I was imprisoned by subjectivity and you visited me: Bonhoeffer and Foucault on the way to a postmodern Christian self.

One of the most important issues at stake in the church's mission is what the church encourages or allows young adults to think about themselves--what the church teaches about how we should interpret our lives and order our relationships with others. Not only is it observable that on such issues ministry to young adults often stands or falls, it is also the case that the meaning of one's own life and relationship with others is at the very heart of the way of Jesus. Because of the margin of freedom that many young adults claim with respect to personal and spiritual development and church affiliation, and given the power that the church can and does exercise over the lives of young adults, a great deal hinges for both on what the church communicates about what is important about our lives and how we order our relationships with others. What exactly the church should be preaching and practicing about self-identity is a complicated question, both in principle and in the actual situation of many of our churches t oday. Each of us practicing theology or ministry does so with an at least implicit understanding of what constitutes a Christian self. Fortuitously, subjectivity has come in for serious questioning in much postmodern philosophy and theology. The time is opportune for an intentional reappraisal of how we construe Christian subjectivity.

In service of such a reappraisal, the purpose of this lecture is to resource Dietrich Bonhoeffer, by way of Michel Foucault, for the task of reinterpreting the Christian self in our present. The rethinking of subjectivity going on in postmodern theories and theologies affords an opportunity to revisit a classic Protestant work, through a postmodern lens, for the sake of gathering up intellectual resources for ministry in the present. It is not a matter of forcing Bonhoeffer's work to take responsibility for our questions or our answers but rather of culling what is useful for Christian subjectivity today from the resources of our Christian tradition.

I come to Bonhoeffer's work, in the words of Michel de Certeau, to "poach" it, (1) to read it strictly for my purposes, putting it to use for a theology of the present. Such a project was not foreign to Bonhoeffer, who remarked in an early lecture that out of "love for this contemporary world of ours[,] [e]very word is to be spoken out of the present for the present." (2) This poaching delimits my task in giving to our understanding of a theology of the cultures of younger generations further tools in service of what Foucault called the "undefined work of freedom." (3) Thus, when an idea struck me as useful in Bonhoeffer's work, I adopted Maria von Wedemeyer's tactic: "I purloined it and bore it off." (4) My style of interpreting Bonhoeffer is also a matter of honoring a chief characteristic of Bonhoeffer's own theological style, of which Eberhard Bethge has written, "Bonhoeffer did not let himself be deterred from applying his subjective contemporary experience to an eclectic examination of texts." (5)

I admit a certain hesitation in writing about Bonhoeffer, because I am, first, a Roman Catholic and second, decidedly not a "Bonhoeffer scholar." Can anything new be said of this man, or can anything said of old be deployed for a new freedom? My task here is to ask, with respect to an ethic of the self, not what Bonhoeffer himself necessarily saw but what his work allows us to see today. This is not an attempt at comprehensiveness with respect to Bonhoeffer's ouvre. Although it is important to associate my question within ever-widening circles of his other works, of interpretations of the Christianity of his day, and of interpretations of the self in the traditions to which he was heir, none of these tasks can be accomplished here. At the risk of parochialism, I shall restrict myself as much as possible to the prison letters, fixing their coordinates for this question as an initial movement in a larger project for a post-modern Christian interpretation of the self.

One challenge of this topic is that its evidence is scattered like so much chad over the gaps, repetitions, miscommunications, and interruptions intrinsic to letter-writing. Some sort of tentative whole must be made, risking Adorno's warning that "the whole is the untrue." Threads joining fragments together will have to be sewn into the text, and artificial limbs affixed. While this is true of an interpretation of any text, it is readily evidenced in a project such as this. I begin with Foucault to furnish a running start into Bonhoeffer: sketching the self in Foucault, looking at the self in Bonhoeffer's letters, and drawing implications for theology and ministry today. In this way I hope to develop one small piece of the groundwork of a problematic that will serve the church's mission to young adults.

The self in Foucault

One of the most fruitful construals of the self in postmodern philosophy has come from the French philosopher Foucault (1926-1984). I do not survey his work here but merely introduce the logic of one strand of his thought about the self. This work attempts to demonstrate and provoke critical thought about the meaning of subjectivity. Foucault privileges a rigorously historical approach that seeks to remove subjectivity from the realm of the natural, the transcendental, and the ahistorical and strives to demarcate the historicity of subjectivity itself. In principle, this is not an inscrutable method of inquiry: honesty in the face of historical consciousness would demand that we observe that people in different times and places have understood themselves, and what it is about themselves that they share with other human beings, quite differently; they have valued very different qualities about themselves; they have appealed to a wide range of authorities to interpret themselves; they have imagined in very diff erent ways what it means to say "I," indeed have innovated very different terms to refer to the entity who is the author of his or her actions. Even today, what it means to be or to have a "self" manifests significant variations according to one's geographic place, economic situation, race, sex or gender, and educational background. It is of course one thing to understand this in principle and quite another to know what to make of it in the implications for one's own life.

One distinguishing characteristic of Foucault's approach is that he refuses to unite the differences present in the history of subjectivity through an appeal to a transcendental subjectivity, on the one hand, or through privileging the modern, Western, "enlightened," individual, rational Christian self as the summit of selfhood, on the other. The latter is one particular historical configuration of subjectivity whose superiority to other historical periods or places cannot be assumed. Who are we today, and how is it exactly that we have come to know who we are? Do we dare to historicize not only our political structures, cultural forms, and religions but our very selves? For the sake of our own freedom, Foucault says, we must do so, lest we be bound to the histories of our subjectivity instead of taking up a critical relation to ourselves through confronting the history of selfhood. Once this line of inquiry is opened, a flood of questions is released, and the attempt to think critically about subjectivity ne cessitates not only a rigorous historicity but an inquiry into the subtle functioning of power and knowledge in that historicity: How does the modem Western self come to recognize itself as a self or to be recognized as such by the cultural authorities? When we recognize ourselves as subjects, what is it exactly that we are recognizing or knowing about ourselves, and what was the historical process that created the conditions for such a recognition or knowledge? What exclusions were enacted in that very historical process? What options and possibilities for relating to ourselves have been denied in order to secure the history of the subjects that we are today?

In the West today, we can readily call upon a constellated self-identity familiar to the formally educated classes: many if not most of us understand ourselves in the terms of a certain constellation of psychological discourses (I am a hothouse of unfinished childhood business and secret sexual desires; I am the Meyers-Briggs classification "INTJ"); Christian religious discourses (I am sinful/graced/saved/lost); sex and gender discourses (I am masculine/ feminine, gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered/straight); racial discourses (I am Euro/African-American/Hispanic/Latino/ Asian); and economic discourses (I am productive or unproductive). It is those qualities that we take to be most natural about ourselves that Foucault placed radically into question as historically constituted. It is those aspects of being a self that we think are transcendentally given or ahistorical that Foucault unearthed and whose history he wanted to trace. At the points at which we are most certain about our identities, Foucault wants t o ask how, why, and at what cost that point of assurance came to be associated with truth and that truth with subjectivity. He suspends "human nature" in quotation marks. He forces the daunting question about the medical, psychological, economic, theological, and pedagogical "discourses" in which our understandings of ourselves are implicated.

