Niki Kasumi Clements’s research while affiliated with Rice University and other places

In an archived draft at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Foucault describes two questions haunting him since 1963: “Why are we obliged to tell the truth about ourselves? Which truth?” Foucault poses these two questions in 1980 in drafts for his lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, and I see in these two questions two argumentative threads that weave through Foucault's changing History of Sexuality series over his last decade. These two threads correspond to the dimorphism Foucault frames in Part III of Confessions of the Flesh between confessing monks and married men, that correlates with the distinction between “veridiction” and “juridiction” as two forms relating subjectivity and sexuality. To help tease out these threads, I make two recommendations for how to read Confessions of the Flesh in this following review essay: (1) situate Confessions of the Flesh in relation to Foucault's History of Sexuality series which spans his last decade from 1974 to 1984 and (2) untangle two major threads of Confessions of the Flesh in Foucault's treatment of Cassian and Augustine, as progenitors of veridiction and juridiction respectively, which together produce the conditions for modern disciplinary subjects.

In this article, I argue that Foucault's archives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France require that we re-evaluate the development of his tournant antique . Between 1976 and 1984, Foucault does not orchestrate a turn to ancient Greek and Roman ethics in a departure from his analysis of modern sexuality in the 1976 History of Sexuality , volume 1, as volumes 2 and 3 as published suggest. Instead, it is through his redrafting of volume 2 that he moves from early modern to late ancient Christians, to Greco-Roman philosophers, to ancient Greek philosophers. Tracing Foucault's use of the "moral of the elephant" both before and after his January 1981 Collège de France course provides a way to better understand how Foucault shifts and constructs his History of Sexuality series over his last decade.

From the 1981 “Sexuality and Solitude” to the 1982 “Le combat de la chasteté” to the 1984 History of Sexuality, Volume 2, Michel Foucault’s published works have long recognized the influence of the historian of late antiquity, Peter Brown. With the 2018 publication of Foucault’s draft of Les Aveux de la chair (Confessions of the Flesh) bearing no mention of Brown, the depth of this influence requires further elaboration. Despite Brown not appearing in the “Index of Modern Authors,” Confessions of the Flesh reflects Foucault’s debt to Brown for his readings of Augustine of Hippo and his conceptualizations of sexuality and subjectivity. Analyzing archival evidence alongside biographical narratives helps us better understand Brown’s vital influence as Foucault was shifting his History of Sexuality project, his archival practices, and his genealogy of subjectivity. Appreciating the textual and conceptual engagement between Foucault and Brown thus illuminates not only Confessions of the Flesh as Volume 4 in the History of Sexuality series but also the conceptual and methodological developments of both scholars in their disciplinary intersections.

In the months before his June 1984 death, Michel Foucault saw the publication of the second and third volumes in his History of Sexuality series. Opening Volume 2, Foucault notes the conceptual and methodological shifts between Volume 1, An Introduction, published in 1976, and Volumes 2 and 3. In an insert to Volume 2, The Use of Pleasure, Foucault describes the forthcoming fourth and final volume in his History of Sexuality series: “Confessions of the Flesh will deal, finally, with the experience of the flesh in the first centuries of Christianity, and with the role played in it by the hermeneutic, and purifying decipherment, of desire” (Gallimard, 2018, iii; also 2021, viii). Foucault’s death would preclude the completion of his edits for Volume 4 and its planned publication in October 1984. Yet, we learn from this insert that Foucault anticipated a text on the experience of the flesh, the hermeneutics of the subject, and the purifying analysis of desire in early Christian experience.

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—notably 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, I establish 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 critical developments enables better analysis of Confessions of the Flesh and affirms methodological possibilities in the study of religion today.

Of the practices John Cassian (c.360–c.435) brings from Egyptian desert elders to southern Gallic monks, his scriptural hermeneutics best reflects the dynamic link between exegesis and askēsis, reflection and action, and authority and agency. His four-fold method reinforces the view that scripture is absolutely authoritative but incredibly obscure and therefore requires interpretation. Riddled with contradictions, acts of violence, and the plainly nonsensical, scripture provides foundations in early Christianity only through the complex interplay of interpretation, authority, and power. To read exegesis only as an intellectual exercise or assertion of power, however, neglects its relation to other forms of askēsis in Cassian’s Conferences and Institutes. For Cassian, scriptural interpretation renders lived practice and practical knowledge (praktikē) inseparable from contemplative knowledge (theōretikē). Cassian’s view of scriptural meditātiō is shaped in late antique Christian milieus where interpretive reading practices shape ascetic habits alongside practices of manual labor, fasting, and prayer. For Cassian and the Egyptian desert ascetics with whom he trained, scriptural interpretation does not lead to keen description or reflection alone, but must impact one’s practices, one’s tropos, one’s very way of life. Such a perspective allows us to see not only the relevance of Cassian’s ethics to Christian thought and practice, but also to approach Cassian’s texts with a critical eye for how they enable reflection on contemporary religious ethics beyond the particulars of Christian predicates.