The aim of this article is to contribute to the recently revived debate over the normativity of Foucault’s genealogical method. More specifically, I shall respond to Fraser’s charge that Foucault’s rejection of humanism is unjustified because he cannot state why a totally panopticized, autonomous society would be objectionable. After dismissing a non-normative defence strategy of Foucault’s work, I shall proceed as follows: firstly, I shall clarify Fou-cault’s model of critique as a practice of problematization geared to free his addressees from (...) their captivation to the system of truths sustaining the power mechanisms of modern biopolitics. Secondly, I shall argue that Fraser’s society should be resisted because it would reproduce this regime of captivity, thereby obstructing the exercise of freedom as self-transformation. Thirdly, I shall contend that Foucault’s normative orientation to a post-humanist conception of freedom as self-transformation finds a contextual, explanatory account in his attempt to revitalize the emancipatory project of Enlightenment modernity through a transformative problematization of our normative commitments. Moreover, I shall show that the standard of validity of this effort is represented by Foucault’s exemplary embodiment of the critical ethos of the Enlightenment in both his style of existence and theoretical activity. Finally, the article terminates by illustrating three shortcomings of Foucault’s normative approach. (shrink)

Focusing on his last courses at the Collège de France, the present paper aims at exploring the strategic role the notion of parrhesia plays in the elaboration of Foucault’s critical project, according to which parrhesia is what enables the pas- sage from the concept of problematization as an archaeo-genealogical target of inquiry to the idea of problematization as a verbal act of investigation. To this end, the article argues that parrhesia is the condition of possibility for the problematization of one’s (...) mode of subjectivation, whereby it comes to describe a transformative practice of resistance against the existing power regimes in charge of truth. After tracing the seminal formulation of such a form of resistance in the Socratic imperative of taking care of oneself, the paper then concludes by briefly pointing to the importance of Socrates’ parrhesiastic philosophy for the development of Foucault’s own critical ethos. (shrink)

This article offers a comparative exploration of the practices of resistance Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault champion against the structures of modern power their enquiries have the merit to illuminate and contest. After a preliminary examination of their views about the relationship between theory and praxis, I shall pursue two goals: first, I shall illustrate the limitations of Adorno’s negativist portrait of an ethics of resistance and contrast it with Foucault’s more promising notion of resistance as strategic counter-conduct, which in (...) his late ethico-political writings becomes the heart of a distinctive politics of the governed. Second, despite their dissimilarities, I shall argue that their ideas can be brought together to elaborate a ‘compounded’ account of resistance, where Adorno’s politics of suffering figures as the necessary pre-condition for the creative practices of freedom Foucault seeks to encourage. (shrink)

The essay explores the philosophical concept of fear as it appears in the chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit entitled Absolute Freedom & Terror, dedicated to the analysis of the French Revolution. The aim of the essay is to show Hegel’s critique against the abstract logic of modern political rationalism implied by the Revolution itself. This critique finds its base in a new productive concept of fear, which, in the form of Terror [Schrecken], represents the dialectic driving force for the (...) affirmation of the freedom of Spirit. (shrink)

This article contests the division that, up to now, has characterized the two fundamental approaches to the philosophy of Alain Badiou. The first concentrates its attention upon the domain of being and being-there, while the other is concerned with the event and the retroactive coming-to-be of truths. As a matter of fact, it argues that this division misses Badiou’s core proposal: his attempt to renovate materialistic dialectics in order to account for the emergence of novelty in a divided situation. -/- (...) With this context in mind, the focus of the paper is Badiou’s uninterrupted confrontation with Hegel as the source of the most important concepts that build up his post-dialectical dialectics, even after the so called ‘mathematical turn’, that is to say, the notions of scission and subject. Hence, it analyses these categories as they first appear in Théorie du sujet’s dialectics between algebra and topology. Secondly, it explores how they are transposed in L’Être et l’événement, emphasising the latter’s profoundly dialectical articulation notwithstanding its overly structural and potentially misleading orientation. Thirdly, it tries to underline how Logiques des mondes supplements this one-sidedness with the topological approach of a (new) theory of the subject, where Théorie du sujet represents the ‘vanishing mediator’ between the two tomes of Badiou’s magnum opus. Finally, it concludes that Badiou finds in Hegel a doctrine of the event, motivated by the creation of a new figure of man against those of reaction and obscurantism that dominate modern democratic materialism. (shrink)

The essay explores the philosophical concept of fear as it appears in the chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit entitled Absolute Freedom & Terror , dedicated to the analysis of the French Revolution. The aim of the essay is to show Hegel’s critique against the abstract logic of modern political rationalism implied by the Revolution itself. This critique finds its base in a new productive concept of fear, which, in the form of Terror [ Schrecken ], represents the dialectic driving (...) force for the affirmation of the freedom of Spirit. (shrink)