Reflections on Michel Foucault’s Les aveux de la chair [Paris, Gallimard, 2018].

Eng. Tr.,  The History of Sexuality: 4: Confessions of the Flesh, trans. By Robert Hurley, Pernguin UK 2021.

            It wasn’t until 34 years after Foucault’s death in 1984 that what would have been the last (fourth) volume of his History of Sexuality was definitively reconstructed.  In Confessions of the Flesh (2018), Frederic Gros (ed.) pulls from Foucault’s original and edited manuscripts to give us this long awaited volume. Here we have the place where Foucault weighs in on pre-medieval Christian conceptions of sexuality.

            It should be recalled that, unlike so many historians today, Foucault in his History only marginally dealt with sexual customs in the Western world.  He was not seeking to reconstruct how the general population behaved in bed, who they married, etc.; he was occupied with a theoretical elaboration—by philosophers, moralists, theologians—regarding sexuality.  Rather than History of Sexuality, it might have more appropriately been called History of Discourses on Sexuality. Basically, Foucault is aristocratic: what counts is what “philosophers” in a broad sense have elaborated on the relation between the subject and sexual drives.  Foucault’s decision seems like the historiographical equivalent of the Jesuits’ missionary strategy:  the Jesuits did not waste time converting the general population, but rather their prince. Foucault takes for granted then that even sexual practices throughout various epochs sooner or later conform to the meditative art on the argument.

            Foucault makes it clear that the austerity of the “Christian pastoral of daily life” is not a Christian invention, but essentially continues the philosophical morals of pagan authors, in particular those of the stoics like Plutarch, Musonius, Seneca, or Epictetus. I would add, however, that the difference is that while pagan ascetic ethics were indeed reserved for a very cultured class, for somehow superior beings, Christian ethics were intended to be a directive for all Christians, and thus prospectively for all human beings.  Ancient Christian ethics popularized, I would say even democratized, an ascesis that in paganism was not intended to educate the masses.

            Foucault’s thesis is that Christianity’s difference with respect to other ethics intended to control one’s own and others’ sensuality, is that it is carried out by means of a confession (and this even before the practice of confession was institutionalized as a sacrament). By confessing, an individual truth is manifested. “Confess your faults in order to destroy your faults,” St. John Chrysostom said.  The explicit enunciation to the other of one’s own sin, and thus of one’s own guilty desire, is a fundamental operant in Christianity.  For example, according to St. Ambrose, God punishes Cain not so much for the fratricide he committed, but for his impudence—for having lied to God, for having not admitted his crime before Him.  And the confession (aveu) is not simply the communication to the other of something the subject already knows about himself, but rather the inner discovery of one’s own guilt.  It is our discovery of ourselves as sinners, and our acknowledgement of this before an other, or Other (God).  “Thus the sin, at the very moment that it infringes on God’s truth or His law,” Foucault writes, “incurs an obligation of truth […] At the heart of the economy of guilt, Christianity has placed the duty to tell the truth.” “In Christianity, this ‘telling the truth’ about our blame occupies a far more important place—and in any place plays a far more complex role—than in the majority of other religions […] that require the confession of sins.” [1][Translated by Benvenuto] The sinner is condemned not for his sin, but for not having admitted and confessed it.  “The duty of truth, like belief and confession, is at the center of Christianity.”[2]   Foucault may not mention it explicitly in this text, but it is evident what he is thinking: that the ethics of psychoanalysis today—to succeed in sharing one’s own unconscious, admitting one’s unspeakable phantasies (what Lacan will call “full speech”)—derives in some way precisely from this Christian specificity that links faith to a practice of speaking the truth.  Psychoanalysis may have Jewish roots in Freud, but it carries on, in a Lacanian key, a Christian strategy.

            To describe Christian thought surrounding sexuality means to recreate the way in which, for centuries, theologians have had to confront various puzzles; and in particular, how they have sought to find some coherence in how Church ethics proceeds and reconciles Holy Scripture with rational argumentation—one puzzle being how to merge an exaltation of virginity with a certain belated sanctification of marriage.

