Augustine of Hippo is the star of Michel Foucault's Confessions of the Flesh, posthumously published in 2018 and translated in 2021 as the fourth and final volume for the History of Sexuality series. Continuous with his 1980-1981 Collège de France lectures, Foucault asks “the big question in Christian thought, Saint Augustine’s question, but also our question: ‘What in truth is our desire?’.” This co-sponsored session between the Foucault seminar and the Augustine and Augstinianisms unit brings together three papers and a respondent to ask: whose desire does Foucault attend to? And how does Augustine offer a different account of desire than we see in Foucault’s Augustine? Our panelists and respondent take up and challenge Foucault’s reading of sexual desire (as focused on the male erection and individualizing forms of subjectivity) through a relational understanding of desire as a more robust way of considering the ethical relation between self and others.
As Lynne Huffer suggests in Mad for Foucault (Columbia, 2010), the question of ethics is, for Foucault, always a question of the self in relation to the other. This relationality that Huffer locates in Foucault is inspired by her reading of Luce Irigaray, and, as such, is a question of ethics as it relates to a cultivation of self in relation to desire. In this paper, I chart Foucault’s notion of desire across four volumes of The History of Sexuality to articulate desire as “the historical transcendental from which we can and must think the history of sexuality” (Foucault, 1981). I then read Foucault’s interpretation of the desiring subject in Augustine through Irigaray’s concept of sexuate difference (as an irreducible two necessary for desire to exist), and conclude by considering the ways a radical reading Irigaray’s notion of self-affection contributes to a more robust reading of desire in Foucault.
In Confessions of the Flesh, Michel Foucault attempts to show how Augustine was instrumental in reconfiguring early church debates about the nature of Christian marriage. The key to licit sexuality, for Augustine, was the self-governance of libido in the conjugal act. Foucault’s genealogy of desire in the church’s discourses on marriage uncovers a “subject of concupiscence.” This essay expands Foucault’s method of analyzing the desiring subject. Augustine’s (and Foucault’s) gaze is fixated on male erection. However, another involuntary, visible, and unpredictable bodily phenomenon—shared by men and women—also manifests erotic desire: the blush. This essay examines the erotics of blushing in a comparative analysis of two keen observers of human passion: Augustine and Jane Austen. I argue that examining the role of blushing, using theological and literary analytical methods, complements and deepens Foucault’s analysis of the construction of the desiring subject.
In Confessions of the Flesh, Foucault argues that Augustine reframes ancient attitudes toward sex by emphasizing the quality of the desiring subject’s will. For Foucault, Augustine’s emphasis on the will transforms the ethical questions around sexual conduct into a question of the self’s relationship to itself. What Foucault’s account misses, however, is that Augustine’s discussion of sexuality in City of God expresses longing for a therapeutic restoration of a lost harmony to the human subject. More importantly, with regards to sexual ethics, Augustine’s discussion of Edenic sex focuses on how this harmony of the unperturbed subject coheres with a harmony between lovers. This is a profoundly relational ideal, by contrast to the solipsistic subjectivity Foucault presents; this tension between paradise and the present is central to Augustine’s complicated attitude toward sex and sexuality.
| Charles Mathewes | ctm9d@virginia.edu | View |