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machine-body had two registers, the body as object of knowledge, an “analyzable” and “intelligible” body written in the “anatomico-metaphysical” register begun by Descartes, and a “manipulable” body found in the “technico-political” register of military, educational, and medical institutions. Their point of overlap, which Foucault claims to be able to read in La Mettrie’s L’Homme-machine, is the docile body, “which joins the analyzable body to the manipulable body. A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved” (EDP, 136; see also EHS1, 139, where Foucault talks about the disciplinary body as a “machine” when contrasted with biopolitical population management).

Although the “disciplines” that constructed docile bodies were not new, they changed scale, object, and modality to the point where they became “general formulas of domination” (EDP, 137). Disciplines work at the intersection of individual and group, producing, by the team of four great techniques – the drawing up of tables, the prescription of movements, the imposition of exercises, and the arrangement of tactics – an individuality with four characteristics: cellular (distributed bodies); organic (coded activities); genetic (trained aptitudes); and combinatory (composition of forces). The summary formula of discipline is: “the architecture, anatomy, mechanics, economy of the disciplinary body” (EDP, 167).

The irst two of the four procedures of discipline – the spatial distribution of bodies and the control of time via the timetable – could work with a “mechanical body,” a body of “solids” and “movements.” But the full lowering of the disciplines needed a “new object” beyond the mechanical body; it needed a “natural” body, “the bearer of forces and the seat of duration” (EDP, 155; see McWhorter 1999, 153). The natural and organic body is the target of the “organization of geneses” (graduated exercises: EDP, 156–162) as well as the “composition of forces” (practices inculcating teamwork: EDP, 162–167). But this natural and organic body constituted by these practices is still part of a machine: “the soldier whose body has been trained to function part by part for particular operations must in turn form an element in a mechanism at another level.... The body is constituted as a part of a multi-segmen- tary machine” (EDP, 164).

There are many challenging philosophical issues raised by Foucault’s treatment of the body in Discipline and Punish: What is a “natural” body that is at once a

“new object” and part of a “machine”? How can the natural body be “discovered” at a point in time? How could that discovery of the natural body come after and “supersede” the “mechanical” body? How can the natural body be more amenable to incorporation in a machine than a mechanical body? Whatever we might say about Foucault’s treatment of the natural-machinic disciplinary body, we cannot claim it to be resting on a raw “nature” outside of culture, for the “natural” body of the disciplines is constituted by its submission to exercises and teamwork. If there is any biology at work here it must be a biology of plasticity: not pure social constructivism, but not raw extracultural nature either. Unfortunately, fully exploring these issues is beyond the scope of this entry, but we can at least mention the school of thought

Body / 55

known as Developmental Systems Theory, with its emphasis on epigenetic and even social factors of development, as a possible resource in further exploring the naturalmachinic body (Oyama, Grifiths, and Gray 2001).

As might be expected, the body also plays a central role in Foucault’s second great genealogy, volume one of The History of Sexuality. The major claim here is that sexuality is at the intersection of the disciplines of body and the biopolitical management of populations (EHS1, 145). We see this intersection in the four “igures” of the deployment of sexuality, each of which is an individual body deined in its relation to the reproductive capacity of the population: the hysterical woman (who may neglect her motherly duties), the masturbating child (whose sexual potential is at risk), the Malthusian couple (which must be guided, via economic and political incentives as well as medical interventions, to play its proper role), and the perverse adult (who must be studied and rehabilitated) (EHS1, 105).

The body also plays a key role in Foucault’s delationary nominalism with regard to both “sexuality” and “sex.” Far from being a natural kind, a transhistorical essence whose truth we are only now beginning to glimpse via our scientiic treatment of what had previously been shrouded in myth and superstition, sexuality for Foucault is a “historical construct,” a “great surface network” linking together a series of separate factors: “the stimulation of bodies, the intensiication of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges [connaissances], [and] the strengthening of controls and resistances” (EHS1, 105–106). Foucault is similarly nominalist when it comes to the notion of “sex” as an “in itself” separate from its components. Foucault is skeptical of “sex” as the “idea that there exists something other than bodies, organs, somatic localizations, functions, anatomo-physio- logical systems, sensations, and pleasures; something else and something more, with intrinsic properties and laws of its own: ‘sex’” (EHS1, 152–153). In another passage, Foucault seemingly ups the ante on his nominalism, as “body” no longer appears, being itself dissolved into its components. Here, in stressing that “sex” has a function in the dispositif (apparatus) of sexuality, and there alone, Foucault moves below even

“body”: “The notion of ‘sex’ made it possible to group together, in an artiicial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, and pleasures, and it enabled one to make use of this ictitious unity as a causal principle, an omnipresent meaning, a secret to be discovered everywhere: sex was thus able to function as a unique signiier and as a universal signiied” (EHS1, 154). But we should not place too much weight on this passage, as soon thereafter “bodies” reappear in their role as a component of the “ictitious unity” of “sex.” Foucault writes, “sex is the most speculative, most ideal, and most internal element in a deployment of sexuality organized by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensations, and pleasures” (EHS1, 155).

