Cressida J. Heyes
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195310535
- eISBN:
- 9780199871445
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195310535.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
This book argues that we live in an age of somatic subjects, whose authentic identity must be represented through the body. When a perceived mismatch between inner self and outer form occurs, ...
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This book argues that we live in an age of somatic subjects, whose authentic identity must be represented through the body. When a perceived mismatch between inner self and outer form occurs, technologies can step in to change the flesh. Drawing on Wittgenstein's objections to the idea of a private language, and on Foucault's critical account of normalization, this book shows how we have been led to think of ourselves in this way, and suggests that breaking the hold of this picture of the self will be central to our freedom. How should we work on ourselves when so often the kind of self we are urged to be is itself a product of normalization? This question is answered through three case studies that analyze feminist interpretations of transgender politics, the allure of weight-loss dieting, and representations of cosmetic surgery patients. Mixing philosophical argument with personal narrative and analysis of popular culture, the book moves from engagement with Leslie Feinberg on trans liberation, to an auto-ethnography of Weight Watchers meetings, to a reading of Extreme Makeover, to the author's own practice of yoga. The book draws on philosophy, sociology, medicine, cultural studies, and psychology to suggest that these examples, in different ways, are connected to the picture of the somatic subject. Working on the self can both generate new skills and make us more docile; enhance our pleasures and narrow our possibilities; encourage us to take care of ourselves while increasing our dependence on experts. Self transformation through the body can limit us and liberate us at the same time. To move beyond this paradox, the book concludes by arguing that Foucault's last work on ethics provides untapped resources for understanding how we might use our embodied agency to change ourselves for the better.Less
This book argues that we live in an age of somatic subjects, whose authentic identity must be represented through the body. When a perceived mismatch between inner self and outer form occurs, technologies can step in to change the flesh. Drawing on Wittgenstein's objections to the idea of a private language, and on Foucault's critical account of normalization, this book shows how we have been led to think of ourselves in this way, and suggests that breaking the hold of this picture of the self will be central to our freedom. How should we work on ourselves when so often the kind of self we are urged to be is itself a product of normalization? This question is answered through three case studies that analyze feminist interpretations of transgender politics, the allure of weight-loss dieting, and representations of cosmetic surgery patients. Mixing philosophical argument with personal narrative and analysis of popular culture, the book moves from engagement with Leslie Feinberg on trans liberation, to an auto-ethnography of Weight Watchers meetings, to a reading of Extreme Makeover, to the author's own practice of yoga. The book draws on philosophy, sociology, medicine, cultural studies, and psychology to suggest that these examples, in different ways, are connected to the picture of the somatic subject. Working on the self can both generate new skills and make us more docile; enhance our pleasures and narrow our possibilities; encourage us to take care of ourselves while increasing our dependence on experts. Self transformation through the body can limit us and liberate us at the same time. To move beyond this paradox, the book concludes by arguing that Foucault's last work on ethics provides untapped resources for understanding how we might use our embodied agency to change ourselves for the better.
Cressida J. Heyes
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195310535
- eISBN:
- 9780199871445
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195310535.003.0007
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
Scholars influenced by Michel Foucault need to say more about how care of the self emerges intersubjectively, and how it can be a set of practices that includes an understanding of responsibility and ...
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Scholars influenced by Michel Foucault need to say more about how care of the self emerges intersubjectively, and how it can be a set of practices that includes an understanding of responsibility and ethical commitment to embodied others. Furthermore, Foucault's work is devoid of programmatic political theory for a number of reasons, but there is a need for careful articulation of political projects that challenge docility and make creative, joyful living more possible. Not without reservations, we might follow a philosophical tradition that labels this undertaking “style”. If feminist commentators are sometimes too pessimistic about women's agency in the face of normalization, the heroic discourse of style risks being too self-satisfied to notice that many of the strategies it implies are out of reach for ordinary mortals, and may lead enthusiastic converts into novel forms of conformity. The challenge that remains is to articulate a somaesthetics within which abject bodies can articulate their own style without falling back on the voluntarism that is so often complicit with their very abjection.Less
Scholars influenced by Michel Foucault need to say more about how care of the self emerges intersubjectively, and how it can be a set of practices that includes an understanding of responsibility and ethical commitment to embodied others. Furthermore, Foucault's work is devoid of programmatic political theory for a number of reasons, but there is a need for careful articulation of political projects that challenge docility and make creative, joyful living more possible. Not without reservations, we might follow a philosophical tradition that labels this undertaking “style”. If feminist commentators are sometimes too pessimistic about women's agency in the face of normalization, the heroic discourse of style risks being too self-satisfied to notice that many of the strategies it implies are out of reach for ordinary mortals, and may lead enthusiastic converts into novel forms of conformity. The challenge that remains is to articulate a somaesthetics within which abject bodies can articulate their own style without falling back on the voluntarism that is so often complicit with their very abjection.
