Foucault’s Keystone: Confessions of the Flesh

Authors

Bernard E. Harcourt, Columbia Law SchoolFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2021

DOI

https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.vi29.6214

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 oeconomicus strips the State of knowledge and thus deals a fatal blow to its legitimacy. The appearance of both the modern legal actor and homo oeconomicus 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.

Disciplines

Gender and Sexuality | Law | Public Law and Legal Theory | Sexuality and the Law

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Bernard E. Harcourt, Foucault’s Keystone: Confessions of the Flesh, 29 Foucault Stud. 48 (2021).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/2592