Les choses et les mots: Missing words and blurry things in the history of sexuality (original) (raw)
Related papers
With the recent publication of the fourth volume of Foucault's History of Sexuality, Les aveux de la chair, the intense editorial activity surrounding his work appears to be drawing to a close. The publication of this long-awaited volume comes just after the edition of Theories et Institutions Pénales (2015), the last volume of his lectures at the Collège de France. While several smaller texts, interviews and documents might still appear in years to come, we have probably reached the end of a cycle. The wide range of material currently available has given us a more comprehensive view of Foucault's last decade. Ten years ago almost none of his lectures (either at the College de France or elsewhere) were open to consultation and our understanding of the 'late' Foucault was rather limited.
On the "Christian Turn" in Foucault’s Thought: Apropos of _Foucault, les Pères, le sexe_
Maynooth Philosophical Papers, 2022
The recently published volume _Foucault, les Pères, le sexe_ brings together sixteen papers delivered at a conference held in 2018 to mark the launch of _Les aveux de la chair_, the posthumous fourth volume of the _History of Sexuality_. This review essay focuses on the contribution of the Foucault Archives to research on the philosopher's thought; on critical reactions by patrologists to Foucault's venture into study of the Church Fathers; and, finally, on the significance of the "Christian turn" in the late Foucault's lectures and writings.
Power, freedom, and individuality: Foucault and sexual difference
Human studies, 2005
This paper offers a detailed account of Foucault's ethical and political notion of individuality as presented in his late work, and discusses its relationship to the feminist project of the theory of sexual difference. I argue that Foucault's elaboration of the classical ethos of "care for the self" opens the way for regarding the "I-woman" as an ethical, political and aesthetic self-creation. However, it has significant limitations that cannot be ignored. I elaborate on two aspects of Foucault's avoidance of sexual difference as a relevant category for an account of political and ethical individuality, which thus implicitly associates individual agency with men. I argue that Foucault implicitly assumes the existence of an ontological desire to become engaged in political self-creation. However, the ethical position of self-knowledge and desire should be understood as a contingent option that depends on material and historical conditions for its realization. Hence, I argue that a feminist reworking of Foucault's notion of political individuality should add a substantial ethical condition to the imperative of self-knowledge and self-creation -making possible the desiring woman subject.
Sex and Truth: Foucault's History of Sexuality as History of Truth
The question of truth stands at the core of Foucault's philosophy. He was interested in how different pieces of knowledge had attained truth status over the course of history, how power had legitimated itself through truth, how people had shaped themselves via producing truth. The multivolume History of Sexuality, conceived in the 1970s, was originally intended as a study of the relationship between sex and truth. This project that spread over almost ten years constituted Foucault's main laboratory of the history of truth, where he could test new concepts, ideas, and materials. The project went through a very important transformation in time: while in 1970s, Foucault was primarily interested in the relations between truth, sex and power, in the 1980s he mainly studies the relations between truth, sex and the subject. Looking back at the evolution of his thought in the second volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault admits to realising that all of his work has in fact been dealing with the history of truth: “I seem to have gained a better perspective on the way I worked – gropingly, and by means of different or successive fragments – on this project, whose goal is a history of truth.”
Continental Thought and Theory (CT&T), 2022
Foucault was first and foremost a historian and insists that the past enables the present to exist, to think about and to occur. It is at this conjuncture that Foucault presents a demand on all who follow in his wake: we have to know history, engage in and with history, critique, wrestle with and rethink history in order to make sense of the present. One cannot follow or properly draw upon Foucault if history is bypassed or dismissed – which is perhaps why Foucault is often so mis-used today? This issue reads Foucault (who, if alive today would be 96) from the present and asks what do contemporary readings of Foucault offer to thinking via those political, subjective, and social issues relevant today? Reading Foucault from within the 21st century is not only to engage with Foucault from a distance (that is, the aftermath of the rise and fall of Foucault in the academy) but also to remind ourselves of how the 21st century is itself as series of power discourses continuing into the new century. The contributions in this issue all put to work not only Foucault’s methods of politics, genealogy and historicity as specific readings of social and subjective phenomenon but also read him across and alongside other authors, some recent such as Dean and Zamora’s controversial reading of Foucault and neoliberalism, and other provocative intellectual interlocutors, such as Guartarri, Jameson, Baudrillard, Allouch, Zupancic, Canguilhem, Lacan, Kant, Freud and Illouz. What is also put to work is the interdisciplinary nexus of Foucault’s thinking relating to philosophy, biology, history, sex, autoethnography, technology, Christianity, and politics. The authors all take up Foucault’s work not as a legacy of the past, but rather as a modality of contemporaneity: How can his praxis be thought today via his reconsideration of parrhesia? What might be Foucault’s reception to Greek and Roman philosophies? What are the implications and effects of a contemporary Foucauldian praxis regarding the crises and conundrums we currently encounter? In the face of the current trend towards universalism how can Foucault provide a challenge or riff to such theoretical and rhetorical orientations, especially concerning the ‘political subjectivity’ as one which unapologetically takes up pleasure?
Monsters of Sex: Michel Foucault and the Problem of Life
Foucault Studies, 2018
This article argues, contra-Derrida, that Foucault does not essentialize or pre-comprehend the meaning of life or bio-in his writings on biopolitics. Instead, Foucault problematizes life and provokes genealogical questions about the meaning of modernity more broadly. In The Order of Things, the 1974-75 lecture course at the Collège de France, and Herculine Barbin, the monster is an important figure of the uncertain shape of modernity and its entangled problems (life, sex, madness, criminality, etc). Engaging Foucault's monsters, I show that the problematization of life is far from a "desire for a threshold," à la Derrida. It is a spur to interrogating and critiquing thresholds, a fraught question mark where we have "something to do." As Foucault puts it in "The Lives of Infamous Men," it an ambiguous frontier where beings lived and died and they appear to us "because of an encounter with power which, in striking down a life and turning it to ashes, makes it emerge, like a flash [...]."
Les Aveux Review Foucault Studies 5593-20745-2-PB.pdf
REVIEW ESSAY Michel Foucault’s Confessions of the Flesh. The fourth volume of the History of Sexuality, 2018
With Histoire de la sexualité 4: Les aveux de la chair, a long awaited and major publication in Foucault’s œuvre has finally become available. In order to fully understand Les aveux de la chair and its contribution to Foucault’s work, Foucault Studies and future use of Foucault’s work, it is necessary to understand its publication history as well as its place within Foucault’s wider oeuvre and, in particular, his History of Sexuality. This review essay therefore begins by providing an outline of the broader context of Les aveux de la chair in a section entitled “The Setting of Foucault’s Confessions of the Flesh.” This part gives an account of the gradual yet decisive and important shift in the period of investigation and the overall perspective of the History of Sexuality that led to the publication of Les aveux as the fourth volume in this series. Subsequently, the review provides an overview of the main parts of the book and their contents entitled “The structure of Les aveux.” While the following parts articulate “The contribution of the volume” and “Further implications of the volume,” the final part “More to come?” concludes by anticipating possible future publications of Foucault’s work.