You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
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), Frédéric Gros 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 in 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, and Epictetus. I would add, however, that the difference is