STEFANOS GEROULANOSshown, just as the visual realm forms a blueprint for analyses of power, so it is rife with
problematic formulations and often sickening consequences.^18 Foucault made the connec-
tion as early as his 1963Birth of the Clinic,recognizing the clinical gaze’s management of
near-absolute power and medical knowledge through ‘‘a logical armature, which exor-
cised from the outset the naı ̈vete ́of an unprepared empiricism.’’^19 Debord’s understand-
ing of a ‘‘social relationship mediated by images’’ as attacking ‘‘directly lived reality’’ dates
to his writings from the late 1950s,^20 and returns strongly in his 1967Society of the Specta-
cle, which presents the spectacle as the fundamental socioeconomic form and medium of
modernity.^21 Commentators have noted that the spectacle, whether as a term of social
analysis or as a rhetorical element, is so central, even voracious, in Debord’s writing that
it faces two dangers: (1) the failure to distinguish between various ‘‘spectacles’’ (cinema,
advertising, etc.) and ‘‘the spectacle’’ as socioeconomic totality,^22 and (2) the potential
collapse of ‘‘the spectacle’’ into no more than a catchword.^23 This presentation situates the
gaze at once as a powerless faculty (for it can in no way overcome the near omnipotence of
the spectacle) and as the site of all sensation in modern life, the site that demonstrates the
limits of a modernity of the spectacle.
A third and often underappreciated shared element is Foucault’s and Debord’s re-
spect for and reliance on a theological origin of modern power—a sort of allegory, mi-
metic history, and structural analogy between modern power and the divine. As I will try
to show, theirs are not modernities of secularization but accounts that reconstruct theo-
logical structures in contemporary society, giving them not only metaphorical but para-
digmatic significance.
Foucault, Scopic Asymmetry, and Theoscopy
From its emergence as a central category in Foucault’s thought during the early 1970s,
power contained a certain theological dimension, which it often occluded as an awkward
shadow. It is indicative (and quite remarkable), for example, that Foucault’s essays and
interviews on panopticism resist religious allegorization and explicit theological interpre-
tation of the panoptic machine and its effects.^24 At least until his 1979 essay ‘‘Governmen-
tality,’’^25 and despite his long and serious treatment of religious themes,^26 not one of
Foucault’s works demonstrates his ‘‘uncanny ability to discern history and contingency
where others see nature and necessity’’ with regard to the theological dimensions of such
‘‘nature and necessity.’’^27
While an unwillingness explicitly to present theology as prowling in the realms of
power might be explained by Foucault’s focus on the Enlightenment, it is important to
appreciate his project of a negative anthropology as also one of negative theology.^28 Reli-
gion provided him with (often mostly Christian^29 ) categories and concepts, which funda-
mentally affected his fascination with the historical construction of possibilities and forms
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