L’occhio e l’orecchio. Michel Foucault e «Le confessioni della carne»

The Eye and the Ear. Michel Foucault and the «Confessions of the Flesh» · The fourth volume of the History of Sexuality reveals some decisive problematizations of Foucault’s power analytics. Displaced from its preliminary inclusion in the judicial framework and from its contamination with the inquisitorial practices of torture - a theme that recurs be- tween Surveiller et punir and the Courses of 1974-75 – ‘the confession’, in the double mean- ing of the sacramental practice (aveu) and of the ‘profession’; of faith (confession), returns to the centre of Foucauldian research, as a ‘governed’ form of veridiction and access to that particular dimension of Christian subjectivity - the ‘western’ form of subjectivity, Foucault was to recognize - which, starting from the first centuries and not to date from the post-tri- dentine era, decisively marks the culture to which we belong. This research on Christianity is only preliminary and serves not only to set up a genealogy of the techniques of veridiction historically functional to the emergence of the governed form of subjectivity, but also to formulate the problem of that ‘politics of ourselves’ that will occupy until the last Foucault. The research conducted between 1980 and 1982 therefore maintains a transitional role. And it is probably for this reason that he gave up publishing Les aveux de la chair.