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Religion.
Discussing the Discipline
Foucault’s Christianities
NikiKasumiClements*
The publication of Michel Foucault’s Les Aveux de la chair (History of
Sexuality, Volume 4: Confessions of the Flesh) thirty-four years after his
death highlights and complicates the relevance of Christian texts—not-
ably from the second through fifth centuries—to Foucault’s forms of
critical analysis between 1974 and 1984, as his interests migrate from
monastic disciplines to pastoral power to governmentality to the care of
the self. What begins as suspicion towards confession as a tool of Catholic
power anticipating modern psychoanalysis becomes a critical genealogy
of subjectivity from western antiquity to modernity. To frame Foucault’s
dynamic engagement with forms of Christianity, Iestablish three stages
over his last decade as he moves from diagnosing mechanisms of power
to analyzing ethics as care of the self. Tracing Foucault’s textual and crit-
ical developments enables better analysis of Confessions of the Flesh and
affirms methodological possibilities in the study of religion today.
TOWARD the last hour of the last lecture of the last year of his life,
on March 28, 1984, Michel Foucault takes his auditors at the Collège de
France back to early Christianity. His 1983 and 1984 lectures had until
then focused on παρρησία (parrēsia) as truth-telling in antiquity. Plato,
Foucault’s 1983 exemplar of speaking truth to power, protests the tyranny
of Dionysius II even as such counsel puts his life at risk (Foucault 2010).
*Niki Kasumi Clements, Department of Religion, Rice University, 6100 Main Street, Houston,
Texas 77005, USA. Email: niki.clements@rice.edu. The author thanks the Foucault estate for their ac-
cess to the archives of Michel Foucault at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, with the generous as-
sistance of Laurence Le Bras. Gratitude extends to Elizabeth Clark, Peter Brown, Philippe Chevallier,
James Faubion, a meticulous anonymous reviewer, and communities at the University of Chicago,
Duke University, Brown University, and Rice University for invaluable feedback on versions of this
article; and to the Rice University Humanities Research Center for support.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion, March 2021, Vol. 89, No. 1, pp. 1–40
doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfab024
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion2
Diogenes the Cynic, the 1984 exemplar, contests norms with his very
way of life, chiding Alexander the Great and relieving himself in public
(Foucault 2011).
Foucault’s urgent attention to parrēsia develops as he comes to articu-
late ethics as a domain of experience alongside domains of power and
knowledge (Foucault 2001b, 1516). His 1982 lectures at the Collège elab-
orate an “ethics of the subject defined by the relationship of self to self”
(Foucault 2005, 252). Though he emphasizes this language of “ethics” pub-
licly in 1982, in unpublished drafts in the archives at the Bibliothèque na-
tionale de France, Foucault refers to the “ethical” (as well as parrēsia) back
in the autumn of 1980 (Foucault 28730, XL.1.1, 13).1 Foucault here en-
gages the two questions that have haunted him for decades: “Why are we
obliged to tell the truth about ourselves? Which truth?” (Foucault 28730,
XL.1.1).2 As a counter to the institutionalized compulsion to tell the truth
about oneself, ethics as a self-relation enables the parrēsiast to communi-
cate the truth, both as spoken critique of forms of domination (with Plato)
and embodied critique of social norms (with Diogenes). Foucault spends
his last years considering the ethical force of ancient “care for the self”
(Foucault 1988a, 4)and “practices of freedom” (Foucault 1988a, 3)—con-
cerns that James Bernauer describes Foucault as coming to through his
“reading of the Christian experience” (Bernauer and Rasmussen 1988,50).
On March 28, 1984, Foucault completes this arc through western
antiquity by moving from the radical force of Cynic philosophy to the
Stoic philosophy of Epictetus, arguing that this establishes the ground-
work—albeit in “a certain, no doubt impure and mixed form” (Foucault
2011, 316)—for the practices that constitute early Christian experience.
Stressing continuities over differences between pagan and Christian forms
of life, Foucault suggests:
Maybe Iwill try to explore these themes a little next year—but Icannot
guarantee it, Iconfess that Istill don’t know and have not yet decided.
Maybe Iwill try to pursue this history of the arts of living, of philosophy
as form of life, of asceticism in its relation to the truth, precisely, after an-
cient philosophy, in Christianity. (Foucault 2011, 316)
1In an earlier draft of his 1980 Howison Lectures, Foucault writes an extended treatment on
“technologies of the self” (Foucault 28730, XL.1.6–7) that reappears in his first 1982 lecture at the
University of Vermont (Foucault 1988b), with a shorter treatment in 1980 (Foucault 2016a). “Parresia
was the opening of the heart,” Foucault notes in an archived English tapuscript, framing it as “a ques-
tion of an ethical and technical rule concerning verbal relationships” (Foucault 28730, XL.1.13). For
parrēsia, see also Foucault 2010; 2011; 2016b.
2Foregrounding these questions in his 1981 Louvain lectures, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The
Function of Avowal in Justice (Foucault 2014b), Foucault describes these as the questions animating
his academic research since 1963 in his first publication on Dr. Leuret, confession, and water-torture,
“L’eau et la folie” (Foucault 2001a, 296–300).
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Clements: Foucault’s Christianities 3
Foucault presents his analysis of Christianity as incomplete in his
final lecture, “—mais sous toute réserve, j’avoue que je n’en sais encore rien,
je suis pas encore décidé” (Foucault 2009a, 290). Yet Foucault’s confes-
sion (his “j’avoue”) is even more striking when considering how central
“Christianity” becomes to his work from 1974 to 1984 as he moves from
modern disciplinary apparatuses to ancient arts ofliving.
The posthumous release of Foucault’s fourth volume in the History of
Sexuality, Les Aveux de la chair (Confessions of the Flesh), intensifies the
need for such an analysis, illuminating the ethical potentials of Foucault’s
arts of living and the Christian forms of life that loom so large in his final
years. Edited by Frédéric Gros and published by Gallimard in France on
February 8, 2018, this fourth volume was written over thirty-four years
before and is a far cry from Foucault’s most influential work, Discipline
and Punish. Media channels had a difficult time addressing this somewhat
odd and dated work on Christian sexual ethics, with English-language
headlines declaring, “‘Key’ fourth book of Foucault’s History of Sexuality
published in France” (Flood 2018), “Michel Foucault’s Unfinished Book
Published in France” (Libbey 2018), and “The Final ‘Final Foucault’?”
(Tanke 2018).3 Situating Confessions in the context of Foucault’s March
1984 avowal suggests that this volume is not Foucault’s “final” word on
Christianity or ethics, even as it demonstrates the textual and theoretical
nuance with which he comes to engage ancient Christiantexts.
Analyzing Foucault’s decade-long grappling with forms of Christianity
as a fulcrum for his shifting emphases from power-knowledge to including
ethics also helps contextualize Confessions of the Flesh. Confessions high-
lights but complicates the relevance of Christian texts—notably from the
second through fifth centuries—to Foucault’s deepening forms of critical
analysis between 1974 and 1984, as his interests migrate from monastic
disciplines to pastoral power to governmentality to the care of the self.
What begins as a suspicion towards confession as a tool of Catholic power
that anticipates modern psychoanalysis—“Why are we obliged to tell the
truth about ourselves?”—becomes a critical genealogy of subjectivity from
western antiquity to modernity. Foucault’s continued influence across
academic and cultural domains requires that scholars both in and beyond
the study of religion appreciate his dynamic engagement with forms of
3A lack of historical sense is evident in a thousand-year misdating with Alison Flood reporting:
“Gallimard, which released Confessions of the Flesh last week, said the volume tackled the doctrines of
Christianity between the 11th and 14th century” (Flood 2018). Gallimard’s catalogue indicates that Les
Aveux de la chair treats the second to fourth centuries, which is also inaccurate, as Foucault spends
much of the text discussing the fifth-century texts of Augustine and Cassian. “III s’attachait aux règles
et doctrines du christianisme élaborées du IIIe au IVe siècles par les Pères de l’Église” (Gallimard
2018). The “key” designation comes fromthe crucial studyElden 2016.
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion4
Christianity.4 In Part I, Iestablish Foucault’s archival and conceptual en-
gagement in three stages, as he moves from diagnosing mechanisms of
power to analyzing ethics as care of the self. Having periodized Foucault’s
textual and critical developments enables better analysis of Confessions in
Part II, where Iaffirm methodological possibilities alongside critiques of
Foucault in the study of religion.
PART I.FOUCAULT’S LAST DECADE: FROM CHRISTIAN
DISCIPLINE TO THE ASCETIC PARRĒSIAST
Surprise or confusion over Foucault’s engagement with Christianity
is part of a broader question: what happens between Foucault’s 1976
monograph History of Sexuality: Volume 1, An Introduction and his
1984 monographs—History of Sexuality: Volume 2, The Use of Pleasure
and Volume 3, The Care of the Self? Foucault announces the reorganiza-
tion around “the slow formation, in antiquity, of a hermeneutics of the
self” (Foucault 1990b, 6)in the introduction of Volume 2, yet does not
fully explain how he comes to the ethical task to “think differently, in-
stead of legitimating what is already known” (Foucault 1990b, 9). Tracing
Foucault’s engagement with Christianity, however, helps us analyze how
his nuancing of questions of power contributes to his attention to forms
of ethics. Despite a still-too-limited view of Christianity’s importance to
Foucault (Raffnsøe 2018), works by Averil Cameron (1986), Elizabeth
Clark (1988), James Bernauer (1990), John Behr (1993), Jeremy Carrette
(2000), Daniel Boyarin and Elizabeth Castelli (2001), James Bernauer and
Jeremy Carrette (2004), J. Joyce Schuld (2004), Philippe Chevallier (2011),
Jonathan Tran (2011), Valérie Nicolet (2012), Michel Senellart (2013),
Mark Jordan (2014), Petra Carlsson Redell (2014), Sergey Horujy (2015),
Stuart Elden (2016), Patrick Stefan (2019), and myself (Clements 2020),
have both developed the critical possibilities Foucault finds in Christianity
and posed challenges to his readings.
Daniele Lorenzini, Ariane Revel, and Arianna Sforzini correlate schol-
arly engagement with Foucault’s last decade with the publication of his
texts in three phases (Lorenzini etal. 2013, 9–11): (1) the 1984 mono-
graphs History of Sexuality, Volumes 2 and 3 provide primary materials
4As of August 2020, Foucault was quantified as the #1 most-cited researcher in the world across
all disciplines (excluding high energy physics) with an h-index of 296 and 1,026,230 citations in
the 12th edition of Highly Cited Researchers (h>100) according to their Google Scholar Citations
(2020) public profiles. (http://www.webometrics.info/en/hlargerthan100 accessed August 15, 2020 at
7:45pm). NB: The authors changed their ranking methodology, counting only living researchers for
the 13th edition onwards, so Foucault (along with many theorists important to the academic study of
religion) is no longer listed on thesite.
