Foucault’s Subject: An Ontological Reading

2014

In this dissertation, I will consider the multiple trajectories of the thought of Michel Foucault in the 1970s and 1980s, offering an approach through which his writings on power and knowledge on one hand, and ethics and the self on the other can be understood fruitfully in relation to each other without being seen as representing a radical break in his work. I will do this by, first, locating the question of the subject and its formation within Foucault’s works on disciplinary power and sexuality, paving the way for this question to be revisited through his later writings on ethics. I will then consider how the development of Foucault’s ideas on power into biopower and governmentality enable an approach through which continuity within Foucault’s works can be identified through the relations between power, conduct and modes of individualisation. This will lead to considering Foucault’s genealogy of ethics and the modern subject not as a departure from his earlier ideas, but as the culmination of his interest in analysing knowledge, power and ethics. I will consider but go beyond the notions of aesthetics of existence and care of the self in Foucault’s discussion of ancient Greek and Hellenistic ethics in order to deal with his ideas on parrhēsia and truth-telling from his final lecture courses at the Collège De France that show that his late ideas reflect his earlier concerns. Therefore, by appealing to the conceptual developments within his writings as well as his approach to philosophical analysis, Foucault’s philosophical projects need not be seen as disparate and so the issue of continuity in his work can be raised and positively viewed.

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.

2016

Freedom from Domination A Foucauldian Account of Power, Subject Formation, and the Need for Recognition Katharine M. McIntyre Michel Foucault is criticized for offering an account of power that leaves no room for the freedom of individuals. This dissertation will provide an account of freedom that is compatible with Foucault’s descriptions of the operation of power and its role in the constitution of the subject. First, I clarify Foucault’s own distinction between power and domination, the conflation of which has been the primary source of criticism of his social theory. With this distinction in hand, I address the apparent break in Foucault’s middle and late periods, which, respectively, describe human beings as constituted by power on the one hand and as having the reflective critical capacities necessary for selftransformation on the other. I then explore Foucault’s criticism of the modern concept of autonomy, which he believes to be inherited from the Enlightenment and, more spe...

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2016

Michel Foucault’s account of the subject has a double meaning: it relates to both being a “subject of” and being “subject to” political forces. This book interrogates the philosophical and political consequences of such a dual definition of the subject, by exploring the processes of subjectivation and objectivation through which subjects are produced. Drawing together well-known scholars of Foucaultian thought and critical theory, alongside a newly translated interview with Foucault himself, the book will engage in a serious reconsideration of the notion of “autonomy” beyond the liberal tradition, connecting it to processes of subjectivation. In the face of the ongoing proliferation of analyses using the notion of subjectivation, this book will retrace Foucault’s reflections on it and interrogate the current theoretical and political implications of a series of approaches that mobilize the Foucaultian understanding of the subject in relation to truth and power.

Foucault’s emphasis of socio-historical factors in literary interpretation is often understood to eliminate author-based interpretation. Critics argue that this approach undermines an author’s ability to transcend her subjection to power structures. Alexander Nehamas and Hans Sluga conclude that, while Foucault’s radical view raises interesting questions, overall it remains incoherent. Nehamas further posits that—contra Foucault—we ought to renew transcendent notions such as agents, intention, and rationality. This issue is still controversial: if Foucault seeks to reduce the author to discursive power relations, what is the role of the author but that of a socially- or culturally-determined object? Thus, critics argue, Foucault fails to offer a satisfying theory of authorship. I will cite Foucault’s closely-related discussion of the Subject, highlighting this tension between discursive formation and the thinking, acting, choosing self. Despite apparent tension, there is room for the self (and similarly, for freedom) in Foucault’s discussion of subject and author formation. I will refer to recent work by Amy Allen, who argues that freedom and responsibility are compatible with the historically-situated subject. I will then argue that the scope of Foucault’s criticism merely removes the author from its authoritative role in interpretation; the “Death of the Author” thesis is therefore exaggerated. The implication follows that, while Foucault resisted the transcendent subject, we need not appeal to one (as Nehamas asserts), to allow freedom and responsibility amid discursive power structures. Thus, Foucault’s broader project of emancipation from power structures becomes less contradictory.

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.

Handbook of Governmentality

In this chapter, I retrace the emergence of the notion of governmentality in Michel Foucault’s work as both a way of prolonging his previous analyses of disciplinary and biopolitical power, and as a necessary condition for the development of his reflections on “ethics” and the techniques of the self. First, I show that the anatomo- and bio-political mechanisms of power that Foucault explores in the 1970s have a common goal: the government of human beings’ (everyday) life in its multiple, interconnected dimensions (Section 2). I then argue that Foucault elaborates the notion of governmentality as a response to the objection according to which his power/knowledge framework makes any attempt at resistance ultimately pointless. His genealogy of the government of human beings emphasizes that the point of articulation and clash between power and resistance is to be situated at the level of what he calls “subjectivity,” thus establishing a direct link between politics and ethics (Section 3). Indeed, defined as the contact point between coercion-technologies and self-technologies, subjectivity constitutes for Foucault both the main target of governmental mechanisms of power and the essential support for the enactment of counter-conducts and practices of freedom (Section 4). This, I argue, helps to explain the distinctively “anarchaeological” flair of Foucault’s lectures and writings post-1978: the study of governmentality goes hand in hand with the postulate of the non-necessity of all power, and hence with the ever-present possibility of critique and resistance. The political relevance of Foucault’s so-called “turn to ethics,” I claim, can only be understood in this light, since governmentality for him ultimately implies the relationship of self to self (Section 5).

Foucault Studies, 2024

Michel Foucault's essay 'The Subject and Power' has seen four decades. It is the most quoted of Foucault's shorter texts and exerts a persistent influence across the social sciences and humanities. The essay merges two main trajectories of Foucault's research in the 1970s: his genealogies of legal-disciplinary power and his studies of pastoral power and governance. This article connects these two trajectories to Althusser's thesis on the ideological state apparatuses, demonstrating affinities between Althusser's thesis and Foucault's diagnosis of the welfare state as a 'matrix' of individualising and totalising power. The article suggests that Foucault's essay straddles between two different concepts of subjectivation. First, one encounters the citizen 'internally subjugated' by disciplinary and pastoral power, whereas, at the end, we find a 'flat' subject of governance; a form of power which intervenes only in the environment in which individuals make their rational, self-fashioning choices. The implication of Foucault's newfound concept of governance is a weakening of the link between subjectivation and the formation of the state, which also meant that the state's role in reproducing capitalism receded into the background of Foucauldian scholarship. Finally, the article suggests extending Foucault's analytical 'matrix' to current techniques of subjectivation associated with the advent of big data and artificial intelligence, which buttress the expansive technique of predictive profiling.