The book he forbade, published thirty-six years on: Foucault's fourth volume

Michel Foucault's will comes down to a single sentence: no posthumous publication.

It was one of the firmest prohibitions in philosophical publishing. And for years it held.

Then an exception was made — and the story of that exception is as instructive as the contents of the book.

The journey of a manuscript#

Foucault had settled on the title Les aveux de la chair — Confessions of the Flesh — as early as 1977. The volume he then planned was to be about the Catholic manuals of confession of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

He delivered the manuscript to Gallimard in 1982.

When he died in 1984, the publisher halted the book in accordance with his will.

It appeared in February 2018, edited by Frédéric Gros. Thirty-six years had passed — thirty-six from delivery to publication, thirty-four from his death.

The decision was not uncontested. How Foucault's estate should be managed has been argued over among philosophers for years. But in practice the position was this: the Collège de France lectures fell under the same prohibition, and they had long since been published. Thirteen years of lectures — from Society Must Be Defended to The Courage of Truth — had all been transcribed from the recordings.

The ban, in other words, had already eroded.

An unexpected book#

When the book was opened, the modern period readers expected was not there.

Confessions of the Flesh deals with the early Church Fathers, from the second century to the fifth. It follows the formation of Christian sexual morality and asks what it meant historically.

Three parts: the formation of a new experience, virginity, marriage.

For readers of Foucault this came as a surprise — though in retrospect it is consistent.

The second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality (The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, 1984) had likewise dealt not with the modern period but with Greece and Rome. Halfway through the project, Foucault had gone centuries backwards.

The fourth volume is the last step of that retreat: the passage from the Graeco-Roman world to Christianity.

The central thesis#

What Foucault is tracing is not a simple history of morals.

The question he asks is this: when, and how, did the human being become a creature obliged to tell the truth about itself, continually?

In Graeco-Roman ethics the matter was one of governing oneself — the measured use of pleasures, self-mastery, life as an art. There too there was a "work upon the self"; but it did not require one to decipher oneself.

With Christianity something new appears: confession. Governing oneself is no longer enough. One must recognise the desire within, name it and tell it to another.

For Foucault this is the birthplace of the modern subject. The obligation to narrate, explain and make oneself transparent — the line that runs from therapy to the curriculum vitae, from the questionnaire to social media — is the secularised continuation of that practice.

The Augustine file we published today shows the other face of the thesis. Augustine's Confessions is the discovery of the inner life in Western thought. On Foucault's reading the very same text is also the founding document of a technology.

The two do not conflict. That a practice can be at once liberating and binding is the basic observation of Foucault's entire body of work.

Why it is being discussed now#

Because 2026 is the centenary of Foucault's birth and the fiftieth anniversary of the first volume of The History of Sexuality.

That is precisely the rationale of The Foucault Century symposium, which we covered today: the posthumous texts have made rereading Foucault unavoidable.

And this is not an ordinary case of new material coming to light.

The standard portrait of Foucault — the analyst of power, discourse and normalisation — rests on the work of his middle period. The late texts show a different Foucault: a thinker concerned with the subject's possibilities of constituting itself.

As we noted in the Foucault file this column published on 1 September, this is not a break but a completion: if the subject has been constituted, then the possibility of constituting it anew exists as well.

A note on reading#

The book is not an easy text and should not be read as an introduction to Foucault.

It engages closely with the patristic literature: Tertullian, Cyprian of Carthage, Methodius, John Cassian, Augustine. Foucault reads these texts with a philologist's care.

The right order is this: The History of Sexuality I (The Will to Knowledge) first, then II and III, and IV last of all. And, if possible, alongside the lectures published as The Hermeneutics of the Subject.

---

Details: Michel Foucault · Histoire de la sexualité IV: Les aveux de la chair · edited by Frédéric Gros · Gallimard, February 2018 · published in English as Confessions of the Flesh.

Note: Foucault's Collège de France lectures and much of The History of Sexuality have been translated into Turkish.