Download or read book Foucault and the Kamasutra written by Sanjay K. Gautam and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-06-22 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Kamasutra is best known in the West for its scandalous celebration of unbridled sensuality. Yet, there is much, much more to it; embedded in the text is a vision of the city founded on art and aesthetic pleasure. In Foucault and the "Kamasutra", Sanjay K. Gautam lays out the nature and origin of this iconic Indian text and engages in the first serious reading of its relationship with Foucault. Gautam shows how closely intertwined the history of erotics in Indian culture is with the history of theater-aesthetics grounded in the discourse of love, and Foucault provides the framework for opening up an intellectual horizon of Indian thought. To do this, Gautam looks to the history of three inglorious characters in classical India: the courtesan and her two closest male companions—her patron, the dandy consort; and her teacher and advisor, the dandy guru. Foucault’s distinction between erotic arts and the science of sexuality drives Gautam’s exploration of the courtesan as a symbol of both sexual-erotic and aesthetic pleasure. In the end, by entwining together Foucault’s works on the history of sexuality in the West and the classical Indian texts on eros, Gautam transforms our understanding of both, even as he opens up new ways of investigating erotics, aesthetics, gender relations, and subjectivity.
Download or read book Foucault and the Kamasutra written by Sanjay K. Gautam and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-06-22 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gautam has here laid out the first serious reading of Michel Foucault in relation to key Sanskrit texts, and--what may be a surprise to many--he has written the first book-length work in English on the nature and origin of the Kamasutra. Gautam also takes up the Natyasastra (the Kamasutra's twin), locating in the first the themes of sexual-erotic pleasure, and locating in the second the classical Indian view of theater, music, dance, and aesthetic pleasure. The book shows how closely intertwined the history of erotics in ancient Indian culture is with the history of theater-aesthetics. Foucault provides a framework for opening up the intellectual horizon of Indian thought; it is his distinction between ars erotics (erotic arts) and scientia sexualis (science of sexuality) that fuels Gautam's exploration of the courtesan as symbol of both erotic and aesthetic pleasure, particularly in her role as a wife to her patron, which entails the morphing of erotics into a form of theater. The scope broadens ambitiously, to an inquiry on the nature of knowledge formation, erotics, theater, and gender relations in premodern Indian society and culture--as they converged on the historical figures of the courtesan and her male counterpart, the dandy. Gautam's twining of aims and subjects--Foucault's western philosophy of pleasure and India's classic text on eros (anchored in art and aesthetics)--transforms both the modern and the ancient texts with new understandings, and as new forms of investigating erotics and subjectivity itself.
Download or read book Michel Foucault written by Dan Beer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-02 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a study of the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault's 1976 work ""La Volonte de Savoir"". Dan Beer aims to uncover a network of ideas and linguistic patterns beneath the surface of the text. Through close textual analysis he addresses the issue of language and its effects on the world we inhabit. The book covers a range of references from the forgotten narratives of 19th-century European psychiatry, examining the scope of confessional literature, to the heated debates that surround Foucault's language and ideas."
Download or read book The Routledge Guidebook to Foucault s The History of Sexuality written by Chloe Taylor and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-11-03 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality is one of the most influential philosophical works of the twentieth century and has been instrumental in shaping the study of Gender, Feminist Theory and Queer Theory. But Foucault’s writing can be a difficult book to grasp as Foucault assumes a familiarity with the intellectually dominant theories of his time which renders many passages obscure for newcomers to his work. The Routledge Guidebook to Foucault’s The History of Sexuality offers a clear and comprehensive guide to this groundbreaking work, examining: The historical context in which Foucault wrote A critical discussion of the text, which examines the relationship between The History of Sexuality, The Use of Pleasure and The Care of The Self The reception and ongoing influence of The History of Sexuality Offering a close reading of the text, this is essential reading for anyone studying this enormously influential work.
