THE BODY THAT WANDERS through Mark Jordan’s Convulsing Bodies: Religion and Resistance in Foucault, is not just the convulsing body of the title. The body is a sounding body, a body whose utterance has moved beyond speech but not beyond hearing. The cry of that body marks the limits of speech, and the limits of power. Indeed, speech and power approach identity in Jordan’s beautifully written, palimpsestic record of a life of palimpsestic reading. The death-dealing capacities of language to identify identity—to trap becoming as being—are eluded, resisted, and made visible behind their “perfect mask[s]” (114) as the body expends its force at the uttermost limits of what can be borne by living, carnal matter. Linguistic violence and flesh-rendering violence cannot be separated, for one permits the other. One exercises its capacities in service of the other as power exerts its force on living matter. Power names, by way of its filial conventions (the authority of origin), in order to fix the fixable and torment the resistant. Power’s speech arranges bodies spatially, in relation to each other and within and in relation to the architecture of power, as for instance in the transformation of the monk’s cell into the prisoner’s, or as bodies pass by a destroyed temple and an empty, magnificent church. Power conceals itself under the blank face of the bureaucrat; or as a laughably spectacular display of sovereignty that conceals its own power precisely in its display. Exciting power to dis-close itself requires theatricalization, performing bodies that speak toward the limits of speech. Yet as each diagnostic performance arrives belatedly in power’s arena, power has already moved on to a new, cunning stratagem for extending its reach while concealing itself. At the moment power overreaches by provoking the non-agential body into convulsion and the cry, power expels the convulsing body from its then-current, pastoral domain and into the domains of the medical and juridical. As power expels the convulsing body from the pastoral domain, power goes along with the convulsing body into those new domains. For power is omnispatial.

Jordan’s style of reading is reflected—or so it seems—in his style of writing. As I worked through Convulsing Bodies, I found myself repeatedly wondering about, and imagining, the material practices that subtend such careful, archival work, work that nevertheless moves always across (quer) and in a curve, rather than in a straight line of dependency, genealogy, or authority. What kind of notebooks does he use? How does he retrace his steps, to discover just the page and line that illuminates another page, far removed from the former in time or space? Do his physical books, like mine, fall apart from too many travels and too much scribbling? Do they surround him in stacks or return to his attention one at a time? Jordan writes writing, in analogical and even homologous relationship to the performing analyst of power who attempts to point to the body’s cry. Writing writing, as Jordan makes splendidly evident, is also writing reading. And while Jordan does not make the point in as flatly literal a way as I am about to, the writing of reading is intrinsic to (albeit not coextensive with) queer interpretive practices. Reading queerly means reading with and across other readers, other readings; writing reading creates other readers too. And in queer theology, as Jordan knows far better than I, its founding moment is perhaps the moment in which a reader first reads the words of a writer who tells of her own writing body as it writes its reading, the moment that teaches how to “do theology without underwear.”

The marvel of the non-coincidental contiguity of word/sound and body returns to the fore over and over. Jordan ceaselessly reminds us that words have the temerity to seek to capture bodies, imposing themselves on bodies from infancy (114), representing unruly bodies by way of the dead letter. But bodies voice themselves, especially their agony, in response, adding the aural and temporal to the spatial. For the architecture of dead knowledge of the falsely represented body is historical, not eternal. Having pushed the body to the limits of its endurance, the body revolts in space and by sound. At that moment, the body seems to promise a non-classifiable “knowledge” of its capacity to evade invasion, waging guerilla warfare against the can(n)ons of empire. So power takes the body’s promise for its own, producing the externality and sexuality of the body as the fictional other of power’s repressive force.

I wonder how far power has taken the place that power itself marked out for sexuality in this story. Power conceals its actual histories under different masks, masks that require the uncovered, naked truth of the body (genitals silenced, or at least silent? [103]) to resistantly distort power’s knowledge in service of another truth. Power acts, perhaps not as a substance but certainly as an agent, or actant. Jordan, writing his reading of Foucault, marks the danger in characteristically thoughtful fashion (82). Yet power invades (83), “makes itself tolerable by masking itself” (110), practices “deliberately irresponsible naming” (112) when it invents sexuality. As long as the agent of power remains Christianity, or pastoral power, or the Roman Catholic Church, power’s aggression and intrusiveness (90) belong (fictionally? really? both?) somewhere, to some ones, or at least to the practices of power an institution/fiction (the “Church”) exercises. To look for such a somewhere, or a someone, afterward, is to be “tricked again by monarchial narratives of power” (113) that have “imposed [concepts] on [embodiment] from infancy” (114).

Imposed? Are we then to circle through this sequence again? Perhaps. The turn to the body as the site of our hope takes place with and alongside the invention of sexuality. The age of sexuality is also the age of “embodiment”; our theoreticians of resistance discover the body’s capacities for resistance at the same time as bodies are organized into factories, then disciplined in front of desks; at the same time as bodies are allowed their various pleasures as long as they do not interfere with work. Jordan refuses to fall for seductive but finally unconvincing stories of how “bodies and pleasures” will save us all (116). Such an interpretation drowns artifice in flat sincerity, sacrifices irony to the idol of the real—the condition under which names could mistakenly be thought to have captured bodies. As Jordan repeatedly shows, unmasking power requires denaturalization, but strategies of reversal are not enough for the terms of engagement remain the same. Another economy, outside the territory of the idol of the real, must be found.

It may turn out that only “knowing” god in the body can save us, if indeed we can be saved. Or at least that “knowing” (in the biblical sense) god in the body moves one away from the moral code and into an ascetics of excess, an ascetics of camp. The dead idol of the universal law can perhaps be shown up as deadly deception by self-duplication that places the self beside the self in order “to become again, by remaking what has already been made” (173), to become what one never was.

At the end, we are left with the body of the Cynic, who “transmut[es] social ostracism and physical suffering into philosophic teaching” (189). Genet does not appear as a named actor in this drama, but in the doubled consciousness of reading the writing of a character, “Mark,” who reads the (sort of self-) presentation of a character, “Michel,” in order to hear the cry of the body, his presence cannot but be noted. Let us walk once more through the circle to descry whether the landscape mapped out by the ruses of power’s self-concealment under sexuality’s desire for an authentic-authorizing name has indeed shifted (and I stay here with spatial metaphors while cognizant of Jordan’s suggestion that temporality, or space thought temporally, offers more promise).

Cynic bodies are self-stylized bodies that go all the way, holding nothing back. “Cynicism presents a series of breaking points at which philosophy must confront its own inconsistencies. It is a carnival but also a race to the limit” (188). The Cynic reads the body’s role so sincerely that the very sincerity becomes parodic, carnivalesque. The Cynics seek “the genres in which to make manifest the style of life that shows forth truth” (188), by making their own bodies into the bodies of truth. They “invert . . . gender expectations” and “includ[e] women as equal members” (189); they play outrageous roles in order to draw attention to truth, to make truth a form (a style) of life. The parrhesic mode of speech of the Cynics interests Foucault, Jordan suggests, as “an open situation of risk with an unknowable outcome” (180–81). Making themselves into the material of their becoming what they never were, the Cynics risk themselves in an uncertain, non-calculable future.

But to double oneself and to produce a role for oneself in order to risk oneself into an uncertain future, to double oneself as a way to become the self one never was, is analogous to another figure I spend much of my time thinking about these days, the figure of the entrepreneur. This is not, let me hurry to insist, a repetition of a debate I find generally uninteresting, about the relation between Foucault and neoliberalism (in part because my understanding of contemporary capitalism moves beyond the standard worries about neoliberalism as the extension of economic logics into all domains of life). Rather, I think about relationships between risk and incalculability, between vulnerability and threat, and between an open future that beckons invitingly and an open future into whose threatening maw one has no choice but to run with all one’s power. For the entrepreneur shares significant features with the truth-teller. The entrepreneur is one who risks beyond calculability (at the very point where calculability fails, and remember that the calculation of risk to the point where it can no longer be calculated is fundamental to the rise of modern capitalism); the entrepreneur is vulnerable, but risks themself in a total way; the entrepreneur commits to a future only they can see, a future that emerges at the limit of the possible. Is the relation between the entrepreneurial and the parrhesic one of indeterminacy, or dependent on outcome? Or to ask in an idiom closer to Jordan’s own, if a form of life that permits truth-telling is a matter of style, what resources remain to distinguish the entrepreneur from the truth-teller? In which story is Baudelaire like the Renaissance man like Lypsinka? In what sense did being the queen of Bithynia prevent Gaius Julius from making himself into the Caesar that never was before?

