The tekhne of Married Life in Michel Foucault’s Reading of St. John Chrysostom

In 1984 Michel Foucault published the long awaited sequel to his Histoire de la sexualite. The Use of Pleasures, as volume two was titled, ends with a final chapter called True Love, which offers a reading of Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus. In many ways, this chapter is crucial to understanding Foucault's whole project in the History of Sexuality. For one thing, it takes up and responds to Lacan's reading of the Symposium in his well-known 1961 seminar on transference and thus is central to understanding the relation between the Histoire and psychoanalysis. For Lacan, the essence of the Symposium is its exploration of the transferential relationship and the logic of substitution that relation implies between Socrates, Alcibiades, and Agathon. (1) In his reading, Alcibiades and Agathon, while not identical, are substitutable as objects of desire, insofar as each of them is beautiful. At the same time, Socrates is the object of Alcibiades' desire precisely because Alcibiades desires to be his object. Subject and object, desire and its tokens, all become part of an economy of substitution in which Agathon (literally Mr. Good) and Alcibiades (the beautiful boy par excellence) become place holders in a dance that leads from the empirical to the sublime through a logic of transference and counter-transference as all three characters play musical couches at the conclusion of Plato's great dialogue. Foucault's reading, in the end, does not so much contest Lacan's interpretation as historicize it, asking how is it that Love or Desire (Eros) came to be seen as a problem of rather than a simple question of regime or of the use of pleasures. As we shall see later, in so doing, he offers a powerful recontextualization of psychoanalysis's framing of desire in relation to the truth of the subject. But Lacan's seminar on transference was the second in a sequence devoted to texts from antiquity. The first was 1960's The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, which featured an extended reading of the Antigone (1986). And while Foucault offers an important response to the problem of desire and its relation to truth, as first posited by Plato and reinterpreted by Freud and Lacan, he does not do the same for Antigone. This, as we shall see, constitutes an important lacuna: for the Antigone does not so much pose the Symposium's question of desire's relation to and to an economy of substitutions, according to Lacan, as posit the possibility of an enjoyment, of a drive, that goes beyond any such economy, beyond all calculation, and hence beyond the pleasure principle. This is a possibility the History of Sexuality does not directly consider. When at the end of Volume One Foucault asks us to imagine a world not founded on sexuality, but on bodies and pleasures (1976), he is positing a utopia that Alcibiades might well have understood but one that has no room for Antigone and her choice of death. Moreover Antigone is not a unique case in this regard, as we shall demonstrate later when we read what is many ways a sister text: the visionary writings of the medieval anchorite, Julian of Norwich. To fully understand the stakes of Foucault's final chapter of Volume Two of the History of Sexuality, however, we must also come to see how his reading offers a counterdiscourse to another famous psychoanalytic interpretation of the Symposium, one that is contemporary with his own and one that takes direct aim at what it terms his homosexual discourse, Julia Kristeva's Tales of Love. Kristeva's text not only opens with a reading of the same Platonic dialogues as Foucault but it also makes pointed allusions to Foucault's person, using phrases such as our archeologists of love and defining all homosexuality as characterized by sado-masochistic domination. Nor is this a single reference. The association of homosexuality, sado-masochism, and Foucault is repeated in more menacing and less flattering terms in Kristeva's thinly veiled portrait of the philosopher in her roman a clef, Les samourais. …

