foucault studies
foucault studies
© John McSweeney, 2005
ISSN: 1832-5203
Foucault Studies, No 2, pp.117-144, May 2005
STATE OF THE DISCIPLINES
Foucault and Theology
John McSweeney
Theological Appropriations of Foucault
From its emergence in the mid-1980s, theological engagement with the
thought of Michel Foucault – taking place within the Christian tradition – has
followed three principal trajectories, reflecting developments in Foucault
scholarship as well as wider critical debates, and variously negotiating the
relationship that might be established between Foucault’s thought and
theology. Sharon Welch inaugurated the first of these trajectories in 1985,
when, taking up the broader examination of the implications of Foucault’s
analyses of ‘power-knowledge’ then current in Foucault studies, she utilised
these analyses toward the construction of a feminist theology of liberation.1
Subsequently, a number of theologians explored further the critical
possibilities associated with ‘power-knowledge’ for theologies of liberation,2
scriptural hermeneutics,3 and practical theology (drawing upon Foucault’s
1 See Sharon D. Welch, Communities of Resistance and Solidarity: A Feminist Theology of
Liberation. (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 1985). Even earlier is the influence of
Foucault’s work upon the broader study of religion in Bryan S. Turner, Religion and
Social Theory (London: Sage, 1983). Following Foucault, Turner shifts the emphasis in
the study of religion from “ideology” to the “body” and, hence, to a “materialistic”
approach to religion (p. 2).
2 See Marc P. Lalonde, “Power/Knowledge and Liberation: Foucault as a Parabolic
Thinker”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 61:1 (1993), 81-100; Daniel N.
Hopkins, “Postmodernity, Black Theology of Liberation and the U.S.A.: Michel
Foucault and James H. Cone”, in David B. Batstone et al., eds., Liberation Theologies,
Postmodernity and the Americas (London & New York: Routledge, 1997), 205-221. See
also Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Changing the Subject: Women’s Discourses and
Feminist Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), in which a poststructuralist
feminist theology is elaborated, drawing in part upon Foucault.
3 See Elizabeth A. Castelli, Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power (Louisville and
Westminster: John Knox Press, 1991); idem., “Interpretations of Power in 1
Corinthians”, Semeia 54 (1992) 199-222, reprinted in James Bernauer and Jeremy
Carrette, eds., Michel Foucault and Theology: The Politics of Religious Experience (London:
Ashgate, 2004), 19-38; Stephen D. Moore, God’s Gym: Divine Male Bodies of the Bible
117
foucault studies, No 2, pp. 117-144
analyses of “pastoral power”, in particular),4 while these analyses were also
applied to the broader study of religion.5 With these utilisations of his
thought, a pattern was established of applying certain of Foucault’s critical
tools and conceptualisations to a variety of theological questions – a pattern,
which would be expanded as more points of contact between his work and
theology came to light, with his later work explored for its contribution to
scholarly understanding of early Christian writings,6 his ethics for its import
for moral theology,7 and his genealogical histories for its effect upon the
theology of tradition,8 to name just some of these recent engagements with his
work.9
(London and New York: Routledge, 1996). For an earlier version of some of this
material see Moore, Poststructuralism and the New Testament: Derrida and Foucault at the
Foot of the Cross (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994). See also, Heather A., McKay, “She
Said to Him, He Said to Her: Power Talk in the Bible or Foucault Listens at the
Keyhole”, Biblical Theology Bulletin 28:2 (1998), 45-51. Another theological application
of Foucault’s analyses of power is to be found in Kyle A. Pasework, A Theology of
Power: Being Beyond Domination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993).
4 See Wege zum Menschen 47 (1995) with the following articles: Eva Erdmann, “Die
Macht unserer Kirchenväter. Über ‘die Geständnisse des Fleisches’”, 53-60; M
Weimer, “Das Verdrängte in der Hirtenmetaphor. Kritische Reflexionen zu Foucaults
Begriff des ‘Pastorats’”, 61-76; N. Mette, “‘Pastoral Macht’. Praktisch-theologische
Anmerkungen zu einem Theorem M. Foucaults”, 76-83; Hermann Steinkamp, “Die
‘Seele’ – ‘Illusion der Theologen’. Michel Foucaults Bestimmung der ‘Seele’ an die
Seelsorge”, 84-93; Susan .J. Dunlap, Counselling Depressed Women: Counselling and
Pastoral Theology (Westminster: John Knox Press 1998), which draws on Foucault’s
theory of power; Hermann Steinkamp, Die sanfte Macht der Hirten. Die Bedeutung
Michel Foucaults fur die praktische Theologie (Mainz: Grünewald, 1999). A further recent
application of Foucault’s thought to practical theology, which shifts the emphasis
from his analysis of power to that of subjectivity, is that of Claudia Kolf-van Melis,
Tod des Subjeks? Praktische Theologie in Auseinandersetzung mit Michel Foucaults
Subjetkritik (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2003).
5 In addition to the work of Bryan Turner cited in note 1, the influence of Foucault
upon the study of religion is to be found in David Chidester, “Michel Foucault and
the Study of Religion”, Religious Studies Review 12:1 (1986), 1-9; Catherine Bell, Ritual
Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford, 1992); Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion
(Baltimore: Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 1993).
6 Elizabeth A. Clark, “Foucault, the Fathers, and Sex”, Journal of the American Academy
of Religion 56 (1998), 619-641, reprinted in Bernauer and Carrette, eds., Michel Foucault
and Theology, 39-56; John Behr, “Shifting Sands: Foucault, Brown and the Framework
of Christian Asceticism”, The Heythrop Journal 34:1 (1993), 1-21.
7 Marcus Pfannkuchen, Archäologie der Moral. Zur Relevanz von Michel Foucault für die
theologische Ethik (Münster: LIT, 2000).
8 James M. Byrne, “Foucault on Continuity: The Postmodern Challenge to Tradition”,
Faith and Philosophy 9:3 (1992), 335-352.
9 In addition see Stephen A. Ray, The Modern Soul: Michel Foucault and the Theological
Discourse of Gordon Kaufman and David Tracy (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987); Grace
Jantzen, Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995); David O’Toole, Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo: Theological Reflections on
118
McSweeney: Foucault and Theology
These readings open up important perspectives upon the challenges
and possibilities of Foucault’s thought for theological knowledge and
constitute valuable projects in their own right – as when Elizabeth Castelli
demonstrates the power relations inaugurated by St. Paul’s call to the early
churches to imitate his apostolic example, or when Grace Jantzen develops a
critical, gendered genealogy of Christian mysticism.10 However, as
theological engagements with Foucault, their abstraction of aspects of his
work from his larger project risks distorting the wider strategic intentions of
his analyses, as Stephen Carr illustrates in relation to Welch’s deployment of
Foucault’s notion of power within a Habermasian and Rortyian pragmatics of
truth.11 Conversely, their application of components of his thought to
predefined theological questions tends to circumscribe the potential impact of
his thought upon theology.12
Foucault And Postmodern Theology
It is not surprising, therefore, that such applications of Foucault’s thought
have remained for the most part isolated within their respective disciplines,
and that the question of the extent of the significance for and compatibility
Nihilism, Tragedy, and Apocalypse (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1998) which
develops a metaphysics of tragedy from the work of Foucault and Nietzsche as a
basis of its theological reflection; Thomas M. Beaudoin, “I Was Imprisoned by
Subjectivity and You Visited Me: Bonhoeffer and Foucault on the Way to a
Postmodern Christian Self”, Currents in Theology 29:5 (2002), 341-361; idem.,
“Foucault-Teaching-Theology”, Religious Education 98:1 (2003), 25-42; Vincent Miller,
Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture (New York:
Continuum, 2003); Karlheinz Ruhstorfer, Konversionen: Eine theologische Archäologie der
Bestimmung des Menschen bei Foucault, Nietzsche, Augustine und Paulus (Paderborn:
Schöningh, 2003).
10 Castelli, Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power; Jantzen, Power, Gender and Christian
Mysticism.
11 See Stephen Carr, ‘Foucault Amongst The Theologians’, Sophia 40.2 (2001) 31-45, at
38.
12 The recent work of Claudia Kolf-van Melis is instructive here. She pursues a
dialogue, on the question of subjectivity, between Foucault’s thought and the
theology of the twentieth-century Catholic theologian Karl Rahner. While she argues
that Foucault’s treatment of the question is incompatible with the ‘transcendental
subjectivity’ underpinning Rahner’s ‘dogmatic’ or ‘systematic’ theology, and
excludes the possibility of dialogue in this sphere, she nonetheless pursues a
comparison – quite productive on its own terms – between Foucault’s notion of ‘care
of the self’ and Rahner’s less technical treatment of subjectivity within the sphere of
practical theology. The effect of this move, however, is that, where Foucault’s
treatment of subjectivity might be expected to bring the ‘practical’ to bear upon and
complicate theology’s theoretical or ‘systematic’ viewpoint, Kolf-van Melis’s
restriction of engagement with Foucault’s work to a ‘practical’ register reinforces the
divisions within theological discourse which tend to separate the practical and the
theoretical. See Kolf-van Melis, Tod des Subjekts?, 267ff.