Hugh Grady
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198130048
- eISBN:
- 9780191671906
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198130048.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
William Shakespeare was neither a Royalist defender of order and hierarchy nor a consistently radical champion of social equality, but rather simultaneously radical ...
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William Shakespeare was neither a Royalist defender of order and hierarchy nor a consistently radical champion of social equality, but rather simultaneously radical and conservative as a critic of emerging forms of modernity. This book argues that Shakespeare's social criticism in fact often parallels that of critics of modernity from our own Postmodernist era: that the broad analysis of modernity produced by Karl Marx, Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Michel Foucault, and others can serve as a productive enabling representation and critique of the emerging modernity represented by the image in Troilus and Cressida of ‘an universal wolf’ of appetite, power, and will. The readings in this book demonstrate Shakespeare's keen interest in what twentieth-century theory has called ‘reification’ — a term that designates social systems created by human societies, but that confronts those societies as operating beyond human control, according to an autonomous ‘systems’ logic — in nascent mercantile capitalism, in power-oriented Machiavellian politics, and in the scientistic, value-free rationality which Horkheimer and Adorno call ‘instrumental reason’.Less
William Shakespeare was neither a Royalist defender of order and hierarchy nor a consistently radical champion of social equality, but rather simultaneously radical and conservative as a critic of emerging forms of modernity. This book argues that Shakespeare's social criticism in fact often parallels that of critics of modernity from our own Postmodernist era: that the broad analysis of modernity produced by Karl Marx, Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Michel Foucault, and others can serve as a productive enabling representation and critique of the emerging modernity represented by the image in Troilus and Cressida of ‘an universal wolf’ of appetite, power, and will. The readings in this book demonstrate Shakespeare's keen interest in what twentieth-century theory has called ‘reification’ — a term that designates social systems created by human societies, but that confronts those societies as operating beyond human control, according to an autonomous ‘systems’ logic — in nascent mercantile capitalism, in power-oriented Machiavellian politics, and in the scientistic, value-free rationality which Horkheimer and Adorno call ‘instrumental reason’.
Amit Chaudhuri and Tom Paulin
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199260522
- eISBN:
- 9780191698668
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199260522.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This study explores D. H. Lawrence's position as a ‘foreigner’ in the English canon. Focussing on poetry, the book examines how Lawrence's works, and Lawrence himself, have been read, and misread, in ...
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This study explores D. H. Lawrence's position as a ‘foreigner’ in the English canon. Focussing on poetry, the book examines how Lawrence's works, and Lawrence himself, have been read, and misread, in terms of their ‘difference.’ In contrast to the Leavisite project of placing Lawrence in the English ‘great tradition,’ this study demonstrates how Lawrence's writing brings into question the notion of ‘Englishness’ itself. It also shows how Lawrence's aesthetic set him apart radically from both his Modernist contemporaries and his Romantic forbears. The starting-point of this enquiry into Lawrentian ‘difference’ is, for the purposes of this study, the poetry, its stylistic features, the ways in which it has been read, and, importantly, it involves a search for a critical language by which the poetry, and its ‘difference’, might be addressed. In doing so, this book takes recourse to Jacques Derrida's notions of ‘grammatology’ and ‘ecriture’, and Michel Foucault's notion of ‘discourse’. Referring to Lawrence's travel writings about Mexico and Italy, his essays on European and Etruscan art, on Mexican marketplaces and rituals, and American literature, and especially to his poetic manifesto, ‘The Poetry of the Present,’ this book shows how Lawrence was working towards both a theory and a practice that critiqued the post-Enlightenment unitary European self. The book also, radically, allows a post-colonial identity to inform the reading of the poetry, and to let the poems enter into a conversation with that identity.Less
This study explores D. H. Lawrence's position as a ‘foreigner’ in the English canon. Focussing on poetry, the book examines how Lawrence's works, and Lawrence himself, have been read, and misread, in terms of their ‘difference.’ In contrast to the Leavisite project of placing Lawrence in the English ‘great tradition,’ this study demonstrates how Lawrence's writing brings into question the notion of ‘Englishness’ itself. It also shows how Lawrence's aesthetic set him apart radically from both his Modernist contemporaries and his Romantic forbears. The starting-point of this enquiry into Lawrentian ‘difference’ is, for the purposes of this study, the poetry, its stylistic features, the ways in which it has been read, and, importantly, it involves a search for a critical language by which the poetry, and its ‘difference’, might be addressed. In doing so, this book takes recourse to Jacques Derrida's notions of ‘grammatology’ and ‘ecriture’, and Michel Foucault's notion of ‘discourse’. Referring to Lawrence's travel writings about Mexico and Italy, his essays on European and Etruscan art, on Mexican marketplaces and rituals, and American literature, and especially to his poetic manifesto, ‘The Poetry of the Present,’ this book shows how Lawrence was working towards both a theory and a practice that critiqued the post-Enlightenment unitary European self. The book also, radically, allows a post-colonial identity to inform the reading of the poetry, and to let the poems enter into a conversation with that identity.
