redeeming foucault SELMYS, MELiNDA. New Oxford Review. JulAug2014, Vol. 81 Issue 6, p35 39

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properly integrated with our souls. Insofar as our 
culture allows this, we will find ourselves danger­
ously close to Aldous Huxley’s dystopian vision of a 
future society in Brave New World. In contrasting 
the dark futures of Huxley’s novel and George Or­
well’s 1984, Postman observed:
Orwell feared those who would deprive us of 
information. Huxley feared those who would 
give us so much that we would be reduced to 
passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the
tru th would be concealed from us. Huxley 
feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of 
irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a 
captive culture. Huxley feared we would be­
come a trivial culture.
Postman stated that Amusing Ourselves to Death 
“is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was 
right.” We have surely taken one giant step closer to 
realizing Huxley’s fears with the advent and rapid 
spread of social media. ■
POWER-KNOWLEDGE FOUNDED IN AUTHENTIC LOVE
MEliNdA SEliviys
REdEEMiNq FoucauIt
M ichel Foucault (1926-1984) is largely con­sidered a persona non grata within Catho­lic intellectual circles. He is associated with relativism, social constructivism, homosexuality, 
and the breakdown of Western social institutions. 
Our culture’s current crisis of faith has been traced, 
in part, to Foucault’s philosophy, which is under­
stood as an attack on the foundations of truth itself. 
Although Foucault is guilty of numerous errors, 
there is a great deal of genuine value to be gleaned 
from his philosophy. Aristotle’s belief in exposing 
infants for population control did not prevent St. 
Thomas Aquinas from heavily mining his ideas, nor 
do we reject Plato because he proposed to control 
his Republic through a system of religious lies. Phi­
losophy has always been the work of imperfect men 
fumbling toward the truth. Insofar as Foucault is 
different, he is different because he does not propose 
a systematic philosophy but presents his thought 
as a “toolbox,” inviting thinkers to take whatever is 
useful and ignore the rest.
The truths within Foucault’s work are attrac­
tive, they are particularly appropriate to our culture, 
they solve some of the deepest problems confront­
ing the postmodern world, and they therefore have 
a wide social currency. Simply attacking his errors 
is, therefore, not sufficient. Christians must under­
stand Foucault’s work and acknowledge what is true 
within it, in order to formulate an adequate response.
Let’s concentrate on three different themes
Melinda Selmys is the author o f Sexual Authentic­
ity: An Intimate Reflection on Homosexuality and 
Catholicism, Sexual Authenticity: More Reflections, 
and Slave of Two Masters, a study o f Catholic so­
cial teaching and a guide to the virtue o f poverty 
for laymen. She has written for various Catholic 
publications including First Things, The Catholic 
Answer, and This Rock. She lives with her husband 
and six children in rural Ontario.
JULY-AUGUST 2014 35
that arise in Foucault’s work and analyze them in 
the context of Christian belief. The first is the means 
by which selves are produced through relation­
ships of power and knowledge. The second is the 
concentration on intersubjectivity over objectivity 
as a means of approaching the truth. The third is 
the idea of philosophical ekstasis, and of truth as a 
historical process. We can situate all three of these 
analyses within Christian thought by recognizing 
that Foucault is a philosopher of fallen nature. His 
thought traces the development of truth through 
the historical period, revealing the disequilibria, ten­
sions, and exploitations that arise from the relation­
ship that was forged between power and knowledge 
as a result of our first parents’ appropriation of the 
right to “know good and evil.”
At the heart of all of Foucault’s philosophy is 
the notion of power. It is common for liberal think­
ers, neo-Marxists, feminists, et al. to use the stan­
dard socialist understanding of power-as-oppression 
when interpreting Foucault, but Foucault himself 
rejects this interpretation. He sees power within 
society as a productive force that arises wherever 
hum an relationships are in disequilibrium. These 
relationships are dispersed throughout social space, 
and so power does not emanate top-down from a 
hierarchical structure that preys upon the weak, but 
rather emerges from innumerable points through­
out society. Power is not a destructive force that 
ought to be resisted in the name of individual free­
dom but is the matrix in which personalities are 
forged. All forms of resistance to power are in fact 
exercises of power, and there is no autonomous 
se lf existing outside of social relations that can be 
sheltered and nurtured in isolation.
