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“Truth as Force”: Michel Foucault on Religion, State Power, and the Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2015

Nancy J. Holland
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When I was a child my family had a cabin in the southern Sierra Nevadas. A rocky, snow-fed creek ran at the edge of the property and often, when it wasn't warm enough yet to wade, my brother and I would guide board boats down the small cascade above our “beach,” trying to find a path through the rapids that wouldn't capsize our crafts. To do so, we had to learn the easiest paths through the white water, but also had to judge the hidden turbulence under the seemingly still waters in the various pools and eddies along the way. To me, this childhood practice provides a perfect metaphor for the genealogical work of Michel Foucault, work that enriches our understanding of the modern world by following, not the mainstream of historical landmarks, but rather the hidden textual currents that only reveal the full force of their power much further down the stream of time.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Law and Religion , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , 2002 , pp. 79 - 97
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University 2002

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References

1. For reasons noted below, these lectures have a complicated publication history. They were originally presented as the Tanner Lectures at Stanford University in October 1979 and the Howison Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, in October 1980, which Foucault also presented at Dartmouth College the following month. My primary references will be to Foucault, Michel, The Politics of Truth (Lotringer, Sylvère & Hochroth, Lysa eds., Semiotext(e) 1997)Google Scholar for the Howison Lectures, and to Foucault, Michel, Religion and Culture (Carrette, Jeremy R. ed., Routledge 1999)Google Scholar for the Tanner Lectures. Please note, however, that the Carrette volume includes the Dartmouth version of the Howison Lectures, which were also published in Foucault, Michel, About the Beginning of the Hermenautics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth, 21 Political Theory 198–228 (1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; that the Tanner Lectures were published in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values vol. 2 (McMurrin, Sterling M. ed., Cambridge U. Press 1981)Google Scholar; and that Foucault presented very similar lectures at the University of Vermont in 1982, which were then included in Technologies of the Self (Martin, Luther H., Gutman, Huck & Hutton, Patrick H. eds., U. Mass. Press 1988)Google Scholar.

This multitude of texts, which is apparently due to the fact that Foucault failed to made adequate provision for assigning the copyrights on his unpublished work, represents only one of many legal and moral complications related to his untimely death. Not the least of those complications, for those of us who attended the lectures at Stanford and Berkeley and were involved with other aspects of his visits to the Bay Area, is the question of exactly when and where he contracted the virus that killed him.

2. Religion and Culture, supra n. 1, at 138.

3. Id. at 159.

4. Glenn S. Holland, professor of religion at Allegheny College and a St. Paul scholar, informs me that “early Christian” is a relative term, depending on one's point of reference. To be more precise, Foucault's primary Christian sources date from the third through fifth centuries, mainly from North Africa and Asia Minor.

5. Politics of Truth, supra n. 1, at 173.

6. Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality vol. I: An Introduction (Hurley, Robert trans., Pantheon 1978)Google Scholar; vol. II: The Uses of Pleasure (Pantheon 1985)Google Scholar; vol. III: The Care of the Self (Vintage 1988)Google Scholar.

7. Politics of Truth, supra n. 1, at 176.

8. Id. at 180 n. 6 (citing Habermas, Jürgen, Knowledge and Human Interests (Shapiro, Jeremy trans., Beacon Press 1971)Google Scholar, especially the appendix)).

9. Id. at 181.

10. Id. at 182.

11. Id. at 183.

12. Id. at 185.

13. Id. at 190.

14. Id. at 195-196.

15. Id. at 209.

16. Id. at 211. It might help the reader to understand this ritual to remember the scene at the beginning of the film “Becket” in which Henry II is ritually flogged for his role in the Archbishop's martyrdom. In this case the ritual is highly politicized and, of course, also modernized, but it can be understood not only as a symbolic act of submission to the power of the Church (which seems not to be what is on Henry's mind in any case, at least as portrayed by Peter O'Toole) or as an act of punishment for betraying his best friend (which might have been closer to the movie's intent, since otherwise it would appear, strangely, to prefer Becket's politics to Henry's), but also as a display of the fact that, although king, Henry, too, was only flesh, a flesh sullied by sin.

