What became known as the three-volume "History of Sexuality" (The Will to Knowledge, The Use of Pleasures, The Care of Self) posed a simple and clear question targeting the heart of subjectivity within Western culture: "In what way, over the centuries, has the Western man come to recognize himself as a subject of desire"? However, the premature death of Michel Foucault in 1984 would cover an entire volume with the gray color of dust, which would remain locked away for three whole decades, leaving the genealogical question of the desiring subject hanging and unfinished.

This volume is titled "The Confessions of the Flesh" and serves to complement what has so far been known as the three-volume "History of Sexuality," acting 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 sexuality to the Christian attitude towards the flesh and desire, studying the techniques of the self that were developed in the West "within a relationship with the power of the other and with the gaze that simultaneously marks a subjectivization of the individual and an objectification of their interiority."

In this way, the present volume completes the original design of a history of sexuality as experience, "if by experience we mean the correlation that exists within a culture between domains of knowledge, types of normativity, and forms of subjectivity." In this way, Foucault unites the philosophical and historical view with the poeticism of critique, at least as desired by the verses of his favorite 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."