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Clements: Foucault’s Christianities 5
(1984–1993), (2) Foucault’s interviews from the 1980s and the chrono-
logical collection Dits et écrits published in 1994 open the scope beyond “a
history of sexuality” (1994–2001), and (3) the complete Collège de France
lectures foreground content and Foucault’s 1978 shift towards sharing
works in progress as Michel Senellart notes (1997–2015). In 2021, we can
add two additional phases, including (4) the publication of Les Aveux de la
chair and other major lectures (2016–2021), and (5) the unpublished arch-
ives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, which provide precious evi-
dence of Foucault’s meticulous research and drafting processes (acquired
2013, inventory in process) (see Table 1). Expanded access to Foucault’s
work enables an increasingly thorough assessment of his last decade, and
on the basis of both published and archival textual evidence, Ischema-
tize three stages in his year-to-year conceptualizations of “Christianity.” In
Stage 1, 1974–1978, Foucault’s work on power turns his attention towards
constructions of Christianity and confession. Stage 2, 1979–1982, charts
the period when Foucault engages early Christian texts most centrally and
drafts Confessions of the Flesh. Stage 3, 1983–1984, links parrēsia as prac-
tices of truth-telling (differing from confession) in Greek, Roman, and
early Christianethics.
Stage 1: From the Prison to the Pastorate (1974–1978)
Foucault’s most cited work, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison (Surveiller et punir, naissance de la prison, 1975), interest-
ingly telegraphs many of his critical moves over the next decade
(Foucault 1997a). In this work on disciplinary power and carceral so-
ciety, Foucault’s references to Christianity are notable if spare, split
between the general (“Christian theology” [Foucault 1997a,29]) and
the institutional (“the Brothers of the Christian Schools” [Foucault
1997a,166]). His eleven references to sixteenth-century educational
reformer Jean-Baptiste de La Salle are consistent with his rigorous
archival engagement throughout the text. In the first of seventeen ref-
erences to Christianity (including: le chrétien, chrétienne, chrétiennes,
christianisme, le catholicisme, les catholiques, catholique, christianisme),
Foucault famously describes “the historical reality of this soul” as the
“prison of the body” born “out of methods of punishment, supervi-
sion and constraint” (Foucault 1997a, 29). He also ties Christianity
centrally to confession as a public ritual (in the flesh-torn yet verbally
pious Damiens) and the cell as a technique of Christian monachism
(for the reconstitution of “both homo oeconomicus and the religious
conscience” [Foucault 1997a,123]).
Foucault suggests that the very logic of disciplinary power has his-
torical antecedents in the monastic communities that made discipline,
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion6
Table 1. The mismatches between Foucault’s lecture delivery dates, ori-
ginal publication dates, and translation dates contribute to confusion over
how to follow his last decade. For ease of reference, the reader can follow
this chronological table and my interactive visualizations of Foucault’s cit-
ations of early Christian texts at www.nikiclements.com/foucault.
Chronology of Foucault’s Monographs and Selected Lectures from 1974–1984
Year delivered French title & original
publication date
English translation &
original publication date
1973–1974 Le pouvoir psychiatrique. Cours au
Collège de France (2003)
Psychiatric Power: Lectures
at the Collège de France
(2006)
1974–1975 Les anormaux. Cours au Collège de
France (1999)
Abnormal: Lectures at the
Collège de France (2003)
1975 Surveiller et punir, naissance de la
prison (1975)
Discipline and Punish: Birth
of the Prison (1977)
1975–1976 « Il faut défendre la société ».
Cours au Collège de France (1997)
“Society Must Be Defended”:
Lectures at the Collège de
France (2003)
1976 Histoire de la sexualité I.La
Volonté de savoir (1976)
History of Sexuality, Vol 1:
An Introduction (1978)
1977–1978 Sécurité, Territoire, Population.
Cours au Collège de France (2004)
Security, Territory,
Population: Lectures at the
Collège de France (2007)
1978 « Sexualité et pouvoir »,
Gendai-shisô (1978)
“Sexuality and Power”
(1999)
1978–1979 Naissance de la biopolitique.
Cours au Collège de France (2004)
The Birth of Biopolitics:
Lectures at the Collège de
France (2008)
1979 « Omnes et singulatim: vers une
critique de la raison politique »,
Dits et écrits (1994)
“Omnes et Singulatim:
Towards a Criticism of
‘Political Reason’” (1981)
1979–1980 Du gouvernement des vivants.
Cours au Collège de France (2012)
On the Government of
the Living: Lectures at the
Collège de France (2014)
1980 L’origine de l’herméneutique
de soi. Conférences prononcées à
Dartmouth College (2013)
“Subjectivity and Truth”
and “Christianity and
Confession,” Political
Theory (1993), About
the Beginning of the
Hermeneutics of the Self
(2016)
1980 « Sexualité et solitude »,
Dits et écrits (1994)
“Sexuality and Solitude,”
London Review of Books
(1981)
1980–1981 Subjectivité et Vérité. Cours
au Collège de France (2014)
Subjectivity and Truth:
Lectures at the Collège de
France (2017)
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Clements: Foucault’s Christianities 7
self-regulation, and subjection a way of life. “Discipline is a political anatomy
of detail” (Foucault 1997a, 139), he states, relating Christianity to discip-
linary power through three techniques of subjection. Afocus on (1) detail
renders training comprehensive and totalizing in the lives of its subjects.
Such institutionalized techniques do not impose a singular model on its
subjects, but instead (2) individuate them according to their strengths and
aptitudes, rendering each subject a site of continuous inspection and “a
whole field of knowledge” (Foucault 1997a, 186). Relations of “strict sub-
jection” (Foucault 1997a, 138)lead to (3) vitiation of subjects through an
exhausting optimization of efficiency that also preemptsrevolt.
Table 1. Continued
Chronology of Foucault’s Monographs and Selected Lectures from 1974–1984
Year delivered French title & original
publication date
English translation &
original publication date
1981 Mal faire, dire vrai. Fonction
de l’aveu en justice (2012)
Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling:
The Function of Avowal in
Justice (2014)
1981–1982 L’Herméneutique du sujet.
Cours au Collège de France (2001)
The Hermeneutics of the
Subject: Lectures at the
Collège de France (2005)
1982 « Les techniques de soi »,
Dits et écrits (1994)
Technologies of the Self:
ASeminar with Michel
Foucault (1988)
1982 « Le combat de la chasteté »,
Communications (1982)
“The Battle for Chastity,”
Western Sexuality (1985)
1982 Dire vrai sur soi-même: “Speaking
the Truth about Oneself: Lectures at
Victoria University, Toronto (2021)”
conférences prononcées
à l’Université Victoria
de Toronto (2017)
1982–1983 Le gouvernement de soi
et des autres. Cours au Collège
de France (2008)
The Government of Self
and Others: Lectures at the
Collège de France (2010)
1983 Discours et vérité, précédé de
La parrêsia (2016)
Discourse and Truth and
Parrēsia (2019)
1983–1984 Le courage de la vérité. Le
gouvernement de soi et des
autres II. Cours au Collège de France
(2009)
The Courage of Truth:
Lectures at the Collège de
France (2011)
1984 Histoire de la sexualité II.
L’Usage des plaisirs (1984)
History of Sexuality, Vol 2:
The Use of Pleasure (1985)
1984 Histoire de la sexualité III.
Le Souci de soi (1984)
History of Sexuality, Vol 3:
The Care of the Self (1986)
-- Histoire de la sexualité IV.
Les Aveux de la chair (2018)
History of Sexuality, Vol
4: Confessions of the Flesh
(2021)
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion8
Foucault contrasts medieval and early modern “‘disciplines’ of a mo-
nastic type, whose function was to obtain renunciations” (Foucault 1997a,
137) with their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century corollaries where
such disciplinary mechanisms came out from the monastery and “became
general formulas of domination” (Foucault 1997a, 137). These figurations
expand from Foucault’s November 1973 Collège de France lectures on
psychiatric power, establishing the soul as “projected behind disciplinary
power” (Foucault 2006b, 52)and identifying the disciplinary apparatuses
in monastic “religious communities” (Foucault 2006b, 64)that in the late
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries “appear and are established which
no longer have a religious basis” (Foucault 2006b, 70). The correlation
between monastic discipline and renunciation becomes a central theme
in Foucault’s readings of Christianity and a key foil in his turn to ancient
ethics. In Discipline and Punish (his most-cited text), however, Foucault
defaults to generalizations of Christianity and offers little textual detail of
monastic discipline.
On August 26, 1974, Foucault completes Discipline and Punish after four
years of work (Foucault 2001a, 61). That same day, according to his partner,
Daniel Defert, he starts writing the first volume in a projected six-volume
series on the History of Sexuality (Miller 1993, 240). In History of Sexuality,
Volume 1: An Introduction (L’Histoire de la sexualité I. Volonté de savoir,
1976), Foucault correlates the emergence of the knowing, confessing subject
with the proliferation of discourses concerning sexuality (Foucault 1990a).
Both monographs focus on the discursive production of modern subjects,
even as Foucault moves in Volume 1 towards more specific analyses of the
mechanisms of domination in the history of Catholic confession.
In the twenty-odd references to Christianity, Catholicism, mysticism,
or asceticism in Volume 1, Foucault discusses Christianity in relation to
the imposition of confessional practices since the Lateran Council (1215
CE) and the Council of Trent (1545–1563 CE), tethering his thematic
reading to particular historical anchors. He develops his focus on six-
teenth- and seventeenth-century practices of confession, the pastoral, and
the flesh from his 1974–1975 Collège de France lectures Abnormal (Les
Anormaux) (Foucault 2003a).5 Foucault considers the development of the
5By contrast, Foucault references Christianity just twice in his 1975–1976 lectures at the Collège de
France, Society Must Be Defended (Il faut défendre la société), noting how “secret societies” of “useless
erudition” “formed in the early Christian era, probably at the time of the first monasteries, on the
fringes of invasions, fires, and forests” (Foucault 2003b, 5). In these lectures elaborating biopolitics,
modern racism, and “the murderous function of the state,” Foucault describes the force of “the
counterhistory of races” from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the shift to “a society whose
historical consciousness centers not on sovereignty and the problem of its foundation, but on revolu-
tion, its promises, and its prophecies of future emancipation” (Foucault 2003b, 80). Although Foucault
does not develop this attention to race, revolution, and emancipation at length in his later work on
ethics and contesting power, their intersection can be pursued. See Taylor 2011.
