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Acknowledgements
This research has been supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
Notes
1. Michel Foucault, ‘The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: An Interview with Michel Foucault’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 12, 1987; A I Davidson, ‘Ethics as Ascetics: Foucault, the History of Ethics, and Ancient Thought’, in G Gutting (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p 127. See Foucault in ‘The Subject and Power’ (‘Le sujet et le pouvoir’, in Dits et Écrits, vol 2: 1976–1988, Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 2001): ‘The ideas which I would like to discuss here represent neither a theory nor a methodology. I would like to say, first of all, what has been the goal of my work during the last twenty years. It has not been to analyze the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis. My objective, instead, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects.’ Translation in P Rabinow (ed), The Foucault Reader, New York: Vintage Books, 2010 [1984]. Italics are mine.
2. M Foucault, ‘Subjectivité et vérité’, in Dits et Écrits, vol 2, p 1033. On the complex relationship between notions of governmentality, ethics, freedom and ‘care of the self’, see M Foucault, ‘L'éthique du souci de soi comme pratique de la liberté’, in Dits et Écrits, vol 2: ‘The ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom: an interview with Michel Foucault on January 20, 1984’: ‘[...] I do not think that the only point of possible resistance to political power—understand of course, as a state of domination—lies in the relationship of self to self. I say that governmentality implies the relationship of self to self, which means exactly that, in the idea of governmentality, I am aiming at the totality of practices, by which one can constitute, define, organize, instrumentalize the strategies which individuals in their liberty can have in regard to each other. It is free individuals who try to control, to determine, to delimit the liberty of others and, in order to do that, they dispose of certain instruments to govern others. That rests indeed on freedom, on the relationship of self to self and the relationship to the other. [...].’ Translation in Foucault, ‘The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom’, pp 130–131.
3. Here I use the distinction made by James Tully between ‘practices of the self’ and ‘practices of liberation’: ‘Practices of liberation refer either to the strategic games of liberty agents play together in a practical system or the more individual “practices of the self” an agent applies to himself or herself’ (James Tully, ‘To think and act differently: comparing critical ethos and critical theory,’ in James Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key. Volume 1. Democracy and Civic Freedom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, p 78.). If no explicit distinction is made, I refer to both of these dimensions when I use the term ‘practices of freedom’. On the difference between the notions of ‘power relations’ and ‘domination’, see Foucault, ‘L'éthique du souci de soi comme pratique de la liberté’: ‘[...] That is where the idea of domination must be introduced. The analyses I have been trying to make have to do essentially with the relationships of power. I understand by that something other than the states of domination. The relationships of power have an extremely wide extension in human relations. There is a whole network of relationships of power, which can operate between individuals, in the bosom of the family, in an educational relationship, in the political body, etc. This analysis of relations of power constitutes a very complex field; it sometimes meets what we can call facts or states of domination, in which the relations of power, instead of being variable and allowing different partners a strategy which alters them, find themselves firmly set and congealed. When an individual or a social group manages to block a field of relations of power, to render them impassive and invariable and to prevent all reversibility of movement—by means of instruments which can be economic as well as political or military—we are facing what can be called a state of domination. [...] Liberation opens up new relationships of power, which have to be controlled by practices of liberty.’ Translation in Foucault, ‘The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom’, p 114.
4. The concept of ethos is a complex notion that merges together both a specific way of conceiving critique and a particular attitude or way of behaving towards oneself and others. On the notion of ‘critical ethos’ in relation to ‘historical ontology’, see Foucault in ‘What is Enlightenment?’ (M Foucault, Qu'est-ce que Les Lumières?’ (1984), in Dits et Écrits, vol 2; translation in Rabinow, The Foucault Reader). On the definition of ethos as a mode of being and behaving, and on the relationship between ‘freedom’ and ‘ethos’ see Foucault, ‘L'éthique du souci de soi comme pratique de la liberté’: ‘The Greeks, in fact, considered this freedom as a problem and the freedom of the individual as an ethical problem. But ethical in the sense that Greeks could understand. Ethos was the deportment and the way to behave. It was the subject's mode of being and a certain manner of acting visible to others. One's ethos was seen by his dress, by his bearing, by his gait, by the poise with which he reacts to events, etc. For them, that is the concrete expression of liberty.’ Translation in Foucault, ‘The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom’, p 117. See also the interesting assertion by Foucault from the same text: ‘Liberty is the ontological condition of ethics. But ethics is the deliberate form assumed by liberty’ (p 115). Italics are mine.