Margaret D. Kamitsuka
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195311624
- eISBN:
- 9780199785643
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195311624.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
How can we respect the irreducible diversity of women's experiences and unmask entrenched forms of privilege in feminist theological discourse? This book offers proposals on how to address the ...
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How can we respect the irreducible diversity of women's experiences and unmask entrenched forms of privilege in feminist theological discourse? This book offers proposals on how to address the challenge of difference for constructive theological purposes. Toward this end, the objective of this book is three-fold: 1) to make the case for why ongoing attentiveness to differences of race and sexuality is needed in order to avoid the imposition of white racial privilege and heterosexual privilege; 2) to make creative use of poststructuralism principally (Judith Butler, Michel Foucault), but also postcolonial, queer, and other theoretical resources in order to complicate our understanding of embodied selfhood, moral agency, and empowerment; and 3) to make constructive proposals in light of those theories on methodological issues (e.g., appeals to women's experience, to the erotic, or to women's solidarity), on hermeneutical issues (e.g., white feminist uses of the literature of women of color or interpreting biblical texts that harbor patriarchal, imperialist, heteronormative, and other biases), and on doctrinal issues (e.g., sin, creation in the image of God, and christology). New theoretical resources are indispensable for analyzing divisive issues in feminist theology today, and for carving out new avenues for critical negotiation with a religious tradition that feminists see as both alienating and sustaining, repressive and empowering.Less
How can we respect the irreducible diversity of women's experiences and unmask entrenched forms of privilege in feminist theological discourse? This book offers proposals on how to address the challenge of difference for constructive theological purposes. Toward this end, the objective of this book is three-fold: 1) to make the case for why ongoing attentiveness to differences of race and sexuality is needed in order to avoid the imposition of white racial privilege and heterosexual privilege; 2) to make creative use of poststructuralism principally (Judith Butler, Michel Foucault), but also postcolonial, queer, and other theoretical resources in order to complicate our understanding of embodied selfhood, moral agency, and empowerment; and 3) to make constructive proposals in light of those theories on methodological issues (e.g., appeals to women's experience, to the erotic, or to women's solidarity), on hermeneutical issues (e.g., white feminist uses of the literature of women of color or interpreting biblical texts that harbor patriarchal, imperialist, heteronormative, and other biases), and on doctrinal issues (e.g., sin, creation in the image of God, and christology). New theoretical resources are indispensable for analyzing divisive issues in feminist theology today, and for carving out new avenues for critical negotiation with a religious tradition that feminists see as both alienating and sustaining, repressive and empowering.
David B. Wong
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2006
- ISBN:
- 9780195305395
- eISBN:
- 9780199786657
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195305396.003.0008
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Moral Philosophy
Morality can enter deeply into human identity, but we can question whether its influence is a good thing for us. Though a traditional goal of moral philosophy is to establish that the individual’s ...
