Watt J. and Lilly G. Jackson Assistant Professor of Religion and the Allison Sarofim Assistant Professor of Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities at Rice University
May 19, 2021
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.
Niki Kasumi Clements is the Watt J. and Lilly G. Jackson Assistant Professor of Religion and the Allison Sarofim Assistant Professor of Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities at Rice University. The volume editor for Mental Religion: The Brain, Cognition, and Culture (2016), her first monograph, Sites of the Ascetic Self (2020), approaches these questions through the ethics of John Cassian (c.360-c.435), the late ancient ascetic whose views of human ability contribute to new forms of life at the fall of empire. Clements is currently working on philosopher Michel Foucault’s fascination with Cassian, early Christianity, sexuality, and ethics as an art of living that helps contest modern forms of domination and dehumanization. This book, Foucault the Confessor, charts the relation between these fascinations over the last decade of Foucault’s life through investigation of Foucault’s archives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.