Michel Foucault: An Ethical Politics of care of the Self and Others

Michel Foucault An Ethical Politics of Care of Self and Others ALAN MILCHMAN AND ALAN ROSENBERG IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AUTHORS AND ARGUMENTS EDITED BY CATHERINE H. ZUCKERT CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2011 PAGES 228-237 The name Michel Foucault seems to be inseparable from a discussion of power, that preeminent political concept. Politics, the political, permeates almost everything that Foucault wrote, just as it was a focal point of his life. One seminal feature of the Foucauldian way, we believe, was his juxtaposition of ethics and politics. Indeed, as he sought to weave the several strands of his thinking together in the last years of his life, Foucault came to see politics as an ethics, ethics not understood as normative rules or a moral code, but the self’s relation to itself, the way one constitutes oneself as a subject. For us, Foucault’s ethical turn of the early 1980s did not lead him away from the domain of the political, but rather in the direction of a reconceptualization of politics as an ethical politics. And, we contend, it was an adumbration of an ethical politics of care of self and others that Foucault was engaged in at the time of his death in 1984. 1 Foucault is known for his rejection of the originary, foundational, ahistorical subject, which has shaped the Western metaphysical tradition from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Hegel. Foucault’s “subjects” – and discussion and the genealogies of them fill the pages of his books, lectures, and interviews – are historically constituted on the bases of determinate apparatuses (dispositifs) and discourses (discours), which are themselves the outcome of contingent and changing practices to which they are integrally linked. An apparatus is the network of power relations, strategies, and technologies on the bases of which a mode of subjectivity is constituted. A discourse constitutes the specific network of rules and procedures on the bases of which “truth” is established in a given historical time and place, the criteria for what Foucault terms the forms of “veridiction.” What these apparatuses and discourses, as well as the different modes of subjectivity that they produce, share is their historicity. One strand of modern philosophy, though, beginning with Kant’s question – “What is Enlightenment?” – with which Foucault explicitly identified himself, revolves around the problem: Who are we at present? In the opening lecture of his course at the Collège de France in 1983, Foucault elaborated on his own vision of philosophy: “It seems to me that philosophy as the surface of emergence of a present reality, as a questioning of the philosophical meaning of the present reality of which it is a part, and philosophy as the philosopher’s questioning of this ‘we’ to which he belongs and in relation to which he has to situate himself, is a distinctive feature of philosophy as a discourse of modernity and on modernity.”i In a 1981 interview, Foucault was asked: “What has been your itinerary? What was the driving force of your reflection?” Given Foucault’s emphasis on genealogy in his writings, and his understanding of history, one might have expected an elucidation of the genealogy of his own thinking and texts, beginning with his first published book, The History of Madness (1961), then 2 the volume that first brought him fame, The Order of Things (1966), and his path-breaking studies of power relations, Discipline and Punish (1975), and of the ways in which relations of power shaped modern sexuality, The History of Sexuality (1976). Instead, Foucault answered: “You are asking me a difficult question. First because the driving line cannot be determined until one is at the end of the road…”ii Perhaps we can follow Foucault’s lead here, starting with the issues that preoccupied him in the final cycle of lectures and courses, focusing on what has been termed his “ethical turn,” and concentrating on just where his own “road,” his own philosophical journey, was taking him when he died so prematurely in 1984.iii One fruitful way to describe Foucault’s “histories,” then is that they are genealogies of the subject. As Foucault put it, though, in his lectures at Berkeley and at Dartmouth in 1980, his histories have a definite “political dimension”: I mean an analysis that relates to what we are willing to accept in our world, to accept, to refuse, to change, both in ourselves and in our circumstances. In sum, it is a question of searching for another kind of critical philosophy. Not a critical philosophy that seeks to determine the conditions and the limits of our possible knowledge of the object, but a critical philosophy that seeks the conditions and the indefinite possibilities of transforming the subject, of transforming ourselves.iv Those possibilities were signaled by Foucault as early as the (in)famous conclusion to The Order of Things, where he hinted at the prospect that the “arrangements” that created the modern subject might crumble, in which case one could “certainly wager that man would be erased like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea.”v While many interpreters at the time read Foucault as