This is a challenge not to the Christian notion 
of the self but to the modernist notion of the self. 
Modernity’s view of the human person is perhaps 
best summed up by Immanuel Kant, who defines 
the person as an autonomous rational agent of in­
finite worth and dignity. It is unsurprising, in light 
of this conception, that high modernism embraced 
eugenics and sought to cleanse the species of those 
who failed to meet sufficient criteria for intelligence 
and free action.
More commonly, modernity has solved the 
problem of hum an irrationality and lack of free­
dom by treating these as forms of madness. The 
Church’s relationship to this conception has long
been problematic. Throughout the modem period, 
the Church has frequently turned to the psycho­
logical profession as a means of establishing the 
non-validity of behaviors or experiences that are 
antithetical to Catholic doctrine. As Foucault points 
out, “From about 1680 to 1740, the [medical] pro­
fession was called in by the entire Catholic Church 
and the government against the explosion of Prot­
estant and Jansenist mysticism.... Doctors were 
then called upon by the ecclesiastical authorities 
to show that all phenomena of ecstasy, inspiration, 
prophesying, and possession by the Holy Spirit 
were due (in the case of heretics, of course) sim­
ply to the violent movements of the humors or of 
spirits” (Maladie Mentale et Psychologie). A more 
contemporary example would be the treatment of 
homosexuality as a “mental illness” within conser­
vative Christian circles.
The irony, of course, is that psychology has a 
tendency to characterize all religious experience as 
neurotic because it views faith as ultimately nei­
ther rational nor empirical in its approach to truth. 
Christian thinkers from Tertullian to Kierkegaard 
have consistently pointed out that there is a point in 
the journey toward religious truth at which reason 
alone becomes insufficient. Essential parts of the 
human experience transcend or exclude mere ratio­
nality. “Madness,” as Foucault puts it, “is a nature 
of nature” {ibid.). The truth of this observation can 
be understood in the context of St. Paul’s musings 
on “the foolishness of God,” which exceeds and 
scandalizes human reason.
Man is not, by nature, either purely autono­
mous or purely rational. This is catastrophic for 
moral solutions based on abstract deontology (the 
study of moral obligation), utilitarian calculations, 
Or rational self-interest. In order to achieve the social 
effects of a rational society, it is necessary to “ratio­
nalize” human behaviors in the sense of artificially 
conforming them to rational criteria established 
from without.
Foucault shows that, ultimately, this ratio­
nalization has to be carried out at the expense of 
individual autonomy. Modernism invented a series 
of techniques to bypass the unreasonableness of 
individual action. Psychology is the ultimate ex­
pression of this rationalization, characterizing all 
non-rational human activity as the id, an inhuman 
and unreasoning force that m ust be broughtinto
36 nexuj oxfxyaJD R e o le c o
control through a penetrating knowledge that places 
it within the power of rational expertise. Through 
knowledge, the individual comes to possess power 
over himself, but he is also placed within the sphere 
of power of those who possess the ability to under­
stand and interpret the knowledge so gained.
Foucault points out that in this relationship be­
tween power and knowledge there is no process by 
which a pre-existing individuality is unearthed from 
beneath a mass of subconscious impulses. Instead, 
the individuality of the patient is formed under the 
aegis of the psychological relationship. The same 
is true of all forms of relating in which power and 
knowledge are combined and applied to the person: 
in factory labor, education, penal systems, sexuality, 
etc. Human beings are neither oppressed nor freed 
by power-knowledge; rather, our identities are the 
product of systems that are both outside ourselves 
and of which we are an inseparable part.
To put this in the perspective of Christian 
thought, we might turn to the concept of the com- 
munio personarum discussed by St. John Paul II in 
his “theology of the body.” John Paul also criticizes 
the notion of radical individualism, and his reasons 
for doing so are fundamentally similar to Foucault’s. 
Both agree that human persons are not capable of 
becoming fully human outside of relationships with 
other people. We become ourselves by knowing and 
being known by the other. Human subjectivity is 
dependent on this communio. Foucault tends to 
focus on the perversions that arise as a result of dis­
turbed power relations, whereas John Paul attempts 
to excavate the original meaning of intersubjectivity 
by harkening back to the beginning, to the creation 
of man and his time in the Garden. Both investigate 
the role interpersonality plays in shaping human 
identities, and both reject a purely individualistic 
understanding of human personality.
