ISSN 1393-614X Minerva - An Internet Journal of
Philosophy Vol. 10 2006
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Heterodox Religion and Post-Atheism:
Bataille / Klossowski/ Foucault Jones
Irwin |
Abstract
This
essay seeks to delineate a heterodox religious hermeneutics developing from the
work of Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski through to the later work of
Michel Foucault (in his unpublished Confessions of the Flesh). Each of
these thinkers can be seen as heavily influenced by Nietzsche, while
nonetheless deriving nonatheistic conclusions from his proclamation of the
‘death of God’. The interconnections between the work of the earlier Bataille
and Klossowski and the later Foucault are traced through an analysis of
Foucault’s genealogy of his own intellectual development, where he pays
explicit homage to his precursors. In effect, these readings provide an
alternative reading of the genealogy of the postmodern as such. However, the
particular focus of the essay is on how, at a more micro-level of
interpretation, the analyses of each of these three thinkers provides a
reintroduction of late antique or medieval metaphysics, now redeployed in a
very different intellectual context. The heterodox readings of the religious on
the one side, and of Nietzsche and Sade on the other, provide a fascinating
possibility of rapprochement between postmodern philosophy and what Foucault
tentatively calls ‘spirituality’. However, this possibility is at odds with the
more recently vaunted option of the phenomenology of religion. These analyses
also remain simultaneously inimical to philosophical atheism.
The
death of God does not terminate in an atheism: it is the remains of Golgotha:
it is definitive, it continues Pierre
Klossowski
Although the epithet ‘post-modern’
is generally first applied to the group of French thinkers who began writing in
the late 1950s (Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida), it is clear that an earlier group
of French writers had a formative influence on this later movement. In
particular, the literary and philosophical works of Georges Bataille and Pierre
Klossowski appear to have anticipated many of the later so-called ‘post-modern’
themes. This is nowhere more evident than in the theme of the ‘religious’ or
the ‘sacred’ which has in recent times become one of the most important
subjects for Continentalist thought and writing, albeit almost exclusively
within the confines of neo-phenomenological approaches. This paper will seek to
address the importance of the meditation on the theme of the ‘religious’ by
both Bataille and Klossowski and its subsequent influence on the later
Foucault’s interest in the themes of religious confession and Christian
selfhood.
In the case of Bataille,
the theorising concerning religion in his philosophical texts (most notably Inner
Experience [Bataille 1998] and Theory of Religion [Bataille 1990])
is also reflected (or refracted) in the theme of the sacred running throughout
his novels and poems (most especially Madame Edwarda [Bataille 1996]). Bataille’s
concern with the religious goes back to his earliest years, his earliest known
text being a eulogy to a French Cathedral. Pierre Klossowski’s theoretical work
in the 1930s and 1940s was also crucial in the reappraisal of the relation
between philosophy and theology. His pivotal text on Nietzsche (Nietzsche
and the Vicious Circle) [Klossowski 1997] highlights an implicit
religiosity at the heart of one of history’s most apparently secular thinkers.
Although not published until 1969, this text collects earlier essays from the
1960s while also going back to work which Klossowski had been outlining since
1937. In particular here also one could cite his 1957 lecture ‘Nietzsche,
polytheism and parody’, which is explicitly praised by Deleuze as renewing the
interpretation of Nietzsche in
My paper will thus seek to
foreground the importance of both Bataille and Klossowski for an understanding
of the recent turn towards the ‘religious’ in post-modern philosophy and
literature. One of the least known and appraised aspects of this renewed
interest in the theme of religion is found in Foucault’s later work. For
Foucault, reflection on the historical genealogy of philosophical paradigms
points to the contingency of these paradigms and towards the creation of new
paradigms of thought, what he terms ‘technologies’ of thought. It also allows
us to see that what we often consider to be new or radical ‘modes’ of
philosophising are often merely the repetition in naivety of rather stultified
and traditional thoughts. I will specifically address Foucault’s analysis of
Christian thought in his later work, most especially those fragmentary texts
and lectures which make up the context for the proposed fourth volume of his History
of Sexuality, which he entitled ‘Confessions of the Flesh’. (Foucault 1999)
This Foucauldian interest in Christian philosophy did not arrive ex nihilo.
His works demonstrate a consistent interest in Christianity and in the
phenomenon of religion more generally from the early 1960s through the 1970s
and up until his most sustained treatment of these issues in his final works of
the early 1980s. However, one significant aspect of his later treatment of
Christian thought is that it represents a methodological and philosophical
break with his earlier work, moving from a more structuralist interpretation to
an approach focused on the technologies of self-formation. His work on the History
of Sexuality is paradigmatic here and it is instructive that he regarded
the unpublished fourth volume as the most important aspect of this work. As we
will see, this importance derives for Foucault from his analysis there of the
Christian development of the concept of ‘self’ and ‘subjectivity’.
The later French thinker who most explicitly owes and
pays his debts to the work of Bataille and Klossowski is Michel Foucault.
