Marx, Foucault, and the Secularization of Western Culture

Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, 2005

Historical Materialism, 2010

Th is article reconsiders Marx's thinking on religion in light of current preoccupations with the encroachment of religious practices and beliefs into political life. It argues that Marx formulates a critique of the anti-clerical and Enlightenment-critique of religion, in which he subsumes the secular repudiation of spiritual authority and religious transcendence into a broader analysis of the 'real abstractions' that dominate our social existence. Th e tools forged by Marx in his engagement with critiques of religious authority allow him to discern the 'religious' and 'transcendent' dimension of state and capital, and may contribute to a contemporary investigation into the links between capitalism as a religion of everyday life and what Mike Davis has called the current 'reenchantment of catastrophic modernity'.

The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences , 2022

Prompted by scholarship which has proposed that Western selfhood beginning in the nineteenth century was largely defined as a stable and static form of selfidentity, this chapter turns to the late writings and lectures of Michel Foucault and his account of "spirituality," or the ethical practices of conversion and transformation. While Foucault posits that spirituality was a hallmark of ancient ethical traditions, he proposes nonetheless that vestiges of a self-transformative ethics continue to be evident in two particular post-eighteenth-century doctrines of thoughtnamely, Marxism and psychoanalysis, which tacitly espoused a political and medical form of spirituality, respectively. This chapter considers the modern perseverance of the notion of spirituality in the context of radical political and medical doctrines.

Religions, 2019

In contemporary debates on the so-called "return of religion" in new forms and practices of spirituality, the spiritual practices are often seen as emerging on the ruins of a fragmented and outdated religious tradition. In this article an attempt is made to conceptualize spirituality beyond the religion-secularization divide. An alternative perspective on spirituality is developed through a reading of Michel Foucault's writings and lectures on spiritual practices in antique philosophy and in Christianity. In this perspective the modalities of individual spiritual practices are largely dependent on interactions with dominant power-knowledge regimes and problematizations of individual lives. This article argues that this perspective on the spiritual practices in the West has the potential of making a valuable contribution to interpretations of present-day spirituality and lived religiosity.

Marx, Marxism and the Spiritual. Routledge. , 2020

This paper departs from the hegemonic notion of truth-the cognitive notion of truth-and arrives at four other notions of truth in Marx, Gandhi, Heidegger, and Foucault. It puts the four to a possible dialogue. It argues that one can get a glimpse of the cusp of Marxism and spirituality in the dialogue among the four. The work at the cusp, in turn, renders Marxism asketic and the spiritual phronetic. Thinking at the cusp also inaugurates the possibility of an anti-Oedipal future for Marxism and a this-worldly present for spirituality.

Foucault Studies, 2013

Using Foucault’s conceptual frame from The Archaeology of Knowledge to read Foucault’s late deployment of “spirituality,” this article argues that Foucault’s enigmatic gesture in using this concept reveals a refusal of “rupture” from the Christian pre-modern discourse of “spirit.” Despite attempts to alter the “field of use,” Foucault’s genealogical commitment ensures a Christian continuity in modern discourses of transformation. In a detailed examination of the 1982 Collège de France lectures, the article returns Foucault’s use of “spirituality” to the Alexandrian joining of philosophy and theology and the specificity of Christian practice and belief.

Like any other social category, the meaning and conceptual boundary of “religion” is ambiguous and contentious. Historically speaking, its semantics have been transformed in highly complex ways. What is meant by “religion” reflects the specific norms and imperatives of the classifier. This article critically reflects upon the idea of “religion” employed by Karl Marx in the early 1840s. Marx reimagined the encompassing notion of “religion,” which was predominant in his time, by privatizing it in his attempt to critique the theological foundation of the Prussian state. In this process, young Marx’s discourse siphons what is claimed to be “religious” out of the categories of “philosophy,” “science,” and “politics.” In this way, Marx constructs the realm of nonreligion where he associates his own discourse with natural reason, against the reified notion of “religion” as fantastic illusions.

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition, which needs illusions. 1