Foucault, Christianity & Practices of Cultivation

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Niki Kasumi Clements. Niki is the Watt J. and Lilly G. Jackson Associate Professor of Religion at Rice University. Dr. Clements is an ethicist working on how humans can shape their lives through daily practices and come to critique the social, political, cultural, economic, and ecological factors that render humans differentially vulnerable to structural violence. Clements’s first monograph, Sites of the Ascetic Self (2020), approaches these questions through the ethics of John Cassian (c.360-c.435), the late ancient ascetic whose views of human ability contributed to new forms of life in a shifting empire. Between 1977 and 1984, philosopher Michel Foucault became particularly interested in Cassian as part of the genealogy of the desiring subject–and Sites reconsiders these readings through Cassian’s attention to embodied, affective, and inter-relational practices. Clements’s research for her second monograph, Foucault the Confessor, engages Foucault’s fascination with Christianity and ethics through both his published works and the archives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The posthumous publication of History of Sexuality, Volume 4, Les Aveux de la chair (2018, translated as Confessions of the Flesh in 2021) confirms the extent of his engagement with early Christianity and ancient sexual ethics as an art of living; it also confirms just how important the study of religion is for engaging Foucault’s work on subjection, alongside the possibilities for self-formation and challenges to structures of domination. Influenced by her mentors at Brown University (Ph.D., 2014), Harvard Divinity School (M.T.S., 2007), and Sarah Lawrence College (B.A., 2003), as well as her students at Rice, Clements’s teaching and service share her research attention to recognizing human ability and critiquing structural disparities. In this episode, we explore a various topics: Michel Foucault (some of the exciting new findings from the archives) Ancient philosophical and spiritual self-care practices Why Christianity (through St. Augustine) routed sexuality and subjectivity so closely together How to think about the cultivation of individual autonomy while also participating in collective spaces of resistance Why modern figures like Jordan Peterson are dangerous (even if they have some useful points to make) How men can think about their complicity in systems of oppression while also listening to themselves and others as a means of self-care and political engagement. Website: http://www.nikiclements.com