Significantly, for our purposes, this debt is specifically in relation to the
thematic of ‘religion’. Foucault’s later work, for example his unpublished
fourth volume of the History of Sexuality entitled Confessions of the
Flesh, (Foucault 1999) takes the phenomenon of the ‘religious’ as its
central concern. Here, Foucault’s meditation upon the religious seems to derive
from two alternative sources. One source is the ethnography of Claude
Lévi-Strauss and Georges Dumézil, while the other source is the avant-garde
writing of Bataille, Klossowski and Maurice Blanchot. As Foucault clarifies in
the interview, ‘Who are you, Professor Foucault?’ in 1967:
For a long time, there was a
sort of unresolved conflict in me between a passion for Blanchot and Bataille,
and on the other hand the interest I nurtured for more positive studies, like
those of Dumézil and Lévi-Strauss, for example… these two directions had as
their only common denominator the religious question….. (Foucault 1999, 98)
To simplify here we might say that, from the
ethnographic studies, Foucault inherited a more ‘functionalist’ approach to
religion (and this certainly clearly distinguishes his work on religion from,
for example, recent phenomenological appropriations of the religious). It is
clear that in his later work on what he refers to as ‘Christian confession’,
Foucault develops his earlier structuralist methodology into a focus on the
‘self’, a bottom-up rather than a top-down approach, but this analysis still
focuses on a functioning self rather than a phenomenological self. That is, for
Foucault, the self is more a construction than an ontological discovery. This
then would explain the influence of Lévi-Strauss and Dumézil. Foucault’s debt
to his avant-garde precursors, Bataille, Blanchot and Klossowski, is however
more enigmatic.
From Bataille, and Klossowski in particular, Foucault
inherits a fascination for the ancient world and ancient philosophy and
religion. Indeed it seems clear that the debt which the Continental
philosophical tradition in general owes to Bataille and Klossowski, with regard
to the reintroduction of the problematic of ancient and medieval thought, has
been vastly underestimated. Most especially, this debt is with reference to a
certain complicating of the position of late antique and medieval thought.
Klossowski’s foregrounding of Gnostic thinking and Bataille’s constant
interrogation of medieval mysticism problematise the simple exclusion of
medieval thought as the ‘handmaiden of theology’. It doesn’t seem far-fetched
to conclude that Foucault’s own sustained analysis of Stoicism and the
I want to develop this enquiry through looking at how
Foucault himself thematises this influence on his work in two essays, ‘A
Preface to Transgression’ (on Bataille) [Foucault 1998] and ‘The Prose of
Actaeon’ (on Klossowski). [ibid] Foucault begins his analysis of Bataille with
a reference to Bataille’s writing on medieval Christian mysticism in his text Eroticism:
“never did sexuality enjoy a more immediately natural understanding and never
did it know a greater ‘felicity of expression’ than in the Christian world of
fallen bodies and of sin” (ibid, 57). Bataille’s work on early Christian
mysticism, and in particular its conception of sexuality, is thus being
prioritised here by Foucault. This reference significantly anticipates
Foucault’s own analysis of early Christian mysticism and exactly its relation
to sexuality and the sexual self, twenty years later (‘A Preface to
Transgression’ was written in 1963, just after Bataille’s death). Another
reference later in the text to Kant is also instructive. According to Foucault,
Kant’s philosophy created an ‘opening’ in Western philosophy, to the extent
that he offered a critique of metaphysics and a critique of the limits of
reason. Nonetheless, this opening was subsequently closed (according to
Foucault) by Kant himself, insofar as “he [Kant] ultimately relegated all
critical investigations to an anthropological question”. (ibid, 63)
Whatever we might think of this interpretation of
Kant, it is clear that, from Foucault’s point of view, Bataille’s philosophy
represents a re-opening of what Kant sought to close. Bataille’s work
introduces what Foucault refers to as a principle of ‘contestation’, (ibid,
61/62) a philosophical principle par excellence which Bataille defines
in Inner Experience as “having the power to implicate (and to question)
everything without possible respite” (quoted ibid, 62). This principle of
contestation, so to speak, transgresses the late Kantian limit of
philosophy and thought. Bataille’s use of this principle of contestation also
seems to maintain, according to Foucault, some enigmatic relationship to
Christian mysticism (although, in this text, the relation is merely suggestive).
As with his analysis of Bataille, what is initially
striking for Foucault in Klossowski’s work is that he ‘revives a long lost
experience’ (Foucault 1999, 75). And, again as with Bataille, chronologically,
Klossowski’s thought returns us to a late antique world of metaphysics, that of
the Gnostics and the Manichees. While much recent work in this area has cast
new light on the original texts and contexts of this period, Klossowski’s work
can nonetheless be seen as seminal. Foucault highlights Klossowski’s crucial
theme of the ‘double’ (ibid, 75), the doubling of all the binary oppositions
which structure late antique thought: God and Satan, good and evil, finitude
and infinitude amongst others. “But what, asks Foucault, if on the contrary, the
Other were the Same? And the Temptation were not one episode of the great
antagonism, but the meagre insinuation of the Double? What if the duel took
place inside a mirror’s space?” (ibid, 75). For Foucault, the importance of
Klossowski’s work lies in its complication and subversion of metaphysical
dualism, most especially as this relates to the Gnostic or (sometimes)
Christian dualism between God and Satan and good and evil. But this subversion
is less an extrinsic attack on Christian thought and more a development of a
repressed logic within Christian philosophy itself. As Foucault observes:
“there is a vast range of Christian experience well familiar with this danger:
the temptation to experience the temptation in the mode of the indiscernible”
(ibid, 75). Written in 1964, this essay on Klossowski looks forward to some of
the main themes of ‘Confessions of the Flesh’.