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Clements: Foucault’s Christianities 9
sacrament of penance in Volume 1 as a means of analyzing how “the scope
of the confession—the confession of the flesh—continually increased”
(Foucault 1990a, 19). Claiming the connection between Christian con-
fession and the modern incitement to discourse, he professes: “This
scheme for transforming sex into discourse had been devised long before
in an ascetic and monastic setting. The seventeenth century made it into
a rule for everyone” (Foucault 1990a, 20). Out from the monastery into
the everyday, the confessional impulse becomes a condition of modern
western subject formation.
The 1976 publication of Volume 1 announces five more volumes in
the History of Sexuality. Volume 2, La Chair et le corps (The Flesh and the
Body), would develop how “the reformed pastoral also laid down rules,
albeit in a more discreet way, for putting sex into discourse” (Foucault
1990a, 21fn4), expanding Foucault’s argument that the history of sexuality
has “its beginnings in the technology of the ‘flesh’ in classical Christianity”
(Foucault 1990a, 113). Although Foucault largely destroyed this draft of
Volume 2, Philippe Chevallier notes archival evidence of a later 1978
manuscript on confession and concupiscence in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries (Chevallier 2011, 149–50).6 In Volume 1, Foucault pro-
jects the last four volumes would move to “the four great strategies that
were deployed in the nineteenth century” (Foucault 1990a, 114): Volume
3, on masturbating children; Volume 4, on hysterical women; Volume 5,
on the medicalization of “perverse” men; and Volume 6, on the Malthusian
couple and biologization of race.7 He starts and then diverts his research
on these deviant subjects who become privileged sites of social and med-
ical regulation.
Foucault thereby begins his analysis of the “Christian pastoral”
and “confession of the flesh” in his Abnormal lectures, Volume 1 (An
Introduction), and the originally conceived Volume 2 (The Flesh and the
Body). He connects the Christian pastoral—which “discovers” the flesh
and places it into a juridical framework—to the production of institutional
forms whose rationalities he problematizes in his earlier works: psychiatry
and the asylum (History of Madness) (Foucault 2006a), medicine (The
6In Foucault’s archives, Dossier No XX “Reforme/Contre Reforme” includes 539 pages of Foucault’s
notes on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century confessional manuals that likely figured into this
volume’s production. See also Dossiers No XXVII “Direction de conscience” and LXXXIX “La Chair
et le corps.” Dossier No LI “Histoire de la sexualité” and Dossier No LXIV “La volonté de savoir et
La croisade des enfants” both have material on masturbation perhaps intended for Volume 3, La
Croisade des enfants. For analysis of early modern confessional manuals relevant to Foucault, see
Peterson 2016.
7These titles include: III: La croisade des enfants (3: The Children’s Crusade); IV: La femme, la mère
et l’hystérique (4: Woman, Mother, and Hysteric); V. Les pervers (5: Perverts); VI. Population et races (6:
Population and Races) (Foucault 2018,I).
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion10
Birth of the Clinic) (Foucault 1994a), the “human sciences” of economics,
biology, and philology (Foucault 1994b), and incarceration (Discipline
and Punish) (Foucault 1997a). As he notes in Volume 1, each of these areas
“went back to methods that had already been formed by Christianity, but
of course not without modifying them” (Foucault 1990a, 117). Regulating
behavior within clinical/political/juridical frameworks, “Christianity”
in Foucault’s developing fascination produces the mechanisms of power
that prove effective means of subjection for modern discipline and so-
cial regulation. In interviews from 1977, Foucault continues to connect
the Christian procedure of confession (l’av eu ) to sexuality as at the heart
of human existence and to its eventual expansion beyond rituals of pen-
ance (Foucault 2001b, 230, 257, 412). Though provocative, Foucault’s ana-
lyses in these years rest largely on caricature, claiming a general, epochal
Christian prehistory of subjection unmoored from analysis of particular
years, individuals, ortexts.
In August 1977, according to Defert, Foucault starts to read and write
on early Christians—moving back at least a millennium in the process
(Foucault 2001a, 71). After a year of sabbatical (from 1976 to 1977),
Foucault’s 1977–1978 lectures for the Collège de France, Security, Territory,
Population (Sécurité, territoire, population), begin to engage textual re-
sources in antiquity to develop his conception of “pastoral power” more
robustly (Foucault 2009b, 169). Foucault explains the “Christian pastoral”
through the relation of shepherd and flock as the primary metaphor for
governance, in contrast to the maritime metaphor of ancient Greek city-
state governance as a piloted ship (Foucault 2009b, 122–23). The shepherd
(elder, bishop, authority) watches over the well-being both of the flock and
of each sheep; omnes et singulatim, the whole and the individual, defines
both “the techniques of power in Christian pastorship, and of the, let’s say,
modern techniques of power deployed in the technologies of population”
(Foucault 2009b, 128). Via the organizing logics of biopower with which
he opens these 1978 lectures (and which was to feature in the originally
conceived Volume 6 on population), Foucault connects the mechanisms
of detail, individualization, and vitiation articulated in Discipline and
Punish to those of subject formation: “The individualization of Western
man throughout the long millennium of the Christian pastorate was car-
ried out at the price of subjectivity. By subjectivation. To become indi-
vidual one must become subject” (Foucault 2009b,231).
In what Foucault notes should have been called “a history of
‘governmentality’” (Foucault 2009b, 108), his 1977 and 1978 research on
early Christian writers hones in on “the origin of the idea of a govern-
ment … first, in the idea and organization of a pastoral type of power,
and second, in the practice of spiritual direction, the direction of souls”
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Clements: Foucault’s Christianities 11
(Foucault 2009b, 123). Foucault refers to a number of Christian texts
from the third through the sixth centuries, including John Chrysostom’s
De sacerdotio, Cyprian’s Epistles, Ambrose’s De officiis ministrorum, and
Gregory the Great’s Liber pastoralis. With increased textual diversity and
temporal specificity, Foucault in 1978 analyzes “Christianity” in more his-
torically particular constructions. Nevertheless, he presents few examples
of textual evidence, he refers very generally to the “Christian pastoral,”
and he does not adequately cite what he labels the “more dense, more in-
tense form of the pastoral” (Foucault 2009b, 166)in the monastic texts of
John Cassian, the letters of Jerome, and the Rules of Benedict. Foucault
continues to characterize Christianity sweepingly (e.g., as “absolutely
unique in history and no other example of which is found in the history of
any other civilization” [Foucault 2009b,148]) and to insist on the lasting
influence of these mechanisms (e.g., “pastoral power in its typology, or-
ganization, and mode of functioning, pastoral power exercised as power,
is doubtless something from which we have still not freed ourselves”
[Foucault 2009b, 148]). In these 1978 Collège lectures, he also begins
to articulate counter-conduct as contesting dominant structures, noting
Martin Luther and even early Christian ascetics as examples of resistance
to pastoralpower.
As Foucault nuances his analysis of Christian texts, his problematiza-
tion of power undergoes transformations, with attendant changes to his
engagement with questions of critique and resistance. Foucault’s six-
volume format for the History of Sexuality series shifts as he intensifies
his readings of early Christian texts. Mark Jordan notes of Foucault’s April
1978 lectures at Tokyo University: “In Tokyo, the turn to Christianity is
presented as the next step in a search for some beginning of the distinct-
ively Western science of sexuality” (Jordan 2014, 126). In an opposition
drawn out in Volume 1 between ars erotica (the erotic arts Foucault iden-
tifies largely with Asian religious traditions) and scientia sexualis (the
“science of sexuality” identified with modern western mores), in Tokyo
Foucault specifies of the latter: “The West introduces to sexuality, it de-
velops, starting with sexuality, an entire complex mechanism in which it
is a question of the constitution of individuality, of subjectivity; in brief,
of the manner in which we behave and in which we become conscious of
ourselves” (Foucault 1999, 129). As forms of Christianity accrue social
and political force in the Roman Empire of the third and fourth centuries,
Foucault reads Christianity as rejecting the erotic potential of pleasure in
the ars erotica and developing a “science of sexuality” tied to “flesh, the
subjectivity itself of the body” (Foucault 1999,126).
To analyze the emergence of the scientia sexualis and its rendering of
sex into discourse, Foucault moves away from his originally conceived
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion12
six-volume series. He abandons his Volume 2 on Reformation and
Counter-Reformation practices of confession as he seeks the roots of such
practices in the second- through fifth-century texts that he anticipates
will expose the emergence of the mechanisms that link sexuality and sub-
jectivity. In this first stage from 1974 to 1978, Foucault moves from early
modern Catholic disciplinary apparatuses to ancient Christian pastoral
power in the genealogy of the desiring subject he will develop over the
decade. Even as his project and methods develop over what Ibelow char-
acterize as the next two stages (1979–1982 and 1983–1984), certain foci
remain core to his analysis: above all, the mechanisms of power forged
through relations of obedience, detail, and individuation. Despite these
continuities with the subsequent stages, this first stage differs in three
notable ways: (1) methodologically, Foucault rarely cites Christian texts
directly in his analyses; (2) archivally, he does not engage ancient philo-
sophical or medical texts to a pronounced degree; and (3) thematically,
his inquiry is focused on the operations of power, its mechanisms, and,
less frequently, possibilities for “a resistance to the power that wishes to
dominate it” as he notes in Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1997a,219).
In Stage 1, Foucault shifts his attention from diagnosing modern
disciplinary formations to analyzing their pre-modern antecedents. As
his History of Sexuality research shifts, so too does his focus move from
the biopolitics regulating modern subjects to ancient forms of pastoral
power that developed many practices of governmentality. Yet while
foregrounding the discipline of subjects, Foucault gradually unfolds the
resistance of “convulsing bodies” (Jordan 2014, 199)and of other forms
of life (Chrulew 2014). Subjects are not just produced through the discip-
linary apparatuses forged by Christian monasticism that govern modern
institutions (e.g., the hospital, the asylum, the school, or the prison); they
might also challenge forms of power through counter-conduct.
Stage 2: Eliciting Confessions of the Flesh (1979–1982)
With Foucault’s explicit shift away from the six-volume History of Sexuality
and its modern focus, the second volume becomes the textual fulcrum for
the four-volume series eventually published. Foucault abandons La Chair
et le corps as the second volume, and, according to Defert, starts to write
Les Aveux de la chair (Confessions of the Flesh) on ancient Christianity in
January 1979 (Foucault 2001a, 77). Foucault delivers his 1978–1979 lec-
tures at the Collège de France that spring, Birth of Biopolitics (Naissance
de la biopolitique), on neoliberalism in Germany with no mention of this
concurrent research (Foucault 2008). Later in 1979, he accepts the offer
from Michel Albaric to change his longstanding research locale from the
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Clements: Foucault’s Christianities 13
Bibliothèque nationale de France to the Bibliothèque du Saulchoir, a small
Dominican library in the 13th arrondissement of Paris (Perrin 2019, 1).
