Search Results

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.

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.

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.

This chapter focuses on how the figure of Oedipus came to be at the centre of a debate about the role of the political subject in structuralist thought. At the centre of this section is an examination of Jean-Pierre Vernant's dialogue with the structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and his famous interpretation of the Oedipus myth. In stark contrast to the Lévi-Straussian version, Vernant's reading of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus makes the context of Athenian democracy absolutely central to its analysis, and thus poses a challenge to the ahistorical and apolitical vision of Lévi-Strauss. The second half of this chapter turns to Michel Foucault and his debate with Vernant's political interpretation of the Oedipus. Foucault's Oedipus is not only profoundly influenced by Vernant, but also sheds new light on Vernant's anti-psychoanalytic readings by reinterpreting them through the prism of May '68 and the publication of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus.

This chapter examines philosopher Michel Foucault's views on sexuality and the history of homosexuality in France. It argues that analyzing simultaneously Foucault's sexual life as a gay French male and his work on sexuality will illuminate both the work and the life in important ways. It suggests that Foucault's scholarly hermeneutic made it possible for him to be both the object and the subject of his investigations of the history of homosexuality.

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.

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.

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.

This chapter explores both Michel Foucault's influence and his practices as a historian of culture. It also argues that Foucault studied culture through the prism of the technologies of power, which he located strategically in discourse. Specifically, the chapter is dedicated to three main concerns: Foucault's relation to and reception by members of the historical profession; Foucault's achievements and failures as a historian—whether or not in method, research, and concerns he operated within the discipline; and Foucault's influence on the writing of history and what the prospects are for the survival of such influence. Foucault's methodological challenges embraced one of the most traditional of historical endeavors: his collected works represent a new history of Western civilization. His study of culture is a history with beginnings but no causes. He also has refashioned historical understanding through practice rather than theory.

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.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the key arguments and subjects discussed in the book, but it undertakes this review by means of a close investigation of the place of registration in contemporary scholarship. It explores the meaning of the term registration, and then examines the concept in existing social science theory, tracking the limits of its usage in the writings of Michel Foucault, Jack Goody, James Scott, and Amartya Sen's scholarship of social rights. It draws linkages between the chapters in the volume and the existing historiography on documentary government, drawing out the implications, in particular, of Clanchy's work. Moving beyond this review, it offers a theoretical account of the work of registration which highlights the (often neglected) dialectical politics at work in the registration of membership in human collectivities across time and region.

In his piece, “Epicurean Presences in Foucault's The Hermeneutics of the Subject,” Alain Gigandet studies the ways in which Epicureanism, while providing some of the evidence for Foucault’s 1981-82 course on the hermeneutics of the subject, nonetheless seems to posit a subject that operates in terms different than those articulated by Foucault’s predominantly Stoic picture. Specifically, Gigandet suggests that Epicurean ethics posits a subject defined above all by the image of the conquest of a place, especially in a defensive manner.  To make his case, he examines some of the central metaphors in the De Rerum Natura and other Epicurean texts that define the nature of the subject.  He considers, for example, the famous Epicurean dictum that because of our common mortality we inhabit a “city without walls,” a metaphor that points to the ultimately precarious foundation of our happiness, as well as famous Lucretian images of the wise man as “fortified” by his Epicurean doctrine.  He thus defines an Epicurean “hermeneutics of the subject” that is perhaps necessarily marginalized in Foucault’s writings, as it is not entirely reducible to Foucault’s broader and largely Stoic portrait.

This chapter sets out four key conceptual themes that provide the tools which help answer the question: how might we conceive of contemporary finance in such a way as to understand qualitative transformations in everyday saving and borrowing routines that forge close relationships between the society and the financial markets? These key conceptual themes are financial networks, financial power, financial identity, and financial dissent. The chapter draws primarily on actor-network theory (ANT) aspects of the scholarship of Michel Foucault, and insights from writers of everyday life.

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.