Abstract
How do the Middle Ages fit into the French historian of ideas Michel Foucault’s (1926–1984) unconventional history of ideas, archaeologies of knowledge, and genealogies of the subject, and do the various references to the Middle Ages in Foucault’s main texts merely serve as analogical references to his broader critique of modernity? The objective of this article is to answer these two questions by using one of Foucault’s most recent posthumous publications, Histoire de la sexualité 4 (Les aveux de la chair, edited by Frédéric Gros in 2018), as a novel case study.
For Foucault, without modernist prejudice, the Middle Ages form part of the contingent development of Western intellectual history from the Greeks to late modernity. However, because of his emphasis on contingency, references to the Middle Ages do not appear systematically and coherently in his history of ideas. They appear, rather, as analogical (thus between the medieval and the modern) furrows in the diverse contexts of his archaeologies, genealogies and problematisations, whether of madness, sex, discipline, surveillance, psychiatry, public health, population control or the origins of the human sciences, to name but a few areas of interest. The question is whether these references have only this single rhetorical function in Foucault’s works – precisely because his idea-historical analyses were never intended to be read as conventionally historiographical.
On the trail of the influential medieval scholar Pierre Payer’s critical analysis and restrained commendation of Histoire de la sexualité 1 (La volonté de savoir) almost four decades ago, and given the assertion by the eminent Annales historian of the Middle Ages, Jacques le Goff, that Foucault indeed contributed to medieval studies as such, the article holds Foucault’s interpretation of the Middle Ages, specifically regarding his reading of the early medieval Augustine in Les aveux de la chair, close to the historically verifiable sources. Even if Foucault’s references to the Middle Ages in this recent publication (as well as in his previous works) have a predominant analogical, rhetorical and thus modern-critical function, they should still conform to the first criterion of historiography, namely as systematic analyses that can be verified via references to the relevant primary sources. Foucault’s interpretation of Augustine and the early Middle Ages in Les aveux de la chair is hence evaluated in terms of this basic question – whether he kept close to the relevant historical sources as such.
After indicating analyses of Foucault’s interpretation of the Middle Ages as an underdeveloped theme in the current scholarship, based on a comparative reading of several recent introductions, companions and editorial works, the author contextualises Foucault’s interpretation of and references to Augustine and the early Middle Ages in Les aveux de la chair. The conclusion reached is that although Foucault’s references to the Middle Ages in this work again played a crucial analogical and indeed rhetorical role in his critique of modernity, he also expanded the existing body of knowledge on the early Middle Ages, and hence contributed to medieval studies as such. On these grounds the persistent accusation of a latent medievalism in Foucault’s thought is shown to be questionable.
Keywords: Augustine (354–430); Michel Foucault (1926–1984); Histoire de la sexualité 4 (Les aveux de la chair); Jacques le Goff (1924–2014); medieval philosophy; medieval studies; medievalism; Middle Ages; Pierre Payer (1936–)
- The painting of Augustine by Sandro Botticelli used on this article’s featured image is in the public domain and is available on Wikipedia.
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