Foucault’s Power-Knowledge and Apocalyptic Resistance

As various biblical scholars like Allan Boesak, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, and Anathea Portier-Young, have argued, there are different forms of resistance presented in and by the apocalypse, which is defined by John Collins as “a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.” (1979:9) Such apocalyptic resistance is inseparable from the notions of knowledge and power. This relation is evident not only in the linguistic meanings of the terms “apocalyptic” and “resistance” but also in the content of the apocalyptic literature from which apocalyptic resistance draws its meanings. However, the conception of knowledge and power and their interrelation in apocalyptic resistance deserve more examination that goes beyond the simple moral representation of (revealed) knowledge as good and pure or the common reading of a unilateral causation – knowledge giving rise to the power to resist. In this paper, I will conduct this examination through a critical reading of Michel Foucault’s analysis of power-knowledge which suggests an internal relation – mutual production – between power and knowledge. I will show that Foucault’s analysis problematizes the general apocalyptic understanding of revealed knowledge as merely a reception occurring in an external process that takes place outside the spatial and temporal dimension of the world, unrelated to its existing power relations.

This paper is structured into three parts. The first part shall briefly read Foucault’s analysis of power and knowledge, especially by engaging with his work in Discipline and Punish. The second part reviews the concept of apocalyptic resistance by examining the role of revelation in the resistance presented in and by the apocalypse. Specifically, it investigates three assumptions that the apocalypse traditionally makes about knowledge and power, upon which the notion of apocalyptic resistance rests: 1) knowledge as good and internally related with the Truth, 2) knowledge as revealed in an external process of reception, and 3) power as a conferrable quality that accompanies the revelation of knowledge. The third part then considers the implications of Foucault’s analysis on apocalyptic resistance. It discusses how Foucault’s power-knowledge has posed questions to and suggested a review of the apocalyptic assumptions regarding the relation between knowledge and power. It argues that traditional understanding of revelation, which separates revelation from the process of mediation in apocalyptic writing, not only leaves little space for the examination of power-knowledge relations in the apocalypse but also creates a paradox that renders apocalyptic resistance incongruous and ineffective. It then proposes a wholistic understanding of revelation that considers the process of mediation as a constitutive part of revelation. With this understanding, it points out that the power-knowledge complex has always existed in the apocalyptic writing and in the resistance it presents, and it supports this argument by pointing to the practice of pseudepigraphy in the apocalypse as an example.