Foucault and the Devil

Michel Foucault never focuses too directly—not theologically, not even genealogically—on anything circumscribing “Satan,” but, as a figure, the Devil is a lurking and constructive presence in various aspects of his theoretical work.  Foucault’s scholastic dealings with the Devil begin conceptually with the historical transition from witchcraft and the persecution of witches to the birth of “medical knowledge” through the medicalization of possession; they somehow culminate a dozen or so centuries earlier as Foucault remarks on a separate evolution: that which relates baptism in the second century with confession by the fifth.  In some ways, “the Devil” is an empty signifier for Foucault, but one that traverses the necessary space to get him where he needs to go.  Ultimately, the Devil serves as a subtle, discursive mark in a Foucauldian matrix that interweaves techniques of power, regimes of truth, forms of knowledge, and technologies of the self.