Confessions of the Flesh

December 15, 2020
The long-awaited culmination of the noted historian and philosopher's multivolume work on human sexuality. It has long been rumored that acolytes of Foucault, who died in 1984, would complete a work that the scholar intended to remain incomplete, having publicly stated that he wanted no posthumous publications. While it is true, writes Gros, that some of the draft work in the History of Sexuality series will not be published, the present volume was substantially complete. The subject is largely the "problematization of the flesh by the Christian fathers," involving exegetical and teleological leaps. Following the teachings of second-century apologist Justin, it is dogma that one has sex only to produce children. This being a Foucauldian investigation, there are fascinating wrinkles and arcana aplenty. In the case of Justin, for instance, sex figures in a long catalog of "a code for living," one that includes what one should drink, what sorts of shoes and jewelry are appropriate to Christians, what kind of furniture one should buy, etc. For his part, Clement of Alexandria and other theologians further the insistence that sex is for procreation, but again with a wrinkle, namely the "seemingly rather arbitrary distinction that Clement introduces between the generation of progeny, which must be the 'goal' of sexual relations, and the value of having descendants, which must be its 'end.' " Foucault also explores how Adam and Eve must have been virgins, according to Augustine and others, operating along the lines of sexual magic that incorporates parthenogenesis, while the sexual act followed by later humans is an aspect of a "paroxysmal bloc" that binds together "sex, truth, and law." That bloc was also closely monitored, surrounded by prescriptions and proscriptions, and governed by "a very precise codification of the moments, the initiatives, the invitations, the acceptances, the refusals, the positions, the gestures, the caresses, even the words...that can take place in sexual relations." A brilliant, challenging contribution to the history of ideas.

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