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Culture and Religion: An

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Foucault and the study of

religion in a postcolonial
age
Richard King

a b

Professor of Asian Philosophy and Comparative

Religion , University of Derby
b

Religious Studies , University of Derby , Derby,

DE3 5GX, UK E-mail:
Published online: 30 May 2008.

To cite this article: Richard King (2001) Foucault and the study of religion in a
postcolonial age, Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2:1, 113-120,
DOI: 10.1080/01438300108567167
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Review Symposium Culture and Religion 2(1), 2001

Foucault and the study of

religion in a post-colonial age

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Richard King
University of Derby, UK
These two books constitute a major step forward in the study of Foucault and in
the relevance of his ideas for the study of religions. The first book, Religion
and Culture is an edited collection of Foucault's writings exploring religious
(mainly Christian) themes and issues present in the work of the French historian
of ideas Michel Foucault. As well as editing this collection and providing an
insightful and useful introduction to Foucault for scholars of religion in this
book, Dr Carrette also offers us an excellent study of the religious sub-text
underpinning much of Foucault's writing in his own work Foucault and
Religion.
There are many themes that one could explore and discuss in relation to these
two books. One could look, for instance, at Foucault's conception of and
attitude towards western Christianity, at the implications of his poststructuralist orientation and its emphasis on the elision of pouvoir and savoir
(power and knowledge). Again, one might examine the exploration of
constructions of sexuality and identity in relation to traditional religious and
modern secular epistemes as these are represented in Foucault's body of works.
Alternatively, one could dwell upon what Dr Carrette calls Foucault's 'corporal
spirituality'that is his radically immanent approach to 'spiritual' praxis. This
orientation emphasises embodiment in direct contrast to the body-soul
dichotomies of western Christianity. Or again we could examine the more overt
'political spirituality' which Carrette argues can be found in Foucault's later
(that is, post-1976) work.
All of these themes merit further attention. However, in this paper I wish to
take a slightly different approach to the material under review. Dr Carrette very
ably examines the religious, one might even say theological, fragments within
Foucault's own writings. In so doing he draws attention to the debate and
movement beyond Christianity that is embedded in Foucault's work. One of the
great benefits of Carrette's approach to Foucault is that he holds onto the
unresolved tensions in Foucault's writing and refuses the rationalist desire for
closure (Carrette 2000:151). As Carrette would acknowledge, there are many
different, if overlapping, Michel Foucaults, and I would not be surprised if the
spirit of Foucault were hovering in a corner somewhere laughing at scholarly
attempts to pigeonhole him.
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In his own study of Foucault, Carrette focuses upon two conceptual themes
in his analysisthe emphasis upon what he calls 'corporal spirituality' in the
early works of Foucault and the shift from 1976 onwards to a concern with
'political spirituality'. The former denotes a non-dualistic rejection of the binary
opposition of spirit and body in favour of a this-worldly, embodied and
radically immanent approach to questions of spiritual practice and the leading of
an authentic lifestyle after the 'death of God' (see Carrette 2000:4-5 129, 139,
etc.). In Foucault's later works, according to Carrette, there is a shift towards a
'political spirituality', that is a more concerted interest in the political
dimensions of religious and spiritual practice. This shift also leads to a
problematisation of the spiritual in terms of the notion of governmentality and a
sharper awareness of the socio-political factors involved in the construction of
the subject (Carrette 2000:131, 137-8). According to Carrette:
Foucault's 'spiritual corporality' and 'political spirituality' is a fusion of
terms, a 'messing up' of the binary categories of the 'spiritual' and the
material, and, more specifically for Foucault, of the Christian order of
things. Such a reordering transforms the entire field of religion into an
immanent process of 'governmentality'... Foucault 'problematises'
religious language and experience in such a way as to make the body and
the politics of the subject unavoidable issues in religious discourse.
(Carrette 2000:139)
Carrette uses these two notions as hermeneutic tools allowing him to 'gather up
the fragments' of Foucault's thinking about religion, that is as an analytic
strategy for reading the 'religious sub-text' of Foucault's various works (Carrette
2000:143-4). This is an original and highly stimulating approach and works
well in drawing out not only the ambiguities in Foucault's understanding of
religion, but also in highlighting aspects and themes in Foucault's work which
might usefully be built upon or critiqued by more specialist scholars of
religion. As a specialist in Asian systems of thought I cannot help wondering
what an engaged and thoroughgoing analysis of non-dualistic philosophies from
the Hindu, Buddhist, and Daoist traditions might add to such debates. In the
attempt to find models of spiritual praxis that focus upon radical immanence
and a rejection of binary oppositions such as 'spirit' and 'matter' there is much
to be said for examining traditions such as Advaita Vedanta, Mahayana
Buddhism, and Daoism. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Foucault had
such an abiding personal interest in the Japanese traditions of Zen, for who
better to consider as a theorist of radical immanence than Dogen for instance?
An analysis of such traditions will soon demonstrate, however, that even
explicitly non-dualistic philosophies have continued in practice to construct
binary oppositions and hierarchies of value as well as regimes for the
governance of the self and the body. Nevertheless, there remains much work to
be done in exploring such issues. Notable in this regard has been the work of
Bernard Faure on the rhetoric of the Ch'an and Zen traditions (see Faure 1991,

