(PDF) Foucault and Brown: Disciplinary Intersections

In February 2018 the fourth volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality was finally published. Les aveux de la chair [Confessions of the Flesh] was edited by Frédéric Gros, and appeared in the same Gallimard series as Volumes 1, 2 and 3. The book deals with the early Christian Church Fathers of the second to fifth centuries. This essay reviews the book in relation to Foucault’s other work, showing how it sits in sequence with Volumes 2 and 3, but also partly bridges the chronological and conceptual gap to Volume 1. It discusses the state of the manuscript and whether it should have been published, given Foucault’s stipulation of ‘no posthumous publications’. It outlines the contents of the book, which is in three parts, on the formation of a new experience, on virginity and on marriage. There are also some important supplementary materials included. The review discusses how it begins to answer previously unanswered questions about Foucault’s work, and offers some suggestions ab...

This article now published in History: The Journal of the Historical Association looks at why many historians of sexuality appear dissatisfied with the level of theoretical precision in the field by considering the reception of Foucault’s approach and why some parts of it have been more difficult to assimilate within the historical discipline than others. It proposes that Foucault has been only partially understood by most historians of sexuality with the result that the properties of his unique disciplined ascesis have been under-considered. The paper argues that Foucault shared many of the critical and ethical goals that are inherent to certain types of historical writing, noting where he diverged from them in ways that have problematized his reception among sexuality historians. It argues that Foucault's own ascesis or ‘transformation of self’ as an intellectual might be better appreciated as a unique set of scholarly virtues expressed in his concerns about teleology, presentism, and the critical practice of ‘history of the present’ that characterize his work on sexuality. The document found here is a final author version and the published version may differ slightly from it. If citing, please use the final version: Alison Downham Moore, "Foucault’s Scholarly Virtues and Sexuality Historiography," History: The Journal of the Historical Association 105, no.366 (July 2020): 446-469. Doi: 10.1111/1468-229X.13015

Summary In this article, I propose a different reading of Foucault’s newly published work than suggested by the publishers and in initial reviews. I question the claim that it represents the fourth volume of the History of Sexuality and rather propose to regard it as an intended second volume. Comparing Foucault’s final plan of publication of the series with the background and stated purpose of Les aveux de la chair, I hold that it is part of a different philosophical project than volumes two and three. Foucault wrote Les aveux de la chair to explore the roots of modern power in the experiences that early Christianity occasioned. This makes the work relevant for current theology and the philosophy of religion.

© Niki Kasumi Clements ISSN: 1832-5203 DOI: https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.vi32.6701 Foucault Studies, No. 32, 1-27, October 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ ARTICLE Foucault and Brown: Disciplinary Intersections NIKI KASUMI CLEMENTS Rice University, United States of America ABSTRACT. From the 1981 “Sexuality and Solitude” to the 1982 “Le combat de la chasteté” to the 1984 History of Sexuality, Volume 2, Michel Foucault’s published works have long recognized the influence of the historian of late antiquity, Peter Brown. With the 2018 publication of Foucault’s draft of Les Aveux de la chair (Confessions of the Flesh) bearing no mention of Brown, the depth of this influence requires further elaboration. Despite Brown not appearing in the “Index of Modern Authors,” Confessions of the Flesh reflects Foucault’s debt to Brown for his readings of Augustine of Hippo and his conceptualizations of sexuality and subjectivity. Analyzing archival evidence alongside biographical narratives helps us better understand Brown’s vital influence as Foucault was shifting his History of Sexuality project, his archival practices, and his genealogy of subjectivity. Appreciating the textual and conceptual engagement between Foucault and Brown thus illuminates not only Confessions of the Flesh as Volume 4 in the History of Sexuality series but also the conceptual and methodological developments of both scholars in their disciplinary intersections. Keywords: Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo, Confessions of the Flesh, genealogy of subjectivity1 INTRODUCTION In August 2019, researching in the Fonds Foucault at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, I came across a twelve-page lecture by Peter Brown titled “Augustine and Sexuality” in Box 84 Les aveux de la chair, Folder 11. Archival encounters often produce surprise and open questions, yet this find was particularly moving, since this folder carries the note by Daniel Defert: « Chemise trouvée sur la table de Michel ».2 Less legibly The author thanks Peter Brown, James Bernauer, Elizabeth Clark, Philippe Chevallier, James Faubion, Charles Mathewes, Elias Bongmba, John Mulligan, the Foucault estate, the editors of Foucault Studies, Laurence Le Bras, and the conservators and staff in the manuscript room at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France at the Richelieu site. 2 Folder for Les aveux de la chair, NAF 28730, Box 84, Folder 11, Fonds Foucault, Bibliothèque Nationale de France (B.N.F.), Paris, France (hereafter cited as B.N.F. Fonds Foucault). 1 Foucault and Brown: Disciplinary Intersections underneath is written: « voir si exercice fait partie des Aveux ».3 These notes suggest Michel Foucault had this folder ready to hand at the end of his life. And these materials might have contributed to his ongoing edits of Les Aveux de la chair before his death in June 1984.4 The 2018 posthumous publication of Foucault’s draft of this fourth volume in his History of Sexuality series—Les Aveux de la chair (Confessions of the Flesh)—continues to arouse interest and confusion. Expertly edited by Frédéric Gros for 2018 and translated into English by Robert Hurley in 2021, Confessions of the Flesh evokes as many questions as it provides answers. Is this the key to Foucault’s work? Is the History of Sexuality series, begun by Foucault in August 1974, now complete? Why is this volume devoted to close analyses of early Christian texts? Foucault’s final folder for this final work suggests that the influence of Peter Brown can help us form responses to some of these questions. As even the casual reader can see, Foucault dedicates more of Confessions of the Flesh to Augustine than any other figure, yet these treatments are mostly found in Part III of the volume.5 Better understanding Confessions of the Flesh requires a keener sense of how Foucault comes to this late ancient Bishop of Hippo amidst his growing appreciation for early Christian texts and the genealogy of the desiring subject. Addressing these questions involves analysis of both the textual records (published and archival) and historical encounters between Foucault and Brown. Brown has long acknowledged his reliance on Foucault’s work, and Foucault’s influence on late ancient studies has been given sustained critical interest within the field as seen in Elizabeth A. Clark and Averil Cameron’s treatments of the subject.6 The question remains of what role Brown’s work also played in Ibid. Thanks to Laurence Le Bras for clarifying the handwriting. Foucault hand-edits the typescripts for Les Aveux between March and May 1984 with an anticipated publication in October foreclosed by his death on June 25, 1984. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité Vol. IIII, Les aveux de la chair (2018), vii. 5 Foucault cites John Chrysostom with second-greatest frequency and then John Cassian third. It is notable that Augustine and Chrysostom both heavily feature in Part III of Confessions of the Flesh but not in the rest of the draft; there are only 18 references to Augustine in the rest of Confessions. This suggests to me a similar timeframe for research and composition for Part III on marriage that is distinct from Parts I and II; Annex 4 concludes Foucault’s typescript for Part III, although Gros moves it to an annex (Foucault, Les aveux de la chair, 404-406; trans. Confessions of the Flesh, 321-323). 6 Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988), xviixviii; The Body and Society (2008), xxi, xxxv-xxxvii; “A Life of Learning,” ACLS Occasional Paper 55 (2003), 2, 13-14. We are also indebted to Brown for sharing his reflections on May 6, 2021, in the virtual series Foucault’s Confessions at Rice University. https://foucaultsconfessions.org/peter-brown/. See in particular, Averil Cameron, “Redrawing the Map: Early Christian Territory after Foucault,” Journal of Roman Studies 76 (1986), 266-71; Cameron, “Patristics and Late Antiquity: Partners or Rivals?,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 28:2 (2020), 283-302; Elizabeth A. Clark, “1990 Presidential Address: Sex, Shame, and Rhetoric: En-Gendering Early Christian Ethics,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 59:2 (1991), 221-45; Elizabeth A. Clark, “Foucault, The Fathers, and Sex,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 56.4 (1988): 619-41; Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. 3 4 Foucault Studies, No. 32, 1-27. 2 NIKI KASUMI CLEMENTS Foucault’s tournant antique and what these dynamics help us understand about their disciplinary intersections.7 In this article, I present evidence that Brown contributes to Foucault’s understanding of late ancient social history and Christian textual sources in ways that have ramifications for Foucault’s History of Sexuality series and his conceptualization of the genealogy of the desiring subject.8 Scholars have long noted the importance of Foucault to cultural historians and philosophers of antiquity, Paul Veyne and Pierre Hadot.9 There is important archival evidence for how prominently Foucault also engaged the history of Christianity, amplifying his attention to historical lines of continuity between “pagan” and “Christian” antiquity through the influence of Brown.10 That Augustine becomes a central figure for Foucault only after Foucault meets Brown is also suggestive, when considering the dominance of Augustine in Confessions of the Flesh.11 I. FOUCAULT ON AUGUSTINE Before his October 1980 meeting with Brown at the University of California, Berkeley, Foucault’s public engagement with Augustine is very minimal. With Foucault’s This is not a question of a one-way influence but of the significance that overlapping intellectual movements from philosophical and historical disciplines could prove mutually beneficial for Foucault and Brown; even as their uses of these materials diverge, they took place within and shaped important academic movements which we remain subjects in and of. See Cameron, Clark, and John Behr, “Shifting Sands: Foucault, Brown and the Framework of Christian Asceticism,” The Heythrop Journal 34:1 (1993), 1-21. 8 James Bernauer has long argued for the importance of Christianity to Foucault’s shifts in the History of Sexuality series and attention to ancient care of the self (James Bernauer, “Fascinating Flesh: Revealing the Catholic Foucault,” Foucault Studies 29 (2021), 38-47; James Bernauer and David Rasmussen, ed., The Final Foucault (1988); James Bernauer, Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight: Toward an Ethics for Thought (1990). See also Jeremy Carrette’s crucial edited volume Religion and Culture (1999); Carrette, Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporeality and Political Spirituality (2000); Jonathan Tran, Foucault and Theology (2011). Elizabeth Castelli and Daniel Boyarin presciently frame these movements in “Introduction: Foucault's “The History of Sexuality”: The Fourth Volume, or, A Field Left Fallow for Others to Till,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 10:3-4 (2001): 357–374. 