Post-doctoral researcher in Aesthetics at the University of Fribourg
May 25, 2021
“Rebellious Flesh”: Virgins, Consecrated Women, and the Radicality of Conversion
According to Foucault, the Christian flesh is the result of a set of practices of the self that take the form of a technique of revolt: a never-ending struggle between the self and that which, within the self, escapes its conscious mastery. The question at the center of my talk is the resistant and militant scope of this “rebellious self”: can we find in the Christian theorization of the flesh a virtuality of fracture and transformation of the self? Against the stereotypical image of Christianity as a religion of absolute obedience, I will underline the political value of the question of “conversion” in the writings of the Fathers and in the history of early Christianity. I will take two important examples of conversion, both theoretical and existential, described by Foucault: the conversion as “death of self” preached by Tertullian, and the practices of female virginity as a resistance to the feminine model of mother and wife in imperial society. Can we rethink, through the Fathers and through Foucault, current issues such as the dissociation between sex, gender and sexuality, and the complex interplay between heteronomy and freedom in defining personal identity?
Arianna Sforzini is a post-doctoral researcher in Aesthetics at the University of Fribourg (2020/2022). She teaches philosophy at Sciences po – Paris and is a member of the Association pour le Centre Michel Foucault. She has been an Associated Researcher to the Bibliothèque nationale de France (2016-2019), a Post-doctoral Fellow for the ANR project “Foucault Fiches de Lecture / Foucault’s Reading Notes” (CNRS – ENS Lyon, 2018-2020) and a Post-graduate Fellow at ICI Berlin – Institute for Cultural Inquiry (2016-2017). She is the author of many articles and essays on Foucault’s thought and contemporary continental philosophy, particularly in its relation to the arts and the performances of bodies. She published two monographs : Les scènes de la vérité. Michel Foucault et le théâtre (Lormont : Le bord de l’eau, 2017) et Michel Foucault. Une pensée du corps (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014), and she coedited: Foucault(s) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2017), Un demi-siècle d’Histoire de la folie (Paris: Kimé, 2013), Michel Foucault: éthique et vérité (1980-1984) (Paris: Vrin, 2013).