This paper argues that the phenomenon of globalisation can be best understood as the secularisation and widespread extension of a particular type of life?conduct that originated in Western monasticism. This concerns not substantive content but modality and form, like the self?sustaining methodical regularisation of the everyday conduct of life in closed and partitioned space aiming at rationalisation and perfection. This type of inner?worldly asceticism was a successful response to the challenge of chaotic ?liminal periods of transition, following a wholesale dissolution (...) of order. However, the solution represents a generalisation of liminality into a permanent condition, explaining both the innovativeness and creativity of modern societies, but also their characteristic tempo of hectic change that disrupts stable human relationships and the coexistence with animals and plants, losing balance and measure. (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)

Wie können Freiheit und Widerstand innerhalb von Foucaults Theorie der Macht und Subjektivierung konzipiert werden? Diese zentrale Frage der Interpretation von Foucaults vielschichtigem Werk wurde breit diskutiert und dennoch nicht befriedigend beantwortet. Dass bis heute kaum Klarheit über den Status von Freiheit in Foucaults Werk erreicht werden konnte, liegt auch daran, dass die gängigen Interpretationen die verschiedenen Freiheitsbegriffe, die in Foucaults Werk zu finden sind, vermischen. Der Artikel bringt deshalb Ordnung in diese unübersichtliche Lage, indem er die verschiedenen Freiheitsbegriffe und (...) Freiheitsprobleme in Foucaults Werk differenziert. Dies ermöglicht ein besseres Verständnis von Foucaults Freiheitsdenken und Machttheorie und führt zu einem neuen Freiheitsbegriff: Freiheit als die Fähigkeit zur kritischen Reflexion der eigenen Subjektivierung. Weil diese "Freiheit als Kritik" nur durch politische Institutionen ermöglicht werden kann, produziert dieser Freiheitsbegriff neue Anschlüsse von Foucaults Denken an die normative politische Theorie und postfundamentalistische Demokratietheorie. How can freedom and resistance be conceived within Foucault's theory of power and subjectivation? This central question of the interpretation of Foucault's multi-layered work has been widely discussed and yet not satisfactorily answered. The fact that until today there has been little clarity about the status of freedom in Foucault's work is also due to the fact that the current interpretations confuse the various concepts of freedom which can be found in Foucault's work. The article therefore brings order to this confusing situation by differentiating the various concepts and problems of freedom in Foucault's work. This enables a better understanding of Foucault's thinking of freedom and his theory of power and leads to a new concept of freedom: freedom as the capability to critically reflect on one's own subjectivation. Because this "freedom as critique" can only be made possible by political institutions, this concept of freedom produces new connections from Foucault's thinking to normative political theory and post-fundamentalist democratic theory. (shrink)

In his later lectures, published as The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Michel Foucault surveys different modalities of obtaining ‘truth’ about one's self and the world: from Socrates to the Cynics, Stoics, Epicureans and early church writers. Genealogically tracing this opposition between knowing self and world, he occasionally invites phenomenological enquiry into how this epistemic couplet bears on education. Drawing on three vignettes familiar to educators, my investigation explores modes of discovering self and world through counselling, distributed governance in the classroom (...) and the arts of writing. In each case we confront a paradox of freedom, in that agency is needed, already, to liberate the self from the world. An exegetical task is to show how Foucault worked through this philosophical problem, of relevance to many situations in education, by re-reading Kant, Nietzsche and Heidegger. (shrink)

Although Foucault was clearly a critical thinker, his approach also provides for the possibility of a genealogy of critique. Such an approach problematizes critique, and I trace the emergent problematization of critique in Foucault’s later works, and briefly in Latour and Boltanski. From this I move on to the ‘critical problematic’, that is, how critique operates as a form of power/knowledge, as a discourse that creates subjects through a critical regime of truth and critical truth-games. Specifically, I argue that critique (...) is a discourse which transforms and unmasks other ‘truth-claims’, replacing them with a starker vision of reality, which in the end is also a specific cultural vision. To elaborate this view, I return to Foucault’s discussion of Kant, his late lectures on Cynicism and also on ordo-liberalism. The wider circulation of critical discourses is demonstrated through an analysis of ‘cool’ or critical consumerism. In conclusion, the relationship between critique, crisis and modernity is considered. (shrink)