As early as St. Paul, virginity and chastity were situated on a higher level with respect to marriage (which at the time was not even a sacrament).  So why, then, did God give this institution to humans?  Contrary to today’s Church, in its early centuries, Christian ethics did not value marriage as an instrument of procreation.  In an era when the end of time appeared imminent, the need to reproduce the species was certainly not at the top of theological worries.  Paradoxically, marriage was considered above all a way to repress concupiscence and exalt chastity, given that a married Christian man would content himself with his own wife and avoid fornication (that is to say, sexual relations with people outside the marriage).

            In its early centuries, we find marriage as an indissoluble bond thanks to which the body of each spouse belongs not to his/herself, but to the other.  In a culture in which the woman was considered inferior to man, Christian marriage instead introduces an extraordinary dyscrasia: a perfect sexual parity between a man and a woman, neither of whom (not even the man!) can shirk their obligatory sexual duty.  In short, marriage is a form of sexual slavery where each spouse is at once slave and master of the other, with the right to use sexually the body of the other; so that if marriage was intended to place a limit on the excesses of concupiscence, then this is asking the other to ensure this limitation.  “If you wish to abstain (from sex) as agreed with your spouse—St. John Chrysostom prescribed—then may it not last long.”

            So, for Christian thinking at that time, marriage was an effect of the fall following Original Sin: in earthly paradise there had been no marriage because—and this is one of the first theories put forth—there were no sexual relations.  Coitus implies concupiscence, which is the effect of the fall.  And this concupiscence has condemned humans to the sex trade and individual death (the sexual relation was viewed as a form of corruption entirely similar to death; and the orgasm was seen as moving towards the limits of death).  But then, what did God have in mind when he told the first two humans to “go forth and multiply”?  And moreover, why did God create woman, as if Adam were not enough?  Genesis says, “so that woman can help man,” but not in the sense of having sex, because then it would not have been paradise.  But then how would procreation have taken place in paradise?  Without a sexual relationship?  But if there were no need for a sexual relationship for reproduction, then why our sexual difference?

            Foucault shows the evolution of this problem from St. John Chrysostom onwards, up to what appears to him to be the most sophisticated final solution, that of Augustine of Hippo.  St. Augustine hypothesized that Adam and Eve did indeed have intercourse in paradise, but without concupiscence: they had to “have sex” much like our hands screw on the wheel of a cart, or our feet walk, purely voluntary activities without any implication of sensual desire at their source.  For that epoch, one’s genitals were organs controlled by pure human will, like our arms and legs.  Because this is the essential distinction for St. Augustine (as it will later be for a good part of the successive Church): the soul is, above all, free will, while sensuality, and in particular erotic sensuality, is constriction, and takes the form of a physical need.  After the fall, humans—and the male in particular—lost the free use of their genitalia, which function only if stimulated by the libido.

            The History of Sexuality as a whole should be read against a background that Foucault only partly clarified in the first volume, The will to knowledge, and what I would define as distancing himself from the culture of the liberal-libertine denunciation of asceticism—a culture from which Foucault himself originated.  This culture, quite diffused in intellectual circles, finds its mentors essentially in Nietzsche, Mill, and Freud, and tends to view the ascetic vocation—first pagan and later Christian, extending up to the “Victorian” 19^th century—as a “false prejudice,” to use a much-abused term today in certain countries.  It carries on the enlightened criticism of prejudices, for example, that religious faiths are superstitions that need to make way for scientific rationality, and analogously that the repression (secular as well as religious) of concupiscence results from a cognitive error (the idea being that sensuality damages one’s health) or from a psychic lesion (that is, the effect of a morbid repression of drives).  The control of the libido is a pathogen, and asceticism is an error, or a pathogen, or simultaneously both.  For a century or so, this re-evaluation of sensuality and of bodily pleasures (the term flesh is no longer used) has ultimately influenced that same Christian theology and ethics that today appear much better disposed towards instinctual drives (as long as adultery is not involved, sexuality tends to be sanctified today by churches).  In this secular (what I call liberal-libertine) perspective of the seven capital sins, at least lust and gluttony should be subtracted—the two sins most intimately connected to our drives.  If one considers that at the end of the 19^th century, positivist (and hence non-religious) doctors were obsessed by infantile masturbation as the cause of various psycho-physical disturbances (and that it was thus imperative to use all methods possible to prevent it), one can ponder how our present-day mentality (largely shaped by sexual liberty) is distant.  In effect, over this last century in the Christian West, utilitarianist philosophy has prevailed (Bentham, Mill, etc.), according to which the human being is essentially inclined towards achieving pleasure and avoiding displeasure.  Seeking pleasure and avoiding pain essentially describes what the human species does, but it is also what the human being in some way should seek to do.  According to the utilitarianist (even sexual) ethic, the juxtaposition between soul and body, or between will and flesh, is cancelled, because pleasure and displeasure pertain at once to the body and to the mind.

