Questions of style are often deemed of marginal importance in philosophy, as well as in metaphilosophical debates concerning the analytic/Continental divide. I take issue with this common tendency by showing how style – suitably conceived not merely as a way of writing, but as a form of expression intimately linked to a form of life – occupies a central role in philosophy. After providing an analysis of the concept of style, I take a fresh look at the analytic/Continental division by (...) examining the various stylistic differences between philosophers on each side. Despite these differences, I argue, both sides of the divide suffer from a common stylistic deficiency, and if this deficiency were rectified the gulf separating the two traditions may not appear as insurmountable as it presently does. To show this, I draw principally from the philosophy of religion, a field that has recently experienced a renewal in both the analytic and Continental traditions. (shrink)

Within recent scholarship, a long-standing tendency to view Foucault as pessimistic about the possibilities of activism is now being reversed. For many contemporary commentators who emphasize the themes of personal agency, transgression and radical freedom in their assessment of his thought, Foucault offers new possibilities for political practice and for the pursuit of self-determination. However, an examination of Foucault’s work, particularly in the transitional period preceding his so-called ‘ethical’ writings, indicates his appreciation of basic human needs and functions that complicates (...) the current understanding of Foucault as a philosopher of freedom. Particularly in his discussions of the ideas of ‘desubjectivation’ and ‘limit-experience’, Foucault’s work recognizes that prior conditions of psychological, economic and social ‘well-being’ are prerequisites for any subsequent performance of freedom. Examining this dimension of Foucault’s work reveals interesting points of convergence between his thought and the capabilities approach advocated by philosophers such as Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Like them, Foucault’s work recognizes that there are some minimal levels of human functioning below which talk of self-determination is misplaced. As such, political philosophy needs to be concerned with the grounds of personal and political obligation, no less than the limits and possibilities of freedom. (shrink)

Several critics of Foucault, notably Alan Megill and Jürgen Habermas, accuse Foucault of being an ‘aestheticist’. As such, Foucault fails to realise that the very appeal to aesthetics is made possible by modernity's rationalization, which offers better resources for emancipation than dangerous aestheticizations. This paper argues that such criticisms mistakenly deploy only certain modernist notions of aesthetics against Foucault. There are some fair grounds for holding that Foucault does appeal to such conceptions of aesthetics in his theorization of transgression, not (...) least because of his interest in modernist, avant‐garde writers and artists such as Roussel and Magritte. Yet, overall, Foucault's interest in avant‐garde aesthetics is not modernist in the sense understood by his critics. Foucault tends to focus on modernist illustration of the absence of foundations for representation and language, adopting a paraesthetic angle of critique. The limiting conditions that make representation possible can be seen in this light as both contingent yet necessary. Foucault's model of critique is developed in his early analyses of avant‐garde art and then expanded to cover subjectivity and the aesthetics of existence in his later philosophical critical ethos of modernity. Foucault uses avant‐garde art as a critical mode of reflection, to analyse and rethink the limits of the present. (shrink)

This article interprets Foucault’s intellectual project by analysing the relation between his understanding of critique and the political conditions of subjectivation out of which it emerged. After reviewing some of the most typical criticisms of Foucault’s work, the argument shows in what sense he conceived of critique as a form of resistance and how the latter, in turn, was theorised as a force co-extensive to the power it counters. The paper goes on to argue that his theory of resistance is (...) not necessarily to be viewed as a metaphysical representation of the immutable nature of political struggle, but might well be interpreted in performative terms, i.e. as a strategic re-inscription of existing political-discursive formations. More precisely, the analysis shows in what way Foucault’s articulation of critique represented an attempt to displace the forms of subjectivation that underpin anthropological thought and the government of the self in the modern age. (shrink)

Michel’s Foucault’s later work has been the subject of much critical interest regarding the question of whether it provides a normative stance that prescribes how the self ought to act. Having first outlined the nature of the debate, I engage with Foucault’s comparative analysis of the ethical systems of ancient Greeks and Christianity to show that he holds that the former maintains that the ethical subject was premised not on adherence to a priori rules as in Christianity, but from and (...) around an on-going process of practical experimentation. From this, Foucault goes on to describe the practices through which the self acted to make and re-make itself, which leads to the question of whether such descriptions also contain prescriptions as to how the self should act. I argue that they do contain a prescriptively normative stance, but in a very specific sense. Rather than delineating the specific ethical commitments we should adopt, Foucault takes off from the example of the ancient Greeks to insist that individuals should adopt an indeterminate orientating principle based on absolute openness to each context, with this principle given content through a context-specific, spontaneous, on-going, and inherently individual, albeit socially situated, process of practical experimentation. The result is a highly original account of normativity that makes individuals absolutely responsible for themselves and their ethical activities in each moment. (shrink)

