The Body–Power Relationship and Immanent Philosophy: A Question of Life and Death

Abstract

According to Foucault, the human body is the targeted object of modern power systems. In his genealogical studies, Foucault describes the manner in which these power systems leave an imprint on the body and utilize knowledge of the body as an indirect means of exercising subtle forms of control. In recent years, several researchers have claimed that the status of the body, subsumed as it is by modern power networks, has become a means for conducting a unique political critique in which the human being is viewed as an agent of oppression and freedom. This article takes a fresh look at Foucault’s notions of life and death that underpin the critical understanding the body–power relationship. While this approach recognizes the completeness of subjective structuring processes, it also enables the formulation of new insights regarding the status of the modern individual as the subject of separate and independent modes of speech and action.

Notes

1. Jerold Abrams, “Aesthetics of Self-fashioning and Cosmopolitanism: Foucault and Rorty on the Art of Living,” Philosophy Today 46.1 (2002): 185; and “Pragmatism, Artificial Intelligence, and Posthuman Bio-ethics: Shusterman, Rorty, Foucault,” Human Studies 27 (2004): 241.

2. Abrams, “Aesthetics of Self-fashioning,” 185.

3. Saul Tobias, “Foucault on Freedom and Capabilities,” Theory, Culture and Society 22.4 (2005): 66.

4. Judith Butler, “Bodies and Power, Revisited,” Radical Philosophy 114 (2002): 15.

5. Several early critics claim that that the body is not a corporal entity in Foucault’s theories, even Butler suggesting that Foucault confuses the ontological and epistemological: Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 120.

6. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, History, Genealogy,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1971), 375.

7. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984. Vol. 1: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 340; hereafter abbreviated as SP and cited in the text.

8. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 29; hereafter abbreviated as DP and cited in the text.

9. David Hoy, Critical Resistance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 60.

10. Mark Bevir, “Foucault and Critique,” Political Theory 27.1 (1999): 67.

11. David Dudrick, “Foucault, Butler and the Body,” European Journal of Philosophy 13.2 (2005): 228–34.

12. C. Colwell, “Agency of the Body,” International Studies in Philosophy 32.4 (2002): 16.

13. Colwell considers the subject an agent, borrowing Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the pre-personal through which to examine the status attributed to the body in genealogical descriptions.

14. Tobias, “Foucault on Freedom and Capabilities,” 71.

15. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” trans. Rupert Swver (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 2003), 239–40; hereafter abbreviated as SMD and cited in the text.

16. Michel Foucault, “The Social Extension of the Norm,” in Foucault Live, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext[e], 1989), 197.

17. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 103–13; hereafter abbreviated as HS and cited in the text.

18. Gilles Deleuze, “What is a Dispositif,” in Michel Foucault, Philosopher, ed. Timothy Armstrong (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 161.

19. Thomas F. Tierney, “Suicidal Thoughts: Hobbes, Foucault and the Right to Die,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 32.5 (2011): 605–6.

20. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

21. Didier Fassein, “Another Politics of Life is Possible,” Theory, Culture, Society 26.5 (2009): 507.

22. See Thomas F. Tierney, “The Governmentality of Suicide: Peuchet, Marx, Durkheim and Foucault,” Journal of Classical Sociology 10 (2010): 358–71.

23. Stuart Murray, “Thanatopolitics: On the Use of Death for Mobilizing Political Life,” Polygraph 18 (2006): 207.

24. See A. T. Nuyen, “The Politics of Emancipation: From Self to Society,” Human Studies 21.1 (1998): 27–43.

25. Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984. Vol. 2: Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, ed. James Faubion (New York: New Press 1997), 72; hereafter abbreviated as PT and cited in the text.

26. Johanna Oksala, “Anarchic Bodies: Foucault and the Feminist Question of Experience,” Hypatia 19.4 (2004): 110.

27. Michel Foucault, “Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity,” in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984. Vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 165–74.

28. Michel Foucault, “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act,” in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, 14–23; hereafter abbreviated as SC and cited in the text.

29. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: New Press, 1985), 15–20; hereafter abbreviated as UP and cited in the text.

30. Oksala, “Anarchic Bodies,” 110.

31. For examples, see Pat Califia, Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex (New York: Cleis, 2000).

32. Michel Foucault, “Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity,” in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, 165–66; hereafter abbreviated as SPP and cited in the text.

33. Bob Plant, “Playing Games/Playing Us,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 33.5 (2007): 532–35.

34. Anne McClintock, “Maid to Order: Commercial Fetishism and Gender Power,” Social Order 37 (1993): 90.

35. Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and the Care of the Self: The Case of Foucault,” The Monist 83.1 (2000): 540.

36. Richard Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1996), 157–79.

37. Abrams, “Pragmatism, Artificial Intelligence, and Posthuman Bio-ethics,” 244.

38. Davide Panagia, “The Political Life of Sensation,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 19.1 (20011): 13–58.

39. See Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).