Thus, the fear of concupiscence appears in a certain way an enigma to our culture.  In effect, condemning the fear of concupiscence still does not explain it.  How is it that in the West, from Plato on up to Victorian morality, this culture of moral or medical rejection of sensuality flourished—although truthfully without always prevailing?  Foucault, as historian, does not propose any explanatory hypotheses.  But his historiography puts us on the path of, perhaps, not a response, but at least a more perspicuous reconstruction of the reason for these various sexual “cultures.”

             What St. Augustine said, that intercourse in earthy paradise did not entail concupiscence, appears crucial to me because it reveals how, at the center of Christian reflection, there is precisely what we would call—after Nietzsche—the will for power.  (Furthermore, all of Foucault’s work is substantially the application of the Nietzschean doctrine of Wille zur Macht to the field of historiography.)  What both pagan philosophers as well as Christian theologians fear about sensuality is its being pathos, passion, passive submission to desire.  The soul and its qualities become identified with the conscious will of man: the intelligible opposes itself to the perceptible, just as human free will opposes itself to the servitude of sensuality.  The libido is considered a force external to will, that conditions it, and annuls it.  The soul, like free will, is constantly threatened by the risk of being submerged by the flesh.  Starting from stoic asceticism all the way up to Christianity, there is this steady conception that identifies sensual desires with servitude, and the willing consciousness with mastery.  A good part of thinking in ancient times (extending up to not so long ago in the West) consisted of a theory-practice which sought to assure the mastery of the subject over himself, and which thus viewed sexual desires (even those purely sensual) somewhat as we today view substance abuse, from alcohol to cocaine: constraints of freedom stemming from the body itself.  In this perspective, the asceticism of part of Western culture becomes a comprehensible strategy even for our modern times: it is part of a certain project which puts the freedom of human consciousness at the very core.  It is a project of separation from one’s own flesh insofar as it is needy.

            One might ask then if this means that contemporary culture has renounced the will for power.  An absurd affirmation, given how today more than ever our culture is assailed by the control of one’s own body and mind, even if by means of technology—that is to say, by an ever more scientific treatment of the body and mind.  Hence the passion for diets, gyms, cosmetic treatments, mental tests—in short, for fitness.  The maximization of the efficiency of body and mind are today also part of popular culture.  But the difference, with respect to the past, is that this fitness, along the lines of utilitarianist philosophy, is applied to both sensual and intellectual life, without any ethical-ontological barrier between the two: it is necessary to maximize orgasms as much as it is necessary to maximize one’s logical-mathematical capacities or one’s personal patrimony.  Sex, money, power, knowledge: everything is to be maximized.  We need to be fantastic lovers, excellent businessmen, creative gourmands, or the best philosophers in the academic field. This modern will for power no longer distinguishes between the soul and flesh.  Sensual desires should be satisfied as much as possible, as long as they do not damage the general fitness of the individual.

            Does this mean the end of anything pastoral in our culture?  Foucault devotes much attention to what was a traditional theme in ancient cultures: political power depicted as the relation between the shepherd and his flock of sheep.  The good king, or for the Christian world the bishop or pope, is the good shepherd of his human flock.  As Foucault notes, this does not at all imply that the members of the flock are indistinguishable: a good shepherd knows that his own sheep are not all alike, that each requires to be treated individually.  “Omnes et singulatim,”[3] wrote Foucault; the flock may be considered in its totality, but every single member is cared for.  And the good shepherd, just as in the biblical parable (Luke 15, 3-7; Matthew 18, 12-14), must know how to abandon the flock to save the single missing sheep.  The image of the king-shepherd or of the priest-shepherd should be transposed even within the subject himself: we should be shepherds of ourselves, if we consider our desires as a flock of sensualities. 