having proclaimed the “death of the subject,” consonant with his purported structuralism, it seems to us that Foucault was pointing to the historico-political conditions within our actuality 3 for the creation of new modes of subjectivity. What was being erased was the foundational subject, and its hypostasis within much of the Western philosophical tradition; the death was that of the humanist subject, the specific mode of subjectivity that, as Judith Revel has pointed out, was seen as “a solipsistic and a-historical consciousness, self-constituted and absolutely free.”vi Foucault’s philosophical journey, the elaboration of that critical philosophy, then, led him to begin to articulate what we would term a politics of care of self, beginning around 1980, a project that was ongoing at the time of his death. Foucault himself would clearly articulate that project at the end of his second Dartmouth lecture: Maybe our problem now is to discover that the self is nothing else than the historical correlation of the technology built in our history. Maybe the problem is to change those technologies [or maybe to get rid of those technologies, and then, to get rid of the sacrifice which is linked to those technologies.] And in this case, one of the main political problems nowadays would be, in the strict sense of the word, the politics of ourselves.vii Such a politics of care of self entails both a genealogical analysis of the historical contingencies, and their attendant power relations, that produced our modern subjectivity, and the possibilities now contained within our present reality for creating new modes of subjectivity. Foucault’s political theory, then, is a critical ontology of ourselves, a critique of who we are, the subjects that we have historically become, and the possibilities of fashioning ourselves differently. Foucault’s analysis of the power relations in modern societies, the various modes of domination, discipline, and control, what he termed assujettissement, and which we translate as “subjectification,” cannot be reduced to subjection or subjugation, with its implication of a passive subject. It also contains the possibility of resistance on the part of those who are subjectified. The importance of acknowledging the active role of the subject in assujettissement 4 or subjectification becomes especially important in the late 1970s, when Foucault expanded the purview of his investigation of power relations beyond sovereignty and disciplinary power, with its “docile bodies,” to include what he termed “governmentality.” Modern governmentality, for Foucault, extended power relations beyond coercion and subjection, to encapsulate the global administration of the lives of a whole population. At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries in Western Europe, with the birth of liberalism, the whole of the life of the individual, and that of the population as a whole, sexual, psychological, medical, educational, economic, and moral, came to be progressively invested by what Foucault designated as “biopowers,” and the distinction, imposed by a “social medicine,” between the normal and the abnormal. However, governmentality, in investing the whole of life, implicated the person directly in the operation of its micro-powers and constitutes a veritable crossroads of technologies of domination and techniques of the self. Even as governmentality permits the spread of technologies of power into virtually every pore of individual and political life, within its ambit, as Johanna Oksala has put it, the subject “is now capable of turning back upon itself: of critically studying the processes of its own constitution, but also of subverting them and effecting changes in them.”viii Moreover, as Judith Revel has opined, it is possible that bio-powers could also be “the site of emergence of a counter-power, the site of the production of subjectivity which would constitute a moment of de-subjectification [désassujettissement].”ix Beyond subjectification, then, Foucault’s ethical turn led him to explore a range of possibilities for fashioning one’s own self, what he would designate as subjectivation in his 1982 lecture course at the Collège de France, a project of “rejoining oneself as the end and object of a technique of life, an art of living,”x entailing a self-relation arising from the subject’s own practices of freedom, from his or her own choice. Subjectivation constitutes a fresh way of 5 grappling with the question of the subject, though one that Foucault himself did not live to elaborate, but which seems to us to be integral to his ethical turn after the publication of the first volume of The History of Sexuality. It points to Foucault’s growing interest in the prospects that the contemporary sociocultural world provides for the project of arts of living and the transfiguration of self. This important distinction between assujettissement and subjectivation also corresponds to two distinct modes of power, a distinction that is obscured in English translations of Foucault, by virtue of the conventions of the English language itself. When Foucault speaks of assujettissement he links it to pouvoir, whereas when he speaks of subjectivation he links it to puissance. English makes do with the same word for