Abstract
Carrying out any kind of excavation—literal or metaphorical—requires a constant negotiation between two opposing processes. Every attempt to strip away another layer of matter, history, or discourse necessarily involves adding an additional layer or surface as the debris piles up around us. Moreover, it is important to recognize the impossibility of doing this cleanly and evenly—what one ends up with is a collection of uneven lumps and patches—and the attempt and failure to make definitive sense of these fragments and traces is perhaps part of the human condition or, at the very least, what keeps academics in business. To assume the role of archaeologist inevitably involves getting dirt under one’s fingernails. Not only are we ourselves bound up, implicated in this process of excavating, we also must and should recognize ourselves as such, acknowledging the ways in which our handling of the material that we are sifting through both adds and takes away from it.
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Notes
Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method, translated by Luca D’Isanto with Kevin Attell (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2009), 89.
See John D. Caputo and Linda Martín Alcoff (eds.), St. Paul among the Philosophers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), a collection bringing together these various positions.
David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: Vintage, 1984). See in particular the introduction, “I, Michel Foucault…,” xi–xxiii.
Pierre Klossowski, “Sur quelques thèmes fondamentaux de la ‘Gaya Scienza’ de Nietzsche (1958),” in Un si funeste désir (Paris: Gallimard, 1963).
See in particular Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1974), 279.
For perhaps the most comprehensive critique of Foucault’s notion of archaeology and the shift to a genealogical approach see Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Brighton: Harvester, 1982).
Jeremy Carrette, Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality (London: Routledge, 2000), 1.
Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile Books, 2008), 4.
See in particular Elizabeth A. Castelli, Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991).
Heather McKay, “She Said to Him, He Said to Her: Power Talk in the Bible or Foucault Listens at the Keyhole,” Biblical Theology Bulletin, 28.2 (1998), 45.
Sharon D. Welch, Communities of Resistance and Solidarity: A Feminist Theology of liberation (New York, NY: Orbis Books, 1985), 11.
Stephen Carr, “Foucault amongst the Theologians,” Sophia, 40.2 (December 2001), 43.
John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, After the Death of God (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2007), 68.
James Bernauer, “The Prisons of Man: An Introduction to Foucault’s Negative Theology,” International Philosophical Quarterly, 27.3 (September 1987), 376.
Arthur Bradley, “Thinking the Outside: Foucault, Derrida and Negative Theology,” Textual Practice, 16.1 (2002), 57.
Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: Galilée, 1974), 244.
A summary of the events of 1978–9 is presented before the first of Foucault’s reports reprinted in DE2, 663. A useful background is also provided by Michiel Leezenberg, “Power and Political Spirituality: Michel Foucault on the Islamic Revolution in Iran,” in Michel Foucault and Theology: The Politics of Religious Experience, edited by James Bernauer and Jeremy Carrette (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2004), 99–115.
Conversely, Žižek has more recently suggested that Foucault ‘s engagement with the Iranian Revolution was an “appropriate gesture” but performed for the wrong reasons. Foucault was right, according to Žižek, in recognizing the “emancipatory potential” of the events of 1978 but made a fundamental mistake in how he set about theorizing this potential. Like Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazis, Foucault’s conceptualization of the revolutionary event fails to distinguish between that which Žižek, following Badiou, terms “authentic” and the pseudo-event, which lacks a genuine possibility for universal change. Slavoj Žižek, In Defence of Lost Causes (London and New York, NY: Verso, 2008), 108–16.
Philip S. Gorski, “Historicizing the Secularization Debate: Church, State, and Society in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ca 1300 to 1700,” American Sociological Review, 65.1 (February 2000), 140.
Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003), 6.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1968), 146.
Philip Goodchild, The Theology of Money (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2007).
Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Pour un catastrophisme éclair: quand l’impossible devient certain (Paris: Seuil, 2004).
Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, translated by Dana Hollander (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 79.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated Walter Kaufmann (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978), 214.
Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 61.
Alain Badiou, “Who is Nietzsche?,” Pli, 11 (2001), 7.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, “Letter to Strindberg, 8th December 1888” in Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, edited by Christopher Middleton (Indianapolis, IN, and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1996), 330.
Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute (London and New York, NY: Verso, 2000), 2.
Claudie Lavaud, “Badiou: lecteur de Saint Paul” in Alain Badiou: Penser le multiple, edited by Charles Ramond (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002).
Etienne Balibar, “The History of Truth: Alain Badiou in French Philosophy” in Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, edited by Peter Hallward (London: Continuum, 2004), 38.
Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, translated by Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 104–8.
Benjamin D. Crowe, Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religion: Realism and Cultural Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 139.
Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History (1940). Available at http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm
Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 51.
John D. Caputo, “Introduction: Postcards from Paul” in St. Paul among the Philosophers, edited by John D. Caputo and Linda Martín Alcoff (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009), 14.
Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London and New York, NY: Verso, 2002), 88.
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© 2013 Sophie Fuggle
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Fuggle, S. (2013). Excavations. In: Foucault/Paul. Radical Theologies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137323408_2
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