Foucault and the Study of Religion
JEREMY CARRETTE
Michel Foucault (1926–84) was chair in the history of systems of thought at the Collège de France from 1970 until his untimely death from AIDS. He had previously held various academic positions in Europe and North Africa, but rose to public attention on the wave of structuralist and poststructuralist thinking in Paris in the 1960s, not least with his work The Order of Things, published in 1966. Foucault is best understood in the Parisian context of poststructuralism, rather than through the obfuscating notion of postmodernism, which covers over the historical location of his thinking, his specificity within French intellectual life, and his normative assertions, which resist a simple relativist critique. It is important to note that Foucault resisted attribution of his work as either structuralist, poststructuralist, or postmodernist.1 Recognizing that he had been perceived in so many different ways by so many different people, he stated in an interview in 1984: “I think I have been situated in most squares on the political checkerboard, one after another and sometimes simultaneously.… None of these descriptions is important by itself; taken together, on the other hand, they mean something. And I must admit that I rather like what they mean.”2 He enjoyed the enigmatic and silent play that refused simple positions and established thinking that was strategic and contextual.
THREE WAVES OF ENGAGEMENT WITH FOUCAULT
Foucault is a central critical resource for the field of religious studies. The engagement with his thinking in the field of religion has followed the three distinct waves of interpretation and translation within Foucault scholarship.3 The first phase of engagement (late 1970s to the late 1980s) was marked by the first reception of Foucault’s ideas outside France. Although this was mainly in the areas of French studies, philosophy, history, sociology, and political theory, there was some tentative mapping in religious studies. For example, David Chidester outlined the central theoretical apparatus of Foucault’s thought, showing how his thinking could be used to theoretically reshape the study of religion. Other studies showed the critical value of his thinking on early Christianity and sexuality.4
The second wave of studies (late 1980s to early 2000) was shaped by the response to Foucault’s death in 1984 and the publication of the definitive collection of his articles and interviews, Dits et écrits, in 1994.5 It saw a stronger and more sophisticated application of his ideas and a deeper historical appreciation of knowledge across all fields of study. At this time there was an explosion of studies on Foucault across the humanities and social sciences. The interdisciplinary field of religious studies deployed Foucault’s genealogical method to its great advantage, supported by studies in feminist theory, cultural studies, and queer theory. His work was used to read religious history and ideas, not least through a critical rethinking of key concepts such as mysticism, religion, power, and gender.6
In the second wave, there was also a deeper textual appreciation of Foucault, inspired by Dits et écrits. This drew a distinction between scholars who sought to reveal Foucault’s own engagement with religious and theological ideas—through his Catholic context in France and engagement with Christianity and religious ideas—and those studies that utilized his work without primary concern for his own texts; there was, however, some crossover between these two approaches.7
The third phase was shaped by the reception of the posthumous publication of Foucault’s Collège de France lectures from early 2000 onward. At this time there was a growing appreciation of the “late Foucault,” a critical appreciation of his use of the concept “spirituality,” and a sharper appreciation of the issue of translation and secondary elaboration.8 In this phase, the study of Foucault in religious studies went through a consolidation after the initial disciplinary excitement. His work was positioned alongside other critical methods, such as postcolonial and gender theory. It was also located more strongly and more effectively within the domain of poststructural methods, alongside Derrida and Lacan.9 In this phase the struggle between textual specialist and secondary developments became increasingly apparent. As Clare O’Farrell makes clear: “There is a mythical Foucault that often bears little resemblance to the Foucault who appears in his own writings.… There now exists entire books which purport to be about Foucault, but which scarcely refer to his original work—focusing instead on what others have had to say about him.”10
Each of these stages of engagement with Foucault’s thinking has established him as a central figure in the postphenomenological wave of critical scholarship in religious studies.11 In order to appreciate fully how Foucault moves religious studies beyond phenomenological thinking we can look more closely at his critical methods.
THINKING DIFFERENTLY
I would like my books to be a kind of tool box which others can rummage through to find a tool which they can use however they wish in their own area.12
Foucault offers the study of religion a series of critical tools, which emerge from his own historical-philosophical method. He takes the study of religion to central questions of its truth-claims and epistemology. His work questions the given assumptions about knowledge and representation of the world. It shows how wider social and historical forces drive different forms of knowledge. Each study “profoundly changes the terms of thinking” about the issue.13 As he famously declared late in his career, the challenge was to “think differently.”14 Arguably, just as he saw the nature of the philosophical life as “transformation”—a new ethicopolitical spiritual practice—so his own thinking was an act of seeking transformation.15 The transformation was necessary because the relations of power that shape a subject of knowledge can be altered by what is refused or concealed.
