It’ll be about the will to knowledge, which is obviously the title to the first volume of his History of Sexuality. But it was delivered in the first couple months of 1971, so you’d expect more Archeology of Knowledge  type insights. The course summary (which has been available for some time) does appear fairly theoretical, albeit with a concrete focus on Nietzsche and Aristotle. At the same time, the title is not so misleading: Foucault’s thought was focused on penal forms of knowledge from at least this period. As it is, if the course anything like the lectures he delivered in 1973 (and rumour has it they do resemble each other at important points), it’ll be some of the most insightful work on law we have yet seen.

In other news, Amazon is recommending I buy a book called Madness: the Invention of an Idea. However, this is just a re-issue of Mental Illness and Psychology, the revised version of his earliest work, Mental Illness and Personality, which has still never been translated. Foucault all but disowned it. The translated work, though, acts as a good run up to his great work (still to my mind one of the best three) Madness and Unreason, just as Portrait of an Artist is a good run up to Ulysses.

This strikes me as fallacious. It is only to the extent that we approve of the institution that we can use it as a touchstone for our moral judgement. Categorical imperatives that submit to the authority of institutions are no longer autonomous. They in other words have to call into question the terms into which they are put (debt, institutions, manners, etc.).

I was given a cutting example of this before summer when I was marking several groups of school pupils. When I saw pupils get marks that did not represent their capacity, I experienced it as a deep tragedy. I could have cheated the school, tampered with their marks, and repaired the system. But doing so would undermine my belief that the individual teacher should not be given that power. There are no doubt a large number of jerks in this business. But giving just marks at all assumes that I sign up to the idea that people’s lives should be conditioned by their performance at the age of 19. It is a long shot. In any case, I could not determine what I should do without going quite some way in analysing the institutions of which I formed a part.

This experience gives me two thoughts: firstly, I really did experience the possibility of effective moral deliberation. I did not cheat on this occasion, but I did disobey school and national rules on other occasions, trusting in my own moral certainty. Secondly, why has Kantian ethics so rarely resulted in systematic institutional critique? Even the best example I can think of of such a critique based on Kant’s principles – namely Foucault’s work – claims not to be ultimately interested in institutional critique, but in individual ways of life, and grass roots relationships.

But maybe the critique of institutions we are most familiar with (i.e. based on the traditions of social thought like Weber and others) are actually based on Kant but aren’t telling us so.

These two books are examples of how well humans can think. I have at times attempted to emulate their style, and failed drastically. It takes more than a mere decision. They are also models that demonstrate the principle that style and content can not be separated.

Cheers Librivox!

Goodchild’s work is probably the only set of writings that has persuaded me to signficantly change direction in my thinking. Apart from being my supervisor, he is also the one that makes it most clear to me that doing modern philosophical theology is worthwhile.

And Anthony knows his work better than most, so if you’ve never read Goodchild, this is a good way in.

In many ways, preparing to complete a PhD has been a lesson in concentration. I spent one entire year studying someone (Berkeley) who barely got a mention in the final thing. You have to focus in on topics and shut out other concerns.

So going from that to teaching eighteen and nineteen year olds about Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Philosophy and Religious Studies per se in the course of one year, with three lessons per week is something of an experience. Instead of going narrow and deep, you have to go shallow and broad. A couple weeks back, for example, I ran through, in the course of about 50 minutes, the tensions between Mediterranean power blocs and Iranian steppe-based power blocs from 500 BCE to around 700 BCE as a way to go from Buddhism to Islam. I used google map and my time line.

Now I’m teaching Islam, and ploughing my way through the Qu’ran (which is also available for free as a spoken word book), which is frankly exhilerating. Also, given that I am somewhat bearded and foreign, it gets me loads of street cred. Some strangers enthusiastically engage me in conversation, others take steps to avoid me.

My point is, all of us have a series of books that are really basic, but way outside their central field of interest that they’ve never gotten around to reading. Not having read the Qu’ran is a particularly heinous academic sin, but surely most people have similar academic skeletons in the closet. So I would wish every PhD graduate a chance to teach in school for a year or two before they continue their trek towards tenure. I’ve been forced to it (although I do not know if I will even rejoin the trek…) and have already seen how wonderful it is.

Not least because you’ll have an excuse to read Critchley’s hilarious Book of Dead Philosophers.

The boring biographical reason is that immediately before finishing my MA thesis on Augustine and Signs, I had ruled out the idea of taking a PhD because I didn’t have any big idea. The morning after making this decision, I woke up with an idea.

It turned out, however, that the idea was pretty crap. I had read Dostoevksy’s novels and Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation, and wondered how the Christian holy fool tradition would face up to the Foucauldian critique, which I still saw epistemologically, as basically interpreting nonsense (itself conceived in a Wittgensteinian framework).

