1. Michael Foucault, Les aveux de la chair, ed. Frédéric Gros (Paris: Gallimard, 2018). In what follows, I refer to this book as AC in inline quotations. An earlier version of the present text is forthcoming as “L’intériorité de la conscience et l’extériorité des aveux: le sujet chrétien selon Michel Foucault,” in Foucault, les Pères et le sexe, Autour des Aveux de la chair, ed. Philippe Chevallier et al. (Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2021). I wish to thank Mr. Nikolaas Deketelaere for his help with the translation of that text into English.
2. Cf. for what follows, Frédéric Gros, “Avertissement,” in Foucault, Les aveux de la chair, i–xvii.
3. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Late Antiquity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). The relationship between Foucault and Brown’s projects is fascinating. Whereas Brown, “A Life of Learning,” ACLS Occasional Paper no. 55 (2003): 1–20, at 2–3, spoke of an “intellectual friendship” between himself and Foucault in rather vague terms (“intense but largely unplanned conversations”), Foucault himself attributed to his colleague the insight that “what we have to understand is why it is that sexuality became, in Christian cultures, the seismograph of our subjectivity,” indicating that Brown might have had a considerable influence on the fundamental direction of the enquiry in Les aveux de la chair. Michel Foucault and Richard Sennett, “Sexuality and Solitude,” London Review of Books 3, no. 9 (21 May 1981): 3–7.
4. For the discussion during the 1980s, see the extensive review of volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality by Averil Cameron: “Redrawing the Map: Early Christian Territory after Foucault,” Journal of Roman Studies 76 (1986): 266–271. See also Richard Alston, “Foucault and Roman Antiquity: Foucault’s Rome Introduction,” Foucault Studies 22 (2017): 8–30. Alston defends Foucault against critics of his interpretation of sexuality in the Roman Empire by observing that his “project” would have “culminated in early Christian texts”: “Foucault was working backwards from the Christian conception of the self to its discursive origin” (22).
5. See, in particular, Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). Aline Roussell’s important book, Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), was originally published at the same time as volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality. For the wider discussion about ancient Christianity in its late ancient environment, see Alan Kreider, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbably Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2016); Larry Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World (Waco, TX: Baylor, 2016).