foucault-and-the-iranian-revolution-janet-afary

154 Foucault's Writings on the Iranian Revolution
affection, attention, and reciprocity. There was also a questioning of adult
male love for boys, on new moral and ethical grounds. Plutarch, who had
been a member of Plato's academy, argued that pederasty often involved force
and violence. What was lacking in the relationship to the paidika was charis,
or consent.22 The Roman rhetorician Marcus Fabius Quintilian (35-95 eE)
had likewise called for new standards in the academy. The teacher, he argued,
must " adopt the attitude of a parent toward his pupils and consider that he is
tak . ing the place of those who entrust their children to him" (cited in Foucault
1986, 190) .
In The Care of the Self, Foucault did not respond to Plutarch or Quintil­
ian's keen observations that consent was lacking in most man/boy relations.
Instead, he lamented the fact that as marital love and better communication
between husband and wife become cherished goals, "one begins to question,
in an increasingly doubtful mode, the privileges that used to be granted to the
love of boys " (Foucault 1986, 185). A bit further on, Foucault wrote: -Every­
thing that the erotics of boys was able to claim as properly belonging to that
form of love (in opposition to the false love for women) will be re-utilized here,
not only to the fondness for women, but to the conjugal relationship itself"
(203). Furthermore, Foucault wrote that Plutarch "has borrowed from the
erotics of boys its fundamental and traditional features in order to demon­
strate that they can be applied not to all forms of love, but to the conjugal
relationship alone" (205). While many readers today would sympathize with
Foucault's lament, they would find his rejection of reciprocity more troubling.
Elsewhere, in a conversation with Paul Rabinow, Foucault was even more
blunt in distinguishing his "ethics" from any notion ofreciprocity:
L'Usage du plaisir is a book about sexual ethics; it's not a book about love, or
about friendship, or about reciprocity. And it is very significant that when
Plato tries to integrate love for boys and friendship, he is obliged to put aside
sexual relations. Friendship is reciprocal, and sexual relations are not recipro­
cal; in sexual relations, you can penetrate or you are penetrated . .. If you have
friendship, it is difficult to have sexual relations. (Foucault 1983, 344)23
Foucault's ethics of love in antiquity shared some of the problems of
the Aristotelian ethics on which it was based, without exhibiting many of
its positive attributes. As Ruth Groenhout (1998), Linda Hirshman (1998),
and Martha Nussbaum (1998) have argued, the problem with Aristotelian
ethics was that it upheld many existing traditions, including social and reli­
gious ones that subordinated women. Aristotle set up a hierarchical notion of