Philippe Chevalier , Michel Foucault et le christianisme (Lyon

In 1980, an American Philosophy and Theology student named James Bernauer organized a private meeting between Foucault and some fellow theologians.While it is only a guess what Foucault may have learned from that meeting, it proved to be influential for Bernauer, who went on to author and inspire a number of studies arguing for the relevance of Foucault for contemporary Christian theology.Phillip Chevalier's book follows this tradition, but has the advantage of unprecedented access to still unpublished materials from Foucault's archive, including some which may never be released for general publications.He is also a careful reader, has a superb knowledge of Foucault's work, and is familiar with the scholarship of early Christianity and with Catholic theology.All of which makes this book important for those interested in the in the question of Foucault and Christian theology, as well as for anybody interested in Foucault's late teachings.Chevalier characterizes Foucault's approach to Christianity as a series of trials and errors he compares to the many emendations and revisions of a manuscript, rather than the progressive refinement of an initial notion (230), an image that conveys Chevalier's conviction that there is unity beneath the different ways in which Foucault's thought crosses Christianity.While Chevalier's does not organize his book chronologically, it may be useful to enumerate the different approaches to Christianity that Chevalier's finds in Foucault's work.There is (1) a Nietzschean inspired discourse in the period immediately after Madness and Civilization where Christianity functions as the other of modernity (231-290); (2) a period extending from 1966-1976 where Foucault does not seem to be interested in Christianity as a historical totality, but only in specific aspects (Lectures from 1974(Lectures from -1975)); (3) Christianity as pastoral Governmentality, where Christianity seems mainly to be conceived as the matrix where the modern techniques of social regulation and control were developed and refined (Lectures from 1976(Lectures from -1978)); (4) a period, which covers 1979-1984, in which Foucault slowly develops his original understanding of Christianity as a 'precarious relationship to truth.' (291-348) Chevalier is interested in Christianity as a unified body of beliefs, practices, and institutions with a multi-secular history.Such a perspective seems to be prima facie foreign to Foucault's "project of an historiography that wants to remain oriented to local analysis, to carve out of the archive series of discourses or practices that cross themselves only strategically." (56, my translation) This tension between author and interpreter explains the somewhat complex organization of the book into three parts.The first, dealing with the methodological problem

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