Foucault and the Devil

Perhaps lost on even the most capacious readers, Satan has played an illuminating if subliminal role in the thought of Michel Foucault.  Treatment of the notion of the Devil has traversed Foucault’s writing from his earliest pages to those towards his life’s end.  Foucault uncovers a link, that begins with Tertullian’s enunciations on baptism beginning in the middle of the second century, flows into John Cassian’s contemplations on confession by the fifth, and culminates at the conceptual transition from the persecution of witches—given the disciplinary mechanisms of the inquisition—to the demarcation and eventual medicalization of bodies as a consequence of possession much later in the history of the West.  Through archival work and the quotations of these various interlocutors Foucault subtly constructs a painterly portrait of a shifting and seductive Satan, but underneath it all is a much bigger suggestion about the formation of specific techniques of power, interwoven between a multiplicity of regimes of truth, manifesting in new technologies of the self, and all subtended within these innocuous mentions of the Devil.

The actual written instances of Devil are few and far between in what material made it to print while Foucault was living.  Of those books, only Madness and Civilization, provided suitable space for mention of Satan. However, this lacuna of theorization is only superficial, as the publication of his lectures and posthumous work make clear,  because the Devil consistently served as a heuristic device in between the broader and more conceptual points Foucault was contemplating.  These insights on the Devil do maintain a cohesive trajectory throughout, but the ways in which Foucault arrives there are perhaps most interesting, and, like all things Foucault, this genealogy is anything but linear.

As mentioned, at least on the page, Foucault’s pursuit of (perhaps “concurrent adventure with” is more apt) the Devil does begin in Madness and Civilization.  Along with an essay published in 1962 titled “Religious deviations and medical knowledge” in this period Foucault is continuously investigating the relationships between the science, religion, reason, power, pathologization and most importantly the locus in which they all metastasize: the body.  Satan’s role is minor, but crucial, as this spirit or “evil angel” serves as a necessary obstacle in the formation and utility of truth.  The first signs of the Devil’s trickery, at least for this Foucauldian retelling, appear here, not as an active attempt to deceive, but where, by the nature and complexity of consciousness, deceit is always already present and “the mark of [Satan’s] victory.”  This relationship with truth is a crucial step for Foucault, as the ways in which medical knowledge is placed on, in, or against the body becomes paramount for his conceptualization of disciplinary power.

However, Foucault’s arrival at what will come to be known as governmentality, though imminent, will not be completed through medical knowledge alone.  By way of a detour of detours, before Foucault sets aside, to some degree, this pursuit for one into the mechanics of discourses themselves (e.g., his archaeological period) he embarks on a quick spell in the world of literature, flirting again with the Devil.  In the early to mid-1960s this is twofold, as Foucault explores the works of Raymond Roussel and Pierre Klossowski.  In May of 1963, Foucault published a book on the former, the poet, novelist, and writer, Roussel, that discusses at length the story Chiquenaude.  It deals with a bandit and his interaction with the Devil, but for Foucault the importance of this story lies in the “metagram.”  This word game, where a word is transformed into another by way of substituting a single letter, serves linguistically as the doubling device through which new meaning and knowledge can be constructed through various and even competing discourses.  The following year, in an essay on Klossowski entitled “The prose of Actaeon,” Foucault infers a doubling device again, but this time engaging the Devil directly.  Here Foucault considers the movement between the Same and the Other, most notably as represented by God and the Devil.  These two literary undertakings heighten Foucault’s focus on the ways in which the relations of power imprint on, among other things, the body through not just a multiplicity of disciplinary techniques, but through the discourses by which they are structured.

Foucault’s contemplation of the Devil culminates with Confessions of the Flesh (CoTF), posthumously and perhaps devilishly published in 2018, but two periods of lecturing at the Collège de France pave the way.  The first, in 1975 during the courses he titled Abnormal, deals with the more recent past at least in comparison to where Foucault finds himself in CoTF.  Foucault strategically analyzes the period from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century where the demonic focus shifts from that of witchcraft to that of possession.  The devil in this period shifts as well: with witches, the Devil is external and corrupting (through influence), and witches represent that which must be excluded, but for possession, the Devil is internal, deceitful and a representation of the inherent sin of individuals.  Exclusion will not work here, only through constant examination and/or purification can the Devil be excised.

Ultimately, it is in the second period of lecturing where the space between examination and purification are mapped out.  In 1980, after Foucault’s voyage into pastoral power, governmentality, and the birth of biopolitics, Foucault finally continues what he set out to examine prior.  Naturally, that voyage was necessary to inform where Foucault was going next but starting in the On the Government of the Living lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault explores the relationship between baptism and what that was to mean going forward for the act of confession.  From Tertullian to Cassian, the Devil continuously appears as the proverbial substance for which bodies (and souls) are defined, governed, and potentially extricated.  These points are fervently expanded in CoTF, but either way, without treating earlier acknowledgements of Satan and the Devil as the incisive discursive foundations that they are, these insights could have been lost in the details.