It is a sensation and a posthumous miracle: Three and a half decades after the author's death, the fourth and final volume of Sexuality and Truth is published – Michel Foucault's extensive history of sexuality and a milestone of philosophical research in the 20th century. The Confessions of the Flesh, completed by Foucault on his deathbed, connect to the legendary preceding volumes and once again testify to the exceptional status of this thinker.

At the center are the ethical discussions of the Church Fathers regarding sexual life in the early Christian centuries. Foucault reads the sermons and treatises of Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, John Cassian, and Augustine of Hippo as documents of concern for the salvation of souls – as testimonies to the development of a new morality and self-experience that would shape the West from then on. In particular, virginity and marriage are the focus of the debates, which culminate in Augustine's concept of a desire economy that continues to influence us today: a constitutive obligation of the subject to continually problematize the relationship between freedom and nature, reason and desire.