Rethinking the Paradox of the Subject: “Power” and “Freedom” in Nietzsche and Foucault

ABSTRACT

This essay re-examines “the paradox of the subject” as one of the main traps for critical theory today. I attempt to demonstrate that this famous paradox is an effect of the ambivalence of the power/freedom relationship in Foucault and it may be resolved by recourse to Nietzsche. Following Paul Patton I argue that in a Nietzschean context “power” and “freedom” are not in opposition: freedom is power to act. But this synonymy creates a risk that “freedom” will become indistinguishable from “subjection” and “subordination.” Turning once again to Nietzsche’s perspectivism, I attempt to demonstrate how immanent evaluative confrontations are made between “freedom” and “power”—how, when, and why they function as antonyms. Freedom is not every power, but only the one we exercise from “our” actual perspective, in “the first person.” With every performance we inevitably make strong evaluations—including distinctions between freedom and domination—in an entirely immanent way, without resorting to justification. Finally, I attempt to focus on the strategic possibilities for critique today, which can enable us to practice—while keeping reflexive “modesty”—freedom of evaluation, including the freedom of making strong evaluations, which are not based upon pre-given normative models.

KEYWORDS:

• The paradox of the subject
• power
• freedom
• Nietzsche
• Foucault

Acknowledgements

During my stay at Dartmouth College as a Fulbright visiting scholar (February–June 2014), I had the pleasure of engaging in direct dialogue with Amy Allen within the framework of the Critical Theory Research Colloquium, as well as of catching up on her present studies in manuscript form (Allen 2016). I am much obliged to the Fulbright Visiting Scholar Programme, which provided financial support for this study. I also thank Katerina Popova for her translation of this article from Bulgarian to English.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Dimitar Vatsov is Associate Professor of philosophy at the Department of Philosophy and Sociology, New Bulgarian University, Sofia, Bulgaria. He is Editor-in-Chief of Critique & Humanism. His research interests are political philosophy, especially critical theory, and post-analytic philosophy of language. He is the author of the following books (in Bulgarian): Essays on Power and Truth (Sofia: New Bulgarian University, 2009), Freedom and Recognition: The Interactive Sources of Identity (Sofia: New Bulgarian University, 2006), Ontology of Affirmation: Nietzsche as a Task (Sofia: East-West Publishers, 2003). He has also published numerous papers in English, Italian, Russian, French, Spanish and Polish.

Notes

1. A similar critique has been addressed repeatedly at Judith Butler, including at her vocabulary of “citationality”: it is difficult to distinguish between “‘good’ (subversive) citations and ‘bad’ (forced) citations,” see Salih (2002, 95). I do not think that the ethics of non-violence, developed by Butler in the last more than 10 years, can successfully respond to this critique, but this is a question that requires a separate study.

2. Axel Honneth (1995, 261–63) has already posed the subject’s problem as stemming from these two different historical lines of argumentation.

3. This ambivalence appears, in another aspect, in the exchange between Amy Allen (2014) and Paul Patton (2014) on whether the later Foucault continues to think of “power” in “strategic” terms or has overcome the strategic model.

4. For such an interpretation of Wittgenstein, see Tully (2008, 49ff.).

5. Our “understanding of an event” has consisted in our inventing a subject, which was made responsible for something that happens and for how it happens. We have combined our feeling of will, our feeling of “freedom,” our feeling of responsibility and our intention to perform an act into the concept of “cause” (Nietzsche 1968, 296).

6. Although some of Nietzsche’s practical-ethical judgments will probably continue to shock readers, at the conceptual level the master morality of the Übermensch (and of “free spirits”—most often these two terms, the Übermensch and the free spirits are synonyms in Nietzsche) can be read as a consistent requirement: as Ulrich Plass (2015, 384) puts it, “Nietzsche vehemently argues for an active rejection of moral injunctions and proposes that the only truly ethical way of living is to live immorally and aesthetically, to embrace life as it appears (emphasis original) to us—in all its irreducible uncertainty.”

7. Of course, implicit evaluations are not absent in Foucault’s writing. Moreover, he also offers us a series of explicit practical gestures of engagement—with prison conditions, with the abolition of the death penalty, with the Iranian revolution, and so on. His civic acts, however, remain separate from his systematic and deliberate pursuit of a research perspective that abstains from making evaluations in “the first person.”

8. Proto-perspectivist ideas can be found, of course, also in some of Nietzsche’s earlier works such as The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings (1999) and “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (1979).

9. Stanley Cavell (1995) best paved the way for a Nietzschean reading of John Austin’s performativity. Cavell accepts Derrida’s critique of speech act theory: according to Derrida, performatives are not unilateral acts but subjectless events. Still, Cavell defends Austin and his reading of performatives as acts, noting precisely the Nietzschean effect of ego-centring in utterances. This inescapable effect of ego-centring (of “signing” in Derrida’s vocabulary) is to be understood as “a tragedy of sincerity, that is to say, of the inability to be insincere, an inability not to be signed on to your words and deeds” (61; emphasis original). We could add that every performative utterance is an event that immediately takes the form of an act because it indexically fixes, explicitly or implicitly, its speaker’s point in the first person. A detailed examination of this problem requires a separate study.

10. Nehamas (1985) links Nietzsche’s perspectivism and rhetoric “aesthetically.” For Nietzsche’s performative strategy, see also Strong (2013).

11. Nietzsche’s individualism is a strategic rhetorical effect. In fact, Nietzsche works with interactive and recognitional premises, as Owen (2007) demonstrates.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Bulgarian-American Fulbright Commission [Grant Number 13-21-05].