From this concern with interpersonality arises 
a shift in methodology with respect to truth. Fou­
cault, like other postmodern thinkers, is deeply 
suspicious of the modernist quest for objectivity, 
particularly with respect to the human person. The 
foundation of his critique is the observation that 
in the process of knowing another person you are 
bringing that person into being. All relationships of 
knowledge are also relationships of power that exert 
influence over the subject, which means that there 
is no way of discovering the truth about the human
person through objective observation of behavior.
It m ust be noted here that the Christian ap­
proach to understanding hum an nature through 
an ontological perspective based on revelation is not 
the same as the objective approach of the human 
sciences. Foucault’s critique is directed toward the 
latter. The search for an objective anthropology as­
sumes that a person is able to get outside his own 
subjectivity and his own relationships to under­
stand the other as an object of external contempla­
tion. This is untrue, and insofar as it is attempted 
it involves a denial of the inherent dignity of the 
other.
In Discipline and Punish Foucault analyzes the 
architectural concept of the panopticon, proposed 
by Jeremy Bentham, as a metaphor for the violent 
objectivity and individualization demanded by mod­
ernist anthropology. The panopticon is a building in 
which human beings are isolated and observed from 
a central point by an unseen observer. The lack of 
reciprocity within such a system produces persons 
who are “subjects” similar to laboratory mice. Sub-
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JULY-AUGUST 2014 37
jectivity thus becomes an expression of subjugation 
to the objectifying gaze of the observer. Modernism, 
by attempting to establish a perspective of expertise 
from which hum an beings could be known “ob­
jectively,” denies the reciprocal dimension of hu­
man relationships. In doing so, it turns the subject 
into an object of appropriation, a situation most 
clearly evident in structures like prisons or factories, 
wherein human dignity is routinely subordinated to 
the demands of efficiency.
Modernist philosophies tend to seek to know 
the person by a one-sided interrogation of the sub­
ject, or through systematic theories that, according 
to John Paul II, “accuse the human ‘heart,’” making 
hum an motivations comprehensible by reducing 
them to the dimension of concupiscence. Both Fou­
cault and John Paul point toward intersubjectivity as 
the solution to this kind of accusatory-interrogative 
knowledge. Intersubjectivity demands a deep humil­
ity with respect to the other, a willingness to listen 
to and identify with another person, even with one 
who has a very different perspective. This involves 
a revival of the Socratic conviction that the wise 
man is the one who knows that he knows noth­
ing — a much-needed reminder in the context of 
scientific hubris that tends to exclude, among other 
things, religious and irrational forms of knowledge. 
Foucault points out that “it is not that religion is 
delusional by nature...religious delusion is a func­
tion of the secularization of culture: religion may be 
the object of delusional belief insofar as the culture 
of a group no longer permits the assimilation of 
religious or mystical beliefs in the present content 
of experience” {Maladie Mentale et Psychologie). 
Certain types of phenomena and experience are 
excluded by scientific objectivity as a product of 
the relationship that is set up between the “expert” 
authority figure and the person who has the experi­
ence, whose knowledge is seen as merely subjective 
and therefore suspect.
Intersubjective knowledge breaks down the 
inequality in this kind of relationship by allowing a 
two-way, reciprocal flow of knowledge and power. 
It removes the temptation to believe that we can be 
“like God, knowing good and evil” within the hearts 
of others, and in its Christian form it encourages a 
kind of positive and productive power-knowledge 
founded in authentic love. The other is approached 
not as an object of knowledge to be processed and
assimilated, but rather as a subject of love. By relin­
quishing the illusion of objectivity in human rela­
tionships, it becomes possible to enter into genuine 
communion with the other and to seek truth from 
an attitude of humility, receiving the truths the 
other has to offer as a gift rather than as a challenge 
to one’s own authority.