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Richard King

1997) and most recently, in The Red Thread (Faure 1998)an exploration of
Buddhist approaches to sexuality which has more than a passing indebtedness
to the work of Foucault.
In this paper I wish to explore a different sub-text or thread that can be drawn
from the works of Foucault, one that is mentioned in passing by Carrette but
never really explored. That is the sense in which Foucault as a late twentieth
century European thinker clears a space for a move beyond the horizons of
western Christian intellectual thought. As Carrette notes, with a few notable
exceptions such as a very brief discussion of Zen Buddhism, and his interests in
the Iranian revolution, there is a general slippage in Foucault's thinking between
the category of religion in general and western Christianity in particular
(Carrette 2000:141,144-5). Despite this lacuna, Foucault has become one of the
central influences in contemporary post-colonial thinking and is now beginning
to make an impact in the comparative study of religion. If Edward Said can be
described as the father of post-colonial discourse analysis, then Foucault must
surely be one of its grandfathers! How can this be and what might Foucault
offer to those scholars of religion interested in post-colonial issues and the
politics of cross-cultural analysis?
In a narrowly institutional sense, Michel Foucault was not a scholar of
religion, a specialist in non-western philosophies, nor a post-colonial theorist.
Nevertheless, his work has implications that are relevant to each of these fields.
In a 1978 interview with a Zen roshi in Japan, contained in Dr Carrette's edited
collection of writings by Foucault on Religion and Culture (1999), Foucault
was asked if Eastern philosophies might provide answers to the contemporary
crisis of Western thought. Foucault's reply is interesting, precisely because it
opens up avenues of exploration that he himself did not follow. He remarks:
It is true European thought finds itself at a turning point. This turning
point, on an historical scale, is nothing other than the end of imperialism.
The crisis of Western thought is identical to the end of imperialism [and]
has produced no supreme philosopher who excels in signifying that
crisis... For it is the end of the era of Western philosophy. Thus, if
philosophy of the future exists, it must be born outside of Europe or
equally born in consequence of meetings and impacts between Europe and
non-Europe. (Carrette 1999:113)
Foucault's knowledge of Asian religions and philosophies was rather limited, as
his discussion of Zen Buddhism in this short interview demonstrates. However,
he retained a personal interest in such matters and was deeply influenced in his
understanding of the nature of discourse by his friend and mentor, the French
Orientalist Georges Dumezil. This is an intellectual debt that has yet to be fully
explored by scholars of Foucault's life and work (see Carrette 1999:38,n.l76).
Dr Carrette has highlighted rather well some of the challenges and
continuities found in Foucault's writings with regard to the legacy of western
Christianity in modern European culture. In a 1976 interview, Foucault
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described his project as an 'ethnology of the culture to which we belong'

