Foucault, the Subject.

Radical Philosophy 51, 1989

The following essay is an initial attempt to extend the comparison of the thought of Michel Foucault with that of the Frankfurt School, begun in my Logics of Disintegration (Verso, 1987), to cover the work ofF oucault's last phase. It does not claim to be a comprehensive analysis, but simply seeks to establish two fundamental points: firstly, that the return of a self-constituting subjectivity in F oucault' s final writings cannot be seen as merely a shift of emphasis within a consistent probject (as suggested,for example, by Deleuze, in his book on Foucault), but arises out of the intractable dilemmas ofF oucault' s earlier work, and represents a break with many of its assumptions; secondly, that the form in which Foucault introduces the concept of the subject, namely as an undialectical reaction to the political implications of philosophical' antihumanism' , raises as many problems as it solves. A somewhat different version of this essay is to appear in German in the anthology Die Aktualitlit der 'Dialektik der Aufkllirung ': Zwischen Modernismus und Postmodernismus, published by Campus Verlag, Frankfurt (1989). I am grateful to the Verlag for permission to republish this material here.

Journal of Modernism and Postmodernism Studies, 2022

In this essay, I argue that it's theoretically and historically misleading to talk about a break between modernism and postmodernism, and more specifically, that thinkers such as Foucault and Derrida, two figures frequently associated with the postmodern turn, are situated within certain rational, enlightenment and modernist traditions. As part of this claim, I explore how features such as essentialism, binarism, determinism, positivism, and productivism are not characteristics that can be applied to all of enlightenment thought and modernism, and that such a description of the enlightenment and modernism would themselves be essentialist and caught up in binaries. To illustrate these arguments, I re-read figures such as Berkeley, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and a range of Modern artists (especially their conceptualizations about essences, representations, and processes), tracing patterns such as plurality, particularity, and absurdity/incoherence throughout their thought. After historical and theoretical overview, I connect the experiential and philosophical patterns existing before our so-called "postmodern turn" to an examination of Foucault's rational methodology and critical ontology, as well as his theorization of enlightenment thought, power/knowledge, ethics, and resistance (especially in, but not limited to, his later works). Through all of this, I ultimately show that 1) Rather than a break, postmodernism signifies an extrapolation of certain pre-existing enlightenment and modernist trends, and 2) Michel Foucault can be claimed as both an enlightenment thinker and a modernist. Such a set of arguments, if deduced as correct by readers, might restructure traditional understandings of postmodernism and the legacy of enlightenment thought.

After Foucault: Culture, Theory, and Criticism in the 21st Century (Cambridge University Press), 2018

How to inherit Foucault? To take up the challenge of thinking about the concept of subjectivity after Foucault is, first of all, to recognize that while his work remains widely debated, reinterpreted, and often critiqued, it has constituted a veritable event in the history of modern thought, in the sense of marking the difference between a ‘before’ and an ‘after.’ His analyses wrested the concept of subjectivity from the dominant problematics in which it had been hitherto situated, transformed its trajectory, and reinvented the problems to which it may constitute a response. Stated in the broadest terms, Foucault proposed a genealogy of subjectivity in explicit contrast to the project of developing a philosophy of the subject as ‘the foundation for all knowledge and the principle of all signification.’1 This move reversed the relation that had traditionally been posited between subjectivity and the possibility of knowledge. Thereafter, subjectivity became intelligible as the product, rather than the origin, of historically specific concepts and theories embedded in the working of normative institutions. Beyond this, as we will go on to argue, Foucault’s engagement with the problem of subjectivity effected an even more profound displacement, by historicizing the privilege of knowledge (and scientific knowledge in particular) as a modality of relation to the truth in the constitution of human beings as subjects. It is in light of these profound displacements that engaging with the concept of subjectivity in modern thought today—whether to endorse, to interpret, to criticize, or to transform it—is to become, directly or indirectly, faithfully or unfaithfully, Foucault’s heirs. Our aim in this chapter is to explore what inheriting Foucault may involve, what it may demand of those who think and write about subjectivity after him.

