Ancient World Seminar: Niki Clements (Rice University): "What Foucault Learnt from Late Ancient Christianity"

Abstract

This CRASIS talk will explore the relationship between sexuality and early Christian monasticism. Over the last decade of his life, Michel Foucault drafts and redrafts his History of Sexuality series. And between 1974 and 1984, he becomes increasingly invested in late ancient and then ancient discourses on sexual ethics. The 2018 posthumous publication of History of Sexuality: Volume 4, Les aveux de la chair, leaves us with no doubt as to the importance of late ancient askesis and spiritual direction in  his "sex series." So what did Foucault learn from late antiquity? How did he come to engage the work of the monk and theologian John Cassian as a particular site for understanding modern confessional subjection? And how does he end up extolling virginity as an art of living in the church father Gregory of Nyssa? In this talk, I will stage how Foucault transformed his sex series into an inquiry into ethics through the fulcrum of late ancient Christianity.