(Carrette 1999:91). In highlighting the socially constructed and historically
specific nature of epistemes and regimes of knowledge, Foucault is a prime
example of an anthropologist of the west. One of the challenges offered by
Foucault to later generations of scholars is to continue the radical questioning of
the limits and apparent normativity of modern western thought, that is, to
reverse the anthropological gaze, which until recent times has generally served
to demonstrate the 'otherness' of non-western cultures. What Foucault
highlights is the particularity or exoticism of modern western culture. This is
one way of demonstrating, if you like, the provinciality of European modes of
thought. Part of this ongoing project is to draw attention to the role played by
European colonial expansion in the production of the myth of European
universalism that came out of the Enlightenment. As the subalternist historian
Dipesh Chakrabarty notes,
For the point is not that Enlightenment rationalism is always
unreasonable in itself but rather a matter of documenting how[that is]
through what historical processits 'reason', which was not always selfevident to everyone, has been made to look 'obvious' far beyond the
ground where it originated. If a language, as has been said, is but a dialect
backed up by an army, the same could be said of the narratives of
'modernity' that, almost universally today, point to a certain 'Europe' as
the primary habitus of the modern. (Chakrabarty 1992:20-21)
One of the strengths of Carrette's own analysis of Foucault's writings is the
refusal to opt for closure in terms of a homogeneous account of Foucault's
intellectual thought processes. What Carrette allows us to appreciate quite well I
think is the strategic nature of Foucault's writings. Foucault provides us with a
lens for examining a particular dimension of the socio-cultural dynamic and I
am heartened to see that Dr Carrette agrees with me in rejecting a reading of
Foucault which sees him as suggesting that we should simplistically reduce
everything to power relations (Carrette 2000:149). As I have argued in my own
recent work (King 1999:207-9), such an attempt to discipline Foucault's work
is a move that is not easily rendered compatible with his own Nietzschean style
perspectivism of 'doing philosophy with a hammer'. For Foucault the role of
the intellectual is to problematise the 'normative' by focusing attention upon
the ways in which 'received wisdom' legitimates the authority of some and
silences others. However, it is precisely this challenge that Foucault offers that
must be applied critically by scholars and returned back to Foucault himself. As
Dr Carrette reminds us, after Foucault there is a need to go beyond Foucault
(Carrette 2000:145). Indeed, as I wish to argue, the social constructivist
position advocated by Foucault and his role as an 'ethnologist' of the west,
necessitates a further move, namely, the shift to cross-cultural or comparative
analysis and a renewed concern with the politics of colonialism and interaction
between cultures. This, I would contend, is one reason why Foucault is both an

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inspiration and a problem for post-colonial theorists and comparativists. On the

one hand he opens up a space for the recognition of the particularity of western
culture as well as providing conceptual tools and strategies for highlighting
subjugated knowledges. On the other hand however, Foucault's overall project
remains firmly embedded in modern western intellectual culture.

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Foucault and postcolonial criticism

Much of contemporary 'post-colonial theory' since the 1980s reflects the
influence of European thinkers such as Gramsci, Foucault, Derrida and Bakhtin.
To some extent this reflects the specific though partial use of Foucauldian ideas
in Edward Said's groundbreaking critique of Orientalism (1978). This
intellectual debt however, begs a serious question. To what extent should a
post-colonial exploration of the histories and philosophies of non-western
remain indebted to European theorists and philosophies? Nicholas Dirks asks
us, for instance,
What does it mean that Edward Said, or Ranajit Guha and the Subaltern
Studies collective of Indian historians, take the very same texts by
Gramsci, Foucault, or Williams as fundamental that are recited elsewhere
in the academy. We ignore at our peril the manifestations of the
postcolonial predicament in provincial universities in Asia and Africa
where these theorists would all signify elitist forms of exclusion, new
Western forms of domination. (Dirks 1992:12)
Doubts have been expressed for instance about the usefulness of Foucauldian
analysis for exploring the imperial space (Bhatnagar 1986; Sarkar 1994). Ann
Stoler argues for instance that
Europe's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses on sexuality, like
other cultural, political, or economic assertions, cannot be charted in
Europe alone. In short-circuiting empire, Foucault's history of European
sexuality misses key sites in the production of that discourse, discounts
the practices that racialised bodies, and thus elides a field of knowledge
that provides the contrasts for what a 'healthy, vigorous, bourgeois body'
was all about. (Stoler 1995:7)
As with the work of feminists such as Lois McNay, Stoler's analysis offers us
the possibility of recapturing Foucault's work by interlacing his analysis of
European sexuality with a post-colonial emphasis upon the politics of
imperialism. Similarly, Foucault's challenge to his readers to use his works as
tools for their own problematising projects has been taken up by Lisa Lowe
(1991, Critical Terrains) who uses Foucault's notion of heterotopia'the
spaces of otherness' to provide a challenge to the totalisation of Orientalist
discourse in Edward Said's early work. Lowe displaces the emphasis upon
Orientalism as a self-contained set of power-relations by drawing attention to
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the involvement of class, race, nation, gender and sexuality as multiple axes of
domination that impinge upon as they are conditioned themselves by Orientalist
discourses.

