The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

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This Foucauldian approach to self can be further explored in relation to three speciic themes that appear consistently over the course of Foucault’s oeuvre: ethics, power, and transformation. First, self is central to Foucauldian ethics, which Foucault deines as the relation of soi to soi, of self to itself or others. As the site of an ethical problematization, self emerges as a response to the Socratic question “how is one to live?” In his work on the Greco-Roman world, Foucault explores self in its “etho-poetic” (EHS2, 13) function as a style to be given to one’s conduct and one’s life: self as self-cultivation. This understanding of self reframes subjectivity as a form produced by recursive, ascetic practices of self-care: epimeleia heautou in Greek (EHS3, 45), sui cura in Latin (EHS3, 45), souci de soi in French (FHS3, 61). These arts of self or techniques of existence (techne tou biou [EHS3, 43]) turn life, or bios, into an aesthetic material to be fashioned through practices of askesis

(EHS3, 68). Signiicantly, Foucault contrasts Greek and Roman ascetic exercises with later Christian practices of austerity that focus on self-sacriice and the renunciation of self. According to Foucault, Christianity inaugurates a new method of self-scrutiny – the hermeneutic principle – and the speaking of that hermeneutic project through a confession of the self. In modernity, confessional self-revelation forms what Foucault calls the “repressive hypothesis” (EHS1) of a subjectivity that is rationally objectiied and morally coded through a sexual core buried deep within the psyche. Thus the modern psychological self emerges via a scientistic, rationalist incitement to speak that turns sexuality into “the seismograph of our subjectivity” (EEW1, 179).

Framed as part of a history of relexive practices, the experience of askesis –

“testing oneself, examining oneself, monitoring oneself in a series of clearly deined exercises” (EHS3, 68) – is also “a practice of truth” (ECF-HOS, 317) that is “central to the formation of the ethical subject” (EHS3, 68). This perspective on askesis underscores Foucault’s further elaboration of ethics as a historically shifting relation between subjectivity and truth. “I have always been interested in the problem of the relationship between subject and truth” (EEW1, 289), Foucault says in a 1984 interview. In that context, Foucault distinguishes between the ancient privileging of self-care over self-knowledge and its modern reversal in the “Cartesian moment” (ECF-HOS, 14) when philosophy makes self-knowing “into a fundamental means of access to truth” (ECF-HOS, 14) at the expense of self-care. Unlike the ancient approach to truth through ascetic practices of self-care, the modern rationalist self remains untransformed in its quest for truth. Importantly, Foucault points out that the ancient modes of access to truth reemerge over the course of Western history in other moments of “self-testing,” particularly during the Renaissance and the nineteenth century (ECF-HOS, 251). Such descriptions of historically speciic moments and practices that reemerge asynchronously, as temporal ruptures within their own ethos, highlight the coexistence of seemingly self-contradictory forms

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of ethical subjectivity within Foucault’s simultaneously diachronic and recursive conceptions of time.

The second theme, subjectivity and power, focuses on self as a function of power-knowledge and what Foucault later calls governmentality. In the summary of his 1980–1981 course at the Collège de France, Foucault describes ethical subjectiication as a problem that emerges at the intersection of two themes in his work: a history of subjectivity and an analysis of governmentality. From this perspective, Foucault’s earlier work on madness, illness, and delinquency can be seen retrospectively as part of a larger fabric that embeds ethical relection on self in an analysis of power-knowledge. The concept of governmentality in particular allows Foucault to reconceive the history of subjectivity as bound up not only with repressive and productive forms of subjectiication but also as a domain for self-creation and practices of freedom. Governmentality thus has two related objectives that bear on Foucault’s conception of self: irst, to critique standard understandings of power as centralized, unitary, and emanating from a single source; and second, to analyze power as a domain of strategic relations between individuals and groups. Foucault describes this second aspect of governmentality in terms that resonate with his description of ethics: “the government of self by self (de soi par soi) in its articulation with relations to others” (FDE2a, 1033).

Placing the self at the intersection of a history of subjectivity and a history of governmentality has important implications for rethinking subjectivity in political terms. A range of critics, especially Habermasians and feminists, have challenged what they view in Foucault as a politically impoverished conception of self that does not allow for free will, individual agency, or collective social and political action. If, however, one considers Foucault’s deinition of governmentality as “a strategic ield of power relations in their mobility, transformability, and reversibility” (ECF-HOS, 252), possibilities emerge for reconsidering political subjectiication at the intersection of subjectivity and governmentality. Differentiating the subject of governmentality from “a juridical conception of the subject of right” (ECF-HOS, 252), Foucault explicitly links power with ethics: “the analysis of governmentality ... must refer to an ethics of the subject deined by the relationship of self to self” (ibid.). Emphasizing this point, Foucault describes “politics as an ethics” (EFR, 375). These and other articulations of the relation between ethical subjectiication and governmentality suggest that in Foucault the ethical subject is capable of political acts of resistance, contestation, and even revolt. These acts can be conceived as ethico-political practices of freedom that transform the self in its relation to itself and others. As Foucault puts it in a 1984 interview, ethics as “the conscious [réléchie] practice of freedom” (EEW1, 284) “is thus inherently political” (EEW1, 286).