In this approach to subjectivity, no aspect of modem selfhood gets a free pass. If the glory of modernity was its celebration of the progress of a scientific understanding of the world and the self, the Foucaultian logic struggles to recover the secret imprisonments that are the untold history not only of our past but of our present. In Foucault' s studies, he did this by attending to the creation of new dimensions of the self in modernity associated with truth: insanity, criminality, sexual identity. "The 'Enlightenment,' which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines." (6) It is characteristic of his work that Foucault refuses to disassociate the former from the latter. Psychology, religion, sexuality, medicine: all have both freed and imprisoned us in new categories of self-definition. This logic of subjectivity redirects our thought about ourselves: What new forms of thought are occluded by our contemporary understandings of the difference between reason and unreason? What economic or socia l order benefits from the institutionalization of a class of people called criminals? What pleasures and forms of relationship to oneself and others are denied us by the rigidity of modem confessions of sexual identity? In short, what freedoms are denied to human self-creation by accepting as natural, given, and freeing the aspects of self that are themselves historically constituted and continually reinforced in our lives? Foucaultian thought forces us to begin to confront the vertigo of the radically historical character of our identities. The purpose of this logic is twofold: first, to refuse the contingent and historical limits on what we can be, limits that are reinforced by institutions and traditions that benefit from fixing one historical configuration of the self as the eternal or natural self; and second, to create new ways of practicing ourselves, of more varied and creative freedoms in our present.

The critical interrogation of how we have come to be ourselves is the task of what Foucault understands by ethics. The most basic question of ethics for Foucault is what relation we take up to ourselves--a relation to self both under the control of external forces and under our own authority. How do we come to know the truth of ourselves? What are the practices by which we constitute ourselves as the subjects of our own moral action, our own thinking and doing?

In order to analyze one's relationship to oneself, Foucault breaks this relationship into four primary dimensions. (7) First is the "ethical substance," that area of oneself that is understood to be the relevant domain for ethical judgment. Second is "the self-forming activity," or "ascetics," the work that you do on yourself to turn yourself into an ethical subject. Third is the "mode of subjection," the way in which persons set up their relationship to a particular moral code or rule of conduct. Fourth is the "telos," the endpoint of ethical work, the mode of being at which one is aiming. Searching out the content of these four aspects, and the way they relate to one another in any particular place and time discloses how the self is constituted in that place and time. Ethics, in sum, critically examines how the self relates to itself, how the self participates in

a process in which the individual delimits that part of himself that will form the object of his moral practice, defines his position relative to the precept he will follow, and decides on a certain mode of being that will serve as his moral goal. And this requires him to act upon himself, to monitor, test, improve and transform himself. (8)

It would be a mistake to think of Foucault's work as simply anti-modern or anti-Enlightenment. The degree to which he prizes human freedom and makes use of, while reformulating, tools of historical consciousness and critical theory block such a judgment. Late in his life, he associated his work with a new stage of the Kantian project--not repudiating but reformulating Kant. As James Bernauer argues, Foucault took Kant's three great questions and inverted them by "denaturalizing" and "historicizing" them:

Not "What can I know?" but rather, "How have my questions been produced? How has the path of my knowing been determined?" Not "What ought Ito do?," but rather, "How have I been situated to experience the real? How have exclusions operated in delineating the realm of obligation for me?" Not "What may I hope for?," but rather, "What are the struggles in which I am engaged? How have the parameters for my aspirations been defined?" (9)

Foucault's work challenges us to ask how we take up new relationships to ourselves, and so to others, that rely on less dominative strategies, that give over less of our bodies, intellects, and freedom to institutions, traditions, and governments that do not serve the critical practices of human flourishing. What relations to ourselves remain to be created?

In service of these questions, he called for a new aesthetics of the self, new "technologies of self" that

permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and Way of being, so as to transform them-selves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. (10)

Technologies of self are intermeshed with technologies of power. The latter seek to distort subjectivity by setting up relations of domination to oneself and to others, through a violence of psycho-socio-spiritual restraint or coercion that rarely reaches the level of explicit physical compulsion. Foucault enumerated technologies of power as varied as medical-psychological-scientific discourses, pedagogical institutions, religious traditions, and penal systems. Technologies of power, for all their heterogeneity, share the common strategy of an attempted control over the actual and potential freedom of the subject to realize his or her own capacities. Technologies of self are certainly acts of power over one's relation to oneself and others; power is not, for Foucault, something to be either accepted or rejected. It is to be used to expand the margin of freedom for oneself and others while at the same time holding permanently open the final meaning and content of that freedom.

The technologies of power by disciplines, traditions, and institutions often attempt to govern us and our relation to ourselves in the name of liberation: liberation of our essence, our identity, our interior, our secrets, our sex, our soul. Through our participation in their discourses of liberation, they instill in us a "positive" content of self-knowledge that binds us to discourses, practices, institutions, and histories that compromise, restrict, and domesticate the possibilities of freedom. Foucault's notion of technology presses the question: How did we come to identify with the truth of ourselves, and how did that truth come to be identified with a particular biological, sexual, therapeutic, moral, or religious content? (11) Who or what produced this within us? (12)

I find Foucault's notion of ethics as relation to self helpful for the ways it provides conceptual tools in service of human liberation, and thus a significant apparatus for Christian theology. It views subjectivity as a historically particular technology, enmeshed in competing discourses of power and knowledge. The technology of self is not an ahistorical idea of oneself but a set of practices of relating to oneself and others, practices that are dangerous because they have been shaped by institutions and traditions seeking not only to form but also deform the self. I posit that it is necessary, precisely on Christian grounds, to rigorously examine Christian technologies of power and to elaborate more adequate Christian technologies of self. One approach to elaborating such an argument can, I believe, be derived from Bonhoeffer's prison letters.

Theology and ministry need to develop Christian technologies of self to contest technologies of power operative inside the church and in the larger culture. In Christian ministry and in the larger culture, technologies of power can be particularly pernicious and destructive because they are immersed in regimes of knowledge about the self reinforced by pastoral and institutional power--so often today deployed under various banners of liberation. I have in mind here medical-psychological-sexual discourses about the truth of human identity and religio-economic discourses about the identity of the Christian vis-a-vis the larger economic and political structures of society. More specifically, I have in mind the way the church deploys shame and guilt, healing and reconciliation, and confession, and what the church preaches and models about taking up a relationship to the prevalent economic and political structures of one's time--in short, the various forms of normalization attempted by the church: over the proper f orm of one's relationships and family, over the way one relates to culture, over the proper disposition of one's soul, over the proper value and use of one's money.

How will our Christian traditions think through the ways they may help to free younger generations through specifically Christian technologies of self for our present? We may look to Christians who dared to develop new technologies of the self. It is here that Bonhoeffer is a resource.

The self in Bonhoeffer's prison letters

I am turning to Bonhoeffer's prison letters because I am interested in testing their adequacy as a theological resource for a new generation and because they record an intensified relation to self from a man whose life problematic was the meaning of freedom. As I read the letters, I see a man who had the courage to take up a new relationship to himself in prison out of his desire to practice a more deeply freeing and hence authentic Christian life. I hope not only to show this but also to indicate that he trod some ground that his twenty-first-century readers may productively re-till, for the sake of contesting the technologies of power in postmodernity. In retrieving a classic Christian resource, my presumption is that theology constantly reinterprets, re-uses, and ruses its own past in seeking answers to problems of the present situation.