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Morality can enter deeply into human identity, but we can question whether its influence is a good thing for us. Though a traditional goal of moral philosophy is to establish that the individual’s flourishing requires morality, this chapter explores the more modest and achievable goal of showing that morality is consistent with flourishing. Criticism is directed at the pessimistic stance, based on Foucault, that morality’s constitution of individual selves is necessarily an exercise in power and domination. A case is made, partly through the exploration of an argument from Xunzi, that morality answers to powerful needs in human beings, and partly through discussion of the story of John Sassall, a country doctor who found fulfillment not only in caring for his patients but in bearing witness to their lives. He also found deep depression in recognizing the limits on what he could do for his patients, and this leads to the conclusion that any vindication of morality must be incomplete as long as those who seek to accomplish moral ends must do so in oppressive structures that drastically limit the life prospects of many.Less
Morality can enter deeply into human identity, but we can question whether its influence is a good thing for us. Though a traditional goal of moral philosophy is to establish that the individual’s flourishing requires morality, this chapter explores the more modest and achievable goal of showing that morality is consistent with flourishing. Criticism is directed at the pessimistic stance, based on Foucault, that morality’s constitution of individual selves is necessarily an exercise in power and domination. A case is made, partly through the exploration of an argument from Xunzi, that morality answers to powerful needs in human beings, and partly through discussion of the story of John Sassall, a country doctor who found fulfillment not only in caring for his patients but in bearing witness to their lives. He also found deep depression in recognizing the limits on what he could do for his patients, and this leads to the conclusion that any vindication of morality must be incomplete as long as those who seek to accomplish moral ends must do so in oppressive structures that drastically limit the life prospects of many.
Margaret D. Kamitsuka
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195311624
- eISBN:
- 9780199785643
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195311624.003.0004
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
The issue of power surfaces throughout feminist theological writings, particularly in discussions of structural or social sin. There is a tendency among feminist theologians to inscribe potentially ...
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The issue of power surfaces throughout feminist theological writings, particularly in discussions of structural or social sin. There is a tendency among feminist theologians to inscribe potentially restrictive essentialisms about women as victims in relation to systems of oppressive power construed too monolithically. Michel Foucault's poststructuralist theory of the disciplinary and productive effects of power and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's postcolonial notion of strategic essentialization will be used to reconceptualize social sin in an effort to retain the ethical and political force of appeals to a subaltern oppressed standpoint, but without static essentialisms. Part two of this chapter carves out theoretical space for seeing how oppressive Christian symbols (the cross and the maleness of Jesus as the Christ) might be deployed as what Foucault calls technologies for the care of the self.Less
The issue of power surfaces throughout feminist theological writings, particularly in discussions of structural or social sin. There is a tendency among feminist theologians to inscribe potentially restrictive essentialisms about women as victims in relation to systems of oppressive power construed too monolithically. Michel Foucault's poststructuralist theory of the disciplinary and productive effects of power and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's postcolonial notion of strategic essentialization will be used to reconceptualize social sin in an effort to retain the ethical and political force of appeals to a subaltern oppressed standpoint, but without static essentialisms. Part two of this chapter carves out theoretical space for seeing how oppressive Christian symbols (the cross and the maleness of Jesus as the Christ) might be deployed as what Foucault calls technologies for the care of the self.
David Howarth
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780198292371
- eISBN:
- 9780191600159
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0198292376.003.0012
- Subject:
- Political Science, Reference
An overview of contributions to the development of discourse theoretical approaches in social science from the work of Althusser, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Laclau, and Mouffe. Particular attention is ...
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An overview of contributions to the development of discourse theoretical approaches in social science from the work of Althusser, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Laclau, and Mouffe. Particular attention is given to the concepts of signification, antagonisms, political subjectivity, agency, hegemony, the hermeneutical tradition in social science, and how to apply deconstruction methods.Less
An overview of contributions to the development of discourse theoretical approaches in social science from the work of Althusser, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Laclau, and Mouffe. Particular attention is given to the concepts of signification, antagonisms, political subjectivity, agency, hegemony, the hermeneutical tradition in social science, and how to apply deconstruction methods.
Maarten A. Hajer
- Published in print:
- 1997
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780198293330
- eISBN:
- 9780191599408
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/019829333X.003.0003
- Subject:
- Political Science, Environmental Politics
Introduces discourse analysis as a way to analyse the policy process. Draws on two different discourse analytical approaches: the work of Michel Foucault and the social psychological work by Michael ...
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Introduces discourse analysis as a way to analyse the policy process. Draws on two different discourse analytical approaches: the work of Michel Foucault and the social psychological work by Michael Billig and Rom Harré. Concludes by comparing the analysis of policy making using the concept of discourse coalitions to the well‐known concept of ‘advocacy coalitions’.Less
Introduces discourse analysis as a way to analyse the policy process. Draws on two different discourse analytical approaches: the work of Michel Foucault and the social psychological work by Michael Billig and Rom Harré. Concludes by comparing the analysis of policy making using the concept of discourse coalitions to the well‐known concept of ‘advocacy coalitions’.