Finally, there is the famous and cryptic slogan: “[T]he rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire but bodies and pleasures” (EHS1, 157). Although duly noting the enormous commentary

56 / John Protevi

on this phrase, a good bit of it devoted to accusing Foucault of an escape to a precultural “nature,” we can point to others who see the body here as not an ahistorical body but as the sort of plastic, biosocial body we encountered in Discipline and Punish

(on both points, see McWhorter 1999, 157 and 251n14), literally a “body politic.” We might say that the key to ighting the deployment of sexuality, which claims scientiic knowledge of the natural body, is to design, in connection with others, your own disciplinary practices, your own techniques of the self.

With this last phrase, we can move to a very brief discussion of the body as it appears in the last period of Foucault’s work. Briely put, the body is a matter of concern to the ethical subjects in volumes two and three of The History of Sexuality.

For the Greeks and Romans Foucault examines, there are three areas of concern: dietetics, economics, and erotics. That is, he is concerned with the body as seen in regimes of diet, exercise, and sleep, as mediated by advice by physicians (EHS2, 95–139; EHS3, 97–144); the relation to others in the household (EHS2, 143–184; EHS3, 147–185); and the relation to the beloved (EHS2, 187–246; EHS3, 189–232). These concerns are not those of escaping, as in certain Platonic schemes, the body as the prison of the soul. Rather, the body is one of the matters of concern the ethical subject will have with regard to himself.

John Protevi

Suggested Reading

McWhorter, Ladelle. 1999. Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Protevi, John. 2009. Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

Sawicki, Jana. 1991. Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power, and the Body. New York: Routledge.

CARE

“Care,” a translation of the French souci, is most commonly associated with Foucault’s notion of souci de soi, or care of the self.The term “care” often has positive connotations in English, potentially leading readers to

believe that care of the self indicates a way of being kind to oneself. However, the term should also be considered in the sense of concern, as when one cares whether or not a dreaded event occurs. Care as concern can hold negative implications and would indicate an anxious relationship with the self. Souci, like “care,” is equivocal insofar as this single term holds both positive and negative connotations (Kelly 2009, 100). As “care” is the standard translation, it will stand for souci for the purpose of this entry.

Le souci de soi is Foucault’s translation of the Greek injunction epimeleia heautou.

Foucault contends that injunction “is indeed the justiicatory framework, ground, and foundation for the imperative ‘know yourself’” (ECF-HOS, 8). As such, the obligation to care for oneself was more fundamental than the injunction to know yourself; knowing oneself appeared as one of many techniques for taking care of oneself. Foucault’s genealogy of the subject reveals a different mode of ethical subjectivity in antiquity than that of the modern hermeneutics of desire, which seeks to uncover the subject’s secret truth. In Ancient Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman philosophy, Foucault locates an aesthetic rather than an epistemological experience of the self. In opposition to a hermeneutics of self-discovery, epimeleia heautou, or care of the self, provided the foundation for ethical subjectivity.

Care of the self is not “synonymous” with ethics. Rather, “in antiquity, ethics as the conscious practice of freedom has revolved around this fundamental imperative: ‘Take care of yourself’” (EEW1, 285). For Foucault, “ancient philosophy can be comprehended ... as a vast project of inventing, deining, elaborating, and practicing a complex ‘care of the self’” (McGushin 2007, 3). Care of the self as askesis extends from Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman thought through Christian philosophy. It

58 / Stephanie Jenkins

dominated ethical thought in the Greco-Roman world and continued its inluence through early Christian ethics, when care of the self became associated with selfishness, individualism, and egoism. With the Hellenistic model of care for the self found in Stoic and Epicurean philosophy, Foucault inds a mode of subjectiication that is “irreducible to either Christianity or to Platonism” (Gros 2005, 699). In The Care of the Self, Foucault argues that in the irst two centuries AD, there is an emphasis on “the attention that should be brought to bear on oneself” (EHS3, 41).

This attention is associated with “the practices of self-fashioning that one takes up in order to give one’s existence a particular form” (McGushin 2007, 39). Care of the self is a way of relating to oneself in order to elaborate and intensify one’s ethical subjectivity. Although Socrates’ question in Alcibiades I or II – do you take proper care of yourself? – marks a turning point in the history of ethics, Foucault most explicitly associates the injunction to care for oneself with “la culture de soi” found in

Hellenistic and Roman philosophy (FHS3, 60). Particularly in Stoic and Epicurean thought, care of the self appears as a practical activity rather than an emotional state or theoretical endeavor.