The mode of transformation, of fracture, from the body’s cry into truth-telling is not an event that happens once. But the body that cries out is gendered: “The origin of truth telling is a female accusation against the mendacious silence of a male god” (183). Jordan makes the case through a reading of Foucault (and Nietzsche) on Ariadne, and Foucault on Creusa. Creusa moves from the cry to truthful speech (confession), as both Ariadne and Creusa learn that “a cry extorted from a convulsing human body is the only proper speech for getting a god’s attention” (183). The move into truth-telling follows Foucault’s bodily representation of Creusa’s cry (185). But Jordan’s response to worries about whether Foucault is a misogynist leave me underwhelmed, or at least wanting more. Jordan fears losing the other questions that we might ask to the question over Foucault’s misogyny. For instance, “Which bodies do we consider authorized to write the cries of other resisting bodies?” (184). To determine what Foucault is allowed to say is to situate oneself an enforcer of biopower’s precepts. Another important question: “What kind of relation do we assume between the legibility of a body and its writing?” (185). Now, these are indeed important questions, and I share Jordan’s desire for “an embodied authorship that can contest power by writing across assigned identities, their privileges and inhibitions” (185). But the juxtaposition of these questions to a feminist worry makes feminists who worry about the content, not the body, of Foucault’s writing the willing handmaiden/soldiers of biopower, because Jordan elides the worry about content with concern regarding Foucault’s body. To my mind, the important questions about Foucault on gender are not questions about whether, say, a woman or non-binary person writing what Foucault writes would elicit the same worries in their readers. The important questions are quite specific to the content of Foucault’s writing, and they have to do with fundamental questions, and possible disagreements, regarding what sorts of bodied writing of reading are most promising for those who recognize the binary sex-gender system as a distorting, destructive system of power-knowledge. Jordan hopes, for instance, that writing as Foucault does on violated male bodies and “through or against gender expectations” “complicate[s] the relation of violence to gender” (184). It is just here that feminists disagree with each other (feminists of many different sex-gender identities and feminists of none). Does the violation of male bodies change the relation between gender and violence? Are sex-gender systems best made unstable by denaturalization or inversion? Is change in sex-gender systems best elicited by way of written, bodily representation, by way of voiced bodily representation, or some other way? (Perhaps encounter with gender-confounding persons is more transformative in the body than in the imaginations that accompany our reading.) Are sex-gender systems as stable as they pretend, or is their stability an effect of their instability? After all, Jordan has just described a transmutation of power—when convulsion is given up by the Roman Catholic Church to the medical and psychiatric realms—that further solidified, rather than changed, power’s illusional capacity to capture identitarianly determined bodies. I would like to read more of Jordan’s bodied thinking on some of these questions, perhaps because I find feminist worries less driven by identitarian concerns than he does.

Reading Foucault on religion after Jordan is a new task, one more interesting to me now than it was before Jordan’s attentiveness to the performative, bodied moments in which form and content unite in Foucault’s oeuvre. After Convulsing Bodies, I find myself gratefully forbidden to do to Jordan what he refuses to do to Foucault. (I will admit great affection, perhaps even fandom, for To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, and for some of Guibert’s writing elsewhere as well.) Much remains to be said, in particular about the implications of Jordan’s reading of Foucault for redirecting searches for religion in territories outside the Foucauldian. There is at least an implicit sense in which Jordan points toward other topoi than those usually canvassed by the religion-hunter. I am grateful for the chance to see for a time with his eyes.

MARK D. JORDAN’S CONVULSING BODIES: Religion & Resistance in Foucault is an unusual text. It is difficult to categorize: Part reader’s guide with a quasi-pedagogical style, part primer to Foucault’s work focused predominantly on its ambivalent entanglements with religion, the text reads as an homage of a scholar who has been engaged with Foucault for a lifetime, deciding to reread that corpus once more. Throughout, it remains close to Foucault’s work, retracing its development, placing intonations and emphases throughout, while cautioning against a variety of possible misreadings and confusions. The book presents less than an overall thesis about Foucault than a set of structured ruminations, building a path, at once personal and scholarly, through Foucault’s extravagant production and its entanglements with religion, which in this case (as in many others) ultimately means Christianity. As Jordan himself puts it, in a gesture of humility that the text carries out, “I wish only to stand in front of a selection of Foucault’s texts, pointing here and there in admiration” (10–11). In what follows, I will pick up a few notes of shared admiration, but also pointing to knots of theoretical complexity that have come to mind in regards to Foucault while reading Jordan’s book. What follows is both a dialogue with Jordan and an attempt to think with Foucault, trying to be true to the kind of community of reading that Convulsing Bodies enacts.

One of the effects of reading Convulsing Bodies is to remind us of the ways Foucault’s discourse problematizes and undercuts any clear distinctions between religious and secular modes of speech, discourse, and ways of life. Part of this results from Foucault’s attentiveness to the material lives and embodiments of religion, or as Jordan quite eloquently puts it: “Foucault’s inquiry presupposes that religion arises from and issues in fields of forces inseparable from the rest of human history. What distinguishes it is not some rigid connection with an already separate realm of special entities. Religion is distinguished instead by how it arranges languages and practices—teaching and rituals—to control this world and the bodies very much in it” (9). Foucault’s discourse remains itself indeterminable—neither easily religious nor secular. Instead it repeatedly traces the complicated entanglements, afterlives, mutations, and separations of putatively religious and secular elements across different epochs and assemblages. As readers of Foucault know, the concrete concatenations are rather varied and multiple. In History of Madness, for example, it is a question of the constitution of (secular) reason through the confinement and disqualification of modes of speech that used to be, among others, taken to be forms of ecstatic speech, divine speech, and mystic speech. Across the works of the late 1970s, it becomes tracing the contours of Christianity’s pastoral power as a certain genealogical kernel for modern governmentality. In the final stage of Foucault’s writing, it becomes the exploration of spiritual exercises informing the epochal transformation between philosophical and religious modes of subjectivation.

Convulsing Bodies covers these and a number of others transitions and articulations, but in each case, the relationship between religious and secular elements is shown to be neither developmental, nor even necessarily oppositional, but micrological and specific. Elements are extracted from exclusively religious or purely secular frameworks of interpretation and are repeatedly seen as forming heterogeneous and historically singular dispositifs. It is precisely training the readers’ sight to these elements—modes of speech, comportments of body, modes of subjectivation, techniques of power, forms discourse and truth—while freely thinking across the boundary separating religious and secular that has made Foucault’s thought so important for recent critical rethinking of secularism.

On this point, I would agree with Jordan’s assessment when he writes: “There is no bright line between the old religion and the secular state, however much the latter prides itself on being utterly distinct. In many ways, the secular is another mode of religious reform, the latest reformed religion” (53). But I would agree only partially. Yes, Foucault’s work repeatedly subverts the boundary necessary for secularism’s self-justifying narratives, but religion is itself hardly a monolithic entity, whose name could signal an entity that could be (re)formed into secular modernity. Rather, I take Foucault’s perspective to suggest that what the secular state wants to enforce as a divide is always interpenetrating and hybrid—that forms of subjectivation or techniques of power are plugged into assemblages that do not respect the secular/religious divide, but operate on a level that makes the attribution of secularity or religiosity difficult, if not impossible. The dispositif does not abide by a clear-cut secularist distinction (between itself and what is religious), but even so—it is not rendered religious thereby. Secular modes of power contain material techniques and practices taken over from putatively religious histories, and religious modes of speech and subjectivation have secular effects and afterlives—the question is of constructing material links and modes of analysis that could follow these crossings.

For example, if at the heart of the modern disciplinary apparatus is the extension of disciplinary techniques and spaces of confinement (e.g., “cells”) of old monastic environment, as Discipline and Punish suggests, then a number of questions arise. How does one think about the status of the two sides, their relation and nature of transformation? One might want to draw a line of distinction between willed regimes/practices (monasticism) and imposed regimes/practices (penal disciplinary modernity). But such distinction breaks down if we recall that monastic life was oriented around production of submission, humility, and obedience, that is to say, it can by no means be seen as unproblematically willed (even if the original entry into the monastery was admittedly much more willed than entry into the penal system). Or, to put the question another way, do we begin thinking of the monastic modes of life, and everything that went into them, differently after this linking with disciplinary modernity is asserted? It is a question of at once continuity and discontinuity—of thinking together, without reduction—since just as there is an originary monastic site for the formation of disciplinary practices, there are also a number of new elements (such as, for example, the rise of the norm) that render the modern disciplinary dispositif radically different from what occurred in the monastic environment. An altered version of this question emerges again later in Foucault’s work when he explores the role of truth telling and verbalization of sins in the formation of the modern subject, and finds its original formulation in the monastic works of John Cassian. Here again we are pushed to ask, what are the effects of these stories that take modern modes of secular subjectivity and power back to the spaces of the monastery? It is certainly a kind of rewriting of Weber, a kind of displacement, from a Protestant inner-worldly asceticism to a longue durée framework of early and medieval Christianity, but how does the visibility of this filiation transform not only our understanding of modernity, but precisely of monastic formations with which they are tethered in this narrative?

In the late 1970s, Foucault began exploring pastoral power as it was developed in Christianity—and Jordan’s book is particularly engaging in tracing this element of Foucault’s oeuvre. Security, Territory, Population, the 1977–78 Collège de France lectures, suggests that it was pastoral power that was the original site of incubation for modern forms of government. There, Foucault isolates major elements of pastoral power being that (a) it is non-territorial but focused on the flock; (b) it is a power of care oriented around salvation; (c) it is performed in a self-sacrificing way with endless application; (d) it is fundamentally individualistic and individualizing. It is responsible for all and each. Remarkably, in these lectures, pastoral power becomes a kind of defining and singular element of Christianity. “The pastorate begins with a process that is absolutely unique in history and no other example of which is found in the history of any other civilization: the process by which a religion, a religious community, constitutes itself as a Church, that is to say, as an institution that claims to govern men in their daily life on the grounds of leading them into eternal life in the other world, and to do this not only on the scale of a definite group, a city or a state, but of the whole humanity . . . and we have no other example of this in the history of societies” (STP, 148). Moreover, for Foucault, this formation of pastoral power is ultimately “something from which we have still not freed ourselves” (STP, 148).

What interests me here is thinking about the forms of resistance to pastoral power that Foucault outlines. If pastoral power is a power that sought to mold and govern human conduct, it has not been an all-encompassing totalizing historical process, but was repeatedly disturbed by modes of what he terms counter-conduct. “It seems to me that the Middle Ages developed five main forms of counter-conduct, all of which tend to redistribute, reverse, nullify, and partially or totally discredit pastoral power in the systems of salvation, obedience, and truth” (STP, 204). Typologically, these include asceticism, formation of counter-communities, forms of mysticism, modes of scriptural exegesis and eschatological affirmation.