119
foucault studies, No 2, pp. 117-144
with theology of Foucault’s thought has been more widely and acutely
addressed within a second ‘postmodern’ trajectory of engagement with his
thought. As broader critical debates concerning postmodernism impacted
upon theology in the 1990s, theological investigation of Foucault’s thought
was filtered through the question of the extent to which there can or ought to
be a ‘postmodern theology’. Here Foucault’s thought, along with that of
Derrida, Lyotard and others, was typically understood as representative of a
wider ‘post-modernism’, which, in championing ‘multiplicity’ and
‘difference’, displaces and succeeds modernity. Consequently, its theological
significance has typically been determined according to three familiar
attitudes to postmodernism thus conceived.
Firstly, his thought has been drawn upon by what may be described as
the theologies of “dissolution” of Mark C. Taylor and others, which embrace
the postmodern as ushering in a post-modern and post-Christian age, with
which theology must come to terms, and which opens up, in the ruins of
modernity, new possibilities of (post)theological thought.13 An important
instance of this approach is provided by Johannes Hoff, who embraces the
‘destructive’ element of the thought of Foucault and Derrida, but stresses
their ultimate “deconstructive” intent: their destruction of false stabilities and
identities constituting a constructive engagement with the aporiae and
discontinuities of human language and thought.14 Secondly, and by contrast,
traditional ecclesial theologies have typically concluded that, while Foucault
offers valuable insights which might be integrated into existing philosophical
and theological frameworks, on its own terms his work is ultimately prone to
the relativism that undermines radical postmodernism.15 Consequently, in
these circles, theological appropriation of Foucault’s work has been rather
more circumspect. As Saskia Wendel has recently articulated it, one can have
13 Terrence Tilley et al., Postmodern Theologies: The Challenge of Religious Diversity
(Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 1995), viii, 41ff.
14 Johannes Hoff, Spiritualität und Sprachverlust: Theologie nach Foucault und Derrida
(Paderborn: Schöningh, 1999), 18.
15 See Stanley Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism (Grand Rapids, Michigan and
Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdemans Publishing, 1996). Paul Lakeland,
Postmodernity: Christian Identity in a Fragmented Age (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
1997); Anthony Thiselton, Interpreting God and the Postmodern Self: On Meaning,
Manipulation and Promise (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1995). Having achieved a
significant degree of rapprochement with modern thought, these theologies are
typically more at home with ‘late modern’ projects, such as that of Jürgen Habermas,
which seek to reform and extend the modern project, than those which appear to
radically critique it. See, for example, Don S. Browning and Francis Schüssler
Fiorenza, eds., Habermas, Modernity and Public Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1992).
120
McSweeney: Foucault and Theology
a theology which “takes up his questions, his criticisms, his analyses”, but
such a theology “cannot affirmatively adopt Foucault’s perspective”.16
Thirdly, the emergence of the “radical orthodoxy” movement in the
theologies of John Milbank, Graham Ward and others has given this
‘postmodern’ approach a new and more apologetic twist. For these
theologians, Foucault’s thought shares with postmodernism in general the
merit of enabling theology to free itself from the tyranny of modernity.
Nonetheless, it is representative of a postmodern nihilism against which
theology must articulate its own proper identity.17 An important difference in
emphasis between Milbank and Ward is noteworthy here. For, while Milbank
trenchantly argues that Foucault and other ‘postmodern’ thinkers purvey an
“ontology of violence” entirely incompatible with Christian thought, Ward is
increasingly sensitive to the degree to which contemporary theology is
dependent for its form upon other discourses.18 In this regard, Ward
approaches at least some way toward the more positive attitude of narrative
theologian Stanley Hauerwas who understands Foucault – by contrast with
many other postmoderns – as offering to theology a constructive challenge:
that theologians might do for theology what Foucault has done for thought in
general.19 Nonetheless, even in this more positive appraisal a clear distinction
is maintained: Foucault may contribute to shaping the external form of
theology, but his critical challenge cannot be allowed to affect the core of its
self-understanding.
In its various forms, this second, postmodern trajectory, therefore,
brings to the fore the question of the extent to which there can be or ought to
be a theology ‘after’ Foucault. In particular, it highlights how ‘ecclesial’
16 See Saskia Wendel, “Foucault und/oder Theologie? Chancen und Gefahren einer
theologischen Rezeption der Philosophie Michel Foucaults”, in C. Bauer and M.
Hölzl, eds., Gottes und des Menschen Tod? Die Theologie vor der Herausforderung Michel
Foucaults (Mainz, Grünewald, 2003), 51-65 at 58. A similar evaluation is found in
several other contributions to this volume.
17 See John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1990), 278ff; Graham Ward, “Kulturkritik im Dienste der Theologie. Ein
Vergleich zwischen Michel Foucault und Pierre Bourdieu”, trans. Michael Hölzl, in
Bauer and Hölzl, eds., Gottes und des Menschen Tod?, 129-141. In addition, within
Catholic thought see the recent encyclical, Pope John Paul II, Fides et Ratio (London:
Catholic Truth Society, 1998), n.91 which links postmodernity with nihilism, though
it is less trenchant in its attitude than radical orthodoxy.
18 See, for instance, Ward, Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), especially 115, where Ward argues that although
there is no general hermeneutics within which Christianity might be located,
nonetheless it does not have a pure form. Rather, its “identity is always constituted
only in relation to.”
19 Stanley Hauerwas, “The Christian Difference, or Surviving Postmodernism”, in
Graham Ward, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2001), 145-161.
121
foucault studies, No 2, pp. 117-144
theologies increasingly confront the challenge of Foucault’s thought for
theology with their own concern to articulate, against the legacy of modern
foundationalism, a “theological theology” that “springs from its own proper
sources”, rather than having its foundation in ‘secular’ concepts such as
‘liberation’.20 The critical question these theologies pose concerns how to
engage with Foucault without installing his thought as a new philosophical
‘foundation’ – thereby diluting its own proper identity. However, the ultimate
difficulty for this approach, as Gavin Hyman has demonstrated, is that the
conception of the postmodern invoked across each of these readings tends to
repeat the apologetic dichotomy between theology and philosophy prevalent
in modern thought.21 By interpreting the postmodern as sharply post-
modern, thought is confronted with a direct choice between a modern and a
postmodern mode of thought, and in turn, theology is confronted with a
choice for or against a ‘postmodern theology’. Consequently, one can have a
theology which preserves its identity against Foucault’s ‘dangerous’ project,
appropriating only that which can be safely integrated within its existing
worldview, or one can have a thoroughly Foucauldian theology. This
dilemma allows little room for investigation of the extent to which Foucault’s
thought might inform or disrupt theology’s self-understanding, nor for how
theology might welcome and negotiate the challenge of his thought beyond
ascribing to or rejecting it.22
Moreover, as postmodern categories lose something of their analytic
power in contemporary discourse, it is increasingly doubtful that Foucault’s
thought can be adequately construed as postmodern.23 In any case, as David
20 Walter Kasper, “Postmodern Dogmatics: Toward a Renewed Discussion of
Foundations in North America”, Communio 17 (Summer 1990), 181-191, at 191.
21 Gavin Hyman, The Predicament of Postmodern Theology: Radical Orthodoxy or Nihilist
Textualism? (Louisville and London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001).
22 Wendel offers a telling instance of this, when she reveals that the reason that theology
cannot adopt Foucault’s perspective is that his ‘postfoundational’ philosophy does
not provide any secure ‘ground’, be it a philosophy of the human subject or of
freedom, upon which theological knowledge might be articulated. As such, she
implicitly assumes that a certain kind of philosophy is necessary for theological
thought and, therefore, cannot engage with Foucault’s whole rethinking of these
categories in his pursuit of the ‘history of the present’. Wendel, “Foucault und/oder
Theologie?”, 58. See also Thomas G. Guarino, ‘Fides et Ratio: Theology and
Contemporary Pluralism’, Theological Studies 62:4 (2001), 675-700, at 693-695. Guarino
makes the point that in judging postmodernism’s postmetaphysical as tending
toward nihilism, the Catholic encyclical of Pope John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, fails to
allow for the possibility that so-called ‘postmodern’ thinkers might be constructively
engaging with contemporary philosophical issues.
23 See, for example, Frank Palmeri, “Other Than Postmodern? Foucault, Pynchon,
Hybridity, Ethics”, Postmodern Culture 12:1 (2001); online journal available at
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.901/12.1palmeri.txt, accessed
on 19/01/05. Palmeri argues that rather than being ‘postmodern’, Foucault is best
122
McSweeney: Foucault and Theology
Couzens Hoy already argued in 1988, if Foucault’s thought is postmodern, it
is so in a manner such that “[t]he same person, discipline, or institution can be
traditional in some respects, modern in others, and postmodern in yet
others.”24 As such, Foucault does not argue for a total or definitive historical
break which would inaugurate a postmodern era, and the dilemma of
choosing or rejecting the postmodern, and of the alternative of theology
cautiously appropriating aspects of Foucault’s work or a Foucauldian
theology is a false one within the perspective of Foucault’s own thought.
In part, the limitations of each of these first two trajectories of
theological engagement with Foucault – application of his thought to
theological questions and a postmodern reading of his work – can be traced to
a number of historical factors. Firstly, during much of the 1990s, the
phenomenological focus of the debate generated by the “theological turn” in
continental philosophy served to obscure the possible points of intersection
between Foucault’s more ‘genealogical’ project and theology.25 It has only
been in recent years, as the intense engagements between thinkers like
Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion have played out, that the exploration of the
‘theological’ importance of the work of a wider group of ‘poststructuralist’
thinkers has been investigated.26 Equally, it has only been with the
publication of Foucault’s Dits et écrits in 1994 that the full scope of Foucault’s
project could begin to be appreciated.27 In particular, his sustained re-
described as ‘other than postmodern’, aiming at a “non-modern” critique concerned
with, and imagining more possibilities for ethics and politics than postmodernism
allows (paragraph 15ff). Also see, Foucault, “Structuralisme et poststructuralisme”, in
DE II, 1250, 1265-66, where Foucault distances himself from postmodernism.
