Convulsing Bodies: Religion and Resistance in Foucault by Mark D. Jordan (review)

texts of world literature; pied-noir literature is not an exception here. The strength of the bond/attachment to Algeria, felt and expressed by the pieds-noirs (like that of the Harkis and so many other Algerian exiles), that of their pain and suffering, and the beautiful pages that have result from that experience, remain, alas, unexamined. One can acknowledge the beauty of the prose and explore, say, Cardinal’s complex attachment to the land while at the same time be critical of her sense of ownership. In the end, Hubbell’s book tackles a challenging topic and does a great job framing and analyzing the pied-noir experience from a mostly psychoanalytic perspective. The stimulating sections where figures such as Derrida and Cixous are examined in their relationship to Algeria, remind us of the much-needed studies of the pied-noir experience and its related literature that remain to be produced. Claremont McKenna College (CA) Fazia Aïtel Jordan, Mark D. Convulsing Bodies: Religion and Resistance in Foucault. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2015. ISBN 978-0-8047-9276-9. Pp. 272. $25. While literary scholars of all areas, including those studying French language and literatures, have long drawn on many of Foucault’s key concepts, from the panopticon to heterotopia and biopower, fewer have extensively engaged Foucault as a literary figure and his writings as literature. Jordan critically reinvests Foucault’s encounter with religion, as modernity’s other, as well as Christianity’s relationship to its other, antiquity. As the title suggests, the work is especially attentive to those moments in Foucault’s work where the functioning of religious and secular power is disrupted by the body interrupting official discourse. This might include involuntary spasms (as the nuns of Loudon), inarticulate cries (as in the shrieks of Damiens, the would-be assassin of Louis XV), or even as the body itself becomes a space of philosophical speculation (as in Diderot’s“bijoux indiscrets”) and demonstration (the Cynics’public mimicking of animal behavior and calls). These are moments where the functioning of power appears as it desperately attempts to translate corporeal confusion into continuous and comprehensible discourse. Readers of French are sure to find Jordan’s painstaking attention to the turns of phrase in the original French and Foucault’s readings of French literature most interesting. The first part of the book contains detailed analyses of Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, and Alfred Jarry’s various mises-en-scène of power and sacrifice. Jordan also attends to Julien Gracq’s Le rivage des Syrtes in detail, offering its narrator as a figure who comes to realize Foucault’s insight that we “suffer errors in imagining and representing power. [We] don’t know where to look for power in the world, in ourselves” (82). For Jordan, Foucault’s late interest in ways of managing the body both in antiquity and medieval Christianity are part of the development of “the techniques of speaking the self in relation to the flesh” (127) that will later evolve into the modern understanding of biopower. Going 246 FRENCH REVIEW 89.4 Reviews 247 beyond ars ertotica, Jordan argues that Foucault’s interest in such oeuvres as the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola suggest a working through the body to develop an ars vivendi (or style de vie in the fullest sense). Jordan’s readings of Foucault give fresh perspectives on how the body enters discourse’s grip and its subversive possibilities that have been forgotten or co-opted. Foucault’s highly performative and self-reflexive approach to power, in which he never seeks to define a term, but rather to reenact and draw attention again and again to its functioning, will frustrate those searching for a definitive discourse for oppositional identity. But as Jordan reminds us, “for Foucault the most arduous writing recalls scenes of bodily resistance at the edge of language”(199). Scholars of gender, sexuality, as well as those interested in fresh readings of the transgressive possibilities of French literature, will find that struggling with language, in Foucault’s prose and Jordan’s readings, is well worth the effort. Stetson University (FL) Robert J. Watson Leroy, Fabrice. Sfar...