The complete collection of the monumental History of Sexuality, gathered for the first time in a box set. One of the most important works by French philosopher Michel Foucault.
Throughout the 1970s, Michel Foucault dedicated his work at the Collège de France to analyzing the place of sexuality in Western society, which gave rise to the four-volume History of Sexuality. His reflections found sex and sexuality to be the cause of all events in social life. The philosopher undertook historical research, establishing an anthropology and discourse analysis of this topic so fundamental to the human condition.
History of Sexuality: The Will to Know (Vol. 1) – 176 pages
The first volume, The Will to Know, shows that sexuality was not repressed by capitalism, after having lived in freedom. Its hypothesis is that, since the 16th century—a process that intensified from the 19th century onward—sex has been encouraged to manifest itself by a desire to know about sexuality, which is part of the strategies of control over individuals and populations characteristic of modern societies.
History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasures (Vol. 2) – 320 pages
The second volume, The Use of Pleasures, marks a significant shift in the history of sexuality. Retaining his goal of investigating how the notion of sexuality emerged in modern Western societies, Foucault goes back in time to classical Greece to explore how sexual activity became a domain of moral practice and a mode of subjectivation characteristic of the project of an "aesthetics of existence."
History of Sexuality: Self-Care (Vol. 3) – 320 pages
The third volume, The Care of the Self, studies the development, in the first two centuries of our era, of the art of existence created by the Greeks. Thus, it examines the mode of subjectivation characteristic of this period to understand its difference both in relation to Greece, which created the aesthetics of existence, and in relation to Christianity, which inclined it toward a hermeneutics of desire.
History of Sexuality: Confessions of the Flesh (Vol. 4) – 528 pages
The fourth volume of the History of Sexuality, The Confessions of the Flesh, previously unpublished, analyzes the Christian experience of sex from the second to the fifth centuries. It is important for clarifying the relationships between the first centuries of Christianity, Antiquity, and Modernity in terms of how people thought about sex. It also highlights how the History of Sexuality, which began by prioritizing mechanisms of subjection, became a historical-philosophical study of modes of subjectivation.