Some commentators, most notably James Millar, have
sought to interpret the concern with the religious in Bataille and Klossowski
as deriving from a kind of neo-Christian mysticism. Other writers, such as
Jeremy Carrette, have presented this attempted assimilation as misguided, as
deriving from a mixture of “theological naivety .. [and] popular misconception”
(Carrette, in Foucault 1999, 18). Rather, what is taking place in Bataille and
Klossowski is rather according to Carrette a “multi-layered reading and
re-organisation of religious ideas which demands careful scrutiny” (ibid). In
the next two sections, I want to look at how we might develop this insight
through specific readings of Bataille and Klossowski. I will return to a more
detailed analysis of Foucault’s work on religion in the final sections of the
essay.
3 On Bataille’s Sacred
One of the most interesting interpretations of
Bataille’s work from our point of view is one expressed by Klossowski himself,
and this reading sheds light on the context of Klossowski’s own oeuvre.
Commenting on the lingering but unacknowledged influence of the Russian thinker
Leon Chestov on Bataille’s reading of Nietzsche, Klossowski comments: “the
death of God does not terminate in an atheism: it is the remains of Golgotha:
it is definitive, it continues” (quoted Surya 2002, 63). The Nietzschean
influence on Bataille and Klossowski, and its direct contribution to their
foregrounding of the religious and the sacred, cannot be underestimated, but
their readings of Nietzsche (singular as they are) share a certain heterodoxy.
As Michel Surya has commented, Bataille’s Nietzsche is perhaps “not very
accurate”, it is a Christian Nietzsche, a Pascalian Nietzsche (Surya 2002, 61),
although by the same token, in this relationship, Christianity is also
Nietzschified (ibid). It is in this sense we can perhaps say that, for both
Bataille and Klossowski, while there is a death of God, there is not, at least
not necessarily, an atheism.
Bataille’s text Theory of Religion (Bataille
1990) shows a strong Nietzschean influence and here Bataille is keen to
extricate the phenomenon of the religious from its mere Christianisation. In
particular, Bataille focuses on what he terms the ‘positing of a Supreme
Being’, (Bataille 1990, 33) which he interprets as an “impoverishment”. (ibid,
34) In his analysis of this phenomenon, Bataille would appear to be also implicitly
critiquing pre-Christian concepts of the Supreme Being, whether of the
Neo-Platonists or the Judaic tradition. “There is doubtless, in the positing of
a supreme being, a determination to define a value that is greater than any
other. But this desire to increase results in a diminution”. (ibid, 34)
Bataille regards such monotheism as a diminution of the force of the sacred.
“The sacred is that prodigious effervescence of life that, for the sake of
duration, the order of things holds in check… The sacred is exactly comparable
to the flame that destroys the wood by consuming it. It is that opposite of a
thing which an unlimited fire is; it spreads, it radiates heat and light, it
suddenly inflames and blinds in turn”. (ibid, 53) This anarchic religious or
sacred force is reduced, through more conventional religious orthodoxy, to the
orderly point of a Supreme Being. This of course, for Bataille, is not
exclusively a theological issue but also relates to the whole socio-political
and moral infrastructure which is attendant on monotheism. The sacred is
translated into a moral and political set of commandments (and here again we
can see the analogy with Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals). [Nietzsche
1967]
But in clearly rejecting a certain tendency within Christianity,
indeed one might say its very foundation as a theism and its positing of a
Supreme Being, Bataille is also paradoxically drawing close to another aspect
of Christianity itself. Early in his life, Bataille had become aware, he once
said, of his raison d’être: “my interest in this world was to write and develop
a paradoxical philosophy”. (Surya 2002, 16) His relation to Christianity is
paradoxical insofar as, while rejecting its diminution of the force of the
sacred, he also recognises a no less actual aspect of Christianity. Here it is
less a question of the Christian God and more an issue of Christian morals, or
rather anti-morals, encapsulated in the concept of felix culpa, or
“happy sin”. Sin for Bataille is a necessity of Christianity: “Perhaps
Christianity is even fundamentally the pressing demand for crime, the demand
for the horror that in a sense it needs in order to forgive”. [quoted in Surya,
460] Paradoxically, again, this is precisely what distances Bataille from
Nietzsche. Whereas Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals sees Christian
sin, most especially as evidenced in the concept of ‘evil’, as a symptom of
‘ressentiment’ and lack of health, Bataille rather sees it as endemic to the
very idea of the sacred and the religious. Significantly, in his early text
‘The Old Mole’ (Bataille 1985, 34), Bataille comments on what he sees as a
misguided ‘idealism’ in Nietzsche’s work. This is also what distinguishes
Bataille’s concern with ‘debauchery’ from Sade’s emphasis on ‘libertinage’
(although as we shall see Klossowski’s interpretation of Sade brings the latter
closer to ‘debauchery’). [cf. Surya 2002, 104ff] The anthropological work of
Marcel Mauss and Emile Durkheim on pre-Christian society is undoubtedly also an
influence on Bataille here.
