Different Subjects: Postmodern Selves in Psychology and Religion

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John Blevins
Candler School of Theology at Emory University

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Abstract:

The process by which the self is constituted—the question of human subjectivity—is a recurrent theoretical question within postmodern thought. If modernity is characterized by universal conceptions of human beings and by a confidence in the possibility of rationality to ascertain and articulate the truth, then the critiques of these epistemological assumptions—the kind of critical discourse we generally associate with postmodernity—arose by various cultural theorists calling into question the very notion of a unified, unitary self. This paper will explore these postmodern critiques in light of the scholarship of two important cultural theorists, Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau. 

Foucault’s cultural historical analysis is particularly central for the questions raised in this paper because it explores the dangers of the notion of modern subjectivity, specifically in light of human sciences such as psychology and in light of the pastoral power of Christianity. And yet, Foucault died as he was exploring various ways to resist these demands of the modern subject. His ethical project of creating oneself aesthetically through certain re-appropriations of classical concepts of caring for the self is intriguing and tantalizing; it is also, sadly, unfinished. Certeau, a Jesuit scholar and psychoanalyst, took the kind of resistance Foucault hoped to articulate further than Foucault was able. Drawing on Foucault’s own ideas—Foucault was an important interlocutor for de Certeau—he sought to create alternative readings of psychoanalysis and Christian mysticism that can describe another understanding of human subjectivity based not on unity, rationality, and universality but on multiplicity, myth, and possibility. Certeau sought to articulate these alternatives not only in theoretical abstractions but in descriptions of the tactics of everyday life lived outside of the scope of the normative and normalizing lens of modernity.

I have seen Buddy* for weekly pastoral counseling sessions since September of 1999.  Our first meeting took place in the Mental Health Unit of the outpatient HIV clinic in Atlanta’s publicly-funded health system—the Grady Infectious Disease Program.  Prior to starting doctoral studies I had worked in the field of HIV public health and mental health for seven years as a chaplain, counselor, and member of the clinical faculty in the medical school at Emory University.  Buddy was guarded in our first sessions.  At the time I thought he was wise to be guarded.  I still do.  My reasons for appreciating the wisdom in his defenses come about not because I think I have been an uncaring or unskilled pastoral counselor with Buddy.  In fact, I would argue that our eight-year counseling relationship testifies to the strength of our therapeutic alliance and his improved daily functioning testifies, at minimum, to the limits of any harm I have done while also providing a basis for me to claim that the counseling has done Buddy some good.  So why, then, do I believe that Buddy was wise to be guarded?  I believe so because I find myself always uneasy at the dangers of the theories and theologies I employ in pastoral counseling.  Their dangers lie, in my opinion, in their normative claims of human beings and human subjectivity. 

On the day I first met Buddy in 1999 he was a 58 year-old white, gay man living with AIDS.  He was accessing a public health system that had not always treated him with respect, much less compassion.  He was under the care of a psychiatrist who had involuntarily committed him to an inpatient psychiatric unit with a diagnosis of bi-polar disorder, most recent episode hypomanic with psychotic features.  He was sitting across from a man who represented  Christianity, a religious tradition whose followers—family members and friends from Buddy’s rural, middle-Georgia childhood—had explicitly condemned him to hell. 

As I reflect on that first meeting, I remember that Buddy was not the only one guarded.  I, too, was anxious because I found myself with less and less ground to maneuver in clinical practice due to the normative assumptions grounding the psychodynamic psychological theory that formed the foundation of my doctoral studies.  As an out gay man in the program, I had, from the first time we read psychoanalytic texts, raised sharp critiques about the performances of “calm violence”1 these theories could authorize (in fact, had authorized).

Buddy was guarded as he met with me for the first time in the fall of 1999 because he rightly realized that I was someone who could not approach our conversations together with a benign neutrality; he realized that I was someone who possessed the knowledge of a number of disciplines—psychiatric, psychological, and theological in nature—which had a capacity to perform a disciplinary function in Buddy and his life.  All of these disciplines are built on epistemic perspectives that could be utilized to name Buddy as a psychotic, a pervert, or a sinner; the fact that each of these disciplines could also employ other perspectives does not nullify the potential contained in each of them to define Buddy as the wrong kind of human being.  In this paper, I will explore the capacity of psychological and theological discourses to name us as human beings and define human subjectivity, using my work with Buddy as a context from which to describe both the dangers our discourses present and the possibilities for alternatives. 
The critical scholarship of the French cultural historian Michel Foucault will serve as a basis for exploring these questions.  His analysis is particularly relevant in this context because it raises as a central concern the problem of the modern self, the seeming certainty and fixity of our subjectivity as a fact.  Psychology and theology are discourses (among others) that create the lens by which we make normative claims about human beings and human behavior and they make sense of experience by creating systems and patterns in order to make sense of the broad mix of complex and contradictory events of modern life.  For Foucault, these productions of truth are problematic.  They inevitably create disciplinary structures that seek to contain and limit human experience and human subjectivity.  Western cultural discourses provide us with a normative picture of human beings only by creating and naming the deviants who fall outside that norm.  They provide meaning to human experience only by rendering events that do not fall into our systems and patterns of meaning-making either dangerous or invisible.  Foucault was not interested in some existential search for the authentic self but in uncovering how changes in discourses and ways of knowing led to new assumptions of the self-evident “givenness” of human experience and by tracing backwards how the discourses that interpret human experience in the present are built upon earlier discourses and practices from the past.  Following the development of this project over the course of his writing, one sees Foucault turn his critical gaze to a number of systems of thought.   This paper will focus on Foucault’s argument developed in The Order of Things, one of his earlier works from the 1960s, and from his later scholarship on the Christian pastorate in the late 1970s and early 1980s. 

Growing out of his later critical scholarship on the question of subjectivity in the context of Christian pastoral practices of self-knowledge, Foucault began to articulate an alternative which focused on practices of formation of subjectivity that might resist the normative demands of modernity’s discourses; as he began to formulate this alternative, he described it as an ethical system based on earlier Greek practices of care of the self.  The contours of this idea of ethical practices of self-formation were left unexplored by Foucault; he died in 1984 in the midst of tracing those contours.  Other scholars—most notably scholars in postmodern and poststructuralist studies—have taken up that work.  Having summarized Foucault’s critical perspective, this paper will turn to the work of one of those other scholars—Michel de Certeau—to explore the “practices of freedom”2 that might offer ways to resist modernity’s normative demands and fashion our selves differently.

Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and the Unconscious in Foucault

“Once I got older, my dad quit hitting me because he knew I could hurt him worse.  And then my piano lessons, opera records, tennis matches and writing simply made me some mystery in his eyes.  He never knew me.”

“You were a queer kid and you’re father didn’t understand that.”

