This paper uses a semiotic, performative theory of language and post-colonial theory to argue that nursing's representations of ‘multiculturalism’ need to be grounded in a theory of whiteness, an historicized understanding of how ethnic/cultural differences come to be represented in the ways they are and informed by Foucault's notions of power/knowledge. Using nursing education and ‘cultural compentency’ as examples, the paper draws on a range of literatures to suggest more critical and politically productive ways of approaching difference from within nursing's (...) largely white interpretive framework. (shrink)

I offer a major reassessment of Foucault’s philosophico-historical account of the basic problems of modernity. I revise our understanding of Foucault by countering the influential misinterpretations proffered by his European interlocutors such as Habermas and Derrida. Central to Foucault’s account of modernity was his work on two crucial concept pairs: freedom/power and reason/madness. I argue against the view of Habermas and Derrida that Foucault understood modern power and reason as straightforwardly opposed to modern freedom and madness. I show that Foucault (...) held a much more complex view of these pairs, a view encapsulated in his term ‘reciprocal incompatibility’. By revising our interpretation of Foucault’s work on modernity in this way, we open the way to much more effective deployments of his critical apparatus. (shrink)

Charles Taylor and Michel Foucault offer two very different descriptions and analyses of modern identities. While it can be argued that Taylor and Foucault are thematizing two very different aspects of identity — Taylor is focusing on first-person, subjective, affirmed identity, and Foucault is focusing on third-person, or ascribed, category identity — in practice, these two are very much intertwined. I argue that attention to identities of race, gender, class and sexual orientation demands that we combine a Foucauldian power analysis (...) with a Taylorean understanding of authenticity. Taking Nancy Fraser's and Linda Gordon's example of the `single black mother on welfare' as the `icon of dependency' in America and Charles Taylor's example of the `householder' who understands himself in relation to an ideal of independence, I show that neither individual can develop either self-knowledge or freedom without engaging in a quest for authenticity that involves both analysis of relations of power and identification with resistant identities. This requires moving beyond both Taylor and Foucault to an understanding of identity in terms of critical relations with defining communities. Key Words: authenticity • critique • Michel Foucault • freedom • identity • meaning • power • self-knowledge • social being • Charles Taylor. (shrink)

Opening a symposium on Malcolm Bull?s Anti-Nietzsche, Dews retraces the logic of critical supersession in European philosophy before taking issue with the author?s account of Nietzschean will to power and the reading strategy to be pursued in the face of it.

This article interprets Foucault’s intellectual project by analysing the relation between his understanding of critique and the political conditions of subjectivation out of which it emerged. After reviewing some of the most typical criticisms of Foucault’s work, the argument shows in what sense he conceived of critique as a form of resistance and how the latter, in turn, was theorised as a force co-extensive to the power it counters. The paper goes on to argue that his theory of resistance is (...) not necessarily to be viewed as a metaphysical representation of the immutable nature of political struggle, but might well be interpreted in performative terms, i.e. as a strategic re-inscription of existing political-discursive formations. More precisely, the analysis shows in what way Foucault’s articulation of critique represented an attempt to displace the forms of subjectivation that underpin anthropological thought and the government of the self in the modern age. (shrink)

Towards the end of his life, Michel Foucault turns his attention to antiquity where he locates an additional process by which the subject is constituted. Technologies of the self comprise an important contribution to the study of subjectivity, however Foucault employs these findings to set out towards a new direction, challenging the way we think about morality. Against a singular truth and a singular way of life as promulgated by western moral theories, Foucault understands his work as a toolbox capable (...) of assisting in the exploration of multiple styles of living. Nevertheless, references to this new direction are not only scattered but also incomplete. Drawing upon his most recent understanding of subjectivity and the latest reformulation of his work, the dissertation attempts to piece together Foucault’s ethical project. In doing so, the dissertation will address two major limitations arising from Foucault’s ethical endeavour. As his ethical project draws upon technologies of the self, it has been misinterpreted as an aesthetic turn while his ethical findings have also been challenged as conceptually erroneous. However, the study indicates that Foucault’s ethical project comprises of two components: enhancing de-subjectification and the intensification of processes of subjectivation. By pulling together various elements of Foucault’s work, the dissertation indicates how he perceived the study of subjectivity as a counter-effect to processes of subjectification but also to the promotion of a singular way of life. Moreover, a study in Stoicism shows that Foucault was not wrong in identifying the care of the self in antiquity but most importantly, that his focus on the self is not an aesthetic turn but a call for transformation. The dissertation therefore proposes a reading of Foucault’s ethical project not as aesthetic but as relational and transversal. (shrink)