There would be a lot more to say about Bataille in
this context — the religious is one of his central themes. However, before
addressing Klossowski, I will refer briefly to just two more points. In the
first case, Bataille’s concern with the religious is also fundamentally a
concern with the phenomenon of death. Bataille is certainly one of those
figures whom one could refer to as having had an ‘early death awareness’.
Indeed, he sees it as one of his major aims as a writer to re-introduce the
sense of death, which has been lost through the diminution of the sacred. In
his journal Acephalé in 1937, he states: “No one thinks any longer that
the reality of a communal life — which is to say, human existence — depends on
the sharing of nocturnal terrors and on the kind of ecstatic spasms spread by
death”. (Surya 2002, 243) The interweaving of the religious and of death is a
consistent theme throughout his work; it is perhaps most eloquently and
vociferously expressed in his early pornographic novel, The Story of the
Eye. (Bataille 2001) The very pornography of this work also develops an
obsessive sub-theme in Bataille — the relationship between sex and the sacred
and, by extension, the fatal affinity between sex and death.
Second, there is a significant issue in Bataille’s
work concerning the relation between the sacred and the political, most
especially as this relates to the question of Fascism. Parallels have been
drawn by some commentators between Bataille’s emphasis on the ‘sacred’ in the
late 1930s and the contemporaneous emphasis on certain forms of ‘enthusiasm’ in
Fascism. However, suffice to say, in this limited context, that Bataille was
very much aware of these parallels but was precisely developing his interest in
the ‘sacred’ for contrary reasons. His creation of and work for the group
Contre-Attaque bears this out (cf. Surya 2002, 218ff). In re-invoking the
religious and the sacred, Bataille is hoping to cultivate the very resources
employed by Fascism to combat the latter: “We intend in our turn to use for our
benefit the weapons created by Fascism, which has been able to use humanity’s
fundamental aspirations for affective exaltation and fanaticism”. Indeed,
Bataille was one of the first and only thinkers of the period to address the
problem of the ‘fascination’ which Fascism exerted; here one can mention his
seminal 1935 essay, “On the Psychological Structure of Fascism”. (Bataille
1985)
4 ‘Under the Mask of Atheism’: Klossowski on
the Religious
Pierre Klossowski maintained a close, life-long
friendship with Bataille and the themes of their work consistently intertwine.
This is nowhere more apparent than in the theme of the ‘religious’ which, as
with Bataille, occupies much of Klossowski’s writing. That said, there are
different emphases in each thinker’s work. There is for example a more explicit
concern with early Greek myth in Klossowski’s work, and its relation to the
sacred. Klossowski also shows an abiding concern with late antique Gnosticism.
However, the commonalities are striking; the disavowal of orthodox religion
after being young seminarians, the emphasis on heterodoxy and heresy, the
reflection on the problematic relation between the pagan and the Christian.
There is also a significant theme of the relation between the sacred and
eroticism or sexuality in both their work, and this becomes most vehemently
expressed in their respective literary work. These are themes which I can only
suggestively leave in suspension here.
My focus with regard to Klossowski’s work will be on
his 1947 essay “Under the Mask of Atheism”, which is included as part of his
text Sade, My Neighbour. (Klossowski 1991) In a highly idiosyncratic and
original reading of Sade, Klossowski argues that the Sadean system which
appears focused on the concepts of ‘Nature’ and ‘perpetual motion’ is, in fact,
a transposition of themes connected with the religious: “The terms Nature
and perpetual motion have served only to transfer the mystery and
incomprehensibility of God into metaphysical entities, without resolving or
exhausting that mystery of being which is the possibility of evil and of
nothingness”. (Klossowski 1991, 99) Far from being the ultimate modernist, Sade
is rather a pre-modern, invoking concepts and experiences which constitute a
re-awakening of the most ancient sources: “In the soul of this libertine great
lord of the century of Enlightenment, very old mental structures are
reawakened; it is impossible not to recognise the whole ancient system of the
Manichean gnosis, the visions of Basilides, Valentinus, and especially
Marcion”. (Klossowski 1991, 100)
Under the mask of being an atheist modernist, in fact
of being the atheist modernist, Sade is rather an opponent of modernism.
Klossowski compares Sade to Baudelaire, figures looking back from modernity to pre-modern
themes, and also looking forward to post-modernity, to the demise of modernity;
caught temporally in what Lyotard has referred to as the “future anterior”.
Sade has been so misinterpreted because he has been looked at exclusively
through a modernist lens. Judged by the values of rational morality and social
conscience representative of modernity, (ibid, 108) Sade’s work can only be
misread. As Klossowski said of Bataille, if Sade is proclaiming the death of
God, he is not for all that proclaiming a secular atheism.
Far from it. “Everything in Sade will thus predispose
him, in these last years of the century of Voltaire, to speak the language of a
latent Jansenism”. (ibid, 106) Developing a logic of religion we have already
seen expressed in Bataille, Klossowski foregrounds the concept of ‘sin’ as
central to his analysis. (ibid, 108ff) The key to understanding Sade, according
to Klossowski, is the medieval Christian conception of delectatio morosa
or ‘morose delectation’ (also ‘morbid pleasure’). (ibid, 112) In Klossowski’s
analysis, this concept serves an analogous function to Bataille’s use of the
concept of felix culpa. “Morose delectation consists in that
movement of the soul by which it bears itself voluntarily towards images of
forbidden carnal or spiritual acts in order to linger in contemplation of
them”. (ibid, 113) To this extent, although Sade appears to be transgressing
religious mores through his debauched characterisations, on Klossowski’s
interpretation, he is in fact manifesting his true faith.
