Confessions of the Flesh by Michel Foucault

Author:Michel Foucault [Foucault, Michel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

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Should we see a strengthening of the “prohibitions,” an increased valorization of complete continence, a growing disqualification of the sexual act, from Tertullian to Cassian? The problem must undoubtedly not be framed in those terms.

The organization of the monastic institution and the dimorphism that was thus established between the life of monks and that of laypersons introduced important changes into the problem of the renunciation of sexual relations. Correlatively, they led to the development of very complex technologies of the self. In this way there appeared, in the practice of renunciation, a code of living and a mode of analysis that, despite visible continuities, exhibit important differences from the past. In Tertullian the state of virginity implied an external and internal attitude of renunciation of the world, complemented by rules of apparel, conduct, and lifestyle. In the great mystique of virginity that developed starting in the third century the rigor of renunciation (on the theme, already present in Tertullian, of the union with Christ) turns the negative form of continence into the promise of spiritual marriage. In Cassian who, once again, is much more a witness than an inventor, there occurs a kind of dividing in two or drawing back that brings out all of the depth of an interior scene.

But this doesn’t involve the interiorization of a catalogue of prohibitions, replacing prohibition of the act with prohibition of the intention. It’s a matter of opening up a domain (whose importance was already underscored by Gregory of Nyssa or especially Basil of Ancyra) which is that of thought, with its irregular and spontaneous flow, its images, its memories, its perceptions, with its impulses and impressions that are communicated from the body to the soul and from the soul to the body. What is involved, then, is not a code of permitted and forbidden acts, but a whole technique for monitoring, analyzing, and diagnosing thought, its origins, its qualities, its dangers, its powers of seduction, and all the dark forces that may hide beneath the appearance it presents. And if the objective, finally, is indeed to expel all that is impure or an inducer of impurity, it can be attained only by a vigilance that never disarms, a suspicion that must be directed everywhere and at every moment against oneself. The question must always be raised in a manner that will ferret out all the secret forms of “fornication” that may be hiding in the deepest recesses of the soul.

In this asceticism of chastity one can recognize a process of “subjectification” that pushes a sexual ethic centered on acts far into the background. But two things need to be emphasized straightaway. This subjectification is inseparable from a knowledge process that makes the obligation to tell the truth about oneself a necessary and permanent condition of this ethic. If there is a subjectification, it implies an indefinite objectification of oneself by oneself—indefinite in the sense that, never acquired once and for all, it has no end in time;

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