Foucault, Magritte and negative theology beyond representation

Abstract

Recent theological writings on the French philosopher Michel Foucault often mention Foucault in relation to negative theology. This article discusses the negative motion in Foucauldian thinking through Foucault's essay on the Belgian painter René Magritte. On the basis of this discussion, the article sketches a renewed account of negative theology. It is a post-representational account of negative theology in accordance with Foucault's critique of representation, as presented in his Magritte essay.

Notes

1. James Bernauer and Jeremy Carrette, “Introduction: The Enduring Problem: Foucault, Theology and Culture,” in Michel Foucault and Theology: The Politics of Religious Experience (ed. James Bernauer and Jeremy Carrette; Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 8.

2. Bernauer and Carrette, “Introduction,” 9.

3. Bernauer calls Foucault's work a “negative theology” rather than a “negative anthropology” because, he says, “its flight from modern man is an escape from yet another conceptualization of God.” (James Bernauer, “The Prisons of Man: Foucault's Negative Theology,” International Philosophical Quarterly 27 (December 1987): 365–80.

4. See e.g. the collections: Bernauer and Carrette, Michel Foucault and Theology, Jeremy Carrette, Religion and Culture: Michel Foucault (New York: Routledge, 1999), and Bernauer's excellent Michel Foucault's Force of Flight: Toward an Ethics for Thought (Atlantic Highlands, N. J.: Humanities, 1990).

5. According to David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: Vintage, 1994; repr., New York: Pantheon, 1993), 505, n. 105.

6. Michel Foucault, This is not a pipe (trans. James Harkness; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); repr., 1983).

7. Foucault, This is not a pipe, 26.

8. Foucault, This is not a pipe, 27.

9. Foucault, This is not a pipe, 25.

10. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (London: Continuum, 2006).

11. Foucault, This is not a pipe, 27 f. There is also a fourth voice speaking through the first and the second – a voice suggesting that if the image of the pipe is not a pipe, are the words then words or are they images of words, a painting of a sentence?

12. Foucault, This is not a pipe, 28.

13. Foucault, This is not a pipe, 15.

14. Foucault, This is not a pipe, 30f.

15. Harkness, the translator, underlines the French wordplay of “lieu commun” which works just as well in English, in Foucault, This is not a pipe, 61.

16. Andrew Louth, Denys the Areopagite (London: Continuum, 2001), 87.

17. Louth, Denys the Areopagite, 20.

18. Foucault, This is not a pipe, 32.

19. Foucault, This is not a pipe, 34.

20. Foucault, This is not a pipe, 34 f.

21. René Magritte, Exhibition of paintings by Reneì Magritte opening Thursday, December 1st from 4 to 7 p.m. at Sidney Janis, 6 West 57 thru December 31, 1977 (New York: Sidney Janis Gallery, 1977).

22. Foucault, This is not a pipe, 43.

23. Foucault, This is not a pipe, 38.

24. See e.g. on language-poetry and language-materialism in Sigrid Nurbo, Sprawl (Stockholm: Modernista, 2008).

25. Teresa Berger, Women's ways of worship: gender analysis and liturgical history (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical, 1998), 145.

26. Gordon Lathrop, The Pastor: A Spirituality (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2011), ix.

27. Berger describes (in 1998) a historical development beginning with, for instance, attempts at minor changes in existing liturgies toward a more inclusive language, of trying to open the ministry for women (Berger is Catholic) etc. However, there seems to be a point in time where the larger Christian women's movement came to realize that these changes in liturgical practice were “too few, too cosmetic, too haphazard, and too slow.” (Berger, Women's ways, 121).

28. Foucault, This is not a pipe, 43.