Two elements are interesting to note. First, by elaborating a perspective that highlights question of counter-conduct, Foucault allows for a way of linking medieval revolts with modern phenomena of social and political unrest. As he notes, for example, about nineteenth-century political revolts—they were organized around questions of conduct: “to be led differently, by other men, and toward other objectives than those proposed by the apparent and visible official governmentality of society” (STP, 199). With such a perspective, Foucault opens up anew connections that were made on different theoretical grounds by Marxists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—but have unfortunately been left aside by scholars of religion more recently. In fact, Foucault suggests a kind of condensed counter-history of revolts to pastoral organization of conduct, tracing a lineage that includes, among others, Beghards and Beguine movements, Wycliffe and Huss, but also Anabaptists, and including various modern revolutionary formations. These pages of the lectures are more suggestive then programmatic. But they do open up a possibility of further thought—and at least two questions about it: First, if Christian pastoral power is at the origins of modern European governmental power, to put the argument all too briefly, then what kind of transformed afterlives can these earlier heretical modalities of counter-conduct have? And, furthermore, what does a retelling of history of resistance that crosses the medieval/modern or Christian/secular divide allow us to see?

But the schema of counter-conduct is not stable. Sometimes for example, as Jordan notes, mysticism is not seen as a form of counter-conduct but as an expression of pastoral power. This is a minor but significant note insofar as it points to the broader question of the status of these modes of counter-conduct. It is true that all five have the capacity to resist pastoral power as Foucault describes, but under what conditions and in what situations do they resist and actually are modes of counter-conduct? Moreover, is it justifiable analytically to exclusively center Christianity around the question of pastoral power—without embedding it precisely within modes of eschatology, community, ascesis, exegesis? This is to ask, do all these modes of conduct have an ambivalent structure, such that they can be and have been enacted, at various times within the history of Christianity, as proposing programs of counter-conduct as much as legitimating proper conduct? That is, there are forms of eschatological proclamations and ascetic practice (to take two of the five) that buffer and legitimate the power of the church and pastoral power as much as there are those that challenge and subvert them. If so, such oscillations point toward the necessity of thinking of broader assemblages, wherein forms of eschatology or asceticism or mysticism partake of a single apparatus, be it in a given instance legitimizing or subversive. In this case, one would also have to trace the condition under which mysticism or eschatology, for example, has articulated a form of radical counter-conduct rather than merely another set of practices and discourses for a more effective enactment and enforcement of proper conduct. And more generally, one could ask whether these counter-operations actually subvert the governmental paradigm or rather, in the end, only seek to improve and perfect it?

But of course pastoral power’s centrality in Foucault’s work takes on different directions. Subsequently, for example, in On the Government of the Living it is seen as the incubation point for modern forms of subjectivity. Indeed, it is centrally the monastic instructional texts of John Cassian that embody the double obligation of obedience or willing nothing by oneself and hiding nothing or telling the whole truth about oneself, the dual obligation that for Foucault is constitutive of the western subjectivity. Here early Christian monasticism forms “a regime defined by obligations for individuals to have a continuous relationship to themselves of knowledge, their obligation to discover, deep within themselves, secrets that elude them, their obligation, finally, to manifest these secret and individual truths by acts that have specific, liberating effects that go well beyond the effects of knowledge” (GoL, 83).

Jordan is particularly good at tracing the nuanced differences that emerge across chronologically distinct iterations and occasions in Foucault’s writing. But the question for me remains how are we to think together about the various, if not mutually exclusive then at least not immediately convergent, schemas of pastoral power. I find Jordan’s suggestion that Foucault is a negative theoretician, like a negative theologian, perpetually unsaying and displacing his own prior formulas, useful (121)—but I am left with the question of how to think, for example, of the role of pastoral power—when can it be tied to questions of governmentality, but also subjection and subjectivation? How do we think through the interconnection of this bewildering set of schemas across the years of lectures? Moreover what is the effect of repeatedly proliferating new schemas? Part of the effect, I would suggest, is to put into question, in ever more nuanced ways, whether western modernity has ever escaped being Christian—and whether secular power has always been, at least in part, a Christian power, despite its own insistences and narratives.1

If spiritual direction is a practice central to pastoral power’s individualizing practice and partakes in the formation of a truth-telling subject, it also appears in another moment of Foucault’s work. Earlier, in the Abnormal lectures, we see the way early modern spiritual direction produces an intensification of speech and vigilance about the body. And this new form of power-knowledge produces its correlate object, which Foucault names the flesh. As Jordan describes it, “The desiring body—the concupiscent body, to use the technical term—is coded or gridded as flesh that can be endlessly monitored and copiously described. Flesh is a way of personifying a new power through or behind the body” (86). A resolutely modern matrix is developed between sexuality, confession, direction and the flesh. Indeed, as Jordan notes, tying the discussions together, pastoral power contributes “these techniques of interiorization, of cultivating the conscience by alerting oneself to the sources of sinfulness—to what Christians already begin to call ‘the flesh’” (125). Here, the flesh becomes an effect of an interiorizing power of surveillance.

In turn, convulsions repeatedly mark a certain resistance to the disciplinary and surveillance apparatus. As Foucault writes, “The convulsive flesh is the body penetrated by the right of examination and subject to the obligation of exhaustive confession and the body that bristles against this right and this obligation. . . . The convulsive flesh is the resistance effect of Christianization at the level of individual bodies” (Abnormal, 213). But is there a difference between convulsive flesh and the convulsing bodies that give Jordan’s book its name? Jordan’s discussion at times deploys the terms in distinction and at others more pushes them toward synonymy—convulsions revealing modes of resistance become more significant than whether they are said of the body or the flesh.

But exactly how do we think the analytics of the relation of the flesh to the body? Is flesh only an object that becomes enacted and manifested in relation to a specific kind of power, as a way to control and discipline the body? Or can the flesh name something more impersonal and dis-individuated that allows us to rethink the theoretical primacy accorded to the status of the body? This question seems to require to be both within and without Foucault’s paradigm, putting it in discussion with other theorizations of the flesh. As Mayra Rivera suggests in her recent Poetics of the Flesh, perhaps the flesh can help us name and think more material forms of relationality, interdependence, and exposure. Or one can think of others engagements like that of Alexander Weheliye’s deployment of the thought of Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter to think of the flesh as something that stands at a tension with the individuated status accorded to the body. Can the flesh become a name for thinking against plans for redemption and salvation that power elaborates for it? Perhaps, furthermore, this thought from the flesh, could also be tied to the question of mystic speech—toward modes of speech that affirm the possibilities of desubjectivation; this would be a speech other than that of the subject incessantly revealing its own proper truth, that might register instead something like commonness of the flesh. Such questions can not only potentially lead to uncovering a different archive within Christian and secular modes of speech than those that prioritize obedience and subjection, but also return us to the status of madness in relation to reason, and traverse again the force implied by counter-conduct.

The poet recommends: “Bend down, bend down further.”
—René Char

IN A TWO-PART lecture he gave in Brussels in December 1964, Foucault draws our attention to Odysseus in a famous mourning scene from book 8 of The Odyssey. I want to use Foucault’s Odysseus figure as a way to bring out Jordan’s “camp” approach to speech about loss: a paradoxical, convulsive speech that cannot speak in the face of the very death that sustains it. Jordan makes much of Foucault’s attraction to Char’s poetry in the early 1960s, drawing special attention to the poet’s call to “bend down, bend down further” (19). “To the page of poetry” (19), Jordan continues. “To the archival document not yet recognized as poetry. To the murmurs of the silenced mad. To the echoes of retreating gods” (19). To the bodies of those who have departed, one might add.

Foucault, Jordan reminds us, spent his life attending to the dead, to the remains of monks and sodomites captured in archives. We find Odysseus in just this attentive posture, bent over, in the first part of the Brussels lecture, “Literature and Language,” itself a document recently published through the efforts of readers bending down over the Foucault archive. In the lecture, Foucault redescribes the scene in The Odyssey where, visiting the Phaenicians and disguised as a stranger, Odysseus hears the aoidos, Demodocus, sing of Odysseus’s own adventures. Foucault lingers over the Homeric description of Odysseus dissolving as he finds himself, doubled over and crouching, in the bard’s words. Hearing Demodocus’s song, he “lowers his head, veils his face, and weeps,” Foucault writes, in the gesture “of a woman who, after battle, receives her husband’s cadaver.”1

This scene from Foucault’s 1964 lecture doesn’t appear in Jordan’s book, but it might have. Convulsing Bodies devotes many pages to crouching bodies undone by grief, their gestures part of a pattern of speech stripped of words Jordan helps us to find over the course of Foucault’s writing. Importantly, the Odysseus scene captures not only convulsive writing but also gestures of reading as acts of mourning that leave “traces of a body’s time spent” (1). Jordan opens Convulsing Bodies with a description of the traces of his own gay body: Coming out, watching fog over San Francisco’s Kite Hill, holding men as they died “from the ‘complications’ of the unnamable virus that killed Foucault” (2). We see Jordan, like Odysseus, crouching over the dead bodies of other men, unable to find words for the thing that killed them.

Importantly, as Jordan tells it, this singular, book-opening death of an author from “an unnamable virus” remains iterative, unfixed, convulsive: Unlike the clichéd “death of the author” so often affixed to Foucault, this author’s death in Jordan refuses to congeal into diagnostic platitudes or the hashtag celebrity of an icon. Instead, the book stages its own beginning in death as something non-generalizable: Here death unfolds as stubbornly singular, contingent, and painful. We can only read it as one of the many traces “of a body’s time spent” (1). But for all the pain that attends this and other post-mortem acts of reading, it is a pain Jordan seems to welcome. Recalling a story by Henry James, “The Death of the Lion,” about a woman who wants nothing of an author but his death—that is, his texts—Jordan writes: “I am that young woman” (3).