Intersubjective knowledge poses a problem 
for those accustomed to seeking objective truths 
because it demands a fundamentally different re­
lationship to truth itself. Foucault describes this 
relationship in terms of ekstasis, “not the curiosity 
that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to 
know, but that which enables one to get free of one­
self’ (Histoire de la Sexualite: L ’Usage des Plaisirs). 
In his later work, his methodology as a historian 
of truth seems to have crystallized into a desire to 
move into other modes of thinking, to approach 
the “arts of existence” and the “practices of the self’ 
from the perspective of other writers in other times 
in order to enter into the forms of subjectivity that 
existed within those cultures.
On the face of it, this may seem like an odd or 
even dangerous way of proceeding. One is forced to 
approach truth as a kind of game thatis played out 
through large-scale tactical engagements on the 
battlefields of history and also within the individual 
subject as he searches for the truth about himself 
and his existence. The recognition that the games 
we play with truth are, in fact, games might seem 
like heresy, despair, or frivolity. On the contrary, 
what is being echoed here is a deep intuition that we 
are constantly playing hide-and-seek with wisdom. 
In our search for truth, we are like the angelic child 
on St. Augustine’s beach, trying to put the ocean 
into a hole he digs in the sand. This parable may be 
taken as an invitation to epistemological despair, or 
it may be taken as an encouragement to recognize 
that we are intellectual children joyfully playing in 
the mud. The games are serious only insofar as they 
constitute the play by which the soul prepares itself 
for the ultimate encounter with Truth.
Within Foucault’s methodology there is a rec­
ognition that history is a process by which we seek 
to know and understand the truth through different 
cultural forms and practices. The fullness of truth is 
not manifested from any single point of view. The 
practice of philosophy, therefore, allows the seeker 
of wisdom to go forth into modes of thinking and
38 neuj oxfiofi.'O R e o t e r n
seeing that are inaccessible within his own cultural 
paradigm: “There are times in life when the ques­
tion 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” {ibid.).
This view of the historicity of truth resonates 
with the notion that the Church exists in a mutual 
and reciprocal relationship with history. Although 
the Church has received the fullness of truth in 
Christ and exists in order to transmit this truth to 
all cultures and all times, it is also true that history 
exists in order to allow the Church to realize com­
pletely the truth she has received. This is why we 
believe in the development of doctrine and in the 
principle of inculturation. Willing and open contact 
with forms of truth that are not immediately acces­
sible to one’s own way of thinking does not have to 
produce confusion or nihilism. If it is undertaken 
with a childlike spirit of wonder, a willingness to play 
with truth and to be astonished by it, an attitude of 
humility with respect to the gift of knowledge re­
ceived from the other, and by a deep love of wisdom, 
this approach yields an insatiable desire to receive 
that “beauty ever ancient, ever new” in a variety of 
ancient and novel forms. ■
books iN REViEW
H arrIet Mimphy 
SisTERS of PerpetuaL Vicriivihood
Spiritual Leadership for Chal­
lenging Tim es: Presidential 
Addresses from the Leader­
ship C onference o f W omen 
Religious. Edited by Annmarie 
Sanders, I.H.M. Orbis Books. 
160 pages. $20.
Roger Kimball, editor of The 
New Criterion, argued in 1990 that 
politics had corrupted higher edu­
cation. His book Tenured Radi­
cals describes how professional 
academics are for the most part 
untouchable. Prof. Daphne Patai 
argued from within the academy
in 1994 that professing feminism 
on campus was about indoctrina­
tion rather than scholarship. Prof. 
John M. Ellis pointed out in 1997 
that literature was being lost as 
social agendas started corrupting 
the proper teaching of the h u ­
manities. While it is a stretch for 
some to think of Catholic nuns 
as agents of destruction, corrup­
tion, or politically correct jargon 
about class, sex, and race, many 
religious sisters too are “tenured 
radicals,” not in universities but 
in modem convents.
One picks up Spiritual Lead­
ership for Challenging Times, a 
collection of addresses delivered
Harriet Murphy is the author o f 
The Spiritual Writings of Raphael 
Cardinal Merry del Val and The 
Decline and Fall of Female Reli­
gious: The Story So Far, to ap­
pear in 2015. She taught modem 
languages and literature at the 
National University o f Ireland 
and the University o f Warwick in 
England.
JULY-AUGUST 2014 39
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