Abstract

This dissertation conducts a genealogical critique of political subjectivity relying on the work of the French philosopher, Michel Foucault. Since his death in 1984, there has been much scholarly debate over whether, and in what way, Foucault's seemingly disparate analyses of discourse, technologies of power, and modes of subjectivation, or ethical self-formation, could be organized into a single coherent philosophy. Although Foucault would resist such projects, he did come to realize that these three so-called "movements" of his work bear a relation to each other, though he was never able to bring them together in a concentrated project. In this dissertation, I bring the movements of Foucault's work together to show that political subjects emerge within the axial interplay of discursive practices, power relations, and the self-appropriation of values. This understanding is applied critically to traditional notions of political subjectivity, focusing especially on the private, autonomous individual of the Liberal Tradition, from Hobbes to Nozick. The Liberal Tradition has come to take the individual for granted in its juridical projects to define the rights, freedom, power, and obligations of the political subject. However, the dissertation suspends the "givenness" of the individual in order to expose its emergence as an effect of a matrix of experience. This matrix consists of an interplay of historically-contingent discursive and non-discursive practices that bind us to an identificational determination. The discourses of the Liberal Tradition are thoroughly imbricated in this matrix in that they produce a Discourse of Threat which at once isolates us to a private autonomy and permits a governmental integration of subjects within the body of the nation. This integration is made possible through traditional appeals to right which conceal the network of power/knowledge relations that actually constitute political subjects. This genealogical critique has serious repercussions for the way we presently understand the tasks of political philosophy. In particular, it forces us to re-think the notion of political freedom, and to examine the necessity of our ideological oppositions