From November 5, Foucault would make this libraryhome.
That October 1979, Foucault presents “Omnes et Singulatim: Towards
a Criticism of Political Reason” at Stanford University, with Lecture 1 on
Christian pastoral power (“the individualising power”) (Foucault 1999,
136)and Lecture 2 on raison d’état (“the political form of a centralised
and centralising power”) (Foucault 1999, 136). Foucault stresses how
the pastorate’s “techniques of examination, confession, guidance, obedi-
ence, have an aim … a renunciation of this world and of oneself: a kind
of everyday death” (Foucault 1999, 143). Exposing these renunciatory ef-
fects, Foucault begins to theorize “liberation” as possible only by attacking
“political rationality’s very roots” (Foucault 1999, 152)in both Christian
pastoral power and raison d’état. Unmasking the mechanisms of pas-
toral power and state power becomes the condition for their subversion,
developing possibilities for more robust resistance and counter-conduct.
In his 1980 Collège lectures On the Government of the Living (Du
Gouvernement des vivants), Foucault completes analytical moves from
power to governmentality and from knowledge to truth. In the emergence
of “reflexive truth acts” (Foucault 2014a, 82), he contrasts an ancient Greek
form—metonymized by Oedipus who comes to recognize himself in rela-
tion to a cosmic truth—with forms of truth-telling in Christianity where
one seeks the truth of oneself. Foucault reads second- to third-century
Christians like Tertullian as reorganizing the relation between subjectivity
and truth through ἐξομολόγησις (exomologēsis) as a ritual disclosure of
one’s converted identity, performed in practices of baptism and ecclesial
penance. Foucault stresses ἐξαγόρευσις (exagoreusis) as a corollary prac-
tice connecting truth acts and remission of sins in fourth- to fifth-century
monasticism through obedience, incessant examination of conscience,
and exhaustive confession. Notably in the works of John Cassian, Foucault
sees the subject as turning inwards as “Christianity autonomized know-
ledge of self as an endless task, an always unfinished labor of perfection”
(Foucault 2014a,310).
Foucault considers his 1980 analytical shift to the relation between
subjectivity and truth vital, contrasting alethurgy in Oedipus with proced-
ures of truth-telling in exomologēsis and exagoreusis. Methodologically,
he engages texts and concepts with an increasingly nuanced parsing of
the third and fourth centuries, declaring that he reads these ancient texts
not for their dogmatic systems but for their construction of truth acts.
Philippe Chevallier further argues how, between February 20 and March
26, Foucault shifts his reading of the “truth of the soul” as no longer
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion14
essential to baptism and penitence but vital to self-examination and con-
fession (Chevallier 2020). Two shifts in his 1980 Collège course come to
define Foucault’s final work: (1) a thematic reframing of subjectivity and
truth as foregrounding practices of truth-telling, and (2) an analytic con-
trast between ancient Greek self-relations as active and tied to the pur-
suit of truth and monastic Christian self-relations as bound by obedience
and renunciation. As Jeremy Carrette notes, Foucault’s rethinking of Les
Aveux and his original work on Christian confession occurs explicitly in
his retrospective Collège course summary for 1980 (Carrette 1999,45).
With people beating down the doors to hear his October 1980
Howison Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, Foucault
synthesizes his research over the year. Developing the relation between
subjectivity and the two forms of the “obligation of truth” proper to
Christianity, exomologēsis and exagoreusis, he argues: “This organization,
this Christian organization, so different from the pagan one, is some-
thing which Ithink quite decisive for the genealogy of the modern self ”
(Foucault 2016a, 37). Recapitulated in November 1980 at Dartmouth
College, these lectures stress technologies of the self as important forms of
self-activity by which subjects are shaped in different times and contexts.
Foucault reads early monastic Christian technologies of the self as relying
on a hermeneutics of the self, which constitutes subjectivity through a
constant suspicion towards oneself and unconditional submission to
one’s superiors. Continuing his Spring 1980 Collège argument that “the
subjectivation of Western man is Christian, not Greco-Roman” (Foucault
2014a, 236), Foucault articulates western subjectivation as a process that
derives its mechanisms from early Christianity (notably through Cassian’s
confession), not pagan antiquity, and genealogically links to modern dis-
ciplinary subjectivity.
Foucault’s focus shifts from Cassian and confession to Augustine and
sexuality for his November 1980 James Lecture and seminars at the New
York Institute for the Humanities; this shift takes place after Foucault and
Peter Brown discuss Cassian and Augustine in Berkeley that October.8 In
8Foucault and Brown discussed mainly Cassian for over two hours after Foucault’s lecture on
October 21, and Brown gave materials to Foucault (including Brown 1978; Brown 1980; Rousseau
1975). Foucault’s archives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and a box at the University of
California, Berkeley (Foucault 90/136Z 1, 13)indicate engagement with these texts. Thanks to Peter
Brown for illuminating this interaction in personal correspondences from August 12, 2019, and
October 1,2019.
In the November 20, 1980 manuscript upon which “Sexuality and Solitude” is based, Foucault
notes: “Few weeks ago, Dr Peter Brown told me: ‘What we have to understand is why sexuality became
in the Western Christian culture the seismograph of our subjectivity.’”(Foucault 28730, XL. 6.1.29).
The influence between Foucault and Brown requires further analysis and raises important discip-
linary questions.
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Clements: Foucault’s Christianities 15
a comparison of Artemidorus’s Oneirocritica on dream interpretation and
Augustine’s City of God (Book 14), Foucault contrasts the Greco-Roman
problem of penetration with the problem of erection in Augustine’s con-
ception of libido as “Christianity proposed a new type of experience of
oneself as a sexual being” (Foucault 1999, 184). In his second of three
seminars in New York, Foucault argues how Christian sexual ethics are
rooted in Roman practices even as something crucial changes in the two
centuries between Clement of Alexandria and Augustine: “not the code
itself, but something more difficult to analyse and to decipher: what I’d
like to call the relation one has to oneself through sex or through sex ex-
perience, or more precisely through an experience Latin authors called:
concupiscentia” (Foucault 28730, XL.6.3.17). As Michel Senellart con-
nects Foucault’s 1980 Collège lectures’ focus on monastic self-examin-
ation and discourses of sexuality in the New York lectures, “It is against
the background of Augustine’s ‘libidinisation of sex’ that the monastic
activity of control of thoughts, analyzed in March 1980, finds its signifi-
cance” (Senellart 2013, 34). Foucault’s reading of the history of confession
and the hermeneutics of desire links the history of concupiscence—the
relation one has to oneself through sex experience—to the genealogy of
modern western subjectivity.
Foucault’s early 1981 Collège lectures, Subjectivity and Truth
(Subjectivité et Vérité), amplify both continuities and deviations in his en-
gagement with western antiquity. Although he opens these lectures with
the Counter-Reformation bishop Francis de Sales’ account of elephant
mating to illustrate principles of monogamy in Christian sexual ethics,
from January 21 to April 1, Foucault primarily attends to texts from the
Hellenistic and Roman periods, folding Christian comparisons therein.
This shift can mislead readers into thinking that Foucault changes his
project radically in spring 1981. Considering Foucault’s April to May
1981 Louvain lectures as a synthesis “across the entirety of his work in
the 1970s, alongside the work on Christianity in the 1980 course” (Elden
2016, 130), Stuart Elden claims there is very little overlap with the Collège
lectures despite their temporal propinquity. Elden sees in the Louvain lec-
tures Foucault’s last gasp of interest in Christianity “as if, realizing he had
now embarked on a new historical period that would take his work in
novel and challenging directions, he wanted to have one last chance at
providing the history of confession he had promised for so long” (Elden
2016,130).
Foucault certainly intensifies his engagement with ancient Greek and
Roman philosophical and medical texts, and in June 1981 indicates his
intent to publish a work under a title that comes to be known as The Care
of the Self (Le Souci de soi). We can see this third volume in the History of
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion16
Sexuality series germinate in the 1981 Collège lectures as Foucault asks:
“What took place in the first century CE, at the turning point of what
is called pagan ethics and Christian morality?” (Foucault 2017b, 18).
Pursuing an answer through pagan sexual ethics, Foucault parses how
“the arts of living, on the art of conducting oneself” emerge with such
prominence in antiquity “lasted for a very long time and has now disap-
peared” (Foucault 2017b, 27). In a notable terminological shift to “the arts
of living” (ἡ τέχνη τοῦ βίου), Foucault frames how from the Hellenistic
period to late ancient Christianity there is a “focus less on the question of
doing … than on the question of being, on the way of being … one learns
to change one’s being, to modify or model one’s being to give oneself an
absolutely specific type of experience” (Foucault 2017b, 30). The arts of
living in antiquity rely on the critical ability of subjects to actively conduct
themselves instead of being subjected toothers.
But this signals a continuity more than a break: Foucault does not op-
pose “pagan ethics” to “Christian morality”—indeed his interest in the
former stems from his recognition of the dialectical development of these
histories. Throughout his 1981 Collège lectures, Foucault develops his
readings of early Christian texts with attention to the eroticization of mar-
riage, codification of sexual relations between man and wife, and “the big
question in Christian thought, Saint Augustine’s question, but also our
question: ‘What in truth is our desire?’” (Foucault 2017b, 167). Augustine
comes to play a key role in how Foucault sees the relationship between
subjectivity and sexuality shift in Christianity, both in these 1981 lectures
and in Les Aveux, notably in the imperative of procreation (as the human
τέλος or “goal”) and the marital obligation of sexual intercourse (as
using concupiscentia or “desire”). Although such practices are common
to Hellenistic sexual ethics, Foucault sees “the relationship to truth that
is changed” (Foucault 2017b, 157), differentiating “the Christian experi-
ence of the flesh from the Greek experience of the aphrodisia” (Foucault
2017b, 156). Foucault’s conceptualization of this shift in experience
highlights how early Christianity remains vital to his 1981 lectures and
informs his ongoing project, for “that relationship of subjectivity and of
the truth regarding desire was formed that is so characteristic not only of
Christianity but of our whole civilization and way of thinking” (Foucault
2017b, 158). Indeed, this argument in favor of continuities between an-
cient and Christian ethics signals his concern with nuancing his reading
of early Christian texts in relation to arts of living, relations to truth, and
subjectivity.