Foucault Studies, 2005

The 'late' Foucault and his purported 'return to the subject' is a much discussed issue. Over the past twenty years, various suggestions have been made as to how to integrate Foucault's ethics into his oeuvre as a whole. This paper holds that there is a 'conceptual continuity', rather than a break, between Foucault's earlier works on normalizing power, and his later works on ethical self-constitution. On the basis of a conceptual framework, which is developed in Section II, a reading of two themes concerning certain practices of the self is offered in the following sections (namely, dietetics and spiritual guidance). The material, drawn from the recently published lecture series L'herméneutique du sujet as well as from other published works, is related back to Foucault's ideas on the process of 'subjectivation', in order to support the claim that 'fabrication' and 'self-constitution' are but two aspects of subjectivation. 1 The notion of "aesthetics of existence" refers to an understanding of ethics that derives from the philosophies of post-classical Greece and the Roman Empire, and these are the same sources that Foucault uses for his re-interpretation. The idea it refers to was called "ethics" in Antiquity, in the sense of a personal "ethos" (cf. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame (Indiana): University of Notre Dame Press, 2nd edition 1984), chap. 4) The idea of "Art", which is implied by the term "aesthetics", was always understood as an "imitation of life" in ancient philosophy (cf. Aristotle, Poetics, 1. 1447a). Hence, life itself cannot be interpreted as an "Art" in the sense of "aesthetics". The ancient notion of "tekhnê tou biou", i.e. the "art of living", bears a different use of the term, as in "the art of woodcarving", (cf. Julia Annas, "Virtue as a Skill," International Journal of Philosophical Studies 3 (1995): 227-243). While the idea behind it clearly derives from ancient foucault studies, No 2, pp. 75-96 embedded in, have given rise to the hypothesis of a "return of the subject" in Foucault's later philosophy. The "late Foucault" is probably one of the most widely discussed topics in research published on Foucault. A popular view on this late period holds that at some point in his oeuvre, Foucault turned away from analysing the power/knowledge mechanisms that fabricate subjects, and turned to analysing how subjects constitute themselves. 2 This view sometimes implies the idea that these notions, "constitution" and "fabrication", refer to two distinct phenomena. 3 In this paper, I will argue against this view. Instead of a "return of the subject", I will advocate the view that on the theme of subjectivity, we find a conceptual continuity traversing the whole of Foucault's oeuvre, rather than a rupture that separates the "early" from the "late" Foucault. Assuming we granted the idea that the "subject" in Foucault's later work is ontologically different from the one we find in his earlier work, we would have to assume that at the respective point in Foucault's oeuvre, there is some sort of turn or even rupture in his thinking. And this can in turn be evaluated either positively or negatively. Those that have criticised Foucault thought, the notion of "aesthetics of existence", which plays on the ambiguity of the word "art", is a Foucaldian term. Recently, another aspect of this notion has been pointed out by Joseph Tanke (cf. his "Cynical aesthetics: A theme from Michel Foucault's 1984 lectures at the Collège de France," Philosophy Today 46, 2 (2002): 170-184). Tanke reports Foucault's comparison of the way of life of the early Cynics to that of contemporary artists, pointing out that the forms of likening one's life to one's thinking involved in both of them are essentially the same. This is an idea that may also be implied to Foucault's notion of the "aesthetics" of existence. 2 Cf.

Journal for Cultural Research,, 2017

The paper interprets Foucault’s intellectual project by analyzing the relation between his understanding of critique and the political conditions of subjectivation out of which it emerged. After reviewing some of the most typical criticisms to Foucault’s work (and especially those maintaining that genealogy can only be rooted in a non-genealogical and universal conception of power), the argument shows in what sense he conceived of critique as a form of resistance and how the latter, in turn, was theorized as a force co-extensive to the power it counters. The paper goes on arguing that his theory of resistance is not necessarily to be viewed as a metaphysical representation of the immutable nature of political struggle, but might well be interpreted in performative terms, i.e. as a strategic re-inscription of existing political-discursive formations. More precisely, the analysis shows in what way Foucault’s articulation of critique represented an attempt to displace the forms of subjectivation that underpin anthropological thought and the government of the self in the modern age.

