Foucault’s Political Theologies and the Traces of Liberation Theology in Latin America

In this piece I explore resonances between Foucault's engagements with political theology and a localized political spirituality embedded in a vast popular uprising in Colombia's Afro-Pacific littoral in May of 2017. I follow the prompt of Foucault's late remarks regarding a “philosop...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Political theology
Subtitles:Roundtable Discussion: Michel Foucault and Political Theology
Main Author: Manrique, Carlos A. (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group [2021]
In: Political theology
Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains:B Foucault, Michel 1926-1984 / Buenaventura (Colombia) / Geschichte 2017 / Strike / Liberation theology
RelBib Classification:CG Christianity and Politics
FD Contextual theology
KAJ Church history 1914-; recent history
KBR Latin America
VA Philosophy
Further subjects:B Liberation Theology
B Michel Foucault
B spirituality and politics
B religion and decolonial critique
B Buenaventuras's civic strike
B Political Theology
B religion and resistance
Online Access: Volltext (Resolving-System)
Description
Summary:In this piece I explore resonances between Foucault's engagements with political theology and a localized political spirituality embedded in a vast popular uprising in Colombia's Afro-Pacific littoral in May of 2017. I follow the prompt of Foucault's late remarks regarding a “philosophy of the future” that would emerge beyond the frontiers of Europe, attentive to ideas that emerge in people's lived experiences and struggles on the ground; and moved by how life is affirmed otherwise in these practices of resistance. I approach the ethnographic site from this angle, to probe the potentialities and limitations of Foucault's “tactical pointers” for understanding the political force of the popular Catholicism that played a decisive role in this uprising. A form of Christianity that, in the heterogeneous and discontinuous traces of liberation theology in Latin America not only departs drastically from Foucault's characterization of Christianity in his genealogy of moral experience in the West, but also defies in intriguing ways his distinction between “liberation” and “practices of freedom”, and the conceptualization of resistance articulated around it.
ISSN:1743-1719
Contains:Enthalten in: Political theology
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1080/1462317X.2020.1866811