Sex, truth, and law: Rereading Foucault's <i>History of Sexuality</i> after volume 4, <i>The Confessions of the Flesh</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Foucault's historical studies were motivated by problems he identified in the present and there is no reason to think that History of Sexuality is different in this regard.1 But that raises a question no reader of The Confessions of the Flesh can escape: How is a scholarly 426-page treatise on the Church Fathers relevant to the contemporary world, or, at least, to concerns that emerged from Foucault's own historical present? 2 The question is only highlighted by the absence of explicit links between the past and the present in Foucault's text, which was published posthumously, in 2018, as the fourth and final volume of History of Sexuality.This book had been advertised as forthcoming already in 1984, when volumes 2 and 3 were published weeks before Foucault's death.3 Therefore, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that only now, in light of the perspective the long-awaited final volume offers, are we in a position to assess Foucault's History of Sexuality project as a whole.At the same time, this broader context is vital for understanding the philosophical significance of volume 4, which remains, no doubt due to its unfinished state, strikingly silent about the philosophical aim of the meticulous historical work, as Foucault himself understood it.Therefore, the question of contemporary significance needs to be examined both with respect to the project overall and, specifically, by asking what role the analyses of baptism, repentance, libido, virginity, and marriage, which fill out volume 4, might play in it.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.052 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".