9 Paul Veyne explains his own engagement with Foucault in Michel Foucault. Sa pensée, sa personne (2008). For the influence of Paul Veyne on Foucault, see Sandra Boerhinger, “Paul Veyne, historien de la sexualité antique ?” in Autour d’une « œuvre en porte-à-faux » : Paul Veyne et l’Histoire, ed. Paul Cournarie and Pascal Montlahuc (forthcoming, 2022). Foucault thanks Brown, Hadot, and Veyne in his introduction to History of Sexuality, Volume 2; the influence of Ilsetraut Hadot’s work on Stoic philosophers remains understudied (despite Foucault’s reliance on her scholarship evident in the archives). 10 Johannes Zachubber notes the suggestiveness of this influence of Brown on Foucault in “L’interiorite” in Foucault, les Pères, le Sexe : Autour des Aveux de la chair, ed. Philippe Büttgen, Philippe Chevallier, Agustín Colombo, and Arianna Sforzini, 2021. For Foucault’s engagement with forms of Christianity, see Philippe Chevallier, Foucault et le christianisme (2011); Niki Kasumi Clements, “Foucault’s Christianities,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 89:1 (2021), 1-40; Michel Senellart, “Gouverner l’être-autre : la question du corps chrétien,” in Foucault(s), ed. Jean-François Braunstein et al., 205-222 (2017). 11 Foucault’s reading of Augustine is not the same as Brown’s, as Agustín Colombo recently argues in “What is a desiring man?” Foucault Studies 29 (2021), 71-90. For a superb critique of Foucault’s reading of Augustine, see Elizabeth A. Clark, “L’Augustin de Foucault au risqué d’Augustin,” in Foucault, les Pères, le Sexe : Autour des Aveux de la chair, trans. Philippe Büttgen, ed. Philippe Büttgen, Philippe Chevallier, Agustín Colombo, and Arianna Sforzini (2021), 233-245. 7 Foucault Studies, No. 32, 1-27. 3 Foucault and Brown: Disciplinary Intersections monographs and posthumously published lectures, I begin by establishing a chronology of how Foucault publicly engages the texts and figure of Augustine. Understanding how Foucault’s engagement with Augustine intensifies after his encounter with Brown highlights how Foucault’s readings of Augustine change over time, in a correlative if not causative engagement with the cultural historian. My analysis in this section contributes to a larger methodological claim concerning how we read Foucault’s work today, as I emphasize the need to differentiate between Foucault’s direct references and the source attributions of his editors. i. from the Collège de France A casual listing of Augustine in his 1964 « Postface à Flaubert » and a brief challenge to Noam Chomsky’s reading of Descartes vis-à-vis “le courant augustinien de la pensée chrétienne” in their 1971 interview suggest the extent of Foucault’s public engagement with Augustine in the 1960s and early 1970s.12 Before 1979, Foucault barely mentions Augustine’s name directly and we mainly infer the relevance of Augustine through Foucault’s editors of his posthumously published lectures. In November 1973, for example, Foucault frames the history of disciplinary apparatuses (dispositifs) as linked to the Middle Ages through the sixteenth century in “religious communities”; Jacques Lagrange as editor of these 1973-1974 Psychiatric Power lectures includes a footnote on monastic orders as following the Rule of Augustine.13 The single reference to Augustine in the 1977-1978 Security, Territory, Population lectures comes from Michel Senellart as editor linking Foucault’s discussion on ἀπάθεια to Augustine’s City of God 14.9.4.14 At the University of Tokyo in April 1978, speaking about “the problem of the production of theories of sexuality in Western society,” Foucault highlights Augustine for the first time: “For this massive production, which goes back a great distance, at least since St Augustine, since the first Christian centuries, is a phenomenon to be taken seriously.”15 Published that same year in Gendai-shisô, Foucault ties Augustine to constructions of sexuality while revising his History of Sexuality series.16 In the October 1979 Tanner Lectures Michel Foucault, “Postface à Flaubert,” in Dits et Écrits, Tome 1 : 1954 - 1975 (2001), 321-353; Michel Foucault, “De la nature humaine: justice contre pouvoir,” in Dits et Écrits, Tome 1 : 1954 - 1975 (2001), 1339-1380. A brief reference to an archbishop quoting Augustine “on the bishops’ power of intercession” appears in his Penal Theories and Institutions: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1971-1972, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Bernard Harcourt (2019), 61. 13 Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France 1973-1974, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Jacques Lagrange (2006), 63-64. A similar footnote on the Augustinian rule appears in Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni (2003), 53fn5. 14 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Michel Senellart (2007), 189. Perhaps the editors found associated notes in Foucault’s folders, but I have not found any indication in the published records. 15 Michel Foucault, “Sexuality and power” [1978], in Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy Carrette (1999), 75. Published as “Sexualité et pouvoir” in Gendai-shisô (1978), see Dits et Écrits, Tome 2 : 1976 - 1988 (2001), 552-570. 16 For the larger context of Foucault’s editing and redrafting of the second volume, see Philippe Chevallier’s magisterial treatment, “The Genesis of Confessions of the Flesh,” Foucault’s Confessions, Rice University, May 12 Foucault Studies, No. 32, 1-27. 4 NIKI KASUMI CLEMENTS at Stanford University, Foucault unfolds his account of early Christianity and pastoral power without any reference to Augustine, instead noting “Chrysostom, Cyprian, Ambrose, Jerome, and for the monastic life, Cassian or Benedict.”17 He does not cite Augustine, nor any other ancient Christian figure, during his 1978-1979 Collège de France lectures, The Birth of Biopolitics.18 In his 1979-1980 Collège lectures, On the Government of the Living, Foucault refers to Augustine six times.19 Yet because this year’s lectures are dedicated to early Christian texts, having so few references to Augustine is surprising. On February 20, Foucault notes how Augustine describes the baptismal ceremony to the catechumenate in Sermon 216, urging examination of the heart.20 Foucault draws out a contrast between the later practice of penance and the earlier examination of conscience “at the time of Saint Augustine, that we find this idea of a verbal confession addressed to the priest or bishop.”21 Foucault’s most substantive note on Augustine occurs on March 12: “We have the impression that we can draw a direct line from the gnothi seauton to the obligation of the examination of conscience in Evagrius Ponticus, Cassian, Saint Jerome, and Saint Augustine.”22 The question of connecting truth and subjectivity to one another will prove influential for Foucault’s last four years. In his 1980-1981 Collège lectures, Subjectivity and Truth, Foucault refers to Augustine only four times yet closes in on two constructs vital to Confessions of the Flesh. First, how “the conjugalization of marriage” raises “the big question in Christian thought, Saint Augustine’s question, but also our question: ‘What in truth is our desire?’.”23 Second, Augustine’s De bono conjugali’s attention to “affective bond [and] procreation” and the debitum conjugale where “[o]ut of charity, one owes sexual intercourse to the other.”24 11, 2021; https://foucaultsconfessions.org/philippe-chevallier/. This vital work has been published as “The Birth of Confessions of the Flesh,” Maynooth Philosophical Papers 11 (2022): 55-73. 17 Michel Foucault, “Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of ‘Political Reason,’” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (1981), 225-254, 236. 18 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Michel Senellart (2008). 19 Michel Foucault, On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979-1980, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Michel Senellart, (2014). By contrast, Foucault dedicates at least two complete lectures to Cassian: March 19, 1980 engages largely Institutes 4, and March 5 and 26, 1980 discuss discretio largely in Conferences 2, 7, and 24. There is not much on Chrysostom this year, either, who Foucault cites second to only Augustine in Confessions of the Flesh. 20 Foucault, Government of the Living, 149; 163fn23. 21 Ibid., 154. 22 Ibid., 228. Senellart as editor notes that this is perhaps an allusion to Pierre Courcelle’s Connais-toi toi-même de Socrate à Saint Bernard (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1974), which draws out the Delphic precept of “know thyself” from antiquity through pre-Scholastic Christians like Bernard of Clairvaux (Foucault, Government of the Living, 274fn6). 23 Michel Foucault, Subjectivity and Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1980-1981, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Frédéric Gros (2017), 39, 159, 167. 24 Ibid., 230-231. Foucault Studies, No. 32, 1-27. 5 Foucault and Brown: Disciplinary Intersections ii. from the Archives Such minimal engagement with Augustine is surprising because, as Daniel Defert notes, Foucault began reading Tertullian, Cassian, and Augustine in August 1977.25 The Fonds Foucault at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (B.N.F.) also includes a large folder of 144 pages of Foucault’s meticulous reading notes on Augustine.26 This raises the questions of when and how Foucault came to Augustine’s texts.27 Circa 1974-1975, Box 20 (Réforme, Contre-Réforme) includes an early mention of Augustine in a bibliographical list of scholarly works.28 Box 21 (Notes de lecture) includes notes on a volume edited by Charles Kannengiesser, Jean Chrysostome et Augustin: Actes du Colloque de Chantilly 22-24 septembre 1974, which shows up often in Foucault’s reading notes.29 Box 22 (Pères de l’Église, Lecture de notes prises vers 1977, Préparation des Aveux de la chair) includes a handful of scholarly sources which briefly refer to Augustine.30 These scholarly references assume familiarity with Augustine but do not develop arguments or concepts that Foucault ties to his History of Sexuality series. The paucity of references to Augustine in Boxes 20-22 differs starkly with the folder dedicated to Augustine in Box 24 (Dire vrai sur soi-même). This Folder 7 (Saint-Augustin) includes the 144 pages of Foucault’s meticulous notes with close readings on more than twenty of Augustine’s texts.31 Yet I know of no lectures dedicated to Augustine, either at the Collège de France or internationally, that engage this range of texts. Michel Senellart, “Le cours de 1980, Du gouvernement des vivants, dans la perspective de l'Histoire de la sexualité,” in Michel Foucault: éthique et vérité: 1980-1984, ed. Daniele Lorenzini, Ariane Revel, and Arianna Sforzini (2013), 31-51, 33; Michel Foucault, Dits et Écrits, Tome 1 : 1954 - 1975 (2001), 71. 26 Notes for Box 24, Folder 7 (Saint-Augustin), B.N.F. Fonds Foucault. 27 Although my research in the Fonds Foucault remains in process, as of 2021, I have found Foucault to briefly reference Augustine in notes ranging from the 1960s through the 1980s in Boxes 30.7, 70.1, 91.5, 92.19, 92.20, 93.22, and 93.26. Longer treatments of Foucault on Augustine are discussed in the rest of this article (particularly Boxes 24.10, 24.14, 84.11, 87.15, 87.16, 88.6, and 88.9). 