In an important Appendix (ibid, 137ff) to Sade, My
Neighbour, Klossowski clarifies the genealogy of this faith in sin through
a discussion of Carpocrates, whom he describes as a ‘Gnostic sectarian’. (ibid,
138) The Carpocratian sect of the Gnostics gave an especial emphasis to Matthew
5:25-26; “agree with thine adversary”. (ibid, 138) On their interpretation,
this passage involved an acceptance of the adversary of sin: “crime is a
tribute paid to life, they say, a tribute demanded by the creator of this life.
It is necessary, then, that the soul delivers itself over to sin as soon as
temptation presents itself”. (ibid, 138) The Sadean crimes against humanity are
thus interpreted by Klossowski as intrinsically religious acts; they are
perpetuated not against the sacred but precisely in the name of the sacred
against the rational morality and social solidarity of modernity. Sade thus
becomes an unlikely advocate of religiosity and the sacred, albeit in an
unorthodox key and under the ‘mask of atheism’.
As with my analysis of Bataille, I have had to be very
selective in my focus on Klossowski’s concern with the religious. It is
arguable that the phenomenon of the ‘religious’ is Klossowski’s most obsessive
theme, running all through his novels and critical works, and his analysis and
emphasis is different in different contexts. I have chosen Sade, My Neighbor,
because it represents two of Klossowski’s most insistent suggestions: first,
that modernity is haunted and ultimately defeated and torn apart by the
pre-modern. And second, that the subtleties and subversions of the Gnostic
philosophical religion anticipate the reconfiguration of philosophy, after and
beyond modernity. This reconfiguration of philosophy was of course undertaken,
amongst others, by Michel Foucault, and I will turn now to an analysis of
Foucault’s later work on Christian technologies of the self.
5 ‘On the Hermeneutics of The
Self’
Two lectures given in the United States in 1980,
jointly entitled ‘On the beginning of the hermeneutics of the self,’ make up
some of the most important notes for Foucault’s projected fourth volume of the History
of Sexuality, which was to be entitled ‘Confessions of the Flesh’.
(Foucault 1999) Early in this text, Foucault clarifies his reasons for
addressing such an apparently obscure topic as the Christian self (although
some might argue that what he is really addressing here is the concept of the
Christian ‘soul’):
In order to justify the
attention I am giving to what is seemingly so specialised a subject, let me
take a step back for a moment. All that, after all, is for me only a means that
I will use to take on a much more general theme — that is, the genealogy of the
modern subject. [ibid, 159]
Foucault highlights what he sees as the context,
immediately preceding the Second World War, and immediately after it, which
generated such an exclusive concern with the philosophy of the subject.
Continental
Crucially, Foucault wants to mark his difference from
both of these perspectives and to assert his own distinctive philosophical
methodology:
I have tried to get out of
the philosophy of the subject through a genealogy of this subject, by studying
the constitution of the subject across history which has led us to the modern
concept of the self. (Foucault 1999, 160)
But, here in 1980, Foucault also wants to mark a
change in his own methodology in this regard. Whereas his most famous
historical and archealogical analyses have been concerned to show how subjects
became objects, and objects of domination and control (for example in the Birth
of the Clinic and Discipline and Punish), Foucault is now inverting
this analysis by looking at “those forms of understanding which the subject
creates about himself, those forms of self-understanding” (ibid, 161). One
might refer to these rather than processes of objectification as processes of subjectification
or subjectivisation. Foucault also refers to these as ‘technologies’
(ibid, 161) of the self, techniques of self-understanding. Moreover, this
analysis is not to be simply academic or theoretical, but what he refers to as
‘political’ (ibid, 161):
This
would be a theoretical analysis which has, at the same time, a political
dimension. By this word ‘political dimension’ I mean an analysis that relates
to what we are willing to accept in our world, to accept, to refuse, and to
change, both in ourselves and in our circumstances (ibid, 161).
