The Unwritten Foucaultian History of Sexuality: The Flesh and the Body.

The Archive and Its Scattering

Abstract

This article carries out a detailed, contextual and punctual reconstruction of one of the versions of Foucault's manuscript, contained in box LXXXIX of his archives kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and which was to be the second volume of History of Sexuality entitled The Flesh and the Body, which was ultimately not published. The reconstruction referred to is centered on the concept of flesh and the apparatus of confession, making a genealogical review of its three main models, namely the accusatory, the inquisitorial and the examiner. In this manuscript, flesh is understood as the element that connects the soul to the body through sexuality. The present text closes with Foucault's recovery of the definition of the modern subject as an animal of confession and asks to what extent this subject continues to be such and to what extent it could cease to be so.