Download or read book Bodies and Pleasures written by Ladelle McWhorter and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1999-07-22 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sexual identities are dangerous, Michel Foucault tells us. Categories of desire harden into stereotypes by which the forces of normalization hold us and judge us. In Bodies and Pleasures, Ladelle McWhorter reads Foucault from an original and personal angle, motivated by the differences this experience has made in her life. At the same time, her analysis advances discussion of key issues in Foucault scholarship: the genealogical critique, the status of the subject and humanism, essentialism versus social construction, and the relationships between identity, community, and political action. Weaving her own experience of coming to grips with her lesbian sexual identity into her readings of Foucault's most recent writings on sexuality and power, McWhorter argues compellingly that Foucault's texts should be read less for the arguments they advance and more for their transformative effect. By exploring bodies and pleasures—gardening, line dancing, or doing philosophy, for example—McWhorter shows that it isn't necessary to conform with socially recognized sexual identities. Bodies and Pleasures takes the reader beyond unexplored norms and imposed identities as it points the way toward a personal politics, ethics, and style that challenges our sexual selves.
Download or read book In Praise of Krishna written by Edward C. Dimock and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1981-08-15 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arising out of a devotional and enthusiastic religious movement that swept across most of northern and eastern India in the period from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries, the powerful and moving lyrics collected and elegantly translated here depict the love of Radha for the god Krishna—a love whose intensity and range of emotions trace the course of all true love between man and woman and between man and God. Intermingling physical and metaphysical imagery, the spiritual yearning for the divine is articulated in the passionate language of intense sensual desire for an irresistible but ultimately unpossessable lover, thus touching a resonant chord in our humanity.
Download or read book An Analysis of Michel Foucault s The History of Sexuality written by Rachele Dini and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michel Foucault is famous as one of the 20th-century’s most innovative and wide-ranging thinkers. The qualities that made him one of the most-read and influential theorists of the modern age find full expression in History of Sexuality, the last project Foucault was able to complete before his death in 1984. Central to Foucault’s appeal is the creativity of his thought. Creative thinking takes many forms – from redefining an issue in a novel way to making unexpected and illuminating connections. Foucault’s particular talent could perhaps best be described as turning questions inside out. In the case of sexuality, for instance, his interpretation of the historical evidence led him to argue that the sexual categories that we are used to (homosexual, lesbian, straight, and so on) are not “natural,” but constructs that are products of the ways in which power and knowledge interact in society. Such categories, Foucault continues, actually serve to produce the desires they seek to name. And their creation, in turn, is closely linked to the power that society exerts on those who belong to different sexual groups. Foucault’s ideas – familiar now – were so novel in their time that they proved highly challenging. But to see the world through Foucault’s thought is to see it in a profoundly different and illuminating way – an example of creative thinking at its best.
Download or read book Foucault Biopolitics and Resistance written by Lauri Siisiäinen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-11-21 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political resistance is flourishing. In this context, there is a growing interest to reread Michel Foucault’s work, especially from the late period, from the perspective of resistance, social movements and affirmative biopolitics. Yet what has been missing so far is a book-length, comprehensive study focusing on this topic. This volume undertakes this task, providing an original typology of the resources of resistance discovered in Foucault’s late thinking: resistance as discursive protection of autonomy bodily and affective resistance the strategies, arts and practices of affirmative biopolitics or ‘politics of life’ The book shows how these different types of tools, arts and practices can be used in resistant politics, in struggles against various regimes and institutions of power and government, so that they mutually supplement and reinforce one another. The author embarks on advancing Foucault’s insights on resistance from where he stopped. Furthermore, the volume proposes a novel assessment of the Foucauldian political toolkit in the 21st century context, addressing its pertinence for struggles against neoliberalism and post-Fordist capitalism. Foucault, Biopolitics and Resistance will be an important resource for students and scholars interested in Foucault, resistance and 21st century politics within many fields, including political science, international relations, contemporary and continental philosophy as well as sociology. The work elaborates fresh methodological insights, fruitful for further empirical research on social and political movements.