The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference Roderick A. Ferguson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.A central demand of the student movements in the United States throughout the 1960s and 1970s was an opening of the academy through the creation of new courses, departments and schools, increased enfranchisement through the enrollment and hiring of non-white students and faculty members, and a challenge to conventional pedagogies of minority difference. However, as this sophisticated and thoughtprovoking study illustrates, the rise of interdisciplines through new departments and fields on race, gender, sexuality and ethnicity represented not only a challenge to hegemonic depictions of minority difference by state, academy and capital but also an opportunity for minority culture and the politics of difference to be appropriated by these same networks of power.Contrary to conventional poststructuralist and postmarxist theories which have neglected these social movements and the rise of interdisciplines, Ferguson stresses the need for new theoretical perspectives which seriously consider the impact and effect of new fields such as race studies, ethnicity studies and queer studies on the academy. Building on Foucault's reading of the strategic nature of power relations {The History of Sexuality, 1990) and Stuart Hall's critique of institutionalisation (Cultural Studies and Theoretical Legacies, 1993), the author develops a rich theoretical framework centered on minority difference being identified by institutions of power as something that could be absorbed into their own aims and objectives. Ferguson highlights the inherent contradictions of the student movements in simultaneously working to innovate and add new meaning to critical discourses on minority difference whilst at the same time attempting to formalize and institutionalize this difference in a way that made it presentable within the university system.The opening chapters chart the rise of the interdisciplines and the proliferation of minority difference in the post-war period, situating these transformations within the broader context of a fragmenting national culture which had historically presented itself as homogenous and the changing role of the American academy, which became more heavily invested in difference as part of sweeping changes within the US university system. Ferguson skilfully links localised case studies of the contestation and reproduction of minority difference such as the Lumumba-Zapata movement at the University of California in the late 1960s and early 1970s to the broader co-option of revolutionary movements by imperial and constitutional projects to bolster the global US political economy. He complicates the credit attributed to black studies in leading the charge to the institutionalisation of racial studies by examining its role in helping to midwife interest in minority difference (110), although at points the attempt to map multiple discourses of minority difference within the academy and the community becomes tangled. …

The Pastoral Ministry, Ancient and Modern Sergio Benvenuto (bio) Reflections on Michel Foucault'sLes aveux de la chair [Paris, Gallimard, 2018] It wasn't until 34 years after Foucault's death in 1984 that what would have been the last (fourth) volume of his History of Sexuality was definitively reconstructed. In Confessions of the Flesh (2018), Frédéric Gros pulls from Foucault's original and edited manuscripts to give us this long awaited volume. Here we have the place where Foucault weighs in on pre-medieval Christian conceptions of sexuality. It should be recalled that, unlike so many historians today, Foucault in his History only marginally dealt with sexual customs in the Western world. He was not seeking to reconstruct how the general population behaved in bed, who they married, etc.; he was occupied with a theoretical elaboration—by philosophers, moralists, theologians—regarding sexuality. Rather than History of Sexuality, it might have more appropriately been called History of Discourses on Sexuality. Basically, Foucault is aristocratic: what counts is what "philosophers" in a broad sense have elaborated on in the relation between the subject and sexual drives. Foucault's decision seems like the historiographical equivalent of the Jesuits' missionary strategy: the Jesuits did not waste time converting the general population, but rather their prince. Foucault takes for granted then that even sexual practices throughout various epochs sooner or later conform to the meditative art on the argument. Foucault makes it clear that the austerity of the "Christian pastoral of daily life" is not a Christian invention, but essentially continues the philosophical morals of pagan authors, in particular those of the stoics like Plutarch, Musonius, Seneca, and Epictetus. I would add, however, that the difference is [End Page 39] that while pagan ascetic ethics were indeed reserved for a very cultured class, for somehow superior beings, Christian ethics were intended to be a directive for all Christians, and thus prospectively for all human beings. Ancient Christian ethics popularized, I would say even democratized, an ascesis that in paganism was not intended to educate the masses. Foucault's thesis is that Christianity's difference with respect to other ethics intended to control one's own and others' sensuality, is that it is carried out by means of a confession (and this even before the practice of confession was institutionalized as a sacrament). By confessing, an individual truth is manifested. "Confess your faults in order to destroy your faults," St. John Chrysostom said. The explicit enunciation to the other of one's own sin, and thus of one's own guilty desire, is a fundamental operant in Christianity. For example, according to St. Ambrose, God punishes Cain not so much for the fratricide he committed, but for his impudence—for having lied to God, for having not admitted his crime before Him. And the confession (aveu) is not simply the communication to the other of something the subject already knows about himself, but rather the inner discovery of one's own guilt. It is our discovery of ourselves as sinners, and our acknowledgement of this before an other, or Other (God). "Thus the sin, at the very moment that it infringes on God's truth or His law," Foucault writes, "incurs an obligation of truth […] At the heart of the economy of guilt, Christianity has placed the duty to tell the truth." "In Christianity, this 'telling the truth' about our blame occupies a far more important place—and in any place plays a far more complex role—than in the majority of other religions […] that require the confession of sins" (para 8710). The sinner is condemned not for his sin, but for not having admitted and confessed it. "The duty of truth, like belief and confession, is at the center of Christianity" (para 8731).1 Foucault may not mention it explicitly in this text, but it is evident what he is thinking: that the ethics of psychoanalysis today—to succeed in sharing one's own unconscious, admitting one's unspeakable phantasies (what Lacan will call "full speech")—derives in some way precisely from this Christian specificity that links faith to a practice of speaking the truth. Psychoanalysis may have Jewish roots in...

