15 - Michel Foucault: an ethical politics of care of self and others

Summary

The name Michel Foucault seems to be inseparable from a discussion of power, that preeminent political concept. Politics, the political, permeates almost everything that Foucault wrote, just as it was a focal point of his life. One seminal feature of the Foucauldian way, we believe, was his juxtaposition of ethics and politics. Indeed, as he sought to weave the several strands of his thinking together 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. For us, 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. Finally, we contend that it was an adumbration of an ethical politics of care of self and others that Foucault was engaged in at the time of his death in 1984.

Foucault is known for his rejection of the originary, foundational, ahistorical subject, which has shaped the Western metaphysical tradition from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Hegel. Foucault's “subjects” – discussion about them and their genealogies 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, the criteria for establishing what Foucault terms the forms of “veridiction.” What these apparatuses and discourses, as well as the different modes of subjectivity that they produce, share is their historicity.