Download or read book Confessions of the Flesh written by Michel Foucault and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2022-01-18 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fourth and final volume in Michel Foucault’s acclaimed History of Sexuality, completed just before his death in 1984 and finally available to the public One of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, Michel Foucault made an indelible impact on Western thought. The first three volumes in his History of Sexuality—which trace cultural and intellectual notions of sexuality, arguing that it has been profoundly shaped by the power structures applied to it—constitute some of Foucault’s most important work. This fourth volume posits that the origins of totalitarian self-surveillance began with the Christian practice of confession. The manuscript had long been secreted away, in accordance with Foucault’s stated wish that there be no posthumous publication of his unpublished work. With the sale of the Foucault archives in 2013, Foucault’s nephew felt that the time had come to publish this final volume in Foucault’s seminal history. Philosophically, it is a chapter in his hermeneutics of the desiring subject. Historically, it focuses on the remodeling of subjectivity carried out by the early Christian Fathers, who set out to transform the classical Logos of truthful human discourse into a theologos—the divine Word of a pure sovereign. What did God will in the matter of righteous sexual practice? Foucault parses out the logic of the various responses proffered by theologians over the centuries, culminating with Saint Augustine’s fascinating discussion of the libido. Sweeping and deeply personal, Confessions of the Flesh is a tour de force from a philosophical master
Download or read book The Foucault Reader written by Michel Foucault and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1984-11-12 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michel Foucault was one of the most influential philosophical thinkers in the contemporary world, someone whose work has affected the teaching of half a dozen disciplines ranging from literary criticism to the history of criminology. But of his many books, not one offers a satisfactory introduction to the entire complex body of his work. The Foucault Reader was commissioned precisely to serve that purpose. The Reader contains selections from each area of Foucault's work as well as a wealth of previously unpublished writings, including important material written especially for this volume, the preface to the long-awaited second volume of The History of Sexuality, and interviews with Foucault himself, in the course of which he discussed his philosophy at first hand and with unprecedented candor. This philosophy comprises an astonishing intellectual enterprise: a minute and ongoing investigation of the nature of power in society. Foucault's analyses of this power as it manifests itself in society, schools, hospitals, factories, homes, families, and other forms of organized society are brought together in The Foucault Reader to create an overview of this theme and of the broad social and political vision that underlies it.
Download or read book The History of Sexuality Vol 2 written by Michel Foucault and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1990-04-14 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this sequel to The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, the brilliantly original French thinker who died in 1984 gives an analysis of how the ancient Greeks perceived sexuality. Throughout The Use of Pleasure Foucault analyzes an irresistible array of ancient Greek texts on eroticism as he tries to answer basic questions: How in the West did sexual experience become a moral issue? And why were other appetites of the body, such as hunger, and collective concerns, such as civic duty, not subjected to the numberless rules and regulations and judgments that have defined, if not confined, sexual behavior?
Download or read book The History of Sexuality written by Michel Foucault and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1990-04-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why we are so fascinated with sex and sexuality—from the preeminent philosopher of the 20th century. Michel Foucault offers an iconoclastic exploration of why we feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex, and of the social and mental mechanisms of power that cause us to direct the questions of what we are to what our sexuality is.
Download or read book Mad for Foucault written by Lynne Huffer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary critiques of sexuality have their origins in the work of Michel Foucault. While Foucault's seminal arguments helped to establish the foundations of queer theory and greatly advance feminist critique, Lynne Huffer argues that our interpretation of the theorist's powerful ideas remains flawed.
Download or read book Laughing Matters written by Lee Siegel and published by Motilal Banarsidass Publishe. This book was released on 1989 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ars Erotica written by Richard Shusterman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-25 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on theories of lovemaking from ancient Asian and Western cultures, this book provides a new aesthetics of erotic love.
Download or read book Love Reason and God s Story written by David Cloutier and published by Saint Mary's Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The author of this book provides readers with a basic understanding of the history of Catholic teaching on sexual ethics, particularly as it has evolved in the last half century."--
Download or read book The History of Sexuality written by Michel Foucault and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1990-04-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why we are so fascinated with sex and sexuality—from the preeminent philosopher of the 20th century. Michel Foucault offers an iconoclastic exploration of why we feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex, and of the social and mental mechanisms of power that cause us to direct the questions of what we are to what our sexuality is.
