Foucault'S Ethics and Politics

FOUCAULT’S ETHICS AND POLITICS
Introduction
Michel Foucault was a French philosopher,

social theorist and a historian of ideas.
His thoughts influenced academics

especially those working in communication
studies, anthropology, sociology, cultural
studies, feminism and critical theory.
Foucault’s Works
POWER:
Power is diffuse, which means that it is not being practiced through a

one center, rather it exists in different points and takes many forms.
GOVERNMENTALITY:
He argued that states are not just determining how they govern us but
they’re also effecting and shaping how should we govern ourselves.
MENTAL
ILLNESS
MADNESS
MENTAL ILLNESS:
He argued that for the mentally ill people, things are seeming got
better but actually it is worsened throughout time. Back in
Renaissance, they were being treated as ‘different’ persons and
allowed to live inside the society.
In the mid 17. century a new attitude was born that relentlessly
medicalized and institutionalized mentally ill people and they’re
started to being taken away from their families and locked up. Today,
we have way better medications and studies, but this is still a reality.
Execution of Charles I, 1649
PRISONS:
He stated that, before the modern prisons came into the stage, most of the
time; people were being executed rather than imprisoned, at that time they
were still being treated very bad but it was made in the streets so that
everybody was witnessing their executions so that everything was visible to
the public. So people were seeing the executioner, or the power; concretely.
And in history, they were uprising against injustices when they see it.
Today it seems like the situation for the criminals is got better, but in fact, it
is not. Power is still being implemented on them harshly, they’re being
treated badly, but it's happening behind the walls and people don’t see
what's happening and they don’t see the power which doing this either. So if
this power would be implemented unfairly, people will not really see this,
today.
Execution of Charles I, 1649
Foucault also talked about the feminism, critical theory, literacy
theory and sexuality.
Ethics and Politics
In the last years of his life, Foucault came to see politics as an ethics –
not understood as normative rules or a moral code, but as the self’s
relation to itself, the way one constitutes oneself as a subject.
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.
Foucault is known for his rejection of the originary, foundational,
a-historical subject, which has shaped the Western metaphysical tradition
from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Hegel. Foucault’s “subjects” –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.
What these apparatuses and discourses, as well as the different modes

of subjectivity that they produce, share is their historicity.
Although many interpreters at the time read Foucault as having
proclaimed the “death of the subject,” Foucault was pointing to the
historico-political conditions within our actuality for the creation of new
modes of subjectivity.
What was being erased was the foundational subject , “a solipsistic and
a-historical consciousness, self-constituted and absolutely free.”
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; this project was ongoing
at the time of his death. Foucault clearly articulated that project in
November 1980:
Foucault:
‘’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 and in this case, one of the
main political problems nowadays would be, in the strict sense of the
word, the politics of ourselves.’’
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.
For Foucault, modern governmentality extended power relations beyond

coercion and subjection to encapsulate the global administration of the lives of
an entire population.
At the end of the 18. century 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 “bio-powers” and by the distinction, imposed by
a “social medicine,” between the normal and the abnormal.
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.’’

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. Subjectivation is a project of “rejoining oneself as the end and
object of a technique of life, an art of living,” entailing a self-relation
arising from the subject’s own practices of freedom, from his or her own
choice.
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. For Foucault, ethics concerns a self’s relationship to itself,
how we relate to our ownself.
It concerns 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.
Indeed, as he put it in one of his last interviews:
“what is ethics, if not the practice of freedom, the conscious 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.”
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."
PARHESSIA
Parhessia
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 care of
oneself, without a relationship to another person." Such relationships
are themselves political and require parrhesia. As Foucault explicates it,
parrhesia involves “the affirmation that in fact one genuinely thinks
,judges, and considers the truth one is saying to be genuinely true.”
It “only exists when there is freedom in the enunciation of
the truth, freedom of the act by which the subject says the
truth,”
and 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," for telling truth to power.
For Foucault, the concept of parrhesia was both a preeminent political
concept and one directly linked to democracy.
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;
and second, parrhesia: which is added to the rights of a citizen and which
entails a subject who has made a “parrhesiastic pact” that binds the subject
both to speak the truth and to “take on the risk of all its consequences.”
According to Foucault’s concept of democracy, isegoria, equal rights,
and parrhesia all 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. "
SUMMARY
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 on 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.
THANK YOU FOR ATTENDING!

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FOUCAULT’S ETHICS AND POLITICS

Michel Foucault was a French philosopher,

His thoughts influenced academics

Power is diffuse, which means that it is not being practiced through a

What these apparatuses and discourses, as well as the different modes

For Foucault, modern governmentality extended power relations beyond

“what is ethics, if not the practice of freedom, the conscious practice of

An art of living, a culture of self, for Foucault, “required a relationship

and there is a risk in one’s free-spokenness “that the fact of telling

Indeed, truth tellers, “parrhesiasts are those who, if necessary,

“the discourse of others, to which one leaves space alongside

The agonistic character of democracy on which Foucault insisted, linked to its

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