24 David Couzens Hoy, “Foucault: Modern or Postmodern?”, in Jonathon Arac, ed.,
After Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge and Postmodern Challenges (New Brunswick and
London: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 12-41, at 38.
25 Arthur Bradley, “Thinking the Outside: Foucault, Derrida and Negative Theology”,
Textual Practice 16.1 (Spring 2002), 57-74; idem., Negative Theology and Modern French
Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). Bradley’s article reflects a
tendency to read Foucault through the lens of the kind of (post)phenomenological
debate pursued by Derrida, Marion and others, and on these terms to find his
engagement with theological questions wanting. By contrast, while Bradley’s later
book continues to be informed by this debate, Foucault’s work is presented as
concerned with rather different questions and a rather different project.
26 A typical debate between Derrida and Marion is found in John D. Caputo and
Michael J. Scanlon, eds., God, the Gift and Postmodernism (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999). For a wider engagement with
‘postmodern’ or ‘poststructuralist’ thinkers, see, for example, Ward, ed., The
Postmodern God: A Theological Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); Frederick C.
Bauerschmidt, “The Abrahamic Voyage: Michel de Certeau and Theology”, Modern
Theology 12.1 (1996), 1-26; Mary Bryden, ed., Deleuze and Religion (London: Routledge,
2001).
27 Foucault, Dits et Écrits, 1954-1988. Ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald, 4 volumes
(Paris Gallimard, 1994.); 2 Volumes (Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 2001). See Arnold I.
123
foucault studies, No 2, pp. 117-144
working of the History of Sexuality series has meant that the ethical focus and
direction of his later work has often to be reconstructed from these essays,
lectures and interviews.28 The situation has been even more acute in relation
to his treatment of early Christian writings as the final volume of Foucault’s
History of Sexuality bringing to fruition his work on “the confession of the
flesh” in early Christian practices has famously remained unpublished.29
A Third Trajectory: James Bernauer And Jeremy Carrette
A third trajectory of exploration of the theological significance of Foucault’s
thought has emerged in recent years and takes up the two-fold challenge and
opportunity of the situation brought about by these developments: to engage
with Foucault’s thought as an original and substantial, ethical project and to
examine precisely how this project intersects with theological discourse. More
accurately, this challenge had already been anticipated to a considerable
extent by the philosopher James Bernauer, who attended Foucault’s lectures
at the Collège de France in the late 1970s. As early as 1987, Bernauer had
proposed that Foucault’s thought might be conceived of as a “negative
theology”.30 In 1988, he co-edited a volume exploring the work of the “final
Foucault”, which made available a substantial bibliography of Foucault’s
works, compiled with Thomas Keenan.31 In turn, a comprehensive 1990 study
of Foucault’s thought brought together in synthesis a sustained ethical
interpretation of his work with Bernauer’s claim concerning Foucault’s
“negative theology”.32 More recently, Jeremy Carrette, working in the field of
Davidson, “Structures and Strategies of a Discourse: Remarks Towards a History of
Foucault’s Philosophy of Language” in Davidson, ed., Foucault and His Interlocuters
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 1. Davidson announces how with the
publication of these texts, “we are in a new position to begin to assess the significance
of his work”.
28 See, for example, Jeremy Moss, ed., The Later Foucault: Politics and Philosophy
(Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 1998); Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living:
Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault. Sather Classical Lectures, 61 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998); Timothy O’Leary, Foucault and the Art of Ethics
(London and New York: Continuum, 2002).
29 Publication of this work has been considered to be ruled out by Foucault’s
prohibition on posthumous publications. However, the recent comments by Daniel
Defert, cited Elden, “Review. Bernauer and Carrette, eds., Michel Foucault and
Theology”, Foucault Studies 1 (Dec 2004), 114, suggest that, in addition, the work is in a
less developed state than had previously been thought.
30 James W. Bernauer, “The Prisons of Man: An Introduction to Foucault's Negative
Theology.” International Philosophical Quarterly 27 (1987), 365-380.
31 James W. Bernauer, and David Rasmussen, eds., The Final Foucault (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1988), See Bernauer, and Keenan, T., “The Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-
1984”, 119-158.
32 Bernauer, Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight: Toward an Ethics of Thought (London:
Humanities Press International, 1990).
124
McSweeney: Foucault and Theology
religious studies and building upon the Dits et écrits texts, as well as further
archival research, has complemented Bernauer’s earlier studies by tracing in
detail Foucault’s engagement with theological themes throughout the course
of his work – what he terms the “religious subtext” of his thought. In
addition, he has published, in English translation, a selection of Foucault’s
essays and other writings, which bear upon the relation of religion and
culture.33 However, aspects of Carrette’s reading of Foucault are in tension
with those of Bernauer, not least his assertion that Foucault’s thought
constitutes a negative theology. The dialogue between their projects has
culminated in a co-edited volume, which seeks to bring the Foucault of this
“second wave” of reading of his work into dialogue with mainstream
theology, and sets the agenda for theological engagement with Foucault going
forward.34
Against misunderstandings of Foucault’s project, Bernauer’s 1990
study pays close attention to its paths, motivations and intensities,
characterising “that thought’s fundamental experience of itself” as a coherent
and unrelenting ethical “force of flight” beyond the imprisonments of modern
society. Thus, beginning with Foucault’s early psychological interrogation of
‘man’, within the framework of a Heideggerian phenomenology, Bernauer
figures Foucault as adopting successive paradigms of thought, only, as it
were, to think each one through to its limits – thereby revealing its contingent
conditions of emergence and ‘negating’ its scientific claims. Thus, Foucault’s
broadly Heideggerian approach collapses under the weight of the experience
of thinking the ‘silence’ of a madness excluded by reason. Foucault’s
encounter with the limits of the thinkable, and its relation of dependence to an
‘unthought’, leads to what Bernauer describes as the “cathartic” research of
The Order of Things, which seeks to “comprehend and purge the epistemic
conditions determining the major principles of current knowledge in the
human sciences”, in their relation to their subject and object, ‘man’.35 In turn,
Bernauer traces how, sensing the instability of this recent creation, Foucault
articulates in the late 1960s his own “dissonant” archaeological method, and
how this transposes, in the 1970s, into a “dissident” investigation of politics,
power, and power’s production of subjects and what counts as true. Finally,
33 Jeremy R. Carrette, Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality
(London and New York: Routledge, 2000). Michel Foucault, Religion and Culture, ed.
Jeremy Carrette (New York: Routledge, 1999), 11-17.
34 Bernauer and Carrette, eds., Michel Foucault and Theology: The Politics of Religious
Experience (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). My treatment of this collection focuses upon its
development of the researches inaugurated by Bernauer and Carrette. For a wider
perspective, see Stuart Elden’s review in Foucault Studies 1 (Dec. 2004), 114-115. Elden
gives particular mention to Thomas Beaudoin article, “From Singular to Plural
Domains of Theological Knowledge: Notes Toward a New Foucaultian Question”,
171-190.
35 Bernauer, Foucault’s Force of Flight, 5.
125
foucault studies, No 2, pp. 117-144
with Foucault’s recognition after 1976 that his own emphasis on power had
tended to obscure the possibilities of resistance and freedom, there emerges a
“final and culminating stage in Foucault’s development”: an “ecstatic”
thinking, which, without returning to the modern subject, explores the
genealogy of the desiring subject and, in particular, future ethical modes of
thought and spaces of freedom.
Crucially, for Bernauer, in this final phase, Foucault’s thought most
clearly reveals its inner impulse as a “worldly mysticism” and a “cry of spirit”
that continually seeks freedom from the imprisonments and normalising
power of modern society.36 Its continual discernment of, and movement
beyond, the limits of our finite constructions of truth, achieved in “ascetic”
practices of self and thought, suggest, for Bernauer, that Foucault’s thought
constitutes a negative theology. This claim is not, he argues, an arbitrary one
on his part. He points out that Foucault had suggested, in a 1967 interview,
that the tension in his work in the 1960s had been between his passion for the
work of writers like Blanchot and Bataille, on the one hand, and the
structuralist analyses of Dumézil and Lévi-Strauss, on the other. The common
denominator for both these interests, Foucault suggested, was “the religious
problem”, allowing him to recognise that “structure, the very possibility of a
rigorous discourse on structure, leads to a negative discourse on the
subject…similar to Bataille’s and Blanchot’s”.37 Bernauer connects this
statement with the explicit link made by Foucault, in his analysis of Blanchot’s
“thought of the outside”, between his thought and the tradition of negative
theology,38 and, with a comment of Foucault’s in a 1980 lecture, that his
thought was like a negative theology but in relation to the human sciences
36 Bernauer, Foucault’s Force of Flight, 178, 183. Bernauer stresses how Foucault’s thought
is permeated by notions such as “freeing ourselves from ourselves”, re-appropriation
of the Enlightenment as an Ausgang, and philosophy as a way of life and an ascesis.
See also, Bernauer, ‘Beyond Life and Death: On Foucault's Post-Auschwitz Ethic.’
