Liberating theological anthropology: The church, Foucault, and the concept of transformation

In this paper, I examine the possibility of creating a liberating theological anthropology, using Michel Foucault’s concept of desubjectivation to reinterpret the concept of transformation.
In the church, a constellation of terms has been used to express transformation. Nonetheless, there has been a dominant trajectory, premised on pessimistic anthropological assumptions. In practice, transformation has been endorsed for the sake of church order and discipline. Obedience is the end.
In contrast, Foucault develops an alternative trajectory of transformation by examining Greek, Roman, and Hellenistic spiritual practices. This is a secular construal of transformation. It has an optimistic view of humankind. It is about the subject’s very being. And freedom is the end.
The meaning of transformation in Foucault is not entirely clear, however, as he is in two minds about the language of transformation. This is partly because he cannot erase all religious traces from discourses of transformation. So, then, I develop a religious trajectory of transformation using Foucault’s concept of desubjectivation.
Desubjectivation, in this paper, represents the undoing and reforming of the subject, generated by a limit-experience. It has an optimistic view of humankind, which is held in tension with the reality of suffering and violence. So, transformation is an experience of desubjectivation, which is a limit-experience, encompassing transgressing boundaries and crossing thresholds. The sacrament of baptism, for example, is an experience of desubjectivation with a political nuance. Subsequently, transformation has a place in church order, but church order is not its raison d’etre.