“Well, yes, but it’s more than that.  I don’t honestly care that my father couldn’t understand that I was a queer kid.  Hell, being a queer kid saved me.  It got me away from him and out of Griffin and into life.”  (Conversation with Buddy, Spring 2003)

The predominant hermeneutic of psychodynamic psychology provides the following picture: Because his father was abusive, Buddy never formed attachments to his father in his early childhood; this prohibited Buddy from experiencing an idealized self-object, someone “larger-than-life” in Buddy’s mind whom Buddy could aspire to emulate.  Buddy could not rely on him as a psychic object by which he might navigate the Oedipal crisis.  The result was a narcissistic, primitive homosexual.  Buddy’s protestations that he was not bothered by his father’s lack of understanding are merely psychic defense mechanisms to avoid the pain of his narcissistic wounds.  Of course, Buddy cares that his father couldn’t understand him; he needed that fatherly understanding and now suffers from systemic personality deficits because it was missing.  This is not Buddy’s fault; this is his father’s doing. 

In this description, Buddy is primitive, and suffers from an axis II personality disorder.  It is the close-ended conclusion of orthodox psychoanalytic interpretation that makes a claim to see Buddy not as a sinful sodomite but as a pathetic child-like homosexual.  Buddy is not vilified; he is pitied.  I would never consciously use this hermeneutic to make sense of Buddy’s life, but I did become trapped in its influence: “You were a queer kid and your father didn’t understand that.”  The homosexual child must, of course, have wanted his father’s approval; the adult gay man must, of course, still be dealing with the psychic wounds of the father’s violent disapproval.  Buddy responded not by denying that dimension of his experience, but by making the story more complex. 

A good deal of Foucault’s early research in the 1950s and 1960s consisted of a critical analysis of the function of psychological theory in Western modernity.  In The Order of Things, which was released in France in 1966, Foucault endeavored to show how psychology (and other human sciences3) constituted the modern human subject as a clear, certain, universal entity.  According to Foucault, psychology contained a particularly strong power over its object of study, the human being, as it provided a clear lens by which to see and name and study that object.  From this perspective, our contemporary self-understanding is not intrinsic, but is, rather, the product of the ways in which the human sciences make specific truth claims about what it means to be human.  Foucault found any discourse that had the power to give rise to modern self-understanding particularly dangerous because it also inevitably limited alternative understandings, experiences, and subjectivities that remained hidden from view simply because they did not correspond to the language

In the later chapters of The Order of Things, Michel Foucault intended to show the particular mechanisms by which psychology constituted the modern self.  In tracing this development, Foucault contended that psychological theory developed claims of function and norm.  Throughout the nineteenth century, psychological study proliferated in areas relating to functions over and above those areas relating to norms.  An emphasis on this first pole created a tension in psychology:  a study focused on human functioning must observe both normal and abnormal functioning, which required the full breadth of divergent human behaviors– both those that met the norm of healthy functioning and those that did not– to be considered. 

The twentieth century marked a change in emphasis to the norm.  In this change, epistemological tension disappeared because psychology now had an internal coherence.  The study of normal or abnormal functioning was subsumed under the criterion of the norm which, by its very definition, provided tremendous ontological weight as it classified human beings themselves rather than specific behaviors.  Norms provide criteria of legitimacy; they tell us what it means to be a human being in the episteme of psychology.  This psychological human is a quintessentially modern subject: the self.  The norms of psychology invent the self. When the norm became the primary emphasis in psychological study, those who fell outside it became different kinds of human beings from those who stayed inside.  Though this change in psychology was revolutionary, it occurred without any epistemological revolution because the pole demarcated on one end by functions and on the other end by norms did not change.  The only change, a decisive one, came by privileging the norm over the functions.4

There were, however, dimensions in psychological discourse that prevented the clear and full articulation of the modern subject; those dimensions were first explored in a growing awareness that rationality and cognition could not account for the breadth of human experience.  As it focused on norms, psychology pushed toward and past the limits of consciousness and rationality because those norms establish functions in ways that cannot be mapped only within conscious thought.  We may not be aware of norms, functions they inaugurate, or the rules they demand even though they operate upon us.  We are aware of some behaviors that we ended up performing without employing reason alone.  In attempting to articulate norms within this terrain beyond rationality, psychology faced an epistemic challenge.  As such, Foucault claims, “the human sciences speak only within the element of the representable, but in accordance with a conscious/unconscious dimension, a dimension that becomes more and more marked as one attempts to bring the order of … norms to light.”5

As psychology proliferated into realms of inquiry no longer bounded by consciousness, psychoanalysis played a central, unique role.  Up until Freud’s discovery of the unconscious (and Foucault credits Freud with that discovery6), psychology could only refer obliquely to the realms beyond rationality in its theories. But psychoanalysis was a form of discourse which entered headfirst into the unconscious, reaching over conscious representations into the unconscious itself.  Once there, psychoanalysis glimpsed the strange operation of norms as they played out in the unconscious by means of Death, Desire, and the Law (which functioned as inverses of the  norms and rules and systems).7  This capacity of psychoanalysis to enter into the realm of the unconscious moved psychology beyond the limits of the conscious representations in human beings; paradoxically, however, in exercising this capacity, psychoanalysis also spelled the demise of the object of study for the human sciences: the modern human being.  This demise occurred because modern subjectivity—the “authentic self”—was grounded on epistemic universals and those universals could not be articulated once the unconscious entered the epistemic field.  In this way, then, psychoanalysis functioned as a counter-science in that it worked backwards, undoing the universal subject.8  
This “undoing” signaled the death of the modern human subject: “If those arrangements [of the human sciences] were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility– without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises– were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”9 

By the end of The Order of Things Foucault has articulated an argument that undoes the certainty of subjectivity and makes any appeal to a readily apparent essential “self” impossible (he does this, at least, if you accept the terms of his argument).10  But, if psychological theory—particularly psychological theory informed by psychoanalysis—opens the door for thinking of human beings outside of essential norms, then why does Foucault call it a “calm violence?”  He does so because he distinguishes between the unknowability of psychological theories that attempt to map the unconscious and the certainty of psychological practices that endeavor to strengthen the “authentic self” to withstand the impulses of the unconscious.  For Foucault, psychology is an epistemic discourse marked by ambiguity and a clinical practice uncomfortable with that ambiguity and demanding clarity and norms.  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a scholar in gender theory and queer theory describes this tension between theory and practice well:

Psychoanalytic theory, if only through the almost astrologically lush plurality of its overlapping taxonomies of physical zones, developmental stages, representational mechanisms, and levels of consciousness, seemed to introduce a certain becoming amplitude into discussions of what people are like– only to turn, in its streamlined trajectory across so many institutional boundaries, into the sveltest of metatheoretical disciplines, sleeked down to such elegant operational entities as the mother, the father, the preoedipal, the oedipal, the other or Other.  Within the less theorized institutional confines of intrapsychoanalytic discourse, meanwhile, a narrowly and severely normative, difference-eradicating ethical program has long been sheltered under developmental narratives and a metaphorics of health and pathology11 

Psychological discourses illuminating psychoanalytic theory provide complicated narratives of the powerful forces of the unconscious playing out in individual lives.  But at the same time they require tightly controlled (and controlling) clinical practices predicated on broad universal descriptions of human subjectivity and normative claims of health.  Psychology’s effort to contain the unknowability of its own discourse, a discourse which acts as a contagion on the human sciences and threatens them with their very undoing, always leaves it vulnerable to the temptation to function as a disciplinary system of power. 