This theme of transformation constitutes the third and in many ways most important lens through which to understand self in Foucault’s thought. Foucault

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consistently asserts the ethical and political importance of self-transformation: a conception of subjectivity in which self “can eventually change” (EEW1, 177). This theme functions in Foucault’s thinking in multiple ways. First, self-transformation names the principle of discontinuity as it relates to the history of subjectivity in Foucault’s work. Self, as a concept, is subject to change: self in one period is not self in another. To take the most obvious example, despite its importance for Foucault’s conceptual exploration of ethical subjectiication, ancient Greek self-relexivity is radically different from modern instantiations of the self, and any attempt to argue for a continuity between ancient Greek and modern forms of subjectivity would deny the principles of temporal discontinuity and epistemic difference that distinguish Foucauldian genealogies from standard histories. In that sense, the history of self in its transformations is itself nothing more than a self-relexive movement of return that tracks the epistemic limits of our own attempts to apprehend the alterity of the past.

On a second level, transformation describes a uniquely Foucauldian approach to games of truth that modify the self in its genealogical quest for knowledge. Foucault’s genealogies dramatize the play between subject and object in a philosophical pursuit of truth that unfolds in the archive. From this perspective, Foucault’s archival work is itself a transformative practice: an art of the self or technique of existence. In his descriptions of his own contact with the materiality of history’s traces, Foucault describes a self-transformative erotic practice of thinking and feeling in which he, a knowing subject, is changed by his own repeated encounters with the “poem-lives” (EEW3, 159) he inds in the archive. Ultimately this archival method has the capacity to transform, in a rereversal of the “Cartesian moment” (ECF-HOS, 14), the subject–object relation that structures the modern analytic of initude Foucault describes in The Order of Things. In this archival ars erotica, the contact between a knowing subject and an archival object produces a shift, a play in the present-day epistemic and ethical ield that Foucault calls freedom. Thus Foucault’s self-transformative archival method is inextricably linked to an ethical subjectiication whose condition of possibility is freedom: “freedom,” Foucault says, “is the ontological condition of ethics” (EEW1, 284); and again, he says, “the freedom of the subject in relation to others ... constitutes the very stuff [la matière même] of ethics” (EEW1, 300).

Finally, this notion of a self-undoing ethical subjectiication through a practice of freedom links the theme of transformation to desubjectiication. Toward the end of his life, Foucault describes his own work as a “philosophical exercise” whose purpose is “to free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently” (EHS2, 9). This freeing of thought from its own thinking is impelled by a curiosity that undoes the subject, enabling “one to get free of oneself” (EHS2,

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Suggested Reading

Allen, Amy. 2008. The Politics of Ourselves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.

Davidson, Arnold. 2003. “Ethics as Ascetics: Foucault, the History of Ethics, and Ancient Thought,” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 2nd ed., ed. Gary Gutting. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, pp. 123–148.

O’Leary, Timothy. 2002. Foucault and the Art of Ethics. London: Continuum.

Veyne, Paul. 1997. “The Final Foucault and His Ethics,” trans. Catherine Porter and Arnold I. Davidson, in Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. Arnold I. Davidson. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, pp. 225–233.

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alternative to humanism required an alternate account of sexuality. However, despite these early signs of its importance, sexuality did not become an object of explicit study for him until The History of Sexuality, the irst volume of which was published in 1976.

