Foucault and Antiquity Beyond Sexuality

In Foucault’s last lectures, he turned to the Cynics (2009). At a time when he was obviously ill, and increasingly frail, he continued to give his weekly lectures at the Collège de France. He spoke of these ancient philosophers who, like the Platonists traced their lineage to Socrates, but who refused to accumulate a body of doctrine, who lived their lives in the public square, who begged, ate scraps, and masturbated in public. The Cynics were the « dogs » of philosophy. They were the street corner preachers who confronted us with our conformity, our petty hypocrisies, our dishonesties.

In The Order of Things, first published in French in 1966, Michel Foucault declared that life as the object of biology does not exist prior to the nineteenth century; only, rather “living beings,” viewed as objects of natural history (1970: 139).

In recent years it has become increasingly common to draw connections between the political thought of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. On the one hand, there are strong continuities between their respective theories of power. On the other hand, as influential theorists such as Giorgio Agamben (1998) have argued, Arendt and Foucault share an account of modernity and of the entry of biological life into the political sphere.

In several lecture series, Michel Foucault analyzed the Funeral Games of Patroclus in Homer’s Iliad as a starting point in accounting for the history of “avowal” and the “will to truth” in the Western tradition (see Leonard 2005; Foucault 2000, 2013, 2014). Classical scholars have often considered the Funeral Games to be a somewhat minor and overall happy event compared to the rest of the poem (see most recently Elmer 2013; Kyle 2015, B.K.M Brown 2016; for a contrary view see Kelly 2017).

Victoria Hunter (1997) concludes her seminal study of the Athenian prison (desmôtêrion) thus: ‘…I would imagine [the desmôtêrion as] a structure not designed specifically as a prison where inmates were expected to serve long sentences in solitude, subjected to discipline and normalization, but rather one modeled on domestic accommodation, a kind of large lodging-house for inmates whose stay was temporary and usually very brief’ (emphases added).