5. Tully, vol. 1, 2008, pp 76–77. See David Owen's description of autonomy as ‘the activity of self-construction’, showing the rapprochement between Nietzsche's and Foucault's thought contra Habermas: ‘By contrast [with Habermas], the Nietzschean trajectory of thought articulates the relationship between autonomy and critique in terms of a thinking of autonomy as the activity of self-construction which locates critique as the specification of the form of this activity. In this context, we may attempt to grasp Foucault's conception of ‘the principle of a critique and a permanent creation of ourselves in our autonomy.’ D Owen, Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason, London: Routledge, 1994, p 161. Italics are mine.
6. Robert Nichols, ‘Postcolonial Studies and the Discourse of Foucault: Survey of a Field of Problematization’, Foucault Studies 9, 2010, pp 114–144.
7. Nichols 2010, p 33.
8. Foucault, Tully 2008, pp 76–83, Owen, Maturity and Modernity, pp 160–162.
9. P Veyne, Comment on écrit l'histoire; suivi de Foucault révolutionne l'histoire, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1979; M Dean, Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault's Methods and Historical Sociology, London: Routledge, 1994; I Hacking, Historical Ontology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
10. As David Owen summarizes it: ‘The actual ways in which we constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge govern the ways in which we can reflect on others and ourselves and, thereby, define a field of possible ways of acting on others and ourselves; while, at the same time, the actual ways in which we act on others and ourselves govern the possible ways in which we can constitute ourselves as subject of knowledge. Viewed in this way, Foucault's project of historical ontology may be situated as a mode of accounting for the emergence and development of the structures of recognition constitutive of our subjectivity through a tracing of the movement from fields of possibility to patterns of actuality in the interplay of structures of consciousness and structures of the will.’ Owen, Maturity and Modernity, p 156. Italics are mine.
11. This seems to be at least the conclusion reached by Sergei Prozorov, making an exemplary use of Foucault's critical methodology to attack identity politics and other cultural diagrammatic ‘enframing’. See S Prozorov, Foucault, Freedom and Sovereignty, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.
12. The term ‘ontology’ is often used in diverse ways and with different connotations. Etymologically speaking, the term ‘ontology’ refers to a conjunction of the Greek words on to (‘what is’) and logos (‘reason or discourse’). The term ontology can therefore be loosely translated as ‘rational discourse on what is’ (or Being). As a discipline, ontology refers to a branch of metaphysics that is broadly defined as the philosophical exploration of what we might consider the first or most general principles of reality. In its classical formulation, ontology came to designate the part of philosophy that studies the first causes and principles of physics, the study of ‘beings qua beings’, influenced in this definition by the seminal work of Aristotle. Ontology remains an unpopular topic despite recent and often excellent attempts to explore the ontological assumptions held by canonical philosophers (J Coujou, Philosophie politique et ontologie: remarques sur la fonction de l'ontologie dans la constitution de la pensée politique, 2 vols, Paris: L'Harmattan, 2006), or to rethink materialism, Marxism or the usual dichotomies informing Western thinking (C Strathausen, A Leftist Ontology: Beyond Relativism and Identity Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009; D H Coole, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010; J Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). For an interesting explanation as to why ontology is still an obscure notion to many, see Ian Hacking's opening remarks in Historical Ontology, pp. 1–2.
13. Subject to many discussions, it has been debated that Foucault might in fact be a successor to modernity rather than its radical antithesis. According to Foucault, Kant expresses the space of a quintessential interrogation characterizing modernity in his appeal to use of our own reason (against dogmas), while developing an analysis of the conditions under which it is legitimate to claim what can be known, done and hoped. For Foucault this interrogation is the first one to place itself at the vertical of its own historicity or actuality, opening the possibility to interrogate rational thought, not only its nature, but also its history. The critical project of Foucault through the notion of historical ontology can thus be considered as a philosophical ‘successor’ of the Enlightenment rather than its antithesis. See M Mahon, Foucault's Nietzschean Genealogy: Truth, Power, and the Subject, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992, p 181.
