Foucault and Perpetua: Trials in Truth-Telling

This paper treats passages of the martyrdom account of Perpetua in conversation with the late work of Michel Foucault, in particular the History of Sexuality volume 4:Confessions of the Flesh and the lectures at the College de France (1978 - 2084). The reading parses the relationship between mechanics of truth-telling and modes of subject formation through attention to the practices demonstrated by Perpetua, and the rhetorical elements of the martyrdom account itself. In addition, the reading raises a tension in using the Foucauldian frameworks to read the martyrdom account. By driving towards these sites of tension, the discussion aims to address what Foucault's late work can contribute to the study of early Christian martyrdom accounts and what early Christian martyrdom accounts can contribute to the study of Foucault. 

The martyrdom of Perpetua tells the story of a woman, Perpetua, and her fellow Christians martyred under the Roman Empire. Framed by a powerful editorial voice, the text tells its readers what to make of the trial, improsonment, and execution of this figure and her fellows. Filled with rich metaphorical language and evocative imagery, the text offers a dramatic site through which to explore the scenes of martyrdom in early Christianity. Most relevant to the question here, the texts creates a dramatic scene - or rather layers of dramatic scenes - in which the act of truth-telling is framed and illuminated. I take this truth-telling in the martyrdom account as a central theme, and read the elements of the account through this question.

In order to understand the nature of this truth-telling, I turn to the work of Michel Foucault. The notion of regimes of truth, practices of truth-telling, and historical investigations of the relation between subject, power, and truth in antiquity and Christianity all help to draw out political, rhetorical, and historical components of the text. On the other hand, the text also sits at a strange historical and conceptual juncture. The early Christian martyrs and martydom are little treated in Foucault's late work, and I argue centrally connected to its questions. Historically, they fall in an under-treated part of early Christianity in v4. Rather than seek to 'fill in a gap,' that is, to use the reading as building a bridge between historical eras of his late unfinished project, I use this material to try to exploit/raise a conceptual tension in Foucault's theoretical apparatus.

In the first part of the paper, I outline the awkward position in which Foucault leaves the martyrdom account in his work on Christian forms of truth-telling. Between the rubrics arranged in the History of Sexuality volumes and lectures at the College de France (1976 - 1984), I raise the way that the schematics Foucault has laid out to study the relations between truth, subject, and power in the period of late Antiquity and early Christianity leads to paradoxes in studying some early Christian practices of truth-telling, such as the martyrdom of Perpetua. In the middle section of the paper, I turn to key passages of the Perpetua martyrdom account to explore elements of truth-telling there and to raise the tensions it presents. In effect, to explore the trial of truth-telling in Perpetua and to put Foucault's notion of truth-telling on trial with Perpetua.

In the end, I raise the way the martyrdom account can continue to build on Foucault's project tracing forms of truth-telling as technologies of the self and as technologies of power. With a brief reflection on the stakes of Foucault's critical project and the purpose of turning to early Christianity, I suggest ways the martyrdom account help to sharpen the critical and historical attention to freedom and power in practices of truth-telling for the study of religoin.