17. Id. at 213-214.

18. Id. at 215.

19. Id. at 217.

20. Id. at 220.

21. Id. at 223.

22. Id. at 226.

23. Id. at 227.

24. Id. at 228.

25. Id. at 229.

26. Religion and Culture, supra n. 1, at 136.

27. Id. at 137. He also explains at some length that Plato explicitly rejects this model of political power in The Statesman. Id. at 139-141.

28. Id. at 137. Central to the Hebrew tradition, of course, is Yahweh's promise of a land, but it is historically honored more in the breach than in fact. More importantly, the relationship is in the first place to the divinity, and only derivatively to the land not, as for the Greeks, to the gods of the land. See Brueggemann, Walter, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Fortress Press 1997)Google Scholar.

29. Foucault, , Religion and Culture at 137Google Scholar.

30. Id. at 138.

31. Id.

32. Id. at 142.

33. Id. at 142. A detailed comparison of Foucault's argument here with the work of Soren Kierkegaard might provide a fruitful basis for rethinking the latter's relation to the history of Christianity.

34. Id. at 143.

35. Id. at 143-144.

36. Again, it might help the reader deal with the differences between the standard American English use of the word “police” and the meaning of the cognate terms in French and German (Foucault's primary sources) by reference to the military use of the term as a matter of keeping order, e.g., “Let's police up these parade grounds,” meaning “Pick up that trash.” Or, again, it might help to know that at least some listeners to these lectures had difficulty, due to Foucault's accent, distinguishing between the words “police” and “polis,” but discovered it made little difference to their understanding of his general point.

37. Id. at 145.

38. Id. at 145.

39. Id. at 146.

40. Id. at 147. On the contrast between politics under the United States constitution and the European political history to which Foucault refers, see § V below.

41. Id. at 147.

42. Id. at 149.

43. Id. at 151.

44. Foucault, Politics of Truth, supra n. 1, at 181.

45. Foucault, Religion and Culture, supra n. 1, at 152.

46. Id.

47. Id.

48. Foucault, Politics of Truth, supra n. 1, at 203-204.

49. Id. at 203.

50. Id. at 203-204.

51. Technologies of the Self, supra n. 1, at 40.

52. Id. at 49.

53. Id. at 146.

54. Id. at 147.

55. Id. at 148.

56. Id. at 152.

57. Id. at 161.

58. Id. at 161.

59. For more on the difference between current and earlier practices in this area, see Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Sheridan, Alan trans., Vintage 1979)Google Scholar.

60. Villa-Vicencio, Charles, The Reek of Cruelty and the Quest for Healing: Where Retributive and Restorative Justice Meet, 14 J L. & Relig. 165, 185 (1999-2000)Google Scholar.

61. Id. at 185

62. Shriver, Donald W. Jr., Truth Commissions and Judicial Trials: Complementary or Antagonistic Servants of Public Justice? 16 J. L. & Relig. 1, 4–5 (2001)Google Scholar.

63. Id. at 16-17.

64. Id. at 33.

65. The first case is reported in a Washington Post article that appeared in Hull, Anne, A Cruel and Unusual Defense: Killer's Madness Fuels Ethics Debate, Star Tribune Al, A20 (01 25, 2001)Google Scholar, and a federal appeals court decision in favor of medicating the accused was reported in an Associated Press story that appears in Associated Press, Suspect Can Be Forcibly Medicated to Stand Trial, Star Tribune A6 (07 28, 2001)Google Scholar. The second case is the subject of an editorial from the Washington Post, Spare The Mentally Ill From the Full Wrath of Criminal Law, Star Tribune A14 (02 21, 2002)Google Scholar.

66. Technologies of the Self, supra n. 1, at 156.

67. Id. at 162.

68. Brooks, Peter, Troubling Confessions 11 n. 6 (U. Chi. Press 2000)Google Scholar.

69. Id. at 21.

70. Id. at 68.

71. Id. at 74.

72. Id. at 17 n. 16 (quoting Weisberg, Robert, Criminal Law, Criminology, and the Small World of Legal Scholars, 63 U. Colo. L. Rev. 538–539 (1992)Google Scholar).

73. Sundby, Scott E., Everyman's Fourth Amendment: Privacy or Mutual Trust Between Government and Citizens?, 94 Colum. L. Rev. 1751, 1754 (1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74. Id. at 1757.

75. Id. at 1778.

76. Id. at 1764.

77. Id. at 1765.

78. Id. at 1769.

79. Id. at 1802.

80. Id. at 1812.