THE BATTLE FOR TRUTH: FOUCAULT, LIBERATION THEOLOGY AND THE INSURRECTION OF SUBJUGATED KNOWLEDGES

In this dissertation I examine a given body of literature--black, feminist, Latin American and political theologies--and attempt to delineate its epistemic shift as well as criticize aspects of it that reflect a reliance on oppressive modes of thought. I conclude thesis that liberation theology is itself an insurrection of subjugated knowledges. To identify liberation theology explicity as an insurrection of subjugated knowledge, and thus approach it with Michel Foucault's genealogical method, provides a rationale for its central themes--a pretheoretical commitment to the oppressed as the focus of theological reflection, and a turn to the practical category of liberation as the criterion of the truth of Christianity. This approach to liberation theology incorporates the three elements of genealogy described by Foucault: the preservation of memories of conflict; the exposition of excluded contents and meanings; a turn to strategic thought, the struggle between these knowledges and presently dominant ones.;I conclude that the tension between relativism and universalism, between skepticism and normative claims, is constitutive of liberation thought. Liberation thought is the life and death practical struggle between nihilism and commitment, between despair and hope. I contend that skepticism must be maintained, even by theologians, that the events of the twentieth century make it impossible to hold any assurances about the possibility of knowledge and liberation.;Concomitant with the method of genealogy is an alternate understanding of truth, one that does not require the same sort of exclusion operative in more traditional apparatuses of power/knowledge. My delineation of the type of truth claims appropriate to liberation thought is aided by an examination of Richard Rorty's contrast of two types of philosophy and the comparison of this alternate style of critical reflection with Jurgen Habermas' concept of critical theory.