The arts of existence and self-care: the problematization of the use of pleasures in Michel Foucault

Abstract

This article aims to present an analysis of the ethics of self-care, a subject of reflection in Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, more specifically (vol. II The Use of Pleasures), in his investigations into Greco-Roman civilization from the 6th to the 4th century BC. C., in which sexual activity was constituted as a moral field, an ethical experience carried out based on a set of techniques related to the proper use of pleasures and the virtue of temperance (Foucault, 1984). In other words, we seek to understand how the virtuous and temperate subject is constituted in the use of their pleasures, discussing the practices of the individual with themselves, their way of having these pleasures within a culture based on the precepts of epimeleia heautou, self-care.