In his 1982 Collège lectures, Hermeneutics of the Subject
(L’Herméneutique du sujet), Foucault continues to engage early Christian
texts as a foil for defining Greek and Roman ethical texts. The lectures
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Clements: Foucault’s Christianities 17
foreground Hellenistic subject matter, focusing on the care of the self
(Gk. ἐπιμελεία ἑαυτοῦ, Lt. cura sui) as anchoring the Delphic injunc-
tion to know oneself (γνῶθι σεαυτόν). Foucault shifts the form of self-
relation from “arts of living” in 1981 to the “care of the self ” in 1982 as
he asks: “Why did Western thought and philosophy neglect the notion of
epimeleia heautou (“care of the self”) in its reconstruction of its own his-
tory?” (Foucault 2005, 12). Framing modern philosophy as splitting the
care of the self from the knowledge of the subject (since at least Descartes),
Foucault extols ancient philosophical attention to their integration. In a
striking continuity between ancient Greek and early Christian texts, he
describes Socrates and Gregory of Nyssa as bookends in an eight-century
span for whom “attending to the self is not therefore just a brief prepar-
ation for life; it is a form of life” (Foucault 2005,494).
Of this vast span of philosophical thought and practice, Foucault in
1982 sees merely formal differences in the care of the self until Christian
monastic practices and the “examination of conscience” in the fourth to
fifth centuries. Like other Athenian elites, Alcibiades “understood that he
had to take care of himself if he wished to take care of others later” (Foucault
2005, 494). Foucault contrasts the Greek ruler with the Christian mo-
nastic who suspiciously inspects their own thoughts and desires; instead
of caring for oneself, one becomes the object of continuous observation.
Foucault highlights Cassian in particular as inaugurating the “decipher-
ment of interiority, the subject’s exegesis of himself” (Foucault 2005, 301).
For Foucault, early Christian confession as exagoreusis involves novice
monastics submitting to elders, confessing every shameful movement of
their thoughts, and renouncing those thoughts as part of their selves. The
mechanisms of confession are connected to different forms of subjectivity,
where the incitement to tell the interior truth about oneself correlates with
the injunction to disavow that veryself.
Foucault, in these 1982 lectures, foregrounds “the self” (le soi) and ex-
plicitly reframes “governmentality” in relation to the “ethics of the subject
defined by the relationship of self to self” (Foucault 2005, 252). Although
he drafts the language of ethics as early as 1980 in his unpublished and
archived Berkeley lectures (Foucault 28730, XL.1), ethics becomes an
explicit orientation in his work only in 1982. In these lectures, Foucault
also publicly introduces the concept of παρρησία (parrēsia) as free speech
that “establishes a certain pact between the subject of enunciation and
the subject of conduct” (Foucault 2005, 406). On May 18, 1982, he dedi-
cates his lecture at the University of Grenoble to parrēsia, stressing the
ethical structure of the obligation to tell the truth about oneself in ancient
Christianity as differing from the obligation in Greco-Roman philosophy
(Foucault 2016b). From May 31 to June 26, Foucault delivers lectures at
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion18
the University of Toronto on the hermeneutics of the subject in antiquity,
which bifurcate between ethical care of the self in Greco-Roman phil-
osophy and truth-obligations in Christian monasticism (Foucault 2017a,
37,135).
Meanwhile, Foucault continues to draft Les Aveux de la chair, which
he submits to Gallimard in October 1982. That year, he publishes the
only excerpt from Les Aveux, “The Battle for Chastity,” on Cassian and
the spirit of fornication (Foucault 2001b). Carrette notes that Foucault’s
October 1982 lectures at the University of Vermont relate to “the final
volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality as located in techniques of the
self and ethics” (Carrette 1999, 45). Yet part of these 1982 Vermont lec-
tures are actually drafted by Foucault in 1980, calling this timing into
question.9 What is clear is that between 1979 and 1982, Foucault carefully
attends to early Christian texts and contexts conceptualizing the arts of
living, care of the self, and monastic production of disciplinary mechan-
isms in the genealogy of modern western subjectivity.
Stage 3: Foucault the Confessor: Speaking Truth to Power (1983–1984)
Foucault’s final two years feature ancient Greek and Roman mater-
ials and the ethical relation between government of self and govern-
ment of others. His 1983 Collège lectures, The Government of Self
and Others (Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres), turn to parrēsia
as a philosophical practice for governing others: “Parrēsia as form of
life, parrēsia as way of behaving, parrēsia even in the philosophers’
style of dress, are constitutive elements of this monopoly” (Foucault
2010, 320). Through Plato’s engagement with the tyrant of Syracuse,
Dionysius II, Foucault elaborates the ethical necessity of the care of
the self—one cares for oneself not only to lead a beautiful philosoph-
ical life but also to contest unjust forms of domination. The parrēsiast
exemplified by Plato challenges tyrannical behavior by telling the
truth (however unpopular) to the ruler. Importantly, the parrēsiast
does not dictate what should be done, instead functioning “as cri-
tique, and as restive exteriority to politics” (Foucault 2010, 354).
Acheck safeguarding the people from authoritarian orders, “parrēsia
founds democracy and democracy is the site of parrēsia” (Foucault
2010,300).
In 1983, Foucault frames parrēsia as a “site of truth telling” that en-
dures through “the great Christian spirituality of the fourth to fifth
century” (Foucault 2010, 47). Between ancient Greece and late ancient
9See footnote 1 of this article.
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Clements: Foucault’s Christianities 19
Christianity (where care of the self remains important), Foucault articu-
lates enduring “relations between truth and courage, or between truth
and ethics” (Foucault 2010, 306). He highlights Plato, Euripides, Plutarch,
Epictetus, and John Chrysostom as boldly treating “the relationship be-
tween truth-telling and the risk of death” (Foucault 2010, 57). In his
October 24 through November 30 lectures at the University of California,
Berkeley, Foucault situates parrēsia at the intersection of the genealogy of
modern subjectivity and the genealogy of the critical attitude in the prob-
lematization of truth (Foucault 2016b, 109, 297). He then frames the insti-
tutionalization of the Christian pastorate in monasticism as changing this
courageous relation. Instead of a critical practice, monastic truth-telling
subordinates novice to advisor and produces the mechanisms reinfor-
cing institutional domination and dogmatic truth-claims (through new
forms of scriptural revelation, authority in the church, and asceticism as
stressing renunciation). Foucault’s treatment of Christianity this year is
textually minimal yet vital to how he conceptualizes human experience
as constituted through “forms of knowledge,” “normative matrices of be-
havior,” and “the subject’s mode of being” (Foucault 2010, 4). Whereas
ancient self-relation allows subjects to be both shaped and self-shaping in
order to govern others, monastic subjects are constituted through subjec-
tion and obedience toothers.
Opening his 1984 Collège lectures, Courage of Truth (Le Courage
de la vérité), Foucault specifies that by examining parrēsia, “we can see
how the analysis of modes of veridiction, the study of techniques of
governmentality, and the identification of forms of practice of self inter-
weave” (Foucault 2011, 8). Examining parrēsia enables analysis of all
three domains constitutive of experience that correlate with Foucault’s
constructions of knowledge, power, and ethics. The parrēsiast both con-
tributes to their own shaping through practices of self and critiques polit-
ical and social formations. Foucault’s 1984 analysis of parrēsia might even
suggest a way to challenge the twin roots he described in 1979—coun-
tering mechanisms of individualization and totalization through forms
of truth-telling that critique (instead of reinforce) the Christian pastorate
and statepower.
Foucault closes his 1984 lectures by extending the radical potential
of Cynic parrēsia, exemplified by Diogenes, who engages “the idea of
a mode of life as the irruptive, violent scandalous manifestation of the
truth” (Foucault 2011, 183),to ancient Christianity, notably martyrs who
speak the truth of the world even when risking death. He particularly
stresses continuities between early Christian asceticism and “the themes
of scandal, of indifference to the opinion of others and to the structures
of power and its representatives that are found in Cynicism” (Foucault
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion20
2011, 318). In contrast to positive parrēsia’s “unrestrained and free aspect”
(Foucault 2011, 318)in the truth-telling of martyrs and ascetics, pastoral
power becomes the negative form of truth-imposition as the success of its
institutionalization annuls critical, liberatory potential. Foucault comes
to suggest possibilities for articulating forms of parrēsia in Christianity,
hoping for the next year: “Maybe Iwill try to pursue this history of the
arts of living, of philosophy as form of life, of asceticism in its relation to
the truth, precisely, after ancient philosophy, in Christianity” (Foucault
2011,316).
That day, March 28, 1984, Foucault delivers his last lecture at the
Collège de France, apologizing for not having the energy to go on. He
forces his analysis to close with the transition from ancient (critical, posi-
tive) parrēsia to the Christian pastoral’s forms of (subjugating, negative)
parrēsia that voids critical power by institutionalizing dogmatics as truth.
Nevertheless, Foucault also recognizes that positive forms of parrēsia
endure in medieval mystics’ challenges to church authority. Poignantly,
Foucault speaks about the imperative for philosophy to remain external
to politics, to critique its movements, and to have figures—like Socrates,
Diogenes, and we can add Foucault himself—who not only speak truth
but live the truth that they speak as a challenge to oppressive norms and
forms of domination.
PART II. CONTEXTUALIZING CONFESSIONS OF THE FLESH
AND “FINAL” FOUCAULT
As Foucault pursues his History of Sexuality series in what Iestablish
as Stages 1 and 2 of his last decade, he moves from very schematic read-
ings of “Christianity” from 1974 to 1978 to careful analyses of ancient
Christian texts from 1979 through 1982, concurrently expanding their
genealogical stakes for understanding modern subjectivity.10 Starting
January 1979, Foucault actively works on Les Aveux de la chair, submit-
ting a draft of the manuscript to his editor, Pierre Nora, at Gallimard in
October 1982 (Foucault 2018, VII). During this time, through the influ-
ence of Paul Veyne, Foucault comes to consider his original introduction
to Les Aveux as rife with clichés of pagan ethics. Engaging source material
on ancient Greek and Roman sexual ethics in greater detail, from 1980
10The caveat for Stage 1 is that this includes material Foucault delivered in monographs or lectures.
Foucault’s research notes are also meticulous and require further analysis in order to more precisely
date and understand his navigation of secondary and primary sources; Dossiers No XX, XXVII, LV,
XXI, XXII, LXXIX, LXII, LXX, XXIV, XXIII, and XXVIII are particularly important for Foucault’s
notes over the last decade that my ongoing study, Foucault the Confessor, addresses (Foucault28730).
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Clements: Foucault’s Christianities 21
through 1984 (as Stages 2 and 3 frame above), Foucault develops his read-
ings of western antiquity and comes to the ethical possibilities of arts of
living and political critique. His rigorous conceptualization of ethics as
its own domain of experience comes a mere two years before his death—
moving from loose constructions of resistance (1974–1976) to counter-
conduct (1977–1978) to governmentality (1979) to subjectivation (1980;
see Davidson 2016) to arts of living (1981) to care of the self (1982) to the
ethical relation of self to self (1983–1984).
