THEOSCOPYof transcendence. ‘‘The sacred,’’ for example, functions in his thought as both a modality
of power and a quasi-theological category: without signifying (or denying) divine pres-
ence, it points to a historicized philosophical capacity or strategy that produces and for-
mulates transcendence in a society or culture.
Foucault’s link of negative anthropology to religious concerns is discernable from
early on: before explicitly advancing a theory of power, Foucault connected man and God,
qua absolutes, in their deaths amidst the order of things: ‘‘Nietzsche rediscovered the
point at which man and God belong to one another, at which the death of the second is
synonymous with the disappearance of the first, and at which the promise of the super-
man signifies first and foremost the imminence of the death of man.’’^30 A space for ques-
tioning opens up with Foucault’s evaluation of tensions in the ‘‘order of man,’’ just as
another does with his problematization oftransparency, finitude,andself-knowledgein
this context.
More evocative still is the category ofpower, which, though not strictly transcenden-
tal, cannot be reduced to immanence or pinned to its endless empirical permutations. In
his introduction to panopticism, echoing not only Jeremy Bentham but also Etienne de
la Boe ́tie, Foucault asks: ‘‘Is it not somewhat excessive to derive such power from the
petty machinations of surveillance? How couldtheyachieve effects of such scope?’’^31 He
then defines power: ‘‘We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in
negative terms: it ‘excludes,’ it ‘represses,’ it ‘censors,’ it ‘abstracts,’ it ‘masks,’ it ‘conceals.’
In fact, power produces.’’^32 Power can be religious in three ways:
- Certain kinds of power are strictly religious (e.g., Christian pastoral power and its
development into a sociopolitical force);^33 - Within a certain group or society, power can be inflected religiously (e.g., in the
addition of a parish church to a panoptic factory);^34 - Power, in modernity, may have a fundamentally religious basis.
I will refrain from demonstrating the first two and concentrate on the last, whose demon-
stration is more complicated and whose implications reach further. I will read Foucault’s
treatment of modern power through four types of theological connection, namely,historical
derivation,structural isomorphism,self-referential knowledge, andparadigmaticity.
Derivation
Characteristic of both Max Weber’sProtestant Ethic and the Logic of Capitalismand Carl
Schmitt’sPolitical Theology(though Schmitt did not stop there^35 ),derivationimplies that
the organization and regulation of the political domain in modernity follows from a
historically anterior theological set of concepts and practices. Foucault openly relies on
such a model: ‘‘The modern Western state has integrated into a new political shape an
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