_Phenomenological insights into health issues relating to bodily self-experience, normality and deviance, self-alienation, and objectification._.

Exploring the apparent tension between Foucault’s analyses of technologies of domination – the ways in which the subject is constituted by power–knowledge relations – and of technologies of the self – the ways in which individuals constitute themselves through practices of freedom – this article endeavors to makes two points: first, the interpretive claim that Foucault’s own attempts to analyse both aspects of the politics of our selves are neither contradictory nor incoherent; and, second, the constructive claim that Foucault’s analysis (...) of the politics of our selves, though not entirely satisfactory as it stands, provides important resources for the project of critical social theory. (shrink)

In order to elucidate some of the ways in which critique and subjectivity become inextricably linked in Foucault’s oeuvre, the paper proceeds first by briefly discussing the concept of critique as limit-attitude as it appears in some of Foucault’s methodological writings. Subsequently, the main tenets of Judith Butler’s commentary on the essay ‘What is Critique?’ will be summarized, concentrating on the image of the virtuous, self-making subject that the author’s interpretation brings out of Foucault’s original text. The second part of (...) the paper aims to develop an alternative reading of Foucault’s notion of critique by looking at the ways in which the notion of space operates as an underlying perspective in his archaeological analysis. Ultimately, it will be shown how the spatial implications of Foucault’s early works and a more passive form of subjectivity as unfolding from his discussion of the ‘author function’ and his own methodological reflections coalesce into a form of practical critique, which, as wished by the author, may take ‘the form of a possible transgression’. (shrink)

I offer a major reassessment of Foucault’s philosophico-historical account of the basic problems of modernity. I revise our understanding of Foucault by countering the influential misinterpretations proffered by his European interlocutors such as Habermas and Derrida. Central to Foucault’s account of modernity was his work on two crucial concept pairs: freedom/power and reason/madness. I argue against the view of Habermas and Derrida that Foucault understood modern power and reason as straightforwardly opposed to modern freedom and madness. I show that Foucault (...) held a much more complex view of these pairs, a view encapsulated in his term ‘reciprocal incompatibility’. By revising our interpretation of Foucault’s work on modernity in this way, we open the way to much more effective deployments of his critical apparatus. (shrink)

Whereas classical Critical Theory has tended to view phenomenology as inherently uncritical, the recent upsurge of what has become known as critical phenomenology has attempted to show that phenomenological concepts and methods can be used in critical analyses of social and political issues. A recent landmark publication, 50 Concepts for Critical Phenomenology, contains no reference to psychiatry and psychopathology, however. This is an unfortunate omission, since the tradition of phenomenological psychiatry—as we will demonstrate in the present article by surveying and (...) discussing the contribution of Jaspers, Minkowski, Laing, Basaglia, and Fanon—from the outset has practiced critical thinking, be it at the theoretical, interpersonal, institutional, or political level. Fanon is today a recognized figure in critical phenomenology, even if his role in psychiatry might not yet have been appreciated as thoroughly as his anticolonial and antiracist contributions. But as we show, he is part of a long history of critical approaches in psychopathology and psychiatry, which has firm roots in the phenomenological tradition, and which keeps up its critical work today. (shrink)

This paper examines ways in which Nazism has been sexualized in contemporary Western media, drawing on Foucault’s theory of biopower to explain this bizarre phenomena. I argue Nazism has been eroticized through its use as a floating signifier for “evil” or “abnormal,” the oppositional half of the hegemonic binary narrative. Looking to Foucault’s later work on resistance and perfectionist ethics, I ultimately argue these representations negatively detract from and silence survivor and witness testimony, problematically distorting popular knowledge and understanding of (...) the Shoah to fit hegemonic binary narratives, rather than to pay respect to or preserve the stories and suffering of the victims. (shrink)

This paper argues that Michel Foucault explicitly rejected the model of critique by which he is often understood—by both his defenders and detractors. Rather than justifying norms that could be said to represent “the people;” judging institutions, norms, and practices accordingly; and creating programs for others to enact, he theorized and practiced an experimental social criticism in which specific intellectuals help people work through “intolerable” situations by multiplying the ways they can think about and act upon them. As Foucault’s work (...) with the prisons in France shows, one way intellectuals can be part of the experimental transformations social bodies carry out upon themselves is through genealogical work describing the ways problems have come to be identified—and can thus be transformed. This account of criticism undercuts the problem of justifying a standpoint of critique that has plagued philosophers and suggests a few concrete means of better aligning theory and practice. (shrink)

