Foucault in the BnF Archives

Foucault's archives are vast, with traces all over the world. The largest collections, however, are situated in Paris, France at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). Since 2019, I have been working through Foucault's drafts, reading notes, and correspondances at the BnF, in order to tell the story of his last decade. Part of that story is the central role that Christianity places in his History of Sexuality series and the developing genealogy of modern subjectivity.

Tracing folder to folder, box to box, in the BnF manuscript reading room I have found that confession and concupiscence only gradually become bound together as Foucault rewrites his History of Sexuality series. To understand why we confess to our modern doctors and shrinks, Foucault turns first to confessional practices in sixteenth to eighteenth century Catholic and Reformation texts, and then moves back to ancient monastic practices in the fourth to fifth centuries. Between 1979 and 1982, Foucault unfolds a genealogy through which sexuality becomes isomorphic with the truth of our selves that we must constantly confess, from ancient Christianity to modernity.

In this talk, I'll give a breakdown of (1) what we find in the six different parts of the massive BnF archives and (2) how we can start to make sense of the role of "religion" (typically isomorophic with Christianity, lamentably, in Foucault's case). One of the only (if only) people to consult all six parts (NAF 28730, 28284, 28803, 28804, 29005, and 29070) of the BnF archives, I really want to share how the disciplinary strategies in religious studies are particularly necessary for analyzing and framing Foucault's historiographical and conceptual moves. 

Our discipline is particularly important to Foucault's last decade (1974 to 1984) as he comes to unfold genealogy as “the history of the present”(DP, 31); that is, the historical conditions of emergence for how we understand, act, and live today. And “think differently” Foucault did. I argue that he started studying Christianity in order to identify how Inquisition-style power makes us confess. Analyzing the history of Christian confession was an elegant way for Foucault to identify the practices that would become institutionalized as strategies of subjection in the nineteenth century.

Yet his conceptualization of power/knowledge left little room for resistance and challenge to those strategies. His activist work, for prisoners’ rights for example, might have left him feeling the need for a richer sense of counter-conduct. So as he traces back forms of governmentality and truth from modernity to antiquity, he gradually identifies the need for ethics as a third axis of human experience.

His inquiry over the last three years of his life identifies “a new ethics”(BNF 90.1-2) as an art of living in Christian and pagan practices alike. Contrary to neoliberal or nihilist readings of Foucault, he comes to stress ethical formation as a collective undertaking in antiquity. The care of the self always relies on the care of others, and enables one to better care for others. Cultivating the ability to see unjust treatment of others and to speak this truth, even when putting oneself at risk, becomes the heart of the parrhēsiastic practice in Foucault’s 1982 to 1984 lectures. The B.N.F. archives give us a singular view into how Foucault also developed this lecture material for the volume Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres (The Government of Self and Others) that he was not able to develop and publish, his life cut tragically short at 57.

Over his last decade, Foucault allowed himself to be changed through the texts and contexts he analyzed as “un expérimenteur”(an experimenter), opening possibilities for ethics alongside realities of subjection.[vi] Analyzing Foucault’s last decade of archived research at the B.N.F. – produced day-to-day, year-to-year – enables us to better appreciate the stakes of Foucault’s changing conceptual apparatus and to better critique his own limitations. Foucault’s archives remain but they too are not static: they change depending on how we are willing to be transformed by them, as he was transformed in his own research. I take up Foucault’s archives vis-à-vis Lynne Huffer’s “archives of infamy” in order to better trace his own ethical challenges to too overt forms of power and subjection. And I hope to show you, too, the possibilities of this pursuit.