That irst volume, subtitled The Will to Knowledge, presents the justiication for, and broad outline of, Foucault’s project for the history of sexuality. Rather than reconstituting a history of sexual practices, or even a history of the ideas about sex, Foucault’s major work on the subject sought to igure out “how an ‘experience’ came to be constituted in modern Western societies, an experience that caused individuals to recognize themselves as subjects of a ‘sexuality’” (EHS2, 4). When, how, and why did it become “obvious” that each person has a sex and that sexuality is constitutive of identity? In trying to answer these questions, Foucault traced the emergence of the knowledge and power structures that make contemporary experiences of sexual subjectivity possible. He tracked how power came to operate through the current coniguration of sexuality to produce and control sexual subjects. For sexuality, as for madness or punishment in earlier works, Foucault began his description of the current power coniguration by taking issue with what he identiies as the standard narrative on which that power depends. History of Madness used a genealogical study to counter the narrative according to which modern psychiatry, beginning with the emblematic tale of Pinel liberating the insane from their chains in 1793, developed as a progressive rationalization, becoming a science and operating on the side of progressive politics, or increasing liberation. The History of Sexuality is likewise structured as a critical response to a dominant narrative, in this case the story of our progressive liberation from the repression of natural sexuality, for which the Victorian age stands as a symbol. Driven by a Nietzschean suspicion that the value of these stories lies in their making possible a certain dominant position, Foucault underlined the effect of “the Repressive Hypothesis” in these terms: “If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression” (EHS1, 6). Thus Foucault’s counternarrative is not just a historical corrective to the dominant story about sexuality; it challenges both the dominant moralizing order, which excludes “perverse” sexualities, and discourses, practices, and institutions that position themselves as the liberating revolutionaries ighting for recognition of sexuality’s natural place and importance.

Foucault claimed that historical investigation reveals that there may well have been an increased policing of language and stricter rules on what can be spoken of in polite company in the Victorian era but that this went hand in hand with what he calls a discursive explosion. Beyond the chastening of language, Foucault saw not censorship but instead a complex “apparatus for producing an ever greater quantity of discourse about sex” (EHS1, 23), a proliferation of political, economical, and technical incitements to talk about sex. Managing and controlling sexuality became the

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concern not just for the law, or for moral authorities, but also for various domains of knowledge (demography, architecture, pedagogy, economics, etc.). Drawing on his work in Discipline and Punish, Foucault mobilized a conception of power “that replaces the privilege of the law with the viewpoint of the objective, the privilege of prohibition with the viewpoint of tactical eficacy” (EPK, 102). Discipline “is not ensured by right but by technique, not by law but by normalization, not by punishment but by control” (EHS1, 89), and it is thus to mechanisms of technique, normalization, and control that Foucault looked to track the discipline of bodies in the domain of sexuality. Understanding power’s relation to sexuality involves much more than understanding what is forbidden. Foucault’s conception of power implies that mechanisms of control are productive even as they exercise restriction. Power is a double relation described by the term “subjectivation,” which Foucault used to emphasize that becoming a subject and being subjected are two aspects of a single operation. The work of the historian is thus not simply to chronicle the shifts in prohibitions through time but, more importantly, to attend to the varied ways in which prohibitions and incitements function to create both social experiences and objects of knowledge. Consider the question of infantile sexuality. Foucault found infantile sexuality to have been sustained, as much as restrained, by the worry that developed around it in the Victorian era. By training parents and teachers to detect and ight any manifestations of sexual interest in children or in the redesigning of homes to segregate the nursery so as to limit the exposure of children to a sexuality that was being conined to the marital bedroom, Foucault saw practices that do not reduce the importance of sexuality in childhood so much as constitute it as a multifaceted and ever more prevalent problem. Although the avowed ambition of the Victorian era may have been to restrict sexuality to the monogamous married couple, the effects of the power that enforced this norm included the production of speciic forms of sexuality. New perversions came to be ixed as objects of concern and, as these were incorporated into individuals, new igures appeared. With an emerging fear of deviant sexualities came a new speciication of dangerous individuals. Whereas sodomy laws had long been on the books, in the nineteenth century the homosexual appears as a “personage,” an individual of whom it is thought that “nothing of what he is escapes his sexuality” (EHS1, 43, translation modiied). This is, for Foucault, a new sexuality; it is a new experience bound up with a new form of subjectivity for which sexuality is central.

As he sketched the project for a history of sexuality understood as a product of a particular type of power, Foucault insisted that “[w]e must conceptualize the deployment of sexuality on the basis of techniques of power that are contemporaneous with it” (EHS1, 150). He lamented that “the representation of power has remained under the spell of the monarchy” and that “in political thought and analysis we still have not cut off the head of the king” (EHS1, 87, emphasis added). This methodological bias has meant excessive, or exclusive, focus on the law, which Foucault countered through

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extensive analysis of the multiple ways in which norms contribute to the ways discipline operates. He further sought to break the “spell of the monarchy” by arguing that, although political analysis may not yet have recognized it, in the last couple of centuries a new form of power has emerged to challenge the sovereign model. His hypothesis was that the dominant regime of power in the Western world is undergoing a shift from the regime of sovereignty to the regime of biopower. Although both are forms of power over life and death, Foucault identiied them as operating according to two different asymmetries. Whereas sovereignty’s mission was to make die or let live, biopower’s mission is to make live or let die. With this change in mission comes a change in objects – sovereignty governs subjects, biopower manages populations. Managing a population, through norms, with the objective of making live, according to Foucault, is the general picture of the form of power that is “the formative matrix of sexuality” (EPK, 186). Thus the history of sexuality that Foucault argued needed to be written would consider the ways in which norms operate at the level of bodies through anatomodiscipline and at the level of populations through biopower in such a way as to both control and sustain sexuality as it is presently experienced.

