Foucault, Freedom and Sovereignty

Foucault Studies, 2008

Through an (un)faithful reconstruction of Foucault's ontology of freedom involving authors like Schmitt, Deleuze, Agamben, Negri and Zizek, Sergei Prozorov proposes a daring return to the 'sovereign subject' as an epitome of freedom. (Un)faithful here does not necessarily mean ill-advised: Prozorov does not reclaim a central position for the sovereign subject, but rather claims a position for a subject which reasserts itself at the limit of every political order as the paradigm of the subject of freedom. In clear terms, the project of this book can be summarised as an attempt to liberate a concrete experience of freedom through an engagement with Foucault's philosophy, which, according to the author, allows us to conceptualize freedom as an ontological condition of human being rather than as an attribute of social order. The main argument of Prozorov is simple: if one wants to think freedom freely, one must resist 'the temptation to fix its meaning and define the possibilities of its practice by locating it within a form of order, real or imaginary, practical or theoretical, possible or impossible' (p. 17). Being Foucaldian has therefore more to do with the liberating experience of the movement of thought toward its own freedom, than with the fidelity to particular concepts, postulates, identities or orthodoxy. Structurally, this book is divided into six chapters. The first part of the book (chapters 1-3) establishes the locus of concrete freedom at the opening of the Deleuzian 'diagram', which ruptures its self-immanence to reveal the figure of the subject as a concept which is primary to any historical ontology of truth, power and ethics. The first chapter addresses the question of whether a Foucaldian freedom is possible. According to the author, 'the exclusion of Foucault from the discourse on freedom rests on his critics' demand for a number of presuppositions that are allegedly necessary to ground a meaningful concept of freedom ' (p. 27). What is usually demanded of Foucault is a set of universal and normative criteria in terms of which a freer society can be posed. For Prozorov, such demands are more concerned with the establishment of a 'perfect order' than with freedom itself, an obsession that often overlooks the stakes and dangers involved in the politics of the global promotion of a specific liberal ideal of freedom. Although governmentality studies are praised for

In recent years, the work of Michel Foucault has been subject to a critical reappraisal. In light of widespread dissatisfaction with the neoliberal economic order and a renewed interest in social democracy among millennial voters, Foucault’s late writings on liberalism and the free market have come under great scrutiny. How could one of the great critics of modern regimes of power and the ideology of progress countenance ideas that would come to underlie a form of life beset by widespread poverty and unemployment and under constant threat of environmental collapse and nuclear war? While it is crucial to question Foucault’s neoliberal vision of freedom, it is even more important to ask whether Foucault’s basic picture of power, institutionality, and normativity can, even in principle, live up to its own aim of providing a critical theory of modernity. This essay accomplishes three things: First, I show that Foucault’s deep misapprehension of transcendental idealism results in an incoherent conception of human discourse and practice. Second, I show that Foucault's genealogical method is unable to adequately specify the modern conception of power and to ground a critique of modern institutional practices. And third, turning to Kant’s greatest inheritor and Foucault’s bête noir, G.W.F. Hegel, I attempt to recover the Hegel that remained inaccessible to Foucault and to establish the conceptual conditions necessary for providing a consistent articulation of the idea of the historicity of reason.

Foucault Studies

This book provides a thorough reconsideration of Foucault's corpus. Oksala proposes that we read and understand Foucault's thought through the lens of freedom. The relevance of freedom as a concept unifying the seemingly disparate themes of Foucault's texts is a suggestive one, although this proposal must in the end meet with some amount of skepticism. I will give a brief overview of Oksala's book before outlining some of the substantial reasons to recommend the book. Finally, I will conclude with some questions and criticism of Oksala's endeavor. As we shall see, despite its flaws, the book does an admirable job of showing how freedom and subjectivity were issues of fundamental importance during Foucault's entire career. At the outset, Oksala makes the obvious point that it would be a mistake to understand Foucault's conception of freedom in the traditional manner. Freedom for Foucault works in marked contrast with the dominant Western and Enlightenment notion of freedom as individual autonomy. Oksala is quick to point out that it is precisely this idea of freedom as autonomy (in the ethical sense) and emancipation (in the political sense) from which Foucault seeks to distance himself, and it is this ambivalence that Foucault's critics find most troubling. Oksala thus has a twofold task: to show the relevance of freedom across Foucault's works and to answer these various criticisms of Foucault. As Oksala points out, Foucault provides a genealogy of this mode of ethical subjectivity, and, in doing so, show that it is contingent and questionable. Indeed, this is the primary aim of genealogy: to show that the stable identities that we have become accustomed to our contingent and therefore open to question. By way of contrast with the self-assured subject as source of transcendental value found in Kant's ethics, Foucault's self-identities are contingent and always revisable. The first part of the book examines Foucault's relationship to phenomenology, primarily that of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and focuses on Foucault's early

Critical Horizons, 2021

The classical theory of sovereignty describes sovereignty as absolute and undivided yet no early modern state could claim such features. Historical record instead suggests that sovereignty was always divided and contested. In this article I argue that Foucault offers a competing account of sovereignty that underlines such features and is thus more historically apt. While commentators typically assume that Foucault's understanding of sovereignty is borrowed from the classical theory, I demonstrate instead that he offers a sui generis interpretation, which results from the application of his general strategic conception of power to sovereignty itself. In construing sovereignty through a "matrix" of civil war, Foucault thus deprives it of the absoluteness traditionally attributed to it. Instead he views sovereignty as constituted by conflictual and mobile power relations, a precarious political technology that deploys violence to restore its authority. I also motivate Foucault's contention that popular sovereignty remains fundamentally continuous with the absolutist sovereignty it succeeds, insofar as it masks and thereby perpetuates unequal power relations in conditions of social conflict. According to Foucault, sovereignty is not a fact of power but a contestory claim, a discourse whose mutability helps to explain its persistence today.