28 Notes for Box 20, Folder 6, Sheet 162, B.N.F. Fonds Foucault: “E Lamirande: Et sur l’ecclésiologie de St Augustin (1969)” referring to E. Lamirande, “Études sur l’ecclésiologie de saint Augustin,” Theological Studies 31 (1970), 585-586. Please note datings for these notes are provisional as I work through archival and published works. 29 Dated after Kannengiesser’s 1975 publication, this bibliography seems penned between 1977 and 1980. Foucault’s reading notes specify particular articles in Kannengiesser’s volume—as “In J. Chrysos et Augustine / Coll. Ed. Kannengiesser / (1975)”—such as that in Box 21.3.88 of A. Natali and in Box 21.3.89 of C. Lepelley’s “St Augustin et la Cité Romano-Africaine” (whose references to DCD XIX.6.17 might be important for Foucault’s navigation of that massive tome of Augustine). There is also a photocopy of Jack Winkler’s “Auctor & Actor: Apuleius and his metamorphoses” in Box 21 (Notes de lecture), Folder 3, with this note (probably from Winkler) on page 64: “This contrast might be interesting to you: the provocatively absent self of Apuleius vs. the all-present self of Augustine.” Thanks to Sandra Boehringer for insight into Winkler’s connection to Foucault. 30 Of the scholarly sources on Christianity important to Foucault’s work in the late 1970s, there are brief references to Augustine in Foucault’s notes on Owen Chadwick’s John Cassian, J-P Guy’s entry for the Dictionnaire de Spiritualité “examen de conscience,” Rouet de Journel’s Textes ascétiques, and Josef Schmid’s entry for Das Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum “Brautschaft, heilige” (Box 22, Folder 1, B.N.F. Fonds Foucault). 31 Folder 7 also includes notes or photocopies of scholarly works related to Augustine by Berrouard (Notes sur Homelies sur l’Ev de 1er Jean), Bonnardière (Revue d’Études Augustiniennes, 1967), Dodds (“Augustine’s Confessions,” 1927), Guichard (Cahiers d’histoire, 1979), Guy (DS IV, “examen de conscience”), Mandouze 25 Foucault Studies, No. 32, 1-27. 6 NIKI KASUMI CLEMENTS Still, we can chart a series of international lectures from late 1980 where Foucault engages Augustine with greater textual selection and analytical rigor.32 Foucault’s second conference at Berkeley includes references to Augustine’s Confessions.33 Foucault continues this line of thought in the “Discussion of ‘Truth and Subjectivity’” on October 23, 1980, responding to a question concerning what kind of confession Augustine’s Confessions present.34 In his second Dartmouth lecture in November 1980, Foucault briefly paraphrases Augustine while reflecting on how institutionalized confession contributes to the emergence of disciplinary subjectivity: “qui facit veritatem venit ad lucem.”35 Foucault’s lectures at Louvain in spring 1981 refer to Augustine with the juridical reading of sexuality and subjectivity. As he frames his Louvain lecture on April 29, “I would like to study this obligation in Christianity—at least in the early Christianity that we could (Actes du colloque de Chantilly, 1974), Meslin (Mystique et continence, 1952), Sage (Revue d’Études Augustiniennes, 1964, 1967), Thonnard (“La prédestination augustinienne,” 1963; “La morale conjugale,” 1969), and Toubert (“Théorie du mariage,” 1976). The presence of Guichard’s article confirms that at least part of this folder is post 1979, even though Foucault uses works published in earlier decades. There is also a reading note with reference to Augustine’s DCD XXIX.19 in Box 24, Folder 13 (Cynisme et christianisme), B.N.F. Fonds Foucault. Folder 13 also includes a bibliographic list with G. I. Bonner’s “Libido and concupiscentia in St Augustine,” Studia Patristica 81 (1962). 32 The closest we get to a dedicated lecture on Augustine takes two forms explored in the next section, both from Box 40, NYIH; one, the English version of the James Lecture for NYIH; the other, the French draft called “Séminaire IV” understood to be the draft of the James lecture but which is significantly different. A further study of the relation between the French drafts and the English lectures for NYIH in Box 40, Folder 6 is needed. I look forward to the upcoming volume of Foucault’s NYIH lectures, edited by Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Daniele Lorenzini. 33 “Berkeley, Deuxième conférence, Manuscrit autographe et dactylogramme,” Box 40, Folder 2, Sheets 2123, B.N.F. Fonds Foucault. In relation to Foucault’s primary categories of ἐξοµολόγησις/exomologēsis (Tertullian) and ἐξαγόρευσις/exagoreusis (Cassian) that he largely expanded at the Collège de France in 1980 and repeats at Dartmouth, Foucault also sets Augustine apart from the movements that he sees as regulating the institutions of Catholicism and mechanisms of disciplinary subjectivity (gleaned in confessional practice of the hermeneutics of the subject with Cassian and ritual disclosures of status in baptism and penance with Tertullian). Foucault’s remarks suggest why he did not incorporate Augustine before—but I think they also show how Foucault shifts his views on both Augustine and his relevance for a possible history of the juridical subject and the emergence of the subject of desire. 34 “I had prepared a rather long development about Augustine, but, of course, I had no time to read it. You see, if I insisted more on what the Greek Fathers called exomologēsis and exagoreusis than on Augustine, the reason is that exomologēsis and exagoreusis were an institutionalized way of confession, and they had all the characteristics of institutions: they were constraining for people, and they had, like all institutions, an evolution through the history of the Church and through the history of Christianity.” (Michel Foucault, About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self, Lectures at Dartmouth College, 1980, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. HenriPaul Fruchaud and Daniele Lorenzini (2016), 93-95.) This excellent volume includes “Subjectivity and Truth” (17 November 1980), “Christianity and Confession” (24 November 1980), “Discussion of ‘Truth and Subjectivity’” (23 October 1980), and “Interview with Michel Foucault” (3 November 1980). The Discussion of ‘Truth and Subjectivity’ takes place two days after Foucault’s discussion with Brown. 35 Michel Foucault, “Christianity and Confession,” in About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self, 79fn4 includes the editor’s reference: “Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1961), 207: ‘We know that you are a lover of faithfulness, for the man whose life is true comes to the light’ (Ecce enim veritatem dilexisti quoniam qui facit eam venit ad lucem).’” Foucault repeats this formula in his 1982 Toronto lectures, Speaking the Truth about Oneself: Lectures at Victoria University, Toronto, 1982, ed. Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Daniele Lorenzini, English ed. est. Daniel Louis Wyche (2021), 95. Foucault Studies, No. 32, 1-27. 7 Foucault and Brown: Disciplinary Intersections say ended and culminated in Saint Augustine.”36 Between October 1980 and May 1981, then, we can see two readings of Augustine that Foucault will continue to bring together. First, his interpretation of Augustine’s theory of libido and its libidinization of “the self.” Second, Augustine’s “cordis affectus, not in the movements of thought but in the movements of the heart.”37 Foucault comes to read Augustine as a complex subject wrestling with desire where, in contrast to his contemporaries, Augustine is not primarily concerned with one’s status (as penitent with Tertullian) nor one’s thoughts (in an examination of conscience with Cassian). Foucault refers to Augustine’s Confessions in 1980 yet only cites this text once in his History of Sexuality series (in the 1984 Volume 2, The Use of Pleasure). In an eponymous irony, Confessions of the Flesh does not have a single reference to Augustine’s Confessions, even as Foucault carefully analyzes nineteen texts of Augustine and devotes more of the text to Augustine than any other figure.38 So how does Foucault come to his readings of Augustine and the use of concupiscence in marriage that becomes so central to Confessions of the Flesh? iii. Brown and Augustine The first published evidence of Foucault’s sustained engagement with Augustine occurs in “Sexuality and Solitude” published in the London Review of Books in May 1981. Here, Foucault reads Augustine’s conception of libido in relation to Brown’s framing of sexuality as becoming the seismograph of subjectivity. Brown is part of the bridge to Foucault’s foregrounding of Augustine in terms of sexuality, which will be centrally elaborated in Confessions of the Flesh. According to Didier Eribon, Foucault deeply admired Brown’s historical biography, Augustine of Hippo, which “Foucault knew almost by heart” in Betsy Wing’s translation.39 36 Michel Foucault, Wrong Doing, Truth Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, ed. Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt (2014), 93. 37 Foucault, About the Beginning, 94. See also Foucault’s notes on “contradictory movements of his heart. ‘Affectus cordis’” in “Berkeley, Deuxième conférence, Manuscrit autographe et dactylogramme,” Box 40, Folder 2, Sheet 23, B.N.F. Fonds Foucault. Foucault’s reading of the centrality of affectus cordis to Augustine might even be from Augustine of Hippo without citing Brown directly (Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo. A Biography (1967), 163). 38 Foucault, Les Aveux de la chair, III.II-III focus on Augustine (283-361). Foucault cites these works as follows: De bono conjugali, De bono uiduitatis, De catechizandis rudibus, De conjugiis adulterinis, De continentia, Contra duas epistulas, Contra Faustum, Contra Julianum, La Cité de Dieu, Discours sur les Psaumes, De Genesi ad litteram, De Genesi contra Manichaeos, De gratia Christi et peccato originali, De nuptiis et concupiscentia, Opus imperfectum, Quaestiones in Evangelium secundum Matthaeum, Retractiones, De sancta virginitate, and Sermons. Philippe Büttgen convincingly frames the omission of Augustine’s Confessions in relation to Foucault’s neglect of « la confession de foi » in his accounts of l’aveu et la confession (« Aveu et confession, » in Foucault, les Pères, le Sexe : Autour des Aveux de la chair, eds. Philippe Büttgen, Philippe Chevallier, Agustín Colombo, and Arianna Sforzini. (2021)). 39 “Les auditeurs de Foucault sont surtout des étudiants en histoire, ceux par exemple qui avaient suivi les enseignements de Peter Brown, l'historien de l'Antiquité tardive, dont Foucault admire le livre magistral sur saint Augustin.” (Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (2011), 508.) Betsy Wing’s English translation of this passage Foucault Studies, No. 32, 1-27. 8 NIKI KASUMI CLEMENTS What remains unclear is when and where Foucault took up Brown’s text.40 Box 22, Folder 10 (Examen chrétien) includes a bibliography of works on ancient Christianity, virginity, and marriage that lists “P. Brown: Christianisme [sic] and society.”41 A reference to a 1976 work helps date this bibliography to between 1976 and early 1981, so this hand-written reference probably points to Brown’s Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine (1972).42 As editor of the 1977-1978 Collège de France lectures, Senellart notes “Foucault was no doubt familiar with Peter Brown’s first articles on the question” when delivering that year’s lectures.43 Foucault’s fall 1980 lectures and seminars for Berkeley, Dartmouth, and the New York Institute for the Humanities (NYIH) in Box 40 at the B.N.F. become significant. Box 40, Folder 6, Subfolder 7 includes a draft in French titled “Séminaire IV,” most likely meant for NYIH, that I believe is the first evidence of Foucault’s extended engagement with Augustine.44 In this draft for November 1980, Foucault refers to De bono conjugali, Contra Julianum, De Genesi ad litteram, De Genesi contra Manichaeos, and De sancta virginitate.45 What reads: “Foucault’s audience consisted primarily of historians, such as the students of Peter Brown, whose book on St. Augustine Foucault knew almost by heart…”(Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (1991), 313-314). 