Confessions of the Flesh: Between Pleasure and Sexuality

Abstract

Confessions of the Flesh:Between Pleasure and Sexuality1 Paul Allen Miller (bio) "Thoughts flutter around in the mind like a feather moved by the wind, but certain ones are stained, and heavier than the others and tend to weigh the soul down." —Michel Foucault (2021, 103) In a way that is paradoxical only at first sight, epithumia, desire, concupiscence, is what constitutes the "raw material" which the arts of monastic and married life have to process. With this difference: in the one case, one must act with oneself alone and in the form of a spiritual combat with one's own "thought" (in the broad sense of the word), in order to give it no possible outlet…and, in the other case, there does exist a legitimate, although "joint," outlet but it has to be seen that this legitimacy stems from the fact that each one thereby enables the other to escape the temptations of their own concupiscence. This is to say that theme is still and always that of the relationship with oneself. —Michel Foucault (2021, 219) Foucault's History of Sexuality is now complete. The long-awaited, post-humous fourth volume, Confessions of the Flesh, first published in French in 2018, has appeared in Robert Hurley's elegant translation. The project has a tortured history. It began life in 1975, with a polemical first volume given the somewhat misleading English title The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (Foucault 1978). The French volume, however, makes the project's scope and ambition clear. Its title page has in a large, centered font La volonté de savoir (The Will to Know), beneath a smaller Histoire de la sexualité 1 (Foucault 1976). Where the English emphasizes that this will be a history of sexuality, the French points toward the will to knowledge as a form of the will to power, toward a Nietzschean genealogy of discourse. The first leads us to expect a chronicle of practices, perversions, and pleasures, the latter a reconstruction of learned discourses, forms of reflection, and structures of truth in relation [End Page 653] to the deployment of various modalities of power and governmentality, what Foucault famously names biopolitics (Foucault 1978, 139). As many a disappointed reader of the History of Sexuality has remarked, there is very little sex in it. The French title moreover is a retread. Foucault first used it as the title of his course at the Collège de France in 1971. The argument of that course is that our familiar correspondence theory of truth is only fully established in fifth-century BCE Greece. The emergence of truth as found in Plato and Aristotle, he contends, is a discursive event, a product of the application of a Nietzschean will to power exemplified in the social and political struggles of archaic Greece (Foucault 2011, 187-88). He advances this argument not by simply accepting Nietzsche's theses or by commenting upon his text, but by tracing the nature and definition of truth, veridiction, and verification from Homer through the social changes that produced the tyrannies of archaic Greece, to the emergence of philosophy, the beginnings of science, and a definition of observed, factual knowledge (connaissance) (Foucault 2011, 191-92). Where in the classical Aristotelian model, which becomes canonical, the "will to know" is curiosity, in the Nietzschean model what lies behind factual knowledge is struggle, the need to gain control of one's environment and circumstances (Foucault 2011, 190, 202-05). A similar dynamic is at work in the History of Sexuality, which does not seek to chart the history of our erotic practices, but poses a very different question: how did we come to speak of sexuality as a thing we have: a thing that possesses us, that founds our identity? Are you straight or gay? Hetero, homo, bi, or poly? L, G, B, T, or Q? Where did these categories come from? How did we get here? It was not always thus. Sexuality for Foucault was not a thing, and it certainly was not natural. Its truth was not an observed fact. Sexuality was a set of enunciations that provided definition and unity to a disparate group of behaviors, sensations, and biological...