Confessions of the Flesh:Between Pleasure and Sexuality1 Paul Allen Miller (bio) "Thoughts flutter around in the mind like a feather moved by the wind, but certain ones are stained, and heavier than the others and tend to weigh the soul down." —Michel Foucault (2021, 103) In a way that is paradoxical only at first sight, epithumia, desire, concupiscence, is what constitutes the "raw material" which the arts of monastic and married life have to process. With this difference: in the one case, one must act with oneself alone and in the form of a spiritual combat with one's own "thought" (in the broad sense of the word), in order to give it no possible outlet…and, in the other case, there does exist a legitimate, although "joint," outlet but it has to be seen that this legitimacy stems from the fact that each one thereby enables the other to escape the temptations of their own concupiscence. This is to say that theme is still and always that of the relationship with oneself. —Michel Foucault (2021, 219) Foucault's History of Sexuality is now complete. The long-awaited, post-humous fourth volume, Confessions of the Flesh, first published in French in 2018, has appeared in Robert Hurley's elegant translation. The project has a tortured history. It began life in 1975, with a polemical first volume given the somewhat misleading English title The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (Foucault 1978). The French volume, however, makes the project's scope and ambition clear. Its title page has in a large, centered font La volonté de savoir (The Will to Know), beneath a smaller Histoire de la sexualité 1 (Foucault 1976). Where the English emphasizes that this will be a history of sexuality, the French points toward the will to knowledge as a form of the will to power, toward a Nietzschean genealogy of discourse. The first leads us to expect a chronicle of practices, perversions, and pleasures, the latter a reconstruction of learned discourses, forms of reflection, and structures of truth in relation [End Page 653] to the deployment of various modalities of power and governmentality, what Foucault famously names biopolitics (Foucault 1978, 139). As many a disappointed reader of the History of Sexuality has remarked, there is very little sex in it. The French title moreover is a retread. Foucault first used it as the title of his course at the Collège de France in 1971. The argument of that course is that our familiar correspondence theory of truth is only fully established in fifth-century BCE Greece. The emergence of truth as found in Plato and Aristotle, he contends, is a discursive event, a product of the application of a Nietzschean will to power exemplified in the social and political struggles of archaic Greece (Foucault 2011, 187-88). He advances this argument not by simply accepting Nietzsche's theses or by commenting upon his text, but by tracing the nature and definition of truth, veridiction, and verification from Homer through the social changes that produced the tyrannies of archaic Greece, to the emergence of philosophy, the beginnings of science, and a definition of observed, factual knowledge (connaissance) (Foucault 2011, 191-92). Where in the classical Aristotelian model, which becomes canonical, the "will to know" is curiosity, in the Nietzschean model what lies behind factual knowledge is struggle, the need to gain control of one's environment and circumstances (Foucault 2011, 190, 202-05). A similar dynamic is at work in the History of Sexuality, which does not seek to chart the history of our erotic practices, but poses a very different question: how did we come to speak of sexuality as a thing we have: a thing that possesses us, that founds our identity? Are you straight or gay? Hetero, homo, bi, or poly? L, G, B, T, or Q? Where did these categories come from? How did we get here? It was not always thus. Sexuality for Foucault was not a thing, and it certainly was not natural. Its truth was not an observed fact. Sexuality was a set of enunciations that provided definition and unity to a disparate group of behaviors, sensations, and biological...

Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism, by Bernadette J. Brooten. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Pp. xxii + 412 + 12 halftones. $34.95 (cloth), $9.00 (paper). In her groundbreaking work Love Between Women; Bernadette Brooten has made fundamental contribution to the fields of biblical studies and classics, as well as the history of sexuality, ancient Mediterranean women's history, and lesbian historiography. Brooten argues that the early Christian indictment of female homoeroticism was neither theological nor cultural innovation, but rather that and other early Christian writers who condemned female homoeroticism wrote in full continuity with their precursors and contemporaries. The book is simultaneously broadly focused history of ideology and interpretation, detailed exegesis of Rom 1:18-32 (with seventy-page commentary on the passage), and Christian theological intervention into contemporary social debates about sexuality and civil rights. Brooten has meticulously collected Greek, Roman, and Jewish sources for her history of male attitudes toward female homoeroticism in the ancient world, history that constitutes the first half of the book. Here, magical papyri, medical texts, astrological handbooks, novels, dream-books, polemics, and artistic representations are mined for evidence of the ancient world's knowledge about and attitudes toward tribades. In this rich elaboration of the sources, one encounters binding spells that seek to enslave one woman to another sexually; astrological explanations for sexual object choices among some women; recommendations for gynecological surgery to remove large clitoris since it is a symptom of turpitude causing women to strive to have their own flesh stimulated just like men; and interpretive guides for analyzing different sexual desires as they are expressed in dreams. In concert with other historians of sexuality, Brooten argues that sexuality was conceptualized in antiquity in binary, hierarchically arranged terms, and passive. These active and passive roles of sexual acts were scrupulously scripted and were tied to carefully structured notions of gender identity. Ancient commentators viewed violations of the hierarchical script as dishonorable transgressions of role and status and judged these violations harshly as challenges to the proper ordering of society. Paul's description of female homoeroticism as the exchange of natural passions for unnatural ones, Brooten argues, should be situated in this broader cultural framework of concern over gender transgressions and their potential threat to the social order. As Brooten puts it directly, Paul condemns sexual between women as `unnatural' because he shares the widely held cultural view that women are passive by nature and therefore should remain passive in sexual relations (p. 216). In part 2 of the book, Rom 1:18-32 emerges into high relief with careful and lengthy exegesis. Here, Brooten provides an extremely close, line-by-line textual analysis that is model for its genre, and she situates the passage in relation to range of biblical intertexts. This analysis is followed by readings of other early Christian texts (the Apocalypse of Peter, the Acts of Thomas, the Apocalypse of Paul) and writers (Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus, John Chrysostom, Shenute of Atripe, Augustine) in whose works the condemnation of female homoeroticism appears. The book concludes with brief assessment of the contemporary theological, cultural, and political stakes involved when through Paul's Letter to the Romans and other early church writings, the principal concepts discussed in this book have come to serve as authoritative for Western cultures, as source for our ethics (p. 361). Brooten's exegesis of is painstaking, demanding, and persuasive. …

