The History of Sexuality, Volume 4: Confessions of the Flesh by Michel Foucault (review)

Reviewed by: The History of Sexuality, Volume 4: Confessions of the Flesh by Michel Foucault Daniel J. Schultz Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 4: Confessions of the Flesh. Ed. Frédéric Gros. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 2021. 416 pages. When Volumes 2 and 3 of Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality appeared in 1984, a publisher's insert announced the imminent arrival of a fourth volume, Confessions of the Flesh. The text was advertised as dealing "with the experience of the flesh in the first centuries of Christianity, and with the role played in it by the hermeneutic, and purifying decipherment, of desire" (vii). Foucault died in June 1984, and the promised fourth and final volume, scheduled to appear in October of that year, did not arrive. Daniel Defert, Foucault's longtime partner, had the unfinished manuscript placed in a bank vault where it sat for over three decades. Until now. [End Page 413] After its long repose in the vault, Histoire de la sexualité 4: Les aveux de la chair has seen the light of day; the unfinished French manuscript, edited by Frédéric Gros, was published by Gallimard in 2018. In 2021, Robert Hurley's English translation was released: The History of Sexuality, Volume 4: Confessions of the Flesh (Pantheon). The English text is the subject of this review essay. Before his death, Foucault declared "no posthumous publication." To his intimate acquaintances, he remarked, "don't pull a Max Brod on me," referring to Kafka's literary executor who famously disobeyed Kafka's wish to have all his unpublished writings burned. Initially, Foucault's directive was interpreted to mean no posthumous publication; nearly forty years out, it is now taken to mean publish everything. How did we get here? The interpretive thaw and slow reversal began in 1994, when the massive four volume edition of Dits et écrits was published (later brought into English in an abbreviated three volume Essential Works). This included interviews, essays, reviews, lectures, and other assorted writings, all of which had been published in Foucault's lifetime (and thus in technical conformity with the prohibition on publication). Around the same time, bootleg transcriptions of publicly accessible recordings of Foucault's lecture course material began circulating. Given that the recordings were already accessible, the decision was made to produce officially authorized high quality transcriptions complete with scholarly editorial apparatuses. To do this scholars and editorial teams received permission from Defert and Foucault's family to consult the original course manuscripts to fill in and smooth out the audio transcription. The floodgates were opened. The result has been the publication, beginning in the late nineties and extending into the 2010s of all thirteen Collège de France lecture courses. Publication now continues unabated of other courses, lectures, and seminars he delivered in places such as Louvain, Berkeley, Vermont, Toronto, and Dartmouth to name just a few. The decision to publish Confessions of the Flesh emerged in this context. It is worth pausing here to note the allure of the existence of an unread Foucault manuscript sitting in a bank vault and the way it stages readerly desire around a forbidden object, a promise, and a secret. It is tempting to imagine that he wrote this volume precisely so it wouldn't be published, wouldn't be read—the unread Volume 4, the talisman that unlocks the mysteries of Volumes 2 and 3. One can imagine this unread text as a coda to Volume 1, a provocation, a joke, a feint, a play, a way for us to think that our liberation is at stake in being able to read it. Is this not precisely the readerly posture Foucault anticipates in the opening pages of The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction [La volonté de savoir], where he ambushes the reader's desire for a story of sexual liberation through a parodic rehearsal of the repressive hypothesis? "For a long time, the story goes. …" (3). In her essay "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value," Gayatri Spivak [End Page 414] reminds us that "one of the determinations of the question of value is the predication of the subject," adding...

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