Timothy Johnston
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199604036
- eISBN:
- 9780191731600
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199604036.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History, Political History
‘Being Soviet’ takes a refreshing and innovative approach to the crucial years between 1939 and 1953 in the USSR. It addresses two of the key recent debates concerning Stalinism. It answers the ...
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‘Being Soviet’ takes a refreshing and innovative approach to the crucial years between 1939 and 1953 in the USSR. It addresses two of the key recent debates concerning Stalinism. It answers the question ‘what was the logic and language of Soviet power?’ by shifting the focus away from Russian nationalism and onto Soviet identity. ‘Sovietness’ is explored via the newspapers, films, plays, and popular music of the era. Soviet identity, in relation to the outside world, provided a powerful frame of reference in the late‐Stalin years. ‘Being Soviet's’ most significant contribution lies in its novel answer to the question ‘How did ordinary citizens relate to Soviet power?’ It avoids the current Foucault‐inspired emphasis on ‘supporters’ and ‘resistors’ of the regime. Instead it argues that most Soviet citizens did not fit easily into either category. Their relationship with Soviet power was defined by a series of subtle ‘tactics of the habitat’ (Kotkin) that enabled them to stay fed, informed, and entertained in these difficult times. ‘Being Soviet’ offers a rich and textured discussion of those everyday survival strategies including rumours, jokes, hairstyles, music tastes, sexual relationships, and political campaigning. Each chapter finishes by exploring what this everyday behaviour tells us about the collective mentalité of Stalin‐era society. ‘Being Soviet’ focuses on the place of Britain and America within Soviet identity; their evolution from wartime allies to Cold War enemies played a vital role in redefining what it meant to be Soviet in Stalin's last years.Less
‘Being Soviet’ takes a refreshing and innovative approach to the crucial years between 1939 and 1953 in the USSR. It addresses two of the key recent debates concerning Stalinism. It answers the question ‘what was the logic and language of Soviet power?’ by shifting the focus away from Russian nationalism and onto Soviet identity. ‘Sovietness’ is explored via the newspapers, films, plays, and popular music of the era. Soviet identity, in relation to the outside world, provided a powerful frame of reference in the late‐Stalin years. ‘Being Soviet's’ most significant contribution lies in its novel answer to the question ‘How did ordinary citizens relate to Soviet power?’ It avoids the current Foucault‐inspired emphasis on ‘supporters’ and ‘resistors’ of the regime. Instead it argues that most Soviet citizens did not fit easily into either category. Their relationship with Soviet power was defined by a series of subtle ‘tactics of the habitat’ (Kotkin) that enabled them to stay fed, informed, and entertained in these difficult times. ‘Being Soviet’ offers a rich and textured discussion of those everyday survival strategies including rumours, jokes, hairstyles, music tastes, sexual relationships, and political campaigning. Each chapter finishes by exploring what this everyday behaviour tells us about the collective mentalité of Stalin‐era society. ‘Being Soviet’ focuses on the place of Britain and America within Soviet identity; their evolution from wartime allies to Cold War enemies played a vital role in redefining what it meant to be Soviet in Stalin's last years.
Terence Ball
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780198279952
- eISBN:
- 9780191598753
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0198279957.003.0007
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
In this chapter, I show how James Mill reworks and recycles the argument of a classic text—viz. Plato's Republic—and uses Plato's theory of justice and just punishment to legitimize Bentham's plans ...
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In this chapter, I show how James Mill reworks and recycles the argument of a classic text—viz. Plato's Republic—and uses Plato's theory of justice and just punishment to legitimize Bentham's plans for penal reform. Pace Michel Foucault, who views Bentham as the thoroughly modern doyen of the `surveillance society’, I argue that much modern political theory has classical roots and that we should therefore be wary of post‐modern genealogists’ claims about discursive continuities between discrete epistemes or systems of thought.Less
In this chapter, I show how James Mill reworks and recycles the argument of a classic text—viz. Plato's Republic—and uses Plato's theory of justice and just punishment to legitimize Bentham's plans for penal reform. Pace Michel Foucault, who views Bentham as the thoroughly modern doyen of the `surveillance society’, I argue that much modern political theory has classical roots and that we should therefore be wary of post‐modern genealogists’ claims about discursive continuities between discrete epistemes or systems of thought.
