{"title":"Confessions of the Flesh – Guest Editors’ Introduction","authors":"A. Colombo, E. McGushin","doi":"10.22439/FS.VI29.6209","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/FS.VI29.6209","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"1-5"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48267689","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Catholic dimension in Foucault’s examination of the Church Fathers is featured because neglect of it may misrepresent the very notions of virginity and of flesh in Confessions of the Flesh. Failure to appreciate the tension between a seditious flesh and an incarnational flesh implicitly confines the Patristic vision to the limited modern field of “sexuality.” The fourth volume might be best interpreted against the background of the investigations that prompted Foucault to immerse himself in religious texts and spiritual experiences: his early writings on literature; the later interest of his lectures in pastoral technologies; and his witnessing of the political-spiritual movements both in Islam (the Iranian revolution) and in Catholicism (the antimilitary protests in South America and the anti-Communism denunciations of Pope John Paul II).
{"title":"Fascinating Flesh: Revealing the Catholic Foucault","authors":"James W. Bernauer","doi":"10.22439/FS.VI29.6213","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/FS.VI29.6213","url":null,"abstract":"The Catholic dimension in Foucault’s examination of the Church Fathers is featured because neglect of it may misrepresent the very notions of virginity and of flesh in Confessions of the Flesh. Failure to appreciate the tension between a seditious flesh and an incarnational flesh implicitly confines the Patristic vision to the limited modern field of “sexuality.” The fourth volume might be best interpreted against the background of the investigations that prompted Foucault to immerse himself in religious texts and spiritual experiences: his early writings on literature; the later interest of his lectures in pastoral technologies; and his witnessing of the political-spiritual movements both in Islam (the Iranian revolution) and in Catholicism (the antimilitary protests in South America and the anti-Communism denunciations of Pope John Paul II).","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"38-47"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42123122","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article investigates Foucault’s account of desiring man by drawing upon History of Sexuality vol. 4, Confessions of the Flesh. In order to do so, the article focuses on Foucault’s diagnosis of the Christian elaboration of “the analytic of the subject of concupiscence” that closes Confessions of the Flesh. As the article shows, “the analytic of the subject of concupiscence” inspires Foucault’s account of desiring man. However, Foucault’s diagnosis of the Christian elaboration of “the analytic of concupiscence” proves to be debatable as it relies on a problematic interplay between Cassian’s and Saint Augustine’s account of concupiscence. The article exposes the problems that such interplay supposes by addressing the contrast between Cassian’s and Augustine’s perspective on both concupiscence and the human condition. Despite this problematic aspect of Foucault’s investigation of Christianity, the article argues that the publication of Confessions of the Flesh is central to understanding Foucault’s History of Sexuality. By providing new elements of analysis, the book reopens Foucault’s genealogical diagnosis of the formation of the medical account of sexuality and allows us to problematise new avenues for developing Foucault’s investigation in depth.
{"title":"What Is a Desiring Man?","authors":"A. Colombo","doi":"10.22439/FS.VI29.6215","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/FS.VI29.6215","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates Foucault’s account of desiring man by drawing upon History of Sexuality vol. 4, Confessions of the Flesh. In order to do so, the article focuses on Foucault’s diagnosis of the Christian elaboration of “the analytic of the subject of concupiscence” that closes Confessions of the Flesh. As the article shows, “the analytic of the subject of concupiscence” inspires Foucault’s account of desiring man. However, Foucault’s diagnosis of the Christian elaboration of “the analytic of concupiscence” proves to be debatable as it relies on a problematic interplay between Cassian’s and Saint Augustine’s account of concupiscence. The article exposes the problems that such interplay supposes by addressing the contrast between Cassian’s and Augustine’s perspective on both concupiscence and the human condition. Despite this problematic aspect of Foucault’s investigation of Christianity, the article argues that the publication of Confessions of the Flesh is central to understanding Foucault’s History of Sexuality. By providing new elements of analysis, the book reopens Foucault’s genealogical diagnosis of the formation of the medical account of sexuality and allows us to problematise new avenues for developing Foucault’s investigation in depth.","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"71-90"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41526480","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The fourth and final volume of The History of Sexuality offers the keystone to Michel Foucault’s critique of Western neoliberal societies. Confessions of the Flesh provides the heretofore missing link that ties Foucault’s late writings on subjectivity to his earlier critique of power. Foucault identifies in Augustine’s treatment of marital sexual relations the moment of birth of the modern legal actor and of the legalization of social relations. With the appearance of the modern legal subject, Foucault’s critique of modern Western societies is complete: it is now possible to see how the later emergence of an all-knowing homo œconomicus strips the State of knowledge and thus deals a fatal blow to its legitimacy. The appearance of both the modern legal actor and homo œconomicus makes it possible to fold the entire four-volume History of Sexuality back into Foucault’s earlier critique of punitive and biopolitical power. And it now challenges us to interrogate how we, contemporary subjects, are shaped in such a way as to implicate ourselves—both willingly and unwittingly—in the social order within which we find ourselves and that, through the interaction of knowledge-power-subjectivity, we reproduce.
