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DESIRE, DISCIPLINE, AND THE POLITICAL BODY DESIRE, DISCIPLINE, AND THE POLITICAL BODY IN MICHEL FOUCAULT AND ST. AUGUSTINE By NATHAN COLBORNE, B.A., M.A. A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy McMaster University ©Copyright by Nathan Colbome, February 2005 DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (2005) McMaster University (Religious Studies) Hamilton, Ontario TITLE: Desire, Discipline and the Political Body in Michel Foucault and St. Augustine AUTHOR: Nathan Col borne, B.A. (University of British Columbia), M.A. (Wilfrid Laurier University) SUPERVISOR: Professor P. Travis Kroeker NUMBER OF PAGES: vi, 248 11 Abstract This dissertation is an attempt to develop an Augustinian response to political problems diagnosed by Michel Foucault's analysis of mod1em political power. Foucault argues that the primary acts of power in the modern age are not repressive acts but creative ones. Instead of prohibiting acts, political power disciplines, rehabilitates and normalizes. The result of this is a disciplined and docile subject within which relations of power are so deeply embedded that 'liberation' can only bring about their entrenchment and the absorption of all aspects of life into the political structures they represent. Foucault's alternative consists in practices of aesthetic self-creation not linked to transcendent or natural construals of order. William Connolly extends Foucault's argument by criticizing Augustine as a thinker projecting a moral order onto the world and then categorizing the world on the basis of this order. This contrasts with Connolly's attempt to derive political practice from ethical sources that do not attempt to order the cosmos unambiguously . I use John Milbank to begin an Augustinian response as Milbank understands Augustine as developing an ontology grounded in the priority of peace and plenitude to violence and scarcity. This provides the basis for my argument that within Augustine's account of the purposive nature of love and desire within the subject lies an implicit critique of Foucault's ethic of aesthetic self-creation. What follows this is an attempt to outline the significant characteristics of a political posture formed by the practice of the Eucharist. These characteristics provide an alternative to both modem political practice and Foucauldian practice. The final chapter applies this Augustinian political posture to the realms of sexuality, on one hand, and punishment and discipline, on the other. 111 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Travis Kroeker. Ifnot for his help in giving shape to my first inchoate reflections I would still be trying to come up with a topic. He has also been a careful and rigorous reader of all that I have submitted, in whatever stage of completion. I thank him for his thoughtful comments and encouragement. The other members of my committee, Drs. Zdravko Planinc and Peter Widdicombe, have also been careful and challenging readers of my work. I thank them for their diligence and helpful suggestions. This research would not have been possible without the generous financial support provided by McMaster University, Ontario Graduate Scholarships and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. I also would like to thank my fellow students in McMaster Religious Studies, both graduate and undergraduate. I have greatly benefited from many formal and informal discussions of material germane to my research. My wife Deb has persevered with me through the most difficult parts of the writing. Only a spouse I think truly knows what it can mean to live with someone writing a dissertation. I thank her greatly for her unflagging support, encouragement and patience. lV CONTENTS Chapter 1. Introduction . 1 Chapter 2. Power and Discipline. 9 The Soul Pan-Opticism Biopower Governmentality Chapter 3. Foucault on the Subject 42 Sexuality and Solitude The History of Sexuality Genealogy as Political Strategy The Structure of Foucault's Genealogies The Displacement and Detachment from the Subject Self-Creation Political Consequences Chapter 4. William Connolly's Political Agonism and John Milbank's Ontology ofPeace . .. 100 Connolly's Foucauldian Political Agonism Moral vs. Ethical Sources for Action The Case Against Augustine An Ontology of Peace v Chapter 5. Augustine and the Subject . 133 The Disorder of Desire The Social Implantation of Desire The Mind's Search for Itself Confession as a 'Technology ofthe Self Incarnation Chapter 6. Augustine and the Eucharist.. .. 180 The Two Cities The Foucault-Connolly Critique The Eucharist Chapter 7. An Augustinian Political Posture 211 Augustine's Sacramental Sexuality Punishment, Correction, and Reproach Bibliography . 