40 Ibid. 41 « Examen chrétien, » Box 22, Folder 10, Sheet 371, B.N.F. Fonds Foucault. This folder also includes full photocopies of Aline Rousselle’s “Abstinence et continence dans les monastères de Gaule méridionale à la fin de l'antiquité et au début du moyen âge : Étude d'un régime alimentaire et de sa fonction,” in Hommage à André Dupont : 1897-1972 (1974) and Krister Stendahl’s “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” (1963), with references to Cyrille Vogel, La discipline pénitentielle en Gaule (1952). 42 Peter Brown’s Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine (1972) was available at the Bibliothèque de Saulchoir [332 C 382] and his engagement with Pelagius might inform Foucault’s treatment in Les Aveux (alongside the volume 23 selections in Augustine’s Œuvres complètes). It is possible that this reference points to Brown’s collection Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (1982), which includes several articles that Michel Senellart notes Foucault “was no doubt familiar with”—however, I think that is too late a dating for such a preliminary reference. 43 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 234. Senellart crafts the following footnote translated on page 272 of the English edition: On Egyptian anachōrēsis, P. Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1978), ch. 4, ‘From the Heavens to the Desert: Anthony and Pachomius.’ At this time Foucault was no doubt familiar with Peter Brown’s first articles on the question (for example, ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,’ Journal of Roman Studies, LXI, 1971, pp. 80-101; reprinted in P. Brown, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (London: Faber and Faber, 1982) pp.103-152 as well as the book by A. Voöbus, A History of Asceticism in the Syrian Orient (Louvain: CSCO, 1958-1960). In my current understanding of the archives, Foucault moves between (1) general and encyclopedic sources, (2) particular scholarship, and (3) particular ancient texts (in editions from the 17th through 20th centuries). When Foucault’s editors add references in the posthumously published lectures (at the Collège and abroad), these references contribute mightily to the critical apparatus of the text yet should not be assumed to have been selected by Foucault. 44 These notes in French are understood to be a part of the NYIH lectures, yet Foucault simply titles them “Séminaire IV” without a direct reference to NYIH. “Séminaire IV,” Box 40 (Berkeley et New York University 1980), Folder 6.7, Sheets 24-37, B.N.F. Fonds Foucault. I believe there are elements of Les Aveux pages 325328 in this section “—C—”. Foucault writes this part of the fourth seminar in notes more than narrative, and it is even possible that he writes this part of the NYIH talks in the weeks after his Berkeley talks where he meets Brown. 45 Foucault, Confessions of the Flesh, part III.I for Chrysostom (195-220); part III.II-III for Augustine (221-285). Foucault Studies, No. 32, 1-27. 9 Foucault and Brown: Disciplinary Intersections will be published as “Sexuality and Solitude” correlates with Foucault’s English treatment of Augustine in Box 40, Folder 3 (Conférence), along with materials from Folder 6.6.1, which Foucault delivers as the James Lecture. While at NYIH in 1980, Foucault makes a series of references to Augustine in his journal (now in Box 93, Folder 22 at the B.N.F.). Foucault begins this journal (a stenographer’s notebook) with “1980 NY Institut Humanités / avec Richard Sennett / en preparation de Sub et ver au Collège de France,” making a series of nearly forty references followed by brief themes, notably concupiscence, excès, consentement, le plaisir, le mariage, la masturbation, and les péchés.46 So when did Foucault write his notes on Augustine’s texts (Box 24.7), and when did Foucault write “Séminaire IV” (Box 40.6.7)? These questions lead me to the direct encounters between Foucault and Brown in the 1980s. II. FOUCAULT AND BROWN The friendship between Michel Foucault and Peter Brown has been long noted.47 As a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Brown attended Foucault’s second Howison Lecture on October 21, 1980, and afterwards the two spoke for two hours in the university pub, the Bear’s Lair.48 Brown recounts how Foucault asked continuous questions on John Cassian in that first meeting, wanting feedback on his reading of Cassian in the Howison Lecture. They also discussed “Augustine’s notion of concupiscence.”49 Before traveling to Seabury-Western Theological Seminary the next day, Brown gave Foucault a packet of materials, including an article by Philip Rousseau on Cassian (“Cassian, Contemplation, and the Cenobitic Life”), Brown’s 1976 The Making of Late Antiquity, and a copy of the Hale Lectures Brown was about to deliver in Chicago.50 Foucault would discuss Augustine’s Confessions more directly two days later on October 23 at Berkeley, as noted above. After his time at Berkeley, Foucault would go to New York and give a series of seminars and a lecture in October and November 1980 at the New York Institute for Humanities (NYIH). In his three seminars delivered in English, Foucault does not expand on Augustine in detail. In his second seminar, Foucault argues how Christian sexual ethics are rooted in Roman practices even as Latin authors including Augustine change “not the Notes for Box 93 (Le Journal Intellectuel de Michel Foucault), Folder 22 (Sans date [vers 1980] Bloc Steno), B.N.F. Fonds Foucault. 47 “It is in this context—the context of the discovery of the strangeness of the bodies of past ages—that I must both acknowledge and delimit my personal debt to Michel Foucault.” (Brown, Body and Society, xxxv.) 48 Brown, personal correspondence, August 12, 2019. 49 Brown, A Life of Learning, 2. 50 Philip Rousseau, “Cassian, Contemplation, and the Cenobitic Life,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 26 (1975), 113-126. Timothy Sedgwick refers to “The Face of Poverty” and “Towards a Sociable Philosophy” as two of Brown’s 1980 Hale Lectures in The Christian Moral Life: Practices of Piety (1999), 85. I am grateful to Sedgwick for his help tracking down the lectures to Styberg Library at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary and Mary-Carol Riehs for generously helping me (even in the doldrums of July 2020!) access a scan of Lecture 5 from Brown’s Hale Lectures listed as “Culture, Society, and Renunciation in Late Antiquity” (Stacks Oversize BX5937.A1 H2 1980), Styberg Library at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston, IL. 46 Foucault Studies, No. 32, 1-27. 10 NIKI KASUMI CLEMENTS code itself, but something more difficult to analyse and to decipher… an experience Latin authors called: concupiscentia. This change took place after Clement of Alexandria and was completed by Augustine. That means that it took place between the 3rd and the 5th century.”51 Foucault’s third seminar at NYIH argues for seeing continuities of practice between “the Hellenistic world and in the Roman societies” and Christian sexual behaviors, even as they diverge in “the techniques—or technology of the self.”52 The most substantive treatment of Augustine comes in the James Lecture, engaging The City of God and Contra Julianum. English typescripts for the three NYIH seminars do not specifically refer to the texts or role of Augustine in Foucault’s developing genealogy. However, in the French draft labeled “Séminaire IV,” Foucault has a sustained engagement with a broader range of Augustine’s texts. “Sexuality & Solitude” (the May 1981 publication resulting from Foucault’s and Sennett’s NYIH communications) concentrates on Artemidorus and Augustine and directly refers to Brown.53 Foucault analyzes Augustine more rigorously than before, focusing on De Civitas Dei, Book XIV, and a singular mention of Contra Julianum, for their “rather horrifying description of the sexual act.”54 Most notable is Foucault’s conceptualization of concupiscence in Augustine, which he comes to understand through Brown, where “in Augustine’s analysis we witness a real libidinisation of sex [sic].”55 Foucault notes in the November 20, 1980 NYIH manuscript: “Few weeks ago, Dr Peter Brown told me: ‘What we have to understand is why sexuality became in the Western Christian culture the seismograph of our subjectivity.’”56 Scholars often cite the version of this phrase in the 1981 London Review of Books publication “Séminaire N.Y.U. 2,” Box 40, Folder 6.3, Sheet 17, B.N.F. Fonds Foucault. Thanks to Daniele Lorenzini for sharing part of his and Henri-Paul Fruchaud’s transcript for Foucault’s English lectures at NYIH. 52 Foucault describes these “technologies” in an earlier draft of the October Howison lecture only present in the archival manuscript (dated by Foucault as September 1980) but not in the final typescript nor delivered lecture at Berkeley (XL.6.3.18). (“Berkeley, Première conférence; Texte en anglais daté Paris, 1980,” Box 40, Folder 1, Sheets 6-7, B.N.F. Fonds Foucault.) In fact, the material in this archival manuscript bears the extended treatment on “technologies of the self” in relation to other technologies of domination, production, and signification that one will find in a near match with his first 1982 lecture at the University of Vermont (Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton (1988)). In these Vermont lectures, Foucault mentions the Confessions and cites Augustine’s “quis facit veritatem” as he does in the second Dartmouth lecture (see footnote above), which makes sense considering the 1980 archival overlap in Box 40 (see “Les techniques de soi,” Dits et Écrits, Tome 2 : 1976 - 1988 (2001), 1624, note 1612). 53 Michel Foucault and Richard Sennett, “Sexuality and Solitude,” London Review of Books 3:9 (1981). 54 Foucault, “Sexuality and Solitude,” 13. 55 In the manuscript, Foucault originally writes “a real libidnisation of the self [sic]”—and continues to note: “And more techniques, relayed by the Augustinian theory of libido, had, I think a huge influence on the western technology of the self.” (Box 40, Folder 3, Sheet 26, B.N.F. Fonds Foucault) I do wonder about Foucault’s attention to the language of libido and libidinisation over concupiscentia. Foucault has a bibliographic reference to G.I. Bonner, “Libido and Concupiscentia in St. Augustine,” Studia Patristica (1962), 303-314 in Box 24, Folder 13, Sheet 21 (currently unnumbered in the archives). The libidinisation of sex informs the developing western technologies of the self; Foucault’s emerging genealogy of subjectivity involves technologies of managing libido. 56 Manuscript in Box 40, Folder 6.1 (Anglais N.Y.U.), Sheet 29, B.N.F. Fonds Foucault. “Why such a fundamental connexion [sic] between sexuality, [truth and] subjectivity, and truth obligations?” (Ibid., Sheet 30.) 51 Foucault Studies, No. 32, 1-27. 