This, if you like, is Foucault’s justification for
addressing such an apparently esoteric and conservative topic as late antique Christian
confession. It should also be pointed out that his understanding of such
‘confession’ is hardly orthodox. Nonetheless, according to Foucault, the
development of a late antique (or what he refers to as ‘early medieval’)
Christian understanding of the self introduces a profound change in the way the
‘self’ is viewed and this is have great significance for the development of the
concept of the ‘self’ in succeeding Western history. So as to clarify this
specific importance of the Christian idea of self, Foucault distinguishes its
import from what he interprets as the Hellenistic idea of self (and Foucault
also seems to consider this Hellenistic conception of self consistent in its
broad outlines with earlier Greek concepts of self). In the first case, this
difference relates to different philosophical aims. As we will see, for
Foucault, the primary aims of the Christian discipline or ‘government’ of self
refer to the obligation to ‘examine one’s conscience’ and to ‘make a confession
of self’, whether before God or before one’s community. (ibid, 163) In
contrast, the aim of Greek selfhood is rather directed at the eudaimonistic
life, to live a happy and balanced life. (ibid, 163) (it is clear that this
interpretation is more easily applicable to Aristotelian and Hellenistic
selfhood than Platonic) At the same time, Foucault recognises that one finds
already, before Christianity, the ‘elaboration of techniques for discovering
and formulating the truth about oneself’. (ibid, 164) Here, Foucault focuses
briefly on some examples from the texts of Seneca. The upshot of this analysis,
for Foucault, is that while a certain confession of the self and a certain
interrogation of the self takes place here, it is of a very specific kind. It
is not concerned with foregrounding any concept of what we might term the ‘true
self’, the self which might lie behind appearances. Rather, it is concerned
with helping the self to remember the “rules of conduct that he had learned”,
(ibid, 165) and here Foucault gives the example of the Stoic exercises, such as
the examination of all the evil things which could happen in life or the
enumeration each morning of the tasks to be accomplished during the day. (ibid,
166) It is here then that Foucault can delineate the crucial differences separating
the Stoic or Hellenistic idea of self and the Christian conception of self:
The [Hellenistic] self is not
something that has to be discovered or deciphered as a very obscure text. You
see that the task is not to put in the light what would be the most obscure
part of our selves. The self has, on the contrary, not to be discovered but to
be constituted, to be constituted through the force of truth….. In the
Christian technologies of the self, the problem is to discover what is hidden
inside the self; the self is like a text or like a book that we have to
decipher, and not something which has to be constructed by the superposition,
the superimposition, of the will and the truth. (ibid, 169)
Foucault develops his analysis of the Christian self
in a detailed discussion of the works of the Early Church Fathers, making
reference to Jerome, Tertullian and Cyprian amongst others, with a particular
focus on the work of John Cassian (again, it is worth pointing out here that
Foucault’s conception of the Christian ascesis involves a certain active
interpretation; it might be countered for example that Christians do not make a
‘confession of self’ the aim of their spiritual exercises but rather the
dedication of oneself to God). It is not until Foucault starts to discuss the
relation between the self and sexuality that Augustine rather appropriately and
inevitably appears. At this stage of the discussion, Foucault wants to
highlight two peculiar aspects of the Christian concept of self, as these are
manifested in ‘penitential rites’ and ‘monastic life’ respectively. (ibid, 171)
In the case of the ‘penitential rites’, Foucault notes how in the early years
of the Church, ‘penance’ is not an act but a “status”. (ibid, 171) That is, a
Christian who has committed one or several serious sins becomes subject to a
number of prohibitions (such as fasting obligations, rules about clothing etc)
but is nonetheless given a chance to reintegrate into the community by means of
such penance. What interests Foucault in this drama of penance is the procedure
or rite which is known as exomologesis, which takes place at the moment
of reconciliation of the penitent. Tertullian gives a lucid description of what
such a rite involves:
The penitent wears a hair
shirt and ashes. He is wretchedly dressed. He is taken by the hand and led into
the church. He prostrates himself before the widows and the priests. He hangs
on the skirts of their garments. He kisses their knees. (ibid, 171)
For Foucault this dramatic self-revelation of the penitent
manifests a crucial difference in its conception of self from the earlier
Hellenistic concepts. Here, exomologesis serves as what Foucault terms a
‘theatrical representation of the sinner willing his own death as sinner’.
(ibid, 171) Unlike the Stoic notion of an affirmed and self-sufficient self,
the Christian self is rather affirmed in its very renunciation, in the refusal
of the self, the breaking off from the self. Undoubtedly, Foucault is here
again taking certain liberties with the conventional interpretation which would
stress atonement and the need for pardon from God’s for one’s sins. However,
his own response would be that this conventionalism masks the true
philosophical radicality at work in this context. To this end, Foucault
synopsises this technology of self in the formula; ego non sum ego (‘I
am not what I am’). (ibid, 173) This hugely important rendering of the
Christian ascesis appears to be Foucault’s own interpretation of the repressed
inner logic of early Christianity. It of course looks forward to the later
Eckhartian notions of ‘detachment’ and ‘annihilation of self’, not to mention
the postmodernist deconstruction of selfhood.
The second innovation in the technologies of self
introduced by early Christianity is described by Foucault through recourse to
the practice of monastic communities. The highest aim of each monk is to
contemplate God. But significantly, in order to achieve true contemplation, the
monk must be concerned not simply with how his actions represent the good, but
also and more importantly with his thoughts and the images which come before
his mind, because it is through images and thoughts that one is turned away
from contemplation. Through a focus on the work of the late antique thinker
John Cassian, Foucault highlights how a whole, new discipline of thought is
introduced during this period. For the first time, according to Foucault,
thoughts are considered as objects of analysis in their own right. The monk
must seek out the genealogy of each thought, deciphering pure thoughts from
negative thoughts (like a moneychanger who must verify the authenticity of
their coinage). To further complicate matters, according to Cassian, one must
adopt an attitude of suspicion to each thought because there is always the
danger that thoughts can be ‘secretly altered, disguised in their substance’
(ibid, 177) by the Devil who is perceived as a presence within the self.
