11 - Foucault, feminism, and questions of identity

Summary

Each of my works is part of my own biography.

The main interest in life is to become someone else that you were not at the beginning. . . . The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end.

- Michel Foucault

A movement for change lives in feelings, actions and words. Whatever circumscribes or mutilates our feelings makes it more difficult to act, keeps our actions reactive, repetitive: abstract thinking, narrow tribal loyalties, every kind of self-righteousness, the arrogance of believing ourselves at the center. It's hard to look back on the limits of my understanding a year, five years ago - how did I look without seeing, hear without listening? It can be difficult to be generous to earlier selves, and keeping in faith with the continuity of our journeys is especially hard in the United States, where identities and loyalties have been shed and replaced without a tremor, all in the name of becoming American. Yet how, except through ourselves, do we discover what moves other people to change! Our old fears and denials — what helps us let go of them? What makes us decide we have to reeducate ourselves, even those of us with "good" educations? A politicized life ought to sharpen both the senses and the memory.

To many of his readers, Foucault's preoccupations with subjectivity and practices of the self in his later writings have been puzzling and disappointing – even embarrassing. His turn toward an esthetics of the self appeared on the surface to fly in the face of his earlier proclamation of the death of man and his anti-authoritarian predilections for anonymous authorship. Moreover, it seemed to mark a retreat into the self and away from the more politically engaged texts such as Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Vol. I. Had Foucault, the notorious “post-humanist” critic, recanted? This very question manifests a now outmoded concern for coherence and continuity – in short, for identity – in an author's work and life. Yet, if we are to take Foucault at his word, each of his works can be understood as “part of [his] own biography.”