One must read the letters carefully for traces of Bonhoeffer's changing relation to himself and its theological overtones. He certainly does not announce it through a bullhorn; nor was it part of his family's tradition to speak openly and easily of intimate matters. Such a fact should remind us that his relation to himself in prison was embedded in the history of the life he had led up to 1943. While one may establish certain lines of continuity between his academic work and his prison life, this is no easy task, because the letters themselves contain varying degrees of self-revelation. Due among other things to the demands of the censor, or rather many censors, internal and external, they include both disclosure and concealment, revelation and deception. (13) This is a first clue to the nature of these texts: they always threaten to trick the reader, disavowing their originary referent in a lonely solitary prison cell. As skillful a letter-writer as he was a musician, his correspondence is full of musical tr icks: he often merely suggests the resolution of chords, modulates unexpectedly, de-tunes in the midst of performance. In the letters, he mutes the notes. We are not like the guards to whom Bonhoeffer entrusts the letters, averting our eyes because they were not written for us. We are more like the censors, passing his letters under our scrutinizing eyes. Yet they still were not written for us. We read them as through a telescope backwards, the deceptively wide optic yielding only a very tiny window onto the one who is practicing himself in prison.

Though the most consistently frank letters seem to be written to his friend Eberhard Bethge and less often to his financee Maria von Wedemeyer, this should not keep us from reading all the letters for clues about our question. They lead us to his prison "ratio--a way of thinking invested in a way of acting." (14)

They are fragmentary; they are incomplete; often they are mere undated phrases. There are a variety of literary forms within them. We must stitch them together if we are to take them from two to three dimensions, from text to sculpture. I offer, then, a provisional thesis: Bonhoeffer's letters reveal fragments for a Christian technology of self funding an apophatic relation to self. I attempt to gather those fragments in what follows.

His prison correspondence reveals fundamental dimensions of his practice of self. These include what we might call various "techniques" by which he constructed a relation to himself. These techniques included (1) giving himself to feelings of existential separation; (2) acknowledging a felt indebtedness to others; (3) practicing an active memory with regard to his own history; and (4) finding solidarity with the sufferings of others and with his own suffering. These four techniques are central to his relation to himself in the letters. I shall give brief examples of each.

1. In the letters we see scattered notes that regard the "experience of time as experience of separation." He mentions several separations, from God and from marriage, and from the past and the future. (15) The pain of separation from Eberhard and Maria in particular was ever-present to him. The contiguity of meditations on time as separation and an anticipatory sense of death may suggest that the relationship he took up to himself in prison was experienced as a slow separation from life, a proleptic death, a radical palpable timeliness about his life both threatened and borne by an impinging timelessness. "Flight before the experience of time in dreams... future, timeless." (16) Projecting his present into a definitive end to this life was already evident when he had written on the verge of prison that "fundamentally we feel that we really belong to death already, and that every new day is a miracle." (17) And in some undated prison notes we find a fragment reading "suicide, not because of consciousness of g uilt but because basically I am already dead." (18)

2. In prison he admits that he is "so completely dependent on other people." (19) For the necessities of protection, food, and health care, such as it was, he relies on the prison staff. For the luxury items of books, paper, clean clothes, and extra food he is utterly dependent on his family and friends. As a result, he showed great gratitude for visitors. In one letter he christologizes such experiences through Matthew 25:36, "I was in prison and you visited me." (20) He relates that Luke 17:11--17, "about gratitude-is one of those which I love and treasure most." (21)

For an eros newly discovered, thrown roughly into sharp relief by an engagement experienced in separation, he relies on Maria. "Irejoice at every word from her. ... Seeing Maria--an indescribable surprise and joy." (22)

That I need not torment myself when thing of you, that my longing to be with you need not distress me in any way, but that I can think of you and long for you with quiet confidence and joy-that is what I owe to you. ... (23)

For the most life-giving of his writing relationships, to Eberhard, he is completely reliant on guards to smuggle the letters back and forth. Though it is a challenge to his independence, he gives himself to this dependence, and, as I will indicate later, thinks theologically through this experience as well.

3. He writes of the utter "need to bring before me my own past" in the face of a "situation that could so easily seem 'empty' and 'wasted." (24) In another letter he writes that "I am forced to live from the past." (25) This bringing before him his own past was a recollection of spiritual trials, musical pleasures, personal relationships, travels--even the significance of an attraction to a woman in his 20s that he reveals to Wedemeyer as "part of the story of my life." (26)

This technique became quite prominent in his regular routine. He writes that a "dialogue with the past, the attempt to hold on to it and recover it, and above all, the fear of losing it, is the almost daily accompaniment of my life here." (27) This dialogue occurred through writing letters, plays, poetry, and fiction, enabling him to regularly reintroduce himself to his own history, to the facticity of a past, we could even say: to take up a relationship to his own concrete history of sin and grace,28 to associate the meaning of his life in the present with a constant re-tilling of that history, and in attention to his history of grace to find reasons to hope for a graceful future. (In this, he shares a strong similarity on the importance of memory with his contemporary who served in the German army during World War II, the Roman Catholic theologian Johann Baptist Metz.) Bonhoeffer dedicates a whole poem to the image of his relationship to his past as one constantly threatened by the inability to retrieve it; it is restored by God in prayer as a history of forgiveness and grace.29

4. His knowledge of himself is given in part by his experience of solidarity with the concrete suffering of fellow prisoners. (30) His "Report on Experiences During Alerts" is one example. (31) In it he details the inadequacies of the prison in dealing with the psychological and physical needs of prisoners during and after bombing attacks. In an aside to Bethge, "My cell is being cleaned out for me, and while it's being done, I can give the cleaner something to eat." (32) He wrote angrily of the harsh guards who were "petty tormentors ... unjustly shout[ing] at and insult[ing]" prisoners. He remarks that "two or three times I've given [the guards] a quite colossal dressing down." (33) He was also confronted with his own significant suffering, including rheumatism, influenza, and stomach problems: "A short time ago my rheumatism was so bad that for a few hours I couldn't get up from my chair without help, or even lift my hands to feed myself." (34) In his famous poem "Who Am I?" he writes of himself as

restless and longing and sick ... struggling for breath ... yearning for colours ... trembling with anger at despotisms and petty humiliation ... weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making, / faint, and ready to say farewell to it all. (35)

Even though he downplays his suffering to almost everyone else, he admits it to Bethge on 15 December 1943:

in spite of everything that I've written so far, things here are revolting, [and] my grim experiences often pursue me into the night. ... I can shake them off only by reciting one hymn after another, [and] I'm apt to wake up with a sigh rather than with a hymn of praise to God...everything I see and hear is putting years on me, and I'm often finding the world nauseating and burdensome. (36)

It is difficult to speak clearly of Bonhoeffer's acceptance of, or "solidarity with," his own suffering due to the fact that he reveals it rarely, and then only to Bethge or to Wedemeyer. He disliked others focusing on it, (37) and he advocated "taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world." (38) However, an acknowledgment of his own suffering does appear in the same letter in which a fragment for a new technology of self appears, as I will note in a moment, allowing us to associate it with his practice of self.

