ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to explain how Foucault first theorized his reference to pederasty in Ancient Greece, in the lectures later published as Subjectivity and Truth, in connection with what he calls the “activity” of the subject. Foucault’s use of the pederastic paradigm is not dogmatic, but rather presented through paradoxical situations. A first paradox consists in the link between the principle of activity and sexual position itself: while it is plausible to understand activity through the dominant position of the lover (that of the penetrator), such a reading stems from an image of masculinity postdating the pederastic institution itself. A second paradox deals with the situation of the beloved towards emancipation: he is supposedly sexually passive, but his course of life must nonetheless lead him toward the same power of activity his initiator has. A third paradox involves the role of knowledge in the pederastic relationship, where the beloved must be initiated and the lover must avoid a kind of self-forgetting through sexual expenditure. Finally, a fourth paradox concerns the distance between our contemporary “homosexuality” and “Greek love.”
