Michel Foucault and the political history of women's truth: the birth of the pure victim

Abstract

Foucault's analyses show how, from the sixteenth century onwards, the body of desire and pleasure appears at the heart of penitentiary practices and techniques of conscience management. The "disturbance of the flesh" will be the new object of knowledge, discursive domain and field of intervention for the Tridentine intensification of the government of souls. Also for the process of transfer of knowledge and power from the Church to other domains of secular life that will assume towards the end of the seventeenth century the reason of State. In his archive, the episode of the possessions of Loudun, approached briefly by the author in 1974, allows us to glimpse a role specifically given to the experience of the flesh of women's bodies: that of being victims of desire and lacking the will to refute it by themselves. Such a position also constructs them as objects of external examination and sanction, especially by the theological, judicial and psychiatric powers. This paper sets out to reconstruct these analyses and their historical sources, seeking to shed light on a political history of bodies and their specific coercion on women's actions, without, however, restoring an identity dimension to them, alien to the author's point of view, but rather seeking to provide elements for a historical-critical genealogy of the political history of the truth of women.