Having briefly suggested four concrete techniques that fed Bonhoeffer's relation to himself, I argue that what we see in the letters from prison is the emergence, through these techniques, of an apophatic self. This apophatic self is, in short, a christomorphic separation from or suspension of all positive contents of the self.

One way in comes from a provocative reference to his understanding of himself, from the December 1943 letter just referenced.

I often wonder who I really am... I know less than ever about myself, and I'm no longer attaching any importance to it.... There is something more at stake than self-knowledge. (39)

There is also the poem "Who Am I?" sent to Bethge on 8 July 1944, in which Bonhoeffer renders poetically the vertigo of his self-identity:

Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person today, and tomorrow
   another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite
   before others,
and before myself a contemptibly
   woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still
   like a beaten army,
fleeing in disorder from victory
   already achieved?
Who am I? They mock me, these lonely
   questions of mine.
Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God,
   I am thine. (40)

What are we to do with these striking passages, which suggest an agnosticism, even an apophaticism, about the self? How did he get from the four techniques to this understanding of himself? While there can be no question of certainty here, our inquiry must become constructive, joining together the scraps of paper, from the four techniques: feeling of separation, acknowledgment of indebtedness, acceptance of one's history, and risking solidarity with the suffering. I offer three theses.

1. These four techniques may be read as funding a christomorphic practice of self In Bonhoeffer's letters, self-knowledge seems to be a sort of poiesis. It is an active care for the suffering of others that, in the very practice of it, produces two effects. The first effect is an experience of history-death-separation in the disorientation to the world produced by suffering; and a giving of that suffering to be shared with another, not interpreted for them in that moment of suffering. The second effect is that the self takes on the irreducible vertigo of the suffering of another as its very own; this vertiginous helplessness introduces a rupture into one's subjectivity, opening a new groundlessness by binding self-identity to the experience of that suffering.

Francis Schussler Fiorenza calls suffering an experience at the "seam of interpretation." (41) That is to say, it is a human experience resistant to hermeneutical analysis. Suffering's meaning cannot be exhausted in the grids of hermeneutics, does not yield up a final "meaning," however much it is influenced by cultural norms. We each suffer "in single file," (42) in a way that relies on a certain interpretation given to experience and yet breaking every stranglehold of hermeneutics in the pure givenness of pain.

For Bonhoeffer, in the binding of self-identity to the vertiginous helplessness of the suffering other, the self is taken ever more to a dissolution of self-apprehension and in this very movement recognizes in

Jesus the limit and condition of all authentic self-relation because Jesus is the limit and condition of all authentic other-relation. "The center of our own lives is outside ourselves" (43): a statement lived most definitively by Jesus is provoked, in the letter of 5 September 1943, by Bonhoeffer's experience of losing students or colleagues to the war. This center that is outside ourselves was also provoked concretely in Bonhoeffer's reflection about his reliance on others, in particular on Bethge: "What we owe to others belongs to ourselves and is a part of our own lives." (44) We allow our indebtedness and our solidarity to hollow out whatever has been placing itself at the center of our lives by recentering us continually beyond ourselves.

2. This christomorphic practice of self yields fragments of an apophatics of self. (45) "I know less than ever about myself. ... There is something more at stake than self-knowledge." (46) A technology of self that manifests the Incarnation must point to its own dissolution in a constant displacement of the truth of oneself. This construal of an historically contingent, precariously free self may in the terms of Bonhoeffer's letters be understood as a "penultimate" self. "One cannot and must not speak the last word before the last but one. We live in the last but one and believe the last. ..." (47) The penultimate self hopes and trusts, through the action of discipleship, that a christomorphic self, in which the truth of one's self is released to crucifixion, will be endorsed by God, and indeed already has been insofar as this has happened in the technology of self lived by the incarnate Word. On this reading, this is why we may "seek the past ... only with God." (48) In meditating on Eccl 3:1, Bonhoeffer wri tes to Bethge that "nothing that is past is lost, that God gathers up again with us our past, which belongs to us." (49) God in Jesus is the God who is experienced in the commitment to the history that is our first and only domain for fullness of Christian life. That is, only the God manifest in the self-dispersing, concretely historical, alienated, indebted, solidaritied Jesus guarantees-eschatologically--the coherence-in-incoherence of the christomorphic self that releases itself to the vertigo of concrete risk, to defining itself by unpopular, inglorious service of causes that defy every definition of success imposed by contemporary technologies of power in church or culture.

The fragments of an apophatic self in historical action and through our very historicity are also present in another form. On 8 July 1944, Bonhoeffer writes a few pages to Bethge that open a line of criticism against "religious blackmail." Several aspects are important here. First, Bonhoeffer criticizes a tendency of ministers (and theologians) in modernity to locate God in ever more remote recesses of human interiority. The "range of [one's] intimate life... [has] become the hunting-ground of modern pastoral workers." (50) Second, these regions of interiority may not be "natural" but rather historical productions. Bonhoeffer briefly intimates his thinking here, suggesting that "the discovery of the so-called inner life dates from the Renaissance, probably from Petrarch." (51) This discovery, in his opinion, is abetted somewhat insidiously by existential philosophy and psychotherapy. (52) To all this he contrasts what he calls a biblical conception of the whole person, not easily separable into an inner and o uter life. Here Bonhoeffer uses this concept of the whole person to block any attempt to elevate an historical region of inquiry into an essential aspect of human self-identity. He did not take the next step and suspend the notion of the whole person in historical quotation marks, or examine the varieties of whole persons in Scripture or Christian tradition. Yet the fragment here is provocative enough to gather up for postmodern Christian selfhood. (53)

One of Bonhoeffer's most-cited Scripture particles in the letters is Jeremiah 45:5. Pressed under the weight of this apophatic reading of the christomorphic self, we may read a new imprint on the letters in this verse, translated in the standard English edition of Letters and Papers as "I will give you your life as a prize of war." In the letter to Bethge of 23 February 1944, Bonhoeffer returns to it after a discussion of the fragmentary quality of the life of his generation. His reflections recall the penultimate self culled from his letters earlier but add a new note. When one confronts the partial and incomplete nature of almost every aspect of existence, Bonhoeffer seems to say, in the final analysis only God can make of these fragments something that may definitively and irreversibly be called "a life." The only task then is to gather up diverse experiences and render them as an aesthetic work through human living, "accumulat[ing] ... a wealth of themes and weld[ing] them into a harmony in which the grea t counterpoint is maintained from start to finish." (54) He imagines our lives as Bachian "Arts of Fugue." Styled be each of us, from fragmentary experience, into our best effort at holism. The blessing of such an aesthetic momentum is a divine gift, a life of fragments beautifully rendered whose "completion can only be a matter for God." (55)

