Blog

What books were on Foucault’s bookshelves? Thanks to the Beinecke Collection at Yale University, we can now access 1,440 records of books “from the library of Michel Foucault” Importantly, these are not all the books Foucault ever owned—they’re a subset of his library, consisting of books inscribed by their respective authors and gifted to Foucault. The Yale librarians have labeled it the “Michel Foucault Library of Inscription Copies.” It necessarily, then, skews heavily toward thinkers and writers contemporaneous with Foucault, who had some affinity for Foucault, and who for a variety of reasons wanted him to own a signed copy of their latest work.

Every book I seem to pick up these days is poorly printed. By this I mean that the ink is decidedly weak. As a result, the book is difficult to read with ease and pleasure. The lettering is almost never a strong, striking black, but invariably a sort of washed-out grey, the weak ink already fading into mere nothingness, straining the eyes and heightening one’s sense of the ephemerality of all Being, the futility of all knowledge…This is surely, on the whole, a disservice to the republic of readers. My Penguin edition of John Barton’s A History of the Bible (2019), besides betraying the terrible glue binding so characteristic of latter-day Penguins—which will probably dissolve within a decade—is not so much printed on the page as it is facsimiled: there is a kind of indistinct, digital-type, semi-pixellated placement of the whole page in blurry grayscale, rather than the stamping-out of individual letters in sharp, dark, inky typeface. Similarly, my hardcover copy of a P. G. Wodehouse novel from the Everyman’s Library series is washed-out and obscure. Black letters are never black any longer, it would seem, but so many shades of gray. Even though the binding is rugged and cover sturdy, the actual printed page is disappointingly weak. Everyman’s and Penguin produced quite decent books in the previous century, but no longer, apparently.

John Barton (2020). A History of the Bible. London: Penguin.

With friends like John Barton, who needs the New Atheists?

The most effective opponents of Christian spirituality today are not its overt detractors but its academic analysts, who don’t so much deny God as paint all things theological in so much grey in grey, as Hegel might have said. It is above all a sad book, freighted down by the sadness of spiritlessness, effectively diminishing the spiritual core that makes the Christian take on the Bible so attractive in the first place. We care for the Bible not because it is a complex patchwork of sources and genres, but because it vibrates with divine energy. Buried beneath a morass of textual criticism, whither belief in the risen Christ? Where is the sense of Immanuel, “God with us,” that has drawn and continues to draw millions into a christocentric existence?

How did you decide to write about this topic?

In our paper “One giant leap for capitalistkind: Private enterprise in outer space,” we were interested in trying to understand what the sudden explosion of interest and investments in outer space meant, structurally and theoretically, with regard to contemporary capitalism. One significant event for us was the much-publicized launch of SpaceX’s first Falcon Heavy rocket in February 2018. It represented a combination of new technological advances in rocket design and space technology, the ascendancy of the private enterprise model of space exploration, and a neoliberal ideology in response to the question of humans as space-traveling beings.

Do intercessory prayers work? Medical science has taken an interest in the power of prayer. One approach is to assign patients randomly to a control group that is to remain in an “unprayed” state; another randomly assigned group of patients then receives intercessory prayers over a set period of time by persons who sign on to pray for them. Unsurprisingly, most studies using this randomized controlled trial (RCT) method show no healing effects of prayer—I say “unsurprisingly” because this result cannot come as news to those with a modicum of knowledge of Christian thought and theology.

We seem to live in a new machine age, a world in which automation, artificial intelligence, algorithms, and the “robotization” of the economy are causing machines to gradually displace human laborers. Where will those millions of menial workers go after our economies have been thoroughly digitized, more completely embedded in what Benjamin Bratton (2015) terms “the Stack,” that is, a planetary-wide matrix of computing power? But just as we begin to think about this terrifying prospect, Marx is already there, waiting for us, as Foucault once said of Hegel, ready to puncture the notion of total capitalist mechanization. Marx is ready to stop us in our tracks, when he writes in Capital concerning the limits to how machines replace human labor. In some particularly advanced industrialized countries, Marx writes, machines are adopted on a sufficiently large scale that they end up “creat[ing] such a superfluity of labour” that wages end up depreciating by the traditional laws of supply and demand. But when machines replace human hands and minds, wages are lowered to such an extent that it no longer becomes profitable for capitalists to replace human labor with machines; it would be more inexpensive to pay for wage-labor than to invest in automation (Marx 1976: 516). Thus, by their very actions—introducing machinery that cheapens labor below the price of those very machines—capitalists tend to generate social circumstances that undermine those selfsame actions: Machines undermine the adoption of machines by way of a social mechanism – the wage. In fact, this might be the central methodological thrust of Marx’s Capital: All things turn into their own opposite.

One of the most attractive theological solutions to the problem of evil is what has been termed afterlife theodicy,revolving around the extreme disjunction we may presume to exist between the scale and scope of suffering on Earth and the scale and scope of joy in Heaven. By ‘scale’ I mean the quantity of suffering and joy, respectively, and by ‘scope’ I mean the quality and duration of suffering and joy. The problem of evil withers away once we frame earthly evils, plentiful as they may appear, within their proper context of a potentially limitless, eternal bliss in Heaven. Thus, I do not mind the momentary pain of the dentist’s drill when I know that it will rid me of the toothache that has been plaguing me for weeks. More to it, I do not mind very much the toil of an eight-hour working day on Friday morning when I know that a two-day weekend is right around the corner.