Foucault’s theory of power and subjectification challenges common concepts of freedom in social philosophy and expands them through the concept of ‘freedom as critique’: Freedom can be defined as the capability to critically reflect upon one’s own subjectification, and the conditions of possibility for this critical capacity lie in political and social institutions. The article develops this concept through a critical discussion of the standard response by Foucault interpreters to the standard objection that Foucault’s thinking obscures freedom. The standard response (...) interprets Foucault’s later works, especially The Subject and Power, as a solution to the problem of freedom. It is mistaken, because it conflates different concepts of freedom that are present in Foucault’s work. By differentiating these concepts, this article proposes a new institutionalist approach to solve the problem of freedom that breaks with the partly anarchist underpinnings of Foucault scholarship: As freedom as critique is not given, but itself a result of subjectification, it entails a demand for ‘modal robustness’ and must therefore be institutionalized. This approach helps to draw out the consequences of Foucault’s thinking on freedom for postfoundationalist democratic theory and the general social-philosophical discussion about freedom. (shrink)

Reply to Stawarska's review in this issue.

This paper explicates Foucault's conception of experience and defends it as an important theoretical resource for feminist theory. It analyzes Linda Alcoff's devastating critique of Foucault's account of sexuality and her reasons for advocating phenomenology as a more viable alternative. I agree with her that a philosophically sophisticated understanding of experience must remain central for feminist theory, but I demonstrate that her critique of Foucault is based on a mistaken view of his philosophical position as well as on a problematic (...) understanding of phenomenology. (shrink)

The paper explicates a politicized conception of reality with the help of Michel Foucault’s critical project. I contend that Foucault’s genealogies of power problematize the relationship between ontology and politics. His idea of productive power incorporates a radical, ontological claim about the nature of reality: Reality as we know it is the result of social practices and struggles over truth and objectivity. Rather than translating the true ontology into the right politics, he reverses the argument. The radicality of his method (...) lies in showing how the ontological order of things is in itself the outcome of a political struggle: Ontology is politics that has forgotten itself. I argue that Foucault’s thought accomplishes the politicization of ontology with two key theoretical moves. The first is the contestation and provocation of all given and necessary ontological foundations. He affirms the ontological view that there is a discontinuity between reality and all ontological schemas that order it, and a subsequent indeterminacy of reason in establishing ultimate truths or foundations. After this initial step whereby ontology is denaturalized—made arbitrary or at least historically contingent—the way is open for explanations that treat the alternative and competing ontological frameworks as resulting from historical, linguistic and social practices of power. The second key move is thus the exposure of power relations and their constitutive role in our conception of reality. I conclude by considering the implications of Foucault’s politicization of ontology for our understanding of politics. (shrink)

In this paper I explore Husserl’s and Foucault’s approaches to the historical a priori and defend Husserl’s richer notion. Foucault borrows the expression ‘historical a priori’ from Husserl and there are continuities, but also significant and ultimately irreconcilable differences, between their conceptions. Both are looking for ‘conditions of possibility,’ forms of ‘institution’ or instauration, and patterns of transformation, for scientific knowledge. Husserl identifies the ‘a priori of history’ with the ‘historical a priori’ and believes that the ‘invariant essential structures of (...) the historical world’ can be identified. Foucault, on the other hand, is less interested in the Kantian inquiry into the limits or legitimization of knowledge than in the relation between knowledge and power. Foucault rejects the idea of universal and necessary a priori structures and denies that the structure of the conceptual framework governing an era can be fully determined. Both Foucault and Husserl contrast ‘inner’ history with external history, but, I argue, Foucault misconstrues Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology as a form of ‘absolute subjectivity’ against which his ‘archaeological’ method reacts. In fact, Foucault’s own conception of the historical a priori is ambiguous and fails to have explanatory value precisely because it misunderstands the need for the a priori to be both universal and necessary, and offers no account of the ‘a priori of historicity’ which, for Husserl, is essential to human cultural life. (shrink)

