Foucault/Paul

Subjects of Power

S. Fuggle

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349460069, 9781137326928
• eBook ISBN: 9781137323408
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The way which society conceives of power in the twenty-first century determines how it approaches future issues. Placing the twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault into critical conjunction with the apostle Paul, Fuggle re-evaluates the way in which power operates within society and underpins ethical and political actions.

Chapter 1

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Excavations

Carrying out any kind of excavation—literal or metaphorical—requires a constant negotiation between two opposing processes. Every attempt to strip away another layer of matter, history, or discourse necessarily involves adding an additional layer or surface as the debris piles up around us. Moreover, it is important to recognize the impossibility of doing this cleanly and evenly—what one ends up with is a collection of uneven lumps and patches—and the attempt and failure to make definitive sense of these fragments and traces is perhaps part of the human condition or, at the very least, what keeps academics in business. To assume the role of archaeologist inevitably involves getting dirt under one’s fingernails. Not only are we ourselves bound up, implicated in this process of excavating, we also must and should recognize ourselves as such, acknowledging the ways in which our handling of the material that we are sifting through both adds and takes away from it.

Toward the end of the 1960s, Michel Foucault articulated his own archaeological approach to the study of truth and knowledge. Where more will be said later in this chapter about what was at stake for Foucault in developing this mode of inquiry in contradistinction to other forms of historiography, I would like to pursue the notion of archaeology and, more specifically, the twofold process of carrying out an excavation with specific reference to the critical project of this book. Using the idea of “excavating” as my starting point, the aim of this chapter is, therefore, to clear away and simultaneously lay some of the conceptual and methodological groundwork for a negotiation between Paul and Foucault. Here, the focus lies in uncovering their respective notions of power and subjectivity in order to consider the various possibilities for individual and collective ethical action that these might engender within a twenty-first century context. The task here is to identify and clarify how Foucault and Paul will be read both on their own terms and together. Here, the necessity of selective reading of both Foucault’s work due the enormous corpus of texts, lectures, and interviews produced during his career and the mountain of scholarship produced on Paul in addition to his own letters is clear. One of the fundamental issues driving this chapter, and indeed the project as a whole, is the need to impose limits on our reading and a consideration of the justifications for doing so.

Foucault’s archaeological method was superseded during the early 1970s by a genealogical approach to understanding the discourses and practices defining and regulating individual and collective subjectivities. However, the recent work of Giorgio Agamben, at once tough critic and enthusiastic follower of Foucault’s thought and method, has done much to tease out some of the semantic niceties to be found in defining the role of the archaeologist that are helpful in articulating my own objectives in this preliminary chapter. In his essay “Philosophical Archaeology,” published in The Signature of All Things, Agamben provides the following assertion as to what archaeology should entail:

Provisionally, we may call “archaeology” that practice which in any historical investigation has not to do with origins but with the moment of a phenomenon’s arising and must therefore engage anew the sources and tradition. It cannot confront tradition without deconstructing the paradigms, techniques, and practices through which tradition regulates the forms of transmission, conditions access to sources, and in the final analysis determines the very status of the knowing subject. The moment of arising is objective and subjective at the same time and is indeed situated on a threshold of undecidability between object and subject. It is never the emergence of the fact without at the same time being the emergence of the knowing subject itself: the operation on the origin is at the same time an operation on the subject.¹

As will become apparent over the course of the chapter, the intention in returning both to Paul and Foucault is indeed to “engage anew the sources and tradition,” thinking of them both in relation to and beyond the contexts in which they were working and writing. Furthermore, the purpose of doing so is precisely that of engendering a change or reconfiguration not only in the object up for discussion, in this instance religious and secular notions of power, but also in the “very status of the knowing subject.” In other words, how we might rethink power for the current moment and consequently our own individual and collective political and ethical subjectivities. This is the dirt under our fingernails.

