John M. Carvalho

Viewers of Renaissance representations of the Annunciation miss an important irony. Where Mary is figured as unimpressed by Gabriel's proposal, she is upholding a masculinist ideal of female virtue. Where she is figured as delighted by the news, she represents an alternative feminine ideal that continues to be attractive to women and feminists, today. Inspired by the writings of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, I figure Mary in Renaissance representations of the Annunciation as contesting an ideal of feminine virtue that would deny her sexual difference and deny her pleasure in fulfilling her role as the bride and mother of God.

In this essay, I account for what we mean by old, what it means to grow old, and what we might mean by a shared achievement in the case of growing old together. I turn to the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz for some early insights on the shared time embodied in growing older together and how a ‘werelationship’ shored up by this temporal structure is the foundation for constituting the social world. I follow Schutz’s attempt to use this temporality to describe the case of making music together and conclude that what Schutz calls growing older together is not the same as growing old together which is necessarily embodied in a way his account of making music together is not. I give an embodied, enactivist account of making music together as a performance and, drawing on recent work by Shaun Gallagher, offer an aesthetics of growing old together as a performance enacted by individuals whose intimate engagements in that performance accomplish the shared achievement of growing old together.

It is generally held that the ancient Greeks had neither the language nor the political experience from which to draw a scientific account of authority. Alternatively it is argued that the Greeks experienced a variation of what we call the prerogative to rule, and that the ancient account of authority can be located in what Aristotle and others have said about ruling and being ruled. I demonstrate that authority does figure in the political lives of the ancient Greeks, that Aristotle gives an account of it in his Politics, that Aristotle's account is markedly different from anything anyone has proposed in modern sciences of politics, and that it draws a picture which more adequately describes the way authority figures in our modern political experiences than the accounts that are typically given. I suggest that Michel Foucault's genealogical reading of the ancient Greek fashioning of ethical character as the subjection of desire to the various moderating regimens of political life makes the most of Aristotle's sciences of practical interaction. And I propose that by dropping the references to a purpose for politics external to the subjection of subjects to themselves, Foucault's philosophy describes the frame within which individuals now as then can fashion their lives as a whole work under the prevailing relations of authority/power

Foucault’s late studies of classical Greek and Roman texts are significant for the attention they give to the nuances and complexities the authors of those texts attribute to the relations between men and boys. Foucault follows carefully the considerations the classical writers gave to the bodies, pleasures and knowledge that formed and were formed by these relations. His aim is not to capture what was said in these texts but to think with them about what it might have taken, lacking any standard or model, for boys and men, both, to become, in the context of their relations with one another, beautiful examples of what it means to be alive. What interests him, ultimately, is not boys or the ancient pleasures associated with boys but this practice of making one’s life admirable, to oneself and to those with whom one associates freely and intimately, in the absence of a given standard or code. If there is a Foucauldean ethics, it can be nothing more or less than this becoming an admirable instance of a life worth living.