STEFANOS GEROULANOSold power technique that originated in Christian institutions.’’^36 On the one hand, power,
in its very transcendental basis, does not exactly have a history, much less a history that
begins in the Christian Middle Ages. On the other hand, the modernapparatusof politi-
cal, penitentiary, and disciplinary power, as described inDiscipline and Punish, begins
with what, in homage to Ernst Kantorowicz, Foucault calls ‘‘the least body of the con-
demned man.’’^37 It is out of Kantorowicz’s era of a political theology of royalty and its
Christological theme of bi-corporeality that the modern construction of the ‘‘soul’’ arises.
This, for Foucault, led to a modern historical reality of the soul, which, ‘‘unlike the soul
represented by Christian theology, is not born in sin and subject to punishment, but is
born rather out of methods of punishment, supervision, and constraint.’’^38 Out of a Chris-
tian and Christomimetic model of subjectivity arises a machine of power that enforces a
subjectivity at once different from and consequent to this original model. Hence the move
from the ritual spectacle of ‘‘the least body of the condemned’’ through the surveillant
society of the carceral. Similarly, modern political rationality explicitly relies on the same
religious past; for Foucault, the connection between pastoral power and reason of state is
one of analogy and latency: ‘‘Political rationality has grown and imposed itself all
throughout the history of Western societies. It first took its stand on the idea of pastoral
power, then on that of reason of state.’’^39
Structural Isomorphism
Schmitt writes of a structural analogy between the theological and the political realms. In
Foucault, one could write instead of a structural isomorphism of modalities of power.^40
As is well known, Foucault postulates an ‘‘infinite,’’ nonessentialist, and certainly nonem-
pirical concept of power, which cannot be reduced to (or really distinguished from) the
technological, architectural, mechanical, legal, and social dimensions that are, in a sense,
its ways of shaping the subject.^41 Foucault’s abstraction of power relations into ‘‘the ob-
jectivizing of the subject in... ‘dividing practices’ ’’ immediately invokes an intersubjec-
tive space of regulation.^42 The subject exists in such a space, framed by the various
operations that subject it, operations that, whatever their specific mechanics, are irreduc-
ibly visual and linguistic. Thus religiously inflected and divisive practices such as the
pastoral are no different from modalities of power that are not fundamentally religious.
While religiousframeworks‘‘disappear in part’’ following the Enlightenment,^43 Foucault
demonstrates that certainproblematicspersist—for example, in a government’s relation
to the pastoral, which becomes a question of ‘‘people management’’ in a mode of shep-
herdhood. Though religious, this thematic is not limited to Christianity but provides a
theoretical framework for ethical, political, and even aesthetic aspects of the rule over
people and the direction of their lives, a rule that for him extends from Plato and early
Christianity to the welfare state.^44
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