--the fourth volume, which posits that the origins of totalitarian self-surveillance began with the Christian practice of confession. This is a text both sweeping and deeply personal, as Foucault--born into a French Catholic family--undoubtedly wrestled with these issues himself. Since he had stipulated "Pas de publication posthume," this text has long been secreted away. However, the sale of the Foucault archives in 2013--which made this text available to scholars--prompted his nephew to seek wider publication. This attitude was shared by Foucault's longtime partner, Daniel Defert, who said, "What is this privilege given to Ph.D students? I have adopted this principle: It is either everybody or nobody.""--

A Virgin Conceived

A Virgin Conceived PDF Author: Mary F. Foskett
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253108969
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
The virginity of Mary has been an influential tenet of Christian belief, a catalyst for Marian devotion, and a foundation for the construction of female Christian piety and practice. In contrast to previous biblical interpreters who have drawn on either linguistic or historical evidence to ponder whether Mary the parthenos is indeed a "virgin," in this study Mary F. Foskett takes a different course. Rather than investigating the meaning and implications of the Virgin as a reified symbol, A Virgin Conceived examines the portrayal of Mary as a virgin in two important early Christian narratives: the canonical Luke-Acts and the second-century Protevangelium of James. Foskett explores the multiple meanings and images that parthenos and virginity display in two sources and describes how they exploit this range of possible meanings in their representations of Mary. Her study departs from earlier biblical interpretation by emphasizing neither the ambiguity of the term parthenos nor the history of tradition concerning Mary. Instead, it displays the multiple meanings of "virginity" and their implications for understanding representations of the Virgin Mary.

Foucault's Strange Eros

Foucault's Strange Eros PDF Author: Lynne Huffer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231552017
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Book Description
What is the strange eros that haunts Foucault’s writing? In this deeply original consideration of Foucault’s erotic ethics, Lynne Huffer provocatively rewrites Foucault as a Sapphic poet. She uncovers eros as a mode of thought that erodes the interiority of the thinking subject. Focusing on the ethical implications of this mode of thought, Huffer shows how Foucault’s poetic archival method offers a way to counter the disciplining of speech. At the heart of this method is a conception of the archive as Sapphic: the past’s remains are, like Sappho’s verses, hole-ridden, scattered, and dissolved by time. Listening for eros across fragmented texts, Huffer stages a series of encounters within an archive of literary and theoretical readings: the eroticization of violence in works by Freud and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the historicity of madness in the Foucault-Derrida debate, the afterlives of Foucault’s antiprison activism, and Monique Wittig’s Sapphic materialism. Through these encounters, Foucault’s Strange Eros conceives of ethics as experiments in living that work poetically to make the present strange. Crafting fragments that dissolve into Sapphic brackets, Huffer performs the ethics she describes in her own practice of experimental writing. Foucault’s Strange Eros hints at the self-hollowing speech of an eros that opens a space for the strange.

Foucault and the Art of Ethics

Foucault and the Art of Ethics PDF Author: Timothy O'Leary
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1847144039
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
The work of Michel Foucault has been extremely influential in fields as varied as philosophy, history, cultural studies, sociology and sexuality studies. In his later work, Foucault turned to the question of ethics. Working back through history, through the Christian interrogation of desire to the origins of the self in the texts of classical Greece, Foucault attempted to conceive of ethics as an art of the self, as an aesthetics of existence and as a practice of liberty. Foucault and the Art of Ethics argues that Foucault's exploration of the history of sexuality and his reinterpretation of the critical philosophical tradition combine to frame a new approach both to the way we understand the tasks of philosophy and to the way we live our lives. The book is essential reading for all those working at the intersection of contemporary debates in philosophy, ethics, politics and cultural studies.

Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages

Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Kathleen Coyne Kelly
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134737556
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
This book challenges the belief that female virginity can be reliably and unambiguously defined, tested and verified. Kelly analyses a variety of medieval Western European texts - including medical treatises and their Classical antecedents - and historical and legal documents. The main focus is the representation of both male and female virgins in saints' legends and romances. The author also makes a comparative study of examples from contemporary fiction, television and film in which testing virginity is a theme. Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages presents a compelling and provocative study of the parodox of bodily and spiritual integrity as both presence and absence.