Thus Jeremiah 45:5 can be read as God's final blessing on this life of fragments straining toward harmony in a daring exercise of human freedom. Out of the great contestation of human subjectivity disseminated by historical vertigo, God gives "a life," finally, a coherent and eternally satisfying relation to oneself and to God, as a prize from this "war" for subjectivity. (Here we see interesting parallels between Bonhoeffer' s Art of Fugue-ish fragmentary self and Foucault's turn to an ethics as aesthetics of existence, in which the self must take responsibility for its own self-fashioning.) Knowing this, according to Bonhoeffer, allows us "not [to] bemoan the fragmentariness of our life, but rather rejoice in it." (56) (Bernard of Clairvaux writes, "Lord Jesus ... [b]y the example of your virtue you train my hands for war...." (57))

Thus perhaps we have gained a more helpful vantage point from which to interpret the fact that at the summit of his radical thinking in the summer of 1944, Bonhoeffer declares his ignorance about his identity. His "Who Am I?" (58) on this reading is not an aberration or a failure of nerve or a momentary psychological crisis rendered poetically. It is instead an intermediate stage in a battle against technologies of power, namely the state and the state church, that sought to domesticate the freedom proper to Christian selfhood. The battle did not reach a conclusive stage before his death; its skirmishes are scattered throughout his letters. In the end, there is indeed "something more at stake than self-knowledge"--in the poem's last line, "Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine." (59) This poem is Bonhoeffer's rewriting of his cell in Tegel as the Garden of Gethsemane--the outwardly strong man for others reduced to absolute self-doubt, crowned with internal division, mocked by his own uncertainty, stri pped of self-presence. The Garden is the ultimate penultimate, where decision in the struggle for the center of one's life must be made. The Garden is the intensification of the everyday Christian self-fashioning that struggles to release itself to accept a life as a prize of war, risking an apophatics of existence.

"Who am I?" is the implicit correlate of the question Bonhoeffer raised a few months earlier, about "Who Christ really is, for us today." (60) "Who is Christ today" and "who am I today" are bound together for the Christian in his letters. Indeed, the last fragment to consider in this apophatic christomorphism is the possibility of an anthropological analogue for the famous notion of "religionless Christianity." (61) We could call such an analogue "humanismless humanity." It may be that one cannot have the former without the latter. For, like the state, "Christian religion" can impose intolerable technologies of the self. Indeed, the question of a radically historicized subject lurks throughout the famous 30 April 1944 letter. Bonhoeffer wonders whether a human "religious a priori" is not itself an historically contingent aspect of human experience--and not a transcendental given of human identity. Doing "without religion" means "without the temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics, inwardness, an d so on." (62) Here we may see a glimpse of his rethinking of Christianity rooted in his practice of an apophatic self--of seeing the necessity of displacing and reconstructing his own relationship to himself. A "humanismless humanity" bonded to a "religionless Christianity," both animated by the principle of the radically historically particular character of the incarnation, and its manifestation in history-cross-death-separation-solidarity. An apophatic trajectory, "inwardly revert[ing] to the simplest aspects of existence," (63) and risking even those.

3. These fragments of an apophatic christomorphism may fund a Christian technology of self contesting our contemporary technologies of power. At issue in a contemporary reading of Bonhoeffer's fragments as an apophatic christomorphism is the mutual interpretation of the Incarnation and postmodern subjectivity.

Bonhoeffer's letters show how the incarnation becomes practicable through a certain technology of self. For these texts, a Christian technology of self is a refusal of reified subjectivity, a willingness to leave a blank there, to not know, and a solidarity with those in need, a "being caught up into the messianic sufferings of God in Jesus Christ," or a "participation in the powerlessness of God in the world." (64) This Christian technology of the self posits a relation to self that always passes through separation, historicity, indebtedness, and solidarity. "Drinking this world to the dregs," in Bonhoeffer's choice phraseology, is the rigorous displacement of any transcendental subjectivity that refuses transfiguration through a cruciform anthropology. "One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself." (65) Who am I? I cannot and must not render a definitive answer that evades my responsibility for the demand that I can and must render a present action. This Christian technology of self joins a rigorous ecstatic apophatics of self to concrete and historical solidarity with those in pain.

These fragments from the letters give us a sense of what a Christian technology of self might look like, with respect to the four dimensions given by Foucault. First is the "ethical substance," that area of oneself that is understood to be the relevant domain for ethical judgment. In these texts this ethical substance is something like the will, which might roughly be defined herein as the direction one gives to the capacity for self-commitment. Second is "the self-forming activity," or "ascetics." This is work that one does on oneself to turn oneself into an ethical subject. These are the techniques of feeling separation and acknowledging indebtedness, accepting one's concrete and absolutely specific history through the practice of memory, and risking solidarity. Third is the "mode of subjection." This is the way in which the subject sets up their relationship to a particular moral code or rule of conduct. The subject seeks to make of these techniques a habitus as both ends and means. Fourth is the "telos." This is the endpoint of ethical work, the mode of being at which one is aiming. In these fragments, the subject is guided by the releasement of self to a center to one's existence that it cannot control, because it does not lie within the subject, and so the subject is released to discover a being-claimed: "... participation in the sufferings of God in the secular life... being caught up into the way of Jesus Christ, into the messianic event." (66) Redemption lies in fashioning this christomorphic relation to self, the practice of displacing every idol that stakes a claim to tell the truth about the center of one's life.

To be sure, Bonhoeffer wrote, "To be a Christian does not mean to make something of oneself... on the basis of some method or other, but to be a man, not a type of man, but the man that Christ creates in us." (67) Knowledge of truth and knowledge of self is a dialectical, relational praxis. Only by fully living in one's present, with a full-bodied "yes" to it, controlled by solidarity with those suffering in that present, does one say yes performatively to Jesus. And only in the redemptively and concretely historically suffering Jesus, for Bonhoeffer's letters, can that yes be practiced with a believable hope. The relation to self whose fragments I am gathering here, which I am also calling a work of poiesis, is not a narcissistic or undialectical "making something of oneself," as if we self-sufficiently create ourselves. It is, however, a self-fashioning, insofar as it is a relationship one takes up to Christ through one's releasement from oneself in the practice of the four techniques. It is a spiritual exe rcise performed on oneself. (68)

Foucault and Bonhoeffer: Summation

These fragments from Bonhoeffer bear an isomorphism to Foucault's own thinking about the self after his study of early Christian practices of the self. This isomorphism helps us see these Bonhoefferian fragments as more than isolated wisps of radical Christian thought but associated with an ancient Christian tradition of relation to, precisely through renunciation of, self.

Foucault argued that the early church encouraged a "publication" of oneself: the self becomes public as a sinner. Christianity imposes a "truth obligation," namely, that "each person has the duty to know who he is,"

that is, to try to know what is happening inside him, to acknowledge faults, to recognize temptations, to locate desires, and everyone is obliged to disclose these things either to God or to others in the community and hence to bear public or private witness against oneself. (69)

This publication, the "demonstration of [one's] particular truth," (70) is not originally confession as the church later knew it, although it does continue into confessional practices. It is "the dramatic recognition of one's status as a penitent." (71)

Penitence becomes an early Christian technology of self: The penitent is "the aggregate of manifested penitential behavior, or self-punishment as well as of self-revelation. The acts by which he punishes himself are indistinguishable from the acts by which he reveals himself." (72) This publication of self is "not a way for the sinner to explain his sins but a way to present himself as a sinner." (73) It is an "everyday death" that is the effect of a unique Christian "relation of oneself to oneself." (74) There is a "permanent hermeneutics of oneself" (75) for early Christianity--a deciphering of one's soul that is a continual attempt to interpret oneself for the ways one is held hostage to sin. The Christian self is a text dense and legible.

