Sex, truth, and law: Rereading Foucault's History of Sexuality after volume 4, The Confessions of the Flesh

Abstract

Foucault's historical studies were motivated by problems he identified in the present and there is no reason to think that History of Sexuality is different in this regard. 1 But that raises a question no reader of The Confessions of the Flesh can escape: How is a scholarly 426-page treatise on the Church Fathers relevant to the contemporary world, or, at least, to concerns that emerged from Foucault's own historical present? 2 The question is only highlighted by the absence of explicit links between the past and the present in Foucault's text, which was published posthumously, in 2018, as the fourth and final volume of History of Sexuality. This book had been advertised as forthcoming already in 1984, when volumes 2 and 3 were published weeks before Foucault's death. 3 Therefore, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that only now, in light of the perspective the long-awaited final volume offers, are we in a position to assess Foucault's History of Sexuality project as a whole. At the same time, this broader context is vital for understanding the philosophical significance of volume 4, which remains, no doubt due to its unfinished state, strikingly silent about the philosophical aim of the meticulous historical work, as Foucault himself understood it. Therefore, the question of contemporary significance needs to be examined both with respect to the project overall and, specifically, by asking what role the analyses of baptism, repentance, libido, virginity, and marriage, which fill out volume 4, might play in it. | HISTORY OF SEXUALITY AS CRITIQUEFoucault's History of Sexuality is critical history in Nietzsche's (1997: 75-77) sense of using history to liberate us from elements of the past that continue to define the present. It is well known that, according to Foucault, the genealogical aim of critical work is to enlarge the scope of discursive possibility that sets limits to the work of freedom subjects can