each, “power,” but pouvoir is power over, while puissance is power to; the former is linked to relations of domination and subjection, the latter to capacities for self-creation and de-subjectification. Foucault explored the prospects for self-creation within the ambit of his treatment of ethics, which for him was integral to politics, and its link to the question of freedom. Ethics, for Foucault, concerns a self’s relationship to itself, how we relate to our own self; how we “govern” our own conduct, which constituted what he termed an “ethical fourfold,” two sides of which are especially relevant here: the ethical work one does on oneself in the effort “to attempt to transform oneself into the ethical subject of one’s behavior,” and the telos, the goal of fashioning a self, which is one’s aim.xi In Foucault’s view, ethics is inseparable from freedom. Indeed, as he put it in one of his last interviews: “what is ethics, if not the practice of freedom, the conscious [réfléchie] practice of freedom? … Freedom is the ontological condition of ethics. But ethics is the considered form that freedom takes when it is informed by reflection.”xii But exactly what kind of freedom is Foucault speaking of here? An existential freedom, rooted in a purported ahistorical human nature? Is Foucault at the end of his life returning to the kinds of philosophical 6 anthropology that he once so harshly criticized as groundless? Such a conclusion, in our view, would be baseless. Is it some legal or constitutional freedom provided to its citizens by a polity or state? That too, in our view, is not the case here – though Foucault was not one to reject such “freedoms” where they existed. Foucauldian freedom seems to us to consist in our own groundlessness, in our possibility of unending change, changing ourselves, our subjectivity, changing the social, cultural, and political conditions and the apparatuses in which we contingently find ourselves. Such a conception of freedom, then, is integrally linked to the notion and practice of refusal, so powerfully expressed by Foucault: “Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are. We have to imagine and to build up what we could be to get rid of this kind of political ‘double bind,’ which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures.”xiii Foucault’s own exploration of those possibilities led him to the ancient Greco-Roman world, though, we believe, always with his eyes on our own actuality. In a series of discussions at Berkley in 1983, Foucault distinguished between two projects focusing on care of self; one he termed a techne of the self and the other a techne of life. The latter, characteristic of ancient Greece, “was to take care of the city, of his companions,” not just one’s self, though the decline of the polis would later shift the focus in the ancient world more exclusively to one’s own self.xiv While Foucault certainly explored the ways in which one’s own life might become a work of art, and the space created in modernity for just such a project, he did not neglect the world of the political, the link between oneself as an artwork and the community in which one lives. Indeed, one implication of care of self, then, is care of others, of those with whom we share a communal life. Foucault’s concern for self, and its cultivation, then, is assuredly not solipsistic. 7 One dimension of treating one’s life as an artwork, though, is care of self, the title of the second volume of what had originally been projected as The History of Sexuality. In one of his last interviews, Foucault was asked: “Could the problematic of the care of the self be at the heart of a new way of thinking about politics, of a form of politics different from what we know today?”xv Foucault responded: “I admit that I have not got very far in this direction, and I would very much like to come back to more contemporary questions to try to see what can be made of all this in the context of the current political problematic.”xvi While death prevented Foucault from taking that path, it seems to us that what has been termed his “journey to Greece,” his focus on the Greco-Roman world in his lecture courses after 1980, provides an indication of what such an ethical politics might look like. In his lecture courses both in Paris (1981–84) and in Berkeley, Foucault explored the meaning and ramifications of the ancient concept of parrhesia, truth telling or “free-spokenness” (franc-parler) as both techne and ethos, a concept that he firmly linked to the political. An art of living, a culture of self, for Foucault, “required a relationship to the other. In other words: one cannot attend to oneself, take are of oneself, without a relationship to another person.”xvii Such relationships are themselves political and require parrhesia. Parrhesia as Foucault explicates it involves “the affirmation that in fact one genuinely thinks, judges, and considers the truth one is saying to be genuinely true,”xviii that parrhesia “only exists when there is freedom in the enunciation of the truth, freedom of the act by which the subject says the truth,”xix and that there is a risk in one’s free-spokenness, “that the fact of telling the truth … will, may, or must entail costly consequences for those who have told it.” Indeed, truth tellers, “parrhesiasts are those who, if necessary, accept death for having told the truth,”xx for telling truth to power. 