If Jordan is “that young woman” in James, he is also that other woman, Odysseus weeping, bending down over a husband’s body killed in battle. When I read Convulsing Bodies I imagine Jordan, theatrically, attending like Odysseus to the cadaver that is Foucault’s corpus. When we add Odysseus to Jordan’s list of female convulsing bodies, we can rehear Char’s directive to “bend down, bend down further” as part of the liturgy that accompanies ritual. In its bodily posture of crouching and curling inward toward oneself undone by another’s death, the reading body participates in a lamentation and, specifically, a feminine act of mourning. “The sign of literature’s implication of itself in itself,” Foucault tells us in the Brussels lecture, “is a ritual: precisely, a ritual of mourning” (GE, 125).

Foucault’s (and Jordan’s) wifely acts of reading as weeping and bending down give a form—as mourning captured, like a tableau vivant—to the self-hollowing act of poetic writing Foucault analyzed often in the early 1960s. One of the many valuable contributions of Jordan’s reading is its loving caress of an intensely literary Foucauldian body whose style is rarely noticed by his sociologically, philosophically, or historically inclined readers. That Odyssean tableau vivant of poetic self-hollowing as mourning ritual describes, on the one hand, what Foucault calls in the Brussels lecture the “restrained and discreet” way in which a work designates itself and, at the same time, cancels or unsigns itself (“se désigne”) (GE, 125). Foucault could be seen as describing here, in the fashion of his time, the quintessential Mallarméean disappearance of the poet into his own words. Such descriptions of poetic acts were all the rage in a certain French literary criticism during the same period when Foucault gave the Brussels lecture. The poetic work unsigns itself in a mise en abyme of its own linguistic utterance. In this guise, literature as mourning ritual presents itself as cerebral, masculine, and unobtrusive. Like a Mallarmé poem, this ritual self-undoing is controlled: A “restrained and discreet” form of mourning.

Except when it’s not. And so, on the other hand, and at the same time, we find the opposite of discretion and restraint: An over-the-top image of Odysseus weeping. He (or better, she) “wails” and “shrieks,” Homer tells us, like a wife with her dead husband, “her tear-drenched face . . . a mask of pain” as she bends over his cadaver.2 From this perspective, Odysseus belongs to Jordan’s cortège of convulsing bodies precisely because of her histrionic excess. The gay word Jordan chooses to name this excess is “camp.”

Despite his admiration for the symbolist teacher of the art of elocutionary self-undoing, Foucault is no Mallarmé. Like Divine, Maria Montez, or Odysseus weeping, Foucault’s textual body is theatrical, unrestrained, melodramatic. Foucault’s books, Jordan writes, “should be understood as dramaturgies. His flaw as a writer,” by Foucault’s own admission, “is a ‘sort of intensification, a dramatization of events about which one should speak less fervently’” (140). Jordan reads Foucault’s reading of the theatrical public penance of a weeping Fabiola (“the sobbing matron”) through the lens of camp. He finds in other Foucauldian convulsing bodies a “camp sensibility” (141), hears Foucault’s famous Collège de France lectures as “a serialized melodrama of magisterial instruction” (63), and reads the equally “melodramatic” famous final image in The Order of Things along lines we might name as camp. That face dissolving at the edge of the sea suddenly looks like a queen of the queer variety, one of many we find strewn across the pages of Foucault’s corpus: Queen Victoria in the opening paragraph of History of Sexuality, volume 1, Marie Antoinette, the jackal queen of Abnormal. I could go on. Jordan has a well-honed feel for the camp aesthetic of a writer who often spoke about himself in the feminine when in the company of his gay friends. It takes one to know one. Linking Foucault’s historiography to Baudelairean self-stylization, Jordan exposes genealogy as a queer method that stylizes history, “transmut[ing] souvenirs from an adored and ambiguous past” (157). Revisiting genealogy, we suddenly find that “the category of camp hovers nearby” (157): As nostalgia, as grief, as a stylized mourning ritual that is never quite finished. “I could go on. (One always can with camp)” (141).

In Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick devotes several pages to camp as a “gay male rehabilitation of the sentimental.”3 Sedgwick’s lens on gay male sentimentality has something to teach us not only about the complex play of affects that is camp, but also, indirectly, about Foucault as a writer well schooled in the arts of affect and, specifically, camp as a queer form of mourning. In the shadow of AIDS and HIV, Sedgwick’s writing on camp brushes up against death: Hovering near camp is “a very specific association of gay male sexuality with tragic early death” (EC, 144). And if the association is recent, Sedgwick writes, “the structure of its articulation is densely grounded in centuries of homoerotic and homophobic intertextuality” (EC, 144). In a footnote she mentions Achilles and Patroclos, Virgilian shepherds, David and Jonathan, St. Sebastian, and the elegiac poetry of Milton, Tennyson, Whitman, and Housman, along with Vito Russo’s Celluloid Closet. She doesn’t mention Odysseus in book 8, but she might have.

Let me then, in closing, return to our opening scene: Odysseus, warrior-turned-woman, wailing and crouched over a dead body. What better way to dramatize the dizzying, abyssal, feminizing doubling that describes Foucault’s erotic, camp philosophy of self-undoing? In Jordan’s hands, the self-hollowing core of Foucault’s convulsive philosophical language becomes, as Jordan puts it, both “poetic” and “holy” (199). Jordan’s pairing of the “holy” with the “poetic” in the final pages of his book mirrors the “religion and resistance” promised, from the start, by his subtitle. Yet here, in the book’s closing, a transmutation has occurred: The academic announcement of a discourse about “religion and resistance” has been sentimentalized as “holy” and “poetic.” Tone-deaf philosophy has taken on the tragi-comic, ironic lyricism of camp.

This is Jordan’s Foucault: An aoidos whose work, both poetic and holy, reworks philosophy and gives it back to us as camp. That reworking happens through the detour of literature, a deviation to which Jordan is unusually attentive. As Foucault explains in the Brussels lecture: The gesture through which literature implicates itself inside itself—the same “curve” (GE, 119) we find in Odysseus bending down over the beloved’s body—opens literature toward a “quasi philosophical reflection” (GE, 120) that Foucault describes as “philosophy’s simulacrum” (GE, 120). Inspired by Jordan, this is what I’m calling Foucault’s camp philosophy. But, as Susan Sontag famously wrote in her “Notes on Camp,” “to talk about Camp is therefore to betray it” (in Jordan 141). Or as Jordan might put it, to say much more about Foucault’s camp philosophy would run the risk of “losing it” (141).

And yet Foucault embraces the paradox of speech that is camp. (In a book about Foucault, I myself once wrote, without realizing it, words similar to Sontag’s: “To explain unreason or make it speak is to betray [it].”4 I probably wouldn’t write that sentence today: I now read it as inflated, melodramatic, as a sentence that wails and shrieks. Perhaps Jordan can help me embrace it as camp.) “More might be learned about camp in Foucault by reconsidering the compositional challenge of writing about it” (141), Jordan writes. One way Foucault confronts the inevitability of betrayal is through a method Jordan calls “unsaying” (118). And so, paradoxically, we come full circle back to “restraint and discretion,” only this time as camp. When Jordan writes that “the only way to reach that other economy is first of all by unsaying, by apophasis” (118), he is describing an economy of convulsing bodies—the economy of the Loudon nuns in Abnormal—that is not only holy and poetic, but also camp in the specifically gay, sentimental, unsayable sense associated with rituals of mourning. As Jordan puts it: “We don’t (yet) have the words” (118).

And so, in the end, Foucault’s camp philosophy is nothing more, or less, than philosophy’s simulacrum. Stylized as camp, this philosophy hollows itself out through literary acts of self-replicating implosion captured by the image of Odysseus as a woman crouching over her dead beloved. This camp philosophy brushes the “edge of language” (199) as it bends down further over the sea of dead bodies that remain unnamed and lost to history. In the secular apophatic mode we find in Jordan’s reading of Foucault, we find a certain longing to record “inarticulate sounds” (198) “at the limits of language” (199): “insect murmurs” (198), “groaning prayers” (198), “cries” (199), “animal noises” (199), or “public love cries” (199). To give a name to those sounds would repeat the panoptical violence that consigns sodomites to archives and delinquents to the prisons of our modern carceral order. By unsaying the prepackaged acts of saying through which a culture both marks and masks its losses, Jordan allows us to feel them. This corporeal feeling captures, for me, the magic of Convulsing Bodies: Jordan lets those bodies “resound” (199) without pinning them down. Their reverberation across and beyond the pages of Jordan’s book—retrained and histrionic, poetic and holy, quiet and shrieking—describes the ethopoiesis that is Foucault’s camp philosophy: A philosophy of self-undoing for which “we don’t (yet) have the words” (118).

I want to hear more about how we might live this ethopoietic camp philosophy: This convulsive speech after death.

SHOULD WE READ FOUCAULT as a novelist? Or, perhaps, the question I would like to pose is not, Should we read Foucault as a novelist? but rather, What do we notice about Mark Jordan’s Convulsing Bodies if we take “reading Foucault as a novelist” as its implicit invitation and provocation? Now, I am not suggesting, in a catty fashion, that Foucault should be read as a novelist—a fabricator of tales and spinner of yarns—because his supposed shortcomings preclude us reading him as a historian: after all, as Jordan observes, Foucault mistaken is more interesting than most serious historians correct about the same subjects and materials (123). No, I am wondering what it means to read a historian, or a philosopher, or a theologian with an eye toward style, and form, and voice, and allusion first, and proposition, conclusion, contribution second. Not: what does she say? Is she right? But: how is her argument crafted? What affect does it generate? In the wake of Convulsing Bodies, as in the wake of Jordan’s other work, I am once again forced to grapple with the question of what it means to read and write tout court—but also specifically, what it means to read and write the relations among “religion,” “bodies,” and “pleasures” after encountering Jordan’s reading of Foucault’s writing about them.