In the months before his death, Foucault publishes his first mono-
graphs since 1976 with History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure
(Histoire de la sexualité II: L’Usage de plaisir) on ancient Greek appreci-
ation for ἀφροδίσια (aphrodisia) in sexual ethics (Foucault 1990b) and
History of Sexuality, Volume 3: The Care of the Self (Histoire de la sexualité
III: Le Souci de soi) on Roman moralities’ tightening forms of sexual aus-
terity (Foucault 1990c).11 Despite its antecedent composition, Les Aveux
de la chair (Confessions of the Flesh) becomes deferred first to Volume
3 and ultimately to Volume 4 in the revised four-volume series. From
March to May 1984, Foucault continues to hand-edit the tapuscripts for
Les Aveux, with an anticipated publication in October foreclosed by his
death on June 25, 1984, and the request “Pas de publication posthume”
(no posthumous publications) (Foucault 2018, VII; 2001a, 90). Periodizing
Foucault’s “Christianities” in three stages enables contemporary readers
to (1) understand theoretical and archival contexts for Confessions of the
Flesh, (2) recognize disciplinary and methodological possibilities in “late”
Foucault, and (3) reckon with the limitations of Foucault’s constructions
of subjectivity.
Reading Confessions of theFlesh
With Frédéric Gros editing Les Aveux de la chair from Foucault’s manu-
script, tapuscript, and other notes, Confessions of the Flesh is not the pro-
duction of a single author.12 Yet the similarities between the volumes in
11Two other notable volumes edited by Foucault during this time are Herculine Barbin, dite Alexina
B. (Foucault 1978) and Le Désordre des familles: Lettres de cachet des Archives de la Bastille au XVIIIe
siècle (Foucault 1982) with ArletteFarge.
12I agree with Philippe Chevallier (2020) that the published title for Volume 4 corresponds better to
Foucault’s earlier work on Christian confession from the twelfth through seventeenth centuries than
it does the second through fifth centuries treated in Les Aveux. In the archives at the Bibliothèque na-
tionale de France, Icould glean four different tables of contents drafted by Foucault, which perhaps
correspond to successive reconceptualizations of Les Aveux as Foucault moves from early modern to
ancient forms of Christianity (Foucault 28730, Dossier No LXXXVI Les Aveux de la chair, Chemise 1;
Dossier No XC Les Aveux de la chair / L’Usage des plaisirs, Chemise1).
In Les Aveux’s table of contents as published, most of the titles are chosen by Gros with the four
of thirteen exceptions noted with “MF.” As with the rest of this article, all translations not attributed
are myown.
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion22
the History of Sexuality series are striking. Like Volume 3, Volume 4 starts
in detailed textual analysis without a formal introduction, and Foucault’s
introduction to Volume 2, which resituates the whole series in antiquity,
acts as the introduction to Volumes 3 and 4 as well.13 Even though
Foucault wrote much of Volume 4 before the other two, Volumes 2, 3, and
4 share a similar structure with attention to the body, social status, and
sexual desire. What in Volumes 2 and 3 appear as sections on the body, the
wife, and erotics towards boys shifts in Volume 4 to the flesh, the virgin,
and the use of concupiscence in marriage (Foucault 2018, 427). All three
volumes engage diverse textual sources and social histories from ancient
Greece to Roman late antiquity yet with limited attention to their broader
historical contexts. Page to page, Confessions performs nuanced exegesis
of ancient Christian texts even as Foucault weaves a genealogical narrative
of the continuities and divergences between pagan and Christian sexual
ethics (e.g., Foucault 2018, 194–95). For scholars of Foucault, Confessions
is a feast of readings drawn from different years of his lectures as well
as some surprises—notably the prevalence of Augustine and the dearth
of Tertullian. For scholars of early Christianity, Foucault’s selection of
texts can be as mystifying as his sometimes idiosyncratic readings and in-
vites critical rereadings.14 For scholars engaging critical theory, Foucault’s
Part I: ‘The formation of a new experience’
1. Creation, procreation[MF]
2. Baptismallabor
3. Secondpenance
4. Art ofarts
Part II: ‘Being a virgin’
1. Virginity and continence
2. On the arts of virginity
3. Virginity and knowledge ofself
Part III: ‘Being married’[MF]
1. The duty of the spouse[MF]
2. The Good and the goods of marriage[MF]
3. The libidinisation ofsex
Annexes 1–4: related texts found with the main manuscript
13I take as a mark of continuity with his treatment of aphrodisia in Volumes 2 and 3, Foucault
changes the first sentence from “Ce regime des Aphrodisia” to “Le regime des Aphrodisia” (Foucault
28730, Dossier No LXXXIV Les Aveux de la chair, Chemise 1“Première partie. Introduction,” Feuillet
1), where “Ce regime” as “This regime” becomes “Le regime” as “The regime.”
14Elizabeth Clark’s “Foucault, the Fathers, and Sex” critiques Foucault’s readings of late ancient
desert ascetics Evagrius Pontus and John Cassian for occluding the role of humility in the care of the
self, the recognition of self-examination as a counterproductive practice, and the relation between
self-knowledge and the question for truth as the quest for God (Clark 1988, 629–30). Clark’s readings
remain brilliantly accurate, even with the trove of publications made available since 1988, and Iam
indebted to her and herwork.
Michel Senellart critiques Foucault’s reading of the pastoral as an individualizing power, stressing
instead its incorporative power (Senellart 2017, 214), Philippe Chevallier corrects Foucault’s reading
of Tertullian on the role of shame in penitence (Chevallier 2020), Béatrice Han critiques Foucault’s
reading of Cassian as too reliant on an overly voluntarist and reflective understanding of obedience
as an exercise of will (Han 2020), Qiwei He offers a careful critique of Foucault’s reading of Cassian
that complements my own and Clark’s (He 2019; Clements 2020), and Chris deWet both engages
Foucault’s reading of John Chrysosthom and shows the need to keep constructions of sexuality and
theology open to reconstruction (deWet 2020).
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Clements: Foucault’s Christianities 23
genealogy of subjectivity helps illuminate the importance of forms of
Christianity for the conditions of modern subjectivity and the discip-
linary institutions producingit.
Foucault clearly affirms the continuities in practices common to
“pagan” and “Christian” contexts. It is not the codes or practices that
change but the experience—the way that one relates to oneself, the other,
and the “truth”—that shifts (Foucault 2018, 50–51). And Foucault frames
the developing mechanisms of the self-to-self relation in the early Christian
period through texts and practices that shift from the second through
fifth centuries. From Clement of Alexandria taking up pagan sexual ethics
without essential modification in the second century (Foucault 2018,
9–51) to Tertullian’s innovation of Christian baptism as a ritual production
of one’s status through exomologēsis in the third century (Foucault 2018,
52–77), Foucault stresses rites of penitence and transformation in part
I.Much of his analysis proceeds temporally with the figures of the third
through fifth centuries occupying a privileged place in parts II and III. In
part II, Foucault lauds virginity in Cyprian and Methodius’ third-century
texts as a recommendation embraced as opposed to compelled, enabling
“the relationship of the individual to himself, in thought, soul, and body”
(Foucault 2018, 152). Foucault admires fourth-century Gregory of Nyssa
in particular for considering virginity as a “care of the self” continuous
with pagan practices (Foucault 2018, 177–205). Such emphases on arts
of living and care of the self are at a striking remove from pastoral power,
which is conspicuously absent from Confessions, except for in Annex 2
(Foucault 2018, 380–95).15
Foucault contrasts Nyssa’s attention in the fourth century to Cassian’s
in the fifth, whose monastic practices stress confession, the subject of
knowledge (instead of a subject of action), and totalizing obedience as
a condition of subjectivity. Foucault reads the relation of self to self as
increasingly mediated by institutional authorities and defined in and
through technologies of domination like obedience and submission
(Foucault 2018, 121–35), thereby inaugurating the mechanisms of discip-
linary power. Most salient is exagoreusis, the submissive practice of mo-
nastics who confess everything to their spiritual director in a relation of
complete and unending obedience (Foucault 2018, 143–45). As Idiscuss
in Stage 2 above, Foucault reads Cassian as stressing self-examination
where one suspiciously applies a hermeneutics of purity to all thoughts
(as cogitationes) by rooting out interior desires and telling their truth
15This section correlates with the Sécurité, Territoire, Population: Cours au Collège de France: 1977–
1978 lectures, especially the end of the February 8th lecture, and suggests to me earlier composition
than the majority of Les Aveux.
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion24
(Foucault 2018, 136–39). Cassian, like Nyssa on virginity, requires chas-
tity as a condition of knowledge in “a form of life within which renun-
ciation of all forms of sexual relations already operates” (Foucault 2018,
216). Foucault is correct about chastity as basic to Cassian’s ascetic form of
life, yet he overreads chastity as compelled and virginity aschosen.
The unexpected heart of Confessions is Augustine—even as Foucault
does not cite Augustine’s own Confessions. Foucault dedicates the ma-
jority of part III to analyzing texts from Augustine’s later period, showing
interest in even the Pelagian treatments of human agency to which
Augustine responds (Foucault 2018, 327–32). Foucault declares reli-
ance on Peter Brown’s framing of “why sexuality became in the Western
Christian culture the seismograph of our subjectivity” (Foucault 28730,
XL.6.1.29). With the “‘libidinisation’ of sex,” sexuality becomes the very
condition of being human (theologically) and of becoming a subject (so-
cially) (Foucault 2018, 328–29).16 Sin and sexuality are not extricable from
human nature as a form of concupiscence to root out; since sexual desire
is part of being human, it should be focused within marital relations in
this reading. Yet as Elizabeth Clark argues, Foucault reads Augustine over-
generously as praising marriage when Augustine’s own texts evince not
praise for the married man but the desire to socially bind all Christians
together (monk and married alike) (Clark 2021).
From the use of pleasure to the subject of concupiscence, Foucault
articulates a shift from ancient philosophy to late ancient Christianity
that “recomposes itself no longer around pleasure and the relation, but
around desire and the subject” (Foucault 2018, 361). Synthesizing themes
from 1974 to 1984 (traced in Stages 1 through 3 above), Foucault articu-
lates his excursus into antiquity as a genealogical analysis of the modern
subject produced through Augustine’s attention to concupiscence and
Cassian’s attention to self-examination. He stages in this history of the
present “the ties that our culture has extended rather than denounced
between sex, truth, and law [droit]” (Foucault 2018, 361). As Daniele
Lorenzini frames, the collusion of “the subject of desire” with “the subject
16I thank Margaret Mitchell for raising the vital question of how Foucault selected and read his
source material, for Iam now tracing how the change in his source materials correlates with his
deepening analysis of ancient texts. Of Foucault’s important interlocutors, the 2018 Les Aveux only
cites Paul Veyne’s Le Pain et le cirque (Veyne 1976) in Annex 2 and only Pierre Hadot’s “Théologies et
mystiques de la Grèce hellénistique et de la fin de l’Antiquité” (Hadot 1970) from Hadot’s many works
as well as those of Ilsetraut Hadot. The 2018 Les Aveux does not cite Peter Brown at all, odd because
of Foucault’s knowledge of Augustine of Hippo (Brown 1967) as well as central references to Brown in
his 1981“Sexuality and Solitude” and his 1982“The Battle for Chastity” (an excerpt from Les Aveux).
