Michel Foucault’s experience, limit-experience and spirituality problem

Abstract

The article is devoted to the historical and philosophical reconstruction of the concepts of experience and limit experience in the context of the problem of spirituality in Michel Foucault’s philosophy. The authors proceed from the thesis that in the postmodern space the concept of philosophical experience dramatically changes its traditional meaning. Turning to liminal philosophy, associated with the figures of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, the authors includes Foucault in this series in connection with the transformation of the concept of spirituality in the course of the intellectual evolution of the French thinker. In Foucault’s legacy, it is possible to distinguish several meanings of “experience”, each connected with a special type of “spirituality”, atheistic during the formation of Foucault’s philosophical position, political during its heyday and aesthetic during its decline. Regardless of these qualitative differences, spirituality in Foucault’s project remains an unattainable goal. The authors associate this feature of the Foucauldian interpretation of spirituality with the experience of desubjectivization. The “limit-experience” is understood by Foucault in two ways: how to set boundaries and how to overcome them. It is necessarily preceded by the experience of assembling the subject by the field of one or another truth. Between these two types of experience, Foucault places “experience-correlation”, which connects areas of knowledge, types of normativity, and forms of subjectivity. If “limit-experience” is established in the process of fleeing from the chaos of everyday life, then the “experience-correlation”, examined from the standpoint of Foucault’s archeology and genealogy, forces one to unravel the subject’s historical structures. Thanks to the practices of changing, dispersing, and splitting the subject, everyday life acquires once-lost meanings. However, spirituality remains an unattainable excess provoking a person to experience in which he himself will inevitably be absent.