Philosophy Today 32 (1988), 128-142.
37 Bernauer, Foucault’s Force of Flight, 178; Foucault, “Who are you, Professor Foucault?
Interview with P. Caruso”, in Michel Foucault, Religion and Culture, 98.
38 Foucault, “Thought of the Outside”, in J.D. Faubian, ed., Aesthetics: Essential Works of
Foucault 1954-1984. Volume 2 (London: Penguin, 2000), 150. The crucial text reads:
“One might assume that [“the thought of the outside”] was born of the mystical
thinking that has prowled the confines of Christianity since the texts of Pseudo-
Dionysius: perhaps it survived for a millennium or so in the various forms of
negative theology. Yet nothing is less certain: although this experience involves going
“outside of oneself,” this is done ultimately in order to find oneself, to wrap and
gather oneself in the dazzling interiority of a thought that is rightfully Being and
Speech, in other words, Discourse, even if it is the silence beyond all language and
the nothingness beyond all being.” It should be noted that Foucault does not clearly
distinguish between negative theology and mystical theology in this context, an
imprecision often found in his conceptualisations in the religious sphere, though this
typically does not vitiate the force of the larger points he is making.
126
McSweeney: Foucault and Theology
rather than God.39 He goes on to argue that while Foucault never developed
the analogy, his critique of modern anthropocentrism is best described as a
negative theology rather than a negative anthropology, for “man” appears
precisely in the shadow of and as a response to the death of God.40 As he put
it in his 1987 article, the substitution of the divine ‘I am’ with the human ‘I
think’ involved a loss of human transcendence insofar as the historical
happiness and perfection of the human being became the goal of thought. By
contrast, Foucault’s thought can be understood as reopening of the possibility
of human transcendence in a negative mode.
Christian Parrhesia
This analysis alone might suggest that while Foucault’s thought is ‘negative’
in structure, it constitutes a negative theology only in a circumscribed sense.
However, Bernauer further develops the idea of Foucault’s thought as a “cry
of spirit”. He suggests firstly that, at the time of his death, Foucault’s ethics of
“care of the self” owed more to Christian spirituality than to the pagan
practices of the self from which it was ostensibly derived.41 He was, Bernauer
argues, fascinated by and “came to esteem and utilise a Christian style of
liberty which combined a care of self with a sacrifice and mortification of that
self.”42 Moreover, recently, Bernauer has developed the claim of Foucault’s
debt to Christian spirituality in a slightly different direction, in an
examination of Foucault’s final lecture at the Collège de France, which treats of
“Christian parrhesia”.43 Framing his discussion of this material within
Foucault’s resistance to all forms of fascism, Bernauer suggests that the
common factor in all fascisms is “the obedient subject”.44 He argues that
Foucault resists the “the blackmail of the enlightenment”, which presents
itself as a new rationality liberated from what has gone before, to uncover
how the post-Reformation period constitutes a kind of christianisation-in-
depth, firstly, within a religious “confessional” context of “pastoral power”,
and, subsequently, within the secular context of modern “governmentality”,
with its processes of “subjectivation”. It is against this production of obedient
39 Bernauer, Foucault’s Force of Flight, 178.
40 Bernauer, Foucault’s Force of Flight, 178-183.
41 Bernauer, “Foreword: A Cry of Spirit”, in Michel Foucault, Religion and Culture, ed.
Jeremy Carrette (New York: Routledge, 1999), 11-17 at 14.
42 Bermauer, “A Cry of Spirit.”
43 Bernauer, “Michel Foucault’s Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction to the Non-
Fascist Life”, in Bernauer and Carrette, eds., Michel Foucault and Theology: The Politics
of Religious Experience (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 77-97.
44 Bernauer, “Michel Foucault’s Philosophy of Religion,” 78.
127
foucault studies, No 2, pp. 117-144
subjects, that Foucault’s rehabilitation of parrhesia as a mode of truth-telling,
fundamentally resistant to “confession”, finds its motivation.45
Much of Foucault’s final lecture course, and part of this last lecture, is
taken up with cynic parrhesia, in particular with its radical resistance via the
other life lived by the cynics. Of critical interest to Bernauer, however, is
Foucault’s analysis of the transposition of this cynic parrhesia in early
Christian thought and practice. Foucault points out how in New Testament
texts parrhesia was, firstly, a quality of the Christian in general, precisely in
their unspoken confidence in God, a confidence based upon obedience to
God’s will. Secondly, it was a quality of the fearless proclamation of the
gospel by the apostles. In the subsequent development of Christian parrhesia,
Foucault distinguishes an anti-parrhesiastic, and essentially ascetic, pole of
Christian thought in which “truth occurs only through the fearful obedience
to God and the suspicious examination of oneself through temptations and
tests,” and parrhesia constitutes “presumption”, in the theological sense of the
term.46 The genealogy of the modern christianisation-in-depth can be traced
to this pole of Christian thought. Alongside this tendency, and increasingly
marginal to it, he discerns a properly parrhesiastic and mystical pole, rooted
in confidence in God’s love. Bernauer argues that Foucault appreciated that in
this latter pole, Christian practice brings a new dimension to parrhesia: “not
the political and moral values of the ancient pagan world but rather the
power of a courageous openness to mystery.”47 Moreover, he suggests that
this Christian parrhesiastic openness to mystery reflects and casts light upon
Foucault’s own “spirituality of persons”, whose freedom resists being
objectivised and “is a kind of irrepressibility”.48 In support of this point, he
cites a comment by Foucault suggesting that he was not ashamed of his
strong Christian background nor, by implication, its influence upon his work,
connecting this analysis to the negative theology he had previously ascribed
to Foucault.49 Thus, while Bernauer allows that Foucault is a worldly mystic,
and does not define Foucault’s precise relationship to theology, he
nonetheless would seem to suggest that there is a strong, critical consonance
between Foucault’s thought and theological concerns, such that one can speak
of Foucault’s “philosophy of religion” as a resource for contemporary
theological thought.
45 Bernauer, “Michel Foucault’s Philosophy of Religion,” 78-79.
46 Bernauer, “Michel Foucault’s Philosophy of Religion,” 87.
47 Bernauer, “Michel Foucault’s Philosophy of Religion,” 91.
48 Bernauer, “Michel Foucault’s Philosophy of Religion,” 92-93,
49 Bernauer, “Michel Foucault’s Philosophy of Religion,” 93, citing Foucault Archives,
Document 250(7), Discussion of 21 April 1983, with Hubert Dreyfus, Paul Rabinow
and others, 11.
128
McSweeney: Foucault and Theology
A Catholic Foucault
The nuances of this Foucault and his relation to theology are reflected, in
Bernauer’s outline, with Carrette, of a further dimension of Foucault’s
engagement with theological themes, which warrants further investigation.
He and Carrette argue, that Foucault’s thinking “holds a distinctively Catholic
dimension” in such a manner that Foucault can be understood as engaging
with the Christian tradition and critically challenging its disciplinary regime,
becoming at once “both guardian and adversary of the Christian faith”.50
However, this influence of Catholicism upon his thought is filtered through
Foucault’s own concerns, which somewhat distort his perspective on religious
questions. Thus, his emphasis upon confession and pastoral power reflects
Catholic theological concerns, but the former may have distorted his analysis
of Christian sexuality. Moreover, they suggest that his view of sexuality may
primarily reflect Foucault’s own Catholic experience of sexuality as saturated
by sin. Again, the ‘visual’ quality of his work echoes what David Tracy has
called the Catholic “analogical imagination”.51 His vision of the tortured
body, at the beginning of Discipline and Punish, and of the tortured, ‘enfleshed’
Christian of early ascetical practices, forcefully bears upon an experience
unfortunately not unknown to Christians. However, once more, Foucault
does not grasp the full story, for if the body can be the register of sin, it can,
within an incarnational worldview, also be the locus of the divine. At the
same time, Bernauer and Carrette argue, Foucault’s practice of thought does
have an appreciation for the finite and limited, which reflects an incarnational
style of thought. Finally, they suggest that his re-appropriation of the
enlightenment as a certain attitude to the present, as an ethos, and his critique
mirror, in important respects, the Christian discernment of spirits.
Jeremy Carrette
Working in the field of religious studies, Jeremy Carrette takes the question of
the relation of Foucault’s thought to religious themes in a somewhat different
direction. Concerned with the reductive appropriations that plague Foucault
scholarship, Carrette seeks to attend to the specific ways in which Foucault’s
work itself engages with religious themes.52 In particular, he seeks to resist
the temptation to fill out the fragmentary traces of a “religious subtext” to
Foucault’s thought in a full-blown Foucauldian theory of religion. Moreover,
while he detects a genuine “religious question” in Foucault’s thought, he
50 Bernauer and Carrette, “Introduction. The Enduring Problem: Foucault, Theology
and Culture”, in Bernauer and Carrette, eds., Michel Foucault and Theology, 1, and for
what follows, 5-9.
51 David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination (New York: Herder and Herder, 1998).
52 Carrette, Foucault and Religion, ix-xi.
129
foucault studies, No 2, pp. 117-144
argues that it does not support a theological world-view, and considers that
the “creative location” of Foucault’s thought within the tradition of negative
theology is valid only as a secondary “redaction”.53 Bernauer is not
mentioned by name here, but his work is clearly within Carrette’s sights.