Agamben provides further insight into this “threshold of indecidability” between the objective and subjective via his identification of the multiple temporalities implicated in the archaeological process. Archaeology is neither concerned with a return to the past nor is its objective the location of an origin. So far I have adopted the term “excavation,” focusing on the similarities between digging up and clearing away of physical matter and the different layers of understanding or thinking of the world associated with different ages or periods, whereas Agamben picks up another term conjurer (to conjure up), used to refer to this process by Foucault in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In its rendering as “to dispel” in the English translation of the text, half the sense of conjurer is lost (Signature, 83–4). To conjure something up is to call upon it, to summon, or to evoke it with the usual intention—as is the case with a demon or spirit—of dispelling or ridding oneself of it once and for all. In this respect, conjuring up has similar connotations to the notion of exorcism. The paradox of conjuring is that in order to get rid of something, it first needs to be made manifest. An existence needs to be acknowledged before it can definitively be renounced or denied. Archaeology, as a form of conjuring up, must also attest, therefore, to the impossibility of the task it has set for itself. It is a project that is utopian but, a deferred utopia, which must take the form of an ongoing practice. Archaeology is not a method that can afford to be caught resting on its laurels, since such laurels are mostly the ruins of past excavations or exorcisms. This is why Agamben, drawing on Kant’s account of the archē, refers to archaeology as a “ruinology.” Hence, its object is neither the immediate production of a totalizing truth nor the gaining of direct access to a previously barred origin, since the present in which we are working offers only incomplete tools, the remains of earlier failures with which to carry out our own excavations. This is not to say, however, that such access might not be gained in the future. “The archai are what could or ought to have been given and perhaps one day might be; for the moment, though, they exist only in the condition of partial objects or ruins” (82). Consequently, it is a process in which the excavating of the past in the present is directed toward a future moment, the future anterior, or “what will have been” (106–7).

In his definition of archaeology in terms of a past that achieves fulfillment only in the future, Agamben identifies a salvific dimension to the project of the archaeologist. The claims that I am making for it here are not so bold. Yet, in seeking to shed light on the nature of power beyond religious and secular paradigms, they are perhaps bolder, since they entail some suggestion of how such a reconfiguration of power might have a practical not simply theoretical or deferred application. What are the genuine possibilities, if any, that a questioning of such modes of power might have for political and ethical action in the present?

This chapter will take the form of two excavations. The first involves locating Foucault as precursor to postsecular thought. Outlining the development of key concepts and major trajectories in his thought, most notably the complex and shifting understanding of power and the subject throughout his career, the intention here is to provide some suggestions as to how he might also provide supplement and clarification to some of the issues in play. For readers less familiar with Foucault’s work, it will also provide an overview of his major works before these and other lesser known texts and interviews are discussed in detail in subsequent chapters. This will be followed by consideration of what Jeremy Carrette has termed Foucault’s “religious perspective.” How does Foucault engage with religion? It is here that we find some of the most complex and also problematic aspects of his work. Consequently, it is necessary to “conjure up” this dimension of Foucault’s work in order to move beyond its own limitations and arrive at a more precise definition of the scope of our own inquiry in contradistinction to existing scholarship being carried out in this area.

The second excavation involves tracing some of the key moments and thinkers involved in the renewed interest in early Christianity taking place within continental philosophy. How exactly is Paul being read by these thinkers? In the ongoing quest for ownership of Paul, three basic positions can be identified. The first belongs to the exegetical biblical scholar epitomized by E. P Sanders: what Paul meant then. The second position, which is connected to the first, is the territory of the religious historian, such as Paula Fredrikson: what can Paul teach us about his own historical moment. Finally, the third position, assumed by (atheist) philosophers Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek: what Paul might mean now and what he might be able to teach us about our own moment.² In keeping with a project that seeks to redefine power and ethics for the twenty-first century, it is the third position as mediated by these three thinkers that first and foremost interests us here.

If poststructuralism has taught us anything, it is that the practice of reading should be treated with as much suspicion as that of writing. In this respect, our approach to reading both Foucault and Paul and, indeed, of reading them against themselves and each other requires a number of critical clarifications. The first of these involves the acknowledgment that this reading not only takes place within a twenty-first century context but is also itself defined and framed by this context. Hence, our engagement with Paul is as dependent upon that of Agamben, Badiou, and others as it is critical of their appropriations and indeed makes no apologies for this. As implied in the preceding discussion of archaeology, there is something misleading and disingenuous about any scholarship that claims to have cleared away two thousand years of exegesis without acknowledging what is at stake in this process of excavating.

