The ‘Religious Question’ in Foucault’s Genealogies of Experience

Abstract

Chapter 5 explores the neglected subtextual ‘religious question’ in the Foucauldian corpus, or the twin concepts of ‘spiritual corporality’ and ‘political spirituality’. Part I of the chapter considers how the concept of ‘experience’ develops in Foucault’s itinerary as both structuring conditions and transformative force. This will show how ‘spiritual corporality’ refuses the mind/body dualism, and offers a way to investigate religious praxis-ideals as both a technology of domination and a more positive technology of desubjectification. Part II of the chapter will map the concept of ‘political spirituality’ against the analytical reorientations that occurred during the late phase of Foucault’s intellectual life (post 1976). Marked by a so-called ‘ethical turn’, Foucault’s late work devotes greater attention to the challenge of activating different forms of subjectivity and fresh ways of becoming. I will show how this neglected aspect of Foucault’s oeuvre not only problematises the distinction between the religious and the secular, but also affirms a messianic ontology in politics.