Truth and the ‘Politics of Ourselves’

Ethics & Bioethics, 2018

Foucault is critical of the tendency to reduce all social and political problems according to predetermined ends and verifiable procedures. For Foucault, philosophical activity is a condition of possibility for the articulation of the question of the self. Inspired by his work on the desiring subject, Foucault begins to explore the ethical and political implications of self-care for modern day concerns. He presents an account of self-care that centres on developing an attitude that questions the personal relationship to truth, and puts to test those ideas and truths held most dearly. Processes of self-care evaluate the consistency between those truths a person regards as necessary and a person's actions in the world. Interested in the ways in which people see themselves as subjects, Foucault directs his attention to the connection between systems of knowledge, power, and practices of the self. Crucial to Foucault's process is the recognition that the self-subject is not given and does not have ontological precedence, and that subjectivity is transformable. By finding the lines and fractures in external and internal modes of objectification Foucault hopes to open up the space of freedom to bring about transformative events. The care of the self serves as a form of critique and resistance where it is both a way of living and acting in the world, and a critical response to a particular time and place.

In this paper I explore what Michel Foucault described as the problem of contemporary Western society in regards to our relations with ourselves. In the 1980 Dartmouth Lectures he dubbed this issue as “the politics of ourselves” (Foucault, 2007b, 190). My hypothesis states that we should interpret Foucault's use of politics, in this instance, as defined by Plutarch as “'a life' and a 'practice' (bios kai praxis)” (Foucault, 1986, 87). Through this interpretation, in order for modern human beings to actively constitute themselves as ethical subjects they must attempt to solve two additional aspects of the puzzle: their lives and their practices. However, I will also maintain that this definition does not necessarily negate the simultaneous interpretation of politics as it is commonly conceived. In fact, I believe the utilization of both definitions is required.

Foucault's early investigations on discourse lead to the conclusion that it is not only necessary to look at the sources and formation of knowledge, but also to recognize how knowledge formation is controlled by certain inherent rules that grants, privileges and marginalizes other knowledges. Foucault reminds us that instead of blindly accepting the illusion of objectivity we must rather interrogate the position and status of the enquirer and the author within the collective circle of competence and credibilities, the assembly to whom he is addressing his discourse, and the power vested within these positionalities. These elements, according to Foucault, create and recreate a web of rules, that are summoned, whenever the need arises, which regulate what is to be accounted as those within the true.

Shifting Roles. The Manifold Identities of Phenomenology (5th Central and Eastern European Conference in Phenomenology), 2019

While we know that Michel Foucault in his early years has been heavily interested in Husserl and Heidegger, it is widely believed that he cut all ties to phenomenology soon after in order to become the critical thinker and political philosopher we know today. My paper is going to call this established view on the relationship between Foucault's critical project and the phenomenological tradition into question. The influence of phenomenology on the development of Foucault's research method, as I will argue, has been highly underestimated so far. In fact to fully understand the method of discourse analysis you have to trace it back to Foucaults early phenomenological enquiries. But more importantly, I am going to point out that Foucault's incorporation of the phenomenological method also transforms phenomenology as such in significant ways. | Foucault's re-definition of Kant's mode of critique shaped his phenomenological approach as well: rather than asking about the formal conditions of the possibility of meaning, he now questioned the factual conditions of it's actualization. As Foucault pointed out, an articulation of meaning is always a bit more than a straightforward representation of intention. The act of articulation comes with it's own mass, it's own gravity and it's own dynamics. More than just being a representation of meaning, it points to the conditions of it's possible fulfilment, which in turn regulate the likelyhood of a meaning's actualization. While this concept isn't all new to Husserl's phenomenology, as the possibily of adequate perception and objective meaning relies on it, Foucault operationalizes this phenomenon in order to establish a distinct form of analysis. | In addition to that he introduces two major corrections regarding Husserl's positions on perception and fulfilment: 1) Coming from Heidegger, Foucault questions the predominant role of perception as the only proper mode of fulfilment. Imagination, rather than being a privative mode of encountering the world, is introduced as a mode of existential orientation, pointing towards the existential conditions of fulfilment. 2) Moreover Foucault managed to establish discourse as a third independent mode of experience – discourse being an original mode of encountering the Other as such –, therefore pointing towards the discoursive, i.e. intersubjective, conditions of fulfilment and actualization, opening up the possibility of what he then calls discourse analysis. | I want to highlight that untangling the phenomenological foundation of Foucault's methodology will not just provide a better understanding of Foucault's work himself, but it will systematically reveal an otherwise under-represented field of phenomenological enquiry: The political nature of human experience.

