Abstract
What do madness, delinquency, sexuality, and Christian confessional practices have in common? All have been topics of Michel Foucault’s genealogical inquiries, and all, whether directly or indirectly, manifest his interest in subjectivities and the interplay between self-formation and the cultural practices, institutions, and public discourses that shape us. Although scholars continue to debate how precisely we should understand the relationship between his early and late works, as well as the coherence of his project in general, Foucault himself identifies a thread running through his work for over two decades. One of his central aims has been to provide a genealogical outline of the ways that humans discover, expand, and produce knowledge about themselves through various discursive and nondiscursive practices.1 Rather than accept uncritically the knowledge claims of scientists, psychiatrists, and specialists, Foucault’s analyses challenge their assertions and show how their current status and influence in contemporary society result from a contingent collision of manifold sociohistorical and cultural strata. Beginning with present socially constructed subjectivities—the deranged, the deviant, the delinquent—Foucault retraces their emergence from the present backward. This retracing activity speaks of one aspect of Foucault’s methodology, namely, his historical or, as he puts it, genealogical method.
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Notes
Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 1: Ethics: Subjectivity, and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 2001), 224.
See also James Bernauer, “Confessions of the Soul: Foucault and Theological Culture,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 31 (2005), 557–72, esp. 561–4.
See, e.g., Jürgen Habermas, “Some Questions Concerning the Theory of Power: Foucault Again,” in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), esp. 266–93;
Charles Taylor, “Foucault on Freedom and Truth,” Political Theory 12 (1984), 152–83;
Anthony Giddens, Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), esp. 218–25.
For one possible schematization of Foucault’s work, see Jeffrey T. Nealon, Foucault beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications Since 1984 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 2. Nealon appeals to Beatrice Han’s tripartite periodization: the archaeological period (1963–69), the genealogical period (1970–76), and the history of subjectivity (1984) (ibid.).
Peter Dews, “The Return of the Subject in Late Foucault,” Radical Philosophy 51 (1989), 38.
Foucault himself will later call his inquiries of the subject “a genealogy of [the] subject.” See, e.g., Michel Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self,” Political Theory 21 (1993), 198–227, esp. 202.
Amy Allen, The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 19–20.
See also Alan D. Schrift, “Foucault’s Reconfiguration of the Subject: From Nietzsche to Bulter, Laclau/Mouffe, and Beyond” Philosophy Today 41 (1997), 154.
Michel Foucault, “An Aesthetics of Existence” (An Interview with Alessandro Fontana, 1984), in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 50–1. For Foucault’s analyses of Greco-Roman practices of active self-fashioning, see “Self-Writing,” in Rabinow, The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 1: Ethics: Subjectivity, and Truth, 207–22.
Michel Foucault, “The History of Sexuality” (An Interview with Lucette Finas), in Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 183.
See, e.g., Seyla Benhabib, “Feminism and Postmodernism,” in Feminist Contentions, eds. Seyla Benhabib et al. (New York: Routledge, 1995), 17–34, esp. 23–4. “Postmodern” and “postmodernism” are, of course, polyvalent terms. Benhabib appeals to Jane Flax’s description of the postmodern position as embracing the following three “deaths”: the “Death of Man,” the “Death of History,” and the “Death of Metaphysics” (ibid., 18).
David Stern, “The Return of the Subject? Power, Reflexivity, and Agency,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (2000), 112.
For a more detailed discussion of how a musician is both shaped by and reshapes musical traditions, see Cynthia R. Nielsen, “What Has Coltrane to Do With Mozart: The Dynamism and Built-in Flexibility of Music,” Expositions 3 (2009), 57–71, esp. 67–8.
See Schrift, “Foucault’s Reconfiguration of the Subject,” for a helpful summary of these questions, esp. 156. Toward the end of his essay, Schrift discusses how contemporary Foucauldian-inspired philosophers—with particular emphasis on Judith Butler’s conception of the subject as performative—have built upon, continued, and advanced Foucault’s insights on subject-formations and subjectivities. See, e.g., Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1995).
Part of my current project, as we shall see, is in fact to “flesh out” this possibility. For helpful suggestions along these lines, see Mark Bevir, “Foucault and Critique: Deploying Agency against Autonomy,” Political Theory 27 (1999), 65–84. Bevir attempts to develop Foucault’s thinking on power “as a basis for ethical critique” (ibid., 65).
Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 92, 93, 95.
See, e.g., Anthony Giddens, Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), esp. 218–25. Giddens claims that for Foucault, “power” is the real agent of history.
Kevin Jon Heller, “Power, Subjectification and Resistance in Foucault,” SubStance 79 (1996), 83.
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 95. Cf., Yves Michaud, “Des modes de subjectivation aux techniques de soi: Foucault et les identités de notre temps,” Cités: Philosophie Politique Histoire 2 (2000), 11–39, esp. 15–18.
Nancy Fraser, “Michel Foucault: A ‘Young onservative’?” Ethics 96 (1985), 182
See, e.g., Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, sec. ed.
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© 2013 Cynthia R. Nielsen
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Nielsen, C.R. (2013). Foucault and Subjectivities. In: Foucault, Douglass, Fanon, and Scotus in Dialogue. New Approaches to Religion and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137034113_2
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