In this article, I consider recent debates on the notion of procreative liberty, to argue that reproductive freedom can be understood as a form of positive freedom—that is, the freedom to make oneself according to various ethical and aesthetic principles or values. To make this argument, I draw on Michel Foucault’s later work on ethics. Both adopting and adapting Foucault’s notion of ethics as a practice of the self and of liberty, I argue that reproductive autonomy requires enactment to gain (...) meaning within the life contexts of prospective parents. Thus, I propose a shift away from the standard negative model of freedom that sees it solely as a matter of noninterference or nonimpedance, a view advocated by major commentators such as John Harris and John Robertson. Instead, reproduction should be understood as a deeply personal project of self-making that integrates both negative and positive freedom. (shrink)

The purpose of the present paper is to offer a Foucauldian critique of Habermas’s theory of law and democracy. Quite famously Habermas viciously attacked Foucault’s positions on law and power in modernity. Those attacks will be taken into consideration here in order to show some deficiencies in Habermas’s own reading of modern law and democracy. My suggestion is that the formal nature of Habermas’s communicative approach fails to take into adequate consideration the question of subjectivity formation. More precisely I will (...) demonstrate that Habermas’s own works show a troublesome ambivalence with regards to the possibility that individuals can participate as ‘unencumbered selves’ to the public life of their community. As a consequence his account turns a blind eye to certain dynamics of power in our society that a Foucauldian approach seems more apt to frame and explore. (shrink)

This article aims at showing that in spite of Michel Foucault’s violent rejection of phenomenology, this discipline never ceased to bear a crucial significance for his archaeological and genealogical analyses, in that it can be construed as a symptom indicating the most serious challenge that the contemporary philosophy has to meet: thinking together Experience and Knowledge. The author intends to prove, by resorting to the Marxian concept of ‘objectively necessary appearance’, that Foucault’s main opposition to phenomenology stems from his original (...) conception of the theory as a sort of experiment made by the philosopher on himself and on his own historical a priori. (shrink)

In this paper I distinguish between two main critical questions: ‘how possible’ questions, which look for enabling conditions and raise issues of epistemic normativity; and ‘whether permissible’ questions, which relate to conditions of legitimacy and ethical normativity. I examine the interplay of both types of questions in Foucault’s work and argue that this helps us to understand both the function of the historical a priori in the archeological period and the subsequent accusations of crypto-normativity levelled against Foucault by commentators such (...) as Taylor and Habermas. I chart the complex conceptual space available for a defense. After examining several possible replies, I conclude that the most effective option, and the one that fits Foucault’s approach best, is to refuse the demand for normative justification as self-defeating, and to opt for the cultivation of an appropriate ethical sensibility through an emphasis on critique as a performative practice of the self. I offer in conclusion some thoughts on what such practice may look like for Foucault. (shrink)

In this paper, we extend Michel Foucault’s final works on the ‘care of the self’ to an empirical examination of research practice in community-based research (CBR). We use Foucault’s ‘morality of behaviors’ to analyze interview data from a national sample of Canadian CBR practitioners working with communities affected by HIV. Despite claims in the literature that ethics review is overly burdensome for non-traditional forms of research, our findings suggest that many researchers using CBR have an ambivalent but ultimately productive relationship (...) with institutional research ethics review requirements. They understand and use prescribed codes, but adapt them in practice to account for the needs of participating community members, members of their research teams and the larger communities with whom they work. Complying with ethics protocols was seen as only the beginning, a minimum standard; our research suggests that the real ethical work happens in the field, where CBR practitioners encounter community members in diverse public roles and must forge ethical consensus across communities. CBR represents an ethical terrain in which practitioners challenge themselves to work differently, and as a result they care for themselves—and others—in ways that often resist the propensity for domination through public health research.‘…there are different ways to “conduct oneself” morally, different ways for the acting individual to operate, not just as an agent, but as an ethical subject of action.’ (Foucault, 1985: 26). (shrink)

