A Foucauldian Secular?

This paper explores the way Foucault’s thinking is entangled with efforts to think, to defend, and to critique the secular. While Foucault does not tackle this issue head on, the reception of Foucauldian method has been central in the elaboration of competing accounts of the secular. On the one hand, Foucauldian genealogy and discourse analysis are at the heart Talal Asad’s critique of secularism. On the other hand, some of the most vocal critics of Asad and his followers are acolytes of the late Edward Said and adherents to his notion of “secular criticism.” While Said’s historicism is to beholden to Vico and mediated through Auerbach (and draws critical inspiration from Marx), his method carries a deep debt Foucauldian to archaeology and genealogy (a debt he avows in the opening sections of Orientalism). In the former case, secularism names a disciplinary technology of governance; in the latter, it names an ethos of criticism, a political and ethical posture in the world. This paper attempts to gather these two conflictual streams of Foucault reception and read them back into Foucault’s text. It then asks: what secular tropes are at work in the organization of Foucault’s thinking? Does some notion of the secular inform the way Foucault writes history, thinks between epistemes, and conceives his periodizations? Might there be a political theology at work in his ethics? Is the “political spirituality” he witnessed in Iran an opening in this direction? The paper works up and works through this problem space.