This temptation is the danger which Buddy wisely sought to avoid as he began to see me for pastoral counseling.  Our conversation over his father’s failure to understand Buddy demonstrates how deftly Buddy avoided this temptation in the practice of our pastoral counseling sessions.  He did so by switching cause and effect.  The psychodynamic paradigm sees the father’s absence as the cause of psychic derailment with the effect of a narcissistic homosexual.  But in Buddy’s narrative, his opera records, tennis matches and writing were present before his father’s rejection.  Buddy was a queer kid in Griffin, Georgia prior to the conflicts that played out in his relationship with his father.  His father’s inability to accept Buddy’s subjectivity (a subjectivity suspect and threatening for rural, central Georgia in the 1950's) led him to attempt to control, to discipline, to “clamp down” on Buddy.  Cause and effect reversed.  And from this point of view, the psychoanalytic interpretation operates just like the father: to discipline the queer child, not through physical violence but through pathologized personality.  Both seek to limit Buddy’s ability to claim a queer subject position.  Buddy told the story from another perspective; his queerness may have led to painful confrontations with his father.  But that queerness also saved him by making him a subject utterly foreign to an abusive father.  Being an undefined/undefinable subject created a line of escape. 

By distinguishing between psychological theory and practice, Michel Foucault began to develop an inquiry into the performance of power that receives its authority from cultural discourses.  This exploration of power marked Foucault’s work in the period following The Order of Things.  The first sustained analysis occurred in his text Discipline and Punish, in which Foucault described disciplinary power in modernity.   As he explored these questions of power in the contexts of criminality and sexuality, Foucault demonstrated that this disciplinary policing power had become pervasive, entering into all the aspects of living. 

In his subsequent writing, Foucault explored the connections between this form of disciplinary power and pastoral power in Christianity.  Contemporary Christian theology tends to understand pastoral practices as intentional, thoughtful responses to a person in crisis in order to offer compassionate care.  The pastoral practices that Foucault described were more pervasive than that definition; they were practices of self-reflection and confession in order to know both one’s sinful status before God and one’s capacity to follow God’s will by resisting that sin through God’s graceful care.  When Buddy expressed his initial wariness at entering into counseling with me, he was aware that the discipline of pastoral counseling drew upon Christian theology as well as psychology.  Foucault’s exploration of the Christian pastorate explains why Buddy’s wariness with the theories employed in the counseling room should not be limited to psychology; the practices of Christianity that arose from Christian theology served as a powerful example of this disciplinary power.  In order to understand the ways in which the Christian pastorate set the stage for describing a normative human subject—a universal self—we need to understand the dimensions of Foucault’s analysis and the connections between pastoral power and the discourse and practice of psychology.

Foucault and Pastoral Power

“I’ve loved three men: Jarle, the Dutchman– we parted ways on good terms; Jeff, the Australian– INS refused his application for a work visa since he was nothing but a faggot coming to the States to be with his faggot lover; and Michael– he died of AIDS in Crawford Long Hospital.  Michael and I talked on the phone nightly in the weeks before he died, but I couldn’t bring myself to go down there to see him.  He told me he loved me, he told me thank you for everything.  I miss them all. Getting INS approval for Jeff to come to America was utterly impossible impossible.  And we like to assume that circumstances are different today.  Don’t be so sure.  Americans have come to tolerate or even seek out us faggots when they need someone fashionable or witty.  Someone to play the gay minstrel show.  But this country will turn on us in a heartbeat if asked to see our relationships as anything more than frivolous or childish or titillating.  Americans don’t want to see us as fully human, as having relationships that matter.  Jeff could not come here twenty years ago; he would not be able to come here today.” If gay men actually celebrate our relationships and work on them so that we might learn something about what really matters in life, then we threaten the picture straight people are desperate to maintain about marriage.   Gay men are threatening whenever we step outside our approved roles in America.  (Conversation with Buddy, Spring 2003)

     There was a time, prior to the Enlightenment, when the ecclesiastical pastorate policed Western societies.  When Western European culture was universally a Christian culture, each member of the society had an obligation to seek her or his salvation: “The Christian society, the Christian societies, did not allow individuals the freedom to say, ‘Well, myself, I do not want to seek my salvation.’  Each individual was required to seek his salvation: ‘You will be saved, or rather, you must do everything that is required in order for you to be saved and we will punish you here in this world if you will not do what is necessary to be saved.’  The power of the pastor consists precisely in that he has the authority to require the people to do everything necessary for their salvation: obligatory salvation.”12

Of course, Christendom’s monolithic power has been dismantled, contemporary Western culture would no longer be described as a Christian society, and the obligatory salvation of Christian faith is no longer the requirement of each individual.  And yet, Foucault argues that although the pastoral practices of the church no longer operate through ecclesiastical channels, they are still very much alive and have entered into modern culture in other guises.  But how did this happen?  Christianity required constant self-inspection not only of sinful actions but of internal desires: “Christianity requires another form of truth obligation from faith.  Each person has the duty to know who he is, to try to know what is happening inside him, to acknowledge faults, to recognize temptations, to locate desires; and everyone is obliged to disclose these things either to God or to others in the community and, hence, to bear public or private witness against oneself.  The truth obligations of faith and the self are linked together.”13

While it is true that the pastoral practices of contemporary Christian life do not rely on Christian theology and ecclesiastical mandates to bring forth an obligatory salvation and members of our culture are not universally searching for salvation through the Christian church, in our contemporary culture we do rely on other sites for obligatory salvation as we bear witness against ourselves in order to help us become the well-adjusted individual adherent to the practices and demands of modern disciplinary power.   Christianity may no longer function as the state religion, but for Foucault this is by no means evidence of the death of Christian pastoral power.  Rather, Foucault argues that this power has, since the start of the renaissance in the sixteenth century, merely entered into the culture in the institutions and practices of modernity.  This Christian exercise of power has permeated the entire culture and its secular institutions.  As such, Foucault claims: “Now we must ask what happened in the sixteenth century.  The period which is characterized not by the beginning of a dechristianization but by the beginning of a christianization-in-depth.”14 

This “christianization-in-depth” of Western modernity occurred through the practices established by the Christian pastorate.  These pastoral practices–practices of confession not only of physical acts but also of internalized desires, practices of self-examination and control–set into place in the West new mechanisms of surveillance and disciplining, which have proliferated into such diverse discourses as psychiatry, criminology, and the human sciences.  For Foucault, the psychoanalyst’s couch is not far removed from the Christian confessional. Christianity developed new mechanisms that set the terms by which we might redeem ourselves in relation to our sinful failings.  Pastoral power represented the institutionalization of these mechanisms, requiring of the faithful an endless policing of actions and also an endless searching of desires, thoughts, and wishes.  These pastoral practices required a constant vigilance against the dangerous mortal sins that sexuality encouraged.  That vigilance was self-imposed by our own watchful, worried introspections and it was enforced in the elaborate system of the confessional and its requirement that we recite both sinful sexual actions and sinful sexual thoughts.

