use of pleasure, n.All

The Use of pleasure is concerned with how, why, and in what forms sexuality was constituted as a moral do­main, and why it was this ethical concern that was so persistent despite its varying forms and intensity.

The Use of pleasure is concerned with the question: what were the games of truth by which human beings came to see themselves as desiring individuals?

The Use of pleasure is concerned with the four great axes of experience; namely, the relation to one's body, the relation to one's wife, the relation to boys, and the relation to truth.

The Use of pleasure is a history of the way in which in­dividuals are urged to constitute themselves as subjects of moral conduct which concerns the models proposed for setting up and developing relationships with the self, for self-reflection, self-knowledge, self-examination, for the deci­pherment of the self by oneself, for the transformations that one seeks to accomplish with oneself as object.

The Use of pleasure is concerned with locating the areas of experience and the forms in which sexual behavior was problematized, becoming an object of concern, an element for reflection, and a material for stylization.

The Use of pleasure is concerned with how sexual behavior, insofar as it implied these different types of relations, came to be conceived as a domain of moral experience.

The Use of pleasure is an attempt not to restore a "doctrinal context" offering peculiar meaning and differential value to the experience of the body, wife, boys, and truth, but rather with eliciting the "field of problematization" that they had in common and that made each of them possible.

The Use of pleasure is an investigation into how individuals were led to practice, on themselves and on others, a hermeneutics of desire, a hermeneutics of which their sexual behavior was doubtless the occasion, but certainly not the exclusive domain.