One of the main influences on Judith Butler‘s thinking has been the work of Michel Foucault. Although this relationship is often commented on, it is rarely discussed in any detail. My thesis makes a contribution in this area. It presents an analysis of Foucault‘s work with the aim of countering Butler‘s representation of his thinking. In the first part of the thesis, I show how Butler initially interprets Foucault‘s project through Nietzschean genealogy, psychoanalysis and Derridean discourse, and how she later (...) develops this interpretation in line with the progress of her own project. In the main part of the thesis, I present an analysis of Foucault‘s thinking in the period from The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) to The History of Sexuality volume 1 (1976). This analysis focuses on the aspect of his work which has most influenced Butler‘s thinking: namely the notion of a relationship between knowledge, discourse and power. The other issues in his work which Butler addresses—genealogy, the subject, the body, abnormality, and sexuality—are discussed within this framework. I show how, in the early 1970s, Foucault develops the notion of power-knowledge, and sets out a relationship between power-knowledge and discourse which is overlooked by Butler. I argue that Butler interprets Foucaultian power through the notions of repression and social norms, and ignores the concepts of technology and strategy which form a key part of Foucault‘s thinking. I show how, from The Archaeology of Knowledge on, Foucault develops a socio-historical ontology and a genealogy of the subject, both of which are at variance with Butler‘s interpretation of his thinking. (shrink)

This article argues that the modern world is not only produced by, and is promoting, processes of rationalization and disenchantment, but is also the site of `enchanting' influences that are genuinely `charming' or `magical'. Such modes of influencing rely increasingly on the power of images, and on theatre-like performances of words or discourses. The impact takes place under conditions that, following Victor Turner's work, could be called `liminal', and which can be turned through `imagemagic' into a state of `permanent liminality'. (...) A path-breaking analysis of such influences can be found in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, written at a highly liminal moment in European history, the end of the Renaissance and the unfolding of the Reformation. It is argued that the central problem of the play is the source of the power that motivates, from the inside, human beings. Shakespeare attributes this power to images through which human beings can be incited to act, in particular to fall in love, and assigns a decisive role in the manipulation of such images to the Trickster figure of folk-tales and myths. Such image-magic makes its victims believe that they gained enlightenment, maturing to reason, exactly when succumbing to its influence; while its lasting impact is the confusion of the senses, or the power to distinguish and discriminate. (shrink)

Max Weber famously diagnosed both an excess and a subordination of meaning in modernity when he coined the term disenchantment next to the fragmentation and irreconcilability of value spheres. Unlike Weber, however, who sought to keep the ideological and the rationalist sides of the modern divide together, his immediate followers capitalized either on his decisionism (i.e. Carl Schmitt) or on his universalism (i.e. Jürgen Habermas). In an attempt to develop a constructive perspective on the question of how we can conceive (...) of irreconcilable values within a larger normative horizon, this article introduces Karl Jaspers’s interpretation and refinement of Weber’s work. Most fundamentally, Jaspers’s existentialist philosophy of communication sought to turn Weber’s warring gods into a source of solidarity rather than divisiveness. I argue that Jaspers did so in rooting human freedom not in the decision or the law but in an experiential uncertainty and the knowledge not to know. The article closes with a discussion of some practical and theoretical implications of Jaspers’s thought for our understanding of diversity in unity in post-truth times. (shrink)

Elias and Foucault ended up making the same core discovery about the same fundamental social process, which we term the ‘social constraints towards self-discipline’ process. We show how three distinct biographical and intellectual factors were important in guiding them toward this discovery: (1) their shared exposure to philosophical traditions associated with Heidegger’s break from Husserl; (2) their common, sustained contact with ‘clinical’ practices; and (3) the traumatic events each experienced in relation to intentional injury and death.

This article examines the recent work of the sociologist Arpad Szakolczai as he attempts to conceptualize the programme of ‘reflexive historical sociology’ in the ‘life-works’ of Max Weber, Eric Voegelin and Michel Foucault as well as Norbert Elias, Lewis Mumford and Franz Borkenau. Particular attention is paid to the innovative manner in which the work of the anthropologist Victor Turner is used to explore the biographies of these social theorists as in effect performative life-works in which crucial liminal periods and (...) experiences are seen as facilitating new understandings. It is suggested that the life-work approach to social theory adds an important reflexive dimension to the analysis of social thought. (shrink)

Los últimos cursos de M. Foucault en el Collège de France prestaron especial atención a la noción de parrhesía y su papel en la tragedia y la filosofía griega para revisar los tratamientos sobre el poder y la verdad. Dichos desarrollos pueden ser teóricamente enriquecidos con el estudio de la figura de Alcibíades y su tematización en el entorno del círculo socrático. Este horizonte mostrará la potencia de sugerencias de Foucault poco atendidas que señalan el camino de investigaciones pendientes e (...) iluminan a la vez la antigüedad y la filosofía contemporánea. (shrink)