These Christian practices created mechanisms for self-examination that still function in many of the institutions of the secular modernity: the clinic, therapy room, courts, and classroom.  Once these practices were adopted by therapeutic practitioners relying on psychological theory, they made self-examination an imperative in Western modernity.  The epistemology of psychology, coupled with the secular pastoral practices of self-examination and confession, function to tell us the “truth” of human beings.  Secular pastoral power allures us with the promise that if we become experts in these epistemologies, we will possess the knowledge that will save us as we uncover the deepest truths of ourselves.  They prove so alluring because they create the notion of “an authentic self,” a notion that Foucault had found so troubling in The Order of Things.  To demonstrate the ways in which the Christian pastorate ushered in the concept of “selfhood,” Foucault contrasted pastoral practices with earlier Greek and Roman practices.

In Christian thought, the believer undertook a number of specific actions of prayer, contemplation, and confession because those actions allowed for a renunciation of a fallen self–they were necessary for salvation.  In earlier Greek and Roman culture, the citizen lived under certain moral demands (which Christian culture had largely adopted by the first centuries of the common era) in order to fashion an ethical life.  The difference is that the earlier Greek and Roman ethical telos was to create an ethical self whereas the Christian ethical goal was to renounce the self, which was already known and real and corrupt, in order to achieve salvation. 

As Christendom waned with the rise of the renaissance and the growing Enlightenment, a growing chorus of critics sought to dislodge the demands of Christian morality from the culture because they had come to see those demands as oppressive.  The solution, these critics said, was to encourage “the authentic self” to emerge from beneath the superstition of a religion these critics saw as irrevocably irrational and oppressive.  The problem with such campaigns, however, was that Christianity had not introduced the moral demands that the critics found so oppressive (those demands had been adopted by early Christians from the larger Greek and Roman culture) but that it had invented “the authentic self.”  The reformers misunderstood the mechanisms that had led to the cultural patterns and institutions they held to be so pervasively oppressive.  Those mechanisms consisted not of uniquely Christian moral demands but of the modern experience of the self as a given, certain entity.  Modern reformers sought to change the codes by which we understood the moral value or cost of our actions but the “givenness” of our subjectivity was never questioned.  In fact, these reformers valorized modern subjectivity and believed that they were freeing the modern individual to experience her or his authentic self by overthrowing the oppressive codes. 
This led to various campaigns of liberation and to an obsession with uncovering the true self, an obsession marked in our present day by the theories of human sciences such as psychology and by the practices that attend such theories, such as psychotherapy.  These efforts were a distraction according to Foucault, a proverbial rabbit-hole, because they promised a utopia while doing nothing to unsettle the real problem–the idea that we could understand human beings with ontological certainty.  He was, instead, interested in exploring the historical ethical ideal of care of the self that had been so central in Greek and Roman culture; this ethical aspiration was categorically different from the modern concept of coming to know one’s authentic self by progressing past earlier delusions:

MF: We have hardly any remnant of the idea in our society that the principal work of art which one must take care of, the main area to which one must apply aesthetic values, is oneself, one’s life, one existence….

Q: But isn’t the Greek concern with the self just an early version of our self-absorption, which many consider a central problem in our society?

MF: You have a certain number of themes–and I don’t say that you have to reutilize them in this way–which indicate to you that in a culture to which we owe a certain number of our most important constant moral elements, there was a practice of the self, a conception of the self, very different from our present culture of the self.  In the Californian cult of the self, one is supposed to discover one’s true self, to separate it from that which might obscure or alienate it, to decipher its truth thanks to psychological or psychoanalytic science, which is supposed to be able to tell you what your true self is.  Therefore, not only do I not identify this ancient culture of the self with what you might call the Californian cult of the self, I think they are diametrically opposed.  What happened in between is precisely an overturning of the classical culture of the self.  This took place when Christianity substituted the idea of a self that one had to renounce, because clinging to the self was opposed to God’s will, for the idea of a self that had to be created as a work of art.”15

For Foucault, the modern idea of liberation simply reinforced the problematic reliance on the certainty of the “true self.”  The pervasiveness of our obsession with this true self reveals itself on the bookshelves of the “self help” section at our local bookstores; within the pages of magazines filled with advice columns and articles designed to tell us the truth about human beings through the media of hair-care products, diet regimens, sex therapists, or relationship experts; or in the topics of afternoon talk shows such as Oprah or Dr. Phil in which the studio and viewing audience are exhorted to uncover the secret potential that is locked in their inner being.  These are the twenty-first century manifestations of this “Californian cult of the self” that Foucault had described in 1984.  In direct opposition to this self-obsession, Foucault was interested in a different, present-day, experience of subjectivity.  Though he refusedto lay out a clear, certain model of what this ethical imperative should look like, Foucault, nonetheless, did make clear that he believed that this historical understanding of ethics as a practice of care for the self contained important possibilities for us.

This question was important not only in an historical analysis but in our time because Foucault believed that modern culture had lost its capacity to think about ethics:
What strikes me is that in Greek ethics people were concerned with their moral conduct, their ethics, their relations to themselves and to others much more than with religious problems.…  Well, I wonder if our problem nowadays is not, in a way, similar to this one, since most of us no longer believe that ethics is founded in religion, nor do we want a legal system to intervene in our moral, personal, private life.  Recent liberation movements suffer from the fact that they cannot find any principle on which to base the elaboration of a new ethics.  They need an ethics, but they cannot find any other ethics than an ethics founded on so-called scientific knowledge of what the self is, what desire is, what the unconscious is, and so on.”16

Foucault believed there was value in interrogating Greek and Roman culture, not in a desire to return to a golden pre-modern, pre-Christian age, but in order to gain some capacity and space to imagine another concept of ethical living, of human subjectivity, of a relationship to oneself, and thereby, to others.
For Foucault, this aesthetic practice–fashioning one’s life according to this ethics of care–allows for a different relationship to the pervasive power that infuses modern life.  In an interview granted only five months before his death, Foucault was asked, “Can this care of the self, which possesses a positive ethical meaning, be understood as a sort of conversion of power?”  He replied: “A conversion, yes.  In fact it is a way of limiting and controlling power.…  In the abuse of power, one exceeds the legitimate exercise of one’s power and imposes one’s fantasies, appetites, and desires on others.…  It is the power over oneself that thus regulates one’s power over others.”17  In this interview, Foucault not only hints that this way of understanding ethical reflection and ethical living allows one to exercise some freedom over and against modern power (by virtue of the aesthetic task of creating one’s life) but also claims that this way of ethical living allows for ethical relationships with others.  For Foucault, care of the self is not an exercise in narcissistic self-absorption, as his answer in this interview shows:

Q: Doesn’t care of the self, when separated from care for others, run the risk of becoming an absolute?  And couldn’t this “absolutization” of the care of the self become a way of exercising power over others, in the sense of dominating others?

