Kirsten Collins

PhD Student, Religion, Literature, and Visual Culture

That Other Fornication: Jewish Law in the Sources of Foucault’s Histoire de la sexualité IV

This paper examines the implications of Judaism’s unremarked presence in the fourth installment of Foucault’s history of sexuality, Confessions of the Flesh. Judaism appears twice in his text, in paraphrases of the early Christian sources through which he attempts to examine the relationship between flesh and spirit, and the conception of subjectivity that he thinks it has produced. Through close readings of John Chrysostom and John Cassian, both within Foucault’s text and outside of it, I attempt to contextualize these references to Judaism, and through them, to examine some gaps in Foucault’s account of “the relation of the self to the self.”

Wednesday, April 24, 12:00 PM, Swift 200

Refreshments provided

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