Niki Clements: Virginity as an Art of Life: Michel Foucault on Gregory of Nyssa’s Περὶ παρθενίας

The biggest surprise of the 2018 posthumous release of Michel Foucault’s Les Aveux de la chair is not its thirty-four year deferred publication but its radical embrace of early Christian texts from Clement of Alexandria to Augustine of Hippo. This fourth and final volume in the History of Sexuality series follows 1984 works on ancient Greek (L’Usage des plaisirs) and Roman (Le Souci de soi) sexual ethics with sustained reflections on the intersection between transformative rites and philosophical anthropology.Within this text, Foucault focuses on Gregory of Nyssa’s Traité de la virginité to analyze the ethical possibilities for the “care of the self” (ἐπιμελεία ἑαυτοῦ) in the construction of virginity. Citing Nyssa’s early view that “la profession de virginité est un art et une science de la vie divine” (De la virginité, IV, 9), Foucault extols Nyssa’s analysis of virginity as an art of life. Keenly interested in the forms of self-relation, silence, and independence that such virginity involves, Foucault extends his reading of Nyssa (in his 1982 lectures, L'Hermeneutique du sujet) as the Christian culmination of a form of attention to the “care of the self” best realized by Socrates eight centuries prior.In this paper, I will analyze Foucault’s reading of Nyssa and the construction of virginity as “un libre choix” in order to assess such praxis, while appealing to Vie de sainte Macrine,Vie de Moïse, and La Création de l'homme as even better illuminating the ethical promise Foucault himself pursues.