But it makes sense that I would be thrown back into questions of reading and writing. Jordan is emphatic, from beginning to end, that Convulsing Bodies does not offer a definitive, summative, exhaustive exegesis of Foucault’s oeuvre. (Because, after all, why write that? We have Foucault’s oeuvre.) Instead, it is a reading diary (1–2, 10–11). Jordan does not give us an apologetic defense of the pronouncements of the Master, but an affectionate tale of the charms of a companion. The first text treated in detail is not one authored by Foucault, not even one that originates in France, but rather a short story by Henry James that illuminates different ways in which fans demonstrate attachment to authors and their works. Or, as Jordan insists, the ways in which fans demonstrate attachments to works, rather than authors (2–3). Jordan reminds us that a common mistake in reading is to take an ironic passage for a literal one (93)—that is, to be inattentive to an author’s cues about how she should be read. When reading Convulsing Bodies, then, we should be particularly mindful of tone and style, given that Jordan is so clear about what kind of book he’s proffering. (We should also be mindful of style and tone since Jordan’s chapters so frequently mirror stylistic features of the Foucault works they treat. With this mimeticism, Jordan is attuning our ears to Foucault’s styles.) Convulsing Bodies does not present Foucault as Theorist or Philosopher; it does not champion him as the Great Resolver of Questions; it does not treat his work as Holy Writ. Jordan does not chide us—or other readers—for not having read carefully enough or broadly enough. This is not a text that glories in correcting and clarifying. Rather, Jordan revels in seduction, in restoring the allure of Foucault’s texts, by revealing charms previously overlooked. Jordan performs an erotic(s of) reading. Perusing Convulsing Bodies is like attending an incredibly well-curated retrospective of an artist we had known only superficially, or sitting up late at night while a friend makes the case that Tyne Daly’s rendition of “Rose’s Turn” is the best of all the recorded versions. Jordan’s writing traces a finger across the page of Foucault’s texts, directing our eyes and focusing our attention.

And where he focuses our attention so frequently is to Foucault’s style and technique—as well as to the literary sources from which they derive. Jordan begins his tour by giving sustained attention to three essays from Foucault’s “literary period” that engage the work of Bataille, Klossowski, and Blanchot. In each, Foucault is interested in the possibility of language to capture and produce a particular set of effects in the reader. In each, Foucault imitates the style of the author he’s engaging. Moreover, Foucault engages these authors’ literary productions alongside their theoretical writings. Just as this triumvirate would remain a touchstone for Foucault, Jordan refers to it across Convulsing Bodies to show how the concerns of these essays linger in Foucault’s work—underscoring its ongoing influence rather than its episodic, phasic character. In this same chapter, in a brief treatment of History of Madness—a monumental tome that surely deserves more attention than these incidental pieces—Jordan reminds us that Foucault took his guidance from a poet, René Char. “A reader can reject Foucault’s refusal to justify his method or even to describe it properly, but a careful reader won’t simply ignore this poetic rule while inserting another method on Foucault’s behalf” (18).

While Char’s poetic principle does not reappear, Jordan makes clear that Foucault was frequently inspired by literary figures. In his treatment of both the first volume of the History of Sexuality and the final lectures at the Collège de France, Jordan underscores how Marcel Proust functions like Foucault’s ghost writer. When treating Discipline and Punish and the Abnormals lectures, Jordan reaches out to Roland Barthes’ writing on Fourier, Sade and Loyola and Alfred Jarry’s theatrical depiction of King Ubu to highlight the ways that Foucault strives to make his readers aware of the multiple forms that power takes—as it strives to confuse, mislead and enchant us. To resist its lure, we must become more sophisticated readers of the aesthetic dimension of life. When discussing Foucault’s fascination with the Cynics, as a potential model for relating to one’s body and one’s self differently, Jordan notes similarities to the dandy and to camp, made visible through the prism of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry as discussed by Walter Benjamin. In his final chapter, Jordan engages Hervé Guibert’s To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life—a biography disguised as a novel, or perhaps the other way around, or, at the very least, a biography honest enough not to hide its novelistic character behind the apparatus of footnotes. Most telling, perhaps, is Jordan’s treatment of Foucault’s fascination with Julien Gracq’s novel Le ravage des Syrtes (77): “What then is the difference between Gracq’s novel, which Foucault so admires, and Foucault’s own epics of aging power . . . ? [Foucault] will claim sometimes to write novels, then proceed to redefine the novel and to undo its sense of authorship” (80).

Why does any of this matter? What difference does it make to trace these allusions, to attend to the form of Foucault’s texts, to lose ourselves in the dense meditations on language’s limitations, to think Foucault differently? What do we gain by reading Foucault in this fashion? To think about the literary quality of Foucault, I would suggest, is to think differently about Foucault’s authority, or about authority generally. In The Freudian Body, Leo Bersani makes the following observations about literature:

Literature mocks and defeats the communicative projects of language; it both invites interpretation and makes language somewhat unsuitable for interpretation. It forces us to be aware of the density of words not as a function of their semantic richness, but rather as a sign of their inadequacy to the mobile sense which they cannot enclose. . . . Literature subverts any project of meaning in language. . . . And it should thereby help us to resist the coercive designs more or less hidden in all such projects. The social function of literature—its critical power—consists in its demystifying the force of argument, argument’s claim to truth. (67)

The attentive reader of Jordan’s Convulsing Bodies will be aware of his disagreements with some claims found in the massive commentary on Foucault’s work. But these disagreements are not the substance of Jordan’s writing. By displacing this kind of attention to Foucault’s writing, Jordan also displaces Foucault’s authority, his status as pronouncer of truth, thereby dislodging certain modes of authoritative truth-telling altogether. Jordan frequently lifts out the “negative theology” lurking in Foucault, the dimension of his writing that seeks to make us suspicious of all writing. By mimicking the literary, Foucault and Jordan pursue the project of disrupting power’s hold on us by interrupting the power of language itself. If anything is Foucault’s project, Convulsing Bodies seems to suggest, this is it. As Jordan told us at the outset, he is a fan not of the author Foucault, but of the texts—the writings—that author produced. And these writings constantly criticize the faith we put in writing as pronouncement, conclusion, definitive answer.

In addition, by thinking about Foucault’s texts—as well as other theoretical, historiographical and theological texts—as literary, we can begin to think differently not only about their authority, but also about their effects, as well as their affects, namely, what they accomplish rather than what they assert. If we take seriously Foucault’s fascination with Bataille, Klossowski and Blanchot, then we must also take seriously Foucault’s abiding fascination with the limit, the limit of language, the limit of experience, the limit of knowledge, the limit of the human—and writing that seeks to produce in its reader the affective charge of an encounter with this limit. This limit, according to Jordan, is the site from which a new economy of bodies and pleasures might just possibly come into being. Or, if that utopian fantasy is too fantastic—an ironic twist at the end of Foucault’s tale of sexuality—we can think this limit as the site from which resistance to the operation of disciplinary biopower will find some energy. Bataille, Klossowski and Blanchot reveal to us—because they revealed to Foucault—certain ways to rupture, to disturb, to explode systems of meaning, frames of orientation, scaffolds of being. But they do this not by offering a positive vision or an operational strategy; instead, they constantly draw us back to the alluring, terrifying void disavowed by the regnant systems of truth, knowledge, regulation, evaluation, and speech. And they do this, in part, by their poetics. If we (re)read Foucault as drawing inspiration from the work of these writers, then we must attend to the places in his writing that fail, that falter, that point to their own inadequacy, that fall silent, that become confused. Following this lead, Foucault can be read only as the guide who points us to the edge of the cliff that precipitates our dizzying disorientation: a disorientation profoundly different than the certainty of knowing ourselves, our place in the world, our theoretical and theological commitments.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, to read Foucault as a novelist, to attend carefully to the literary dimension and inspirations of his work, to the literary character of intellectual work generally, is to imagine the sources and sites of our own work as scholars of religion differently. At the outset of Convulsing Bodies, Mark Jordan writes, “For me, there is no formulable essence of religion, no clear way of separating its words from the rest of human speech” (8). Convulsing Bodies strives, then, to draw attention to the places where Foucault “writes about gods and their devotees” so that its readers can comprehend the way “religion . . . arranges languages and practices—teachings and rituals—to control this world and the bodies very much in it” (8–9). At the same time, of course, “bodies use religious discourses or practices to resist powers”; religious discourses and practices are the places where the language of power gets scrambled, where it is potentially disclosed for what it is and so rendered a little less intense, its regulatory grip loosened just a fraction (10).

Following this trajectory, what if those of us who seek to study and understand religion, bodies, pleasures and the operation of power on, in, through and among them, understood our object of study to be language, its operations, its failures, its scramblings, and its scrambling to hold on, hold us? What if, following Jordan’s tour through Foucault’s fascinations with the sacred and the literary, we began to understand the literary as the site and source of what we’ve understood as religion? If an intense strain of apophaticism informs Foucault’s work, and if it is this strain that marks the limit that is the site of power’s limit, then the work of the scholar who wants to break open new possibilities for bodies inhabiting the world may be to attend very carefully to the form, style, and operation of language—especially to the places where it falters and fails.

