THEOSCOPYThis spiritual and theological isomorphism also underlies Foucault’s rather strange
sympathy for the Iranian Revolution—whose clerical claims he saw as somewhat inciden-
tal and not basic to the character of the revolt.^45 Here, the religious components of power,
among which one may count its ‘‘infinite,’’ transcendental dimensions, its historically
determined religious practices, and its occasional expression in religious forces (as in
Iran), become significant insofar as they help explain the pervasiveness of the theoretical
isomorphism and suggest that it is impossible for power to exist strictly outside of, and
in a different structural formation from, religious conceptualization and practice.
Self-Reflexive Knowledge
Other theologically inflected categories survive in Foucault’s thought due to his approach
to man as a construct of subjectivist self-knowledge, his insistence on the centrality of
knowledge and self-knowledge in the definition of man. But man’s knowledge of himself
and the world, as Foucault repeatedly explains, constructs and helps to formulate both
man’s conception of himselfin the world and his history/development in it—in his modern
separation from an order of things, a separation that inversely created an ‘‘order of
man.’’^46 This ensued in a ‘‘silencing’’ of a unified ‘‘order of discourse,’’^47 because man
turned to construct and know himself by contrast to the nonhuman rest of the world.
The religious aspect emerges with self-referential knowledge (Foucault’s ‘‘folding of repre-
sentation back unto itself ’’^48 and his distancing of man from this ‘‘fold’’), that is, in man’s
understanding of this separation. Above all, this happens because ‘‘Western discourse’’
cannot avoid its own relation to the past; it is tied to a self-construction, concurrent with
the ‘‘death of God,’’ through which it mimetically reorganizes its religiously constituted
past.^49 This concurrence and mimetic self-construction helps foreground two concepts
pertaining to knowledge in ‘‘the order of things’’ in a manner that is tied to both self-
knowledge and religious influence. These concepts arefinitudeandtransparency.
The analytic of finitude becomes a question with the rise of man as both ‘‘object of
knowledge and subject who knows’’;^50 it addresses existential as well as epistemological
finitude—the limits of ‘‘my life’’ and ‘‘my knowledge.’’^51 But the call to self-knowledge at
this stage inverts the very basis of finitude: ‘‘Heralded in positivity, man’s finitude is
outlined in the paradoxical form of theendless; rather than the rigor of a limitation, it
indicates the monotony of a journey which, though it probably has no end, is nevertheless
perhaps not withouthope.’’^52 If we accept the significance of derivation and structural
isomorphism, then the secularization of a Judeo-Christian thematic of a life in aspiration
and a salvation that lies beyond what is possible in the present can only be incomplete.
Man’s self-conception takes upon it permanence, hope, and the ‘‘paradoxical’’ inversion
of finitude into a fantasy of a collective overcoming of death: it admits to no less than the
impossibility of its quest for a pure anthropomorphism, the insertion of a religious ad-
dress of finitude into the humanist defeat of religion.
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