Indeed, Carrette will go on to demonstrate how unlike a negative theologian
like Pseudo-Dionysius, for whom transcendence operates along a ‘vertical’
axis, Foucault uncovers and moves beyond the limits of finite discursive
formulations ‘horizontally’, within the space of discourse.54 Moreover,
Carrette emphasises that in comparing his thought to a negative theology
Foucault was doing no more than suggesting certain parallels with his style of
thought, but not aligning himself with a theological project.55 It is well to note
that Arthur Bradley has made the even stronger point that, in his treatment of
Blanchot’s “thought of the outside”, Foucault juxtaposes negative theology
and the thought of the outside only to demonstrate that they could not be
more different.56 Bradley goes on to suggest that what traces of negative
theology remain in Foucault’s thought do so in spite of his intentions – due to
unresolved tensions between the transcendental and historical in his
thought.57
Constructively, Carrette traces in detail Foucault’s engagement, in the
1960s, with such avant-garde thinkers as Blanchot, Bataille, and Roussel, as
well as de Sade. In Foucault’s analysis, the death of God and man, the return
of language and the emergence of sexuality in modernity open a space in
which the ‘spiritual’ or ‘religious’ come to bear, in a unique manner, upon the
body, in what Carrette terms a “spiritual corporality”.58 The sexualised (male)
body becomes marked as the site of what Carrette terms a Sadeian
‘theological’ anger that both protests the limits imposed by a Christian world-
view and, aided by a transgressive mode of language, signals the death of
God, becoming at the same time the site of God’s absence. For Foucault, this
intensified experience of the body and sexuality complicates philosophical
53 Carrette, Foucault and Religion, x-xi, 1.
54 Carrette, Foucault and Religion, 92 ff.
55 Carrette, “Prologue to a Confession of the Flesh”, in Foucault, Religion and Culture, 3-
4.
56 Bradley, Negative Theology, 118.
57 Bradley, Negative Theology, 148-149. See Béatrice Han, Foucault’s Critical Project:
Between the Transcendental and the Historical (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2002), 38-69. See Thomas R. Flynn, “Partially Desacralized Spaces: the Religious
Availability of Foucault’s Thought”, in Bernauer and Carrette, Michel Foucault and
Theology, 143-156. Flynn suggests that Foucault protests too much the difference
between the thought of the outside and negative theology, however, Bradley’s
argument seems more plausible: that by this act of distancing through comparison
Foucault enables his readers to locate and give substance to the ‘thought of the
outside’ in relation to the broader tradition of western thought.
58 Carrette, Foucault and Religion, 44-84; for what follows see especially 63-84.
130
McSweeney: Foucault and Theology
(and theological) discourse, creating possibilities of disruption and a space to
think the death of God and ‘man’. For Carrette, this “bringing theology into
the bedroom”, offers an important critique of religious discourse,
“contaminating” it, contesting the very possibility of a religious discourse and
experience that could avoid being transformed into this new experience of the
body, sexuality and language.59
While Carrette interprets Foucault as complicating religious discourse,
at the same time, he expresses regret that Foucault’s “spiritual corporality”
never overcomes its dependence on Sadeian models of isolation, distrust and
anxiety and so never explores the positive possibilities for an embodied
notion of belief that his analysis opens up.60 Instead, as he shows, Foucault’s
interest in the ‘disciplinary’ structures of modern society in his genealogical
period in the 1970s, together with his late interest in ethical modes of
subjectivity, sees his concern with religious themes shift toward a “political
spirituality” – a term Foucault first used in 1978 in relation to the Iranian
revolution.61 Carrette can emphasise how discipline’s focus is not upon a
direct ‘marking’ of the body, but with the formation of a ‘soul’ that is both
cause and effect of ‘docile bodies’ suitable for governance in modern society.
Carrette goes on to show how in his analysis of the early Christian injunction
toward ‘confession of the flesh’, Foucault discovers how the ‘spiritual’
transforms and indeed constitutes the subject and explores spirituality’s
political efficacy in the production of subjects. Thus, religious experience is
politicised by Foucault’s thought.62 However, Carrette recognises the complex
trajectory of Foucault’s often problematic conceptualisation of early Christian
spiritual practices, and importantly suggests that his interest is primarily in
the broader technologies of the self of the ancient world and their importance
for the modern truth-governance-subjectivity conjunction. (As a consequence,
his treatment of Christian spirituality was repeatedly pushed back, to the
point of not being completed at the time of his death). By contrast, the central
point of Foucault’s analysis of Christianity concerns the new relations of
59 Developing this aspect of Carrette’s analysis see the following articles in Bernauer
and Carrette, eds., Michel Foucault and Theology: Carrette, “Beyond Theology and
Sexuality: Foucault, the Self and the Que(e)rying of Monotheistic Truth”, 217-232;
Mark D. Jordan, “Sodomites and Churchmen: The Theological Invention of
Homosexuality”, 233-244; Michael Mahon, “Catholic Sex”, 245-266. See also, Jordan,
The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2002).
60 Carrette, Foucault and Religion, 83.
61 Carrette, Foucault and Religion, 129ff. See Michel Foucault, “Questions of Method”, in
Michel Foucault, Power: Essential Works of Foucault. Volume 3. Ed. James D. Faubian
(New York: The New Press, 2000), 223-233, at 233: most briefly excised from his text:
“the will to discover a different way of governing oneself through a differing way of
dividing up true and false – that is what I would call ‘political spirituality’.”
62 Carrette, Foucault and Religion, 136.
131
foucault studies, No 2, pp. 117-144
power it introduces.63 Hence, while not the focus of his thought, religious
experience is implicated in his analysis and has to confront its own power-
effects and its relation to modern modes of governance. In this way, Carrette
again strikes a significantly different note than Bernauer, maintaining the
subtextual status of religion within Foucault’s later conception of the practice
of thought.
While Foucault never integrates ‘spiritual corporality’ and ‘political
spirituality’, Carrette can suggest a coherent direction for the critique of
religious discourse ‘after’ Foucault. Religion must be treated as integrated
with the culture in which it arises. Its discourse must be radically located
socially and historically, and its belief grasped as thoroughly embodied and
‘contaminated’ by the body and sexuality. In turn, the suffusion of religious
discourse (and religious ‘silence’) with relations of power, its ‘micro-politics’,
and its technologies of the self as techniques of governance must be taken
seriously.64 However, it should be noted that Carrette is not simply providing
a Foucauldian critique of religion – although this has radical implications, in
its own right, for both religion and theology. For these, subtextual
engagements with religious themes on Foucault’s part are profoundly
integrated into Foucault’s cultural analyses and critical practice.
Consequently, he argues, religion is shown to have rather more importance in
cultural formation and critical thought than has typically been allowed in
religious studies. More importantly, he detects the possibility that in the
“absence” of religion in the contemporary world, “we are left with questions
of how to create new forms of embodied subjectivity through a ‘spiritual
corporality’ and a ‘political spirituality’”.65 The critical point is that “[f]rom
this ‘absence’ a new ‘religious space’ will emerge in its disappearance.”66 In
other words, for Carrette, Foucault’s thought does not simply provide a
critique which might be applied in the study of religion, or to theology, but
portrays a kind of post-religious and post-theological space to be construed
nonetheless as the ‘religious’ and theological space available to us in the
contemporary context. A phrase from his recent work with Richard King,
suggests the force of what Carrette envisions, at least in embryo, here, when it
is suggested that what we need today are “spiritual atheisms” for our time.67
63 Carrette, Foucault and Religion, 135-136.
64 Carrette, Foucault and Religion, 142-151.
65 Carrette, Foucault and Religion, 152.
66 Carrette, Foucault and Religion, 152.
67 Jeremy Carrette and Richard King, Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion
(London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 182.
132
McSweeney: Foucault and Theology
Convergence: A Foucauldian Spirituality
It is clear in the context of this analysis that the Catholic dimension of
Foucault’s thought serves, for Carrette, not to highlight Foucault’s consonance
with a theological world-view, as Bernauer appears to suggest, but constitutes
further religious tropes within Foucault’s thought, which reinforce his
argument for a Foucauldian “political spirituality”. However, where the
readings of Bernauer and Carrette converge is in their common ascription to
the centrality of “spirituality” to Foucault’s ethico-political practice, which, in
their recent joint work they argue, he understood “as an ensemble of practices
that create not the mere consciousness of the subject but the very being of the
subject and its paths of understanding.”68 Citing Foucault’s comment from
the 1978 lecture, “What is critique?”, that “one of the first great forms of revolt
in the west was mysticism”,69 they stress that this spirituality leads “not to an
isolation from the world but rather a critical immersion into it and a refusal of
its immutability”. While they recognise that mysticism can be problematic
conceptually, they suggest that Foucault’s intellectual practice can be
described as a “mysticism of revolt”. In particular, they connect Foucault’s
thought with the “otherness” and “intensity of [mystical] experience”, which
limits the claims of all categories, including theological ones, being instead
open to “a transformative presence…which pushes the human condition to
find new possibilities” and to resist closure.70
In particular, they argue that Foucault’s thought refuses to separate
theology and culture, but reveals to theology its own conditions of
knowledge. Foucault invites theologians to recognise that “all appeals to the
past are but, paradoxically, an affirmation of the present political desire for
knowledge and power about the nature of truth”. He returns theology to its
history, shifting the focus from doctrinal systems to the pastoral reality and
practices of its living community. “His work uncovers and destabilizes the
unexamined authority of theological discourse and brings Christianity back to
the fragility of human struggle.”71 Theology can be rethought as practice
rather than belief. Consequently, they envision that a “Foucauldian spiritual
sensibility” can lead to “a way of relating to oneself differently from modern
68 Bernauer and Carrette, “Foucault, Theology and Culture”, 8. It is impossible to
determine the relation between the individual authors Bernauer and Carrette, and the
compound author ‘Bernauer and Carrette’. This programmatic introduction reads at
times as a composite piece, with elements of each individual’s views juxtaposed
rather than integrated. However, their treatment of a Foucauldian spirituality
appears a more integrated piece, though capable of a two-fold interpretation – in line
with each of their individual projects.
