WHEN JEAN BAUDRILLARD PUBLISHED HIS INFAMOUS pamphlet, Forget Foucault, in March 1977, "Foucault's intellectual power," as Baudrillard recalled ten years later, "was enormous." After all, the reviews of La volonte' de savoir, the first volume of Michel Foucault's Historj of Sexuality (published the previous November), had onlyjust started to appear. At that time, according to Baudrillard's belated attempt in Cool Memories to redeem his gaffe and to justify himself by portraying his earlier attack on Foucault as having been inspired, improbably, by sentiments of friendship and generosity-Foucault was being "persecuted," allegedly, by "thousands of disciples and ... sycophants"; in such circumstances, Baudrillard virtuously insisted, "to forget him was to do him a service; to adulate him was to do him a disservice."Just how far Baudrillard was willing to go in order to render this sort of unsolicited service to Foucault emerges from another remark of his in the same passage: "Foucault's death. Loss of confidence in his own genius.... Leaving the sexual aspects aside, the loss of the immune system is no more than the biological transcription of the other process."' Foucault was already washed up by the time he died, in other words, and AIDS was merely the outward and visible sign of his inward, moral and intellectual, decay. Leaving the sexual aspects aside, of course. (Baudrillard freely voices elsewhere what he carefully suppresses here about "the sexual aspects" of AIDS: the epidemic, he suggests, might be considered "a form of viral catharsis" and "a remedy against total sexual liberation, which is sometimes more dangerous than an epidemic, because the latter always ends. Thus AIDS could be understood as a counterforce against the total elimination of structure and the total unfolding of sexuality." Some such New Age moralism obviously provides the subtext of Baudrillard's vengeful remarks in CoolMemories on the death of Foucault.) Baudrillard's injunction to forget Foucault, which was premature at the time it was issued, has since become superfluous. Not that Foucault is neglected; not that his work is ignored. (Quite the contrary, in fact.) Rather, Foucault's continuing prestige, and the almost ritualistic invocation of his name by academic practitioners

Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality

Introduction 1. Sexual virtue on display: the cults of pudicitia and honours for women 2. Traditional narratives and Livy's Roman history 3. Valerius Maximus: the complexities of past as paradigm 4. Subversive genres: testing the limits of pudicitia 5. Declamation: what part of 'no' do you understand? 6. Sexual virtue on display II: oratory and the speeches of Cicero 7. Imperial narrative, imperial interventions.

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Sexual Morality in Ancient Rome

By engaging with recent developments in the study of empires, this book examines how inhabitants of Roman imperial Syria reinvented expressions and experiences of Greek, Roman and Syrian identification. It demonstrates how the organization of Greek communities and a peer polity network extending citizenship to ethnic Syrians generated new semiotic frameworks for the performance of Greekness and Syrianness. Within these, Syria's inhabitants reoriented and interwove idioms of diverse cultural origins, including those from the Near East, to express Greek, Roman and Syrian identifications in innovative and complex ways. While exploring a vast array of written and material sources, the book thus posits that Greekness and Syrianness were constantly shifting and transforming categories, and it critiques many assumptions that govern how scholars of antiquity often conceive of Roman imperial Greek identity, ethnicity and culture in the Roman Near East, and processes of 'hybridity' or similar concepts.

Syrian Identity in the Greco-Roman World

This book offers a captivating new interpretation of Lucian as a fictional theorist and writer to stand alongside the novelists of the day, bringing to bear on his works a whole new set of reading strategies. It argues that the aesthetic and cultural issues Lucian faced, in a world of mimesis and replication, were akin to those found in postmodern contexts: the ubiquity of the fake, the erasure of origins, the focus on the freakish and weird at the expense of the traditional. In addition to exploring the texture of Lucian's own writing, Dr ni Mheallaigh uses Lucian as a focal point through which to examine other fictional texts of the period, including Antonius Diogenes' The Incredible Things Beyond Thule, Dictys' Journal of the Trojan War and Ptolemy Chennus' Novel History, and reveals the importance of fiction's engagement with its contemporary culture of writing, entertainment and wonder.

Reading Fiction with Lucian: Fakes, Freaks and Hyperreality

Pseudo-documentarism is a strategy in which an author claims—with varying degrees of irony—to have discovered an authentic document which he transmits to his readers. This article explores three texts of pseudo-documentary fiction from the Imperial period (Dictys’ Journal of the Trojan War , Antonius Diogenes’ The Wonders Beyond Thule , and Lucian’s True Histories ). By suggesting ways in which the implied readers of these texts may be relatable to “real,” exodiegetic readers, the article illustrates how pseudo-documentarism reflects aspects of the contemporary literary and cultural Zeitgeist .

Pseudo-documentarism and the limits of ancient fiction

In this collection of essays, historians and literary theorists assess the influence of Michel Foucault, particularly his "History of Sexuality", on the study of classics Foucault's work presents a theory of sexuality for both ancient and modern times These essays should help the reader to explore Foucault's model of Greek culture and see how well his interpretation accounts for the full range of evidence from Greece and Rome

Rethinking Sexuality Foucault and Classical Antiquity

This is the first substantial commentary on Lucian's "Verae Historiae" ("True Histories"), a fantastic journey narrative considered the earliest surviving example of Science Fiction in the Western tradition. The Introduction situates the work in the context of Lucian's oeuvre, especially his preoccupation with distinguishing truth from fiction and exposing the lies of philosophers. In their commentary, the editors trace the sources and the meaning of the numerous intertextual allusions and parodies of philosophers, poets, historians and paradoxographers. The "Verae Historiae" emerges from this scrutiny as a remarkably complex text with some very "modern" concerns: it problematizes the act of reading, allegorical interpretation, authorial reliability, and the validity of cultural norms and literary genres.

Lucian's Science Fiction Novel True Histories: Interpretation and Commentary

Introduction: Roma, recepta: a topography of the imagination 1. Rome at a gallop: Livy, on not gazing, jumping, or toppling into the void 2. 'In the name of the father': Ovid's Theban law 3. 'I get around': sadism, desire, and metonymy on the streets of Rome with Horace, Ovid, and Juvenal 4. Holes in the body: sites of abjection in Juvenal's Rome 5. Victim and voyeur: Rome as a character in Tacitus' Histories 3 6. The gates of Janus: Bakhtin and Plutarch's Roman meta-chronotope 7. Staging Rome: the renaissance, Rome, and humanism's classical crisis 8. Sizing up Rome, or theorizing the overview 9. Ancient Rome for little comrades: the legacy of classical antiquity in Soviet children's literature 10. The sites and sights of Rome in Fellini's films: 'not a human habitation but a psychical entity'

The sites of Rome : time, space, memory

Lucían and Historiography: ‘De Historia Conscribenda’ and ‘Verae Historiae’

Soulevant le probleme de la fictionalite des «Histoires vraies» de Lucien et des references intertextuelles qu'il entretient avec les oeuvres des poetes, historiens et philosophes qu'il ridiculise, l'A. defend l'idee d'une attitude active du lecteur qui depasse la signification surperficielle du texte pour en chercher la signification cachee, d'une part, et propose de lire le recit du voyage de facon allegorique, c'est-a-dire de lire l'ensemble de l'ouvrage comme une parodie de la quete de la verite philosophique, d'autre part

David H. J. Larmour

Papers

Rethinking Sexuality Foucault and Classical Antiquity

Lucian's Science Fiction Novel True Histories: Interpretation and Commentary

The sites of Rome : time, space, memory

Lucían and Historiography: ‘De Historia Conscribenda’ and ‘Verae Historiae’

Lucian's "Verae Historiae" as Philosophical Parody