So, is there no room in our liberal and capitalistic societies for any pastoral?

             Even in today’s culture, there exists an intellectual and scientific elite, like philosophers and theologians such as St. Chrysostom or St. Augustine who were the elites of their time.  But back then, the great masses were mostly peasants, not exactly ascetic, and in short, the average person’s behavior was much as in the past before Christianism.  Foucault, as we mentioned, only analyzes the work of the elites.  And so, what does today’s liberal-libertine elite think, including maybe even Foucault (and myself)?

            I believe that the modern ideal is creativity. Whether as a lover, a corporate manager, a Michelin chef, a scientist or a tech industry executive, the important thing is to be creative.  It’s not enough to maximize orgasms, money, or investments: what is important is to have all aspects of life (intellectual pursuits, work, sex, and family) be creative. In this sense, the emphasis put by the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott on creativity, or the surrealist conception of an artistic creativity that belongs to each of us if only we can unlock our unconscious, are eloquent expressions of modern ideals. Thus, one can tranquilly give in to sensual desires, as long as one handles them creatively and not in a flat and repetitive way.  The libido and drives (the unconscious) are not to be removed but absorbed and integrated as an opportunity and source of creative energy. In the past, up until the late 19^th century, primacy had been given to willpower.  Today, however, the motto can no longer be, “I wanted, always wanted, very strongly wanted” (a motto by the writer Vittorio Alfieri, familiar to all Italians), but rather “I created, always created, vastly created.”  The creator of aesthetic or technical works—the original thinker, the scientific discoverer—all are idealized figures today, even if they led a rather messy sexual life.  Because what is important today, above all, is to be original, which is a byproduct of creativity.  The dichotomy is no longer between perceptible and intelligible, or sensuality and willpower, but between creativity and repetitiveness, or originality and conformism.

Ancient asceticism was, as in any other repressive culture, an attempt to control the destructive potential of sexuality.  Given that human sexuality has a constructive (if for no other reason than as a means of reproduction) as well as a destructive side, every culture in its own way seeks to reduce to a minimum this latter side.  Let us not forget that even Freud, in Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego, described the besotted couple as something antisocial, and capable of shattering the social bond.  Every culture, from the most primitive to the most modern, must confront the Unbehagen in der Sexualität, inseparable from the Unbehagen in der Kultur.  Sexuality is not only a source of great pleasure, but also of devastating suffering.

Christian morality, founded on indissoluble marriage and monogamy, starts from the biological fact that there is an almost equal number of men and women: if everyone were able of contenting themselves with their partners of the other sex, social life would be completely tranquil.  Naturally, this is only true on paper, and in fact, as we well know, there are men who have many women and others who have none, and one could say the same thing for women.  In fact, sexuality is a societal loose cannon, destroying families, generating crimes of passion, wasting time (in courtship, flirting, fights, painful divorces, etc.).  Both Christian and secular moralities tend towards an optimum; for Christianity, this optimum is this idea of a sexually pacified society, meanwhile, for the secular, it is disposed to pay the price for a certain sexual anarchy, as long as this sexuality is channeled, so to speak, towards creative goals.  In either case, whether asceticism or permissiveness, each sexual culture tends to optimize the sexual trade.  We could say that liberal-libertine willpower is more sophisticated than asceticism, in the sense that it is even more ambitious and demanding: it is only by giving in to one’s senses, surrendering to them, that the subject can accede to a superior power—that of creativity.

            But creativity is an ideal for many, maybe most, that is no less difficult to satisfy than Christian penitential ascesis.  Many have no interest in being creative, instead preferring a tranquil life, ordinary satisfactions, settling into a generic group wellbeing.  To the eyes of most, the elite appear as advocates of a far too demanding pastoral—something that, perhaps, could explain the political turn of events in the West in recent years.