ABSTRACT
This study analyzes the impact of Foucault’s œuvre on the way the history of ancient sexuality is written today. It first presents the lay of the land in the field of Classical Studies at the moment when Foucault began his work, and then discusses the reception of Foucault’s two volumes within that same field, in both France and the United States. Topics discussed include the unexpected influence of 20th-century sociology Foucault’s study on the Greco-Roman world, and the role K.J. Dover’s book Greek Homosexuality played in Foucault’s thinking, a role of preliminary and necessary “fieldwork”– similar to the role played by the archive in his works on other subjects – but only one of several stages in the development of his argument. Foucault profoundly transformed the field of research on sexuality in ancient worlds by building a new framework for thinking ancient eroticism and integrating our “western” sexuality into a broader history, without universals or teleologies, the history of the process by which the individual comes to recognize himself as subject of his desire and his own existence.