Interestingly, Brown’s 1983 Princeton Rabbi Irving Levy Lecture “Augustine and Sexuality” is found
in Chemise 11“Chemise trouvée sur le table de Michel” of Dossier No LXXXIV in the archives, sug-
gesting it was ready-to-hand as Foucault edited Les Aveux in1984.
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Clements: Foucault’s Christianities 25
of law” in Augustine is vital to Foucault’s genealogy of disciplinary and
biopolitical mechanisms of power (Lorenzini 2019, 469). Confessions ana-
lyzes early Christian arts of conducting oneself and others, techniques of
examination, and procedures of confession as continuous with practices
in Foucault’s own time, notably in the incitement to tell the truth about
oneself.
Decades later, what does the 2018 publication of Les Aveux de la chair
show us about how Foucault moved from the relations of power, the his-
tory of sexuality, and governmentality (Stage 1)to an emerging project on
the technologies of the self (Stage 2)to his final interest in arts of living
and parresiastic promise (Stage 3)? Annex 1 of Confessions reiterates how
it is not the moral laws or practices concerning sexual acts that change
from Greek and Roman to early Christian contexts, but the experience and
the relation between subjectivity and truth that changes from knowledge
in general to knowledge of self (Foucault 2018, 365). Foucault locates the
dangers of Christianity within the structures of authority developed in
the fourth century, “increasingly clearly in the fifth and sixth centuries”
(Foucault 2011, 333), that lead subjects to mistrust themselves, to submit
to constant interior inspection, and to come to a knowledge of self that
requires its very renunciation. Foucault seems to worry that truth-telling
no longer enables ethical and political critique of authorities but becomes
a strategy of subjection where one blindly obeys pastoral authorities as
“this theme of parrhēsia-confidence will be replaced by the principle of
a trembling obedience, in which the Christian will have to fear God and
recognize the necessity of submitting to His will, and to the will of those
who represent Him” (Foucault 2011, 333).
Disciplinary and Methodological Implications
Decades after Foucault’s death, there is the temptation to read Confessions
as an event by which to evaluate the “final Foucault” and his completion
of the History of Sexuality series. Yet my analysis of Foucault’s last decade
shows that no one work or event stands in for his dynamic and ongoing
engagement with forms of Christianity and their relation to power, re-
sistance, subjectivity, and truth. Neither straightforwardly adulatory
nor condemnatory, Foucault—in Confessions of the Flesh and in his lec-
tures, interviews, and monographs from the 1970s and 1980s—frames
Christianity both as continuous with the ancient world and as import-
antly inaugurating mechanisms and technologies that will come to de-
fine modern subjectivity—notably through regimes of truth and forms of
governmentality predicated on obedience and confession, on individu-
ation and totalization, on desire and law. As Daniel Boyarin and Elizabeth
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion26
Castelli argued in 2001, Foucault’s ability to trace continuities and differ-
ences across contexts relies on both his rigorous historical-textual archeo-
logical analyses and his capacious genealogical theorizing of experience.
My reading of Foucault relies on both historical and theoretical ap-
proaches to his last decade and to the ancient texts he engages. This two-
fold engagement sets the methodological stakes for situating Confessions
in relation to Foucault’s shifting analyses of “Christianity.” On the one side,
if we only approach Foucault’s texts for their historical descriptions, then
we are liable to point out errors in his interpretations and say he got details
or readings wrong without taking into account the theoretical and polit-
ical importance of his work. And on the other side, if we only attend to his
theorizing, then we are liable to accept his historical accounts uncritically
and to apply his frameworks without sufficient attention to texts and con-
texts. To appreciate the theoretical stakes that come with Foucault’s own
historicizing practices and genealogical analyses requires unfolding the
bibliographic shifts in his work as Idid in Part I.Here, we can consider the
theoretical implications for (1) how Foucault’s attention to Christianity as
productive of the mechanisms of disciplinary power leads him to ethical
questions in antiquity, (2) how his attention to ethics is continuous with
his attention to power and knowledge, and (3) how “Christianity” as a
historical fulcrum in his work requires a critical eye towards Foucault’s
changing “Christianities.”
First,tracing Foucault’s engagement with Christian texts as a spur to
his engagement with Greek and Roman texts helps to mitigate the surprise
that Foucault’s shift in focus between Volume 1 (1976) and Volumes 2 and
3 (1984) often evokes and that the release of Volume 4 amplifies the need
to understand. In History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, Foucault
establishes the theoretical stakes of critique, arguing that “power is toler-
able only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success
is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms” (Foucault 1990a,
86). Foucault gradually works from constructions of Christianity in mod-
ernity to antiquity to uncover the mechanisms instantiated by pastoral
power and covered over through disciplinary apparatuses, in order to
make such power intolerable today. As Mark Jordan beautifully argues, by
turning to ancient Christian texts to unmask these mechanisms, Foucault
explores forms of resistance in counter-conduct that then opened up the
possibility for liberatory practices by considering ancient arts of living
and care of the self (Jordan 2014).17 Foucault then comes to see Christian
17Engaging ethics in antiquity, Foucault’s well-known if provisional articulation of “spirituality”
in 1984 is “that which precisely refers to a subject acceding to a certain mode of being and to the
transformations which the subject must make of himself in order to accede to this mode of being”
(Foucault 1988a,14).
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Clements: Foucault’s Christianities 27
texts like those of Cassian as inaugurating forms of interiority and confes-
sion that would dangerously shore up the dominating power of Catholic
institutions and its violent Inquisition as well as the modern incitement
to truth-telling (Foucault 28730, XL.1.9; see also Zachhuber 2020). Yet
Foucault’s attention to early Christian arts of living and care of the self (as
well as the disruptive potential of mystics) should be seen as continuous
with his interest in forms of resistance enacted by mystics, ascetics, and
parrēsiasts through modernity.
Second,Foucault’s historicization of Christianity largely changes how
he analyzes and apprehends power in subject formation, coming to recog-
nize how “forms of a possible knowledge (savoir), normative frameworks
of behavior for individuals, and potential modes of existence for possible
subjects” (Foucault 2010, 3)together constitute experience. In the ancient
Greek practice of parrēsia, for example, the government of self and others
is not a productive form of domination but a “practice of freedom” and
enables the critique of dominant forms of power and regimes of truth that
have covered over their own contingency and constructedness. Subjects
are discursively shaped, yet they can also participate in forms of ethical
self-shaping. This reading confirms how—as Daniele Lorenzini, Ariane
Revel, and Arianna Sforzini argue—Foucault’s work can no longer be
understood as having “three distinct and mutually exclusive steps, or
‘phases’” (Lorenzini etal. 2013, 8): first, archeology and discourse analysis
in the 1960s; second, genealogy and analysis of power in the 1970s; third,
forms of ethics and subjectivity in the 1980s. On February 1, 1984, at the
Collège, Foucault describes his broader theoretical aim through the inter-
relation of these three axes: “Connecting together modes of veridiction,
techniques of governmentality, and practices of the self is basically what
I have always been trying to do” (Foucault 2011, 8). Far from mutu-
ally exclusive, questions of knowledge, power, and “the self”—engaged
through archeology, genealogy, and ethics as Arnold Davidson has long
described (1986, 221–33)—are co-imbricated in Foucault’s work, or, as
Gilles Deleuze notes, “are irreducible, yet constantly imply one another”
(1988, 114).18
Third,recognizing his methodological shift towards rigorous textual
and historical analyses and theoretical exploration of arts of life and radical
asceticism, Foucault’s constructions of “Christianity” still require a crit-
ical eye because of their privileged positions in his genealogy of modern
subjectivity. In his readings of early Christian texts, Foucault comes to
18This reading also troubles Brent Pickett’s 2005 distinction between “postmodern Foucault”
(largely correlated with my Stage 1 above) and “modern Foucault” (correlated with Stages 2 and
3above).
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion28
account for how technologies of the self can function in relation to tech-
nologies of domination, production, and signification as rigorous forms
of resistance. He widens his frame in the history of sexuality to include
virginity as an art of life in Gregory of Nyssa as a practice of care of the
self inaugurated by Socrates eight centuries prior. Foucault stresses how
practices of obedience, interiorizing interpretation, and self-renunciation
produce the mechanisms of disciplinary power (rendered dangerous in
the ties between desire, truth, and law). And although Ishare critiques
of Foucault’s readings of Cassian and Augustine, Foucault’s assessment of
how self-inspection and truth-telling forge the mechanisms of modern
western subjectivities invites further historical analysis (which can have
implications for theoretical analyses such as that of Butler 2004). Foucault
celebrates how Augustine recognizes the use of concupiscence in marriage
because sexuality is not renounced but is central to subjectivity. And in his
final lecture, he prospectively charts an inquiry into the arts of living in
Christianity (terminology he traces to Gregory of Nazianzus in Les Aveux
as well), holding space for his analysis of parrēsia to extend to forms of
Christianity that might also contest political power in word and deed.
Although Foucault critiques the normalizing forces of the institutional-
ized Christian pastoral, he opens the ethico-political range of possibilities
for transformation of self and social norms in the history of Christianity.
Contemporary Critiques
Tracing Foucault’s engagement with forms of Christianity shows his read-
ings’ mutability and indicates the need, in turn, to engage with their his-
torical accuracy. So too do his genealogical analyses of subjectivity and
sexual ethics require critical engagement (Falzon etal. 2013; Cremonesi
etal. 2016). Although published in 2018, Les Aveux should be both appre-
ciated for Foucault’s grappling with the relation between subjectivity and
truth in the early 1980s and challenged for the limitations of the forms
of subjectivity engaged. Now over thirty-five years have passed since
Foucault’s death, and as the most cited academic researcher, his work
continues to influence work in anthropology, history, literary theory,
philosophy, political theory, the study of religion, and sociology, as well
as academic discourses including queer theory, cultural studies, gender
studies, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, ecocriticism, and animal
studies (Faubion 2014; Downing 2018). Foucault’s turn to western an-
tiquity also influenced historians, redefining social and cultural inquiry in
late ancient studies through the field-defining influences of Peter Brown
(Brown 1988; Cameron 1999) and Elizabeth Clark (Clark 1999; Clark
2004; Clark 2008), amongothers.