The Habermas–Foucault debate, despite the excellent commentary it has generated, has the standing of an ‘unfinished project’ precisely because it occasions the interrogation of the fundamental categories of modernity, and because the lingering sense of anxiety, which continues to remain after arguments and counter-arguments, demands new interpretations. Here, I advance the claim that what gives Habermas’s criticisms of Foucault’s histories and theoretical formulations their bite is the categorial distinction he maintains between facts and rights, and by extension, between causes and (...) reasons. The Kantian distinction between de jure validity and de facto effectivity underwrites the categorial distinction between both ‘norms/facts’ and ‘reasons/causes’ conceptual pairs, which distinction, in turn, is reinforced by a picture of the natural world as matter in motion and human agency as self-determination. I want to claim that Foucault’s work enacts a critique of Habermas not by evading the problem of justification but by undermining the very distinctions Habermas needs to maintain the universal and necessary status of communicative rationality. Drawing on Jonathan Lear’s discussion of reasons and causes in relation to the unconscious, I claim that psychoanalytic discourse helps us make intelligible a type of reflection—such as one finds in Foucault’s historiography—that is at once “critical and empirical.” Moreover, the realization that the distinction between causes and reasons may not be categorial and exhaustive shows how Habermas’s insistence on the contrary leads to one particular kind of misrecognition of our practices. (shrink)

In Foucault’s theoretical writings, the problem of experience occurs in two shapes: his discussions of “limit-experience” and his definition of “experience.” In this article, I propose an interpretation of the concept of “limit-experience” in Foucault’s historiography according to which experience is already limit-experience, and not its static and confining other. I claim that Foucault’s concept of experience involves spatially and temporally indexed, rule-governed practices and that his interrogation of experience becomes critical not by referring to some other of reason but (...) by rendering visible the flip side of the limits of our own space of reasons. The argument in support of my interpretation of Foucault develops in two parts: 1) Foucault’s “methodology” should be seen not as historicizing the transcendental, but as giving it up. 2) This renunciation of the transcendental is nonetheless only intelligible and motivated against the background of the problematic of experience in Kant and Hegel. It thereby becomes possible to provide not a foundation but a justification for a Foucaultian critique of the limits of experience. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new reading of the interaction between subjectivity, reflection and freedom within Foucault’s later work. I begin by introducing three approaches to subjectivity, locating these in relation both to Foucault’s texts and to the recent literature. I suggest that Foucault himself operates within what I call the ‘entanglement approach’, and, as such, he faces a potentially serious challenge, a challenge forcefully articulated by Han. Using Kant’s treatment of reflection as a point of comparison, I argue that Foucault (...) possesses the resources to meet this challenge. The key, I contend, is to distinguish two related theses about reflection and freedom: Foucault’s position is distinctive precisely because he accepts one of these theses whilst rejecting the other. I conclude by indicating how this reading might connect to the longstanding question of Foucault’s own right to appeal to normative standards. (shrink)

As dominant liberal conceptions of the relationship between rights and freedom maintain, freedom is a property of the individual human subject and rights are a mechanism for protecting that freedom—whether it be the freedom to speak, to associate, to practise a certain religion or cultural way of life, and so forth. Rights according to these kinds of accounts are protective of a certain zone of permitted or valorised conduct and they function either as, for example, a ‘side-constraint’ on the actions (...) of others or as a ‘trump’ over governmental or community goals. In such accounts, of course, the emphasis is placed upon the forms of power against which rights protect the individual, whether that be the trespasses of others or the overweening attentions of the state. Such accounts famously do not themselves take much account of the multiple ways in which rights also function as forms of power, often delimiting the courses of action that a putative rights-holder can take and affecting the manner of its exercise, indeed often in the very name of freedom itself. Of course, there is a sizeable critical literature which does address itself to these kinds of question, most notably from the radical traditions of Marxism and critical legal theory, which see rights in terms of the relations of production, consumption and exploitation that they establish between legal subjects. For various reasons, Foucault has not figured as prominently in critical discussions of rights. Here I do not propose to enter into debates surrounding Foucault’s engagement with, or failure to engage with, law as an object of study, nor with the emergent literature on Foucault’s deployments of rights, indeed even of human rights. Rather, what I want to do in this paper is to articulate and defend the view that through a reading of Foucault’s work, both on rights and on power relations more broadly, we can discern an understanding of the political ambivalence of rights. For Foucault (and for some of the post-Foucaultian scholars whose work I shall address, below), rights are both political tools for the contestation and alteration of mechanisms of power and simultaneously mechanisms of inscription, both disciplinary and governmental, which work to conduct those who rely upon them. Far from being an unproblematic tool for the protection of the subject’s freedom, rights emerge in this account as conflicted and ambivalent mechanisms. In the first part of this paper I develop a Foucaultian account of rights along these lines and then hope to illustrate it by reference to several examples, from the constitution of gender and cultural identity via rights to the figure of the refugee, whilst in the final part of the paper I make a return to the idea of freedom in Foucault’s work and link the view of rights developed herein to a certain conception of freedom in his work. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to draw attention to a currently underdeveloped notion of pain and alienation, in order to sketch an account of the harms of ‘discursive abuse’. This form of abuse comprises systemic practices of violating a person’s vulnerable integrity as a knowing agent. Discursive abuse results in, what I would like to call, ‘agential alienation’. This particular genus of alienation, whose broad conceptual origins lie in the respective works of Hegel and the early Marx, involves an (...) agent being robbed of their self-conception as a rational inquirer and participant in a deliberative public sphere. Such alienation causes a particular kind of pain for an agent that often has harrowing material effects. (shrink)

