Niebuhr Professor at Harvard University’s Divinity School
May 13, 2021
Lust in Paradise : On the Origin of Sexualized Selves
Many sections of History of Sexuality 4 could have been predicted from Foucault’s lectures in the years before his death. One that could not is the reconstruction of Augustine’s teaching on libido in Eden. Foucault assembles passages from Augustine into a story about how disobedient desire cut human consciousness. This story, Foucault argues, becomes decisive for “Western” conceptions of sex and its subjects: it not only invites the codification of sex, it posits the (splitting) truth of sex as essential to who and what we are. But even if we accept Foucault’s reading of Augustine exactly as given, I wonder whether his story supplies a history of our present as Foucault himself has characterized it in HS 1. Does an origin-story about the “juridification” of a torn self really help us to resist our flattening by imperial taxonomies?
Mark Jordan is Niebuhr Professor at Harvard University’s Divinity School. He has been writing most recently about lost possibilities for queer language in relation to the unsayable.