Both the German Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner and the French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious exercises marked the beginning of (a) modernity. Both discussed this modernity using terms such as subjectivity, subjection, and subjectivation. Rahner explicitly and Foucault implicitly also focused on the religious practice of spiritual exercises as a major mechanism of self-formation. The talk will use the writings of Rahner and Foucault to revisit the question of subjecthood and modernity.

Moshe Sluhovsky is a fellow at the Advance Research Initiative at the Graduate Center while on leave from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and currently finishing a book tentatively titled Practices of the Self: Modern Subjecthood and Early Modern Catholicism (for University Press of Chicago), following on from The Reformation (in Hebrew), Open University of Israel, 2013; Ritual, Magic and Popular Religion in Early Modern Europe (in Hebrew), Open University of Israel, 2013; The Catholic Reformation (Hebrew), Open University of Israel, 2013; “Believe not Every Spirit”: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism, The University of Chicago Press, 2007; Patroness of Paris: Rituals of Devotion in Late Medieval and Early Modern France, Leiden and New York: E. J. Brill, 1998.