What became known as the three-volume "History of Sexuality" (The Will to Knowledge, The Use of Pleasure, The Care of the Self) posed a concise and clear question aimed at the heart of subjectivity within Western culture: "How, over the centuries, did the Western man come to recognize himself as a subject of desire?" However, Michel Foucault's premature death in 1984 would cast a gray hue of dust over an entire volume, which would remain locked in the archives for three decades, leaving the genealogical question of the desiring subject suspended and unfinished.
This volume is titled "The Confessions of the Flesh" and comes to complete the so far known three-volume "History of Sexuality", serving as the connecting link between the first volume (1976) and the second and third (1984), as it focuses on the transition from the pagan view of pleasures to the Christian attitude towards the flesh and desire, studying the techniques of the self that developed in the West "within a relationship with the power of the other and with the gaze that simultaneously marks the subjectification of the individual and the objectification of his interiority." In this way, the present volume completes the initial plan of a history of sexuality as an experience, "if by the term experience we mean the relationship that exists within a culture between fields of knowledge, types of normativity, and forms of subjectivity." In this way, Foucault unites philosophical and historical perspective with the poetics of critique, at least as desired by the verses of his beloved poet, René Char, which adorn the back cover of the French edition: "The history of men is the long succession of synonyms of the same term. To contradict it is a duty."