This hermeneutics of the self is for the sake of a repudiation of oneself. In this experience, there was no discourse of truth to guide one didactically. Instead, there was self-presentation to the bishop or community. One manifested penitence in order to repudiate oneself, not to get at a positive anthropology of oneself. "Penitence of sin doesn't have as its target the establishing of an identity but serves instead to mark the refusal of the self, the breaking away from self.... It represents a break with one's past identity.... Self-revelation is at the same time self-destruction." (76) The truth of the self is manifest in the ritual martyrdom of penitence. In the words of James Bernauer, for early Christianity,

all truth about the self is tied to the sacrifice of that same self, and the Christian experience of subjectivity declares itself most clearly in the sounds of a rupture with oneself, of an admission that 'I am not who I am.' (77)

Mark Vernon argues that these words are "not only the historical declaration of the neophyte emerging from the waters of death in baptism to new life, but the core of a contemporary Foucauldian ethic." (78) Do we not also see these words in the Bonhoefferian fragments?

Manifesting his debt to this early Christian technology of self in The Use of Pleasure, Foucault wrote of the practice of separating from oneself, getting free of one's "self," of one's "subjectivity," in an "effort to think one's own history." (79) He spoke of his attempts to "render oneself permanently capable of self-detachment." (80) This is an attempt to create new possibilities of selfhood by way of an ethic that is an aesthetic, an artistic self-fashioning, perhaps an art of fugue. This is an ethic not for the sake of stepping out of history itself, or the history of ourselves, but to step anew, and to step always historically, particularly, contingently, but indeed to step, to shift into a new space that eludes--however momentarily--prior determinations.

Foucault writes of the importance of his rendering of this Christian technology of self "to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state... [for] new forms of subjectivity." (81) "What are we and what could we be? What forms of new subjectivity can we create that will not originate in subjection?" (82)

Several decades before Foucault' s disorienting destabilizing of modern "subjectivity," Bonhoeffer sensed both the lack of ground under his feet and his responsibility in this groundless situation. It goes without saying that Bonhoeffer's historical situation was very different from Foucault's. Foucault was fighting a fascism not of the exterior but of the interior. He attempted to innovate historical and philosophical tools to break free of every moralizing domestication of his self-identity, including rejecting the essentialisms impinging on his identity as a gay man. Despite their different historical situations, Foucault, like Bonhoeffer, struggled to articulate an apophatics of the self: "I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning." (83) For both, this insight and its practice were animated by an engagement with Christian discourses; this can be admitted without attempting to reduce Foucault' s latter work on ethics to a simple rehearsal of traditional Christian theology or reducing Bonhoeffer to a proto-Foucaultian.

Bonhoeffer's struggle was certainly against a fascism of the external political world. But was the technology of self he was beginning to develop not also a struggle against an internal political world, an interior fascism? In the words of Foucault, do we not hear the fragments of Bonhoeffer's Christian technology of self struggling to "ferret out... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us"? (84) This technology of self helped him displace what Foucault termed the "political technology of individuals" or the "technology of government." (85) This is a technology of the self organized by the state that leads people "to recognize themselves as a society, as a part of a social entity," (86) and "makes of the individual a significant element for the state." (87) Thus Bonhoeffer's displacement of the practices of obedience so bound to German national identity. The "legitimate self-distrust" in the German tradition of obedience to call could become a "self-sacrifice [that] could be exploited for evil ends." (88) In the letters we witness a subterranean conflict over the questions, Who will tell me the truth about myself? Who will control the practices and discourses producing this truth, and what will they be?

These are two very different thinkers, working out of quite different struggles. (89) What David Tracy remarked of the thinkers that inhabit Jean-Luc Marion's God Without Being may well be true of Bonhoeffer and Foucault: "They clearly do not mean the same, but... their differences can co-inhabit a new space of reflection." (90) Both delineated the intolerability of a pastorate that reified historical constructions of the self and its inner life and that then exploited this reification to its own advantage. Both find intolerable the church's creation and maintenance and control of human interiority--of the "truth" of our inner lives: Bonhoeffer by the relegation of God into the ever-receding depths of human interiority where human knowledge fails and Foucault by the discursive production of human depths where the powers of prevailing morality make their nefarious nest. And in response to this intolerable situation, both, in different ways, schematized something like an apophatics of the self that requires the aesthetic fashioning of a technology of self. For both Bonhoeffer and Foucault, the most radical constructive possibilities of these insights occurred toward the end of their lives. That the works of both reveal subjectivity itself as a potential prison qualifies them as postmodern. Bonhoeffer's way out, a christomorphic self, riffs on Matthew 25:36: My subjectivity was a prison and Jesus visited me.

What James Bernauer says of Foucault is also true, if in a different way, for the Bonhoefferian fragments: they "bear witness to the capacity for an ecstatic transcendence of any history that asserts its necessity." (91) Would it be inappropriate to speak of ecstatic transcendence in Bonhoeffer? His thought and life bear witness to the capacity for idoloclastic suspension of any history that asserts its necessity, through acknowledging debt to and separation from others, accepting one's history, and risking solidarity. There is an ecstasy here, in the sense of ec-stasis, the self s relation to itself as an ongoing displacement of the center not into an apolitical idealism but political solidarity; the self as an intrinsically risky practice.

Implications

Most of us in the Western academic world are not in the boundary situation of war and overt political repression. And it is certainly not a matter of suggesting that the church's mission advocate a fundamentalist repetition of Bonhoeffer's life or technology of self today. Perhaps when Bonhoeffer's resistance to the fascism of the outside seems distant, it may be appropriated today as a Christian technology of self that deflects every essentialism that threatens to become another interior fascism. Here we begin to see more clearly what is at stake in "gather[ing] the fragments left over, so that nothing will be wasted" (John 6:12) from Foucault, Bonhoeffer, and elsewhere in constructing an adequate Christian relation to self in our present.

Can the church present itself to young adults as the bearers of a less dominative relationship to themselves and others? Can the church innovate Christian technologies of self that would enable young adults--to quote Bonhoeffer outside the letters and out of context--"not so much to tolerate and maintain in responsible fashion what already existed, as to create, as a result of radical criticism, their own form of life"? (92) or, in the words of Foucault, "to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed... in order to] show which space of freedom we can still enjoy and how many changes can still be made"? (93) Young adults experience a variety of interlaced technologies of power as the powers and principalities of our lives today. We are often positioned to accept various trinitarianesque doctrines: the seemingly unbreakable bondage of truth-self-desirable body, truth-self-sex, truth-self-productivity, truth-self-race, truth-self-tradition. These dogmas may be found in both "liberal" and "conservative" secular and religious environments. These doctrines become more tempting as forms of retreatism in postmodernity, in the face of increasing ethnic, religious, and sexual pluralism, functioning as a new reification of subjectivity, a new pietism of self. I am beginning to think of the fundamentalistic self as one of postmodernity' s prime temptations, and not only within traditionalist communities. Our culture of options, whether in church or society, remains too often a culture of normalization.