It is probably impossible to deny, however, that I was attracted to all this because of my charismatic background (to which I said farewell theologically in a contribution to this book), and this was brought home to me when I heard someone play the DC talk song “Jesus Freaks”.

So if anyone is going to be bothered to read my thesis, I would suggest the following soundtrack:

• DC Talk, Jesus Freak
• REM, Saturn Rising
• Joan Osbourne, Crazy Baby
• U2, Staring at the sun
• Tom McCrae, Human Remains
• The Divine Comedy, Your Daddy’s Car
• The Blue Nile, Family Life
• Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds (among others), God is in the House
• Mew, Comforting Sounds
• Joni Mitchell, Blue
• Bonnie Prince Billy, I see a darkness
• Jeff Buckley, Lilac Wine

I’d like to point out that I’m not saying any of these are good songs – the first should convince us of that – but they may have guided my thought for good or ill in the course of writing.

We could go on and mention films (Fight Club, Wedding Crashers, etc.), but that could go on for ever. I think the novels that could accompany the thesis are more enlightening, and they would perhaps include:

• Dostoevsky, Demons, Brothers Karamazov, the Idiot (obviously)
• Flaubert, The Temptations of Saint Anthony
• Iris Murdoch, Under the Net
• Kafka, The Trial.

But I would be much more willing to stand by the quality of these! Curiously, I barely referred to them in the thesis, for which I was bizarrely criticised in my defence. Milbank wanted more Dostoevsky. But then, I think that’s because he was reading Rowan at the time…

Having spent some time sitting at Ben’s feet in Durham, I had gotten used to meeting people that knew him. There are many, I think, that learnt to pray with him, thought through problems and explored new worlds in his company. But when I later met Ben at the Society for the Study of Theology, I discovered that he had something of a following. Every year, Ben would present his reflections on something that had perked his interest that year – a poem by Herbert, a turn of phrase in John of the Cross, or a biographical detail about Barth – and share these thoughts in what would always be an entertaining, and well attended, paper.

It is perhaps in this context of academia that I learnt Ben’s best feature. He was oblivious to judgement. Seemingly unaware of who was watching him, Ben would repeatedly commit apt and hilarious indiscretions that I refuse to believe were unintended. He was a master of the art of being inappropriate. He was always visible, always audible: you couldn’t miss him when he threw away a comment. In a variety of senses, he was too big for academia. He didn’t fit.

I’m going to miss Ben because he taught me not to fit in and showed me how to do it. He pushed me to resist following paths that are already laid out for us. So often brushed aside as a polite and potty vicar, Ben was the least orthodox of priests. Not because of his sermons, his articles or book, but because of his laugh.

My question is: what kind of literature should I give them to read? The course should result in a thesis proposal but nothing more. The program in general covers liberation theology, inculturation theology, feminist theology, postcolonial theology and that branch of the discipline. It should be methodical, and should prepare them for taking their first steps into research.

My thoughts so far have included:

Boff, Introduction to Liberation Theology.

Tanner, Theories of Culture.

Something by Sugirtharajah

Maybe some sections of Said’s Orientalism (with a thought to the fact that they will be engaging in data collection).

A chapter or two by de Certeau.

“Can the Subaltern speak?” by Spivak.

But to be honest, I don’t know Tanner’s work very well, and feel a little out of my depth. Any suggestions would be very welcome. They will have already read these books from this course that I am teaching at the moment. So no repetitions. Otherwise, the options are many.

On the 25th June, we celebrated the 25th anniversary of his death, which is being marked by books, conferences, etc. There’s also a conference coming up in Lund on The politics of life which I’m really frustrated to miss.

And then, just to make us really happy, Berkeley library have published as mp3 files most of the Collège de France lectures that are also available in book form! All that scouring the net is now over: they’re here. And they’re mostly of great quality too. Even if your spoken French is as rusty as mine, it only takes a couple lectures of getting used to the voice and style and you can really start taking the lectures in. This includes the theologically relevant governmentality lectures on Security, Territory and Population, and the unique economic analyses, Birth of Biopolitics. There are also the lectures I summarised earlier this year, The Courage of Truth.

There are also some lectures there in English (including those previously published as Fearless Speech), so lack of French doesn’t hinder your enjoyment.

Update: I forgot to mention that French mag Le Point published in Jule one of the unpublished interviews with Foucault with the bold title “Foucault was not revolutionary”. Not really unpublished this time (they did this in 2004 too): it was Roger-Pol Droit that did some interviews in 1975 and has now published them as a book in French called “Interviews“. My thanks to Morthen Sørlie for keeping me on my toes in this respect!

Joy…