The oedipalization of love in Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality

In this article, I highlight the ways in which Michel Foucault’s presentation of the discourse on love in the Greco-Roman and early Christian periods can be made sense of in terms of what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari refer to as a process of ‘oedipalization’. I suggest that the shift in emphasis on general techniques in relation to a multiplicity of non-conflicting forms of love to more specific practices arranged in a fixed hierarchy demonstrates precisely this delimiting ordering process. This framing, I contend, better highlights the ethical concerns shared by both Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari around normalizing or ‘fascist’ processes of subjectivation which diminish one’s capacity for change and self-overcoming.