Sessualità e identità personale. Genealogia di un enigma

Sexuality and Personal Identity: Genealogy of a Riddle This review essay is an inquiry into the relationship between sexual life and personal identity in light of the posthumous fourth volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality (Les aveux de la chair, Gallimard, 2018). Its main argument revolves around the coexistence of both a personal and a subpersonal level in sexual pleasure. From this angle, I begin by sketching a rather conventional picture of human sexuality and its antinomies (personal or subpersonal character of erotic pleasures and imaginaries, activity or passivity of desire, centered or decentered nature of human sensuousness, etc.). I, then, proceed to historically contextualize and theoretically deconstruct this standard picture capitalizing on Foucault’s last works. Only at this point, the focus of the discussion is shifted from the context to one of the crucial elements of Foucault’s investigation into the changes of sexual ethics in early Christianity. Here, the reductive nature of the interpretation of Augustine developed in the last part of the book is critically examined in view of the theologically vital tension between cupiditas and ordinata dilectio.