234 VI PhD Thesis - Nathan Colborne McMaster - Religious Studies Chapter 1 : Introduction The purpose of this dissertation is threefold. It is, first, an attempt to contribute to a genuine engagement of F oucauldian and Augustinian perspectives on political thought. Foucault's work on politics redefines and reorganizes the landscape of political discourse in many ways and this makes it necessary to extend and develop Augustinian categories in directions that respond to this reorientation. The most important claim of this dissertation is that, although Foucault's diagnosis of the most important modern political problems is in large part correct, Augustinian categories can respond to these problems in more satisfactory ways than Foucault himself can. To demonstrate this, I am forced to pursue the other two purposes of the dissertation. In addition to extending Augustine in ways that allow him to engage Foucault, I must, secondly, defend an Augustinian perspective from attacks launched by Foucault and Foucauldians and, finally, use this Augustinian perspective to demonstrate Foucault's own inability to provide an adequate answer to the problem he discerns so clearly. In the second chapter I outline the basic problem that Foucault diagnoses in modern society and the reason he thinks that contemporary politilcal theory is unable to address it. The problem is the changing nature of power from a power that represses to one that is creative, that is, creative of the subjects it holds. Foucault introduces his understanding of power by first attacking what he calls the 'repressive hypothesis.' According to this hypothesis there are natural human desires and instincts that are repressed by prohibitions. As these prohibitions are 1 PhD Thesis- Nathan Colbome McMaster-Religious Studies lifted, human nature and its desires are liberated. The work of radical political theory and practice in recent times has been the lifting of these prohibitions and the subsequent freeing of human nature. Foucault argues, in contrast to this hypothesis, that the primary acts of power in the modem age are not repressive acts but creative ones. Instead of prohibiting acts, political power disciplines, rehabilitates and normalizes. Highly visible but rare exertions of power are replaced with the invisible but constant application of discipline. The result of this is a disciplined and docile subject within which these relations of power are so deeply embedded that 'liberation' can only bring about their entrenchment. This first chapter is not, however, devoted to the subject (an analysis of Foucault's view of the subject takes up the third chapter) but to the political techniques that articulate it. Foucault argues that contemporary political theory, as it is presently constituted, is unable to account for these political techniques. Political theory is still caught up in a theory of the state and state sovereignty that does not address the disciplinary functions of power. These functions become excluded from the political realm, handed over to experts or the market or the private realm. They are de-politicized by contemporary political thought yet are the fundamental ways in which power is exerted. The common categories of the state, sovereignty, rights and law do not deal adequately with what Foucault calls the rise of bio­ power. This refers to the use of power to foster life rather than simply to define the limits outside of which it must not act. Bio-power is the necessary precursor 2 PhD Thesis - Nathan Colborne McMaster - Religious Studies to the totalizing effects of what Foucault terms 'governmentality,' or the absorption of all aspects of life into the political structures of the state. Because the vocabulary of contemporary political thought is inadequate, Foucault argues that it is spending its resources in examining realms that are of only minor importance while ignoring what is most significant. De-politicized. realms like criminality and delinquency, mental illness and sexuality must be reinscribed in the political realm so that their domestication is not so easily performed. Foucault's re-narrating of the histories of these institutions and discourses is part of his attempt to reinscribe them while at the same time redefining what we understand as political. After outlining this I move into an analysis of the political subject and its place in Foucault's thought. The struggle Foucault sees going on in the political realm is recapitulated at the level of the subject and the constitution of the subject undergirds the political discourse Foucault critiques. In Foucault's attempt to trace the development of this subject he targets the Christian practice of confession and its link to the sexual subject, or, as he terms it, 'de:siring man.' This is part of the foundation for the modern disciplined subject. It opens the way for the rise of 'pastoral power,' a power that depends on a detailed knowledge of the inner movements of the soul and therefore on the willing participation of the one over whom power is exercised. Foucault's practice of genealogy is an attempt to detach the reader from this model of the subject, to make its contingency and arbitrariness clear, and to make one realize other possibilities 3 PhD Thesis-Nathan Colbome McMaster- Religious Studies beyond or beside the subject. This chapter ends with a discussion of Foucault's attempt to suggest what might be the broad outlines of an alternative to the docile subject.

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