MF: No, because the risk of dominating others and exercising a tyrannical power over them arises precisely only when one has not taken care of the self and has become a slave of one’s desires.  But if you take proper care of yourself, that is, if you know ontologically what you are, if you know what you are capable of, if you know what it means to be a citizen of a city, to be the master of a household…, if you know what things you should and should not fear, if you know what you can reasonably hope for and, on the other hand, what things should not matter to you, if you know, finally that you should not be afraid of death–if you know all this, you cannot abuse your power over others.  Thus, there is no danger.  That idea will appear much later, when love of self becomes suspect and comes to be perceived as one of the roots of various moral offenses.18

Buddy’s descriptions of his relationships to men remind me that gay men have lived (and at times continue to live) their lives over and against dominant narratives such as psychoanalysis (which defines their relationships as infantile fixations and endless repetitions of immediate gratification) or Christian theology (which labels their relationship as sin and a dangerous threat to the sanctified marriage of the man and woman who embody the fullness of God’s intention for humanity.  Buddy’s experiences point out the challenge of forging and creating a life outside of the dominant cultural narrative, of figuring out the practices that contribute to subject formation differently.  Relationships with the three men he has loved were constrained by cultural and social prohibitions (in the case of Jarle), governmental regulations (in the case of Jeff), and the specter of AIDS (in the case of Michael).  And as he described the challenges of attempting to create the space for himself, Buddy reminds me that the mechanisms that have worked to constrain his life and relationships are still in place and all to well-equipped to limit gay relationships, gay lives.  Foucault’s ethics of care of the self are demanding.

Foucault’s Ethics After Foucault

John, I feel a bit like I’ve come undone.  Can you please come see me? (September 10, 2003)

Buddy’s life has changed in astounding ways in the last decade.  He used to live as a successful executive in Atlanta’s most exclusive neighborhood; today he lives in a studio apartment in a Salvation Army apartment building just south of Ponce de Leon Ave, a neighborhood known locally as So-Po.  In session after session, we’ve talked about the challenges– the pain and the fear and the surprising grace– of those changes.  I have often wanted to wrap up the last decade of his life in some “happily ever after” fiction thatcelebrates the wisdom he has found in the midst of these changes while ignoring the devastation wrought by having the life you have known ripped apart by a terminal illness that doesn’t kill you.  Buddy has been a patient mentor in showing me the dangers of flattening out the complexities of the events of anyone’s life.  He has gained wisdom but he has endured losses as well; his life cannot help but be complicated and ambivalent.

On September 10, 2003 the losses and regrets were haunting Buddy.  He called me at 6:00 AM on my cell phone; he needed to see me.  That afternoon as I sat with Buddy for two hours in his living room surrounded by photographs and letters and symbols of his life, he told story after random story of his past, often through a screen of tears and choked-back sobs:  “I don’t know who I am.  I don’t have an identity.  What has my life amounted to?”  Buddy had worked hard for four years to understand who he was in the midst of the seismic-fault changes he had experienced.  More and more, he had begun to see that his life today helped him to see experiences in new, valuable ways.  But on this day, that new vision was gone and Buddy was blinded by regrets.  I wanted to see Buddy again that week; I was concerned about him.  We agreed to meet the next day.  And on that day Buddy was not so desperate, so anxious.  Choking sobs did not erupt into his speech as they had the day before.  He had remembered again how to think about the wonderful, awful complexity of his life.  On this day, he could see both, recognizing that his life and the ways he has worked to understand it now are not simple or settled.  They never will be.

From Foucault’s perspective the churchly pastoral power of pre-modern Christendom is pervasive in contemporary culture.  One can glimpse that power in the secular epistemologies and practices that tell us who we modern human beings are.  His ethical alternative of care of the self was only articulated and never developed; Foucault died as he was exploring these ideas.  In the two decades since his death, however, various scholars—most notably, scholars in cultural theory—have developed this alternative in various ways.  An outstanding example of the kind of thinking that Foucault’s late research allowed is found in Judith Butler and her work that re-defines gender not as an essential dimension of human subjectivity but as a performance operating within and pushing against the confines of culture.19  In one of Butler’s more recent works—a text marked by a very different writing style than her earlier writing—Butler explores at length the question of human subjectivity in light of Foucault’s ideas.  This text, Giving an Account of Oneself, develops the idea that an experience of the self that is unsettled and ambiguous is a necessary precursor to an ethical life:

A theory of subject formation that acknowledges the limits of self-knowledge can serve as a conception of ethics and, indeed, responsibility.  If the subject is opaque to itself, not fully translucent and knowable to itself, it is not thereby licensed to do what it wants to ignore its obligations to others.  The contrary is surely true.  The opacity of the subject may be a consequence of its being conceived as a relational being, one whose early and primary relations are not always available to conscious knowledge…. Indeed, if it is precisely by virtue of one’s relations to others that one is opaque to oneself, and if those relations to others are the venues for one’s ethical responsibility, then it may well follow that it is precisely by virtue of one’s opacity to itself that it incurs and sustains some of its most ethical bonds.20

As Butler develops the ethical dimensions of a subjectivity characterized by an opaque selfhood, she argues that the task of finding a way to maneuver outside the limiting norms of modern discourses is indeed an ethical choice.  For Butler, the decision to negotiate these discourses is risky—we put our “self” at risk because in questioning the “truthfulness” of these discourse our own selves might become unrecognizable.  This becomes an ethical question—an ethical risk—when I have to decide if I will allow an encounter with the other who is not like me to unsettle my sense of “the way things are” and whether I will risk being changed and possibly to lose social power).  Invoking Foucault’s ideas, Butler names this ethical dimension the sign of virtue—for Foucault this risking of the self is a sign of virtue.21 

This is the core of the ethical challenge in my work with Buddy: am I willing to experience Buddy outside of the epistemic frame of the various discourses—psychological and theological discourses—that tell me who he is?  The complexity of Buddy’s life stands as a direct challenge to the adequacy of the two-dimensional perspective of the predominant psychologies and theologies that dominates modern, liberal Protestant pastoral theology.  But if I am going to engage in clinical practices with Buddy that might be informed by the ethical practices that Foucault imagined then I have to do more than deconstruct psychology or theology because deconstruction alone would have little to say to someone whose life has been torn apart.  What good is it to explore the deconstruction of Buddy’s sense of self when the various aspects of Buddy’s life that led to that sense of self have already been violently ripped away by a terminal illness that didn’t kill him?  When Buddy found out he had AIDS, he set out to live the last months of his life as fully as possible.  He sold and gave away possessions.  He spent lavishly and generously on himself and on others.  But he did not die.  Medical advances in HIV treatment kept Buddy alive; it is, however, a complicated life because he has lost so much of the life he knew and had worked to create.

