Beyond good and evil: The Ethical Sensibility of Michel Foucault

Political Theory

Volumn 21, Issue 3, 1993, Pages 365-389

  Connolly, William E ^a  

^a JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 29144501554     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: 15527476     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591793021003002     Document Type: Article

References (20)

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), 83.
2. James Miller, “The Politics of Limits” (paper delivered at the 1991 convention of the American Political Science Association, September 1-4, Washington, DC), para. 13.
3. Michel Foucault, “Revolutionary Action: ‘Until Now,’ “ in Donald Bouchard, ed. Michel Foucault: Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), 226.
4. Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of life,” in Foucault Live, edited by Sylvere Lotringer and translated by John Johnston (New York: Semiotexte, 1989), 208.
5. In these comparisons I take Charles Taylor to represent the “teleological” model. His version of it, I think, brings out effectively assumptions implicit in the other formulations. He might resist the title I have bestowed on him, but the language through which his morality is couched is very teleological by comparison to the Nietzschean/Foucauldian sensibility defended here. Those are the only terms of comparison that interest me at the moment. See Charles Taylor, Philosophical Papers, vols. 1-2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
6. “But, in the end, I've become rather irritated by an attitude, which for a long time was mine, too, and which I no longer subscribe to, which consists in saying: Our problem is to denounce and to criticize; let them get on with their legislation and their reforms. That doesn't seem to me the right attitude.” Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed. Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Routledge, 1988), 209.
7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), #103, p. 104. Alan White gives an excellent reading of this formulation in Within Nietzsche's Labyrinth (New York: Routledge, 1990).
8. Nietzsche, W//to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968),#995.
9. Narcissus loved not himself but his image in the pond. The transcendental narcissist loves the image of itself that it projects into a transcendental command or direction.
10. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), #290, p. 233.
11. Pierre Hadot, “Reflections on the notion of ‘the cultivation of the self,’ “ in Timothy J. Armstrong, ed. and trans. Michel Foucault: Philosopher (New York: Routledge, 1992), 229.
12. Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” in Michael Shapiro, ed. Language and Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 125-27, emphases added. I find the second half of the last sentence to be more credible than the first. The first might suggest that the level of violence is the same in all instances and hence that it is always impossible to curtail violence.
13. See “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 381-89.
14. Foucault, “An Ethics of Pleasure,” in Foucault Live, edited by Sylvere Lotringer and translated by John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 267.
15. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, #212, p. 137.
16. Foucault, “Politics and Ethics: An Interview,” in Paul Rabinow, ed. The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 379. Foucault refuses the language of “regulative ideal” in pointing out his own double relation to consensus.
17. Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher,” in Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed. Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture (New York: Routledge, 1984), 328.
18. These dimensions are developed more fully in Connolly, Identity\Difference, especially the last two chapters, and “Democracy and Territoriality, Millenium” December (1991): 463-84.
19. Quoted in Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, translated by Betsy Wing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 279. Thomas Keenan, in “The ‘Paradox’ of Knowledge and Power,” Political Theory (February, 1987), discusses this statement thoughtfully and extensively.
20. ‘The Church has at all times desired the destruction of its enemies: We, we imoralists and anti-Christians, see that is to our advantage that the church exists… In politics, too, enmity has become much more spiritual-much more prudent, much more thoughtful, much more forbearing…. We adopt the same attitude toward the ‘enemy within’: There too we have spiritualized enmity, there too we have grasped its value” Nietzsche, Twilight of the idols, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1968), under “Morality as Anti-Nature,” 43-44.