Foucault’s analysis of the Christian concept of self
thus highlights two significant innovations; first, the conception of authentic
selfhood as a renunciation of self (ego non sum ego) and second, the
conception of a discipline of thought which seeks to analyse thoughts as
thoughts rather than in terms of what they refer to. More enigmatically here,
the idea of a ‘devil’ within the mind (a kind of ‘otherness’ which lurks
within) also seems to point to some interesting enigmatic possibilities, which
I will leave in abeyance here. Undoubtedly, this Foucauldian reading is
complicated if one accepts the Neo-Platonic influence on these early Christian
texts which would appear to suggest that Foucault has occluded the realist
basis of the Christian disciplines in favour of a more self-oriented approach.
However, it is arguable that Foucault might also point to a rather underemphasised
transcendentalism in Platonism which is here reappearing in the early Christian
texts, and which seems to be at odds with the supposed doctrine of realism.
This, however, is too large an issue to address in any detail here. To
conclude, I want to take a brief look at what Foucault says about the relation
between this Christian hermeneutics of the self and the sexual self.
6 ‘Sexuality and Solitude’ and
‘The
In two lectures which were to form part of the ‘Confessions
of the Flesh’ text, ‘Sexuality and Solitude’ and ‘The Battle for Chastity’
(written in 1980 and 1982 respectively), (Foucault 1999) Foucault seeks to draw
connections between the Christian hermeneutics of the self and the Christian
concept of the sexual self. Initially, Foucault is interested in complicating
what he sees as a certain historical schema which is applied to the genealogy
of sexual mores. The most obvious example of this schema would seem to be
Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality (although this is not
explicitly mentioned by Foucault). This genealogy starts by positing the Greek
and Roman worlds as periods of free sexual expression, followed by the second
stage of prohibitive Christianity (a saying no to pleasure, no to sex) and then
a continuation and development of this repressive morality through the
sixteenth century bourgeoisie. One final stage which is often added here, notes
Foucault, is the late nineteenth century freeing up of taboo through Freud and
others.
Foucault’s concern here is to complicate this rather
simplistic schema by first pointing to the fact that many of the principles
which Christianity is supposed to have introduced — for example, the principle
of monogamy, the idea of sex as reproduction rather than pleasure and the
general suspicion of sexual pleasure per se, had in fact already been
introduced in pre-Christian society and philosophy. Foucault refers to the
Stoic way of life but one could no doubt look further back here to the Platonic
suspicion and extirpation of the body (most notably in the Phaedo). It
is also significant that, in at least one respect, Christianity rejects this
suspicion of sexuality. Augustine (alone amongst the Early Church Fathers) sees
sex and sexuality as an intrinsic and harmonious part of life before the Fall.
Unlike the other Church Fathers, and indeed many earlier Greek thinkers, who
see sex as intrinsically dangerous and disordered, Augustine rather sees this
sexual disorder as an effect of the Fall rather than of sexuality itself. In an
important passage of The City of God (book 14, chapter 3) Augustine
makes this clear:
Those who imagine that the
ills of the soul derive from the body are mistaken….the corruption of the body,
which weighs down the soul, is not the cause of the first sin, but its
punishment. And it was not the corruptible flesh that made the soul sinful; it
was the sinful soul that made the flesh corruptible. (Augustine 1972, 14:3)
Augustine thus looks forward to a resurrected and
immortal body which returns to its original (sexual) harmony. Complicating the
rather linear (Nietzschean) schema of sexual mores also allows us, according to
Foucault, to recognise what actually is introduced by Christianity in terms of
the sexual self. Whereas the Christian sexual code was merely “a piece of pagan
ethics inserted into Christianity”, the real innovation takes place with regard
to the experience, the phenomenology of oneself as a sexual being. Here we can
see John Cassian’s discipline of thought directed specifically at sexuality.
The primary question of the Christian sexual self becomes not ‘how should I act
sexually?’ but ‘how should I think sexually’? The Christians, so to
speak, start to have sex in the head. Undoubtedly, the genealogy of this
rigorous psychology of sex derived from the context within which the monastic
community found itself. Given that monks had taken a vow of celibacy, at least
in principle they weren’t to be concerned with acting sexually. But this still
left the issue of how to experience one’s own sexuality, the question of
auto-eroticism.
Christianity here introduces, according to Foucault, a
‘new relation between sex and subjectivity’. (Foucault 1999, 186) Whereas the Stoic notion of apatheia was
concerned with the regulation of the self in terms of an external set of rules,
the Christian focus on the sexual self leads to a process of what Foucault
terms ‘interiorisation’. (ibid, 126) This is exemplified, for example, in
Augustine’s discussion of male sexuality. Whereas the emphasis in much of
earlier Greek thought, and also in Early Christian thinkers such as Clement of
7
Towards a Conclusion: Heterodox Religion and Post-Atheism
Philosophical and in particular phenomenological
approaches to religion have in recent times given witness to an increased
interest in and respect for the religious. The work of Jean-Luc Marion (
There are of course clear differences in the
approaches of each of these thinkers. Indeed, in each of these cases, there is
no one self-identical approach to the topic taken, even within their own work.
Perhaps more than the work of most philosophers, our three case studies
represent acutely self-differentiated, even self-contradictory, analyses and
results. Nonetheless, it is possible in summary to delineate significant
concerns in each or all of these thinkers which are worthy of further
reflection and analysis in future philosophical speculation. Here, I will
outline just two of the most pressing of these concerns:
1.