11 Foucault and Brown: Disciplinary Intersections “Sexuality and Solitude.”57 Yet the timeframe of this influence is also important, with Foucault clearly struck by Brown’s views and immediately exploring the ramifications of this claim about sexuality and subjectivity, which he will continue to explore over the last four years of his life. These lines of influence continue to develop in his 1980-1981 lectures at the Collège de France. Although Foucault refers to Augustine only four times, there are significant conceptual moves made. For example, Foucault cites Brown for the language of “watershed” in his understanding of antiquity: “It is about this that we should say something now: how to establish this division, how to make the cartography of this ‘watershed,’ as Peter Brown expressed it, between what one calls Christianity and what one calls paganism?”58 In a difficult-to-date archival draft (probably destined for an earlier version of Les Aveux de la chair), Foucault writes : « Pour s’être donné d’autres éléments de savoir, les discussions d’aujourd’hui sur les communications et les lignes de partage—le Water _________ comme dit Peter Brown entre la culture païenne et la pensée chrétienne, sont toujours aussi chargées d’enjeux (24). »59 Foucault writing « le Water ______ » in French suggests he had not yet settled on how to translate this historiographical concept into French. Foucault delves more deeply into this problem already stressed by Paul Veyne of imputing a separation of “pagan” from “Christian,” notably in relation to practices of sexual ethics. In what I think is a slightly later draft of this same chapter, Foucault notes : “Sur ce point, comme sur tant d’autres, on ne peut pas tracer de ligne droite séparant le christianisme du monde où il est né et où il s’est développé : tout au plus peut-on essayer de débrouiller les faits enchevêtrés d’un écheveau. P. Brown, à propos de cette période, évoquait la difficile cartographie d’un « partage des eaux ».”60 These two chapter drafts are in the same Box 87, and the differences are more modest than their similarities, notably when it comes to “le partage” as the organizing principle of Foucault’s deepening explorations in antiquity. For his part, Brown says that the “separation of the waters” is difficult to map. And the separation, here, is between “pagan” and “Christian” elements of late ancient Mediterranean culture. Foucault particularly rejects the myth that ancient morality was more easygoing and that the responsibility for stringent moralities lies squarely with Christianity— Michel Foucault, “Sexuality and Solitude,” in Essential Works, 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (1997), 179. Jeremy Carrette, for example, then refers to Brown’s authorship of Augustine of Hippo. A biography in the London: Faber and Faber, 1967 version—and other scholars cite Carrette’s footnote in turn (in his excellent edited volume of Foucault’s work, Religion and Culture (1999)). Editors for the Collège de France lectures similarly include references to Brown in the footnotes, such as Michael Senellart’s inclusion of The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988) for understanding Marcion on page 192fn39, even though this work comes out well after Foucault’s death. With the archives now consultable, we can better track what Foucault read and how he engaged this material. 58 Foucault, Subjectivity and Truth, 37. 59 Manuscript in Box 87 (La Chair et le corps), “Chemise 16 3. Importance de la vérité,” B.N.F. Fonds Foucault. 60 Manuscript in Box 87 (La Chair et le corps [projet abandonné de l’Histoire de la Sexualité]), Folder 15 (Sans titre), Sheets 415 (numbered by Foucault as 35) and 416 (numbered as 36), B.N.F. Fonds Foucault. 57 Foucault Studies, No. 32, 1-27. 12 NIKI KASUMI CLEMENTS "la thèse d’une rupture” does not hold up against the historical evidence.61 Following the work of his cultural historian friends, Veyne and Brown, Foucault comes to reject both declension and ascension narratives, refusing the naïvete of separating “pagan” and “Christian” as radically separate worlds. Foucault will go on to cite Brown in his 1982 publication on John Cassian, “Le combat de la chasteté.”62 Recapitulating the watershed reference in 1981, Foucault closes this piece by rejecting any large rupture between “earlier moralities” and Christian sexual ethics: “As Peter Brown says, in speaking of Christianity as part of our reading of the giant mass of antiquity, the topography of the parting of the waters is hard to pin down.”63 This passage is particularly important for understanding the development of Les Aveux de la chair. Nearly the entirety of “Le combat” features in part II.III of Les Aveux (pp.230-245), replacing only the last paragraph for the article Foucault publishes in a 1982 Communications piece. Les Aveux replaces that paragraph in the transition between part II (Être vierge) and part III (Être marié), dropping out direct reference to Brown.64 It is significant that Foucault refers to Brown in the two publications related to Confessions of the Flesh published while he was alive: “Sexuality and Solitude” (1981) and “Le combat de la chasteté” (1982). It is not just that Brown is included in these two texts—it is that Brown is the only scholar Foucault refers to in these two texts. In addition to the fact of influence, the content of influence is important, with Foucault citing Brown for the vital conceptual linking of subjectivity and sexuality that informs his genealogy of ethics over the last few years of his life. These methodological and conceptual features are present in Foucault’s most public declaration of Brown’s influence at the beginning of his 1984 History of Sexuality: Volume 2, The Use of Pleasure. In his desire to not impose “alien forms of analysis” on the ancient texts, Foucault notes: “In dealing with this risk, I have benefited greatly from the works of Peter Brown and those of Pierre Hadot, and I have been helped more than once by the Foucault then describes western societies as identifying their moral universe within the question of « dire vrai selon les règles propres à leur savoir ». This provides a solid link to Foucault’s framing of the injunction to tell the truth about oneself. 62 Michel Foucault, “Le combat de la chasteté,” Dits et Écrits, Tome 2 : 1976 - 1988 (2001); Michel Foucault, “Le combat de la chasteté,” Communications 35 (1982), 15-25. See notes from Michel Senellart in the Pléiade edition, where Foucault notes: “Ce texte est extrait du troisième volume de L'Histoire de la Sexualité” (Michel Foucault, Œuvres (2015), 1365). Noting this excerpt as from the third volume in 1982 indicates that Foucault had not yet split Le Souci de soi into two volumes when Foucault submitted this article. 63 “Comme le dit P. Brown, à propos du christianisme dans la [cul]ture de l’Antiquité [tard]ive, la cartographie du partage des eaux est difficile à établir.” (Ibid., 1379); Michel Foucault, “The Battle for Chastity,” in Essential Works, 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (1997), 196. 64 Foucault, Les Aveux, 245. As the institutionalization of Catholicism expands, “forgetting” Augustine’s use of concupiscence while also requiring forms of confession that become increasingly punitive and disciplinary, the juridico-legalistic framework (from Augustine) within which libido was regulated and permitted comes together with the hermeneutics of the confessing subject (from Cassian in Foucault’s reading) producing the conditions for interiority and disciplinary power over time. Foucault’s disengagement with Augustine’s Confessions after Fall 1980 is not an oversight, I believe, but a commitment to reading the institutionalization of confessional practices (“les aveux”) not vis-à-vis Augustine but rather Cassian. 61 Foucault Studies, No. 32, 1-27. 13 Foucault and Brown: Disciplinary Intersections conversations we have had and the views they have expressed.”65 Foucault refers to Augustine’s Confessions in relation to friendship and “the flesh” in The Use of Pleasure. Foucault also references Contra Julianum in History of Sexuality: Volume 3, The Care of the Self, published that same spring. As Foucault does not begin writing The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self until after he has met Brown in 1980, this opens an interesting question of influence not only on particular readings of ancient Christian texts but even the architecture of the History of Sexuality project.66 Recall that the published Volumes 2 and 3 began as a single volume under the title Le Souci de soi. Foucault starts with the Greco-Roman materials that populate the published Volume 3 and writes the Volume 2 on ancient Greek sexual ethics afterwards; and he cites a different Augustine in these two volumes—not the robust treatments from Confessions of the Flesh, part III, but instead the texts of Augustine that Foucault cites in 1980 (at Berkeley) and 1981 (in “Sexuality and Solitude”). Brown was important for not only particular readings of Foucault in terms of the “watershed” and “seismograph” metaphorics that contribute to Foucault’s genealogical readings of subjectivity and that Brown would go on to develop in his own work. In an interview on May 28, 1984 for Les Nouvelles littéraires, Foucault also credits Brown for his use of “le style” and as engaging in a shared project in antiquity: « Ce que Peter Brown et moi essayons de faire permet d'isoler, dans ce qu'ils ont de singulier, des individus qui ont joué un rôle dans la morale antique ou le christianisme. »67 If only there were more time for direct communication. Aside from a delightful dinner party with Foucault and Paul Veyne in Paris, Brown indicates that before his move to Princeton in 1983, he and Foucault “met on a few, somewhat formal occasions for coffee in that summer term.”68 In a note from March 25, 1983, Foucault notes to Brown he would be happy « d’assister à votre Colloque. Je viens juste de parcourir votre texte qui me paraît extrêmement intéressant et stimulant. »69 Brown had completed the lecture “Augustine and Sexuality” on March 5, 1983, delivering the talk at Princeton as the Rabbi Irving Levy Lecture “on or around March 22.”70 This would be the article found in the folder of exercises for Les Aveux de la chair “sur la table de Michel.”71 Foucault, History of Sexuality: Volume 2, 7-8. The draft of this appears in NAF 28284, Boite 3 (L’usage de plaisir), Chemise 9, beginning with “Avant Propos. Avril 83.” 66 I see suggestive continuities with Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres, the final manuscript by Foucault on ancient ethics, which he declared to be ready for editing, according to Daniel Defert as per B.N.F. Boxes 7274. See Frédéric Gros’s commentary in the Pléiade edition of Foucault’s Œuvres (2015), 1533. 67 Michel Foucault, “Le retour de la morale,” Dits et Écrits, Tome 2 : 1976 - 1988 (2001), 1515-1526. 68 Brown, personal correspondence, August 12, 2019. 69 Brown, personal correspondence, August 12, 2019; reference to Foucault’s correspondence with Brown, March 25, 1983. 70 Ibid. 71 Manuscript in Box 84 (Les Aveux de la chair), Folder 4 “Dans le dossier contenant le dactylogramme, on trouve également, 1 chemise de 11 ff. autographes avec nombreuses corrections, Pour les Aveux de la chair? (11) ff,” B.N.F. Fonds Foucault. Frédéric Gros’ introduction to Les Aveux de la chair refers to these components (Foucault, Les Aveux, vii). 65 Foucault Studies, No. 32, 1-27. 14 NIKI KASUMI CLEMENTS III. BROWN AND FOUCAULT In this final section, I present two additional archival sources that contribute to an understanding of how Foucault was rethinking the History of Sexuality series in relation to Brown’s work. This material has been corroborated by drafts I found in my July-August 2021 consultations at the B.N.F.72 The first is in the University of California, Berkeley archives at Bancroft Library in the thirteenth folder of Foucault’s archival box (90/136 Z).73 Labeled “Preface and Introduction to ‘Genealogy of Ethics’,” this folder is noted by archivists as written in 1981 as an earlier draft to the History of Sexuality, Volume 2; a part of this draft is published in The Foucault Reader, and Philippe Chevallier has also noted the importance of this earlier form of the introduction.74 i. Between Bancroft and the B.N.F. From pages 34 to 38 in this Berkeley document, Foucault directly engages and cites Brown in French. Although without pagination or titles, Foucault cites four passages I identify with corresponding passages from The Making of Late Antiquity (probably in his own translations, perhaps from the copy Brown gave in October 1980):75 I. « la Koiné de l'expérience religieuse méditerranéenne en son ensemble » (Foucault quotes in Bancroft Folder 13, page 34) “Instead, we sense that the koiné of Mediterranean religious experience as a whole has shifted in an insensible tide that washed all its shores and has touched all its inhabitants.” (Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity, 97) The author is grateful to Laurence Le Bras and her colleagues for their daily support in the Manuscripts reading room at the Richelieu site of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. 