Foucault's Futures

Foucault's Futures PDF Author: Penelope Deutscher
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231544553
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
In Foucault's Futures, Penelope Deutscher reconsiders the role of procreation in Foucault's thought, especially its proximity to risk, mortality, and death. She brings together his work on sexuality and biopolitics to challenge our understanding of the politicization of reproduction. By analyzing Foucault's contribution to the politics of maternity and its influence on the work of thinkers such as Roberto Esposito, Giorgio Agamben, and Judith Butler, Deutscher provides new insights into the conflicted political status of reproductive conduct and what it means for feminism and critical theory.

Sexuality

Sexuality PDF Author: Michel Foucault
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231551169
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 564

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Book Description
Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality—the first volume of which was published in 1976—exerts a vast influence across the humanities and social sciences. However, Foucault’s interest in the history of sexuality began as early as the 1960s, when he taught two courses on the subject. These lectures offer crucial insight into the development of Foucault’s thought yet have remained unpublished until recently. This book presents Foucault’s lectures on sexuality for the first time in English. In the first series, held at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in 1964, Foucault asks how sexuality comes to be constituted as a scientific body of knowledge within Western culture and why it derived from the analysis of “perversions”—morbidity, homosexuality, fetishism. The subsequent course, held at the experimental university at Vincennes in 1969, shows how Foucault’s theories were reoriented by the events of May 1968; he refocuses on the regulatory nature of the discourse of sexuality and how it serves economic, social, and political ends. Examining creators of political and literary utopias in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Sade to Fourier to Marcuse, who attempted to integrate “natural” sexualities, including transgressive forms, into social and economic life, Foucault elaborates a double critique of the naturalization and the liberation of sexuality. Together, the lectures span a range of interests, from abnormality to heterotopias to ideology, and they offer an unprecedented glimpse into the evolution of Foucault’s transformative thinking on sexuality.

Foucault at the Movies

Foucault at the Movies PDF Author: Patrice Maniglier
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547838
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
Michel Foucault’s work on film, although not extensive, compellingly illustrates the power of bringing his unique vision to bear on the subject and offers valuable insights into other aspects of his thought. Foucault at the Movies brings together all of Foucault’s commentary on film, some of it available for the first time in English, along with important contemporary analysis and further extensions of this work. Patrice Maniglier and Dork Zabunyan situate Foucault’s writings on film in the context of the rest of his work as well as within a broad historical and philosophical framework. They detail how Foucault’s work directly or indirectly inspired both film critics and directors in surprising ways and discuss his ideas in relation to significant movements within film theory and practice. The book includes film reviews and discussions by Foucault as well as his interviews with the prestigious film magazine Cahiers du cinéma and other journals. Also included are his dialogues with the noted French feminist writer Hélène Cixous and film directors Werner Schroeter and René Féret. Throughout, Foucault and those he is in conversation with reflect on the relationship of film to history, the body, power and politics, knowledge, sexuality, aesthetics, and institutions of internment. Foucault at the Movies makes all of Foucault’s writings on film available to an English-speaking audience in one volume and offers detailed, up-to-date commentary, inviting us to go to the movies with Foucault.

Virgin Territory

Virgin Territory PDF Author: Julia Kelto Lillis
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520389018
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Women's virginity held tremendous significance in early Christianity and the Mediterranean world. Early Christian thinkers developed diverse definitions of virginity and understood its bodily aspects in surprising, often nonanatomical ways. Eventually Christians took part in a cross-cultural shift toward viewing virginity as something that could be perceived in women's sex organs. Treating virginity as anatomical brought both benefits and costs. By charting this change and situating it in the larger landscape of ancient thought, Virgin Territory illuminates unrecognized differences among early Christian sources and historicizes problematic ideas about women's bodies that still persist today.