In this panel, papers take a global approach to deploying the Foucauldian framework to consider the unique ways in which religion is a site of political activity. On regimes, political power, or polymorphous techniques of power, the papers turn to a diverse range of cases engaging questions of gender expression, political spirituality, epistemic regimes, religious racism, and indigeneity. The papers highlight the particular modes in which religion functions with or against forms of political power, and pose questions beyond the work of Foucault’s corpus on the utility, possibilities, limits, and new directions to consider in the study of Foucault and religion today.
Michel Foucault’s On the Government of the Living (2012) explains how confession and obedience shape the ‘modern’ concept of the subject. The ‘West’ developed a false concept of confession as ‘liberation’. Jo Sol’s documentary Fake Orgasm (2010) stages performer Lazlo Pearlman who explores the subversion of confessional culture via the use of the nude transsexual body. They experience a strong request of the audience to confess their ‘identity’, which they resist. Pearlman performs a corporeal insurrection. Film extracts elaborate how the performative and material body denounces the production of the ontological, identitarian body, biopolitical regulations and allows for a genealogical, and critical discussion of the body. The paper scrutinizes the problem of confessional culture and truth regimes; On the Government of the Living – subject formation, agency, embodied resistance and confessional culture; developments in performance theory; epistemology; religion as a discursive, intersectional and performative category of knowledge production (DIP).
This presentation will explore critical methodological issues arising from the study of political spirituality in historical cases. The Novohispanic insurgency of 1810-1821, whose early leadership was composed of priests, one-time seminarians, and lawyers, developed in a milieu where religious and theological discourses of Catholicism inescapably permeated Spanish-American political thought. Moreover, by the turn of the 19th century, the intensive intermingling of Catholicism and the Spanish Crown effectiely blurred the lines between forms of pastoral power and powers of governance. Because Foucault himself had only partially formed an idea of political spirituality at the time of his death and scholarship on the topic has remained relatively underdeveloped, inquiries dealing with political spirituality have necessarily entailed navigating a thicket of methodological issues. Included among these issues are conceptualizing political spirituality, analyzing and interpreting documentary sources to identify political spirituality, historically situating politically spiritual assumptions and statements, and measuring a spirituality's practical effects.
Islam has been a key feature in the history of Malaysia, and Muslims have been considered a majority community. The spread of Islam in transforming the population has been narrated as a process of Islamisation. Since the 1970s to recent times, this Islamisationnarrative has gained further dominance in influencing theyouths and civil society movements, educational institutions, government policies, and also legal and political decisions in the country. However, critics have perceived the Islamisation narrative as to be over-simplifying the complex inter-relations between Islam and the Malay-Muslims population. Thus, this paper aims for a critical examination, by using the Epistemeas a key concept. This paper shall demonstrate how Islam is related to three different epistemic phases; under the Malay Sultanates, British Colonial rule, and the nation-state in the history of Malaysia, and its relation to knowledge and power in shaping the Muslim population in Malaysia.
Can Foucault’s philosophical ideas be in discussion with indigenous traditions? While there have been rich conversations on Foucault and big religions, there is little attention given to Foucault and indigenous religion. This presentation attempts to discuss Foucault’s ideas in comparison with traditional indigenous thoughts.
The comparison mainly addresses the Foucauldian “care of the self” constructed in Foucault’s two writings The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self. The indigenous tradition used in the comparison is the Batak-Indonesian concept of sahala (superior character). The argument of the paper is twofold. First, while indigenous traditions have often been considered community-centered, the idea of “the care of the (individual) self” has long existed in some indigenous communities, one whose purpose is to care for other selves. Second, while the labors of self-cultivation in Foucault sets the ethical goals for self-mastery, the Batak sahalalabors on the ethics of self-giving and integrity.