73 Manuscript in 90/136 Z, Folder 13, University of California, Berkeley, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. 74 Michel Foucault, “Préface à l’Histoire de la sexualité,” in Dits et Écrits, Tome 2 : 1976 - 1988 (2001), 13971403; Michel Foucault, “Preface to the History of Sexuality, Volume II,” The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (1984), 333-339. Philippe Chevallier notes the importance of the earlier form of the introduction to the History of Sexuality, Volume 2, as published in the Foucault Reader (Chevallier, “The Birth of Confessions of the Flesh,” Maynooth Philosophical Papers 11 (2022), 55-73, and Chevallier, “The Genesis of Confessions of the Flesh.” Foucault’s Confessions lecture series, Rice University, May 11, 2021). That Foucault cites and engages Brown so directly in the Bancroft version which precedes the published form in the Foucault Reader suggests that Foucault rethinks the preface to the revised History of Sexuality series earlier than commonly understood and in rigorous relation to Brown’s work (making better sense of Foucault’s debt to Brown in the 1984 publication The Use of Pleasure). Work remains to be done on the relation between the Bancroft draft, Foucault’s “Préface à l’Histoire de la sexualité,” and Foucault’s revised general introduction for L’Usage des plaisirs, of Le Souci de soi, and of Les Aveux de la chair in “Usage des plaisirs et techniques de soi” (Dits et Écrits, Tome 2 : 1976 - 1988 (2001), 13581380). 75 Foucault cites E. R. Dodds in this Berkeley draft, but the citation might also come vis-à-vis page 5 of The Making of Late Antiquity (citing Dodds’ Pagan and Christian, 100). 72 Foucault Studies, No. 32, 1-27. 15 Foucault and Brown: Disciplinary Intersections II. « Il ne s’agit pas de nier les transformations qui s’y sont effectuées, mais de bien comprendre que ‘les mots et les habitudes dans lesquels les nouvelles options devaient bien s’exprimer, existaient déjà dans une forme communicable’. » (Foucault quotes in Bancroft Folder 13, page 37) “The words and habits by which new options might be cogently expressed already existed in readily communicable form.” (Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity, 7) III. Foucault continues on that page without the precise citation: « Ce qu’il a pu y avoir d’innovation est à comparer plus avec ‘une construction’ qui se produit entre éléments préexistants qu’avec une irruption de thèmes étrangers ( ). » (Bancroft Folder 13, page 37) “I would suggest that these shocks are better understood as so many cases of spontaneous combustion arising from friction within a system of widely shared ideas and not as the irruption from the outside …” (Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity, 8) IV. « Il faut lire l’Antiquité tardive comme une redistribution et une réorchestration des composants qui avaient été présents pendant des siècles dans le monde méditerranéen » (Foucault quotes in Bancroft Folder 13, page 37). “It follows from this that the changes that come about in Late Antiquity can best be seen as a redistribution and a reorchestration of components that had already existed for centuries in the Mediterranean world.” (Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity, 8) Foucault stresses “the koiné of Mediterranean religious experience” and Brown’s framing of how “widely shared ideas” as well as “words and habits” describe a Mediterranean world of continuities, not irruptions. While these documents at Berkeley have been long available, there is corroborating drafting in the B.N.F. archives (acquired in 2013), where Foucault cites the same passages from Brown with associated page numbers. Box 52 (Le Souci de soi), Folder 4 (Manuscrits et dactylogrammes), includes a typescript with the title « II. La morale et les pratiques de soi ». Analyzing “ce qu’ils appellent l’ ‘antiquité tardive’,” Foucault notes how historians worked against “deux grands thèmes historiographiques”: that of a long decline since antiquity, and that of complete opposition between Christianity and paganism. Foucault says that Brown counters Dodds’ thesis on the crisis of the third century, instead insisting on the continuities and slow transformations that can be recognized in “the crisis.” Foucault appreciates how Brown analyses « la Koiné de l’expérience religieuse méditerranéenne en son ensemble », without denying the transformations taking place, and Foucault cites Brown on how it is necessary to understand that « les mots et les habitudes Foucault Studies, No. 32, 1-27. 16 NIKI KASUMI CLEMENTS dans lesquels les nouvelles options devaient bien s’exprimer, existaient déjà dans une forme communicable ».76 As he rewrites “ce premier volume” of his revised History of Sexuality series, Foucault incorporates this balance of transformation and continuity from Brown in successive drafts of his genealogical thesis. Instead of an « irruption de thèmes étrangers », the elements already existed for centuries in the Mediterranean world—the question was one of « redistribution et une réorchestration des composants ». He continues: “Ce qui ne tend pas—on le verra bien—à affirmer purement et simplement que le christianisme a repris une morale sexuelle déjà toute formée ; mais à cerner d’aussi près que possible, la nature et les conséquences des transformations effectuées.”77 This is not about a sexual ethics as already formed but an ability to see how the transformations take place and what their consequences were for “our morality.” Foucault builds his genealogy as he navigates a redrafting of the History of Sexuality series. The Berkeley draft for the History of Sexuality, Volume 2 preface and introduction starts with material identifiable also with Box 64 (La Volonté de savoir et La Croisade des enfants), which corresponds to Foucault’s six-volume version of the History of Sexuality series that he comes to replace with the four-volume series published. At this time, Foucault is beginning work on Le Souci de soi, which would eventually be split into Volume 2, The Use of Pleasure, and Volume 3, The Care of the Self. While there is some overlap between the part of History of Sexuality, Volume 2 published in the Foucault Reader and the Berkeley draft in Folder 13, they both differ “substantially from published version (1984).”78 I therefore consider this 1981 document important for evaluating how Foucault shifts his History of Sexuality series as he develops his draft of Les Aveux de la chair. In his 1981 Collège de France lectures and his 1982 “Le combat de la chasteté,” Foucault attributes to Brown the language of “watershed” and the “parting of waters”—yet only in his citations of The Making of Late Antiquity do we see Foucault’s readings of the “tide” directly cited from Brown’s text. Perhaps reading Brown on “these shocks” even corroborates for Foucault the “seismograph” language he gleans from conversation with Brown and uses for his 1980 NYIH lecture and 1981 “Sexuality and Solitude.” Foucault’s attention to the “already existing” “words and habits” also clearly builds from his growing appreciation for such continuities through the urging of Veyne.79 Manuscript in Box 52 (Le Souci de soi), Folder 4 (Manuscrits et dactylogrammes), typescript with the title “II. Méthode, La morale et les pratiques de soi,” B.N.F. Fonds Foucault. 77 Ibid. 78 Foucault, “Préface à l’Histoire de la sexualité,” 1397-1403; manuscript in 90/136 Z, Folder 13, University of California, Berkeley, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. The Bancroft archivists note that this draft of the preface and introduction to the History of Sexuality, Volume 2, “differs substantially from published version (1984).” 79 Notes in Box 28 (Ultimes Papiers), Folder 5 (Pile IV), B.N.F. Fonds Foucault, includes a copy of Paul Veyne’s “Le Monde Romain : la famille et l’amour sous le Haut-Empire romain,” Annales Économies Sociétés Civilisations (1978), 35-63. Veyne inscribes the front page: “Tu connais déjà. – (Cependant, le bas de la page 52 t’amusera peut-être) Amicalement Veyne”. Veyne cites Foucault on this page. 76 Foucault Studies, No. 32, 1-27. 17 Foucault and Brown: Disciplinary Intersections ii. From Hale to Parrhesia In the case of Brown, the timing of influence is also striking. Foucault makes significant shifts in the period after his Howison lectures at Berkeley when the two scholars first met. In addition to The Making of Late Antiquity and an article by Philip Rousseau on Cassian, Brown gave Foucault a suite of six lectures that he was about to deliver at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary that October 1980. These Hale Lectures offer a final locus for analyzing influence and shared conceptual material. Through citations by Timothy Sedgwick, I tracked Brown’s 1980 Hale lectures at Seabury-Western to the Northwestern University database for Styberg Library, where the joint collection between Seabury-Western and Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary reside. Under the title "Culture, Society, and Renunciation in Late Antiquity" in this archived copy, there are six lectures: 1. Philosophy, paideia and power -2. The philosopher in late Roman society -3. Untroubled power -4. The face of poverty : asceticism in fourth century Egypt -5. The image of the monk : sexuality and solidarity -6. Towards a "sociable philosophy" : Basil of Caesarea. Reading these lectures in a full transcript Brown generously shared with me, I offer a reading of the Hale Lectures that Brown titles Philosophers and Monks. Brown’s work strongly resonates with how Foucault develops his engagement with late ancient Christianity and the genealogy of desiring subjects; these resonances are worth pursuing even if it is not certain that Foucault read these lectures. With elements and arguments that would take their fullest form in The Body and Society (1988) and Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity (1992), Brown beautifully unfolds in these lectures his central argument on “the pursuit of holiness” and other disciplinary contributions that would shape studies in late antiquity.80 I note here three sites shared with Foucault’s late project as an entrée for further scholarly analysis: (1) the language of the watershed, (2) the construction of παίδεια (paideia), and (3) the appearance of παρρησία (parrhesia). (1) Lecture One, “Philosophy, Paideia and Power,” includes another written source for Foucault’s attribution of “watershed” to Brown. On page 8 of this unpublished lecture, Brown directly frames the pagan and Christian commonalities and differences: If we can gain a clearer and more sharply differentiated picture of what pagan philosophers and Christian monks had in common, and on what they came to be most bitterly divided, then we may know a little bit more about the end of paganism and the rise of Brown, The Body and Society (1988); Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (1992). 80 Foucault Studies, No. 32, 1-27. 