Carl A. Raschke
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780231173841
- eISBN:
- 9780231539623
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231173841.003.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Philosophy of Religion
This chapter argues that the crisis of representation proves itself to be intertwined with a crisis in the theory of sovereignty, suggesting a deeper challenge to liberalism.
This chapter argues that the crisis of representation proves itself to be intertwined with a crisis in the theory of sovereignty, suggesting a deeper challenge to liberalism.
Sebastian Coxon
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780198160175
- eISBN:
- 9780191716379
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198160175.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
Michel Foucault's analysis of the author as a variable function has led to the re-evaluation of authorship for a number of historical periods. This chapter considers several of the particulars of ...
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Michel Foucault's analysis of the author as a variable function has led to the re-evaluation of authorship for a number of historical periods. This chapter considers several of the particulars of Foucault's argument and measures the book's own findings against them. The centrepiece of Foucault's essay is his four-point characterization of the author-function in Western literary culture. By exploring the extent to which these points are relevant to German narrative literature of the 13th century (1220-90), it should prove possible to view the workings of medieval authorship from a fresh perspective. The issues that Foucault highlights still represent the best frame of reference for any future objective comparison of data relating to authorship in different times and cultures.Less
Michel Foucault's analysis of the author as a variable function has led to the re-evaluation of authorship for a number of historical periods. This chapter considers several of the particulars of Foucault's argument and measures the book's own findings against them. The centrepiece of Foucault's essay is his four-point characterization of the author-function in Western literary culture. By exploring the extent to which these points are relevant to German narrative literature of the 13th century (1220-90), it should prove possible to view the workings of medieval authorship from a fresh perspective. The issues that Foucault highlights still represent the best frame of reference for any future objective comparison of data relating to authorship in different times and cultures.
Karen Zivi
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199826414
- eISBN:
- 9780199919437
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199826414.003.0004
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory, Democratization
This chapter explores the performativity of the claims in the context of the debate over same-sex marriage. It analyzes rights claims made by both proponents and opponents of same-sex marriage rights ...
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This chapter explores the performativity of the claims in the context of the debate over same-sex marriage. It analyzes rights claims made by both proponents and opponents of same-sex marriage rights to illuminate the ways in which making rights claims allows for the contestation and reconstitution of the meaning of democratic citizenship. This chapter thus offers a rejoinder to left critics of rights, such as Michael Warner and Wendy Brown, who worry that rights claiming reinforces state power and undermines democratic freedom, and it does so, in part, by offering a new interpretation of Michel Foucault’s notion of disciplinary power and his position on rights. It also works with the arguments of Judith Butler to further develop the perlocutionary and persuasive dimensions of the act of rights claiming.Less
This chapter explores the performativity of the claims in the context of the debate over same-sex marriage. It analyzes rights claims made by both proponents and opponents of same-sex marriage rights to illuminate the ways in which making rights claims allows for the contestation and reconstitution of the meaning of democratic citizenship. This chapter thus offers a rejoinder to left critics of rights, such as Michael Warner and Wendy Brown, who worry that rights claiming reinforces state power and undermines democratic freedom, and it does so, in part, by offering a new interpretation of Michel Foucault’s notion of disciplinary power and his position on rights. It also works with the arguments of Judith Butler to further develop the perlocutionary and persuasive dimensions of the act of rights claiming.
Cressida J. Heyes
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195310535
- eISBN:
- 9780199871445
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195310535.003.0002
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
This chapter argues that the contemporary Western understanding of the relationship between the body and self is subject to a number of “pictures” that mark significant constraints on our ability to ...
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This chapter argues that the contemporary Western understanding of the relationship between the body and self is subject to a number of “pictures” that mark significant constraints on our ability to imagine alternative ways of caring for ourselves and others, hence on our self-government, and ultimately on our freedom. Two related pictures are used to explain how the somatic individual has come to dominate ways of understanding the self. The first is a picture in which we have an inner depth and authenticity that the outer (in this case, the flesh) must represent. This is a model of the self in general (selves as objects with an inner essence) and also of each self in particular. In their different ways, both Ludwig Wittgenstein and Michel Foucault challenge this picture, the former primarily through his private language argument, and the latter through his genealogical method. The second picture is one of power, and is characterized by the view that power is a substance, power is held and exercised by a sovereign who rules over us, and power is a force external to the self, whose primary purpose is repressive.Less
This chapter argues that the contemporary Western understanding of the relationship between the body and self is subject to a number of “pictures” that mark significant constraints on our ability to imagine alternative ways of caring for ourselves and others, hence on our self-government, and ultimately on our freedom. Two related pictures are used to explain how the somatic individual has come to dominate ways of understanding the self. The first is a picture in which we have an inner depth and authenticity that the outer (in this case, the flesh) must represent. This is a model of the self in general (selves as objects with an inner essence) and also of each self in particular. In their different ways, both Ludwig Wittgenstein and Michel Foucault challenge this picture, the former primarily through his private language argument, and the latter through his genealogical method. The second picture is one of power, and is characterized by the view that power is a substance, power is held and exercised by a sovereign who rules over us, and power is a force external to the self, whose primary purpose is repressive.