The church will serve young adults as no other institution in the United States when it skills young adults to undertake practices of self- examination, to archive their own relationships to the technologies of power in their life, to take up a critical distance from these technologies of power and reestablish technologies of self that will help them resist. This means the church will have to confront its own technologies of power that attempt to control subjectivity through a certain moralizing, a certain pietism, control of access to sacraments, demand of confession, misuse of power relationships in the church community, undialectical acceptance of secular theories of selfhood, or any other controlling, dominative effects of the church's otherwise necessary attempts to make interventions in the subjectivity of young adults. There is no other institution in our culture that can perform this liberating service in the struggle against the fascisms of our inner life in the way that the church can. But it must t ake its own responsibility for the propagation of such interior fascisms.

Bonhoeffer's fragments help clear the way for a recovery of the place in Christian tradition of the eschatological character of truth. Bearing this postmodern cross means re-confronting the gap in John 18:38: In the face of Pilate's question "What is truth?" Jesus is silent, a silence so silent that John does not bother to pause to note the silence. Perhaps we have not fully entered Jesus' silence. It is a magnetic force toward which all of our theological claims are drawn. We must strive again and again to face his silence, which in a practical way means radical and unending critique, and not an access to the truth of ourselves because it has been verbalized, even by an authority like the Son of God (who himself refused to do so). It means living the irresolvable tension between the examination of truth as a practice and the seeking of God's freedom for us.

Can the church resist the slumber of an ahistorical subjectivity and teach vigilance about the self, a continual self-criticism? This project is important if the church is to empower a new generation to say Amen to their present, and by developing a Christian apophatic self inspired by Bonhoeffer, to say Yes to the twenty-first century.

(1.) See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 165-76.

(2.) Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke 10:285, cited in Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, trans. Eric Mosbacher, ed. Victoria J. Barnett (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2000), 115.

(3.) Foucault, "What is Enlightenment?" in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 46.

(4.) Dietrich Bonhoffer and Maria von Wedemeyer, Love Letters from Cell 92, ed. Ruth-Alice von Bismarck and Ulrich Kabitz, trans. John Brownjohn (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), 43.

(5.) Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 528.

(6.) Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1978), 222; emphasis added.

(7.) See Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 26-32.

(8.) Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 28.

(9.) James Bernauer, "Michel Foucault's Ecstatic Thinking," in The Final Foucault, ed. James Bernauer and David Rasmussen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 46-47.

(10.) Foucault, "Technologies of the Self," in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 18.

(11.) Foucault undertook many studies in this regard. He levied a critique of the trinity sex-self-truth that had come to dominate psychoanalytic and religious discourses in modernity. Early in his career he sought to show how a certain bourgeois morality had helped to create the modern idea of the soul in French penal and prison codes, such that the soul became "the prison of the body." He sought to show how sex was an historically constituted discourse, and that the confession of the truth of one's self as a sexual discourse was the heritage of Christian medieval confessional practices that reappeared in psychotherapy. He called attempts to manipulate the inner life of adherents, by first maintaining power/knowledge practices that created such an inner life and positioned us to see it as the seat of our truth, exercises of "pastoral power" (see "Omnes et Singulatim," pp. 300--303, 308-11, and "The Subject and Power," pp. 333ff., in Michel Foucault, Power, ed. James D. Faubion and trans. Robert Hurley et al. [New York: The New Press, 2000]).

(12.) The notion of a technology of self implies a contested character of the self. This contested character comes from the self being deeply embedded in history, from being so immersed in power/knowledge formation, in historically specific "games of truth," that one is oriented to oneself in and through historical practices that are dangerous because they are so tangled in power/knowledge matrices. In a sense, the "negative" aspect of the notion of a technology of the self is the control of subjectivity revealed by the genealogies of our self-identities. The "positive" aspect is the necessity of, and freedom for, taking up a relation to ourselves in order to displace the truths into which we have been subjectified, and into a more nondominative relationship to ourselves and others.

(13.) On his family's muted habits of self-disclosure and his reserved relation to his parents and to Maria von Wedemeyer, see Bethge, Diet rich Bonhoeffer, 837-40.

(14.) de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xv.

(15.) Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 34-35.

(16.) Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers, 34.

(17.) Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers, 16.

(18.) Letters and Papers, 35.

(19.) Letters and Papers, 109.

(20.) Letters and Papers, 236.

(21.) Bonhoeffer and von Wedemeyer, Love Letters, 95.

(22.) Love Letters, 36, 38.

(23.) Love Letters, 73.

(24.) Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers, 129.

(25.) Letters and Papers, 160.

(26.) Bonhoeffer and von Wedemeyer, Love Letters, 246-47.

(27.) Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers, 319; emphasis added.

(28.) "The past...retain[s] its immediacy if we are profoundly, unselfishly grateful for God's gifts and regretful for the perverse way in which we so often vitiate them" (Bonhoeffer, in Bonhoeffer and von Wedemeyer, Love Letters, 229--30).

(29.) Bonhoeffer and von Wedemeyer, Love Letters, 248--52.

(30.) Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers, 17, 361. See also Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 847--53.

(31.) Letters and Papers, 151--52.

(32.) Letters and Papers, 134.

(33.) Letters and Papers, 136.

(34.) Letters and Papers, 124.

(35.) Letters and Papers, 348.

(36.) Letters and Papers, 162.

(37.) Letters and Papers, 231--32.

(38.) Letters and Papers, 370.

(39.) Letters and Papers, 162.

(40.) Letters and Papers, 348.

(41.) Francis Schussler Fiorenza, "The Crisis of Hermeneutics and Christian Theology," in Theology at the End of Modernity, ed. S. G. Davaney (Philadelphia: Trinity, 1991), 135.

(42.) take the phrase from Judith Wallerstein, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce (New York: Hyperion, 2000).

(43.) Letters and Papers, 105.

(44.) Letters and Papers, 150.

(45.) One reason that I argue for only "fragments" is that Bonhoeffer also manifests a very noncontested, relatively unhistorical interpretation of (him)self. Consider his letter to Bethge of 22 April 1944, where he opines that he has not changed much in his life. "Everything seems to have taken its natural course, and to be determined necessarily and straightforwardly by a higher providence" (Letters and Papers, 276; see also pp. 233-34, 295). Indeed, the Christian technology of the self that I am sketching here existed alongside less adventurous construals, one might say traditional kataphaticisms of the self, such as are manifest in his emphatic rendering of gendered marital tasks in his May 1943 wedding sermon (pp. 41-47). Yet even there, in the former example, we see another indication surface, in the statement that "continuity with one's own past is a great gift" (p. 276). It is perhaps this tension between an apophatics of the shifting self and the eschatologically promised stable self that is a keynot e of Bonhoeffer's relationship with himself in Letters and Papers from Prison.

(46.) Letters and Papers, 162.

(47.) Letters and Papers, 157.

(48.) Letters and Papers, 169.

(49.) Letters and Papers, 169.

(50.) Letters and Papers, 344.

(51.) Letters and Papers, 346.

(52.) Letters and Papers, 341.