Care of the self is an intensiication and fortiication of the self. Opposed to introspection or self-hermeneutics that requires an objectiication of the self by itself, it aims for an immanent presence to self. In Frédéric Gros’s words, “It is not a matter of provoking in the self an interior redoubling by which I constitute myself as an object of introspective observation, but of concentrating myself and of accompanying myself ” (Gros 2005, 700).

As a “form of attention” or a state of mind, care permeates one’s actions (ECFHOS, 10). Caring is a way of disclosing a problem in the world; it is an anxiety about “what exists and might exist” (EEW1, 325). As a mode of comportment, it is also a way of responding to such a problem. Care is also a “general standpoint” or way of comporting oneself in the world. It is “an attitude towards the self, others, and the world” (ECF-HOS, 10).

Care is more than an attitude or feeling; it cannot be reduced to an emotional or cognitive state of being. Epimeleia “designates a number of actions exercised on the self by the self, actions by which one takes responsibility for oneself and by which one changes, puriies, transforms, and transigures oneself” (ECF-HOS, 11). According to Foucault, epimeleia is related to melete, which refers to exercise, training, and meditation. Care is an activity or set of practices that use diverse technologies of self, including meditation, writing, dialogue, memorization, practical tests, and so forth: “The meletai are exercises, gymnastic and military exercises, military training. Epimeleisthai refers to a form of vigilant, continuous, applied, regular, etcetera, activity much more than to a mental attitude” (ECF-HOS, 84). Care is an exercise that one performs on oneself in order to transform oneself and to achieve a “certain mode of being” (EEW1, 282). Epimeleia, Foucault writes, “implies labor”

(EHS3, 52). Care of the self is a kind of development, sheltering, cultivation, and

CARE / 59

fortiication. Through care, one engages in activities designed to cultivate a relexive relationship with oneself.

Although in antiquity care of the self mediated the relationship between subjectivity and truth, care of the self is not equivalent to self-knowledge. Care is a mode of perception or attention distinct from knowledge; its primary function is not epistemological. In his 1981–1982 Collège de France lectures, one of Foucault’s main tasks is to demonstrate that the imperative to “know yourself” that predominates modern philosophy was subordinate to the injunction to “take care of yourself” in Greco-Roman culture and thought.

Through an examination of the usage of epimeleia, Foucault outlines the attributes of care that constitute it as a cognitive activity distinct from knowledge. First, there is a conversion to or pivoting toward oneself by the self. It is a transformation of the subject’s “very being” as a subject (ECF-HOS, 27). This conversion requires that one focuses one’s attention on taking care of oneself. Second, care of the self is a withdrawal into the self and a retreating from the world for the purpose of selfrestoration. However, it is not a severance of one’s ties to the world. In care of the self, a distance is created between oneself and the world in order to create a space for careful, deliberate, and directed action. Moreover, medical, legal, and religious texts describe care as a practice; care is a self-cure, an assertion of one’s rights over oneself, and an honoring of the self (ECF-HOS, 85–86). Finally, care of the self aims for selfmastery. This is not merely the capacity of restraint but also an active disciplining of the body. Through practical exercises, one obtains a possession of oneself.

The self, as the object of care, is both instrument and telos; it is the raw material toward which work is directed and an aim to be obtained. This means that “the truth of the self, and the self as a subject capable of knowing the truth and living the true life, are attained not irst and foremost through self-discovery but rather through the poetics of the self” (McGushin 2007, xviii). However, care of the self is not a solipsistic, narcissistic activity. Rather, it is a way of being equal to oneself and inding pleasure in oneself.

Such a self-relation implies and intensiies social relations in two ways. First, one practices care of the self in order to properly perform one’s social role. Foucault explains, “the care of the self enables one to occupy his rightful position in the city, the community, or interpersonal relationships” (EEW1, 287). Care of the self is always exercised in communal and institutional environments. Moreover, care of the self requires the guidance of others; “one needs a guide, a counselor, a friend, someone who will be truthful with you” (EEW1, 287). In order to keep oneself truthful and to avoid slipping into egoism, care of the self demands a master of existence. Care of the self is a way of caring for others and a response to complex social relations. As Foucault states, “Around the care of the self, there developed an entire activity of speaking and writing in which the work of oneself on oneself and communication with others were linked together. Here we touch on one of the most

60 / Stephanie Jenkins

important aspects of this activity devoted to oneself: it constituted, not an exercise in solitude but a true social practice” (EHS3, 51). For example, ethical parresia, or the practice of truth-telling, is a way of caring for oneself that presupposes a relation with others.

