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Chateaubriand and Foucault: a strange encounter in political theology

Vicomte de Chateaubriand and Michel Foucault seem to have nothing in common except that they are sometimes mentioned together under the umbrella-term of Counter-Enlightenment. My idea is to explore their relationship in the field of political theology. While in Chateaubriand’s works one can find abundance of utopian motifs, both Christian and universal (e.g. complete idea of Kingdom of Christ based on love and prayers in Atala, or leaf of grass piercing the mighty marble in René), Foucault’s name is more easily connected with heterotopias, the strange non-places, than with utopias ; however, alongside with Foucault’s Iranian episode and his remarks on the creation of ‘liberal utopias’, his latter theorizing on the hermeneutics of subject opens up space for envisaging different utopias which gain political dimension in the analyses of Cynics and the faculty of parrhesia as authentic political speech. Besides the charting of overt and hidden political theologies in their works, I will explore the connection of utopianism with power and violence, beginning with Chateaubriand’s and Foucault’s strangely congenial depiction of the French Revolution, as well as the relationship of their political theologies with universality (which is, in Foucault’s counter-Hegelian adage, reached by the exclusion of marginality).

Foucault ; Chateaubriand ; political theology ; utopia ; heterotopia ; Iranian revolution ; French revolution

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