Foucault: But can you not see that all discursive formulations hide plays at power? Truth is the illusion that we give to control, and control is the contrivance that we give to oppression so that it may claim objectivity. And every claim or call to "objectivity" (so-called) is merely an attempt to draw the living, fragile, pulsating interplay of all phenomena around a single center. That is the very architecture of tyranny: when the immobility of structures inhibit and demarcate the living openness of life, when closed systems attempt to silence and banish the existence and voice of differences and negations. This must end if we are to know the true, dark freedom of our "selves" (so-called). We must suppress the suppressors and subvert their narratives: narratives of race and gender and class, narratives used as the grindstones of patriarchs and imperialists to efface all peoples and press them into prescribed molds. We must take the hammer of discursive analysis, ever skeptical and critical, and free the world from its subjection to transcendence, its reduction to teleology, and its imprisonment to totalization. We must break down, tear down, inact a willful and purposeful fragmentation whose operation is an endless decentering that leaves no privilege to any center or origin. Only in this, this dispersion and scattering, this transgression of all boundaries, can we hope to find final liberation.
St. Paul: And who told you thus? To what wisdom did you learn such foolishness? To what law did you submit to that told you of the annulment of any and all law? Can you not see that your counsel is darkened with words that lack knowledge? For if you had read the scriptures, or if you knew the power of God, or even if you had properly read the great pagan Plato, then you would have known the truth. You would have known that tyranny cannot be answered by either democracy or anarchy but only monarchy. Wise, benevolent monarchy, ruled by a king who truly knows better than you and who truly seeks your good. And I say to you that there is such a king alive today. A King of kings who is all-Wisdom and all-Goodness, for He is those things and will always be those things, for He was those things even before the foundation of the world and all its imperfect discourses. His name is Jesus, and His title is Christ, and it is in His Lordship and our subjection to it that all oppression fails and our sad divisions cease. For in Him there is neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek, Barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free. In Him there is neither elitism nor populism, nor racism (from any race), sexism (from either sex), or classism (from any class), for all have found their identity in the objectivity and reality of His preeminence. All are equal when all bow at the name of Jesus. All voices are heard when every tongue confesses that Christ is Lord. Unhappy creature! There is no peace nor love nor joy nor hope in tearing all things down into fragments. Such deconstruction is merely destruction, the way of the Destroyer. But the way of Christ is creation, a building up of a living, unified body of many members into His real, objective, absolute, and essential headship. There is no other way under heaven whereby men can be saved or set free.
-Jon Vowell (c) 2012
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