Tecniche di desiderio: un’interpretazione di «Storia della sessualità» di Michel Foucault

The article takes as its starting point the letter Gilles Deleuze wrote to Michel Foucault in 1977, in which he discusses the position his friend had taken in the first volume of "The History of Sexuality" ("The Will to Knowledge") regarding the notions of desire and pleasure and the forms of power to which they respectively refer. A contrast emerges between the two, which nevertheless transforms into a counterpoint, given Foucault’s profound rethinking of the "History of Sexuality" project, which is then expressed in the subsequent volumes. Foucault, in fact, outlines a genealogy of the «subject of desire», which unfolds from the practice of "aphrodisia" in ancient Greece, where desire is understood within a circularity with pleasure and the sexual act. While the dissociation of desire from this circularity led to its conception as a lack – on which the critique in "The Will to Knowledge" focuses – in his later writings Foucault nevertheless finds the reemergence of the circularity of "aphrodisia" even in subsequent times, defining this technique as an «aesthetics of existence».