69 Foucault, “What is critique?” in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York:
Semiotext(e), 1997), 74.
70 Bernauer and Carrette, “Foucault, Theology and Culture,” 8-9.
71 Bernauer and Carrette, “Foucault, Theology and Culture,” 2-4.
133
foucault studies, No 2, pp. 117-144
subjectivity” and can “create new spiritual communities for us to inhabit”,
communities, they recognise, which will be in critical tension with traditional
faith communities.72
Contraindications
Bernauer’s work has given considerable credibility to Foucault’s work as a
fundamentally ethical project, and, at least, has demonstrated that both in the
late 1960s – as, indeed, Blanchot also attests73 – and the late 1970s, Foucault’s
thought engages with themes from “negative theology”. However, in view of
the objections of Carrette and Bradley, the problem for Bernauer is that he is
left with the burden of demonstrating, firstly, that in these instances the
relationship between Foucault and a negative theology is anything but
weakly analogical, given his tangential engagement with these themes, and
secondly, whether his thought as a whole is shaped by them. One
contraindicative text of Foucault’s might be mentioned, in the latter regard. In
a 1966 interview, Foucault distinguished between Hegel and Feuerbach, on
the one hand, and Nietzsche, on the other, in relation to the question of the
death of God. Foucault argued that, with Hegel, reason takes the place of God
as the human spirit gradually develops, while, with Feuerbach, the illusion of
God is replaced by “Man” who comes to realise his liberty. However, for
Nietzsche, with whom Foucault aligns himself, “the death of God signifies the
end of metaphysics, but God is not replaced by man, and the space remains
empty.”74 Consequently, Foucault would appear to complicate the relation
Bernauer asserts between the death of God and of ‘man’.
John Ransom goes further, in his discussion of Bernauer’s work, to
suggest that Foucault would not only resist the description of his thought as a
negative theology, but also the notion of a “Foucauldian spirituality”. Finding
echoes of the vitalism Deleuze ascribes to Foucault in Bernauer’s treatment,
he suggests that as a specific intellectual Foucault was not motivated by any
principle of ‘life’ – or, one might suggest, human “irrepressibility” – but was
concerned with certain concrete expressions of life, or unrealised possibilities,
that might be affirmed or rejected.75 Of course, Foucault himself deployed the
72 Bernauer and Carrette, “Foucault, Theology and Culture,” 8-9.
73 Maurice Blanchot, “Foucault as I Imagine Him”, in Foucault/Blanchot (New York:
Zone Books, 1987), 74.
74 Foucault, “Philosophy and the Death of God”, in Foucault, Religion and Culture, 85. It
might be noted that this interpretation of Nietzsche, as proposing that the place of
God remains empty, was first made, and decisively so, by Heidegger. Foucault’s
interpretation is thus an interesting signal of the importance of Heidegger to his
thought. See Martin Heidegger, “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God is Dead’” (1943), in Off the
Beaten Track (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 157-199.
75 John Ransom, Foucault’s Discipline: The Politics of Spirituality (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 1997), 177-178.
134
McSweeney: Foucault and Theology
notion of spirituality, but it covered both Christian and pagan practices of the
self and thus appeared to have no specifically religious content.76 In this
regard, Karen Vintges makes the criticism that Carrette does not take account
of the fact that when Foucault utilises the notion of “spirituality”, he is not
referring to religion as such, but only to “freedom practices within religion”.77
The implicit difficulty is one to which Carrette himself adverts: how may a
subtext of Foucault’s thought be foregrounded without distortion.78 In
particular, the problem is that while he accepts that Foucault reduces religious
practices to political practices, he nonetheless wants to retain a specifically
religious force to these practices, and to suppose that Foucault’s thought
contains a religious question.79 In Carrette’s own terms, this might be a valid
secondary “redaction”, but appears to imbue Foucault’s notion of spirituality
with unwarranted religious connotations. On the other hand, Vintges’
criticism may invert the tension in Carrette’s position somewhat, for if
Foucault is not necessarily concerned with religion as such, neither is it clear
that, in the genealogical context of his analyses, he can entirely abstract these
practices from their religious contexts. It would seem rather that Derrida’s
point is apposite here: that that, which returns, returns differently. From this
perspective, Foucault is not an Enlightenment enemy of religion, but neither
do the traces of the religious that emerge in his thought necessarily constitute
a ‘religious’ space.80
A further, complicating perspective on this notion of a Foucauldian
spirituality is offered by Michiel Leezenberg, in his fine article on Foucault’s
engagement with the Iranian revolution in Bernauer’s and Carrette’s recent
volume.81 Firstly, Leezenberg’s article reinforces the point highlighted by
Carrette that, although Foucault examines the relation of spirituality and
politics in his later writings, his deployment of the specific concept of a
“political spirituality” is centred on this period in the late 1970s and linked to
Foucault’s response to the Iranian revolution – as is the concept of mysticism
76 See for example, Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in
Progress”, in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984. Volume 1, ed., Paul Rabinow
(London: Penguin, 2000), 253-280 at 294.
77 Karen Vintges, “Endorsing Practices of Freedom: Feminism in a Global Perspective”,
in Dianne Taylor and Karen Vintges, eds., Feminism and the Final Foucault (Urbana
and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 275-299 at 288.
78 Carrette, Foucault and Religion, 2.
79 Carrette, Foucault and Religion, 179-180, note 59.
80 Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: the Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of
Reason Alone”, in Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds., Religion (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1998), 1-78. Derrida highlights how he is not an enemy of religion as certain
Enlightenment thinkers were understood to be. But at the same time he has an
“unreserved taste” for a public and democratic space of thought. (7-8)
81 Michiel Leezenberg, “Power and Political Spirituality: Michel Foucault on the Islamic
Revolution in Iran”, in Bernauer and Carrette, eds., Foucault and Theology, 99-115.
135
foucault studies, No 2, pp. 117-144
as revolt. Moreover, Leezenberg highlights how this concept proved
problematic for Foucault. For the Islamic revolution in Iran against state
power, inspired and facilitated by the people’s “spirituality”, quickly gave
way to the violence of a “bloodthirsty government of reactionary clergy.”82
While Foucault distinguishes the two and does not posit a causal connection
between them, the problem nonetheless remains as to the value of revolt:
hence, his article, “Is it useless to revolt?”
In addition, Foucault felt it necessary to counter the threat of power
unleashed in this context, by appeal beyond “universal principles” to
“unbreakable law and unbridgeable rights”. Leezenberg points out that, while
Foucault did not continue to write about the consequences of these events for
his thought, this universalist appeal leaves him at odds with his earlier
analytic of power. He suggests that this uncomfortable situation arises
because there are traces of a domination-resistance dichotomy still at work in
Foucault’s thought. It seems reasonable to extend Leezenberg’s comments by
suggesting that the very idea of a “spirituality” or a “mysticism of revolt”
reflects this dichotomy, tending as it does toward constituting what Foucault
called a moment “outside history”.83 As Leezenberg’s analysis suggests,
Foucault, at least at first, did not recognise the relations of power already at
play in this “spiritual” revolt. If Foucault’s later investigation of ancient pagan
and Christian writings is informed, at least in part, by this difficulty, then it is
arguable that, although he recognises the deep impact of Christian spirituality
upon western subjectivity, Foucault’s later focus is not upon a specifically
religious or mystical “spirituality” as a potential paradigm of his own
thought. In any case, theological readings of his work need to be careful of not
going beyond Foucault’s deployment of the term.
It is beyond the scope of this article to address these questions in any
detail. However, a somewhat different construal, to that provided by
Bernauer, of Foucault’s treatment of Christian parrhesia in his final lecture at
the Collège de France may suggest something of the potential complication of
ascribing a religious, mystical or Christian style of “spirituality” to Foucault
in light of these later writings.84 The larger context of Foucault’s discussion of
Christian parrhesia, as has been noted, is his sustained exploration of cynic
parrhesia, in which Foucault clearly finds a practice and “problematisation”
of thought in relation to which he can think through several of his own critical
concerns. As the course progresses, one of Foucault’s concerns is with
precisely how this cynic practice, itself marginal in its time and leaving no
82 Michiel Leezenberg, “Power and Political Spirituality,” 110; See Foucault, “Is it
useless to revolt?” in Foucault, Religion and Culture, 133.
83 Foucault, “Is it Useless to Revolt?”, 131.
84 I am very grateful to Professor Bernauer for making available to me the transcripts of
these 1984 lectures, prepared in 1990 by Michael Behrent on behalf of Professor James
Miller.