Foucault is critical of the tendency to reduce all social and political problems according to predetermined ends and verifiable procedures. For Foucault, philosophical activity is a condition of possibility for the articulation of the question of the self. Inspired by his work on the desiring subject, Foucault begins to explore the ethical and political implications of self-care for modern day concerns. He presents an account of self-care that centres on developing an attitude that questions the personal relationship to truth, and (...) puts to test those ideas and truths held most dearly. Processes of self-care evaluate the consistency between those truths a person regards as necessary and a person’s actions in the world. Interested in the ways in which people see themselves as subjects, Foucault directs his attention to the connection between systems of knowledge, power, and practices of the self. Crucial to Foucault’s process is the recognition that the self-subject is not given and does not have ontological precedence, and that subjectivity is transformable. By finding the lines and fractures in external and internal modes of objectification Foucault hopes to open up the space of freedom to bring about transformative events. The care of the self serves as a form of critique and resistance where it is both a way of living and acting in the world, and a critical response to a particular time and place. (shrink)

This paper offers a detailed account of Foucaults ethical and political notion of individuality as presented in his late work, and discusses its relationship to the feminist project of the theory of sexual difference. I argue that Foucaults elaboration of the classical ethos of care for the self opens the way for regarding the I-woman as an ethical, political and aesthetic self-creation. However, it has significant limitations that cannot be ignored. I elaborate on two aspects of Foucaults avoidance of sexual (...) difference as a relevant category for an account of political and ethical individuality, which thus implicitly associates individual agency with men. I argue that Foucault implicitly assumes the existence of an ontological desire to become engaged in political self-creation. However, the ethical position of self-knowledge and desire should be understood as a contingent option that depends on material and historical conditions for its realization. Hence, I argue that a feminist reworking of Foucaults notion of political individuality should add a substantial ethical condition to the imperative of self-knowledge and self-creation – making possible the desiring woman subject. (shrink)

Michel’s Foucault’s later work has been the subject of much critical interest regarding the question of whether it provides a normative stance that prescribes how the self ought to act. Having first outlined the nature of the debate, I engage with Foucault’s comparative analysis of the ethical systems of ancient Greeks and Christianity to show that he holds that the former maintains that the ethical subject was premised not on adherence to a priori rules as in Christianity, but from and (...) around an on-going process of practical experimentation. From this, Foucault goes on to describe the practices through which the self acted to make and re-make itself, which leads to the question of whether such descriptions also contain prescriptions as to how the self should act. I argue that they do contain a prescriptively normative stance, but in a very specific sense. Rather than delineating the specific ethical commitments we should adopt, Foucault takes off from the example of the ancient Greeks to insist that individuals should adopt an indeterminate orientating principle based on absolute openness to each context, with this principle given content through a context-specific, spontaneous, on-going, and inherently individual, albeit socially situated, process of practical experimentation. The result is a highly original account of normativity that makes individuals absolutely responsible for themselves and their ethical activities in each moment. (shrink)

The hegemonic discourse on humanism in the contemporary academy – a critical discourse in the form of a theoretical anti-humanism – is marked by a certain degree of impoverishment. This impoverishment is the result of many contextual factors, including the ideological purposes to which the discourse has been put, but also the effects of internal workings of the paradigm associated with anti-humanism itself. In this article, I trace the development of this discourse in its foundational early- and mid-twentieth century manifestations, (...) outlining its central characteristics as well as its tensions and aporias, both theoretical and political. I argue that the critical discourse, which has informed our contemporary understanding of humanism, needs to be meaningfully sublated and that a new discourse – one that has reflected deeply upon the anti-humanist discourse: its strengths and its weaknesses – should take its place. (shrink)

This article provides a critical evaluation of Ben Golder’s and Peter Fitzpatrick’s recent Foucault’s Law, which it characterizes as a decisive intervention into both legal theory and Foucault scholarship. It argues in favour of Golder’s and Fitzpatrick’s effort to affirm the multiplicity of Foucault’s work, rather than treat that work as either unified by a consistent position or broken into a series of relatively stable periods. But it also argues against Golder’s and Fitzpatrick’s analysis of Foucault’s understanding of the law (...) through a conceptual framework borrowed from Derrida, and especially Derrida’s distinction between law and justice. It shows how this approach to reading Foucault effectively transforms some of his more powerful criticisms of the law into defences of justice. In place of this interpretation, the second half of this paper initiates a reading of Foucault’s later work on ethics and the self in the ancient world. It develops the theme of an ethics, or a way of life, that takes shape at a distance from politics on the one side and law on the other. (shrink)

Exploring the apparent tension between Foucault’s analyses of technologies of domination – the ways in which the subject is constituted by power–knowledge relations – and of technologies of the self – the ways in which individuals constitute themselves through practices of freedom – this article endeavors to makes two points: first, the interpretive claim that Foucault’s own attempts to analyse both aspects of the politics of our selves are neither contradictory nor incoherent; and, second, the constructive claim that Foucault’s analysis (...) of the politics of our selves, though not entirely satisfactory as it stands, provides important resources for the project of critical social theory. (shrink)