This paper analyzes the entanglement of the modern concepts of freedom, autonomy, and the modern notion of the subject and how a passion for and insistence on freedom has undermined the reconstruction of human subjectivity in Heidegger and Foucault, and how such passion has also limited the educational effort at addressing the problems brought to education by the modern notion of the subject. Drawing on Levinas, it suggests that a new understanding of freedom as heteronomy will allow us to envision (...) an open subjectivity that is essential for education. Particularly, it looks at Gert Biesta’s recent campaigns for “subjectification” and “the gift of teaching” to analyze the underlying contradictions caused by the entanglement of freedom and subjectivity. (shrink)

Biesta has suggested that education after humanism should be interested in existence, not essence, in what the subject can do, not in what the subject is—the truth about the subject—and this is the way inspired by Foucault and Levinas. In this article, I analyze Foucault’s alleged deconstruction and reconfiguration of the subject and Levinas’ approach to human subjectivity and suggest that Foucault’s early and later works have already implied certain concepts of the subject and that Levinas’ approach to human subjectivity (...) does not, as has often been perceived in educational circles, avoid theorizing about human subjectivity. Drawing on the French philosophy of difference, particularly Levinas’ ideas of alterity and subjectivity, I propose a post-humanist subject as a singular existence that ‘announces, promises, and at the same time conceals’, that cannot be exhausted, totalized, and replicated. The singular and unique subject, open and responsible to the world and beyond, is indispensible to the educational mission of subjectification. (shrink)

La propuesta ético-política foucaulteana proyectada en torno al cura sui, a partir de la práctica de la parrhesía, ha sido criticada en términos de un puro hacer solipsista, que no busca resistir al poder sino desde una disposición estética individual. Partiendo de una mención foucaulteana —la parrhesía se acerca al modo nietzscheano de pensar la verdad desde el riesgo— buscaremos mostrar dos puntos: que dicha cercanía es pensable desde una comparación entre las relaciones de poder foucaulteanas y de lucha nietzscheanas, (...) lo cual permite concebir el cura sui de un modo más amplio; y que la diferencia desplegada en la concepción de dichas relaciones de poder y de lucha es articulable desde lo que les es, correspondientemente, antagónico en términos ético-políticos: en Foucault, el poder como dominación y en Nietzsche, la civilización heredera de los valores cristianos. (shrink)

Teaching in university education programmes, can, at times, involve the uncomfortable situation of discriminatory speech.A situation that has often occurred in our own teaching, and in those of our colleagues, is the citation of homophobic and heterosexist comments.These are comments that are more likely to occur in foundation subjects such as philosophy and sociology of education.The occurrence of such situations has prompted debate regarding ‘silencing words that wound’. This has prompted the question, ‘should we keep students from stating such discriminatory (...) speech?’ Our article takes up this issue, and considers it from the perspective of the importance of critique.Working with Foucault’s What is Critique? together with his discussion of subjectivation in the 1981–82 lectures at the Collège de France, we set out to make the case for the significance of the relationship between truth and critique.This leads us to a position where we ask the question, if we silence, what do we risk doing to critique? (shrink)

,is article addresses the relationship between sovereignty, biopolitics and governmentality in the work of Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault. By unpacking Foucault’s genealogy of modern governmentality, it responds to a criticism leveled against Foucauldian accounts of power for their alleged abandonment of the traditional model of power in juridico-institutional terms in favor of an understanding of power as purely productive. ,is claim has most signi-cantly been developed by Agamben in “Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life”. I argue (...) that Judith Butler’s analysis of power, in particular in her essay “Inde-nite Detention”, presents a more di.erentiated account of power that registers the signi-cance of practices of sovereignty and resonates with Foucault’s lectures on “Security, Territory, Population”. (shrink)

This article identifies power, subjectivity, and practices of freedom as neglected but significant elements for understanding the ethics of social entrepreneurship. While the ethics of social entrepreneurship is typically conceptualized in conjunction with innate properties or moral commitments of the individual, we problematize this view based on its presupposition of an essentialist conception of the authentic subject. We offer, based on Foucault’s ethical oeuvre, a practice-based alternative which sees ethics as being exercised through a critical and creative dealing with the (...) limits imposed by power, notably as they pertain to the conditioning of the neoliberal subject. To this end, we first draw on prior research which looks at how practitioners of social enterprises engage with government policies that demand that they should act and think more like prototypical entrepreneurs. Instead of simply endorsing the kind of entrepreneurial subjectivity implied in prevailing policies, our results indicate that practitioners are mostly reluctant to identify themselves with the invocation of governmental power, often rejecting the subjectivity offered to them by discourse. Conceiving these acts of resistance as emblematic of how social entrepreneurs practice ethics by retaining a skeptical attitude toward attempts that seek to determine who they should be and how they should live, we introduce three vignettes that illustrate how practices of freedom relate to critique, the care for others, and reflected choice. We conclude that a practice-based approach of ethics can advance our understanding of how social entrepreneurs actively produce conditions of freedom for themselves as well as for others without supposing a ‘true self’ or a utopian space of liberty beyond power. (shrink)

This dissertation claims that the problem of self-knowledge involves a kind of splitting of the mind or self into a knower and a known, a subject and an object of knowledge. As modern philosophy becomes concerned with the project of certainty, its turn toward the self renders this splitting into a kind of aporia: how can the self know itself when it is at once a subject and an object of its own knowing? The goal of this dissertation is not (...) to develop a paradigm of self-awareness that avoids or escapes the limits of self-certainty, per se; rather it considers how we might address what is constitutively unknowable about the self without recapitulating the limits of the modern epistemic subject. Chapter I introduces the problem of self-knowledge and the split self. Chapter 2 analyzes Descartes' Second Meditation in terms of its presentation of self-knowledge as self-certainty. Descartes' res cogitans argument, I claim, reveals not only how Descartes conceives of the self as a substance, but also how such a conception relies upon a notion of transparent self-awareness which attempts to resolve the aporia of the split self. Chapter 3 presents Hume's critique of the philosophical notion of personal identity, particularly in terms of its assumption of the self as a substance. Without an alternative notion of self-awareness, however, Hume's method of critique—his empirical epistemology—leaves in place the position of the knowing self capable of transparent introspection. Chapter 4 focuses on Michel Foucault's critique of self-knowledge as knowledge of a substance by an unimpeded knower. Using Foucault's notion of “caring” for the self, I consider how claims of self-knowledge have a productive effect on the self. I critique Foucault's implicit assumption of and failure to provide an alternative notion of self-awareness, however. Citing Descartes' self-reflective meditations, Chapter 5 explores my own relation to self-knowledge, highlighting by example how one can address what is constitutively unknowable about the self. Through explorations of identity through the figure of ‘being adopted’ I argue that we can begin to unpack both the ontological and the epistemological assumptions of identity. (shrink)

In his final works, Foucault explains his overall project as a “history of truth” centered on the relations between subjectivity and truth. While the early archaeology focuses primarily on the formation of new objects and discourses of knowledge, and later, genealogy on techniques of power, the problematic of truth is the overriding framework through which Foucault develops these analyses. Throughout all of his work, in fact, Foucault’s question is how discourse, institutions, politics, and subjects are established within regimes of truth.