136
McSweeney: Foucault and Theology
canon of writings, might conceivably have constituted part of the genealogy
of western truth-telling, and thus constitute an effective “problematisation” of
thought within that tradition today. Foucault’s treatment of Christian
parrhesia occurs within a genealogical sequence of analyses which trace the
manner in which cynicism is absorbed into Western thought and yet
dynamically transmits certain parrhesiastic values.85 Thus, prior to his analysis
of Christian parrhesia, Foucault examines at length how cynic themes emerge
and are transformed in the thought of the Stoic Epictetus. And, at least in
outline, he projects a history of that transmission and transformation of these
themes beyond Christian practices of the self to nineteenth century
revolutionary politics and to certain forms of twentieth century art.86 Thus,
although, due to time pressure at the end of this final lecture, Foucault
concludes with a treatment of Christian attitudes to parrhesia and, indeed,
with the idea that parrhesia survived on the margins of the Christian tradition
in mystical practices, caution is in order when discerning in the spirituality of
Christian mystical parrhesia an element critical to Foucault’s practice of
thought.
Moreover, certain of his remarks suggest that Foucault had a more
circumspect attitude than Bernauer supposes to Christianity’s mystical and
parrhesiastic pole. Certainly, he saw in the trembling obedience of the anti-
parrhesiastic and ascetical pole of Christian thought the genealogical origin of
“pastoral power”. And he asserted that where there is obedience, there cannot
be parrhesia.87 However, the relation Foucault proposes between the
parrhesiastic and anti-parrhesiastic poles appears to be a complex one. For it
is a tension at the heart of the parrhesiastic pole that ultimately gives rise to
its anti-parrhesiastic alternative. Foucault had argued that in the New
Testament parrhesia signifies confidence in God, but that this confidence is
one which asks nothing other than that which God wants, that is, that it
depends fundamentally upon the notion that human will is in practice
nothing other than the reduplication of God’s will. In Foucault’s judgment,
this circular dynamic of belief follows a principle of obedience.88 However, he
goes on to argue that the positive pole of Christian parrhesia which combines
this confidence with the apostolic courage exhibited in proclaiming the
85 This is not to suggest an underlying parrhesia that persists through history, but
rather that a genealogical sequence of concrete historical practices can be seen both to
share certain continuities with what has gone before but also to be characterised by
contingent historical mutations.
86 Foucault, Lecture of 1 February 1984, 45-51. For the structure and outline of
Foucault’s final course see, Thomas R. Flynn, “Foucault as Parrhesiast: Last Course at
the Collège de France (1984)’ in J. Bernauer and T. Ramussen, eds., The Final Foucault,
102-118.
87 Foucault, Lecture of 28th March 1984, 52.
88 Foucault, Lecture of 28th March 1984, 38.
137
foucault studies, No 2, pp. 117-144
gospel, continues to be marked by this principle of obedience. And ultimately,
it will only require loss of confidence in the human will’s capacity to
reduplicate the divine will to open the way to the troubling anti-parrhesiastic
‘confession of the flesh’.89
Moreover, when Foucault speaks of the survival of parrhesia in the
Christian mystical tradition, he refers specifically to the survival of this
Christian parrhesia of confidence in God. As such, he does not appear to
valorise the Christian mystical tradition as preserving and extending the cynic
notion of parrhesia, as such, but more modestly of preserving this parrhesia of
confidence in and obedience to God.90 Indeed, when he highlights the
manifestation of parrhesia within the Christian tradition, he does not appear
to discern any specifically religious or mystical element within it.91 Reference
might also be made here to Bernauer’s suggestion that Foucault adopts a
Christian form of liberty which combined care and renunciation of self. In
light of this final lecture course, it would seem that Foucault also finds in
cynic parrhesia a vision of a life in which much is ‘renounced’ in order to live
the true ‘other’ life, to ethico-political ends in the social sphere. An interesting
and important question is how Foucault’s Christian and cynic researches
intersect on this topic.92
Beyond questions of interpretation of his work, Bernauer’s and
Carrette’s arguments for a Foucauldian ‘spirituality’ raise a broader
theological issue, one already raised within the ‘postmodern’ approach to
Foucault. To speak of a Foucauldian ‘spirituality’ risks a subtle re-inscription
of the modern relation of theology and philosophy. For to argue for a
Foucauldian ‘spirituality’ consonant with the Christian tradition as Bernauer
appears to do, or to understand Foucault as offering a refigured notion of
spirituality as Carrette seems to suggest, is to echo postures from modern and
postmodern theology (the latter in turn repeating modern dichotomies). One
approaches a situation in which Foucault, on the one hand, can be allowed to
shape theological discourse because his work ultimately resonates with its
own deepest concerns and traditions, or, on the other, so defines the
contemporary space of theological thought, that theology must take his
lessons to heart: the alternative of a theological Foucault or a Foucauldian
89 Foucault, Lecture of 28th March 1984, 45.
90 Foucault, Lecture of 28th March 1984, 54. Foucault suggests that the theme of
obedience to God continues within mysticism transformed into the necessity of a
purity of soul which makes one worthy to come face-to-face with the divine.
91 See, for example, Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in
Progress”, 278.
92 In either case caution is required, as Foucault made it clear in relation to the Greek
world that he was not interested in their solutions, nor in simply adopting their
problematisations, but of taking certain of their problematisations and transforming
them so as to bring them to bear on the problems of contemporary thought.
138
McSweeney: Foucault and Theology
theology. Of course, against this trace in their work and balancing it, both
Bernauer and Carrette each brilliantly articulate Foucault’s capacity
continually to generate profoundly new spaces of theological thought, so that
Foucauldian “spirituality” does not simply constitute a modernist critique but
continually opens theology to new possibilities.93 However, an important
tension remains, which tends variously to articulate the value of Foucault’s
thought for theology at the expense of his distance from it.
By contrast, the work of Foucault’s contemporary, Michel de Certeau,
suggests the outline of an alternative formulation. His thought is framed, on
the one hand, by the theological question of how Christianity is thinkable
today and, on the other, by a broadly ‘poststructuralist’ project not entirely
dissimilar to that of Foucault. As Bradley has elaborated, de Certeau’s
thought seeks an answer to his theological question by risking engagement
with the otherness of contemporary thought, conceived as irreducible to
either ‘sameness’ or ‘difference’, such that to engage with it is to risk the
certainty that the ‘theology’ which emerges “is truly Christianity at all” (or,
one might add, ‘spiritual’ or ‘religious’), for one has the assurance neither that
the other is ultimately of the same order as oneself nor that identity can be
secured in giving oneself over to the other.94 De Certeau’s “mundane other”
is, rather, at every point an irreducible admixture of both likeness and
difference,95 and applied to Foucault allows for a reading of his work as at a
distance in his consonances with and consonant in his distances from
theology. Consequently, beyond the apologetic terms of modern thought,
theology might be at once shaped by Foucault without becoming
Foucauldian, and might constitute a “theological theology” while, at the same
time, unable to circumscribe what Derrida might describe as the spectral
challenge of Foucault’s thought.96
Theologies “After” Foucault
Two recent, constructive theologies ‘after’ Foucault take up interesting
perspectives in relation to the work of Bernauer and Carrette and to these
questions. Firstly, J. Joyce Schuld, within the field of “Christian cultural
analysis”, pursues a sustained conversation between Foucault and Augustine,
93 Bernauer and Carrette, Michel Foucault and Theology, 4.
94 Bradley, Negative Theology, 80.
95 See Wlad Godzich, “Foreword: The Further Possibility of Knowledge”, in Michel de
Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1986), vii and following, where the term is used to describe de Certeau’s notion
of the other. A similar theme is found in Deleuze’s notion of a repetition producing
‘pure’, unquantifiable difference, which nonetheless are not absolute.
96 See Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New
International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).
139
foucault studies, No 2, pp. 117-144
on the basis of the parallels she discovers, on a performative level, between
Foucault’s notion of power and Augustine’s notion of love.97 Like Bernauer
and Carrette, Schuld presents Foucault as an ethical thinker with whom
theology can confidently engage, for Foucault’s ethos of “being pessimistic
without being hopeless”, “comports well with much of the Christian
tradition.”98 However, at the same time, she preserves a distance between the
“Foucault, the atheist” and Christian thought, by a sophisticated cross-
reading which aims to explore the resonances and exploit the differences
between these two thinkers to the benefit of both of their projects, and
without reducing the distinctiveness of their insights and approaches. In
particular, she demonstrates how, as relational, dispersed, and productive,
Augustinian love demonstrates operative parallels with Foucauldian power,
and how love’s emphasis upon the personal and power’s attention to the
social might complement one another to suggest a rich and varied network of
relations constitutive of our personal and social space. In this manner,
Foucault’s and Augustine’s respective social and (inter)personal emphases to
extend, in a kind of cross-contamination, “the geographic reach” of each
other’s analyses, Foucault extending Augustine’s analysis deeper into the
social and political spheres, the latter’s notion of love introducing a richer
grammar of human relationality – one possessing a “generative” capacity in
relation to human possibility that the political heritage of the term ‘power’
necessarily denies it. In Schuld’s view, then, through this cross-reading,
Foucault and Augustine can better attend to the complexities and ambiguities
of the social and political spheres, and a common commitment to attending to
the dangers and vulnerabilities associated with them.