Patients' views of CAM as spiritual practice

For years i’ve been making solo backpacking trips into the wilderness of the Missouri Ozarks. Leaving on a Friday afternoon, I’ll invariably stuff a copy of one of the spiritual classics into my well-worn Kelty pack. I hike at times with John Ruysbroeck or Hildegard of Bingen, now and then with Rumi or Lao-tzu. Old mountains seem to invite the company of old teachers. Some of the oldest rock on the continent lies in the St. Francois Mountains of southeast Missouri. The creek beds are lined with Precambrian granite and pink rhyolite, rocks over a billion and a half years old. In terrain like this, the earth itself is an ancient teacher, illuminating in unexpected ways the text I bring with me. These trips into backcountry are my way of occasionally retreating like a hermit into an isolated place, receiving spiritual direction from an old master. Without this regular discipline every few months, my life would move off center. Experience in backcountry feeds me like nothing else in my life. I’m fascinated by how the chosen site, the embrace of solitude, and the spiritual guide I happen to take along often have a way of coming together for me. I discover the holy in the smell of pine needles, the dread of gathering storm clouds, and the ache of shoulder muscles at the end of the day. The purpose of this book is to show how wilderness backpacking can be a form of spiritual practice, what Bill Plotkin calls a “soulcraft” exercise. Exposure to the harsh realities and fierce beauties of a world not aimed at my comfort has a way of cutting through the self-absorption of my life. The uncontrolled mystery of nature puts the ego in check and invites the soul back (in more than one way) to the ground of its being. It elicits the soul’s deepest desire, enforces a rigorous discipline, and demands a life marked by activism and resistance. It reminds me, in short, that spiritual practice—far from being anything ethereal—is a highly tactile, embodied, and visceral affair.

In this paper I examine different forms of spiritual practice which seek to (re)enchant the everyday and the ordinary. By considering the duality of sacred and profane as the relational outcome of both embodied action and the action of other objects or things that are nominally valued as profane, an account is sought which acknowledges the corporeal enacting and sensing of the sacred both in and of the everyday. Taking empirical examples from New Age spiritual seekers, I trace the ways in which profane spatialities and temporalities are reconfigured into sacred topologies and how these seekers realise spiritual enlightenment through a reinhabited appropriation or articulation of the world. The source of signification of this spiritual comportment lies in embodied practices of the everyday that are sensed as the spiritually ‘correct’ or ‘true’ way of doing things. New ways of thinking everyday spiritual practice are thus sought and elaborated upon.

BackgroundFeelings of gratitude and awe facilitate perceptions and cognitions that go beyond the focus of illness and include positive aspects of one’s personal and interpersonal reality, even in the face of disease. We intended to measure feelings of gratitude, awe, and experiences of beauty in life among patients with multiple sclerosis and psychiatric disorders, particularly with respect to their engagement in specific spiritual/religious practices and their life satisfaction.MethodsWe conducted a cross-sectional survey with standardized questionnaires to measure engagement in various spiritual practices (SpREUK-P) and their relation to experiences of Gratitude, Awe and Beauty in Life and life satisfaction (BMLSS-10). In total, 461 individuals (41 ± 13 years; 68% women) with multiple sclerosis (46%) and depressive (22%) or other psychiatric disorders (32%) participated.ResultsAmong participants, 23% never, 43% rarely, 24% often, and 10% frequently experienced Gratitude. In contrast, 41% never, 37% rarely, 17% often, and 6% frequently experienced Awe. Beauty in Life was never experienced by 8% of the sample, and 28% rarely, 46% often, and 18% frequently experienced it. Gratitude (F = 9.2; p = .003) and Beauty in Life (F = 6.0; p = .015) were experienced significantly more often by women than men. However, the experience of Awe did not differ between women and men (F = 2.2; n.s.). In contrast to our hypothesis, Gratitude/Awe cannot explain any relevant variance in patients’ life satisfaction (R2 = .04). Regression analyses (R2 = .42) revealed that Gratitude/Awe can be predicted best by a person’s engagement in religious practices, followed by other forms of spiritual practices and life satisfaction. Female gender was a weak predictor and underlying disease showed no effect.ConclusionsGratitude/Awe could be regarded as a life orientation towards noticing and appreciating the positive in life - despite the symptoms of disease. Positive spirituality/religiosity seems to be a source of gratitude and appreciation in life, whereas patients with neither spiritual nor religious sentiments (R-S-) seem to have a lower awareness for these feelings.