In my mind, one of the weaknesses of some postmodern theory is that it fails to adequately describe the cost involved in the ethical question Foucault raises about the ways in which we might find new ways to fashion our selves.  That is a tall order– and a terrifying one.  The reality is that there are numerous reasons why we would choose to stay in the safety of our modern selfhood in which we know who we are.  If we are certain kinds of modern subjects—subjects with access to certain reservoirs of social power—we benefit materially from its rules and regulations.  Stepping outside of it is dangerous, lonely, and costly.  The failure of some post-modern thinkers to acknowledge the cost involved in “care of the self” leads to a too-simple expectation that choosing to leave our modern subjectivity behind is quite simple when in fact it is anything but simple.  It certainly has not been simple for Buddy.  Butler’s work is both demanding and helpful for informing my work with Buddy because she places the ethical dimensions of refusing the epistemic certainty of the discourses that create the modern self not on Buddy (he has already experienced the loss of many of those discourses) but on me as his pastoral counselor.  
In thinking about the ethical obligation of refusing certain discourses, there is a discourse that that neither Butler nor Foucault explores for its potential to provide ways of thinking outside of the epistemic certainty of the self.  That discourse is Christian theology.  Their reluctance is understandable, particularly in light of the role that Foucault assigns to Christian practices in giving the self an ontological substance.  In this light, how could we turn to Christian theology to think of the possibilities for ethical thought and practice by risking the loss of the self without running headlong into the discourse that is, according to Foucault, the foundation for the very thing—an ontological certainty of the human being—that we are trying to resist?  Are there any other genres of theological thought?  In fact there are.

How can we think theologically using Foucault’s or Butler’s perspectives?  How can we even think about the nature of God in the kinds of discourses that are fundamentally suspicious of ontological certainties and meta-narratives of transcendent truth? Foucault’s critiques provide a tool for laying bare our unexamined assumptions about human subjectivity in Western modernity.  But he provides us with few or no critiques regarding our theological assumptions about God.  He does say a bit about our theological assumptions regarding human beings and the pastoral practices those assumptions enable, thereby focusing on the role of the Christian pastorate in the formation of the modern human subject.  If we as Christians are to think more fully about Foucault’s ethical descriptions of care of the self, we need to think theologically because new reflections on God’s relationship to humanity can create new pastoral practices that are more than reconciling the sinful subject to God.  But what kind of theology can support that kind of reflection and give rise to those practices?  Negative theology.
Negative theology serves as a constant reminder that no language, no system of knowledge, and no formulation of Christian doctrines can contain the fullness of God because they are all products of human intellect and human intellect is not an adequate vehicle for fully comprehending the Divine.  As such, the negative tradition goes about negating the claims of our theologies, not because they are necessarily false but because they are inevitably incomplete and distorted.  In this way negative theology serves as an acknowledgment that our best, faithful attempts at writing about God and humanity may be caught in idolatrous self-interest.  In making this point, Mark Jordan says: “Negative theology is neither a grammatical caution nor a fringe phenomenon.  It is an event that rewrites Christian theology from scriptural exegesis through systematics to liturgy or pastoral care.  It confronts the whole of Christian theology with the clear-eyed reminder that human languages cannot say who God is or what God does, even (or especially) when they are truly sanctified.”22

Michel de Certeau, one of Foucault’s contemporaries, provides ways of thinking about the implications of negative theology in thought and practice today.  Certeau, a Jesuit scholar in philosophy, theology and psychoanalysis, serves as an important interlocuter for Foucault because he is asking many of the same questions and shares many of the same commitments as Foucault. In Certeau’s best-known (and many would argue, most influential) text for English readers—The Practice of Everyday Life—he equates the practices of the institutions of modernity (the institutions and systems of knowledge of which he and Foucault both are critical) with strategies.  He equates the practices that resist and maneuver around those institutions with tactics.23  Lacking institutional support, tactics are makeshift and improvisational.  They shift in their performance and, therefore, are not easily labeled by the discourses of institutions; they are subversive and unmappable.  Tactics are the practices by which we maneuver around the strategies of modern life.24

Like Foucault’s description of ethical practices, Certeau’s description of tactics provides a description for ways to resist modernity’s demands through the means of alternative subjectivities.  In a way distinct from Foucault, Certeau utilizes theology as a resource for thinking about and describing tactics.  When Certeau turns to the negative  (or mystical) theological tradition, the tactics he describes dethrone any essentialist subjectivities.

“Language That Has Become Uncertain of the Real”25: 
Thinking “God,” “Self,” and “Other” Beyond Theology

A few months after I began seeing Buddy he told me how he had hidden behind a bush at a bus stop outside of Grady’s HIV clinic because he saw a nurse walking up the sidewalk whom he had known socially before his life had been turned upside down.  He also told me that he fully remembers the day he was involuntarily committed into the psychiatric unit at Grady.  In the clinic, Buddy had been known by his legal name, Jerry.  The psychiatrist in the clinic had asked a perfectly logical question, “How are you doing today, Jerry?”  But Buddy did not want to be called that name anymore.  Not only did he refuse the name, he realized that the life that “Jerry” (Buddy had also used the name “Jerry” in his professional career prior to his illness) had known was over.  And so, he insisted to his medical provider that he was not Jerry but his twin brother, Buddy: “I showed up to Dr. Smith’s office insisting that Buddy had died.  ‘I’m not Jerry,’ I told Dr. Smith.  ‘I’m Buddy, Jerry’s twin brother.  Jerry is dead.’ Buddy retold this story with some embarrassment but he recounts it with clarity as to his intentions: he could not bear the thought of giving up the world—the social standing, the material possessions, and the career— he had known.  He now lived in a Salvation Army walk-up apartment and relied on a disability check from Social Security as his only source of income.  AIDS was supposed to have killed him; when it didn’t, he was not prepared for the life in front of him.  If he could only be a different person—someone who knew about his old life but would not have to live up to the expectations that old life demanded—he might be able to fashion something different.    “All I was wanted to do was to try and convince people that the Buddy who had lived this successful life as a professional was dead and that I could come back as my long-lost twin so that I start living this new life, whatever it was.”  When you live a socially-approved life and it gets stripped away from you, the challenge of re-building a new life is terrifying. 

