On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 8:36 PM, Chetan Vemuri <aryavartacnsrn@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> so how would one characterize Foucault's overall attitudes to organized
> religion?
> Would they be Nietzschean/Dawkinsian? Or supportive in a social sense?
In much of his best known work, Foucault developed Max Weber's
insights in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. What
interested him is how "the soul" has become "the prison of the body,"*
making the body obedient to factory discipline,** through such modern
secular institutions as criminal justice, psychiatry, and medicine.
At the same time, Foucault did not think that Marxism put up profound
resistance to the relations of power that create such discipline,
because of its philosophical shortcomings (such as productivism and
progressivism, though these have been questioned by a significant
minority of Marxist philosophers) as well as experiences of state
socialism. Rather, he went in search of a political
spirituality/social movement that potentially could do what Marxism
couldn't (hence his interest in Islam and the Iranian revolution),
while exploring approaches to life that differed from and could help
us question our modern one (hence his interest in Zen, ancient Greek
ethics, and so on).
In other words, it may be said that Foucault fought religion
(capitalist modernity shaped through the Reformation) by religion
(whose etymology means to to "tie again," suggestive of binding
ourselves to one another in friendship as a way of life).
* Through this inversion, Foucault was doing the same thing to
Christianity's understanding of itself as what Marx had done to
Hegelian philosophy's: turning it right side up.
** Tomás Sánchez-Criado observed in another thread that "many Latin
American colleagues [have been] complaining of the scarce utility most
of the writings by Foucault." That is probably because the kind of
existence/experience whose genealogy Foucault critically examined is
that of highly developed capitalist society under a highly developed
bureaucratic state, where a majority of working people are urbanized,
proletarianized, and socially atomized. For a long time, these
material conditions for discipline and governmentality did not exist
outside the "West" (even today a majority of the population in many
nations in the global South are farmers and agricultural workers).
Even in Third-World nations where the development of capitalism has
given rise to a largely urbanized and proletarianized population, a
majority of them are often stuck in the informal sector, unsubjected
to factory discipline and very much neglected by the state (see Mike
Davis, "Planet of Slums," New Left Review 26, March-April 2004: "If
God died in the cities of the industrial revolution, he has risen
again in the postindustrial cities of the developing world").
Yoshie
> so how would one characterize Foucault's overall attitudes to organized
> religion?
> Would they be Nietzschean/Dawkinsian? Or supportive in a social sense?
In much of his best known work, Foucault developed Max Weber's
insights in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. What
interested him is how "the soul" has become "the prison of the body,"*
making the body obedient to factory discipline,** through such modern
secular institutions as criminal justice, psychiatry, and medicine.
At the same time, Foucault did not think that Marxism put up profound
resistance to the relations of power that create such discipline,
because of its philosophical shortcomings (such as productivism and
progressivism, though these have been questioned by a significant
minority of Marxist philosophers) as well as experiences of state
socialism. Rather, he went in search of a political
spirituality/social movement that potentially could do what Marxism
couldn't (hence his interest in Islam and the Iranian revolution),
while exploring approaches to life that differed from and could help
us question our modern one (hence his interest in Zen, ancient Greek
ethics, and so on).
In other words, it may be said that Foucault fought religion
(capitalist modernity shaped through the Reformation) by religion
(whose etymology means to to "tie again," suggestive of binding
ourselves to one another in friendship as a way of life).
* Through this inversion, Foucault was doing the same thing to
Christianity's understanding of itself as what Marx had done to
Hegelian philosophy's: turning it right side up.
** Tomás Sánchez-Criado observed in another thread that "many Latin
American colleagues [have been] complaining of the scarce utility most
of the writings by Foucault." That is probably because the kind of
existence/experience whose genealogy Foucault critically examined is
that of highly developed capitalist society under a highly developed
bureaucratic state, where a majority of working people are urbanized,
proletarianized, and socially atomized. For a long time, these
material conditions for discipline and governmentality did not exist
outside the "West" (even today a majority of the population in many
nations in the global South are farmers and agricultural workers).
Even in Third-World nations where the development of capitalism has
given rise to a largely urbanized and proletarianized population, a
majority of them are often stuck in the informal sector, unsubjected
to factory discipline and very much neglected by the state (see Mike
Davis, "Planet of Slums," New Left Review 26, March-April 2004: "If
God died in the cities of the industrial revolution, he has risen
again in the postindustrial cities of the developing world").
Yoshie