His work is shaped by methods that allow scholars to reveal the unseen in a field of knowledge or in a social or political context. All of his work rests between history and philosophy, uncovering problems of knowledge in historical circumstances.16 He explored issues historically in order to make a political comment about contemporary problems. In some ways his work is best described, as he noted in his work Discipline and Punish (1975), as a “history of the present.”17 A greater appreciation of how Foucault can be a resource, or tool, for critical scholarship in the study of religion can be found by providing a brief synopsis of his critical methodology as it moved from archaeology to genealogy and problematization.18
ARCHAEOLOGICAL CRITIQUE
What, in short, we wish to do is to dispense with “things.” To “depresentify” them. To conjure up their rich, heavy, immediate plenitude, which we usually regard as the primitive law of discourse that has become divorced from it through error, oblivion, illusion, ignorance, or the inertia of beliefs and traditions, or even the perhaps unconscious desire not to see and not to speak.19
Foucault is best situated in a tradition of historical thinking from the French history of science that sees knowledge as historically determined by longer patterns of thought, and in a tradition of philosophical critique that raises questions about the limits of knowledge, a line of thinking that engages both Kant and Nietzsche.20 His archaeological works—History of Madness (1961), The Birth of the Clinic (1963),21 The Order of Things (1966), and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)—all seek to find a “positive unconscious of knowledge.”22 They are all framed by his distinctive style of taking graphic images from history to capture the imagination and then unraveling the texts and practices of a tradition through grafting different, and what appears at first to be disconnected, ideas together.
His history of madness begins with the image of the “ships of fools” and reveals the processes of silencing and the institutionalization of the mad. His history of medicine begins by showing how the medical gaze was constructed through the “stable” objects of death and the corpse, an archaeology of medical perception. His work The Order of Things (1966) begins with exploring the painter’s gaze in Diego Velasquez’s painting Las Meninas (1656). It unravels the archaeology of the human sciences and shows how the human sciences are constituted through the figure of “man” in modern thought. He demonstrates how there was a shift within knowledge from the “Classical period” (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), based on systems of taxinomia, such as wealth analysis, natural history, and general grammar, to a system of knowledge built around the figure of “man.” The new configuration of knowledge around the idea of “man” makes the discourses of economics (notions of labor), biology (notions of the organic structure of life), and philology (notions of language) possible. However, he then makes the stronger assertion that with the end of metaphysics, the notion of “man” emerges as a new philosophical problem. In Foucault’s view it was another temporary historical construction that would disappear. As Foucault explained: “One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge.”23
In an attempt to explain his particular historical method, Foucault wrote The Archaeology of Knowledge, his most theoretical study. His aim was to question the unities within knowledge and the “ready-made syntheses, those groupings that we normally accept before any examination.”24 He sought to suspend the “continuities” and highlight the “discontinuities” of knowledge by examining the network of statements within a discursive regime or field of knowledge. Each discourse is a historical formation. According to Foucault, discourses constellate to form a specific “episteme,” the network of relations that make it possible to say something at a certain time. In this sense, religious studies is involved in a double task of understanding the values behind its representation of the object of study and how the traditions and cultures of study are carrying forward specific social orders and hidden interests. Foucault’s work was particularly concerned with the “rules of exclusion” within a discipline and the “principles of classification, ordering and distribution.”25 Following Foucault, scholars working within religious studies can no longer be seen as engaging in a neutral enterprise. They are rather caught inside a politic of classification and representation. This does not undermine the field or reduce it to relativism, but rather sharpens the awareness of scholars to articulate the values behind the methods and understand the historical processes in which ideas and practices are inevitably caught.
GENEALOGICAL CRITIQUE
I am supposing that in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its power and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality.26
In The Archaeology of Knowledge he recognized that a “preconceptual” realm, the “nondiscursive” and “nondiscursive systems,” shaped discourse.27 After 1971, when he embraced a Nietzschean genealogy, he recognized that these “nondiscursive” dimensions were the power-knowledge regimes of institutional practices.28 In the post-1968 atmosphere of French thought, Foucault developed the idea of discourse as practice and linked them to the more specific operations within society. He began to see how specific discourses emerge within institutional contexts as ways of regulating and shaping life.29 This shifted his concern to “the relations of power, not relations of meaning.”30 The postphenomenological shift in religious studies can be seen precisely at this point when the statements of fact, forms of representation, and types of meaning are shown to be reflections of a system of power relations.
Foucault’s genealogical method can be seen most clearly in his mid-1970s works, Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (1976)—the latter best captured with its French title La volonté de savoir (The Will to Knowledge), a deliberate echo of Nietzsche. Genealogy seeks to examine forms of domination and power. It seeks a form of “counterdiscourse” by examining truth in relation to the body. For Foucault, “it is always the body that is at issue—the body and its forces, their utility and their docility, their distribution and their submission.”31 Knowledge (savoir) is power (pouvoir) and the body reveals how this is manifest.