How should we read Foucault's claims, in his late work, for the relevance of ‘aesthetic criteria’ to politics? What is Foucault's implicit understanding of the nature of aesthetics and the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere? Would an ethics which gave a place to the aesthetic legitimize a politics of manipulation, brutality and aggression ‐ in short, a ‘fascist’ politics ‐ as some of Foucault's critics argue? In this paper, I examine key accounts of the fascist ‘aestheticization of politics’ ‐ from (...) Walter Benjamin's classic essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), to Philippe Lacoue‐Labarthe's work on the relation between Heidegger's philosophy and the fascist theme of politics as the plastic art of the state. Through a discussion of Foucault's late work, the paper demonstrates the connection between Foucault's turn to ancient Greek ethical practices and his call for a contemporary renewal of the idea of ethics as an art of living. The aim of the paper is to show in what ways the ethico‐political position which is presented in Foucault's late work, far from contributing to a fascist politics, in fact provides ways of thinking about the relationship between the aesthetic and the political which avoid both mindless radicalism and totalitarian narcissism. In doing so, the key question is, ‘What's aesthetic about Foucault's “aesthetics of existence"?’. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur and Michel Foucault enjoy a privileged status in nursing academia as two thinkers who influence both nursing research and philosophical explorations of nursing practice. Most nurse authors, however, focus only on the earlier works of these two philosophers and, for example, base qualitative research methodologies on Foucault's genealogy and Ricoeur's hermeneutics. In their later years, both these writers talk more explicitly about being an ethical self. Ideas from their earlier writing is evident in their writing on ethics and (...) both writers could not discuss ethics without also exploring their ideas of the self and the other. I suggest that some of their thoughts on ethics connect with or complement each other quite well. I will first give an overview of Foucault's ethics, self and the other, and then do the same with Ricoeur's thought. In the third part of the paper I will describe how Foucault and Ricoeur complement each other, and conclude the paper by briefly suggesting how these writers influence my own practice as a nurse educator. (shrink)

In The Use of Pleasure, Michel Foucault suggests that it is possible to read Walter Benjamin’s writings on Baudelaire as a contribution to a genealogy of ethics. This article experiments with reading Benjamin in this way. It shows that a distinctive analysis of each of the four elements of Foucauldian ethics can be found in Benjamin’s work on Baudelaire and the Paris arcades. Specifically, the article makes the case for reading Benjamin in terms of his valuable contribution to understandings of (...) the role played by art in modern forms of ‘parrhesia’, or courageous truth-telling. However, whereas Foucault’s notion of ‘arts of living’ focuses on challenging actual relations of power, Benjamin’s focuses on activating potential forms of power. In this way, Benjamin’s ethical framework tests the limits of Foucault’s conceptualization of the government of self and others. (shrink)

In this work, I present an interpretation of two thinkers, Foucault and Arendt. I place these thinkers within a tradition of critical theory running from Kant to Nietzsche. The opposition between modernism and postmodernism, between its philosophical sources, Kant and Nietzsche, has been widely overstated, for example, in the polemical stance taken by Habermas in The Philosophical Discourse ofModenfity (1987). 1 am concerned to show that this way of mapping does Foucault and Arendt an injustice. Foucault and Arendt accept Nietzsche's (...) critique of reason and Western thought and attack Kant's official philosophy, an analytical philosophy of truth. Yet they also appropriate Kant's reflection on the Enlightenment and revolution (Foucault) and his aesthetic judgment (Arendt). More importantly, Foucault and Arendt embrace postmodern sensibility not as an absolute given but as an attitude that must be - at the risk of inviting Nietzschean scorn - constantly checked and examined. For them, critique is based as much on a serious and sustained interrogation of historical experience as it is on a deconstruction of metaphysical philosophy. Recognizing the problems of attaching labels to Foucault's work and that of Arendt, I focus on the tensions and complexity of their work. There are tensions in Foucault's thought between totalizing/detotalizing impulses, discursive/extra-discursive theorization, macro/micro perspectives, and domination/resistance relations as well as between ethical-political commitments and archaeological detachment. There are also tensions in Arendt's thought between creative rupture and exercise in retrieval, between agonism and consensus as well as between existential engagement and philosophical withdrawal. Critical thought, which is experiment as well as problematization, must constantly live within a field of tension. In this light, I argue that these tensions provide the elements for the uniqueness and coherence of their work and that viewing these tensions as a source of flagrant contradiction fundamentally distorts their intentions. (shrink)