Sex, Emancipation, and Aesthetics: Ars Erotica and the Cage of Eurocentric Modernity

Abstract

In an interview, two years after publishing the introductory volume of his Histoire de la sexualité (La Volonté de savoir), Michel Foucault boldly claimed that the future of philosophy depended on looking beyond its European home. “It is the end of the era of occidental philosophy,” Foucault declared to his priestly interlocutors on his 1978 visit to a Zen temple in Japan. “Thus, if there is to be a philosophy of the future, it must be born outside of Europe or it must be born as a consequence of encounters and impacts (percussions) between Europe and non-Europe.”1 Although he had already celebrated Asian ars erotica in contrast to the West’s scientia sexualis, Foucault did not explore the practices and discourses of those erotic arts in his subsequent work on the history of sexuality. Instead he confined himself to Europe, going back to the Greeks and developing his inquiry into Roman and ultimately Christian theorizing concerning sex. Overcoming that severe limitation was a key motivation for my writing Ars Erotica. There were two good reasons for Foucault’s concentration on European sexuality. First, he was primarily concerned with understanding contemporary Western culture’s problematic attitudes toward sex. He sought to explain the stubborn discomforts “We ‘Other Victorians’” still have with sex by showing the error of the conventional Freudian repression thesis and replacing it with a theory of discursive power networks focused on the truth of sex (among them psychoanalysis). These networks have their potent historical