THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY, VOLUME 4: CONFESSIONS OF THE FLESH

By Michel Foucault

When embarking on examining the history of human sexuality, French philosopher Foucault intended to write and translate it into a sevenvolume historical saga, which is now widely known as The History Of Sexuality.

Highly acclaimed as a ground-breaking intellectual analysis, the first three volumes have transformed our understanding of sexuality and offered foundational thinking for many academic disciplines including sociology, political science, gender studies and, of course, queer theory.

Just before he died in 1984, Foucault completed the fourth volume draft. Unfortunately, it went unpublished in the French language until 2018. Finally, three years later, the translation into English of Confessions Of The Flesh, reveals Foucault’s tremendous legacy on the modern intellectual landscape.

In the first three volumes, Foucault looked at the emergence of sexual identities when modern science began to classify and name perversity and subsequently scrutinised Ancient Greek history to highlight how the self’s interiority can be continuously shaped in relation to external knowledge.

In this book, Foucault takes us to the early Christian fathers’ thoughts, which eventually shaped the connection between sexuality, desires, selfhood and divinity. Making this book relevant to the contemporary debates of sexuality is Foucault’s discussion on consent, encouraging us to see how the idea of consent gave birth to selfhood with an ability to “desire” something.

Grand and sharp as usual, Confessions Of The Flesh continues to mark Foucault as one of our time’s most influential thinkers.