8 For Foucault, the concept of parrhesia was both a preeminent political concept and one directly linked to democracy. And while Foucault’s last two lecture courses in Parisxxi both designate parrhesia as a fundamentally political concept, his discussion of that notion draws mostly on ancient texts and examples. Nonetheless, Foucault’s concern with the history of the present leads him to forge explicit links with our own actuality, in the person who engages in “critical discourse in the political domain,” a certain type of philosopher, we would say, and the figure of the revolutionary, “this person who arises within society and says: I am telling the truth, and I am telling the truth in the name of the revolution that I am going to make and that we will make together.”xxii Foucault’s discussion of democracy in ancient Greece focuses on two conjoined elements, both of which would also seem to be integral to a modern conceptualization of democracy as a setting for a politics of care of self: first, isegoria, the equality of all citizens, the equal right to speak, to make decisions, and to actively participate in public life;xxiii and second, parrhesia, which is added to the rights of a citizen, and which entails a subject who has made a “parrhesiastic pact” that both binds the subject to speak the truth and “take on the risk of all its consequences.”xxiv Both isegoria, equal rights, and parrhesia, according to Foucault’s concept of democracy, exist within what he terms an “agonistic game,” a rule-based communal framework, in which the speech, “the discourse of others, to which one leaves space alongside one’s own, may prevail over your discourse. What constitutes the field peculiar to parrhêsia is this political risk of a discourse which leaves room free for other discourse and assumes the task, not of bending others to one’s will, but of persuading them.”xxv A modern democracy, then, would have to instantiate both equality and parrhesia in its own agonistic game, albeit with very different and broader conceptions of citizenship than prevailed even in the democratic polis of ancient Athens. 9 In his lectures on ancient democracy, Foucault was acutely sensitive to the danger of demagogy, to the fate of Periclean Athens, and to the need to distinguish between “good” and “bad” parrhesia. Good parrhesia, of which Pericles was an exemplar,xxvi the ethical qualities of which are those of the parrhesiastic pact, is contrasted with the bad parrhesia linked to rhetoric and flattery of one’s auditors. Bad parrhesia is where the aim of the “orator” is simply to win over the masses, typically by appeals to the basest of emotions and to fears, and where it prevails, those who embody good parrhesia but cannot sway the masses with their own truth telling (dire vrai), who refuse to engage in demagogy, are “threatened with such measures, like expulsion – but these measures may go as far as exile, or ostracism, and also in some cases … death.”xxvii It is not difficult to see here a link with the practices of modern representative or plebiscitarian democracy and their charismatic leaders, as well as the ways in which the mass media and money function within them. Indeed, Foucault concluded his lecture on February 2, 1983, at the Collège on just such a note: Well in a time like ours, when we are so fond of posing the problems of democracy in terms of the distribution of power, of the autonomy of each in the exercise of power, in terms of transparency and opacity, and of the relation between civil society and the state, I think it may be a good idea to recall this old question, which was contemporary with the functioning of Athenian democracy and its crises, namely the question of true discourse and the necessary, indispensable, and fragile caesura that true discourse cannot fail to introduce into a democracy which both makes this discourse possible and constantly threatens it.xxviii Meanwhile, good or ethical parrhesia “is anti-flattery in the sense that in parrhêsia, there is indeed someone who speaks and who speaks to the other, but, unlike what happens in flattery, he 10 speaks to the other in such a way that this other will be able to form an autonomous, independent, full and satisfying relationship to himself. The final aim of parrhêsia is not to keep the person to whom one speaks dependent upon the person who speaks.”xxix Can the philosopher avoid the dangers, dare we say the risks, of political life by withdrawal into his or her study? Foucault was clear that that was not an option, and not just because the philosopher shares the life of his city, her community. Foucault also forges a direct link between logos, rational discourse, and ergon, action,xxx and while he is lecturing on Plato there, its implications for the modern philosopher, and, of course, for Foucault himself, seem clear: the philosopher must act, and act precisely insofar as he or she is both a philosopher and a “citizen.” As Foucault forcefully argues: “Now the philosopher cannot be merely logos with regard to politics. To be more than just ‘hollow words, he must take part in and put his hand directly to action (ergon).”xxxi In