Abstract
Contending for the proper mode of generation of the New Man in the People’s Republic of China, self-cultivation and self-abolition, as two conflicting ‘technologies of the self’ underlined distinct Marxist—Leninist approaches as regards the dialectics between class actuality and potentiality. The battle for the New Man revolving around the valorisation of the revolution and one’s debt to it, as both an achievement and a promise, established a total architecture of subjectivation whose kernel, a dispositif determining the relation of the self to the party-state, was the ‘spirit of selflessness’.
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Notes
Foucault, M. (2005) The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982, New York: Picador, p. 208.
Dutton, M. (2004) ‘Mango Mao: Infections of the Sacred’, Public Culture, Vol. 16. No. 2: 161–187, p. 171.
Ming-ts’ao, ‘Lun shen-tu’. Quoted in Nivison, D. S. (1956) ‘Communist Ethics and Chinese Tradition’, Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 16, No. 1 (November): 51–74, p. 71.
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Coope, U. (2005) Time for Aristotle, Physics IV. 10–14, Oxford: Clarendon, Oxford University Press.
The term here being a loan from Jullien, F. (1999) The Propensity of Things: Towards a History of Efficacy in China, New York: Zone Books.
For a discussion on redemption as, ‘what makes creation comprehensible, that which gives it its meaning’, see Agamben, G. (2009) The Signature of Things, New York: Zone Books, p. 107
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© 2013 Christos Lynteris
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Lynteris, C. (2013). Conclusion. In: The Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China: Socialist Medicine and the New Man. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137293831_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137293831_6
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