The Christian Art of Being Governed

“The Christian art of being governed” Colin Gordon Like all previously published volumes of his lectures, the content of The Government of the Living defies brief summary. It shows us Foucault in 1980 mapping out a major new phase in his work in terms that complicate our existing understanding of his unfinished project. My review looks in turn at the two parts of the course: an unusually lengthy discussion of method and heuristics, followed by a tightly focussed study of early Christian regimes of truth. I suggest that the complex opening theoretical reflections in these lectures go well beyond mapping the course of the immediately following historical analysis. They need to be seen in coordination with other conceptual innovations introduced over the following years, setting a task which Foucault calls here a 'history of the power of truth' on his agenda alongside, and in integral connection with the previously defined goals of a history of governmentality and the subject. A newly published discussion in Berkeley later in 1980 adds crucial context to these Paris lectures, spelling out the linkage of structures of subjectivation to governability and of penitential ascetics to pastoral power. Taken together, the later books and lectures can now be seen to establish a framework of what I suggest we can call 'alethic' or 'aletheological' analysis, analysing and mapping across the span of Western history the modes of engagement of life and truth, with a view to enabling a renewed analysis of the political present.

Foucault Studies, 2015

Foucault Studies, 2015

This review locates the 1980 lectures within the context of the wider discussions of Foucault and religion; highlighting the influence of George Dumézil on the comparative and structural analysis. Assessing the problem of the historical accuracy of Christian history in Foucault’s work and the nature of the archaeological approach, the review explores what would be fair to ask of Foucault’s 1980 lectures on Christianity. The review focuses on the internal consistency, selections and theoretical tensions. While acknowledging that Foucault picks up the important shift towards external ritual performance of early Christian life, the review questions Foucault’s lack of appreciation of the notion of “sacramentum,” which informs the central interpretative framework of “truth acts.” The review suggests that Foucault’s thinking is shaped by an “expressionist theology” and operates on a false binary distinction between faith and practice. It shows the problematic reading of Tertullian and the...

In this paper I situate Foucault’s governmentality analytics between his first lecture course (On the Will to Know, 1970-71) and his first course after his two “governmentality” lectures (On the Government of the Living, 1979-80). The lectures are interconnected by a shared interpretation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex as well as by different but related obsessions with the production of truth: the earlier, with truth as fact; the latter, with truth as self-relation. The former analyses discourses of truth, law, inquiry and sovereignty in ancient Greece. The latter focuses on early Christian individual manifestations of truth (baptism, penance, and spiritual direction) forming a genealogy of confession and, Foucault suggests, of western subjectivity itself. This paper uses the analytical categories of governmentality, usually used to analyse regimes of government, to perform a comparative reading of the lecture courses, charting the continuities and ruptures in their various studies of episteme, techne, identities, ethos and problematisations. This suggests that the earlier lectures outline the birth of the sovereign-juridical compact that modern governmentalities would emerge through and against, while the later lectures use the term “governmentality” less, but enable the analysis of the conduct of conduct to progress to the ethical scale of self-formation.

Economy and Society, 2023

Recent controversies surrounding Michel Foucault suggest tensions and unresolved issues in his unfinished work. Here we interrogate Foucault's legacy in relation to his claim that the welfare-state is a secularization of the Christian pastorate. We challenge Foucault's binary narrative of the Christian flock vs. the Graeco-Roman citizen and expand the focus to other "technologies of power" in Medieval Islam. Rather than an outburst of governmentality in modernity, we suggest a longue-durée history of which the Christian pastorate was merely one facet. This non-binary framework indicates that Foucault's claim of a "demonic" fusion of sovereign and pastoral power in modern politics requires significant revisitation. Finally, we claim that Foucault's much-discussed fascination with neoliberalism may have roots in this one-sided narrative regarding the birth of the welfare-state.

2012

While this 'extraordinary' book appears as an intermezzo within the Homo Sacer series , it supports two fundamental theses with its own philological, epigraphic, liturgical and religious-historical research, and a close reading of figures such as Ernst Kantorowicz and Marcel Mauss. These theses concern political power first as an articulation of sovereign reign and economic government and, secondly, as constituted by acclamations and glorification. These can be approached theoretically through its author's engagement with Michel Foucault's genealogy of governmentality and with the Erik Peterson/Carl Schmitt debate on the closure of political theology. Agamben's reformulation of power and his derivation of liberal governmentality from the theological oikonomia prove convincing. A renewed analytics of power and politics of resistance should be possible, however, without recourse to a project seeking to deactivate all profane powers including those of public bureaucracies.

Theory Culture & society

This article tackles Giorgio Agamben's critique of Michel Foucault's genealogy of governmentality in two ways: first, by presenting an alternative model of the relations between pastoral and theological economy and, second, by conducting a genealogy of the former as revealed in the state of exception, when canon law is suspended. Following the author's genealogy of oikonomia in the state of exception, he argues that politics and economy are distinct from one another by virtue of the fact that the primary relation of the latter is one of inclusion while that of the former is one of exclusion. Finally, the author traces three of oikonomia's prolific qualities in the operation of governmentality in civil society and of market economy: (i) its inclusiveness; (ii) the constant representation of the irreconcilability of law and authority; and (iii) its operation by accommodating to the ways of the governed. Link: http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/06/27/0263276414537315.full

Fórum Linguístico, 2019

The present article discusses Michel Foucault' s analyses of power, resistance and subjectivity developed in the second half of the 1970s. For this purpose, we will take into account the different forms in which his work is presented (lectures, essays, articles, books etc.) and a set of archival documents (unpublished manuscripts) from the Fonds Foucault, recently acquired by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. On the one hand, the article will explore the ethical and political attitude leading Foucault to develop new and complex analysis of power, mainly through his relation to the question of freedom and through his use of the concepts of "governmentality" and "critique". On the other hand, it will explore unpublished manuscripts on the question of the "spiritual direction" and the "government of souls" in the age of Reforms. These texts demonstrate Foucault's progressive interest, in the mid-1970s, in the political and moral history of Christianity. At the heart of complex genealogies that go back to Christian modern theology, he found a new way of thinking the relation to the self as a possibility of both conflict and freedom.

in Laura Cremonesi et al., "Foucault and the Making of Subjects" (London: Rowman & Littlefield), 2016

In this chapter, I explore the rich and complex articulation between two of the main projects that characterise Michel Foucault’s work in the 1970s and the 1980s: on the one side, the project of a history of truth and, on the other, the project of a genealogy of the modern (Western) subject. From this perspective, the year 1980 is to be considered a crucial turning point, since it is in his lectures at the Collège de France, On the Government of the Living, as well as in those at the University of California, Berkeley and Dartmouth College, About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self, that Foucault explicitly connects and articulates in an original way these two projects. After addressing the meaning and ethico-political value of Foucault’s history of truth, focusing above all on the shape it takes in 1980—namely, a genealogy of a series of ‘regimes of truth’ in Western societies—I offer an analysis of the related project of a genealogy of the modern (Western) subject and more precisely of Foucault’s account of the processes of subjection (assujettissement) and subjectivation (subjectivation) within the Christian and the modern Western regimes of truth. I eventually argue that the essential political and moral issue that Foucault raises is not whether the subject is autonomous or not, but rather whether he or she is willing to become a subject of critique by opposing the governmental mechanisms of power which try to govern him or her within our contemporary regime of truth and striving to invent new ways of living and being.