The second volume of *The History of Sexuality* marks a fundamental shift in Michel Foucault’s work. Published eight years after the first volume, *The Use of Pleasure* (1984) opens up a new field of inquiry: the study of the practices through which individuals constitute themselves as moral subjects of their own actions. Foucault analyzes how the Greeks of the fourth century BCE problematized pleasures associated with sexual relations—within dietetics, erotics, economics, and philosophy (specifically the Platonic tradition)—not through prohibitions, but through the principles of a certain "aesthetics of existence." In this framework, the experience of *aphrodisia* (distinct from the Christian experience of "the flesh" and from modern sexuality) becomes part of a voluntary and deliberate "art of the self"—a stylization of one's own subjectivity. Drawing on texts by Greek physicians, philosophers, educators, and moralists, Foucault demonstrates that in classical antiquity, the use of pleasure was governed less by coercive rules claiming to align with a universal human nature than by the principle of self-mastery—or power over oneself—and the task of transforming one’s life into a work worthy of remembrance. Foucault situates this analysis within a broader genealogy of forms of subjectivity in the European tradition, grounded in an understanding of ethics as a "reflective practice of freedom."