Buddy has found a psychiatrist at Grady whom he likes and works well with.  He is on medications for a diagnosis of bi-polar disorder and Buddy feels that they help keep him on an even keel.  He has seen me, his “therapist,” for weekly visits for over eight years.  But it has not been the language or practices of psychiatry or therapy that have given Buddy the courage to create a new life.  Rather, Buddy has made sense of that task– and found the courage and support to undertake it– by spiritual means.  Buddy practices a form of Hindu meditation and contemplation with a guru and group of followers.  With their support, Buddy found the courage to “step into the abyss.”

Buddy spoke with me over a number of sessions about his belief that he needed to take that step and that from his own religious perspective, he was scared.  Because he knew that stepping into that abyss would consume him– he would no longer know who he was.  Buddy’s description of this Hindu spiritual practice bears strong similarities to the descriptions of encountering God in the apophatic Christian tradition.  Buddy knew his old life was gone; he needed to negate what he thought he knew in order to see a way to start to live a new life.  And Buddy found that he could gather the courage to allow such negation through spirituality and spiritual practice. 

In the final lines of The Order of Things, Foucault evokes the end of the modern self:  : “If those arrangements [of the human sciences] were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility– without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises– were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”26  For Certeau, this is the site from which mysticism emerges:  “Mysticism seems to emerge on beaches uncovered by the receding tide.”27  What, for Certeau, constitute mysticism and the negations of theology?  The apophatic tradition of mystic speech requires, for Certeau, three conditions: a place from which to think, write, and speak; a different conception of subjectivity; and a genre in which to write.28

The first condition—a site from which to think, write, and speak—is created in persons who are unshakably resolved in the truth of their beliefs, a belief that is beyond current language.  A belief that emanates from an encounter of the divine that cannot be narrated because language of the divine in this manifestation does not exist is, from the perspective of discourse, a belief in in nothing.  The will must desire resolutely a God who cannot be described or circumscribed by language.  This resolve leads to the founding of a space in which the subject can enter in which the objects of the world are absent because this space exists beyond the limits of experience.  In the resolute affirmation of the truth to which they hold (an affirmation of God which cannot be put into language), these believers who move into this space manifest a subjectivity which has no precedence in language.  This new subject is born in the act of exile and disappearance (it is, therefore, invisible and an exemplar of the tactical).  This is a subjectivity marked by a desire only for the God who desires the subject.29 

This space of “non-self” is the abyss into which Buddy felt he must enter.   He felt he must enter it because the cultural sites which provided him the anchors for understanding his self were no longer available.  Shaken by a resolve to live outside of those cultural sites which had earlier supported him, Buddy did not know how to name the life he was determined to live.  He was resolved to figure out a no thing because he believed in it.  Once he committed to this, he was exiled from the space of discourse because no one could make sense of his life.  He was seen (in his attempts to impersonate a non-existent twin brother) as psychotic and involuntarily committed to an inpatient stay in a publicly-funded psychiatric hospital.  When someone he knew from the cultural space he had inhabited before—the space of discourses that no longer made sense in Buddy’s life—he had to hide; he was compelled to become invisible. 

For Certeau, the entry into the space outside of language allows the second condition to be met.  From this space of (a non-I) subjectivity, a differently subjectivity is established when the “non-self”—the person who finds her/him self in experiences beyond language—speaks.  Mystic speech establishes a subjectivity of the person in the realm of discourse, in the material world of common life together.  But just as the “self” who is born in this act of utterance is a new subject, so too is the language that is recited a new language; earlier discourse are negated not because of their falsity but because of its inadequacy to narrate this new subjectivity.  In this dimension of negation, mystic speech does not rely on authorized statements emanating from another site from which it might repeat or comment under the approval of the institution that first uttered those statements.  It relies, rather, on a command from the object of desire—God.  In this act of speech, the “I” is defined on the basis of an encounter with God.  It and the God who creates it are unbound from the [institutional] world that is unable to support or define or understand them.  This is the mythos—the mythos of the uncentered self—that we have substituted for the old, modern discourse of the cosmos, a mythos of metaphysics.  This new mythos serves as the grammatical source for new language, new discourse.30

This was Buddy’s mythos.  Compelled to speak (first to his psychiatrist, then to his doctor, and then to me—a team of disciplinary experts), Buddy entered into the realms of culture which authorize and demand subjectivity as a different self.  In early sessions with Buddy, we discussed the issue of his name: was he “Buddy” or “Jerry?”  I found out that his given name was Jerry.  This had been the name he had been called in the medical clinic up until the day he was committed to an inpatient psychiatric unit because his legal name and the attendant cultural supports of that name (income statements, driver’s license, proof of residence, social security card) had been used to establish his “status” as an eligible patient.  When this man known as Jerry pronounced to his psychiatrist that Jerry was dead and that he was, in fact, Jerry’s twin brother, Buddy, he was deemed psychotic.  In fact, he was not.  Buddy knew quite well the distinctions and the continuities between “Jerry” and “Buddy.”  “Jerry,” he said, “is the person I used to be.  He wasn’t very nice.  In fact he was a nasty son-of-a-bitch.  I had to be like that in order to be successful in my field.  But not anymore.  Close friends and family used to call me Buddy.  They were the only ones.  Now that I’m trying to figure what it means to live with this damn disease, I don’t want to be Jerry anymore.  I’m Buddy.”  Unshaken in his resolve to live, Buddy was performing his self differently.  But this self was not completely foreign and alien to his old life.  He was speaking in new ways but he was not speaking in ways which were beyond comprehension.  The speech of his subjectivity was pronounced in a different dialect.  In doing so, Buddy was saying something new that was also a connection to all of the languages of his life that had gone before.

Buddy reminds us that the “I” who enunciates mystic speech is a new variety of subjectivity.  The mystic text is also a new variety of speech, never before narrated.  These new varieties fulfill the third condition for mystic speech: a new genre for communication.  The genre is not theology.  It is poesis; unbounded by established rules of construction, poesis consists of the experimental use of metaphors, turns of phrase, and concepts which are new and different.  The mystic text is a genre of writing that has no precedent.  In this new writing, the older texts are negated.  Mystic texts strive to claim and describe the ways in which they emanate from the very space where God speaks.  God’s utterance both founds the mystic text and is that which the mystic text communicates.  Mystic speech, for this reason, is always unstable and apophatic:  it is simultaneously in some relationship to the institution that authorizes language in regard to God and also outside that institution (since it is only speaking of the God of that institution in ways and manners which the institution has no language to understand) while simultaneously within that which authorizes the institution. 