18 NIKI KASUMI CLEMENTS Christianity, and tread with a surer sense of contour the watershed between classical antiquity and the Christian Middle Ages.81 Foucault first uses the language of “watershed” publicly on January 14, 1981 for his Subjectivity & Truth lectures at the Collège de France: It is about this that we should say something now: how to establish this division, how to make the cartography of this ‘watershed,’ as Peter Brown expressed it (fn8), between what one calls Christianity and what one calls paganism?82 As I noted in Section II above, Frédéric Gros as editor of those 1981 lectures associates “watershed” with Brown’s The Making of Late Antiquity and notes that Brown takes the language from a passage in W. H. C. Frend’s Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church.83 In a footnote for the 1981 lectures, for example, Gros cites an entire paragraph from Brown’s Making.84 In addition to the watershed imagery that Foucault cites from Brown in his unpublished Berkeley Folder 13 draft of the History of Sexuality, Volume 2 preface and introduction, Foucault most prominently uses the language of the “parting of the waters” in his 1982 publication, “Le combat de la chasteté,” closing this piece on Cassian by rejecting any large rupture between “earlier moralities” and Christian sexual ethics: As Peter Brown says, in speaking of Christianity as part of our reading of the giant mass of antiquity, the topography of the parting of the waters is hard to pin down.85 As I noted above, this line is part of a paragraph that features in the 1982 article but is omitted in the 2018 Les Aveux de la chair. And so the watershed language here is always already self-critical, baking into Foucault’s engagement with late antiquity and early Christianity a move beyond the crisis model of history. It seems to me that Foucault’s January 1981 description of “watershed” better corresponds to Brown’s Hale lectures and their conversations, while Foucault’s 1982 description of “parting of the waters” corresponds to Brown’s The Making of Late Antiquity. We know from “Sexuality and Solitude” that Foucault picked up the seismograph language directly from conversation with Brown in October 1980. From there, the chapter drafts in B.N.F. Box 87 (Folders 15 and 16) featuring “watershed” and “le partage” seem tied to the Hale lectures, while Foucault directly cites Making of Late Antiquity in archived drafts from B.N.F. Box 52.3 and Berkeley for the language of “Koiné” and the tides of the Mediterranean. We have thus gone from marking a division to mapping a dynamic system. Foucault’s ethical turn as articulated in his study of late antiquity and early Christianity encodes this genealogical dialectic: of both registering the enormity of a historical change and rejecting Peter Brown, Philosophers and Monks (unpublished 1980 manuscript), Lecture 1, p. 8. Foucault, Subjectivity and Truth, 37. 83 William H. C. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (1965), 389. 84 Foucault, Subjectivity and Truth, 44fn8. 85 Foucault, “The Battle for Chastity,” 196. 81 82 Foucault Studies, No. 32, 1-27. 19 Foucault and Brown: Disciplinary Intersections a search for origins. This is particularly the case when it comes to sexual ethics as Foucault’s drafted preface and introduction for the History of Sexuality, Volume 2 at Bancroft affirms. Conceptually, Foucault’s developing interest in the progressive potentials of Christian asceticism in the early 1980s and his ultimate suggestion that early Christians radicalize even Cynic renunciation in his final lecture at the Collège de France both affirm such continuities.86 (2) Brown’s account of the philosopher’s paideia and their critical role in relation to imperial power from Philosophers and Monks also appears in Foucault. There are three references to paideia in Foucault’s History of Sexuality Volumes 2 and 3 as published. The two in Volume 2, The Use of Pleasure, relate to the contexts of Xenophon and Plato.87 Paideia as educative practice, as ethical practice, and as care of the self is also present in Volume 3, The Care of the Self, with reference to Epictetus.88 Foucault would have of course gleaned the importance of paideia from other scholarship and his own education, but Brown’s framing of the ethico-political importance of paideia from ancient Greek philosophy to that of Basil render such critical continuities more salient. They even potentially better account for the more progressive readings of early Christians such as Basil and Gregory of Nyssa that Foucault would take up over time.89 Foucault’s archives at the B.N.F. include a box with his final lecture notes from his desk (Box 28, Ultimes papiers), noted as stacked in piles by Daniel Defert.90 Here, Foucault has prominent notes from “Jaeger. Paideia. III. Sur le régime” and “Taeber. Paideia III. Sur le médecin” with a brief note on sheet 243: Sur la soc. du Bas Empire : L. Ruggini : Economia e società nell’Italia annonaria (Milan 1962) S. Mazzarino : La democratizzazione della cultura nel Basso Impero (XI congr. inter. sc historiques Stockholm 1960. T II, pp.35-54) P. Brown : Religious Dissent in the Later Roman Empire (History, 1961 pp.83-101) Brown’s “Religious Dissent” is noted in relation to paideia, and we might even consider an overlap with Foucault’s notes surrounding the Christus medicus as part of these final papers that also occupy B.N.F. Box 84, Folder 11.91 Medicine, ethics, and education are all concepts highlighted in Foucault’s notes as he works on his last edits. Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983-1984, trans. Graham Burchell (2011), 181-182. Foucault continues: “But what we should also note is that, through the intermediary of Christian asceticism and monasticism of course, the Cynic mode of life was passed on for a very long time.” 87 Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 76. 88 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume 3: The Care of the Self (1988), 55. 89 Brown, Philosophers and Monks, Lecture 1, p. 19. 90 Notes in Box 28, B.N.F. Fonds Foucault. 91 Sheet #243 in that stack includes this brief note. 86 Foucault Studies, No. 32, 1-27. 20 NIKI KASUMI CLEMENTS (3) Brown’s Hale lectures also offer a direct bridge to Foucault’s increasing interest in παρρησία (parrhesia) between 1980 and 1984.92 Brown’s first Hale lecture brings together paideia and parrhesia: “Simply by being what he was, the philosopher became a relevant figure in a host of situations that involved the exercise and control of power.”93 Governing others requires the training to recognize the truth when offered by a philosopher who lives such truth in word and deed. In a final continuity, alongside the materials Foucault worked with at the end of his life, Brown’s “Augustine and Sexuality,” Box 84, Folder 11 includes “la photocopie sur parrhesia.”94 Through communication with James Bernauer, I learnt that Bernauer gave Foucault the photocopy of Stanley Marrow’s article “Parrhesia and the New Testament” in the summer of 1982, while attending Foucault’s course at the University of Toronto.95 I am left wondering if Brown contributed to Foucault’s interest in parrhesia through his Hale lectures, conversation in October 1980, or even through a reading of “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity.”96 92 Brown’s “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity” also centrally refers to parrhesia in the volume Senellart notes Foucault would have known, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (1982), particularly pp. 136-140. Brown also refers to the θεῖος ανήρ (theios anēr) in this article, and Foucault refers to this concept in Box 74 (Gouvernment de soi et des autres, Les Autres). 93 Brown, Philosophers and Monks, Lecture 1, p. 18. 94 Foucault’s earliest references to παρρησία that I have been able to track involve the treatise by Philodemus, which he drafts and then cuts from his Howison talks in 1980. Manuscript in Box 62, Folder 4, sheet 57, B.N.F. Fonds Foucault: “Ce thème de l’aveu nécessaire pour le progrès de l’âme, on le trouve chez les épicuriens. Le peri parrhsias de Philodème est très révélateur sur ce point.”. “Parresia was the opening of the heart,” Foucault notes in an English typescript, framing it as “a question of an ethical and technical rule concerning verbal relationships” (Ibid., 40.1.13). I find it notable that this is one of the earliest constructions of the “ethical” as important in Foucault’s work. Foucault does not publicly discuss parrhesia until The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981-1982, trans. Graham Burchell (2005), notably March 10, 1982 where he discusses Philodemus, Seneca, and Galen. These are the first Collège lectures where Foucault embraces the language of ethics as an explicit orientation in his work (“ethics of the subject defined by the relationship of self to self” (Ibid., 252)), noting parrhesia as “a certain ‘ethics of speech’”(Ibid., 137). Foucault’s “La parrêsia” at the University of Grenoble on 18 May 1982 and “Discours et vérité” series at the University of California, Berkeley in 1983 also present a roadmap of his thinking (Michel Foucault, Discours et vérité, précédé de La parrêsia, ed. Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Daniele Lorenzini (2016)). 95 James Bernauer, personal correspondence, February 18, 2021. Notes in Box 24 (Séminaire « Dire vrai sur soi-même » Notes de lecture Cours à Toronto (mai-jun 82) et Berkeley (circa 1983); reprise de certain cours du Collège de France), Folder 12 (Parrhesia et christianisme), B.N.F. Fonds Foucault. Here, there are two photocopies: one of Gerhard Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament παρρησία entry (Eerdmans, 1965), 869-884, and one of Stanley B. Marrow, “Parrhesia and the New Testament,” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 44:3 (1982), 431-446. I believe Foucault used Marrow’s article as a bibliographic source, considering his notes on several of the footnoted references. 96 Brown’s account in Power and Persuasion of parrhesia and the philosopher, also found in “Asceticism: Pagan and Christian,” as well as the riveting way in which “the wife” plays this function in The Body and Society offer other avenues for considering the philosophical and political necessity of parrhesia in Brown’s work that might have been planted in 1980 or through early 1981 in Foucault’s reading of Brown’s Hale lectures or The Making of Late Antiquity. Brown, Power and Persuasion, 61-62; Peter Brown, “Asceticism: Pagan and Christian,” in The Cambridge Ancient History Volume 13, ed. Averil Cameron and Peter Garnsey (1998), 610; Brown, The Body and Society, 15. Foucault Studies, No. 32, 1-27. 21 Foucault and Brown: Disciplinary Intersections Foucault comes to amplify the ethical stakes of parrhesia in relation to Socratic and Cynic possibilities for contesting power in word and deed in his final 1984 lectures at the Collège de France. In this context, he cites Augustine’s De Civitate Dei, Book XIX, for the unsurprising yet “noticeable interaction between Cynic practice and Christian asceticism.”97 In his closing lecture on March 28—where Foucault suggests he might continue his exploration into “this history of the arts of living, of philosophy as form of life, of asceticism in its relation to the truth” in Christianity—we are left with a sense of Foucault’s interest in the radical challenges parrhesiasts might pose to institutions. Formed in the paideia more continuous than parted between pagan and Christian forms, the cultivation of their ways of life coincides with the cultivation of a critical attitude. Brown’s Hale Lectures are helpful for working out the disciplinary developments and genealogical innovations that connect Brown and Foucault. Brown also directly refers to Foucault’s History of Sexuality series in Hale Lecture 5 (pages 19 and 20). Work remains to chart out the careful convergences and divergences in Foucault’s readings of Cassian, Augustine, the Apophthegmata Patrum, Athanasius, John Chrysostom, Basil and others through the rest of Brown’s Hale lectures. The “cure of souls” and “care of self” at the intersection of Brown’s lectures and Foucault’s work requires more robust consideration and continued archival exploration, notably in Foucault’s amplified interest in “ethics” alongside the force of “power” and “knowledge.” The ancient philosopher and monk are both in the background of much of this rethinking. CONCLUSION I began this article with the argument that Foucault publicly considers Augustine more rigorously after his 1980 Howison lectures at Berkeley. Foucault’s 1980 meeting with Brown in Berkeley can be seen as part of the shift in his engagement with Augustine—a dedication which results in over one third of the published Confessions of the Flesh spent in careful textual analysis of Augustine, while also setting the stakes for “[t]he genealogy of the subject as a subject of ethical actions, or the genealogy of desire as an ethical problem.”98 Confessions of the Flesh certainly shows the fruits of that engagement and Foucault’s debt to Brown, both in relation to Augustine and in relation to Foucault’s broader conceptualization of sexuality and subjectivity. Aline Rousselle’s French translation of Brown’s The Body and Society has a distinctly Foucault-informed title— Le renoncement à la chair : Virginité, célibat et continence dans le christianisme primitif (1995). 