A concern with the problematic of late antique and
medieval thought, culture and religion: While much
has been made of the relationship between ancient thought and continental
thought, much less consideration has been given to the problematic of medieval
thought. This is no doubt due to the aforementioned lazy supposition that
somehow medieval philosophy is nothing more than the ‘handmaiden of theology’
i.e. that it is not worthy of serious, independent philosophical respect. If
nothing else, the analyses of Foucault, Klossowski and Bataille perform a
self-deconstruction of this prejudice. What their renewed interest in late
antique and medieval philosophy seems to attest to is not so much a defence of
the latter per se but rather an anticipation of the connections which have come
to exist between pre-modern and post-modern philosophical perspectives. This is
hardly surprising given that while modernity was explicitly constructed on the
basis of a disavowal of premodern assumptions, the advent of postmodernity
appears to signal some kind of failure of this overall project of modernity and
thus, by implication, suggests the need to re-evaluate the originally disavowed
assumptions or premises. Jean-Francois Lyotard’s phrase for postmodern
temporality, the ‘future anterior’, seems especially apt here. If Bataille,
Klossowski and Foucault can be said to be postmodern thinkers, they can be said
to be such insofar as they are ‘futural’ thinkers but also to the extent that
their thought is ‘anterior’ i.e. looking backwards.
Ades, Dawn et al. 2006. Undercover Surrealism:
Georges Bataille and Documents.
Augustine. 1961. Confessions, translated by
R.S. Pine-Coffin.
1972. City of
Badiou, Alain. 2003.
Bataille, Georges. 1988. Inner Experience,
translated with an introduction by Leslie Anne Boldt.
2004. Divine Filth, translated by Mark Spitzer.
1996. My Mother/Madame Edwarda/The Dead Man, translated
by Austryn Wainhouse.
2001. Story of the Eye, translated by Joachim
Neugroschal.
1990. Theory of Religion, translated by Robert Hurley.
1985. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings
1927-1939, edited by Allan Stoekl.
Baudelaire,
Charles. 1998. Complete Poems, translated by Walter Martin.
Cioran, EM. 1995. Tears and Saints, translated
by IZ Johnston.
Derrida,
Jacques. 1972. Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass.
1981.
Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson.
2002. Acts of Religion, edited and with an
introduction by Gil Anidjar.
Foucault, Michel. 1999. Religion and Culture, selected
and edited by Jeremy R. Carrette.
1998.
Aesthetics – Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984 Volume 2, edited by
James D. Faubion.
Girard, René. 2004. Oedipus Unbound: Selected
Writings on Rivalry and Desire. Stanford.
Hollier, Denis. 1997. Absent Without Leave: French
Literature Under the Threat of War, translated by Catherine Porter.
Irwin, Jones. 2003. ‘On Prohibition and Transgression:
Georges Bataille and the Possibility of Affirming Evil’ in This Thing of
Darkness: Perspectives on Evil, edited by
Margaret Sönser Breen and Richard Hamilton. London/Amsterdam. Rodopi.
2003.
‘Deconstructing God: Defending Derrida Against Radical Orthodoxy’ in Explorations
in Contemporary Continental Philosophy
of Religion.
2006.
‘Reinvoking Nietzsche’s “Religious Instinct” – How to Avoid a New “Theistic
Satisfaction”’, in Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical
Association, edited by James McGuirk. Maynooth, Irish Philosophical
Society.
Klossowski, Pierre. 1991. Sade, My Neighbour,
translated by Alphonso Lingis.
1997.
Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, translated by Daniel W. Smith.
1998. The
Baphomet, translated by Sophie Hawkins and Stephen Sartarelli.
1989. Roberte
Ce Soir / Revocation of Nantes, translated by Austryn Wainhouse.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1981. Otherwise Than Being or
Beyond Essence, translated by Alphonso Lingis.The Hague. Nijhoff.
Mishima, Yukio. 1996. ‘Georges Bataille and Divinus
Deus’ in Bataille, 1996.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. On the Genealogy of
Morals, translated by Walter Kaufmann and RJ Hollingdale.
1990. Beyond Good and Evil
translated by RJ Hollingdale.
Sartre, J.P. 1980. Existentialism and Humanism.
Sontag, Susan. 2001. ‘The Pornographic Imagination’ in
Bataille, 2001.
Surya, Michel. 2002. Georges Bataille: An
Intellectual Biography.
[1] I am very grateful for
the helpful comments of the initial reviewer of this piece who pointed in
particular to the rather inventive aspects of Foucault’s readings of the late antique
and early medieval thought systems. I have sought to integrate her concerns
over the Foucauldian interpretations into my essay where possible. While the
actual accuracy of Foucault’s readings of the original texts and contexts is a
moot point, his avowal of Bataille’s ‘principle of contestation’ indicates his
greater concern with what Derrida has referred to as ‘active interpretation’
rather than simply exposition. In any case, the concern of my essay is less an
accurate rendering of the orthodox past and more a focus on how the heterodoxy
of Bataille, Klossowski and Foucault points us towards a futural vision of the
religious.
Copyright
© 2006 Minerva
All
rights are reserved, but fair and good faith use with full attribution may be
made of this work for educational or scholarly purposes.
Jones Irwin is a Lecturer in Philosophy at St
Patrick's College,
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