Abstract

In the three published volumes of his History of Sexuality Foucault reflects on themes of anxiety situated in the Christian doctrine of the flesh that led to a pastoral ministry establishing the rules of a general social economy--rules that enabled, over time, a discourse on the flesh that took thrift, prudence, modesty, and suspicion as essential ethical premises in the emerging "art of the self." Rather than sensing flesh as a charged, motile potentiality of attachment and intimacy, it came to be seen as skin--as the limit of a sovereign body, embedding guilt and shame into the texture of its expression. This essay pursues the psychological and communication ...