14. Foucault has often been described as a postmodern thinker, associated with a group of thinkers known for their radical critique of objectivity, truth and abstract reason, the teleological approach of history, universalizing grand narratives, the notion of scientific progress, the a priori subject as source of meaning, authenticity and authority. Yet his work has been convincingly described as framed by a modern philosophical gridding, in particular the problem of Kant's anthropological consecration of the Modern Man, which bears direct influence on the formulation of historical ontology (B Han, Foucault's Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical, Atopia, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
15. Owen, Maturity and Modernity, p 147. See also Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Rabinow, The Foucault Reader.
16. M Foucault, L'Ordre du Discours, Paris: Gallimard, 1971, pp 49–50, 76–77. Foucault declares: ‘Husserl and Heidegger bring up for discussion again all our knowledge and its foundations, but they do this by beginning from that which is original. This analysis takes place, however, at the expense of any articulated historical content. Instead, what I liked in Nietzsche is the attempt to bring up for discussion again the fundamental concept of knowledge, of morals, and of metaphysics by appealing to a historical analysis of the positivistic type, without going back to origin’ (M Foucault, Foucault Live: Interviews, 1966–84, trans John Johnston, ed Sylvère Lotringer, New York: Semiotext[e], 1989, p 77; quoted in Han, Foucault's Critical Project, p 102; my italics). This comment should not be interpreted as a negation of the intellectual debt and many similarities characterizing Foucault's work in relation to Heidegger. See A Milchman and A Rosenberg (eds) Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003.
17. A cautionary note for the philosophers of analytical obedience: this does not mean that Foucault rejects the possibility of predicating universal or even aprioristic judgements when they occur within the context of justification of the various ‘regimes of truth’, based upon the acceptance of specific premises and logical implications (which is not the same thing as saying that the Universal actually exists as a thing). Within the limits of contexts of justification, premises that are posited as self-evident, aprioristic or universal are certainly possible, and may even prove useful to the resolution of specific problems (i.e. mathematical problems). Foucault's treatment of ontology rather targets the context of emergence and effectiveness that exceeds the framework of rules and regularities found within these ‘regimes of truths’ we often mistakenly hold to be fundamental at an ontological level. This is not to say that nothing can be said about ‘reality’ either. As David Couzens Hoy puts it, Foucault's methodological nominalism ‘does not entail that universals do not have real effects. [...] From a fictitious relation, Foucault maintains, a real subjection can be born’ (D C Hoy, The Times of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009, p 235). In other words, Foucault is less concerned with the truth or falsity of universal statements than with modes of domination, described as lacking the possibility of any reversal or contestation. Foucault's concern with universality is thus mainly political, not analytical, and certainly not ontological in the classical sense of the term.
18. See Foucault in ‘The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom’, showing the consistency of his critique of the aprioristic way in which phenomenology formulates its theory of the Subject:
Q: But you have always ‘refused’ that we speak to you about the subject in general?MF: No I had not ‘refused.’ I perhaps had some formulations which were inadequate. What I refused was precisely that you first of all set up a theory of the subject—as could be done in phenomenology and in existentialism—and that, beginning from the theory of the subject, you come to pose the question of knowing, for example, how such and such a form of knowledge was possible. What I wanted to know was how the subject constituted himself, in such and such a determined form, as a mad subject or as a normal subject, through a certain number of practices which were games of truth, applications of power, etc. I had to reject a certain a priori theory of the subject in order to make this analysis of the relationships which can exist between the constitution of the subject or different forms of the subject and games of truth, practices of power and so forth.
19. Foucault, ‘L'éthique du souci de soi comme pratique de la liberté’, p 1212.
20. Han, Foucault's Critical Project, p 42.
21. Han, Foucault's Critical Project, p 41.
22. B Han, ‘Foucault and Heidegger on Kant and Finitude’, in A Milchman and A Rosenberg (eds), Foucault and Heidegger. Critical encounters, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003, p 128. See Foucault in ‘What is Enlightenment?’: ‘[...] that criticism is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying. In that sense, this criticism is not transcendental, and its goal is not that of making a metaphysics possible: it is genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method. Archaeological—and not transcendental—in the sense that it will not seek to identify the universal structures of all knowledge or of all possible moral action, but will seek to treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events. And this critique will be genealogical in the sense that it will not deduce from the form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know; but it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think. It is not seeking to make possible a metaphysics that has finally become a science; it is seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom’ (in Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, pp 45–46).
