In the footsteps of Foucault's ars erotica

NA GENEALOGIA DA SEXUALIDADE EM MICHEL FOUCAULT

Abstract

Foucault's approach to sexuality, specifically in the context of classes taught at the Vincennes Experimental University Center (1969), in the formulation of sexual heterotopias, indicates a connection to the introductory volume of the work History of Sexuality: The Will to Know (1976) based on the emphasis on an ethical context regulated by pleasures, namely: the ars erotica. The panorama of erotic art reported by Foucault is presented as a space of contestation and historical counterpoint to the limits of classifications arising from scientia sexualis, the latter seen as a field of knowledge that, in a scientific ordering of sexual issues, imposed itself as an “insistent and indiscreet” practice from the end of the 19th century. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to examine how and to what extent the ars erotica, despite being recurrently questioned due to the inconsistency of its historical effectiveness, would rather appear as a possibility of another space (heterotopia) of ethical-political contestation that permeated Foucault's work about questions of sexuality.