Confessions of the soul: Foucault and theological culture

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 31, Issue 6, 2005, Pages 557-572

  Bernauer, James ^a  

^a BOSTON COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

American apocalyptic; Christianity; Christianization in depth; communism; confession; eastern Orthodoxy; fascism; national socialism; Soviet hermeneutics of the self; theological dialogue

Indexed keywords

EID: 34247649452     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453705055489     Document Type: Article

References (78)

1. Religion and Culture by Michel Foucault, selected and ed. Jeremy Carrette (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).
2. James Bernauer and Jeremy Carrette (eds) Michel Foucault and Theology: The Politics of Religious Experience (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2003).
3. Course lecture of 19 February 1975. The lectures from this course have now been published as Les anormaux (Paris: Gallimard and Le Seuil, 1999), p. 164;
4. and Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975 (New York: Picador), p. 177.
5. ‘What Is Enlightenment?’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 40–3.
6. ‘The Battle for Chastity’, in Michel Foucault, The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), p. 196
7. and Religion and Culture, p. 197.
8. Foucault, Les anormaux, p. 182, note 18;
9. Abnormal, p. 196, note 18.
10. The English translation of Delumeau's work was published as Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire: a New View of the Counter-Reformation (London: Burns & Oates, 1977).
11. Course of 19 February 1975. Foucault, Les anormaux, pp. 164, 179, 175;
12. Abnormal, pp. 177, 193, 188–9.
13. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, An Introduction (New York: Pantheon, 1978), p. 61.
14. Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, I & C 6 (Autumn, 1979): 6. This is the translation of an important lecture from Foucault's 1978 course.
15. Michel Foucault, ‘Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of “Political Reason”’, in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values 2 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1981), pp. 228–31, 236–8. Lectures from the 19 and 26 March 1980 course at the Collège de France which I was able to attend.
16. These sections are abbreviated versions of the section ‘On Christian Experience’ in my volume Michel Foucault's Force of Flight: Toward an Ethics for Thought (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1990), pp. 161–5.
17. ‘Sexuality and Solitude’, in Essential Works of Foucault, p. 178
18. and Religion and Culture, p. 182.
19. ‘The Battle for Chastity’, p. 191
20. and Religion and Culture, p. 193.
21. ‘Sexuality and Solitude’, in Essential Works of Foucault, p. 178.
22. See ‘The Hermeneutic of the Subject’, in Essential Works of Foucault, pp. 95–106.
23. ‘The Battle for Chastity’, p. 195
24. and Religion and Culture, p. 196.
25. See ‘Omnes et Singulatim’, p. 239;
26. the Toronto course, ‘The Discourse of Self-Disclosure’, 15 June 1982;
27. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure (New York: Pantheon, 1985), pp. 63, 70.
28. Michael Hölzl, ‘Kritik und Gegenentwurf der Theologie. Michel Foucault in der Tradition kritischer Theorie’, in Gottes und des Menchen Tod? Die Theologie vor der Herausforderung Michel Foucaults (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald Verlag, 2003), p. 146.
29. L'aveau et le pardon: Les difficultés de la confession XIII–XVIII siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1990), p. 9.
30. See William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Penguin, 1982[1902]), pp. 462–3.
31. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, pp. 61, 59.
32. ‘Omnes et Singulatim’, rev. version in Michel Foucault, Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984: Power, ed. James Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000), p. 31.
33. Geoff Eley, ‘Scholarship Serving the Nazi State I’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 12(4) (1989): 576.
34. James Bernauer, ‘Sexuality in the Nazi War Against Jewish and Gay People’, Budhi II(3) (1998): 149–68.
35. Robert Pois, National Socialism and the Religion of Nature (London: Croom Helm, 1986), p. 91.
36. See Emilio Gentile's The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996);
37. Kenneth Burke, ‘The Rhetoric of Hitler's “Battle”’, in Terms for Order (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), pp. 95–119;