23. B Han, ‘Foucault and Heidegger on Kant and Finitude’, p 129. As Ian Hacking suggests: ‘Foucault regularly historicized Kant. He did not think of the constitution of moral agents as something that is universalizable, apt for all rational beings. On the contrary, we constitute ourselves at a place and time, using materials that have a distinctive and historically formed organization. The genealogy to be unraveled is how we, as peoples in civilizations with histories, have become moral agents, through constituting ourselves as moral agents in quite specific, local, historical ways’ (Hacking, Historical Ontology, p 4).
24. The temporal character of Foucault's thought can be observed in The Order of Things under the form of ‘episteme’ (M Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses: Une Archéologie des Sciences Humaines, Paris: Gallimard, 1966); in the Archaeology of Knowledge under the form of his notion of ‘historical a priori’ (M Foucault, L'Archéologie du Savoir, Bibliothèque des sciences humaines, Paris: Gallimard, 1969); and in his genealogical work under the form of ‘historical ontology’ and ‘problematization’(1975–84). In other words, it can be suggested that the temporal character of Foucault's thought has shaped Foucault's exploration of the problem of the conditions of possibility of knowledge (savoir); his exploration of the problem of the transformation of knowledge (as episteme); and his examination of the problem of the internalizations of various power/knowledge and ethical practices (truth/subject), which are posited as always historically and spatially situated.
25. Quoted by Mahon, Foucault's Nietzschean Genealogy, p 1. See Foucault, ‘L'éthique du souci de soi comme pratique de la liberté’, p 1212, for the French version. Italics are mine.
26. Tully 2008, pp 76–77.
27. Hoy, The Times of Our Lives, p 208. In Hoy's words: ‘The thoroughly temporal character of Foucault's thought is difficult to see at first because it can be found in so many aspects of his work. Although as an archaeological or descriptive historian he concerns himself with making philosophical points by studying the past, as a genealogical or critical historian he writes the “history of the present”’ (p 208).
28. Hoy, The Times of Our Lives, p 208.
29. Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses.
30. I use the term ‘quasi’ here to highlight that Foucault's usage of history/historicity resists—in principle—any aprioristic explanatory principles, because, following Nietzsche, our knowledge of our history is itself based on contingent events/practices that make precisely any attempts to ground the knowledge of any particular history on aprioristic fundamentals impossible (see Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, pp 76–101). I later contest this argument by suggesting that Foucault's genealogical view of history still contains a universalistic and aprioristic basis operating by his turning of historical contingency into an aprioristic and universalistic ontological principle.
31. As Nietzsche put it before him, only that which has no history can be defined in an eternal and self-referential manner: anything else will be chewed by the passage of time (Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, Keith Ansell Pearson (ed) and Carol Diethe (trans), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p 53). In other words, only that which has no history can be ‘true’ from a universal and objective standpoint—which amounts to virtually nothing if we concede that everything we know of must emerge historically. The same premise—but in reverse—can be seen in Foucault's historical ontology: anything that exists is necessarily bounded to its own historical embeddedness, leading to the similar consequence that nothing can be held to be eternally or universally true, including our beliefs in the existence of a ‘human nature’, a transcendental subject, or the unfolding of an Absolute Knowledge, Progress or Subject in History.
32. Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses; Han, Foucault's Critical Project.
33. See ‘On the Archaeology of the Sciences: Response to the Epistemology Circle’ (M Foucault, ‘Sur l‘archéologie des sciences humaines. Réponse au Cercle d‘épistémologie’, in Dits et Écrits, vol 1: 1955–1976; translated in Theoretical Practice 3–4, 1971; revised translation in M Foucault, The Essential Works, vol. 1: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed James D Faubion, London: Penguin, 1998).
34. Owen, Maturity and Modernity, p 160. As David Owen mentions, Habermas (J Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity, 1987), Fraser (N Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory, London: Polity, 1989), Taylor (C Taylor, ‘Foucault on Freedom and Truth’, Political Theory 12, 1984, pp 152–183) and Dews (P Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory, London: Verso, 1987), among others, have all focused their criticism of Foucault's work around similar claims (Owen, Maturity and Modernity, p 235, n 41 of ch 8).
35. It is as such that the concept of practices came to play a central role in the Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), where Foucault discusses the need for a new political analysis of knowledge [savoir] that would supplement the study of episteme by examining the struggles, tactics and decisions shaping the practices and knowledge giving rise to societal and emancipation theories (p 255). Announcing his genealogical shift, the conditions of possibility of knowledge are described as emerging through ‘practices’, which are not only ‘context-bound’ from the standpoint of their historicity, but also context-bound from the standpoint of power dynamics consubstantial to the production of knowledge; dynamics which Foucault later explores under the scope of a microphysics of power in Discipline and Punish (1976), shifting toward an analysis of the productive dimension of power under the notion of biopower in the first book of History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge (1976).