The theory of technological mediation aims to take technological artifacts seriously, recognizing the constitutive role they play in how we experience the world, act in it, and how we are constituted as (moral) subjects. Its quest for a compatible ethics has led it to Foucault’s “care of the self,” i.e., a transformation of the self by oneself through self-discipline. In this regard, technologies have been interpreted as power structures to which one can relate through Foucaultian “technologies of the self” or (...) ascetic practices. However, this leaves unexplored how concrete technologies can actuallysupportthe process of self-care. This paper explores this possibility by examining one such technology: a gamified To-Do list app. Doing so, it first shows that despite the apparent straightforwardness of gamification, confrontation and shame play an important role in how the app motivates me to do better. Second, inspired by Ihde’s schema of human-technology relations, it presents different ways in which the app may confront me with myself. Subsequently, it accounts for the motivation and shame that this technologically mediated confrontation with myself invokes through a Levinasian account of ethical subjectivity. In so doing, it also shows how Levinas’ phenomenology implies a responsibility for self-care and how nonhuman, technological others may still call me to responsibility. It concludes with a reflection on the role of gamification in technologically mediated subjectivation and some implications for design. (shrink)

This article pays close attention to Michel Foucault's theory that political regimes are enlightened through courageous free speech. A Foucaultian enlightenment occurs not when philosophical reason completely replaces superstition and enthusiasm in the public sphere, but instead when the parrhesiast partially organizes competing claims to know and to speak the truth. While much of the recent scholarly literature on Foucault’s later lectures emphasizes the political importance of the parrhesiast, less attention has been paid to the overlap and/or incompatibility between parrhesia (...) and the other modes of truth-telling. Below, I explain Foucault’s analysis of the basic modes of philosophical truth-telling: prophesy, philosophy, teaching, and parrhesia. I provide examples of speakers working within these modes in the ancient and modern world. I explain the overlap and tension between these modes, and I analyze Foucault’s partial organization of them through the image of the parrhesiast. I briefly compare Foucault’s position to the agonistic democratic theory of Chantal Mouffe and distinguish Foucault’s view from consensus-based views of public reason. Finally, I provide practical and theoretical examples of parrhesiastic activity in the contemporary world. (shrink)

In a 1984 interview, Michel Foucault introduced a distinction between two forms of freedom: freedom as the ontological condition of ethics, and ethics as the “practice of freedom” informed by reflection. This text suggests that a good understanding of Foucault’s thoughts on freedom would require accounts of both ontological freedom and practices of freedom, but the secondary literature currently suffers from a shortage of work on these topics. This thesis attempts to fill this gap in the literature by offering a (...) new account of practices of freedom which also shows the connection with ontological freedom. Drawing inspiration from the constitutivist approach to meta-ethics, I suggest that Foucault’s notion of the practice of freedom is best understood by identifying the “constitutive aims” of the practice, in other words, the aims that make an agent’s activity a practice of freedom. Such a framework allows us to understand how Foucault can make specific ethical suggestions without committing himself to substantive moral claims and also allows us to apply the notion of practices of freedom to a broad range of real-life examples. I first offer a new account of ontological freedom and then, using a constitutivist approach, engage in a close reading of Foucault’s work in order to identify the constitutive aim of practices of freedom. With the aims in view, I demonstrate what it means to successfully practice freedom and then apply the account in two close readings of historical individuals. The first, on Socrates as presented in the Platonic dialogues, shows that we can apply our account of the practice of freedom to existing individuals. The second, on Oscar Wilde, argues that Wilde’s experience of agency in the practice of freedom was middle-voiced, rather than active, and thereby allows us to loosen the assumed connection between practices of freedom and active agency. (shrink)