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SOUL
Sociologyindex, Sociology Books 2011
As used by Michel Foucault (1926-84) refers to
what psychologists mean by the psyche, the self, subjectivity or human consciousness.
Foucault argues, for example, that the
development of the penitentiary in the early 19th century resulted in a shift from
punishing the body to punishing the soul.
Confessions of the soul - Foucault and theological
culture
James Bernauer, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA
The article studies Foucault’s treatment of religious culture and some theological
responses to his approach. Foucault examined some modern practices as exhibiting a
‘Christianization-in-depth’, as, for example, in the extension of confession as
a continuing practice in recent and current political culture. Confessions of faith
characterize both fascism and communism and the confessional form of the latter showed
extensive debt to the legacy of eastern Christian practices. The Soviet hermeneutics of
the self contrasted with the western form because the self-knowledge of the former is not
a western confession of desires and movements of the soul but, rather, coming to a clarity
in grasping how one is regarded in the eyes of others. The continuing vitality of
religious forms in contemporary experience shows itself in American apocalyptic creeds.
Foucault’s critical analysis aids a self-understanding in three areas of religious
activism: self-denial; the envisioning of sexuality; the aspirations toward community and
friendship. - psc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/31/5-6/557
Un Ecart Infime (Part III)
The blind spot in Foucault
Leonard Lawlor, University of Memphis, TN, USA
This article is the third part of a trilogy investigating the relation between
Merleau-Ponty and Foucault. All three essays are inspired by Foucault’s diagnosis of
our epoch in terms of biopower. They therefore aim at the creation of a new concept of
life. In ‘Un Ecart Infime (Part III)’, I lay out Foucault’s analysis, from
the first chapter of The Order of Things, of Velázquez’s painting, Las Meninas. By
stressing what Foucault says about the ‘sagittal lines’ exiting the painting,
one can show that that there are three major phases in Foucault’s analysis: locating
the blind spot; multiplying the invisibility; and the diffraction of the multiplicity into
singularities. More generally, we can see that Foucault’s analysis of the painting
concerns the informal space in auto-affection; in other words, it concerns the ‘blind
spot’ in the mirror relation, in the ‘psyché’. The blind spot in the
‘soul’ - and the ambiguity in the French word psyché between mirror and soul -
is why we can say that Foucault’s analysis concerns life: being blind, life must be
conceived as informal and unmappable. I show in the conclusion that the inability of
mapping and of seeing this space in fact allows for the increase of power. -
psc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/31/5-6/665
Mind-Forged Manacles and Habits of the Soul: Foucault's
Debt to Heidegger
Peter Lucas, Lancaster University
This article interprets the state of "subjection," which Foucault took to be
characteristicof the modern subject of power/knowledge, as an abiding psychic
dispositionanalogous to Heidegger's "inauthentic self-understanding." Theauthor
begins by arguing, against prevailing orthodoxy, that in Discipline andPunish, Foucault is
already centrally concerned with the power effects of formsof psychic self-relation. He
then argues that the psychic state of subjectionshould not be understood as a
constellation of ideas, beliefs, or other "representations"but along
de-essentialized Heideggerian/Aristotelian lines as a "habit"of the
soul—the effect of training and technology rather than ideology. -
pos.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/32/3/310
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