Loriane Lafont-Grave, The Mystical Quality of Foucault’s Confessions of the Flesh: An Inquiry from Within, The Journal of Religion 2024 104:2, 145-170
Abstract
This article offers an investigation of Foucault’s Confessions of the Flesh—published in 2018, thirty-four years after the death of the author—through a literary approach. It argues that “The Laborious Baptism,” the second section of the first chapter of the book, “The Formation of a New Experience,” has an immersive quality of writing that signals a way of writing “from within,” to take up an expression coined by Emerson.
By putting Foucault in conversation with James Bernauer, Willemien Otten, Philippe Büttgen, and Pierre Macherey, among others, this article aims to show that Foucault’s Confessions of the Flesh may best be seen, in a final analysis, as a confessio fidei in the flesh. It owns, at some point, a mystical quality so that the book truly offers a peculiar experience to its readership. In the first part of the article, we make some metaliterary comments about the potential pitfalls of dealing with a posthumous book, helped by T. S. Eliot and Nietzsche. In the second part, we delve into “The Laborious Baptism” by making a close reading of it. In concluding remarks, we reflect on how Confessions of the Flesh may display a form of Christian parrhesia under the sign of risk-taking in keeping with Foucault’s ultima verba as a professor in his very last lecture at the Collège de France.
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