Cressida J. Heyes
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195310535
- eISBN:
- 9780199871445
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195310535.003.0004
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
This chapter argues that weight-loss dieting is not only a quest for the ideal body, but also a process of working on the self, marketed and sold to women with particular resonance, that cleverly ...
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This chapter argues that weight-loss dieting is not only a quest for the ideal body, but also a process of working on the self, marketed and sold to women with particular resonance, that cleverly deploys the discourse self-care feminists have long encouraged. The Use of Pleasure, volume 2 of History of Sexuality, is remarkable for its section on dietetics, in which Michel Foucault details certain practices of the ancient Greeks and Romans with regard to regimen as “an art of living”. Contemporary weight-loss dieting both appropriates and debases the forms of rapport a soi Foucault identifies. This chapter supplements existing critical accounts of dieting, which typically rely on the central explanatory concepts either of “false consciousness” or of “docile bodies” to understand better its enabling moments. Such moments exemplify Foucault's thesis that the growth of capabilities occurs in tandem with the intensification of power relations. The author recounts her ten-month experience in participating in Weight Watchers — the largest and best known commercial weight-loss program in the world.Less
This chapter argues that weight-loss dieting is not only a quest for the ideal body, but also a process of working on the self, marketed and sold to women with particular resonance, that cleverly deploys the discourse self-care feminists have long encouraged. The Use of Pleasure, volume 2 of History of Sexuality, is remarkable for its section on dietetics, in which Michel Foucault details certain practices of the ancient Greeks and Romans with regard to regimen as “an art of living”. Contemporary weight-loss dieting both appropriates and debases the forms of rapport a soi Foucault identifies. This chapter supplements existing critical accounts of dieting, which typically rely on the central explanatory concepts either of “false consciousness” or of “docile bodies” to understand better its enabling moments. Such moments exemplify Foucault's thesis that the growth of capabilities occurs in tandem with the intensification of power relations. The author recounts her ten-month experience in participating in Weight Watchers — the largest and best known commercial weight-loss program in the world.
Cressida J. Heyes
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195310535
- eISBN:
- 9780199871445
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195310535.003.0006
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
This chapter spells out how we might work on our embodied selves in ways that advance our freedom. To make this work, it is necessary to return to Michel Foucault's later writing, and reconstruct in ...
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This chapter spells out how we might work on our embodied selves in ways that advance our freedom. To make this work, it is necessary to return to Michel Foucault's later writing, and reconstruct in its most useful form the kind of ethics he endorses as well as the underdeveloped possibilities for a normatively inflected politics of the body to which it might inspire. Specifically, this chapter argues for what Richard Shusterman has termed “somaesthetics” as strategies of resistance to normalization. Examples of dieting or cosmetic surgeries demonstrate how asketic language is superficially deployed against normalization when in fact it often reinforces it. Finally, this chapter articulates some practices of working on oneself as an embodied subject that refuse the habituated trajectories of normalization and gesture toward an art of living which greater embodies freedom.Less
This chapter spells out how we might work on our embodied selves in ways that advance our freedom. To make this work, it is necessary to return to Michel Foucault's later writing, and reconstruct in its most useful form the kind of ethics he endorses as well as the underdeveloped possibilities for a normatively inflected politics of the body to which it might inspire. Specifically, this chapter argues for what Richard Shusterman has termed “somaesthetics” as strategies of resistance to normalization. Examples of dieting or cosmetic surgeries demonstrate how asketic language is superficially deployed against normalization when in fact it often reinforces it. Finally, this chapter articulates some practices of working on oneself as an embodied subject that refuse the habituated trajectories of normalization and gesture toward an art of living which greater embodies freedom.
J. Kameron Carter
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195152791
- eISBN:
- 9780199870578
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195152791.003.0004
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
This chapter begins here the work of developing a theological account of the modern problem of race, starting with an analysis of Cornel West's genealogy of race, ultimately labeling this approach ...