Foucault Studies, 2010

With the translation of this 1983 lecture course, the first of two-parts, with the translation of a second, The Courage of Truth, expected in 2011, also devoted to the government of self and others, given in 1984, and concluded just before Foucault's death, we are now in a better position to grasp the significance of its author's ‚journey to Greece.‛ We do not read Foucault's focus on Greco-Roman antiquity after 1980 as a retreat from a concern with the problems of modernity. Indeed, it seems to us that Foucault's interpretation of ancient texts, Euripides's Ion, Thucydides's account of Pericles's call to arms against Sparta before the Athenian assembly, the figure of Socrates in Platonic dialogues such as the Apology, and the Gorgias, Plato's letters recounting his involvement in the politics of Syracuse, or the account of the Cynic Diogenes's dialogue with Alexander the Great, Foucault's focus on truth-telling or parresia in the ancient world, are all also directed to the issues confronting both political theory and philosophy in the modern world. Indeed, taking his point of departure in the lecture course from one facet of Kant's philosophy, not ‚the question of the conditions of possibility of true knowledge,‛ Kant's analytic of truth, his epistemology, but rather that other dimension of Kant's thinking, ‚what could be called an ontology of the present, of present reality, an ontology of modernity, an ontology of ourselves,‛ (20-21) Foucault explores the prospects of extricating ourselves from our ‚self-incurred‛ tutelage, our present mode of subjectivity through which we exist under the authority of others.

Theory, Culture & Society, 2005

Within recent scholarship, a long-standing tendency to view Foucault as pessimistic about the possibilities of activism is now being reversed. For many contemporary commentators who emphasize the themes of personal agency, transgression and radical freedom in their assessment of his thought, Foucault offers new possibilities for political practice and for the pursuit of self-determination. However, an examination of Foucault’s work, particularly in the transitional period preceding his so-called ‘ethical’ writings, indicates his appreciation of basic human needs and functions that complicates the current understanding of Foucault as a philosopher of freedom. Particularly in his discussions of the ideas of ‘desubjectivation’ and ‘limit-experience’, Foucault’s work recognizes that prior conditions of psychological, economic and social ‘well-being’ are prerequisites for any subsequent performance of freedom. Examining this dimension of Foucault’s work reveals interesting points of conv...

Global Society, 2017

This article demonstrates how Foucault's notion(s) of power can be misappropriated to International Relations (IR) thought. After considering Foucault's early and late work, the article reveals the complexity of his thought, describing how he developed his notion(s) of power and their effects on subjectivity and freedom. Although a number of IR scholars have revealed the challenges of appropriating Foucaultian thought to IR, their approaches highlight the effects rather than the causes of such (mis)appropriation. By unveiling the causes, this article informs IR scholars on how to avoid this (mis)appro-priation and points their attention to the interplay among power, subjectivity and freedom, which is often neglected. Therefore, critical value is added to the Foucaultian IR debate by analysing how Foucault perceived freedom, its association with power and the effects on the subject's agency.

Reading Texts on Sovereignty: Textual Moments in the History of Political Thought, edited by Stella Achilleos and Antonis Balasopoulos, Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 171-178, 2021

Two of the most outstanding figures of late twentieth-century political philosophy, Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, are linked by a sort of ‘filiation bond’, whereby Agamben claimed to take up and develop Foucault’s ‘biopolitical’ project, transforming it, two decades after its subdued inception, into a central and inescapable issue for contemporary philosophical-political debate. From early on, however, critics have emphasised how the two projects differ in scope and intention, and one of the fundamental differences is precisely their understanding of biopower in relation to sovereignty: whereas Foucault saw the two modes of power as historically distinct and (at times, though not consistently) as mutually exclusive, Agamben came to conflate them into one single meta-structure which spells out the very essential trait of Western metaphysics. Both construe their political project in fundamental opposition to sovereignty, but, just like the ways of understanding it, also the modes of this opposition differ to the point of taking opposite routes.

Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2004

Foucault's work is rich enough to sustain multiple readings. I argue in this paper for the continued construction and maintenance of what I have called the 'American Foucault', whose principal preoccupation is with the question of how to be free within our contemporary political constraints and possibilities. (Such a Foucault can be found in the works of American writers such as W. E. Connolly, Todd May, and Thomas Dumm.) Appreciation of Foucault's contribution to an understanding of freedom is too often hampered, however, by the insistence on the part of many of the most influential of Foucault's critics (and some of his defenders) that his particular mode of thinking is ultimately too irresponsible. It is thought that Foucault's refusal to account for the grounds of his work vitiates his overall project. I argue that, if we distinguish between the 'account-ability' demanded by his critics and the 'response-ability' that his work permits, we will be in a better position to appreciate the timeliness of his conception of freedom.