A Companion to Foucault, 2013

Educational Philosophy and Theory

This article argues against the doxa that Foucault's analysis of education inevitably undermines self-originating ethical intention on the part of teachers or students. By attending to Foucault's lesser known, later work-in particular, the notion of 'biopower' and the deepened level of materiality it entails-the article shows how the earlier Foucauldian conception of power is intensified to such an extent that it overflows its original domain, and comes to 'infuse' the subject that might previously have been taken as a mere effect.What emerges, accordingly, is a subject divested of 'traditional', substantial, formation, located wholly on an immanent plane, and yet centrally concerned with the practice of freedom and ethical resistance. In turn, what seemed to have no place at all in the earlier Foucault becomes central: in general, active subjectivization (subjectivation) as a counter to passive subjection (assujetissement); more particularly, subjects' ongoing production and creation (via strategic decisions and localized opposition) of a new ethos, new 'practices of self', and new kinds of relations.With this alternative Foucauldian position outlined, the article then focuses more particularly on the practices of education: it concludes that, instead of being rendered merely the factories of obedient behaviour, schools or colleges can be the locus for a critically-informed, oppositional micro-politics. In other words: the power-relations that (quite literally) constitute education can now be regarded, on Foucault's own terms, as being creative, 'enabling' and positive.

Foucault Studies

We are very pleased to open Foucault Studies No. 25 with the special issue entitled "Foucault and Philosophical Practice," guest edited by Sverre Raffnsøe (Copenhagen Business School) and Alain Beaulieu (Laurentian University). Foucault had a complex and ambivalent relationship with philosophy. Although he was originally trained in philosophy in Paris, many of his main sources, interlocutors, and followers are not philosophers per se. This contributes to making his oeuvre quite multidisciplinary, perhaps the most multidisciplinary since Marx. In the context of this special issue, nevertheless, it might also be worth recalling that Foucault had a number of significant philosophical relationships, while he also persisted in operating at the margins of philosophy proper. In 1949 Foucault graduated from École Normale Supérieure with a Diplôme d'études supérieures under the supervision of the German philosophy specialist Jean Hyppolite. Foucault's DES thesis was entitled La Constitution d'un transcendental dans La Phénoménologie de l'esprit de Hegel. In 1961, in Sorbonne, he completed his main doctoral thesis (thèse principale), Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique under the supervision (rapporteur principal) of the philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem. He then completed his secondary thesis (thèse complémentaire), a translation and substantial commentary on Kant's 1798 work Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, under the supervision (rapporteur principal) of Jean Hyppolite. Both theses, which were required for Foucault's Doctorat d'État, were not orthodox philosophical works. 1 On the one hand, Folie et déraison includes a wide range of historical and archival material with which philosophers are not always familiar; and, on the other hand, in his secondary thesis Foucault was audacious enough to play Nietzsche against Kant before the former really started to be considered as a true philosopher in France. 2 Foucault's academic training also includes a licence in psychology in 1949 as well as a Diplôme de psychopathologie in 1952. In the early fifties, he toyed with the Marxists led by Althusser.

Symposia Melitensia no. 11 (2015): 1-15., 2015

A common criticism of Michel Foucault’s works is that his writings on power relations over-emphasized the effects that technologies of power have upon the subjection of humans, rendering any attempt of resistance futile and reducing the subject to a mere passive effect of power. This criticism treats Foucault’s consideration of ethics in his later works as a break from his earlier views. In this paper, by reading Foucault’s books alongside his lectures and interviews, two ways will be proposed through which the question of the subject can be productively raised and located throughout Foucault’s works, even within his concerns with power relations. The first way is through the relation between assujettisement and critique, and the second way is through the notions of government and conduct.