Tending to the Wounding or Life After Death: Black Critical Thought and Foucault’s Use of Religion/Race

Subjecting Michel Foucault’s schematization and theorization of biopolitics to the rigor of Black critical thought is tending to the wounding that makes biopolitics possible and might also be the site of its refusal. Tending to the wounding is the site of the emergence of something called race and religion, the productivity of what Foucault calls biopower. At the same time, the site of life is marked by both Orlando Patterson’s ‘social death,’ and Hortense Spillers’s ‘flesh.’ Tending to the wounding of the emergence of biopolitics by way of Black critical figures such as Patterson and Spillers, allows for, following thinkers like Biko Mandela Gray, Ashon Crawley, J. Kameron Carter, and importantly Saidiya Hartman, reconceiving of Foucault’s utility for the study of religion with acute attention to is constitutive antiblackness. The goal in this presentation is to forestall the all-too-easy application of Foucault’s biopolitics as diagnostic and analytic on religion and to foreground the Black flesh upon which these procedures rest, so as to adumbrate a mode of Black study which compliments, critiques and creatively offers otherwise possibility to Foucault.

For Black practice in the United States refuses and resists the social a priori of White culture, which is the basis for cultural, historical, and theological constructions of the norm, of the human and of a people, say, for example, in the United States. The white social a priori function as theoretical ideals about the presumed irrelevance and disposability of persons and material racialized as Black before encounter and without explanation.

As I will argue, Foucault’s concept of the biopolitical or biopolitics provides a helpful framework for explaining the emergence of the social a priori of white culture. The biopolitical is European (and Anglo-American) colonial domination of non-Europeans through racialization. The biopolitical articulates and enacts racialization through governing technologies, and justifying knowledges, of exclusion, subjugation, and hierarchicalization. These modes of dominance together form the power and knowledge nexus of discourse. Through these governing technologies and knowledges, some people inhabit “appropriate” subject positions. They are racialized the Christian, the citizen, the proper subject, and they are made to live.

In explaining the emergence of a power that makes white people live, Foucault fails to attend to how that same power makes Black people die. This lacuna is not simply corrected by turning to someone like Achille Mbembe and his famous article (and later book) “Necropolitics.” Foucault explains how the human sciences and new knowledges like criminology and eugenics help shape a population that the nation-state wants to govern and make live. But those same knowledges, discourses, and practices are used for the dispossession and exclusion of Blackness and people racialized as Black. Black people are made to die. Thus death-bound persons are included in this governing order but by exclusion. They are racialized as the savage, the native, the criminal, the insane, the slave, and most often the Black. Racial Blackness is a discursive formation of the biopolitical. Racialization in the biopolitical structure of the world is fundamentally constituted in the dispossession of persons marked Black.

This paper builds upon the important work of Alexander Weheliye’s *Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human*. But this paper goes beyond Weheliye’s work, which makes Giorgio Agamben’s use of biopolitics, its focus, to centering how the work of Patterson and importantly Spillers show the antiblackness at the heart of Foucault’s work, which establishes the life of race and by extension, of religion.

Hortense Spillers provides a Black feminist critique of Foucault’s schematization of the modern order. The grammar that enunciates and enacts power to make whites live violently reduced Blacks to flesh. Spillers, in her famous essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” centers Black dispossession and violent subjugation as the foundation of a new world order. Black people experience what sociologist and theorist Orlando Patterson, in his crucial book *Slavery and Social Death, A Comparative Study*, calls social death in this biopolitical context. Despite being captive flesh for the bodies of a new world polity, Black flesh, through its practices, offers possibilities for life after death.

This practice – what I have here called tending the wounding -- points to the constructive possibilities embedded in Saidiya Hartman’s work, especially * Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America* (WW Norton & Co, 2022). Hartman, who herself engages Foucault’s biopolitics in this magisterial work, writes in an essay for the 25th anniversary edition of the book that “Black performance and quotidian practice were determined by and exceeded the constraints of domination. This dimension has received less attention in the reception of the book.”

Indeed, at the heart of my analysis is the Foucauldian decision to see tending the wounding as that which gives rise, concomitantly to race and religion, and thus to never foreground Blackness. This constitutes, in some way, synthetically, a misreading, or an overreading of Hartman’s work. Turning to Black practice, as a tending the wounding, which may exceed the constraints of domination, I hope to show that when applying Foucault, we must foreground his analytic’s antiblackness, so as to scout out possibilities of other forms of (after)life than biopolitical dispossession.

I finally apply this re-narration of Foucault through Black critical thought to Pentecostalism, a site of tending the wounding of flesh, which may offer otherwise possibility.