It should not be assumed that, with care of the self, Foucault is trying to revive an ancient ethic. In actuality, he considered such ancient male ethics to be abhorrent (EHS2, 22). Moreover, he believed philosophers should not seek to recover a lost past or forgotten truths. In offering his problematization of ethical subjectivity, Foucault did not defend any particular model for morality. The signiicance of his problematization of the care of self lies in its “creative activity” that makes a different future possible (EEW1, 262).

Stephanie Jenkins

Suggested Reading

Davidson, Arnold. 1994. “Ethics as Ascetics: Foucault, the History of Ethics, and Ancient Thought,” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, pp. 115–140.

Gros, Frédéric. 2005. “Le Souci de Soi chez Michel Foucault,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 31, nos. 5–6: 697–708.

McGushin, Edward. 2007. Foucault’s Askesis: An Introduction to Philosophical Life. Evanston, IL:

Northwestern University Press.

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

CHRISTIANIT Y

Foucault’s appreciation of the dynamics of Christianity was twofold: although it was a lively, inluential power in the contemporary world, it could also and had at times become in modernity a demonic force. Foucault’s aware-

ness of Christianity’s dynamism was in part a result of his personal experience. Recall that Foucault spent a year (1958–1959) in Poland, where he saw the Catholic Church’s strong opposition to the Communist government. Of course, Pope John Paul II later brought that resistance to an extraordinary eficacy, as was shown in the massive outpouring of popular support for him during his trip to Poland in spring 1979. That visit was the catalyst for the Solidarity movement, of which Foucault became a strong public advocate. Another important source for understanding Foucault’s sense of the religious dynamic is his visits to Brazil in the 1970s, when the military dictatorship was in control. In terms of his own thinking, his project was a “history of the present.” This necessarily engaged him in a religious-spiritual analysis because the forms of knowledge, power, and subjectivity that he saw as animating our culture were often constructed, he claimed, in decisive ways in argument or alliance with religious practices and concerns. In a 1975 lecture, he mentioned the insight that would greatly shape his studies of the next decade: what “took place starting in the sixteenth century, that is to say, in a period that is not characterized by the beginning of de-Christianization, but rather, as a number of historians have shown, by a phase of in-depth Christianization” (ECF-AB, 177). This insight subverted Foucault’s original plan for The History of Sexuality series of volumes where he was to separate out the modern experience of the body from the Christian fabrication of the lesh. (The original title of volume 2 was to have been La Chair et le corps, Flesh and Body.)

The modern body was enmeshed within the coils of a rebellious lesh, and within those coils was a “moral physiology of the lesh” and the “culpabilisation of the body by the lesh” (ECF-AB, 180, 188).

62 / James Bernauer

Foucault had rejected what he later called the “blackmail of the Enlightenment,” that either-or acceptance of it as some new rationality, liberated from the superstitions of a religious past (EFR, 40–43). As a result, his history of the present came to ignore the customary epochal divisions and concluded that, between different historical eras, the “topography of the parting of the waters is hard to pin down” (EEW1, 196). In the case of the early modern period, he refused the topography of a religious era yielding to a secular age: early modernity was not a tale of growing religious disbelief but rather witnessed the emergence of an energy that drove both the global missionary activities of European Christianity and a vast religious colonization of interior life. This colonization is what Foucault referred to in 1975 as an “indepth Christianization” or a “new Christianization.” The effect of this missionary effort was the “vast interiorization” of a Christian experience that possessed a double center: the practice of confession and the struggle of the lesh with the spirit and the body (ECF-AB, 177, 193, 188–189). Foucault studied these pastoral practices in a variety of contexts, but his major concern came to be with how they operated in the political domain, because it was there that Foucault saw the demonic force of certain seemingly benign religious practices. He claims that the Christian pastorate introduced a “strange game whose elements are life, death, truth, obedience, individuals, self-identity” that seems to have nothing to do with the Greek notion of the city. Foucault wrote: “Our societies proved to be really demonic since they happened to combine these two games – the city-citizen game and the shepherd-lock game – in what we call the modern states” (EEW3, 311). It is against this background that obedience becomes a key modern virtue, that sex becomes political, and that the vision of genocidal war emerges (EHS1, 137).

To grasp Foucault’s understanding of Christianity entails study of his writings on sexuality and on the early Church thinkers (ERC, 154–197). Although he wrote far more on Cassian than Augustine, Foucault may be compared with the latter thinker in his critical concern about institutional power and his anti-utopian appreciation of the moral imperfections within all human endeavors. Quite unexpectedly, Foucault’s work has given rise to a lively discussion with theologians and biblical scholars, as well as to fresh perspectives among historians of Christianity.

James Bernauer