Moreover, while maintaining the distance between their works, Schuld
is able to highlight their common elaboration, against the autonomous
subject, of what might be termed a vulnerable subjectivity and an associated
ethics. A striking comparison of the operative functioning of Augustine’s
theology of original sin and Foucault’s view of world pervaded by power
relation enables Schuld to highlight how each thinker delineates a social space
in which evil is anonymous and yet permeates its most infinitesimal
‘capillaries’ and processes.99 More importantly she shows how both Foucault
and Augustine articulate a sense of human agency and responsibility within
this social space, responsive to the human vulnerability and moral ‘vertigo’
experienced within it. Subsequently, this comparison is extended to articulate
the parallels and distinctive emphases of each thinker in relation to desire and
habit, dominant discourses and politics.
97 J. Joyce Schuld, Foucault and Augustine: Reconsidering Power and Love (Notre Dame,
Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 2003). For a more extensive treatment of
Schuld’s book, see my review in Foucault Studies 1 (Dec. 2004), 105-110.
98 J. Joyce Schuld, Foucault and Augustine, 1-2.
99 J. Joyce Schuld, Foucault and Augustine, 47-51.
140
McSweeney: Foucault and Theology
In all of this, Schuld demonstrates a significant alternative to the
approach of Bernauer and Carrette, in that the consonance of Foucault’s
thought with theological concerns is not at the expense of his distance from
theology. Foucault emerges as something approaching de Certeau’s
“mundane other”, whose thought demonstrates an irreducible mix of
parallels to and differences from theology. At one point, however, Schuld’s
approach is rather more problematic. She claims that no “metanarrative
pressures” are exerted at the performative level of power and love by
Foucault’s and Augustine’s larger projects: for all of the differences between
them, their analyses are ultimately not incompatible.100 This correlates with
Schuld’s interpretation, inspired by aspects of the broader American reception
of his thought, of Foucault’s “specific researches” as “intentionally partial
social descriptions” that are “empirical” in nature and “utterly uninterested in
all-encompassing interpretations”, “bracketing” rather then disqualifying
broader questions. This enables her to present Foucault as attending to
“forgotten voices” in a manner “suited to detecting and responding to the
shifting risks of a post-modern world”, while being able to locate his thought
as “colourful fragments” within a more “intricate and extensive mosaic”.101
Consequently, Schuld deprives Foucault’s thought of a crucial dimension of
its critical force, for in her conception, his analyses of power no longer bears
upon the “ontological and evaluative center” of Augustine’s thought.102
Nevertheless, her larger “cross-reading” is a sophisticated and promising
innovation in theological engagement with Foucault’s work.
In turn, Henrique Pinto utilises Foucault’s work to construct a theology
of interfaith dialogue that moves beyond, what he takes to be, Catholic
theology’s construction and rejection of other religions as the ‘other’ of its
absolute religious claims.103 Integrating Foucault’s earlier work with his later
ethical concerns, Pinto stresses how Foucault continually brings to light how
‘truth’ stands in a relation to specific contexts and relations of power and
hence is always finite, or rather a “finite infinity”.104 He shows how Foucault
brings to light how we tend to absolutise truth in a manner inconsistent with
its finitude and specificity. Drawing on the deployment of the term in the
Archaeology of Knowledge, Pinto argues that for Foucault, the very structure of
language is that there is always a ‘more’ that escapes what we intend to say or
designate by language. This ‘more’ is what remains yet to be thought and that
which undermines and disrupts our efforts to ‘possess’ the truth as something
100 J. Joyce Schuld, Foucault and Augustine, 78.
101 J. Joyce Schuld, Foucault and Augustine, 8, 17-19.
102 J. Joyce Schuld, Foucault and Augustine, 42.
103 H. Pinto, Foucault, Christianity and Interfaith Dialogue (London: Routledge, 2003).
104 H. Pinto, Foucault, Christianity and Interfaith Dialogue, 4, 39ff.
141
foucault studies, No 2, pp. 117-144
definitive and absolute.105 Pinto exploits this term to generate a sophisticated
theological reading of Foucault. As he acknowledges, Foucault’s ‘more’ is not
the divine. However, in a post-metaphysical context, this recommends a
theological interpretation. For ‘the More’, as Pinto writes the term, does not
suggest a “region beyond knowledge”, nor “something prior to the sentences
we speak”, nor a God “beyond history in the shadows of its laws.”106 Instead,
as the openness or opening of language to the unthought, it is the locus of
human-divine relation in history. As such, Pinto can avoid all dualism in
speaking of the divine. In a sustained dialogue with the work of such diverse
thinkers as Meister Eckhart, Milbank, and Marion, Pinto constructs a model of
interfaith dialogue in which the absence of a ‘God beyond reality’ (which
would allow us to absolutise our truth claims) shifts the focus from polemic to
a dialogical ‘being-with-other-faiths’. Pinto does not envisage an overcoming of
differences but that each tradition would recognise that no religious figure
is an exhaustive embodiment of the More lavishing existence, and that life in
relation to them, is not about finding the divine hidden in them and
conforming to it, but about becoming the difference of ourselves through the
sacrificial transformation of our theological positions, in response to the
demands of the More – as we hear it calling in the practice of ourselves and in
the making of society.107
The creativity of Pinto’s reading of Foucault is that he does not have to
suggest that Foucault, despite his own intentions, articulated an opening to
the theological. There is a perfect consistency, for Pinto, in his own and
Foucault’s readings of the ‘more’: Foucault’s reading lacks nothing for not
recognising the ‘more’ as the locus of divine-human relations in history, while
Pinto’s in a sense adds nothing. Its avoidance of dualism also has much to
recommend this approach theologically.
However, his interpretation of the ‘more’ does tend to dissolve the
distance between Foucault and theology so carefully articulated here. Where
in The Archaeology of Knowledge the term refers to the discursive dimension of
language beyond words power to name things, Pinto discovers an “untamed
exteriority”108 more reflective of Foucault’s explorations of the ‘thought of the
outside’ than his later ethics and echoes contested elements of the notion of a
105 The term is found in Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London:
Routledge, 2000) 49. While not a central Foucauldian term, the concept does reflect
important aspects of Foucault’s view of language. For instance, the French title of The
Order of Things (Les Mots et Les Choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966)) similarly (and
ironically) evokes the notion that there is more to language than naming words and
designated things.
106 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 91.
107 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 166.
108 H. Pinto, Foucault, Christianity and Interfaith Dialogue, op cit, 91.
142
McSweeney: Foucault and Theology
Foucauldian spirituality highlighted in relation to Bernauer’s and Carrette’s
work. In particular, that Pinto parallels Foucault’s ‘more’ to Derrida’s
‘différance’ signals a shift from ascribing importance to particular experiences
and specific discursive and power formations to focusing upon the ‘openings’
of a quasi-transcendentally structured language.109 The theological
importance of this is that, while Pinto does not wish to see religious
differences overcome in religious dialogue, this emphasis on the More alters
the dynamic relation between the particularities of tradition and the
‘transcendence’ which it enacts, in favour of the latter. Nonetheless, we find
here once more – albeit less strongly than in Schuld – the perception of a
Foucault at a persistent distance from, yet intersecting with, theology, and an
effort to think the resultant admixture of consonance and dissonance.
Conclusion: Future Lines Of Development
While tracing the evolution of theological engagement with Foucault’s
thought, this article has concentrated upon Bernauer’s and Carrette’s critical
explorations of the intersection of Foucault’s thought with Christian
theological themes, as these investigations more than any others have laid the
basis for a theological dialogue with his thought. Their recent work, in its
achievements and difficulties, highlights how evaluation of the significance of
Foucault’s deployment of the term ‘spirituality’, and the extent of its
‘religious’ and ‘mystical’ connotations, will be crucial to the dialogue between
theology and Foucault going forward. Further exploration of the Catholic
dimension of Foucault’s thought, highlighted by them, and the ongoing
examination of Foucault’s later writings will be central to this process.
However, the constructive theologies ‘after’ Foucault of Schuld and Pinto
reflect a broader persistent theological intuition of, and caution toward, the
distance of Foucault’s thought from theology and suggest the need to arrive at
a style of theological engagement which allows that difference its proper
place. It is perhaps time, therefore, to engage with thinkers like Derrida and
de Certeau, who have grappled more explicitly with theoretical questions
surrounding the intersection of poststructuralist thought and theology,
toward the construction of new paradigms of theological engagement with
Foucault’s thought. Finally, this article has reflected the fact that theological
engagement with the thought of Michel Foucault has essentially taken place
within the Christian tradition. However, as Bernauer suggests, Foucault’s
trips to Japan in 1970 and 1978, and their importance for the development of
his understanding of religion, open up the possibility of a dialogue with
109 See H. Pinto, Foucault, Christianity and Interfaith Dialogue, 124-5. The difficulty with
focusing on the ‘more’ is not that it is not a particularly central Foucauldian term, but
this shift that it induces.
143
foucault studies, No 2, pp. 117-144
eastern religions.110 In addition, Leezenberg’s discussion of Foucault’s
engagement with Islam via the Iranian revolution suggests the possibility of a
further expansion of religious dialogue with his work. However, the limits of
Foucault’s appreciation of the religious dimension of that event, and the
apparent limits of his analytic of power as a critical tool to understand it,
suggests a difficult though potentially rewarding dialogue.
110 Bernauer, “Michel Foucault’s Philosophy of Religion”, 93-94.
144
Theological Appropriations of Foucault
Foucault And Postmodern Theology
A Third Trajectory: James Bernauer And Jeremy Carrette
Christian Parrhesia
A Catholic Foucault
Jeremy Carrette
Convergence: A Foucauldian Spirituality
Contraindications
Theologies “After” Foucault
Conclusion: Future Lines Of Development