Convulsing Bodies is the record of one reader’s—one very astute, very attentive, very thorough, very imaginative reader’s—encounter with Foucault’s writing. By providing such a record, Mark Jordan calls each of us to return once again to the word, to its haunting and halting power, anew.

CONVULSING BODIES IS ABOUT the difficulty of speaking in noncoercive ways.1 Can words make space for flesh? And what kind of space should flesh make for words?

Speech, like original sin, is an inheritance. If you can speak, you probably discovered your voice as you learned to respond to the names your parents called you—especially the (often implicit) labels for racial, gender, national, sexual, or economic identities—like white, middle-class, black, American, female, sissy, or gay. Such names are “powerful templates for forming individuals,” because they are preloaded with judgments and scripted responses. You learned how to interpret others’ and your bodies and acts by absorbing them from your parents, who absorbed the names from their parents.

Building on medieval sacramental theologies, Mark Jordan calls these inherited mini-scripts “characters.”2 Thomas Aquinas’s account of sacramental characters begins with the observation that people often use symbols to mark things off from one other: “a coin is marked for use in exchange of goods, and soldiers are marked with a character as being deputed to military service” (ST 3.63.3). A character, Thomas generalizes, is an external sign or “seal” that identifies something and distinguishes it from other sorts of things.3 Because a character identifies the individual by “a sort of personhood that encompasses many individual bodies,” its uses are versatile (66). It can: signal that someone is included in Christ’s mystical body, mark them as a soldier, or identify them as a Sodomite.

Thomas implies that the tendency to externally identify and distinguish one another reflects something unavoidable about our humanity. We were spoken about before we began to speak, and would have been spoken about whether or not we ever developed voices. The labels we began to collect from infancy (still) organize our experience of others’ bodies and our bodies (114). Even if what we (essentially) are remains an open question, we are becoming who we are because the names others called us prompted the voices with which we name ourselves.4

Our voices embed our lives in the space and time of the group that names us. There can be no such thing as a “timeless body” located “beyond concepts, outside histories” (114–15). How would we ever talk about it? Rather, words were always flesh. You can only write, think, sign, sing, or dance because of the firing energies, pulsing waves, drumming skin, marked paper, significant gesture, vibrating vocal cords, or moving limbs. Because it must be located in these ways, the language that empowers our voices and interprets our bodies has a place and a history.

In Foucault’s telling, the most revealing episode in the western version of this history locates the origin of the modern self in medieval practices of spiritual direction.5 Penitential rites used the power of naming to elicit a new sort of interiority, inventing what people would eventually mean when they used words like “I,” “me,” “individual,” and “self.” Pastors drew on manuals, which specified, expanded, enumerated, and ordered definitions of virtues and vices. By naming possible transgressions, the priests probed the inner lives of penitents, who discovered and then whispered new secrets. Since people, like sheep, are always going shamefully astray, they would forever remain dependent on their shepherds to restore them.

Once the technologies used to elicit confessions were abstracted from their Christian context, modern institutions like prisons, asylums, hospitals, and markets could build on the self that the confessional created. This left modern subjects precariously open to new kinds of control. Those who knew how to use pastoral techniques could enumerate more definitions, create new kinds of secrets, and produce alternative interiorities. Names like criminal, insane, patient, and consumer would capture people from the inside and then endlessly reconstruct them.6

This dynamic—perpetual control, shifting targets—reminds me of a mentally and emotionally abusive relationship. As one partner manipulates the other’s sense of reality, the victim loses individuality and depends on the abuser’s perspective. One abusive technique called gaslighting uses deliberate confusion in order to undermine a victim’s ability to trust his or her own judgment. The gaslighter confidently twists information, avoids questions, sets topics off limits, diverts attention from uncomfortable truths, and minimizes the victims’ responses. This constantly shifting ground beneath the abused partner eventually causes her to distrust herself. She thinks she has gone crazy.7 As one comedian aptly put it: “It was genuinely destabilizing to be on the receiving end of a lie that confident.”8 Coercive speech is designed to keep us unstable, and it uses “deliberately irresponsible naming” to create pariahs, abnormal, unnatural, monstrous, and shameful characters.

For Foucault, the concept of sexual identity functions to cover up a series of confident lies that are designed to keep us unstable. Sexuality has to be important. It grounds our relationships with our families, fellow citizens, and our lovers. It even determines how we relate to ourselves. It makes us who we are on the “inside”; a “sexual identity” is as close to what we can mean by “private” or “interior.” Medical, political, therapeutic, religious, and economic institutions offer to help us define ourselves better by offering us insights into healthy living, family values, God’s “plan,” or “your truth” about what is right for you.

Each distinctive scientia sexualis depends for its persuasiveness on a technique called “doubling.” Sexual identity “doubles” sexual behaviors (117).9 “Why did he do that? Because he’s degenerate.” Or, “He would never do that—he’s straight . . . or I guess maybe not.” Foucault argues that a “homosexual” act “doubles” with a kind of person. The homosexual’s stylized embodiment of sexuality makes him an  “abnormal” person who represents “a fixed species of (fictive) pathology” (66). The more difficult it is to recognize the history of a doubled identity in the place and time of a group, the more that identity feels “normal” or “natural.” I often ask my students whether they could find a homosexual or an African American in nature.“Of course!”, they reply, incredulous and slightly offended. “How did they get to be African Americans? How did they get to be called homosexuals?,” I ask.

Because they cover over histories, terms like “normal” and “natural” function as Trojan horses for shame.10 Shame socially isolates you. It identifies who you are with what you do. Unlike guilt, which says you performed a bad act, shame says you are a bad person. Guilt responds by making up for what you did. Shame wants to hide you from a disapproving gaze, either real or imagined. Natural and normal characters make possible unnatural and abnormal characters, whose difference makes them intrinsically shameful, “freaks of nature.” 11 In reality, of course, “sexual identity” was not primarily meant to help us tell a truth about ourselves. 12 Because the vague unity of social and bodily function is itself an artifact, no definition can possibly reflect a timeless, generic identity (103). 13  The concept of sexuality is “so useful to an emerging form of power” because its lack of clear conceptual boundaries makes it easy to selectively create abnormal characters and thereby shame anyone who calls the smooth functioning of social norms into question (112). “Deliberately irresponsible naming” selectively creates pariahs and abnormal, unnatural, monstrous freakish characters by doubling acts with identities.  Sometimes, you can separate identities and behaviors. It gets especially delicate the more normative and therefore fragile the imagined identity of the actor is. “Straight” men who perform “homosexual acts” with one another might not be gay, just “experimenting.” Other times, doubling is unreasonably inflexible. Preadolescent girls deemed sexually abnormal, criminal, and degenerate are institutionalized and then told, “Your identity is you’re a sex offender.”14

James Baldwin, who wrote with particular acuity about what it meant to construct normal sexual and racial identity in the United States, asserted that such “essentially nostalgic” ideals in his context had “almost nothing to do with what or who an American really is” or with “what life is.” For Baldwin, these black or queer characters exist instead because they externalize a “kind of social paranoia,” a “fear,” “a kind of sleeping terror of some condition which we refuse to imagine.” Without black people, he argues, “we might be forced to deal within ourselves and our own personality, with all those vices, all those conundrums, and all those mysteries which we have invested the negro race.”15

*                      *                      *                      *

Baldwin’s interpretation of “the majority” begins from the observation that coercive speech is not merely a cause of shame, but a response to it. Baldwin’s echo of Christ’s words on the cross indicates that shame also debilitates those who use it to dominate: “I was black in that world, and I was used that way, and by people who truly meant me no harm. And they could not have meant me any harm, because they did not see me.”16 Shame makes truth telling impossible because it depends on a system of lies in order to preserve convenient appearances.

If you want to know whether you can trust someone, Baldwin implies, you should look at how they dance. The dancers filling the Harlem nightclub remain “aware of the terrible and unreachable forces which yet rule their lives.”17 But because the illusion of control doesn’t trap those who feel disempowered, “no one gives a damn, and this allows everyone to be himself—at the club.” The movements of dancing bodies make space inside the shaming system for the dancers to be open to themselves. Dancing extravastates compassion, producing “an atmosphere of freedom which is exactly as real as the limits which have made it necessary.” The dancers in the Harlem nightclub show themselves to be trustworthy because of the way they move indicates that they have found ways to be free. “A person’s freedom can only be judged in terms of his flexibility, his openness toward life; it is not his situation which makes him free, but himself.”18

Alternatively, the “majority” dances with “joylessness.” On the one hand, they are like everyone else,  “struggling to be free of invisible chains.” On the other hand, however, their overriding “wish…to remain socially safe” constrains their style. 19 The need to maintain dominant control makes them quite fragile and insecure. As a result, they can’t make enough space either for themselves or for one another. A pitiful weakness and fears of self-confrontation at the heart of the bullying abuse, which controls them, too: “Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated—in the main, abominably—because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires. Most of us, however, do not appear to be freaks—though we are rarely what we appear to be.”20 The system has to pretend. It depends on weakness and lies.

Shame cannot survive the magnanimity, strength, and dignity of compassion, which is rooted in the perception of being wanted. Compassion overcomes fear and makes it possible to perceive yourself and others truthfully. You can be open to others when you aren’t obsessed with protecting yourself. That is why it is only really possible to love your neighbor as yourself—much less your enemy—when you have figured out how to love own your life. Compassion frees you to speak truthfully and with parrhesia because it enables you to talk about yourself in a way that isn’t fueled by the victimizer’s terms and strategies.