in Laura Cremonesi et al., "Foucault and the Making of Subjects" (London: Rowman & Littlefield), 2016

In this chapter, I explore the rich and complex articulation between two of the main projects that characterise Michel Foucault’s work in the 1970s and the 1980s: on the one side, the project of a history of truth and, on the other, the project of a genealogy of the modern (Western) subject. From this perspective, the year 1980 is to be considered a crucial turning point, since it is in his lectures at the Collège de France, On the Government of the Living, as well as in those at the University of California, Berkeley and Dartmouth College, About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self, that Foucault explicitly connects and articulates in an original way these two projects. After addressing the meaning and ethico-political value of Foucault’s history of truth, focusing above all on the shape it takes in 1980—namely, a genealogy of a series of ‘regimes of truth’ in Western societies—I offer an analysis of the related project of a genealogy of the modern (Western) subject and more precisely of Foucault’s account of the processes of subjection (assujettissement) and subjectivation (subjectivation) within the Christian and the modern Western regimes of truth. I eventually argue that the essential political and moral issue that Foucault raises is not whether the subject is autonomous or not, but rather whether he or she is willing to become a subject of critique by opposing the governmental mechanisms of power which try to govern him or her within our contemporary regime of truth and striving to invent new ways of living and being.

AUSS, 2018

In the wake of the hermeneutical turn in Continental philosophy, the question of the interpretive agent has become a central feature in most discussions on hermeneutics. While schools of thought differ significantly in how they position themselves vis-à-vis the subjectivist-objectivist axis, few would deny that the delineation of the interpretive task must attend to the embodied character of human cognition. Taking such a broader framework as a starting point, I will tackle a specific aspect of this problematic by examining Foucault's conception of subjectivity and truth as it relates to issues of epistemology, moral responsibility, and askēsis. As I will argue, Foucault's "art of living" persuasively highlights the background or "unthought" aspects of hermeneutics. My particular approach will be to connect Foucault's brand of virtue epistemology with a broadly post-Heideggerian conception of engaged agency, and in so doing spotlight some assumptions as to what "having truth" or "arriving at it" might mean in the context of hermeneutical practice and being.

Seminar Falsafah Sosial Sains II, 2016

This essay examines the question of the subject within discursive frameworks and its ability to resist subjectification. In looking at this, it is vital to understand the processes that let the subject come into being as discourses inherently create the subject. It is here that Foucault shares two significant concepts, pastoral power and governmentality because the State and its institutions play an important role in formulating the subject. Since the creation of the subject is strongly influenced by institutional mechanisms, how does one escape or resist subjectification in the situation of repressiveness? Foucault points out to the 'technologies of the self' and specifically, the care of the self as the possibility of resistance. However, his ideas have invited much scepticism due to the ambiguity of the conception, leaving two major points of criticism-the passivity of the subject and the formidability of resistance within power relations.

Michel Foucault’s later concept of parrhesia presents a number of potential inter-pretive problems with respect to his work as a whole and his conception of truth. This article presents an alternative reading of parrhesia, which develops its concept through Foucault’s earlier pronouncements on truth and fiction. Seen this way, parrhesia becomes a means where-by one enacts useful fictions within the context of one’s life. As a practice, which demands self-mastery, orientation towards truth, and a command of one’s life, parrhesia becomes crucial to an aesthetics of existence.

2016