This article offers an investigation of Foucault’s Confessions of the Flesh—published in 2018, thirty-four years after the death of the author—through a literary approach. It argues that “The Laborious Baptism,” the second section of the first chapter of the book, “The Formation of a New Experience,” has an immersive quality of writing that signals a way of writing “from within,” to take up an...
A generation ago the big fight in the philosophy of mysticism was over constructivism versus perennial philosophy. And as Jess BryonHollenback notes, “the contextualist paradigm appears to have scored a resounding triumph over its essentialist predecessor.” Certainly, constructivism today is, as Francis X. Clooney says, the “mainstream consensus.” And as Torben Hammersholt points out, “if one...
Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed is incredibly complex and, after millennia, still subject to controversy. In what follows I do not explicitly engage all of the well-known (and well-worn) debates surrounding that text. The aims of this essay are instead to reveal inMaimonides a sort of “phenomenology”—a term that I will clarify shortly but that at the outset should be taken to signal the...
Denys Turner's excellent study The Darkness of God has focused the attention of scholars of Western spirituality on the Neoplatonic discourse of medieval mystical theologians.' Turner argues that their descriptions of the union between God and man should not be read in experiential terms but in the light of a Neoplatonic discourse that contains the resources for an implicit critique of an...