Second, the importance of close textual analysis in establishing the argumentative and narrative strategies employed by both Paul and Foucault are at times informed by more traditional forms of exegesis. In the case of Paul, attention is paid to his specific choice of Greek terms, incorporating existing debates between established biblical scholars into our discussion where relevant. With Foucault, consideration is given to the original French texts in order to retain semantic and syntactical nuances when rendered into English. Third, a certain degree of sensitivity is required in the treatment of both sets of texts. The Pauline epistles and development of Foucault’s thought both bear witness to a tension between negating past selves and recognizing the importance these bear on later work. As David Macey frequently points out in his extensive biography, there is a tendency on Foucault’s part to negate his previous incarnations, in particular his work on literature during the early 1960s.³ Yet, Foucault often refers to the way in which previous work has provided him with the necessary tools to develop his research in new directions, most notably in defining his research methodology in The Archaeology of Knowledge:

What was my aim in writing this book? Did I wish to explain what I had wanted to do in my earlier books, in which so many things remained obscure? Not altogether, not exactly. By going a little farther in the same direction, and coming back, as if by a new turn in the spiral, towards the point at which I had set out, I hope to show the position from which I was speaking; to map the space that makes these investigations, and others that I may never accomplish, possible. (AK, back cover)

And in his revised project for The History of Sexuality outlined in the introduction to the second volume:

The analysis of discursive practices made it possible to trace the formation of disciplines (savoirs) while escaping the dilemma of science versus ideology. And the analysis of power relations and their technologies made it possible to view them as open strategies, while escaping the alternative of a power conceived of as domination or exposed as a simulacrum. (UP, 4–5)

This dual process of negating his past self, or selves, at the same time as recognizing how earlier experiences and critical perspectives have contributed to the development of his thought is a significant and irresolvable tension in Foucault’s work. Similarly, throughout Paul’s texts there is a simultaneous rejection and appropriation of his Jewish past in the service of his ministry to the Gentiles. Paul’s understanding of the Christ-event is framed within God’s privileged relationship with the Jewish people. It is his fervent knowledge of Hebraic law and scripture that enables him to articulate what it means to exist in such a relationship. Yet, at the same time, he must go beyond the limits of the law, to the extent of acknowledging its failures and the resulting deadlock between man and God.

Identifying such tensions here is not intended to force or overextend some apparent biographical similarities between Foucault and Paul. Rather, it is a means of articulating how they might be read together and the inherent problems that might emerge in either taking the statements they make about power out of context or, moreover, in seeking to present their respective writings as coherent wholes. Both are victims of a multitude of attempts to reduce them to a series of key concepts, slogans, and sound bites. Similarly, both attest to the problematic nature of reducing a set of texts to an oeuvre or canon. Foucault points this out in The Archaeology of Knowledge: “The establishment of a complete oeuvre presupposes a number of choices that are difficult to justify or even to formulate” (AK, 24). In this respect, we should also resist positing Paul’s letters as a coherent whole. Much is missing, not least the responses from the churches and the ongoing debate concerning which letters were in fact written by the apostle himself. In his letters, Paul frequently returned to churches, responding to congregations with precisions (Corinthians) and revisions (Thessalonians). Likewise, Foucault revisited a number of ideas, thinkers, and periods at various points in his career. Such returns do not take the form of a complete and whole circle but, rather, might be conceived in terms of a spiral as evoked by Foucault himself in relation to his archaeological method (cited above). Thus, in our own readings of Foucault and Paul, we might attempt to draw on this kaleidoscopic perspective as a means of remaining sensitive to how the stakes continued to change throughout their lives both for their thought and the sociopolitical context in which they were writing.

Michel Foucault, As We Imagine Him

Our focus here is on power, knowledge, and the subject. This initial and somewhat schematic account will be supplemented, developed, and even at times contested in the chapters that follow. Hence, it goes without saying that it is not intended to be exhaustive or to reduce the rich and complex trajectory of Foucault’s work to a neat summary. Rather, it should serve as an introduction to some of the main concepts and themes that will inform how we will read Foucault and Paul together.

Madness—What If the Battle Took Place within the Space of a Mirror?

The History of Madness, first published in 1961 as Foucault’s doctoral thesis, charts Western society’s attitude toward, and treatment of, madness from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Foucault argues that madness is never “absolute” but rather a social construct dependent upon a relationship with reason that is itself also a construct. What occurs is an exercise of exclusion. Yet this very act of exclusion is in itself a form of inclusion. “Madness is only found within society, it does not exist outside of forms of awareness which isolate it and forms of repulsion which exclude or capture it” (DE1, 197, my translation). Foucault traces these exclusionary techniques, within which madness has become inscribed, back to the Middle Ages where, in the years that followed the Crusades, Western Europe was rife with leprosy. The isolation of lepers was called for as the means of containing, controlling, and eventually eliminating the disease. Their segregation from the r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1   Excavations
• 2   Between Life and Death
• 3   Power
• 4   Ethical Subjects
• Conclusion: Power without Politics?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index