his final lecture course at the Collège de France, February–March 1984, just several months before his death, Foucault focused on the Cynics and Cynic parrhesia. Here, there appeared to be a sharp contrast with the Epicurean and Stoic schools with which Foucault had been concerned just a year earlier, when he first undertook to investigate the government of self and others, for the Cynics enjoined a detachment from and a rejection of familial and civic ties, bonds of friendship or loyalty to a city or polity. However, in their place, as Foucault showed, the Cynics enjoined a freedom to instantiate and “accomplish the great task of ethical universality … the universality of all humans. An individual bond with individuals, but to all individuals, that is what characterized, in its freedom, but also in an obligatory way, the bond of the Cynic with all the other persons that constituted the human species.”xxxii In his or her care for the other, then, the Cynic embodied the qualities of “true political activity, true politeuesthai. … 11 This politeuesthai [living and acting as a citizen] is no longer that of cities or of States, but of the entire world.”xxxiii What then is the relationship between democracy and a politics of care of self, to which Foucault was pointing at the end of his life? That was a project for which his final cycle of lecture courses was only a preparation, and one unfortunately cut short. The agonistic character of democracy upon which Foucault insisted, linked to its parrhesiastic game, the framework within which truth telling functions, opens a path to a politics of care of self and care of others by its constant effort to expand the scope for new modes of subjectivity, by creating the space for the flourishing of a multiplicity of arts of living. A democratic politics would maximize those spaces, and provide a critique of all those practices and discourses that seek to homogenize subjectivity, to make it uniform, and to narrow the scope of freedom. SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING In addition to Foucault’s writings, to which this essay points, readers seeking more information might consult the following. Bernauer, James. Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight: Toward an Ethics for Thought. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1990. Binkley, Sam, and Jorge Capetillo-Ponce, eds. A Foucault for the 21st Century: Governmentality, Biopolitics, and Discipline in the New Millennium. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Paul Rabinow. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Gutting, Gary, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Foucault. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Revel, Judith. Dictionnaire Foucault. Paris: Ellipses, 2008. 12 Footnotes i Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 13. ii Michel Foucault, “What Our Present Is,” in The Politics of Truth (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997), 147. iii These are also the issues that have received the least critical and interpretive attention, and so, despite their importance within the Foucauldian way, they are also still relatively unexplored. iv Michel Foucault, “Subjectivity and Truth,” in The Politics of Truth, 179. v Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 387. vi Judith Revel, Dictionnaire Foucault (Paris: Ellipses, 2008), 129. vii Michel Foucault, “Christianity and Confession,” in The Politics of Truth, 230–31. The words in brackets have been added by the editor, and are from the Berkeley lectures. viii Johanna Oksala, Foucault on Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 165. ix Revel, Dictionnaire Foucault, 26. x Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 333. xi Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 27. xii Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 1, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 284. xiii Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 3, Power, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 2000), 336. xiv Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in Essential Works 1:259–60. xv Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in Essential Works 1:294. xvi Ibid. xvii Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, 43. xviii Ibid., 64. xix Ibid., 66. xx Ibid., 56. xxi The Government of Self and Others and the not yet translated Le Courage de la vérité. xxii Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, 70. xxiii Ibid., 150–51. 13 xxiv Ibid., 65. It also implicitly binds the citizens, who are no less responsible for the outcome of the decisions they have made than are those who first proposed them (ibid., 177). xxv Ibid., 105. xxvi In his analysis of the Orestes of Euripides, Foucault points to the autourgos, the small peasant devoted to his land, as another exemplar of good parrhesia (ibid., 166–67). xxvii Ibid., 181. xxviii Ibid., 184. xxix Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 379. xxx Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, 218–19. xxxi Ibid., 219. xxxii Michel Foucault, Le courage de la vérité: Le gouvernement de soi et des autres II (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2009), 277; our translation. xxxiii Ibid., 278. 14