36. J Tully, ‘To Think and Act Differently’, in S Ashenden and D Owen (eds), Foucault contra Habermas, London: Sage, 1999.
37. Nichols, 2010.
38. Nichols, ‘Postcolonial Studies and the Discourse of Foucault’, p 134.
39. Of course, Nichols's criticism would have to be nuanced by the body of work that already takes Foucault beyond this point, using, for instance, the notion of governmentality. Among others, we can count the work of Peter Pels and Tania Murray Li on Western governmentality and colonialism, Anthony Anghie exploring the relationship between colonial enterprises and the creation of international laws, and David Scott on ‘colonial governmentality’ (P Pels, ‘The Anthropology of Colonialism: Culture, History, and the Emergence of Western Governmentality’, Annual Review of Anthropology 26, 1997, pp 163–183; T Li, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, And the Practice of Politics, Durham: Duke University Press, 2007; A Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, And the Making of International Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; James C Scott, ‘Colonial Governmentality’, in J X Inda, Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality, And Life Politics, Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2005, pp 23–50). Nichols's criticism still stands, however, to the extent that although many governmentality scholars go beyond the problem of knowledge production in archaeological terms, rare are those who have expanded their research to the ethical dimensions. Governmentality scholars, for the most part, stay within the confines of Foucault's ‘microphysics of power’ and his notion of biopower which they argue has been implemented in colonized societies.
40. Many thinkers have used Foucault's critical ethos to investigate the constitution of modern subjectivity through various disciplinary mechanisms (M Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, London: Sage, 1999), the development of biopower in modern societies as a mode of control, regulation and standardization of both the individual and populations (N Rose, Governing the Soul, London: Routledge, 1989; Power of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedecine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), the rise of political economy, and statistics, in generating new ways to regulate our behaviours (T M Porter, Trust in Number: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), the emergence of risks and insurance rationalities boxing what are normal/abnormal behaviours (F Ewald, ‘Insurance and Risk’, in G Burchell, C Gordon and P Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), global governmentality processes and the rise of environmental rationalities of government (W Larner and W Walters, Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces, London: Routledge, 2004; R D Lipschutz, Globalization, Governmentality and Global Politics, New York: Routledge, 2005; T Luke, ‘Environmentality as Green Governmentality’, in E Darier (ed), Discourses of Environment, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999; P Rutherford, ‘The Entry of Life into History’ and ‘Ecological Modernization and Environmental Risk’, in Darier, Discourses of Environment.
41. For instance the lasting influence of the Christian doctrine of Creation when it comes to our cultural understanding of linear temporality, bearer of the metaphysical qualities of finitude, contingency and corruptibility (versus God standing outside time and the corruptibility of creation), or its metaphysical decision, which, by positioning God's will as both external and foundational to Nature, has contributed to shape this ongoing tension between Nature viewed as determined versus the expression of divine or human will, viewed as irreducible to any form of determinism (see M B Foster, ‘The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural Science’, Mind 43(172), 1934, pp 446–468; ‘Christian Theology and Modern Science of Nature (I.)’, Mind 44(176), 1935, pp 439–466; ‘Christian Theology and Modern Science of Nature (II.)’, Mind 45(177), 1936, pp 1–27, for an excellent introduction to these matters).
42. Any mode of knowledge, any science, is based on a number of presuppositions that cannot themselves be fully demonstrated empirically, hence their metaphysical status.
43. A good example of such advanced liberal rationality can be seen in the work of Sergei Prozorov who advocates for a radical dissociation between Foucault's ontology of freedom and all forms of identity politics (Foucault, Freedom and Sovereignty, 2007). Although one can certainly agree that adopting a fixed identity can be problematic for its essentialist and possibly dominative implications, it should also be noticed that deploying a negative form of universalism under the blanket of undetermined freedom and perpetual resistance can also serve to propagate subtle modes of assimilation, relaying well the perpetuation of advanced liberal societies thriving on the constant renewal of malleable and ungrounded identities defined in terms of their shifting needs and desires, here compatible with homogenized modes of capitalistic accumulation and consumption.