No one in the world—in the entire world—knows more—knows Americans better or, odd as this may sound, loves them more than the American Negro. This is because he has had to watch you, outwit you, deal with you, and bear you, and sometimes even bleed and die with you, ever since we got here, that is, since both of us, black and white, got here—and this is a wedding. Whether I like it or not, or whether you like it or not, we are bound together forever. We are part of each other. What is happening to every Negro in the country at any time is also happening to you. There is no way around this.21

Love, it turns out, reflects the truth of the situation. In his later Playboy essay, Baldwin said the same: “Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other. . . . We are a part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.”22 Compassion does not need to define someone else before making space for them.

For Foucault, Jordan, and Baldwin, a politics that uses the fiction of stable identities in order to make space to include everyone presumes the system of shameful naming that it seeks to resist. For “much of the victim [identity politics] means to rescue has been created by the victimizing system” (56). Victims therefore increase their troubles as they seek to subvert, defeat, or join the abuser’s trap.

It seems to me very dangerous to model one’s opposition to the arbitrary definition, to the imposed ordeal, merely on the example supplied by one’s oppressor. The object of one’s hatred is never, alas, conveniently outside but is seated in one’s lap, stirring in one’s bowels and dictating the beat of one’s heart. And if one does not know this, one risks becoming an imitation—and, therefore, a continuation—of principles one imagines oneself to despise.23

Resisting oppressive readings of scripture by offering a better, more convincing reading of some biblical text is a way of merely tinkering with the shaming system. The problem was never with scripture, but with the terms on which it is read, which use gaslighting to shame readers into submission.24 The project of “gay liberation conceived as the proud assertion of gay identity” is also a way of tinkering with the system. “The problem with ‘gay pride’ is not the pride but the identity implicit in ‘gay.’ Overturning scientia sexualis requires giving up the desire for theories about sex—including the theories that underwrite identity politics.” A political response that seeks assimilation into stable categories of race or sexuality merely reverses “the pathological valuation—by proclaiming that the pathology was really normal all along” is a way of tinkering with the shaming system. Pride self-protectively uses identity-markers to push the problem of abnormality onto some different group—bisexuals, transgender persons. For the normalizing “epistemic project,” which remains “intact,” will need a new character on which to displace the fear and insecurity (117).

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Augustine’s theology is typically interpreted as an inadequate tinkering with Roman political, sexual, and social ideals. Perhaps so. But he can also be read through proto-Foucauldian irony. Consider his campy description of how divine compassion in Jesus undermines the Roman ideal of the impenetrable manly man. He playfully takes on the most normative and therefore fragile identity at the heart of the Roman domestic, social, and political structures. If you read him too earnestly, or if you identify too closely with the concerns of the subject that he means to critique, you’ll miss the joke—and, I think, what makes his thought so challenging.25

For example, City of God rewrites the story of the household (domus) from the beginning. God the creator, like any good paterfamilias, injects divine seminal formulae (rationes seminales) into the formless matter (mater). The seminales form the whole material hierarchy into the shape of the eternal Logos. God innovates by placing Adam, the father of the human family, at the head of the fleshly hierarchy. For, unlike other gregarious animals, which are made in groups according to their kinds, all people descend from a single couple. Human conjugal relations signify more than the extension of the human species in time and space. It inscribes the social and political intimacy of the human household onto our flesh.26

The human community was designed to reflect the ideal of the Late Antique, elite Roman household. In such a household, the paterfamilias exercises power (potestas) internally and externally, individually and socially, domestically and civically. Internally, potestas is the reasoned mastery of his body and his emotions. Outwardly, this potestas manifests as his competence to ensure harmony (concordia) in at the various levels of the household: he maintains a relationship of affinity (adfinitas) with his wife and secures the obedience and piety (obedentia and pietas) of his children and his slaves. If the inner-self mastery makes the outer competence possible, then the outer competence displays a character that values justice. In a massive, decentralized empire, civic life depended on personal trustworthiness of those with public responsibilities. And so someone who displays inner mastery through outer competence could be entrusted with civic responsibility. A just man will prioritize the common good over his private advantage. Alternatively, a man who lacked self-control and managed his household incompetently was suspect. How could someone who could not secure his own household be entrusted to protect the common good?

Since the human political community is united by kinship, Adam’s domestic competence would simultaneously ensure the political harmony of the human community. But unlike God, whose competence (omni-potestas) flows from divine self-sufficiency, Adam, the father of the race, was also God’s son. His self-mastery depended on the obedience and piety he owed to God. In City of God, Augustine argues that Adam failed to render God pietas and obedientia. And in On the Trinity, Augustine imagines that at the nexus of the inner and outer households, Adam and Eve traded the “whole that is common to all” for the sake of their own “private property” and were therefore “thrust into anxiety over a part” (trin., XII). They undermined justice by prioritizing their private advantage over the common good.

Adam’s failure to render God obedience and piety caused discord in the divine domus. Adam became impotent (im-potestas). He lost control over himself, his descendants, and his relationship with his wife. In the future, he would relate discordantly to himself, coercively to them, and violently to her. Adam’s immediate, physiological reaction to his disobedience was shame (pudor), which claimed as its icon the unruly male member, as a sign of a man’s inability to control his own body. What were once genitalia, the seed-producing images of God the Father’s fertility, have become pudenda, the shame of men, moving when men don’t try to move them and worse, failing to move in accordance with desire.27 In shame, Adam became obsessed with hiding all signs of his impotence.

Some of the most suggestive interpretations of Augustine locate the transmission of this impotence and shame in coercive naming.28 Adam passes on his insecurity to his descendants by teaching them to talk about themselves in ways that lack compassion and fail to do themselves and others justice. Augustine thought that the Roman social structure could never be just insofar as it depended on covering up male impotence with outward signs of dominance and glory. The social system was founded to be a giant smokescreen – a garment of fig-leaves, if you will – for men to hide their shame and, as a consequence, to manipulatively gaslight everybody else. A deep and enduring insecurity funds the Roman pursuit of glory. The social logic of all subsequent earthy cities repeats the pathology, weaving hierarchies meant to cover the limp and unpredictable with strength and impenetrability.

Augustine portrays the Devil on the model of the ideal Roman man—a transparently insecure bully. Obsessed with compensating for his (l)impotence, his shame-driven obsession with domination (libido dominandi) leads him to project a veneer of impenetrable strength. Since the Devil’s obsession stems from insecurity, his sense of competence is competitive. His need to be big and great depends on disempowering others. He does this chiefly through deception; he bends his superior technological skills to mendacious ends, drawing others into a deceptive cycle whereby he diminishes and shames them. This is why the Devil uses fireworks to show his greatness – they are like big signs meant to compensate for disobedient members. He may be vulnerable, but he can make everyone else even more vulnerable.

Because this version of ideal Roman masculinity lacks the Roman virtue humilitas, Augustine theologically re-narrates the virtue.29 Loving, merciful compassion (caritas) animates reality and makes a just vulnerability or a vulnerable justice a sign of courage. God the Father, secure in the divine potestas, has nothing to prove. Because of the divine sufficiency, the Lord (Dominus) demonstrates divine glory not through dominating haughtiness, but with vulnerability —“the greatness of being lowly” (On Holy Virginity, On the Trinity XIII). Predating Chalcedon’s substance Christologies, Augustine imagines a man (it should be clear why it was important to Augustine that he be a man—even if it turns out that he had to be intersex)30 who enacts a vulnerability so complete from an empowerment so sufficient that only an immediate, continuous flow of divine strength makes it intelligible. This man would seamlessly perform the humility of God. 31  Absent self-interest, he could restore Adam’s headship by pursuing the common good with the single-minded obedience and piety of a son.

The crucifixion is the culmination of the battle between Jesus and the Devil over the claim to competent management of the human household. Christ’s potestas would depend on his vulnerability in pursuit of justitia. Blindly insecure, the Devil knows nothing but the compulsion to compensate for what he lacks. From his weakness he assails justice and pursues his own advantage in order to extend his deceitful dominion. His need to control makes him unable to recognize Christ’s divine competence—and the vulnerability of its offer. Patient and humble pursuit of justice, not coercive domination, would evidence divine strength. Through one lens, Jesus ironically tricked the Devil into confusing his naked vulnerability for a show of weakness. The bully’s victory secured his defeat, for killing Jesus offset and exposed the impotence and insecurity of the Devil’s more conventional sort of dominance. Jesus played the nonstrategic fool whose potestas could more ably manage the human household. The Lord’s loving and healing availability through Christ would free those disempowered by the Devil. For the power that funded Christ’s vulnerability is such that it is chiefly invested in maximizing the style and the uniqueness of each repetition of goodness. In their shame, the deceived forgot about their goodness and resorted to the violent tactics of the bully. In Jesus, they could be made secure once again in God’s love. Baptism might rewrite their identity by giving them a new name in a household integrated not by Roman pride but by divine compassion.

The failure of the Devil’s mode of dominance undermined all its imitators, especially the version of the elite Roman masculine ideal that the alternative Christian view of sex and politics often took for granted. Jovinian’s theology represented the light baptism of the Roman household. It tinkered with the imperial project of masculine subject-formation, but ultimately left it intact. Jerome’s contentiously reasserted the ideal image of the prideful, impenetrable Roman man, but this time as the prideful, impenetrable ascetic. Augustine thought the Jovinianist position an unacceptable accommodation to the status quo, and he associated Jerome’s view of the superb that underwrites the imperial project. Both were too modest – just tinkering with a system that needed to be overhauled.

Through this lens, Augustine’s theology signals the sexual failure of the imperial superstructure. The failure of the Devil’s mode of dominance undermined all its imitators, especially the version of the elite Roman masculine ideal that the alternative Christian views of sex and politics on offer took for granted. By ironically redescribing the character around whom the Roman social and political order revolved, Augustine’s critique of Roman masculinity rejected the central Roman claims to justice and power. By unmasking the technologies used to control people by shaming them, the divine intervention in Christ indicated the dangerous and absurd impotence of Roman masculinity, the persistent violence of sexual intercourse, and the incompetence of Rome’s attempt at justice.

