Foucault News

I will be summarising and commenting Les Aveux de la chair, Foucault’s fourth volume in the history of sexuality tetralogy philosophically. In this first substantial post I wish to show how the first few pages conform to the theses that can be extracted from the sketch for an introduction appended in Annex 1.

The book’s first, and longest, chapter has for title: “The formation of a new experience”, which situates it as a demonstration of the thesis of the mutability of experience.

This is at first sight an epistemological thesis (there is no “raw” experience), but we must not forget that it is also a political (prescriptions for conduct can be neither legitimated nor invalidated by an appeal to constituted experience) and an ontological one (Being scinds experience, rescinds its authority, and prescinds it from exteriority).

The title of the first part of the first chapter is “Creation…