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Perhaps the most shocking moment in 20th century French thought occurred when Michel Foucault (1990) radically transformed his History of Sexuality midstream and turned his focus from power's production of sexuality in volume one to the art of the self developed by the Greeks in volume two. Many other moments undoubtedly contend for this honor - Sartre's violent break with Camus, the former's conversion to Marxism, or Derrida's ethical turn - but in each case, one can find clear antecedents for the rupture. This is not so with Foucault, who spent his entire intellectual career denouncing subjectivity as the effect of power only to associate subjectivity with freedom in his final two books. Where "subject" was a term of reprobation and discipline in the early works, it became a positive possibility in the second and third volumes of the History of Sexuality . This theoretical about-face should hold our attention not just for what it says about Foucault's own intellectual trajectory but for how it anticipates the form of subjectivity that would subsequently emerge with the birth of cyberspace.
When he looks back to Greek antiquity in The Use of Pleasure , Foucault discovers a form of subjectivity that he can embrace, despite the critique of the modern subject that undergirds his work to that point. In contrast to Christian society, the Greek world did not structure its morality around prohibitions but around freely constituting oneself as a subject. As Foucault (1990) puts it in The Use of Pleasure , "The moral reflection of the Greeks on sexual behavior did not seek to justify interdictions, but to stylize a freedom" (p. 97). To put it in the terms of the first volume of Foucault's history, the Greeks had sex without sexuality, without the universal law designed to produce sex as the manifestation of power even when it appears in the guise of resistance (as it does, say, in the case of psychoanalysis).
What Foucault finds so appealing about Greek antiquity is its capacity for articulating subjectivity or agency without subjection to a universal law. The art of the self that the Greeks practiced took place without reference to the law, and yet it avoids any psychotic foreclosure of the law's principal signifier. This form...