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“Normalizing discourse” uses shame to create social closure by inventing knowledges intended to make us transparent to ourselves. These knowledges deceive us, each of them functions to control us, and they use shame to abuse us. Since the names we acquire always “contain histories” and “are caught up in histories,” confessing the coercive naming itself makes room to face the stories that we have believed unknowingly. Confession has the power to dislodge what seemed to us universal “facts.” It thus resists shame noncoercively—without trying to “capture” or “direct” anything.32 Confronting what we have depended on to make our lives rational helps us discover some of the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves. If we make the names explicit, it is more difficult to maintain the shaming system’s core claim that certain characters are “unnatural” or “abnormal” (81–82). If we learn to relate to the realities that the lies exist to avoid, we might begin to see, to receive, and therefore to speak more truthfully33 “Once you have discerned the meaning of a label, it may seem to define you for others, but it does not have the power to define you to yourself.”34 When whole groups confess with parrhesia, then they are “forced to deal with themselves.” They no longer need abnormal characters,35 for they can stop trying to create the closure they think they need to avoid restlessness.

Confession is a “daily practice of rewriting” our bodies so that they can breathe (121). It only resists shame noncoercively when it is free from the anxiety of securing itself. Confession therefore needs to be eschatological, because it postpones the intimacy of words with reality to an indefinite future: now, “we don’t (yet) have the words” to speak with closure. Confession also needs to be apophatic, because it deconstructs and therefore continually undermines the adequacy of any linguistic and social system. “some day, perhaps, we will have another language for bodies and pleasures. We will praise or solicit them without also desiring their scientific truth. The only way to reach that other economy is first of all by unsaying, by apophasis” (117–18).

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You can breathe again when your therapist helps you to name the destructive cycle that has haunted you or your relationship. “When he perceives intensity or hostility in my demeanor, he experiences flooding. It’s a physiological reaction. His heart rate increases. His breath shortens. All he can do is look for the next attack or try to find a way out.” The name, flooding, diagnoses and recommends a script: take a break. Calm down. Return to the topic later. Wait for him to feel centered and able to trust you again. 36 The process of attaching words to experiences and feelings might in this case serves a relationship that exceeds both the words and the reality that the words try to name. By empowering the couple to relate to the dynamic rather than through it, the words empty out a space for both partners to breathe.

Buddhist shamatha-viashyana meditation recommends a similar naming process.37 When you attempt to be present with your breath, your mind wanders into thought and your feelings rush ahead of your breath. Gently, compassionately naming the thought “thinking” and the feeling “anxiety,” “sadness,” or “joy” restores you to your breath and saves you from an infinite regress of harsh self-judgment. Compassionately attaching words makes you present to your thoughts and feelings so that you relate to them rather than through them. It makes your heart capacious and soft. The newly opened emptiness inside of you, bodhichitta, becomes the space to inhale the suffering of all beings and to exhale the joy of the world’s goodness. When you are present to your breath, your perception of the world’s fleetingness—and your own—sharpens. You realize that trying to grasp onto the dream will diminish you. Since nothing is solid, you reject the only alternative—to harden yourself against suffering and joy in order to maintain an illusion. For grasping joy and pushing suffering away trades open emptiness for looming nothingness, reality for a dream. The practice of naming softens your small, stony, self-protective heart into a spacious, fleshy heart.

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Coercive speech must be dangerously pure and stiflingly complete. The social structure it produces aims to leave no space for unpredictable movement or unscripted styles. Whatever its form, it establishes, subverts, or avoids a normalizing space unencumbered by history or limitation. In this light, Jordan has rewritten Foucault in an anti-Pelagian and anti-Donatist tract. This impossible immediacy that purity needs always relies on either in the status quo or in its opposite. If only “the pious hope that the perfect words of the right theory would deliver our bodies to us, intact, unblemished” were reliable! Then words could surpass themselves and the bodies that speak or write them and give us access to something outside of our human bodies. Then we could finally secure ourselves.

Augustine’s thought means that speech cannot transcend flesh or its history. Michael Banner calls perfectionist forms of epistemic purity such as “pure nature” Thomism or its theoretical equivalents “epistemological Pelagianism.”38 An identity politics that secures its arguments by appeal to the transparently legible identity of the author might be called “epistemological Donatism.” In either case, epistemic purity is dangerous. For purity’s empowering fictions—that we can transcend our flesh, that we might be like God, knowing good and evil—trap us in our own certainties, and who knows what we might do with them? Such certainties also leave us without help. For if our words might timelessly absorb flesh in pure speech, why would the Word become flesh?

For Baldwin, pure, identity-completing speech is able to use sex, gender, or race coercively because it treats God as a toy: “I suggest that the role of the Negro in American life has something to do with our concept of what God is, and from my point of view, this concept is not big enough. It has got to be made much bigger than it is because God is, after all, not anybody’s toy.” Non-coercive speech instead relies on “something I do not understand.” It resists epistemic purity and its shameful characterizations by emphasizing the nonlinguistic depth of all speaking.

To be with God is really to be involved with some enormous, overwhelming desire, and joy, and power which you cannot control, which controls you. I conceive of my own life as a journey toward something I do not understand, which in the going toward, makes me better. I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not as a means to control others. Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.39

Baldwin’s God – like Augustine’s – cannot finally shame, dominate, or control subjects. For all speaking, interpreting, and acting participate in the eternal iteration of an unimaginable and ecstatic constancy in which divine life is present to itself in love. That divine self-presence is the vanishing goal to which all our speaking aspires. As the Word is God’s way of being ecstatically present to God and gratuitously present to us, our speaking makes it possible for us to be present us to ourselves and to one another as gratuitous gifts. This means at least allowing each person (whatever we are) to be “utterly distinct” as we share a life together.

As Jordan’s work approaches its constructive limit, I find it increasingly frustrating. The scripts he suggests require readers to improvise, and it can be difficult to know what to do. Recruiting Young Love, for example, sustains a precise, sophisticated, erudite, and compelling microanalyses of naming techniques. But it ends with less than five pages of constructive moral reflection (210–14). I suppose, however, that if my reading of Jordan is right, part of the (essentially Augustinian) point is that theological writing can only resist policing, coercive speech, if it abandons rhetorical techniques meant to control the reader’s response. No rhetoric, fast or slow, can guarantee outcomes. Jordan’s short conclusion retrospectively transforms what has seemed until then merely an erudite historical effort in deconstructive naming into “a litany of queer saints and a repository of queer rituals.” In this light, this and the rest of Jordan’s rather eclectic set of writings (on Thomas, queer theory, American history, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, etc.) reads like a de Lubacian project of ressourcement:

Christianity remains a repository for archaic, transgressive characters of desire and gender. They are inscribed into its scriptures, especially in the person of its founder. . . . The transgressive characters are regularly brought to life in Christian worship, in its liturgy and sacraments. Many churches labor to enforce a dominant moralism, but they inevitably perform a Gospel with a surplus of other possibilities—other characters. I now claim all these rituals for queer religion—and even for queer Christianity. Or I want to.40

Jordan’s writing asks whether there is some form of Christian practice and teaching that might help readers find a style—a way to be more themselves, to find in the “already-formed subject the makings of a future self that is a return to self” (174). He concludes Recruiting Young Love by asking this striking question:

Can we still imagine a Christian community that could form erotic characters in opposition to the state? That community would have to recall the extraordinary power of an englobing rhetoric that can begin in childhood and continue, through every stage of life, into promises for life beyond. It would need to remember that its rituals are more than the belated ramification or affirmation of civic identities. The basic Christian rites, baptism and Eucharist, actualize strange possibilities for gendered desire, as they establish unusual relations with the bodies and “identities” of Jesus Christ.41

Perhaps the unimaginable divine compassion that Baldwin perceived as he challenged white Christian identity politics or that Augustine perceived as he rewrote imperial Roman masculinity can make space for us to move into new and truthful styles. For if that God is real, then you not are necessary. The only reason you are here is because you are wanted. The truest thing about you is that you are a gift. Along with each other thing, your moving flesh shows what goodness is like in a way that nothing else can. That goodness is massive and basic and identical with existence and truth. “The truth must have a body,” and in your own way, that body is you (188). Only you can move the way you do, and so your central responsibility is to maximize your style. The stakes are high: you are an irreplaceably particular way of being the goodness, apart from whom the rest of us lose an opportunity to receive God’s limitless compassion.

Most people are not able to look on each other as human beings, and, in spite of everything, to treat each other that way. Until this happens, freedom is only an empty word. In the meantime, what one’s contrasting is a matter of style, i.e., ways of life, and contrasting these, moreover, in their most public manifestations. The atmosphere of a Harlem nightclub must be different from that of the Copacabana because of the way of life which has produced it, and the peculiar needs it serves.42

If words are always flesh, then words and bodies need to make space for one another in much more self-conscious ways. We need to make space for one another in how we speak. And so it has to be okay that the way we write or speak is always doing a bit more justice to our styles—and therefore never quite enough. We don’t have to interpret failures, mistakes, and imperfections as signs of corruption. Instead, we might be okay with being ourselves, learn to trust each other, negotiate our differences as they arise, and mourn the inevitable tragedies that accompany our limits, and perhaps thereby gain the strength and compassion necessary to confess our failures. That would be honest speech. Perhaps Jordan, together with Baldwin, Foucault, Augustine, and all the company of queer saints can help us to confess—or at least to speak with style.