Download Convulsing Bodies: Religion and Resistance in Foucault by Mark D. Jordan PDF

By Mark D. Jordan

By utilizing faith to get on the center options of Michel Foucault's considering, this ebook deals a robust replacement to the way in which that the philosopher's paintings is learn around the humanities. Foucault was once famously attracted to Christianity as either the rival to historical ethics and the father or mother of recent self-discipline and was once consistently alert to the hypocrisy and the violence in church buildings. but many readers have overlooked how imperative faith is to his inspiration, relatively with reference to human our bodies and the way they're formed. the purpose isn't really to show Foucault into a few kind of believer or to extract from him a set thesis approximately faith as such. relatively, it truly is to determine how Foucault engages non secular rhetoric web page after page—even whilst faith isn't really his major subject. whilst readers stick with his allusions, they could see why he unearths in faith not just an item of critique, yet a perennial provocation to contemplate how speech works on bodies—and how our bodies resist.

Arguing that Foucault conducts experiments in writing to frustrate educational expectancies approximately historical past and thought, Mark Jordan provides equivalent weight to the performative and theatrical elements of Foucault's writing or lecturing. How does Foucault degree chances of self-transformation? How are his books or lectures such as the rituals and liturgies that he dissects in them? Convulsing Bodies follows its personal online game of hide-and-seek with the brokers of totalizing platforms (not least within the academy) and offers us a Foucault who performs together with his audiences as he performs for them—or teaches them.

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Additional resources for Convulsing Bodies: Religion and Resistance in Foucault

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The new genre—the achieved form of his essay— HUNTER OF T HE SACRED  33 is the most obvious answer Foucault gives in it to the challenge of Â� lossowski’s writing. I will admire you, the choice of critical genre says, K but I will not imitate you without reserve. I will interpret your theater without surrendering to its devices. This is indeed a compositional answer to Klossowski. It is not, of course, Foucault’s last. ON BL AN C H O T : O U T SID E L AN G U AG E Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot: Foucault repeats the triplet whenever he describes the condition of our language after the (Nietzschean) death of God.

In this book and the rest, scholars delight to find historical errors. My reading steps around many details of Foucault’s historical€narrative and all the historians’ controversies. I am not concerned with whether he got each of the facts right. On many pages, his historical narrative means not to report facts so much as to represent the fantasies of certain forms of power—forms of power that alter facts or invent them. Strong power tells vivid stories. Writing the history of power requires an ear for fictions and a talent for re-creating them.

He is more interested in Klossowski’s writing than in any summary of the life. A year after publishing “Preface to Transgression,” Foucault made public a similar appreciation of Klossowski. “The Prose of Actaeon” so resembles “Preface to Transgression” that it can seem a simple continuation, the second panel of€a diptych (or, with the piece on Blanchot, a triptych). “The Prose of Â�Actaeon” is indeed a continuation, but it allows Foucault to configure the relations of language, divinity, and bodies otherwise than when reading Bataille—opening different possibilities for his own writing.

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