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Clements: Foucault’s Christianities 29
Critical theoretical advances and political problematizations since
Foucault’s death prompt us to insist on analyzing how gender, race, class,
sexuality, ethnicity, age, and ability play into who counts as a norma-
tive subject able to engage in the ethical possibilities Foucault describes
(Allen 2008; McNay 1992). We can see Foucault’s shift in attention as
he reconceptualizes the History of Sexuality series: he moves from crit-
ical analyses of the nineteenth-century subjection of children (Volume
3), women (Volume 4), men medicalized as “perverse” (Volume 5), and
the biopolitical reliance on racism (Volume 6)in the originally conceived
series to the subject of ethics as a man with significant economic or cul-
tural capital who governs others from his position of authority in societies
reliant on enslavement and militarism in the published Volumes 2, 3, and
4.Volumes 2 and 3 feature the philosophical and medical works of Plato,
Xenophon, Aristotle, Seneca, Epictetus, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius, and
Galen, where the subjects capable of governing themselves are the male,
free-born, land-holding elites who legislate themselves in order to govern
subjected others, including “slaves” and women discussed as “wives,” who
are yoked to household economies, whereas “boys” are tied to economies
of pleasure. Foucault certainly recognizes that his ancient subjects are tied
to dissymmetrical conceptions of “virile society,” which he calls “quite
disgusting!” (Foucault 1997b, 258), and he is both theoretically and polit-
ically opposed to any nostalgic recuperations in this care of theself.
Yet, for contemporary needs, Foucault does not adequately problem-
atize how structural hierarchy is the condition of ancient elites being able
to care for themselves as ethical exemplars, as they govern others as their
economic, social, and political subjects (Faubion 2011). This raises the
question: how radically must we rethink ethics along the lines of a culti-
vation of an art of life in order to divorce it from a politics of dominion
over others and indeed to realize it as opposed to such? In Volume 4, for
example, Foucault’s selections from the historical record occlude the role
that other subjects played in the very forms of life that interest him, con-
tributing to longstanding feminist critiques of his limitations as well as
possibilities in promoting radical change (Sawicki 1991; Hekman 1996;
Taylor and Vintges 2004). Although Foucault refers to women in John
Chrysostom and Augustine’s views of marriage and the use of concupis-
cence, for example, the problem to be dealt with is the male erection, and
the subject of sexual ethics is the man who puts his desire to work within
the bonds of marriage. Foucault also disregards women as ethical exem-
plars even in the texts that he privileges. For example, Foucault’s appreci-
ation for Gregory of Nyssa’s On Virginity (read in Michel Aubineau’s 1966
edition) strikingly does not include how Nyssa extols his sister Macrina as
best embodying the care of the self as a Socratic philosopher, dissolving
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion30
slavery in their household, and scandalously engaging in labor practices
of bread making that break social norms (Nysse 1966, 1971; Elm 2000).
One wonders how Foucault might have developed his views on ethics
in tandem with his attention to biopower where, as Achille Mbembe
stresses, “the function of racism is to regulate the distribution of death
and to make possible the state’s murderous functions” (2019, 71; see also
Foucault 2003b, 256). It is necessary to recognize state violence and anti-
Black racism as refusing the subjectivity of enslaved people and to reckon
with how “the conditions of domination and subjugation determine what
kinds of action are possible or effective” as Saidiya Hartman frames the
double bind (1997, 55). Rey Chow considers Foucault’s work as enabling
contemporary transnational critique, asking “what if struggles against ra-
cism are waged alongside a historical analysis of vestiges of the Christian
hermeneutics of the self” (2018, 119). How then might such analyses con-
tribute to Foucault’s 1976 suggestion that the biopolitical production of
hierarchical taxonomies be met with the counter-forces of “revolution, its
promises, and its prophecies of future emancipation” (Foucault 2003b, 80;
see also Stoler 1995)? How might the conditions of possibility for ethical
self-shaping and critical truth-telling that Foucault leaves us with in 1984
be cultivated today? Recent years have underscored the ethical imperative
of reckoning with how “failures” of state power to protect the structurally
disenfranchised have been the historical condition of its dominating suc-
cess—from grotesque wealth inequality to elevated rates of infection and
death of Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and the working poor to COVID-19
to ongoing abuse of asylum seekers to the police murders of George Floyd
and Breonna Taylor, among too many other Black people, in the United
States.
It is not enough to theorize ethics and practices of the self in so-
cially, culturally, and historically particular forms when contemporary
forms of domination vis-à-vis state violence regulate whose lives matter
(Gray Forthcoming). Foucault himself lived this ethos in word and deed,
whether protesting the penitentiary system, fighting for refugees’ rights
in France, or supporting Solidarity in Poland (Eribon 2011; Macey 1994).
How, then, do we expose the mechanisms of state violence and demand
structural conditions that enable the ethical care of the self extend to all
instead of the few? Foucault’s methodological approaches and theoretical
constructions reflect the status of critical discourses in the early 1980s,
boldly exposing the structural violence of medicalization, moralization,
racialization, and criminalization even as he was killed by related mech-
anisms through another public health disaster. Countering systemic op-
pression in the twenty-first century can use Foucault’s tools and ethos to
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Clements: Foucault’s Christianities 31
analyze forms of ethics without reinscribing normative subjectivity as
male, wealthy, and elite. This field made fallow can now be cultivated,
appreciating the stress on the “transformative work on the self” (Castelli
2004, 235)for all people, particularly those whose subjectivity has been
too long denied. Disrupting normative figurations, Lynne Huffer names
the possibilities that open up at this intersection of ethics and biopolitics:
“If bios is a life form captured by modern power, eros names biopolitical
life’s transfiguration into new possibilities for living” (Huffer 2013, 438;
see also Huffer 2020). Critique need not chasten but instead can amplify
the possibilities for engaging Foucault’s work—and the ethico-political
stakes for critique so central to his own work.
CONCLUSION
With the publication of Les Aveux de la chair comes the ability to assess
Foucault’s “last decade” t hrough his engagement with for ms of Christianity,
alongside the chronological collections Dits et écrits, his interviews, and
his published lectures at the Collège de France and abroad. With access
to his unpublished archives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the
nearly 40,000 pages of notes and drafts illuminate Foucault’s meticulous
research practices and rigorous readings of texts—both primary and sec-
ondary—through this last decade. This unprecedented access to Foucault’s
published and unpublished work allows contemporary scholars to more
fully appreciate and analyze Foucault’s work in its decades-long, complex
transformations.
Contextualizing Confessions of the Fleshin relation to his last decade
helps to clarify Foucault’s sense that the volume was not complete. Rather
than thinking of his reading of Christianity as culminating in 1980 in a
Nietzschean opposition of Christian renunciation to ancient forms of life,
it makes more sense to think of his reading of ethics as underwritten by
his extended grappling with and internally rich attempts to understand the
shifting relation of subjectivity to truth. In the framework of stages, Stage
1 follows Foucault from 1974 to 1978 as he works to diagnose the problem
that dominating power poses, identifying mechanisms of pastoral power
produced in ancient and early modern forms of Christianity. Stage 2 fol-
lows Foucault from 1979 to 1982 as he writes Les Aveux and moves from
power to governmentality, from knowledge to truth, as he works to un-
mask the mechanisms of confession that give rise to institutional forms
of disciplinary subjectivity in the modern period via their more nascent
forms in antiquity. Stage 3 frames Foucault from 1983 to 1984 in terms of
the liberatory possibilities that emerge once the premodern mechanisms
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion32
constitutive of modern subjectivity are exposed and ethical alternatives
for arts of living and social contest are proposed. The intensification of
Foucault’s reading of Christianity in 1981 and 1982, as well as the opening
up of ethical potential in the arts of living in 1983 and 1984 (that arguably
starts in 1980), show that Foucault’s engagement with Christianity does
not end in 1980, nor even in1984.
I urge us readers to both charitably appreciate and critically engage
Foucault’s views of Christianity and forms of subjectivity for their in-
sights and potentialities. Training a critical eye on Foucault’s readings
of Christianity from antiquity to the eighteenth century, historians help
parse the rigor of his various readings and evaluate the strength of his
overarching genealogy. Far from a historical pedantry, such critique can
help expose the enduring assumptions that Foucault’s readings inherited
but that ours need not. When periodizing Foucault’s readings, we can at-
tune ourselves to how his more flawed readings are linked to particular and
evolving frameworks he adopted in the course of his extended research
program and do not reflect his practiced and extensively demonstrated
ability to think differently. Contemporary theorists and philosophers also
help parse his history of sexuality from his genealogy of the modern sub-
ject. Far from ahistorical speculation, the theorization of truth, forms of
governmentality, and practices of the self in particular contexts enables
analysis of the constitution of subjectivity and political and social critique.
This might challenge modern constructions of sexuality as the “seismo-
graph of subjectivity” and open Foucault’s genealogical narrative to con-
sider other indices of subjectivity, including attention to gender, race,
class, and ability, categories that are still philosophically decenteredtoday.
Although there are limitations to a model that imputes “stages” to
Foucault’s dynamic thought, Iconsider such a framework helpful when
gleaning continuities and differences in his developing conception of
Christianity and his genealogy of modern subjectivity.19 Such a staging al-
lows readers—scholars, students, activists alike—to gain purchase on the
complexity of Foucault’s shifting views, from historical, archival, and the-
oretical perspectives. To flatten his characterization of Christianity is to
miss the historiographic nuance of Foucault’s later work—and this means
19Jeremy Carrette, for example, declares: “There are other fragments from interviews and lectures
in the early 1980s which further supplement these central texts but on the whole the other pieces
only replicate or elaborate material contained in this selection” (Carrette 1999, 44). Although Ilargely
agree with Carrette’s organization and analysis of materials in the 1970s, Ihave argued that Foucault’s
work from the 1980s is not a mere replication or elaboration since his readings of Christianity, ethics,
and subjectivity continue to change. For the limitations of heuristic schematizations of Foucault’s
work, see also Raffnsøe etal. 2016,58.
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Clements: Foucault’s Christianities 33
we not only fail to understand Foucault’s own analyses but also fail to ap-
preciate the methodological rigor of his laterwork.
There is ethical promise in Foucault’s readings of ancient Christian
texts, and perhaps he would have been less attentive to the dangerous flesh
and more to the ethical force of the art of living were he able to return
to his proposed inquiry—and perhaps even integrate it with the violent
realities of modern biopolitics. To assess the promise of his theoretical
engagement and to expose some of his own biases regarding subjectivity
requires the historical critique of Foucault’s readings of ancient texts and
the normative subjectivities stressed therein. And this is a methodological
task that Iinvite scholars to take up together, embracing the critical pos-
sibilities he himself wrestled with in his last years. The work of Foucault’s
last decade offers possibilities for theorizing forms of resistance to dom-
ination as well as the formation of subjectivity through and beyond that
struggle.
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