Abstract
The chapter reconstructs the theory of subjectivity in the work of Michel Foucault. It highlights how the question of the subject emerges progressively in Foucault’s oeuvre, as the French theorist’s preoccupations shift from normativity towards a more general problem of measure and self-measurement. The chapter enquiries into subjectivation as a set of subject-making relations where recognition and control do not stand in opposition to each other. It focuses, in particular, on the crucial role played by truth-telling as first-person practice entailing specific ‘risks’. In the final part, the chapter advances the hypothesis that love could be an important element to understand Foucault’s project—to the point that Foucault’s theory of subjectivation could be understood as a philosophy of love.
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Notes
- 1.
Special thanks to the Editors of this Volume for their welcoming attitude, their patience, and attention. This chapter is dedicated to Mari, my everyday encounter with truth.
- 2.
See, for instance, in the conference ‘Sexuality and solitude’, the anecdote about how a certain nineteenth-century psychiatrist doctor Leuret extorted form his patient the admission of being a madman by torturing him with cold water showers (Foucault, 2001b, §II, pp. 987–97).
- 3.
The term is coined by Foucault drawing from what is, to my knowledge, an hapax to be found in the little-known grammarian and allegorist Heraclides, alias Heraclitus the grammarian or Pseudo-Heraclitus, author of the Allegoriae Homericae. At §67 of Allegoriae, the adjective ἀληθουργέστερον can be found, the superlative form of ἀληθουργής, which, joining the words for ‘work’ and ‘truth’, means ‘someone who operates with truth’.
- 4.
Specifically, Subjectivité et vérité (1980–1981) is the course that inaugurates the study of epimeleia, analysing the Hellenistic discourse on the aphrodisia—especially in Artemidorus, Xenophon, and Plutarch—as an instance of gouvernement de soi par soi même.
- 5.
More precisely, the Chair in Histoire de la pensée philosophique, which had been held by Jean Hyppolite until his death in 1968, was renamed for Foucault. Simultaneously, a new Chair in Sociologie de la civilisation moderne was created, soon to be assigned to Raymond Aron.
- 6.
These practices are also examined in the later, more famous seminar on the technologies of the self (Foucault, 1988).
- 7.
Incidentally, the idea that there is no ready-made recipe to become a subject, and that nobody can substitute your own personal quest, is also strongly present in Jewish thinking, particularly in the twentieth-century philosophers Martin Buber and Emmanuel Lévinas (see Buber, 1948; Lévinas, 1961). Buber, in particular, stresses that there is no universal law to reach God: every human being—he writes—can have access to God, but each one of them has a different access. Encountering God can never be assured by just following any set of rules.
- 8.
Such a research question has been subsequently excavated by Boltanski and Chiapello (1999).
- 9.
‘l’homo œconomicus va devoir le caractère positif de son calcul à tout ce qui, précisément, échappe à son calcul. [the homo œconomicus owes the positive character of his own calculations precisely to all that exceeds his own calculation]’ (Foucault, 2004b, p. 281).
- 10.
While there is no space to elaborate on it here, let us just remark that the idea of a link between economy and ethics is, of course, also at the root of Max Weber’s inquiry into the spirit of capitalism.
- 11.
Note how the issue of consideration preludes to the Hegelian theme of recognition.
- 12.
Max Weber termed Bedürfnisse such needs-requirements for measure.
- 13.
I have introduced the notion of ‘diavolution’ in Brighenti (2008).
- 14.
See, for example, Mouffe (2005).
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Brighenti, A.M. (2016). The Excruciating Work of Love: On Foucault’s Kehre Towards the Subject. In: Oberprantacher, A., Siclodi, A. (eds) Subjectivation in Political Theory and Contemporary Practices. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51659-6_3
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