As part of my research on Michel Foucault‘s engagement with early Christian texts, I have been tracing his citational practices from 1974-1984 through his published works; gradually I will include citations from Foucault’s meticulous notes in his archives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The 2018 posthumous publication, L’Histoire de la sexualité IV: Les aveux de la chair, edited by Frédéric Gros, is included; the 2021 translation by Robert Hurley, Confessions of the Flesh, contributes to the need to understand Foucault’s complex navigation of Christian texts and practices. The project Foucault Fiches de Lecture (FFL) is digitizing many of Foucault’s reading notes, offering unprecedented digital access to the Fonds Foucault at the BnF.
Currently processing the textual references Foucault makes to mainly early Christian texts in his monographs and Collège de France lectures between 1974 and 1984, the following dynamic data visualizations were built in Python by the Center for Research Computing at Rice University. Foucault’s works are on the left, leading to (mostly) ancient Christian authors in the middle, leading to cited works of those authors on the right. The number of connections across years and the density of citations are both important.
To make the visualizations more meaningful, the script operates by citation thresholds. In other words, we can get a quick but contentful view of which texts and authors Foucault cites from (mostly) early to late ancient Christianity. Follow the drop-down menu in the visualization for texts meeting citation thresholds between 4 and 9. The sankey graphs are interactive and if you click through the following link to the code and detailed views, you can hover over the name (for the number of citations) or you can hover over the line moving to a text (for the number of citations of that text) https://observablehq.com/@johnmulligan/sankey-diagram
This visualization processes the references from an airtable citational database built between 2019-2020 and populated by research assistants Mariana Nájera & Bilal Rehman. The airtable digital database includes a count of citations at the page level from Foucault to the passage level of various early Christian texts (and the Sankey tool which is a visualization of the data in the database). The citing text and page of Foucault matches with the authors, texts, and passages (when relevant) he cites.
I have cited from the English translations throughout and for Les aveux de la chair, I include both the French page and the English page in the database. For example, this screenshot shows the 2018 posthumously published Les Aveux de la chair with Foucault’s citations of John Cassian and Chrysostom; the “Citing Text Page” includes the corresponding French page number then the English page number.
Another example shows the early Christian texts Foucault refers to in his final year of lectures of the Collège de France, edited and translated as The Courage of Truth (1983-1984); in this selected frame, note Foucault’s references to Paul, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, Dorotheus of Gaza, and the Apophthegmata Patrum. Care has been taken to parse editorial additions of texts from those of Foucault, as well as to maintain integrity between the published French and English translation.
In February 2018, right after the release of Les Aveux de la chair, I completed a rudimentary citational matrix of early Christian sources Foucault cites between 1974-1984 (in alphabetical order below in the translation Foucault uses).
Please note that these tables are drafts and errors & inconsistencies are inevitable yet correctable. The careful reader will note different titles and author spellings between the translations–for the most part, I have stayed as close to references from the published versions of Foucault’s texts. The reader will also observe that the database has a bunch of references that are misplaced–both ancient authors and contemporary scholars–in that they are not *Christian* or not primary sources yet that shaped Foucault’s approach to early Christian asceticism & monasticism. Some of these references are still present because they are saved for the comprehensive database on all ancient sources and they do not substantively impact the visualizations due to the citation thresholds; the two exceptions are Philo of Alexandria and Irénée Hausherr.
This is version 1.0 of the project and if you are interested in contributing to the database or using these tools, please email me at niki.clements@rice.edu. The next two stages of this project are (1) to add to this database on Christian sources all of Foucault’s published writings (Dits et écrits, lectures) and (2) to separate out & establish a database for all other ancient Greek and Roman philosophical and medical sources Foucault cites. For all years!!