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This chapter begins here the work of developing a theological account of the modern problem of race, starting with an analysis of Cornel West's genealogy of race, ultimately labeling this approach problematic it for its inability to come to terms with what is religious, theological and political — all at the same time — about modernity and about how race functions within it. It then turns to Michel Foucault's work. The strength of his genealogy of race, which he positions within a genealogy of the state, is its opening onto a genealogy of religion, one that identifies the quest to overcome Jews and Judaism — the problem of supersessionism — as what propels modernity and moves its discourse of race, which is modernity's inner architecture. Unable to fully account for the theological nature of this problem, Foucault himself remained captive to his own form of intellectual supersessionism.Less
This chapter begins here the work of developing a theological account of the modern problem of race, starting with an analysis of Cornel West's genealogy of race, ultimately labeling this approach problematic it for its inability to come to terms with what is religious, theological and political — all at the same time — about modernity and about how race functions within it. It then turns to Michel Foucault's work. The strength of his genealogy of race, which he positions within a genealogy of the state, is its opening onto a genealogy of religion, one that identifies the quest to overcome Jews and Judaism — the problem of supersessionism — as what propels modernity and moves its discourse of race, which is modernity's inner architecture. Unable to fully account for the theological nature of this problem, Foucault himself remained captive to his own form of intellectual supersessionism.
Berys Gaut
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199263219
- eISBN:
- 9780191718854
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199263219.003.0005
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics
This chapter discusses artists' ethical aims in their works and the influential role of ethical criticism in critical practice, even in the writings of the New Critics and of post-structuralist ...
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This chapter discusses artists' ethical aims in their works and the influential role of ethical criticism in critical practice, even in the writings of the New Critics and of post-structuralist thinkers, such as Foucault, who ostensibly reject ethical criticism. It shows that the use of the terms, ‘moralistic’ and ‘didactic’, as terms of critical censure are consistent with ethicism. Thus, artistic and critical practices subjected to a process of reflective testing give support to ethicism. But it is also shown that given the sheer diversity of critical practices and the strength of ethicism relative to contextualism, appeals to such practices cannot decisively establish ethicism.Less
This chapter discusses artists' ethical aims in their works and the influential role of ethical criticism in critical practice, even in the writings of the New Critics and of post-structuralist thinkers, such as Foucault, who ostensibly reject ethical criticism. It shows that the use of the terms, ‘moralistic’ and ‘didactic’, as terms of critical censure are consistent with ethicism. Thus, artistic and critical practices subjected to a process of reflective testing give support to ethicism. But it is also shown that given the sheer diversity of critical practices and the strength of ethicism relative to contextualism, appeals to such practices cannot decisively establish ethicism.
Troels Engberg‐Pedersen
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199558568
- eISBN:
- 9780191720970
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199558568.003.0006
- Subject:
- Religion, Philosophy of Religion
This chapter considers how the various features of Paul's objective cosmology enter into three themes that belong directly to the level of the Pauline text itself: (i) Paul's accounts of his own ...
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This chapter considers how the various features of Paul's objective cosmology enter into three themes that belong directly to the level of the Pauline text itself: (i) Paul's accounts of his own conversion experience (including his reception of the pneuma), (iii) the picture he gives of the way his addressees should similarly be structured both mentally and physically, and inbetween these two themes, (ii) the way in which (in his so-called ‘moral exhortation’, paraenesis) Paul brings about the latter result through his letter-writing itself on the basis of his self-account. The chapter argues that in connection with all three themes, Paul combines the objective, cosmological world view with the perspective of subjective experience of the world. The chapter makes extended use of modern reflection on ‘religious experience’,‘self’, and ‘habitus’, drawing here on Foucault and Bourdieu.Less
This chapter considers how the various features of Paul's objective cosmology enter into three themes that belong directly to the level of the Pauline text itself: (i) Paul's accounts of his own conversion experience (including his reception of the pneuma), (iii) the picture he gives of the way his addressees should similarly be structured both mentally and physically, and inbetween these two themes, (ii) the way in which (in his so-called ‘moral exhortation’, paraenesis) Paul brings about the latter result through his letter-writing itself on the basis of his self-account. The chapter argues that in connection with all three themes, Paul combines the objective, cosmological world view with the perspective of subjective experience of the world. The chapter makes extended use of modern reflection on ‘religious experience’,‘self’, and ‘habitus’, drawing here on Foucault and Bourdieu.