When, after a long hiatus and indeed only after Foucault’s death, the subsequent volumes of The History of Sexuality were published, it appeared that the project had changed. There is some debate as to the importance of the change, but Foucault himself described the shift as one from the perspective of power to the perspective of the subject on which power operates, away from techniques of power toward the analysis of techniques of the self, as he tracked the origin of what he took to be the crucial move to the idea that sexuality provides the key to the truth about the self (ETS, 16–49). Foucault had identiied the pastoral tradition and Christian confession as the beginning of practices that encouraged man to look for the truth of himself by examining his desire. However, to understand the emergence of this “man of desire,” he found himself having to go further back to a time in which, beneath a thematic similarity, he found a whole different distribution of problems and practices concerning sex. The result of this work is organized in three volumes that involved studying the slow formation during antiquity of a hermeneutic of the self. The Use of Pleasure looks at classical Greek discourses on the proper measure for sexual activity; The Care of the Self follows these problems through the Greek and Latin texts of the second century; and, inally, Confessions of the Flesh outlines the constitution of the doctrine of desire. (The second and third volumes were published in 1984; a fourth volume, almost complete before Foucault’s death, remains unpublished.)

The Use of Pleasure investigated ancient Greece to try to understand how, why, and in what form sexual activity became a subject for moral concern. To answer this, Foucault looked at prescriptive texts that propose rules of moral conduct but are also practical in the sense of providing the means for the free man to interrogate his own conduct. Although it was a moral problem, Greek thought did not treat sex as something requiring the imposition or justiication of limits, or the codiication of

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acceptable acts. Rather, the task was to establish the principles that should regulate the “use of pleasure.” Foucault analyzed three areas (body, marriage, love of boys) to insist on the speciicity of the ancient problems. Sexual temperance was thought of in conjunction with temperance in other bodily needs: eating, drinking, sex, and sleep were all questions of diet. Sex within marriage had to be governed by the principles of household economics – the challenge was to maintain throughout time the hierarchical structure proper to a household. Sexual relations between men and boys had to be governed in such a way as to accommodate the principle that passivity is appropriate only for women or slaves. Around these three themes Foucault articulated the logic of prescriptive texts in such a way as to emphasize that what they prescribe is an obligation to style one’s conduct in a way beitting a free adult male.

According to the method Foucault develops in this work, describing a moral problem requires determining the ethical substance, the mode of subjectivation, the form of ethical elaboration, and inally the telos of the moral subject. Thus, to take one example, the injunction to marital idelity marks a whole series of different moral problems depending on the speciic cultural context. The ethical substance might be the respect of strict rules of behavior, mastery of desires, or the intensiication and permanence of sentiments for one’s spouse; the mode of subjectivation might be submission to the condition of belonging to a social group that accepts the injunction to idelity, but it might also involve practicing idelity as a way of prolonging a certain spiritual tradition, or responding to a call to give one’s personal life a particular form of perfection; the form might be the lengthy assimilation of a series of precepts or regular control of one’s behavior, the sudden renunciation of all pleasure, or an ongoing examination of all movements of one’s desire. All these variations mean that respecting a prohibition on sexual relations outside of marriage is not always the same act; it can participate in a whole series of different ways of constituting the self as a moral subject. Thus, where other commentators see only familiar injunctions to limit certain sexual activities, Foucault argues that “these themes of sexual austerity should be understood, not as an expression of, or commentary on, deep and essential prohibitions, but as the elaboration and stylization of an activity in the exercise of its power and the practice of its liberty” (EHS2, 23). Emphasizing that apparent continuity of experiences between different eras and contexts is the result of anachronistic reading that fails to take into account epistemological and ontological shifts, Foucault makes the case that sex is neither a natural nor a universal given. At the same time, his analyses of the elaboration of practices of freedom in other contexts clearly point toward the necessity of understanding the analogous practices in the present and the possibilities of resistance.

Commenting in 1978 on what he termed a massive evolution toward a liberal rewriting of the laws (including for instance the decriminalizing of homosexuality), Foucault warned that this movement might be counterbalanced by a shift toward the creation of a generalized fear of sexuality. He detected in this double movement signs