{"title":"Foucault’s Keystone: Confessions of the Flesh","authors":"B. Harcourt","doi":"10.22439/FS.VI29.6214","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/FS.VI29.6214","url":null,"abstract":"The fourth and final volume of The History of Sexuality offers the keystone to Michel Foucault’s critique of Western neoliberal societies. Confessions of the Flesh provides the heretofore missing link that ties Foucault’s late writings on subjectivity to his earlier critique of power. Foucault identifies in Augustine’s treatment of marital sexual relations the moment of birth of the modern legal actor and of the legalization of social relations. With the appearance of the modern legal subject, Foucault’s critique of modern Western societies is complete: it is now possible to see how the later emergence of an all-knowing homo œconomicus strips the State of knowledge and thus deals a fatal blow to its legitimacy. The appearance of both the modern legal actor and homo œconomicus makes it possible to fold the entire four-volume History of Sexuality back into Foucault’s earlier critique of punitive and biopolitical power. And it now challenges us to interrogate how we, contemporary subjects, are shaped in such a way as to implicate ourselves—both willingly and unwittingly—in the social order within which we find ourselves and that, through the interaction of knowledge-power-subjectivity, we reproduce.","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"48-70"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42445580","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Marcelo Hoffman (special ed.), Foucault and the Politics of Resistance in Brazil. The Carceral Notebooks 13. (2017-2018). pp. 230. http://www.thecarceral.org/journal-vol13.html.","authors":"P. Dotto","doi":"10.22439/fs.v1i28.6078","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.v1i28.6078","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47588719","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Preface to Symposium on Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson's \"Genealogies of Terrorism\"","authors":"Colin Koopman","doi":"10.22439/FS.V1I28.6068","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/FS.V1I28.6068","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"1-3"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48143081","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Foucault’s remarks concerning psychoanalysis are ambivalent and even prima facie contradictory, at times lauding Freud and Lacan as anti-humanists, at others being severely critical of their imbrication within psychiatric power. This has allowed a profusion of interpretations of his position, between so-called ‘Freudo-Foucauldians’ at one extreme and Foucauldians who condemn psychoanalysis as such at the other. In this article, I begin by surveying Foucault’s biographical and theoretical relationship to psychoanalysis and the secondary scholarship on this relationship to date. I pay particular attention to the discussion of the relationship in feminist scholarship and queer theory, and that by psychoanalytic thinkers, as well as attending to the particular focus in the secondary literature on Foucault’s late work and his relationship to the figure of Jacques Lacan. I conclude that Foucault’s attitude to psychoanalysis varies with context, and that some of his criticisms of psychoanalysis in part reflect an ignorance of the variety of psychoanalytic thought, particularly in its Lacanian form. I thus argue that Foucault sometimes tended to overestimate the extent of the incompatibility of his approach with psychoanalytic ones and that there is ultimately no serious incompatibility there. Rather, psychoanalysis represents a substantively different mode of inquiry to Foucault’s work, which is neither straightforwardly exclusive nor inclusive of psychoanalytic insights.
{"title":"Foucault On Psychoanalysis: Missed Encounter or Gordian Knot?","authors":"M. Kelly","doi":"10.22439/FS.V1I28.6075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/FS.V1I28.6075","url":null,"abstract":"Foucault’s remarks concerning psychoanalysis are ambivalent and even prima facie contradictory, at times lauding Freud and Lacan as anti-humanists, at others being severely critical of their imbrication within psychiatric power. This has allowed a profusion of interpretations of his position, between so-called ‘Freudo-Foucauldians’ at one extreme and Foucauldians who condemn psychoanalysis as such at the other. In this article, I begin by surveying Foucault’s biographical and theoretical relationship to psychoanalysis and the secondary scholarship on this relationship to date. I pay particular attention to the discussion of the relationship in feminist scholarship and queer theory, and that by psychoanalytic thinkers, as well as attending to the particular focus in the secondary literature on Foucault’s late work and his relationship to the figure of Jacques Lacan. I conclude that Foucault’s attitude to psychoanalysis varies with context, and that some of his criticisms of psychoanalysis in part reflect an ignorance of the variety of psychoanalytic thought, particularly in its Lacanian form. I thus argue that Foucault sometimes tended to overestimate the extent of the incompatibility of his approach with psychoanalytic ones and that there is ultimately no serious incompatibility there. Rather, psychoanalysis represents a substantively different mode of inquiry to Foucault’s work, which is neither straightforwardly exclusive nor inclusive of psychoanalytic insights.","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"96-119"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46568247","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"C. Heike Schotten, Queer Terror: Life, Death, and Desire in the Settler Colony. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 272 pp. ISBN: 9780231187473.","authors":"Yin-An Chen","doi":"10.22439/FS.V1I28.6079","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/FS.V1I28.6079","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"169-173"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49209972","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Review Essay on: Simeon Wade, Foucault in California [A True Story – Wherein the Great French Philosopher Drops Acid in the Valley of Death], foreword by Heather Dundas. (Berkeley, California: Heyday, 2019). 144 pp, ISBN 9781597144636 (hardback).
{"title":"Foucault on Drugs: The Personal, the Ethical and the Political in Foucault in California","authors":"Kurt Borg","doi":"10.22439/FS.V1I28.6077","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/FS.V1I28.6077","url":null,"abstract":"Review Essay on: Simeon Wade, Foucault in California [A True Story – Wherein the Great French Philosopher Drops Acid in the Valley of Death], foreword by Heather Dundas. (Berkeley, California: Heyday, 2019). 144 pp, ISBN 9781597144636 (hardback).","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"142-164"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42560565","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}