Volume two of The History of Sexuality turns away from modern institutions and back toward the ancients, to examine how pleasure, self-mastery, and ethics were structured before sexuality became an identity.

Here Foucault studies aphrodisia, dietetics, marriage, and the cultivation of the self. The argument is subtle, leaning towards notions of morality's impossibility to be universal, desire as an unnatural act, and subjectivity is nothing but something history produces.

Sounds more scandal than it is, it's more archaeology. Less repression theory, more ethics as practice.

For readers interested in how bodies become sites of governance.