97 Discussing positive and negative forms of parrhesia, Foucault notes: “You find it again in the Christians expressed in fairly similar ways, apart, however, from the fact that in the history of their asceticism Christians seem to have taken it infinitely further and, at least for a time, tried to radicalize even Cynic renunciation.” (Foucault, The Courage of Truth, 317.) 98 Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in Essential Works, 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (1997), 266. This interview is noted as from working sessions with Paul Rabinow and Hubert Dreyfus at Berkeley in April 1983. In the slightly modified French edition of “On the Genealogy of the Subject,” Foucault maintains his reading of Augustine on the role of the erection and desire (Michel Foucault, “À propos de la généalogie de l'éthique : un aperçu du travail en cours,” Dits et Écrits, Tome 2 : 1976 - 1988 (2001), 1208, 1433, 1213 & 1438). Foucault Studies, No. 32, 1-27. 22 NIKI KASUMI CLEMENTS The genealogy of the influence between Foucault and Brown shows not only that Foucault cites Brown but that his own tournant antique took much from the cultural historian deeply enmeshed in discourses of Christianity, ethics, and subjectivity. As evident in Foucault’s published and archival references to Brown, Brown clearly influenced Foucault’s editing and rethinking of his History of Sexuality series. The disciplinary intersection between historical and philosophical methods is thus vital for understanding Foucault’s work, notably over the last eight years of his life (1976-1984). We cannot understand Foucault’s readings of Augustine nor Foucault’s genealogy of subjectivity without appreciating his engagement with Brown and the questions that emerge in his shifting views of “le partage” between classical and late antiquities. To return to Box 84, Folder 11: Foucault’s last engagement with Christianity involves Augustine and sexuality. And the evidence of Foucault’s last engagement with Augustine involves Brown. Brown’s details of their interactions help to flesh out this influence and, in return, contextualize encounters known in general fact but not in specific content. Brown’s work threads through both Foucault’s unpublished archival material and his published monographs and lectures. Taken together, this evidence suggests that Brown had a vital influence on Foucault precisely as Foucault was shifting his History of Sexuality project, his genealogy of subjectivity, and his archival practices. To contextualize Confessions of the Flesh thus requires understanding the influence of Brown on Foucault—and Augustine on Foucault vis-à-vis Brown. To work through these influences—from direct personal encounters to the distal influences they have had on several fields—is to reckon with larger issues of the disciplinary structure of academic inquiry and the need for critique in academic knowledge production. We can also limit potential textual anachronisms by including archival references to the volumes and sources Foucault engaged, which help us glean how his theoretical developments inform his historical readings, and vice versa. Both Foucault and Brown contributed to the conditions of possibility for each others’ critical historical and philosophical knowledge production—and they did so, to some degree, through the same influences. 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Foucault Studies, No. 32, 1-27. 24 NIKI KASUMI CLEMENTS Chevallier, Philippe, “The Genesis of Confessions of the Flesh,” Foucault’s Confessions talk series, Rice University, May 11, 2021. https://foucaultsconfessions.org/philippe-chevallier/ Clark, Elizabeth A., “1990 Presidential Address: Sex, Shame, and Rhetoric: En-Gendering Early Christian Ethics,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 59:2 (1991), 221-45. Clark, Elizabeth A., “L’Augustin de Foucault au risqué d’Augustin,” in Foucault, les Pères, le Sexe : Autour des Aveux de la chair, ed. Philippe Büttgen, Philippe Chevallier, Agustín Colombo, and Arianna Sforzini. Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2021. Clark, Elizabeth A., “Foucault, The Fathers, and Sex,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 56:4 (1988), 619-41. Clark, Elizabeth A., History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Courcelle, Pierre. Connais-toi toi-même de Socrate à Saint Bernard. Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1974. Eribon, Didier, Michel Foucault. Paris: Flammarion, 2011. Eribon, Didier, Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Foucault, Michel, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975, ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Foucault, Michel, About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self, Lectures at Dartmouth College, 1980, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Daniele Lorenzini. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Foucault, Michel, Archives at University of California, Berkeley, Bancroft Library, 90/136 Z, Berkeley, California. Foucault, Michel, “The Battle for Chastity,” in Essential Works, 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: New Press, 1997. Foucault, Michel, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Michel Senellart. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Foucault, Michel, “Le combat de la chasteté,” in Dits et Écrits, Tome 2 : 1976 – 1988. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. Foucault, Michel, “Le combat de la chasteté,” Communications 35 (1982), 15-25. https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1982.1518 Foucault, Michel, The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983-1984, trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Foucault, Michel, Discours et vérité, précédé de La parrêsia, ed. Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Daniele Lorenzini. Paris: Vrin, 2016. Foucault, Michel, Fonds Foucault, Bibliothèque nationale de France (B.N.F.), NAF 28730, Paris, France. Foucault, Michel, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981-1982, trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Foucault, Michel, Histoire de la sexualité IIII : Les aveux de la chair. Paris: Gallimard, 2018. 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Utah: University of Utah Press, 1981. Foucault, Michel, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in Essential Works, 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: New Press, 1997. Foucault, Michel, On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979-1980, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Foucault, Michel, “Préface à l’Histoire de la sexualité,” in Dits et Écrits, Tome 2 : 1976 – 1988, 1397-1403. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. Foucault, Michel, “Preface to the History of Sexuality, Volume II,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, 333-339. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Foucault, Michel, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France 1973-1974, ed. Jacques Lagrange, trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Foucault, Michel, “Le retour de la morale,” in Dits et Écrits, Tome 2 : 1976 – 1988, 1515-1526. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. Foucault, Michel, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Michel Senellart. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Foucault, Michel, ”Sexualités occidentales,” https://doi.org/10.3406/ahess.1978.293904 Communications 35 (1982), 15-25. Foucault, Michel, “Sexuality and Power (1978),” in Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy Carrette. New York: Routledge, 1999. Published as “Sexualité et pouvoir” in Gendai-shisô (1978). Foucault, Michel, “Sexuality and Solitude,” in Essential Works, 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: New Press, 1997. Foucault, Michel, Speaking the Truth about Oneself: Lectures at Victoria University, Toronto, 1982, ed. Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Daniele Lorenzini, English ed. established by Daniel Louis Wyche. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021. Foucault, Michel, Subjectivity and Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1980-1981, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Frédéric Gros. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Foucault, Michel, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton. Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. Foucault Studies, No. 32, 1-27. 26 NIKI KASUMI CLEMENTS Foucault, Michel, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, ed. Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Frend, Willam H. C., Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church. Oxford: Blackwell, 1965. Marrow, Stanley B., “Parrhesia and the New Testament,” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 44:3 (1982), 431-446. Sedgwick, Timothy, The Christian Moral Life: Practices of Piety. Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing, 1999. Senellart, Michel, “Le cours de 1980, Du gouvernement des vivants, dans la perspective de l'Histoire de la sexualité,” in Michel Foucault: éthique et vérité: 1980-1984, ed. Daniele Lorenzini, Ariane Revel, and Arianna Sforzini, 31-51. Paris: Vrin, 2013. Tran, Jonathan, Foucault and Theology. New York: T & T Clark International, 2011. Veyne, Paul, “Le Monde Romain : la famille et l’amour sous le haut-empire Romain,” Annales Économies Sociétés Civilisations 33:1 (1978), 35-63. https://doi.org/10.3406/ahess.1978.293904 Zachubber, Johannes, “Intériorité de la conscience et extériorité des avuex. Le sujet chrétien selon Foucault,” in Foucault, les Pères, le Sexe: Autour des Aveux de la chair, ed. Philippe Büttgen, Philippe Chevallier, Agustín Colombo, and Arianna Sforzini. Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2021. Author info Niki Kasumi Clements niki.clements@rice.edu Watt J. and Lilly G. Jackson Associate Professor of Religion Department of Religion Rice University United States of America Niki Kasumi Clements researches Michel Foucault’s fascination with Christianity and ethics through both his published works and the archives at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Clements is an ethicist working at the disciplinary intersection of philosophy of religion and late ancient Christianity, notably on questions of daily practices, agency, and subjectivity. Clements’s monograph Sites of the Ascetic Self: John Cassian and Christian Ethical Formation (2020), approaches these questions through the practical ethics of John Cassian (c. 360c. 435), a late ancient ascetic central to Foucault’s reworking of his History of Sexuality series. Clements is at work on the monograph, Foucault the Confessor, as well as a short book, Foucault’s Final Confessions, contextualizing Foucault’s Les Aveux de la chair in relation to his last decade. Foucault Studies, No. 32, 1-27. 27

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