(53.) A question remains here: What role does original sin or the "fall" play in this technology of self? Is the self unknowable essentially because of the state of human corruption (see Letters and Papers, 158-59)? In this strand of Bonhoeffer's thinking/ writing, understanding the truth--presumably also about oneself--is a practice of realizing the limits of inquiry inherent in human fallenness, "showing respect for secrecy, intimacy, and concealment" (p. 159). Truth bears its own cross. The truth of the self has an eschatological character. Foucault would say that a full and final exposure of the self s truth is usually in the interest of a historically contingent power/knowledge regime. Bonhoeffer writes that "exposure is cynical" (p. 158); one can only be most truly exposed to God. Yet it is not only the cross of concealment that negates the exposure of self knowledge but solidarity with the suffering that produces the critical mass to begin with. "Our center is outside ourselves," in those whose sufferi ngs we must share, fundamental teachers about the truth of our lives.

(54.) Letters and Papers, 219.

(55.) Letters and Papers, 219.

(56.) Letters and Papers, 219.

(57.) Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermo super Cantico canticorum, 47.6, cited and translated in Luke Anderson, "The Rhetorical Epistemology in Saint Bernard's Super Cantica," in Bernardus Magister, ed. John Sommerfeldt (Spencer, MA: Cistercian Publications, 1992), 112.

(58.) Letters and Papers, 347-48.

(59.) Letters and Papers, 348.

(60.) Letters and Papers, 279.

(61.) Letters and Papers, 279ff.

(62.) Letters and Papers, 280.

(63.) Bonhoeffer, in Bonhoeffer and von Wedemeyer, Love Letters, 32.

(64.) Letters and Papers, 362.

(65.) Letters and Papers, 369.

(66.) Letters and Papers, 361.

(67.) Letters and Papers, 361.

(68.) Bonhoeffer did remark, apropos the Berneucheners, a Protestant liturgical reform movement, that "faith and style are mutually exclusive. My chief quarrel with the Berneucheners is that they saddle the Christian faith with a style, and thus prevent people from attaining full freedom under the word of God ... I oppose all forms of stylization" (Love Letters, 229). Bonhoeffer here is of course referring to worship and not subjectivity. But, insofar as these comments disclose his more general convictions in 1944 about the relationship between style and freedom, what I am arguing here is that, by contrast, a Foucaultian ethics of self sees stylization as intrinsic to freedom. I am further arguing that this approach is not necessarily in contradiction with Bonhoeffer's convictions about style and self-making, insofar as Foucault gets "behind" the subject in ways that Bonhoeffer presumed but never opened up in his thought. Foucault's ethics of self critically deepens Bonhoeffer's notion of "this-worldliness": "living unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities" (Letters and Papers, 370). It offers to the thought of the self a realization of Bonhoeffer's "acceptance of the uncertain, the incomplete, and the provisional" (Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 678). A Foucaultian technology of the self is an ethics that makes possible a "this-worldliness" "characterized by discipline and the constant knowledge of death and resurrection" (Letters and Papers, 369). That is to say, not only is a technology of self an ascetical practice, but an apophatic technology of self is one that continually deals with the death of self-identity while preparing a "transform[ation] ... to ... immortality" (Foucault, "Technologies of the Self," 18).

(69.) Foucault, "Technologies," 40.

(70.) Foucault, "Omnes et Singulatim," 312.

(71.) Foucault, "Technologies," 41.

(72.) Foucault, "Technologies," 42.

(73.) Foucault, "Technologies," 42.

(74.) Foucault, "Omnes et Singulatim," 311.

(75.) Foucault, "Sexuality and Solitude," in Foucault, Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy Carrette (New York: Routledge, 1999), 186.

(76.) Foucault, "Technologies" 43. See also Foucault, "Sexuality and Solitude," 183.

(77.) Bernauer, "Michel Foucault's Ecstatic Thinking," 53.

(78.) Mark Vernon, "I Am Not What I Am," in Foucault, Religion and Culture, 203.

(79.) Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 9.

(80.) Foucault, "The Concern for Truth," in Foucault Live, ed. Sylvere Lotringer, trans. John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 461.

(81.) Foucault, "The Subject and Power," in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 216.

(82.) Cited in William R. Hackmann, "The Foucault Conference," Telos 51 (Spring 1982), 196, quoted in David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (New York: Vintage, 1995), 439.

(83.) Foucault interview with Rux Martin, "Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault October 25, 1982," in Technologies of the Self, p. 9; emphasis added.

(84.) Foucault, "Preface," in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen Lane (New York: Viking, 1977), xiii.

(85.) Foucault, "The Political Technology of Individuals," in Technologies of the Self, 146, 153.

(86.) Foucault, "The Political Technology of Individuals," 146.

(87.) Foucault, "The Political Technology of Individuals," 153.

(88.) Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers, 6.

(89.) And yet note some striking similarities (the following examples and citations are suggestive, not exhaustive): Both had strong suspicions of psychoanalysis and a strong familiarity with it. Both were strongly suspicious of humanism (Foucault, "Truth, Power, Self," in Technologies, 15). Both were committed to interpreting history from the "underside," "from the perspective of those who suffer" (Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers, 17). Both had a preoccupation with death from an early age (Bethge, Diet rich Bonhoeffer, 38). Both were European intellectuals significantly marked by their experiences in the United States, and both made trips to Africa. Both died young. Both thought their way out of the prevailing orthodoxies of their age, having made personal acquaintance with the representatives of those orthodoxies. For Foucault it was Sartre. For Bonhoeffer it was liberal theology and Barthianism. Both were political activists against repression exercised by the state. Both saw their task as a personally and academically full struggle for life in their own present. Both were shaped at an early age by the experience and humiliation of war. Both made of their own life a project of transformation. "The driving force in [Bonhoeffer's] life was the need for unchallenged self-realization" (Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 37). For both, their academic work was wrapped up in this life transformation. Foucault called this being a "specific intellectual." For Bonhoeffer, "As a Christian theologian of the resistance, [Bonhoeffer] did not simply observe and analyze from an aloof and critical perspective, but shaped viable formulas in the midst of action" (Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 796). Both distanced themselves from works already published and looked forward to the next new project (Foucault, "Truth, Power, Self," in Technologies of the Self, 11; Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 131). Both engaged the question of truth-telling at the end of their lives.

(90.) David Tracy, "Foreword," in Marion, God Without Being: Hors-Texte, trans. T. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), xiii.

(91.) James Bernauer, Michel Foucault's Force of Flight: Toward an Ethics for Thought (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993), 180-81.

(92.) Bonhoeffer, No Rusty Swords: Letters, Lectures and Notes, 1928-1936, ed. Edwin H. Robertson, trans. Edwin H. Robertson and John Bowden (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 191-92, quoted in Bethge, Dietrch Bonhoeffer, 21.

(93.) Foucault, "Truth, Power, Self," in Technologies of the Self, 10-11.

Tom Beaudoin is visiting assistant professor of theology and religious education at Boston College. He is the author of Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X, as well as dozens of articles on theology and culture. His essays published in this issue will appear, in edited form, in books published by Sheed and Ward in 2003 and Orbis in 2004. He teaches throughout North America and plays bass guitar in the rock band Mother Cruiser.