Over five weeks in the month of May and the beginning of June, an international group of scholars engaged the work of Michel Foucault at the intersection of ethics, power, and Christianity in the context of the 2018 Éditions Gallimard publication of Les Aveux de la chair and its 2021 translation as Confessions of the Flesh. Foucault’s work and biography are not without controversy and we invite both critical and charitable engagement.
This series of virtual talks took place on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 11:00 Houston/12:00 NYC/18:00 Paris & Johannesburg. Each session lasts approximately one hour, featuring a speaker’s paper for 30-45 minutes, followed by discussion. These twice-a-week talks enabled continuity as a series, without the constraints of a virtual marathon. These talks were recorded and constitute an ongoing resource for viewers around the world.
We are particularly enthusiastic about the conversations between speakers on Foucault’s “last decade” (1974-1984) rethinking bodies, sexuality, and biopolitics, historical forms of ethics as care of the self and of the other, possibilities for resistance to oppressive norms, and theoretical challenges “to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known.” Contextualizing Foucault’s Confessions of the Flesh is vital for the reading of this book and the general understanding of its relation to his developing theories of subjectivity, sexual ethics, and truth-telling. Les Aveux de la chair includes research from his 1978-1982 lectures, is based on the draft manuscript submitted to Gallimard in 1982, and includes Foucault’s handwritten edits in 1984.
The need to contextualize Foucault’s Confessions of the Flesh as a product of a particular historical moment meets the need to recognize Foucault’s epistemic and ethical contexts as different than ours today. We recognize that the current, vital attention to questions of consent and abuse require that we not avoid a candid accounting. The unverified allegations of sexual abuse have been investigated and retracted (despite the claims’ repetitions in right-wing media). Foucault’s uncompromising critique of any universal standard against which to evaluate who we are or should be still remains a corrective to our desire for comforting conclusions.
Four decades after Foucault drafted this History of Sexuality, Volume IV, we can appreciate his formidable influence on the production of discourses in both academic scholarship and cultural formations as well as apply pressure to some of his historical and theoretical claims. We can also level critiques of the conceptual limitations of his theorizations of subjectivity on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, age, and class. This series on Foucault’s Confessions of the Flesh takes up this charge critically and charitably.
This series is hosted by the Department of Religion at Rice University, with the support of the Rockwell Fund and through the assistance of Marcie Newton and Diana Heard. We thank the Humanities Research Center at Rice University for their invaluable support. We look forward to seeing how this conversation continues over time.