Tending to the Wounding or Life After Death: Black Critical Thought and Foucault’s Use of Religion/Race

Subjecting Michel Foucault’s schematization and theorization of biopolitics to Black critical thought is tending to the wounding that makes biopolitics possible and might also be the site of its refusal. Tending to the wounding is the site of the emergence of something called race and religion, the productivity of what Foucault calls biopower. At the same time, the site of life is marked by both Orlando Patterson’s ‘social death,’ and Hortense Spillers’s ‘flesh.’ Tending to the wounding of the emergence of biopolitics by way of Black critical figures such as Patterson and Spillers, allows for reconceiving of Foucault’s utility for the study of religion with acute attention to is constitutive antiblackness. The goal is to forestall the all-too-easy application of Foucault’s biopolitics as diagnostic and analytic on religion and to foreground the Black flesh, so as to adumbrate a mode of Black study which offers otherwise possibility to Foucault.