Convulsing Bodies: Religion and Resistance in Foucault

March 10, 2015
Convulsing Bodies: Religion and Resistance in Foucault

One of the distinctive pleasures of being Director of the Center is to be able to host events in which we, the community of Harvard Divinity School, take time to attend to each other’s study, teaching, research, and writing. Among such moments, one of my favorites is the series we have hosted since 2010 on new faculty books. The events are straightforward: the faculty member agrees to share his or her book with us in this public form; she invites two or three colleagues to be discussants, to respond in their own way to the book, highlighting themes, raising questions, showing the audience the implications and limits of the book. At the session itself, the author speaks first, dealing in as straightforward a way as possible with some direct questions: How did you come to write this book with this particular focus? What were you trying to accomplish, personally and as a contribution to your field and to the wider community? In turn, the discussants share their insights, and then the time (usually about 90 minutes) is filled out with further discussion among the author, discussants, and audience.

A stellar example in this series occurred on Tuesday evening, March 10, when our book was Convulsing Bodies: Religion and Resistance in Foucault by Mark Jordan (Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Christian Thought). Jordan reflected on his devoted study over past decades to the writings of Michel Foucault, Foucault’s intense and passionate meditations on the body and its states, words struggling to account for experience, and religion disruptively felt and intensely written across an array of bodily and spiritual sites and happenings. Jordan put the book in context of his own work in recent years; his opening remarks thus powerfully disclosed the intersection of what we study, what we write, and how religion is lived across the panorama of human experiences.

Discussants were Amy Hollywood (Elizabeth H. Monrad Professor of Christian Studies), Mayra Rivera Rivera (Associate Professor of Theology and Latina/o Studies), and James Bernauer, SJ (Kraft Family Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Christian-Jewish Studies, Boston College). Each is a respected expert on the issues of body and soul, words and the ineffable, and close readers of the works of Foucault; each opened up new perspectives on Jordan’s meditations on Foucault, deepening and widening our understanding of the very issues Convulsing Bodies puts before us, highlighting a still wider range of social and political implications latent in Foucault’s — and Jordan’s — writing.

There are still three more book events this semester, all at 5:15PM in the Center Common Room:

March 26, Jocelyne Caesari’s The Awakening of Muslim Democracy: Religion, Modernity and the State; discussants:  Ousmane Kane, Leah Greenfeld (Boston University)

April 14, Kevin Madigan’s Medieval Christianity: A New History; discussants: Luis Giron-Negron, Amy Hollywood

April 20, Frank Clooney’s His Hiding Place Is Darkness: A Hindu-Catholic Theopoetics of Divine Absence; discussants:  Jorie Graham, Kimberley Patton, Catherine Cornille (Boston College).

All these events are open to Harvard and to the wider community, so if you are in the area, please do stop in.

—By Francis X. Clooney, Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions

See also: Faculty Book