Askesis and the logic of the spiral

ABSTRACT

This essay sets out to demonstrate a strong connection between eros and askesis in Foucault’s writings. Analogous to Huffer’s argument about eros, I suggest that askesis does not invoke a return to an imagined Greek past, but operates generatively to destabilize subjectivity and normativity. Askesis is central to Foucault’s methodology and, indeed, askesis and eros, two terms that Huffer depicts as “strange” and “untranslatable,” are both requisite for the projects of political, social, and personal liberation toward which Foucault labored.

KEYWORDS:

• Foucault
• Huffer
• askesis
• form
• liberation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

M. Gail Hamner is Professor of Religion at Syracuse University and affiliated faculty in Film and Screen Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies. She is author of a number of essays on film, affect theory, and continental philosophy; The Image of Religion in Film: A Politics of Nostalgia (Palgrave 2012); and American Pragmatism: A Religious Genealogy (Oxford 2002).

Notes

1. Huffer, Are the Lips a Grave?; Huffer, Mad for Foucault.

2. Huffer, Are the Lips a Grave?, 12.

3. Huffer, Mad for Foucault, xvi.

4. Huffer, Are the Lips a Grave?, 5.

5. Ibid., 12.

6. Huffer, Mad for Foucault, 243.

7. Ibid., 277.

8. See Foucault, Technologies of Self, 18.

9. These two sentences are directly evoking and paraphrasing Huffer’s language from the conference paper version of her paper.

10. Huffer, “Strange Eros,” 110 (emphasis added). Henceforth cited as SE.

11. Nealon, Foucault beyond Foucault, 15–16.

12. Foucault, “L’éthique du souci de soi comme pratique de la liberté.”

13. Huffer, Mad for Foucault, 246.

14. Ibid., 248.

15. Huffer cites and discusses this late Foucault essay in Mad for Foucault, 246–53.

16. Huffer, Mad for Foucault, 243. The phrase is from Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject.

17. http://groups.northwestern.edu/critical/Fall%202012%20Session%203%20-%20Foucault%20-%20The%20Ethic%20of%20Care%20for%20the%20Self%20as%20a%20Practice%20of%20Freedom.pdf.

18. For a beautiful discussion of modes of existence that was influential on Merleau-Ponty and Foucault, see Souriau, Les différents modes d’existence, recently translated as Beranek, The Different Modes of Existence.

19. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 94.

20. Simondon, “The Genesis of the Individual,” 301.

21. Ibid., 311.

22. Are the marshaling of ascetical practices into an askesis or life program morally neutral? On a formal level, that is, as a bodily and discursive program, askesis must be neutral. But as a channel or matrix crafted from ascetical practices that are themselves wrought from filaments of resistance to the forces of normalization, it would seem Foucault wishes to orient askesis toward our limits, that is, toward habits that push away from whatever centers or stabilizes us, and toward whatever liberates us. But one has to admit that this desired orientation devolves into semantics. Any formal procedure is by definition at least somewhat indeterminate as to content. My thanks to Randall Johnson for helping me think this through.

23. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 94 (emphasis added).

24. Jordan, Convulsing Bodies, 171–3.

25. Ibid., 171.

26. Foucault, Technologies of Self, 18.

27. “Affecognitive” is a neologism I have formed to register both the importance of the so-called affective turn and to insist that this renewed focus on affect (intensity, feeling, emotion) is best analyzed with and through cognition (concept, discourse).

28. Foucault, “L’éthique de souci,” 1537: “Ce n’est pas une substance, C’est une forme, et cette forme n’est pas surtout ni toujours identique à elle-même.”

29. Foucault, “L’éthique de souci,” 1529: “Mais on sait bien, dans ce cas d’ailleurs précis, que cette pratique de liberation ne suffit pas à définir les pratiques de liberté qui seront ensuite nécessaires pour que ce peuple, cette société et ces individus puissent se définir des formes recevables et acceptables de leur existence ou de la société politique.”

30. McWhorter, “Review of Johanna Oksala’s Foucault on Freedom.”

31. Foucault, Dits et écrits II, 1397: “il nécessite, je pense, toujours le travail sur nos limites, c’est-à-dire un labeur patient qui donne forme à l’impatience de la liberté.”

32. SE (unpublished conference paper).

33. Again I am here paraphrasing Huffer’s language from her conference paper.

34. Mason, “What You Need to Know” (part of a “Room for Debate” article on whether women should delay motherhood). Mason is co-author with Nicolas Wolfinger and Marc Goulden of Do Babies Matter?

35. Waxman and Ipsa-Landa, “Academia’s ‘Baby Penalty.’”

36. Dismantling the rhetoric of choice is too large a task for this essay. Suffice it to say that academics who are otherwise fully invested in social construction and intersectionality casually fall back on banal assertions of liberal agency when they pick up the topic of their women colleagues having babies. It seems an essentialist move to them (as opposed to an essential move of them).

37. Hamner, “Work and Life in the Balance.”