Taking the discontinuity within Foucault’s work as point of departure, this paper focuses on the modifications of the History of Sexuality project in order to map the concept of pleasure as it operates between the proposal of an “ethics of pleasure” and its characterization in The Will to Know as an effect of power. Pleasure is approached here as a marker of an unresolved ambivalence of the subject in Foucault’s work, an ambivalence further developed by Judith Butler. Finally, the paper explores the contributions psychoanalysis can make to this ambivalence of the subject and of pleasures, which some critics addressed in this paper describe as tilted toward a conception of unrestricted freedom in the ethical proposal of the late Foucault