38. Uriel Tal, ‘On Structures of Political Theology and Myth in Germany Prior to the Holocaust’, in Y. Bauer (ed.) The Holocaust as Historical Experience (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981), pp. 43–74;
39. Friedrich Heer, Der Glaube des Adolf Hitler: Anatomie einer politischen Religiosität (Vienna: Amalthea, 1998);
40. and Philippe Burrin, ‘Political Religion: The Relevance of a Concept’, History and Memory 9(1–2) (Fall, 1997): 321–49.
41. See Gary Lease, ‘Odd Fellows’ in the Politics of Religion: Modernism, National Socialism, and German Judaism (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995).
42. See J. P. Stern, Hitler: The Führer and the People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), pp. 90–1.
43. The Language of the Third Reich (London: Athlone Press, 2000), p. 117.
44. See Heinz Schilling, Religion, Political Culture and the Emergence of Early Modern Society (New York: E. J. Brill, 1992);
45. Robert Bireley, ‘Early Modern Germany’, in John O'Malley, Catholicism in Early Modern History: A Guide to Research (Ann Arbor, MI: Edwards Brothers, 1988), pp. 11–30
46. and David Warren Sabean, ‘Production of Self during the Age of Confessionalism’, Central European History 29(1) (1996): 1–18.
47. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 225.
48. Michel Foucault, ‘Technologies of the Self’, in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusettts Press, 1988), pp. 42–3, 47–8.
49. Foucault, Dits et ecrits, vol. IV, pp. 807, 812.
50. ‘Technologies of the Self’, p. 48;
51. Dits et ecrits, vol. IV, pp. 812–13.
52. See Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 35–74.
53. Izvestiia, 2 September 1992.
54. Cited in Igal Halfin's Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 280–1.
55. Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial, pp. 56, 49–50, 91, 104, 29–30, 131–9, 168, 197–8, 208, 51, 33, 262.
56. Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices, pp. 121, 355, 114, 356, 114, 75–122.
57. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, new trans. George Lawrence (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), p. 295.
58. Susan Sontag, ‘Wir fliessen immer mehr ineinander: Der Konflikt zwischen Amerika und Europa’, Süddeutsche Zeitung 235 (13 October 2003): 11.
59. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973).
60. See Robert Jay Lifton, Super Power Syndrome: America's Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2003).
61. A. G. Mojtabai, Blessèd Assurance: At Home with the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1986).
62. Joyce Schuld, Foucault, Augustine and the Hermeneutics of Fragility (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2003).
63. Michel Foucault, ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress’, in The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. I, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), p. 256.
64. Michel Foucault, ‘About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self’, in Religion and Culture by Michel Foucault, p. 180.
65. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Harper, 1976), p. 17.
66. Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 117.
67. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure (New York: Pantheon, 1985), p. 8.
68. ‘Michel Foucault and Zen: a Stay in a Zen Temple’, in Religion and Culture by Michel Foucault, pp. 110–14.
69. See Brian Victoria, Zen at War (New York: Weatherhill, 1997).
70. Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self, vol. 3 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1986);
71. Michel Foucault, L'herméneutique du sujet: Cours au Collège de France, 1981–1982, ed. Frédéric Gros with François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 2001).
72. Michel Foucault, Les Anormaux: Cours au Collège de France 1974–1975 (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 1999), pp. 180, 188;
73. Abnormal, pp. 194, 202 (lectures of 19 and 26 February).
74. See Mark Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997)
75. and ‘Sodomites and Churchmen: The Theological Invention of Homosexuality’, in Michel Foucault and Theology: The Politics of Religious Experience, pp. 233–44.
76. Jeremy Carrette, Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality (New York: Routledge, 2000).
77. Henrique Pinto, Foucault, Christianity and Interfaith Dialogue (London: Routledge, 2003).
78. Michel Foucault, ‘Preface’, in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York: Viking Press, 1977), pp. xii–xiii.