In Discipline and Punish Foucault examined the historical transition from punishment by torture to incarceration and discipline in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He sought to illustrate how the modes of subjection and control of the body shifted from external forces to internal processes of subjection. He showed how the history of the prison was built on other forms of subjection in monasteries, army barracks, and schools. Power in these contexts was not just a negative force, but something that constructed individuals. As Foucault made clear, the subjection to power also creates subjectivity.
While power was a central concern for Foucault, it was not power in a hierarchical or judicial sense, a top-down model of power. “Power,” for Foucault, “is everywhere” and “exercised from innumerable points.”32 This can be seen in Foucault’s discussion of “bio-power”: the regulation and control of the population through the body.33 Power is a complex network of relations within a society, which shapes the very habits and practices of life.
In his work The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 Foucault showed how “sexuality” (not sex as such) was a discourse of power. As a form of bio-power it was a way to control and order the population. These processes of power Foucault traces back to the monastic practices of confession: “The Christian pastoral prescribed as a fundamental duty the task of passing everything having to do with sex through the endless mill of speech.”34 By putting sex into speech (discourse) the body could be controlled. In Western societies, life was controlled through a scientific technical knowledge of the sexual body, the scientia sexualis of the modern world. It created the boundaries of the normal and pathological. As Foucault made clear in his study of sexuality: “Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct.”35
During the period of the mid- to late 1970s Foucault was very interested in Christian practices related to the control and ordering of the body. He even completed a draft manuscript Les aveux de la chair (Confessions of the Flesh), but due to exploring the Greco-Roman traditions this was never published, although fragments appeared in various lectures.36 During this time he was very interested in religious modes of subjectivity, which led him to extend his interests outside his usual Western, Christian focus. He explored the spirit of resistance during the Islam Revolution in Iran, generating much controversy.37 He also explored Japanese Zen Buddhism and expressed a sense of the end of European imperialism. As he explained in an interview while staying in a Japanese Zen temple, “It is true, European thought finds itself at a turning point. This turning point, on an historical scale, is nothing other than the end of imperialism. The crisis of Western thought is identical to the end of imperialism.… There is no philosopher who marks out this period. For it is the end of the era of Western philosophy. Thus, if philosophy of the future exists, it must be born outside of Europe or equally born in consequence of meetings and impacts between Europe and non-Europe.”38
PROBLEMATIZATION: THE CONDITIONS OF EMERGENCE
In 1983 Foucault characterized his work as “problematization” (or problematiques). The idea sought to capture his method of trying to show how and why issues become constituted at certain historical moments. This also signified a shift in his thinking from the issue of domination to government and self. In Foucault’s Collège de France lectures from 1980 there is a shift from concerns of the government of the body and technologies of domination to the ethical government of self or what he called “technologies of self.” Foucault’s last two publications show this change in approach to problematization. He later admitted that although he had “never isolated this notion sufficiently,” it was applicable to all his work.39
In his later work, influenced by the thinking of Pierre Hadot, Foucault was drawing out the conditions under which sex and the body were problematized in the ancient world.40 In The Uses of Pleasure, he examined the ethics of pleasure in Greek writings, exploring codes of austerity toward the body (dietetics), marriage (economics), and the love of boys (erotics). In his final published volume, The Care of the Self, he explored a variety of different texts, including such writers as Epicurus, Seneca, Plutarch, and Marcus Aurelius, to examine the understanding of pleasure in the arts of self-formation.41 His underlying argument was that many of the ethical themes in the Christian period were established in the Greco-Roman period. Christian practices were an extension or intensification of earlier practices of the self, something that can be seen in his lectures from 1980 on Christian baptism and confession.42
In his examination of the “arts of existence” in the ancient world, one of his aims was to show how philosophy in the modern period had lost the link to such practices of the self, or what he called “spirituality.” Though his thinking remains indebted to Christian frameworks, Foucault’s idea of “spirituality” does not imply some modern, quasi-religious experience; it rather seeks to capture the process of “a subject acceding to a certain mode of being and to the transformations which the subject must make of himself in order to accede to this mode of being.”43 As McGushin explored, he was concerned with a philosophical askesis, that is, “an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought,” that brings about transformation.44 His work was seeking to explore the relation between truth and self-governance in the ancient world as a way to offer challenges to the modern construction of knowledge and the subject.
