عنوان

On the Use and Abuse of Religion: Reading Foucault on History, Truth, and Subjectivity

Number

TL49584

.Language of Text, Soundtrack etc

انگلیسی

Title Proper

On the Use and Abuse of Religion: Reading Foucault on History, Truth, and Subjectivity

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Daniel J. Schultz

Subsequent Statement of Responsibility

Davidson, Arnold I.

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

The University of Chicago

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2017

Specific Material Designation and Extent of Item

321

Text of Note

Committee members: Coyne, Ryan; Meltzer, Françoise

Text of Note

Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-0-355-23431-2

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

Ph.D.

Discipline of degree

Divinity

Body granting the degree

The University of Chicago

Text preceding or following the note

2017

Text of Note

This dissertation offers a sustained analysis (both exegetical and critical) of the narrative role and conceptual function of religion internal to the work of Michel Foucault. I argue that while Foucault's work does not yield a single coherent philosophy of religion, there is nevertheless coherence on the level of method that has implications for how we understand religious discourse, how this discourse renders itself intelligible, and how religion as a category of analysis is taken up and made to mean across philosophy and politics. By carefully excavating the use of religious examples in the development of his model of ethics, I show how Foucault's conception of ethics mimics and accommodates styles of religious practice (e.g. askesis), while simultaneously working to unravel certain religious, and religiously inflected, forms of subjectivity (e.g. the hermeneutics of desire). I explore this tension through Foucault's own archives - his historical analysis of Christianity and his philosophical journalism in Revolutionary Iran - and beyond, asking: what implications does his analysis of these heterogeneous forms of religious practice and religious subjectivity have for current debates over secularism, rights discourse, religious and postcolonial historiography, and philosophical conceptions of critique? Across these examples I show how Foucault attempts to fragment the sovereignty of a capital 'R' religion (in both in positive and negative figurations), and instead opts for a mode of analysis that engages the historically specific conceptual structure of forms of experience in their religious and non-religious dimensions alike.

Philosophy of religion

Subject Term

Philosophy, religion and theology;Foucault, Michel;Franciscan iconography;Iranian revolution;Kant, Immanuel;Subjectivity

Wajdi, Firdaus

Davidson, Arnold I.

Subdivision

Divinity

The University of Chicago

Call Number

1957367423; 10603870

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y