Mystic speech claims that even if its assertions are distinct from the tradition of the authorized institution, it speaks of the same as what is said in the tradition.  It rejects tradition to say something new which, because it emanates from the space of the Divine, is the tradition.  We can compare these mystic ngations to poetry or prayer—and they certainly bear a closer resemblance to these forms than to dogmatic formulations—but they are in fact, neither; they are new.  In this way, the apophatic impulse in mysticism is not the end of language or the deconstruction of meaning.  Rather, the apophatic impulse of entering into a space beyond language is the necessary precursor to new languages and, therefore, new meanings.  Mysticism is the very site for the production of meaning; it does not lay down meaning once and for all but creates a space for loving desire and its effects.  Those effects consist of combination.  It is a combination that transforms; in this space God and the subject disappear as discrete “objects” of discourse.  “I” am one with God.31

I have never written anything about AIDS.  Maybe it is time to put some things to paper.  Perhaps a paper, essay, or story will evolve.  So much has been written that I doubt if I can contribute anything new except the story of my own experience and fears.  Why am I sill alive and healthy?  Why am I still here?  Who am I in light of all that’s gone on?  I’ve known about 65+ people who are now dead.  15 or 16 were real friends and now Doug, my friend, is dying.  I hate to watch.  He is my best & last long-term gay friend alive.  The closest thing to a brother I’ve got.  (Buddy’s personal journal, dated June 9, 1999)

These lines from Buddy’s journal are the precursor to new speech, mystic speech.  They serve as a preface for mystic speech as they demonstrate the three conditions that Certeau describes for such speech.  1) The words emanate from a space created by Buddy’s unshakable resolve that he has something to contribute—that his life holds value even if this belief is beyond the certainty of the culture he knows; 2) they are the utterance of someone who is a different subject, someone who asks, “Who am in light of all that’s gone on?”; and 3) they set the stage for a new form of communication, a new genre of language.  The vocabulary and the grammar for that new language is still unfolding in Buddy’s life; I attempt to understand its message in weekly meetings with Buddy. 

That attempt is the core of my pastoral work with him.  It reminds me of my own ethical obligations as Buddy’s counselor because Buddy’s new language is the attempt to speak outside of the discourses—psychological and theological discourses—that have been so violent in his life.  The ethical challenge for me is the recognition that the very forms of knowledge that mark my field of study and practice are the forms of knowledge Buddy is asking me to dethrone as epistemic guides in our work.  This is the ethical question of how we relate to others, how an “I” relates to an “other.”  Mary McClintock Fulkerson recognizes and describes well the temptation to “tame” the otherness of the another in Christian life:

The only way out of this dynamic of saming is to resist the impulse to allow the construction of the other to simply consolidate our own identity.  Yet the liberal impulse to include everyone is precisely the “generous” impulse that appears to open the doors wide, while it continues to set the terms on which one is allowed in… The empowering of the other from a theo/acentric grammar requires more than writing about the other…It requires us to be transformed by the other and to resist, where we recognize it, our domestication of the other.  If this were not true, we would be able to live with that which is truly not-us and resist the impulse to make it be like us as we connect.  The impulse of care for the other is inevitably shaped by the impulse to control, and the process of domestication is the most obvious feature of rendering that which is strange susceptible to control.”32

What is the alternative to this “impulse to care/control?”  In closing this paper with the question of the ethical dimensions of the pastoral relationship, I will turn back to Certeau and then to the kind of practice that Foucault named an ethical virtue.

If the space from which mystic speech originates is the [no]space from which the “I” speaks, then how does the “I” hear the other?  How does the other hear the “I”?  Certeau describes this founding space as a site in which opposites are united.  We have a capacity to hear the other and the other has a capacity to hear us by virtue of our willingness to lose our own native tongues.  This is one of the important qualities of this site of mystic utterance: the discourses of both “self” and “other” are put aside so that both might gain a capacity for new space.  This is the experience of jouissance—“ an erotic agony, a glorious folly, a heavenly madness.”33  Certeau makes clear that mystics (as opposed to schizophrenics?) cannot stay in this beautiful, painful space of jouissance.  They enter back into the realm of discourse but they bring with them echoes of this other space.  St. Theresa, for example, constructed her text and her community as consolations.  They function as “islands of utterance.”  Mystics, then, enter back into the transactions of culture but inhabit the culture differently; they can call upon this space carved out of discourse even in the midst of the institutions that discourse founds.  This, according to Certeau, is the function of St. Teresa’s Interior Castles: “ ‘Despite how strictly cloistered you are, you will take your delight [with you], for you can enter [this castle] and walk about in it at any time without asking leave from your superiors.’  This is exactly what St. Teresa does.”34    This meeting of “self” and “other” in this space is the possibility for pastoral practice that finds tactics to resist the strategies that psychological and theological discourse establish.  This is the ethical virtue that Foucault described and Butler developed, a virtue of saying no to clear subjectivity.

Conclusion: “Saying Loss Is An Other Beginning”

Buddy has taught me many things since the fall of 1999.  He has been a good language teacher in the speech of mystic negations.  I became unsettled and a bit “turned around” as I worked with Jerry in those first months; that disorientation is less pronounced but it still continues today.  It leaves me ambivalent as to the ways in which I can make sense of my pastoral counseling work with Buddy.  On the one hand, much of my academic work has consisted of unsettling therapeutic language, of calling it into question.  On the other hand, I feel compelled to show proficiency at clinical assessment and the use of psychological theories; I need to speak the language of the discipline.   In the end, I have come to realize that I am dealing not only with theories here, but with Buddy himself.  When I utilize psychological theories to make sense of my work with him, those same theories label and define him as a very particular kind of subject; violence is the price of clear subjectivity.  Buddy’s speech has unsettled those theories and informed alternative practices.  For Buddy, a subjectivity marked by access to social and class and economic power dissolved away in the face of AIDS.  The disciplines of modern discourse were all-too-willing to step into that void and define Buddy.  He resisted.  And in doing so, he found new a new sense of self, and new language to speak. 

The modern, Western self is a fiction.  The problem is that we have treated it as an ontological, metaphysical, existential fact.  In doing so, the weight of the self is a weapon against anyone who does not fit the norm of subjectivity that modernity demands.  The ethical task in front of us all is to improvise tactics against these norms.  The cost is high.  Human beings do not like to lose our selves.  But the possibility contained in the loss is one of another beginning:

“One more thing, perhaps, is mystical: the establishment of a space where change serves as a foundation and saying loss is an other beginning.  Because it is always less than what comes  through it and allows a genesis, the mystic poem is cnnected to the nothing that opens the future, the time to come, and, more precisely, to that single work, “Yahweh,” which forever makes possible the self-naming of that which induces departure.”35

NOTES