Spiritual practices are one of the promising and underdeveloped areas of sociological analysis, which at the current stage of development of Russian society is becoming especially relevant as a topic of public discus-sions and scientific research. The article presents the results of the initiative survey conducted among young people living in Moscow. The main categories of spiritual practices are identified: those implying direct and timely impact on the human body, practices of spiritual development and self-education, practices of social interaction. Their demand among young people was determined. To improve their spiritual world, young peo-ple most often use the following methods: hobbies, contemplation of the beauty of the world, introspection and broadening of their horizons. The overwhelming majority of respondents connect spiritual development directly with doing something they love. It is noteworthy that for half of the respondents the most frequently used form of spiritual practice is helping people around them. Body-related practices are inferior to other spiritual activi-ties. The results of federal surveys and the experience of theoretical and methodological research of these cat-egories are presented.

How do the religious engage with one another in Gangjeong village, Jeju when faced with the perceived threat to peace and human security presented by the construction of a naval base in the village? How do their religious teachings and spiritual practices motivate them to actively participate in peace activism? Exploring women’s roles in peace activism at Gangjeong, this essay suggests the dialogue of peacemaking activism informed by feminist activism as a desirable model for interfaith dialogue in Korea. Feminist activism is understood as a way of constructing shared power relations in every part of human society. Considering Korea’s particular geopolitics (i.e. ideological division and excessive militarization of Asia Pacific), this essay argues that first, the Korean religious should pay attention to the role of patriarchal masculinity in militarism and interfaith dialogue; second that a Korean model of dialogue in peace activism should incorporate gender perspectives by seriously considering women’s day-to-day activities as forms of spiritual practice; and third, that those who participate in the dialogue of peace activism should seek out practical ways of creating shared power relations among all living beings and liberate themselves from the fear fed by militarism.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a self-proclaimed ‘Queer Black Troublemaker and Love Evangelist’. Her work, both written and performed, breaks the boundaries of traditional genres. It is poetry, academic research, narrative, ceremony, and archive. This article investigates two of her collections, M Archive: After The End of The World (2018) and Dub: Finding Ceremony (2020), to understand the role of speculative poetics as a form of spiritual practice. More specifically, I argue that Gumbs’ spiritual-speculative poetics, which she describes as ‘not not ancestrally co-written’, embodies practices and presences from diasporic Africana traditions in order to reconnect with the more-than-human and imagine futures beyond the (White) Anthropocene. Reading these texts, this article suggests that reconsidering the spirituality in Anthropocene literature may be a necessary complement to established approaches in eco-critical thought.

As a supervisor-educator for the Canadian Association of Spiritual Care, my primary task is to help developing spiritual care providers and psychospiritual therapists learn how to use psychotherapy within the field of spiritual care. The purpose of this essay is to share a psychospiritual model that I teach my students that helps them see how psychospiritual therapy is a form of spiritual practice that helps their clients experience healing from the sacred.

Through an in-depth reading of the New Confucian thinker Tang Junyi’s (1909–1978) philosophical engagement with the Treatise on Awakening Mahāyāna Faith in his On the Origins of Chinese Philosophy (Zhongguo zhexue yuanlun), this chapter provides a critical analysis of Tang’s interpretation of the “one mind, two gateways” model put forward in the Treatise. In doing so, I argue that Tang’s approach to this model testifies to his staunchly transcendentalist outlook: his insistence on the ontological as well as epistemological irreducibility of the mind vis-a-vis its various “horizons” (jingjie), and his related endeavor of channeling the soteriological potential of philosophy as a form of spiritual practice.

This article proposes to reconceive moral education on the model of spiritual practice. Such an education would be defined not by its content—that is, explicit instruction about moral rules or particular virtues—but rather by the form of its constituent activities. Drawing on the works of both Plato and Foucault, the article addresses questions about the epistemic complexity of virtue raised in Mark E. Jonas and Yoshiaka Nakzawa’s A Platonic Theory of Moral Education. It then goes on to suggest that the form of spiritual practice is uniquely suited to the cultivation of virtue understood on their Platonic model.