Within recent scholarship, a long-standing tendency to view Foucault as pessimistic about the possibilities of activism is now being reversed. For many contemporary commentators who emphasize the themes of personal agency, transgression and radical freedom in their assessment of his thought, Foucault offers new possibilities for political practice and for the pursuit of self-determination. However, an examination of Foucault’s work, particularly in the transitional period preceding his so-called ‘ethical’ writings, indicates his appreciation of basic human needs and functions that complicates (...) the current understanding of Foucault as a philosopher of freedom. Particularly in his discussions of the ideas of ‘desubjectivation’ and ‘limit-experience’, Foucault’s work recognizes that prior conditions of psychological, economic and social ‘well-being’ are prerequisites for any subsequent performance of freedom. Examining this dimension of Foucault’s work reveals interesting points of convergence between his thought and the capabilities approach advocated by philosophers such as Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Like them, Foucault’s work recognizes that there are some minimal levels of human functioning below which talk of self-determination is misplaced. As such, political philosophy needs to be concerned with the grounds of personal and political obligation, no less than the limits and possibilities of freedom. (shrink)

Several critics of Foucault, notably Alan Megill and Jürgen Habermas, accuse Foucault of being an ‘aestheticist’. As such, Foucault fails to realise that the very appeal to aesthetics is made possible by modernity's rationalization, which offers better resources for emancipation than dangerous aestheticizations. This paper argues that such criticisms mistakenly deploy only certain modernist notions of aesthetics against Foucault. There are some fair grounds for holding that Foucault does appeal to such conceptions of aesthetics in his theorization of transgression, not (...) least because of his interest in modernist, avant‐garde writers and artists such as Roussel and Magritte. Yet, overall, Foucault's interest in avant‐garde aesthetics is not modernist in the sense understood by his critics. Foucault tends to focus on modernist illustration of the absence of foundations for representation and language, adopting a paraesthetic angle of critique. The limiting conditions that make representation possible can be seen in this light as both contingent yet necessary. Foucault's model of critique is developed in his early analyses of avant‐garde art and then expanded to cover subjectivity and the aesthetics of existence in his later philosophical critical ethos of modernity. Foucault uses avant‐garde art as a critical mode of reflection, to analyse and rethink the limits of the present. (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)