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The comparative study of religion

It is clear that when entering a cross-cultural, multi-religious and post-colonial
space, the study of religion as an academic enterprise is caught in the contested,
multicultural and agonistic space that has resulted from the end of European
imperialism. One challenge in this new context is to excavate the silences and
gaps that exist in the hegemonic discourses of the present. In what sense, for
instance, once one moves beyond the study of one religionwestern
Christianityto an examination of other religions and cultures should one
retain the same questions, categories and epistemic frameworks? Should a
comparative approach to the study of religion re-think its fundamental
categories, aims and modus operandP. How far should scholars working in this
area problematise the Eurocentricity of the history of religions as an intellectual
discipline? How far should scholars of African, Asian and so-called indigenous
religious traditions question the western theories and categories offered by the
Academy? Should we be looking to re-construct the study of religions from the
ground up in a multi-cultural or perhaps even an inter-cultural space? What
would be the conceptual building blocks of such a process? Foucault of course
did not ask these questions within the main body of his work. They are not,
one might say, his questions. However, in a 1967 interview, contained in Dr
Carrette's edited volume, Foucault is asked to comment upon the contemporary
western fascination with the East. Foucault remarks:
On the face of it, for the last one hundred and fifty years, since
Schopenhauer, say, we have been orientalising; in reality, it is precisely
because the whole world is Westernizing that the West is becoming
relatively more permeable to Indian philosophy, to African art, to
Japanese painting, to Arabic mysticism. Hindu philosophy, African art
acquire a consciousness of self by virtue of those structures through which
Western civilization assimilates them. (Carrette 1999:90)
Following on from this, cross-cultural work in the fields of philosophy and
religion, if taken seriously, will inevitably call into question some of the
Enlightenment assumptions that undergird current practices. As Raimundo
Pannikar has argued with regard to the practice of philosophy,
[CJrosscultural studies do not mean to study other cultures, but to let
other cultures impregnate the very study of the problem which by this
very fact has already been transformed. In this sense a cross-cultural
Philosophy does not study other philosophies but changes the very
perception of what philosophy is. (Pannikar 1992:236)

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Richard King

Scholars of religion must meet the same challenge in the twenty-first century.
How do we look to move beyond the colonialism of the recent past? The crisis
of western thought and the end of European imperialism heralded by Foucault
in his 1978 interview necessitates a sensitive and nuanced engagement with
non-western systems of thought. The question of what is to be jettisoned in this
process of course is still up for grabs. For Foucault the role of philosophy after
Nietzsche is to diagnose rather than to search for universal truths (Carrette
1999:91). Moreover, Foucault suggests the role of disciplines, such as
philosophy, as an autonomous and totalising regime of knowledge has come to
an end. The requirements of specialisation and the demise of the universal
scholar as grand legislator (Carrette 1999:114), means that philosophy today is
an activity that is increasingly practised in a variety of disciplinary fields
(Carrette 1999:96). Foucault's implications are clear: philosophy as the abstract
search for universal truths maintained its credibilityand the illusion of its
universalityprecisely because it was supported by the institutional structures
of western imperialism. The crisis of western thought then is a consequence of
the end of western imperialism. This realisation is one legacy of the challenge
that Foucault offers to philosophers and to the philosophy of religion in the
twenty-first centurythe challenge to 'think differently'. As Foucault remarked
in the second volume of his History of Sexuality:
There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think
differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is
absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.
People will say, perhaps, that these games with oneself would be better
left backstage; or, at best, that they might properly form part of those
preliminary exercises that are forgotten once they have served their
purpose. But then, what is philosophy todayphilosophical activity, I
meanif it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself?
In what does it consist, if not in the endeavour to know how and to what
extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating
what is already known? (Foucault 1992:8-9)'

Notes
1.

My thanks to Krzysztof Jozajtis for reading this paper at the IAHR conference in
my absence.

References
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origins in Edward Said's Orientalism', in Social Scientist 16.7:3-22.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1992. 'Postcoloniality and the artifice of history: who speaks

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for "Indian pasts"?' in Representations 37, Winter 1992:1-26.
Dirks, Nicholas. 1992. 'Introduction' to Colonialism and Culture, Ann Arbor,
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. 1998. The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, Princeton,
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'the Mystic East' New York and London, Routledge
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London, Cornell University Press
Pannikar, Raimundo. 1992. 'A Nonary of Priorities' in Revisioning Philosophy, ed.
James Ogilvy. Albany, State University of New York, 235-46.
Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London,
Penguin (new edition 1991).
Sarkar, Sumit. 1994. 'Orientalism Revisited: Saidian frameworks in the writing of
modern Indian history', in Oxford Literary Review 16:205-24
Stoler, Ann Laura. 1995. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of
Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, London, Duke University Press

Richard King is Professor of Asian Philosophy and Comparative Religion at the

University of Derby.
Richard King, Religious Studies, University of Derby, Derby. DE3 5GX, UK
Email: R.King@derby.ac.uk

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