CONCLUSION: RELIGION STUDIES AFTER FOUCAULT
Foucault’s legacy of critical engagement has sharpened and continues to sharpen methodological debates within religious studies. His work is part of a wider critical and cultural turn from the 1980s that has witnessed the end of phenomenological methods and the domination of social science. Even when Foucault is not appealed to directly, his historical-philosophical methods have been integrated into many aspects of the study of religion, reshaping feminist, gender, race, and postcolonial studies. What he offers is the end of innocence in the representation of knowledge. He transforms the field of religious studies by turning the subject toward its various disciplinary regimes and supporting apparatus. His work shows not only how the “discipline” of religion orders and classifies, but how religious traditions are themselves caught inside complex networks of power. If Foucault’s approach is accurate, then these regimes of power will be most evident where there are distinct claims to truth and where the body is shaped by different social and cultural traditions. Foucault’s various historical-philosophical critical frameworks offer opportunities to return the study of religion to its very foundations as a body of knowledge and intellectual practice.
NOTES
1. Michel Foucault, “Polemics, Politics and Problemizations: An Interview,” trans. Lydia Davies, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1984), 383.
2. Ibid., 383–84.
3. J. McSweeney, “Foucault and Theology,” Foucault Studies no. 2 (2005): 117–44; Jeremy Carrette, review of Michel Foucault, by Clare O’Farrell, Foucault Studies 4 (2007): 164–68.
4. D. Chidester, “Michel Foucault and the Study of Religion,” Religious Studies Review 12, no. 1 (1986): 1–9; E. A. Clark, “Foucault, the Fathers and Sex,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 56, no. 4 (1988): 619–41.
5. Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits: 1954–1988, 4 vols., ed. D. Defert and F. Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994).
6. R. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); R. King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and “the Mystic East” (London: Routledge, 1999); G. Jantzen, Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); G. Jantzen, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); G. Jantzen, Foundations of Violence (London: Routledge, 2004).
7. J. W. Bernauer, Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight: Towards an Ethics for Thought (London: Humanities, 1990); J. W. Bernauer and J. Carrette, Foucault and Theology: The Politics of Religious Experience (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004); J. R. Carrette, Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality (London: Routledge, 2000); Foucault, Religion and Culture, ed. J. R. Carrette (New York: Routledge, 1999).
8. E. F. McGushin, Foucault’s Askésis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2006); C. O’Farrell, Foucault: Historian or Philosopher? (London: Macmillan, 1989); J. R. Carrette, “Rupture and Transformation: Foucault’s Concept of Spirituality Reconsidered,” Foucault Studies 15 (February 2013): 52–71; D. Taylor and K. Vintges, eds., Feminism and the Final Foucault (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
9. J. R. Carrette, “Religion and Post-Structuralism,” in The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion, ed. John Hinnells (London: Routledge, 2009), 274–90.
10. C. O’Farrell, Michel Foucault (London: Sage, 2005), 9–10.
11. Carrette, “Religion and Post-Structuralism.”
12. Michel Foucault, “Prisons et asiles dans le mécanisme du pouvoir,” in Dits et écrits, 2:523–24.
13. Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx, trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito (New York: Semiotext[e], 1978), 27.
14. Michel Foucault, The Uses of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1984), 9.
15. Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
16. See O’Farrell, Foucault: Historian or Philosopher?
17. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1975), 31.
18. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Plon, 1961); Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory and Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D. F. Bouchard, trans. D. F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (New York: Cornell University Press, 1971), 139–64; Michel Foucault, “Critical Theory/Intellectual History,” in Politics Philosophy Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Jeremy Harding (London: Routledge, 1983), 17–46.
19. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1991), 47.
20. Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” trans. Catherine Porter, in The Foucault Reader, 43.
21. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1991).
22. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1991), xi.
23. Ibid., 386.
24. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 22.
25. Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” in The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Rupert Swyer (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 216, 220, 222.
26. Ibid., 216.
27. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 63, 68, 162.
28. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.”
29. Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” 219; Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1976), 112.
30. Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 114.
31. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 25.
32. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1976), 93, 94.
33. Ibid., 139.
34. Ibid., 21.
35. Ibid., 105.
36. See Foucault, Religion and Culture.
37. Michel Foucault, “Iran: The Spirit of a World Without Spirit,” in Politics Philosophy Culture, 211–24; J. Afray and K. B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
38. Michel Foucault, “Michel Foucault and Zen: A Stay in a Zen Temple,” in Religion and Culture, 113.
39. Michel Foucault, “The Concern for Truth,” in Politics Philosophy Culture, 257.
40. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. A. I. Davidson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).
41. Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1984).
42. Michel Foucault, On The Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979–1980, ed. Michel Senellart and trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); J. R. Carrette, “ ‘Spiritual Gymnastics’: Reflections on Michel Foucault’s 1980 Collège de France Lectures,” Foucault Studies 20 (December 2015).
43. Michel Foucault, “The Ethic of the Care of the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in The Final Foucault, ed. James Bernauer and David Rasmussen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 1.
44. McGushin, Foucault’s Askésis; Foucault, The Uses of Pleasure, 9.