Freedom, Responsibility, and the ‘American Foucault’

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 30, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 115-126

  Fillion, Réal ^a  

^a Universite of Sudbury   (Canada)

Author keywords

accountability; critique; Foucault; freedom; genealogy; responsibility; theory

Indexed keywords

EID: 33144469663     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: 1461734X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453704039400     Document Type: Article

References (34)

1. Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 193ff.
2. A recent example of how difficult it is to resist this constant reference to Foucault ‘the thinker’ can be seen in Mark Bevir's ‘Foucault and Critique: Deploying Agency against Autonomy’, Political Theory 27(1) (February, 1999): 65–84. The author makes the important and useful point that Foucault's rejection of autonomy (ascribed to a subject considered independently of its context) does not entail a rejection of the notion of agency. However, the author feels the need to underline this point by calling the Foucault who merely rejects autonomy a ‘composed’ Foucault as opposed to an ‘excitable’ Foucault who would also reject agency.
3. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), p. vii.
4. Linda Alcoff, ‘Expert Discourses of Critique: Foucault as Power/Knowledge’, in Reinterpreting the Political: Continental Philosophy and Political Theory, ed. L. Langsdorf, S. H. Watson and K. Smith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), p. 307.
5. Ewald and Defert, Présentation, p. viii.
6. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F. G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), p. 276.
7. For a very penetrating and sustained reading of fundamental ambiguities in Foucault's work that essentially does the hard work that Habermas does not do, cf. Rudy Visker, Genealogy as Critique (London: Verso, 1995).
8. Ethics, ed. Rabinow, p. xviii.
9. From Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and Power’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 131.
10. Ethics, ed. Rabinow, p. xxxiv.
11. Scott Lash, ‘Genealogy and the Body: Foucault/Deleuze/Nietzsche’, in Barry Smart (ed.) Michel Foucault: Critical Assessments, Vol. III (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 28.
12. Ethics, ed. Rabinow, p. xxvi.
13. Charles Taylor, ‘Foucault on Freedom and Truth’, Political Theory 12 (1984): 152–83.
14. Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 115.
15. Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), p. 54, p. 55.
16. Karlis Racevskis, Michel Foucault and the Subversion of Intellect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 166.
17. Todd May, Between Genealogy and Epistemology: Psychology, Politics, and Knowledge in the Thought of Michel Foucault (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), p. 118.
18. W. E. Connolly's extension of Foucault's insights in this regard is especially illuminating, cf. The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. xv, where he develops the idea that intellectual work can ‘strive to cultivate an ethos of critical responsiveness to political movements that challenge the self-confidence and congealed judgments of dominant constituencies’.
19. May, Between Genealogy and Epistemology, p. 118.
20. I am thinking of the comment with which Dreyfus and Rabinow end their influential commentary on Foucault, specifically, the first line of the last paragraph of their Afterword: ‘It might seem that if Foucault wants to give up one set of dangers for another, he owes us a criterion of what makes one kind of danger more dangerous than another.’ Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 264. What I am suggesting in this paper is that such a demand is not as reasonable as it appears. Intellectual work, like any other form of human activity, is constitutively fraught with dangers. There are no guarantees.
21. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 284.
22. May, Between Genealogy and Epistemology, p. 118. Another recent example of such a critique of Habermas can be found in Christopher Falzon who writes: ‘Habermas’ Kantian conception of the ideal dialogue, with its emphasis on the establishment of universal norms, and its hostility to that which is partial and other, clearly contains the possibility of assisting in the establishment of a new regime of totalising domination, a domination which suppresses otherness and resistance.'
23. Falzon, Foucault and Social Dialogue: Beyond Fragmentation (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 87.
24. May, Between Genealogy and Epistemology, p. 119
25. Gilles Deleuze's appreciation of Foucault's oeuvre also stresses this dimension. For Deleuze, Foucault is an archivist and a cartographer, someone who laid bare and mapped out those ‘things said’ that he conceptualized as énoncés, because he recognized that ‘only statements (énoncés) are determining and revelatory, even though they reveal something other than what they say’; Foucault, p. 67, 54).
26. May, Between Genealogy and Epistemology, p. 119, p. 120.
27. Michael Dillon also develops this connection between freedom and responsibility as ‘response-ability’ in his discussion of the radical hermeneutical phenomenology of Heidegger. Here too there is a focus on the creative space of freedom: ‘Mortal being, anywhere, at any time, displays a certain kind of heroism … when it stands-up in the everyday circumstances in which it finds itself, and seeks to recover for its time its very own free potentiality-for-being. And this I take to be the political moment par excellence; resolute determination, in the face of and on behalf of obligatory human freedom, continuously to discover appropriate ways of remaining responsible or open to (quite literally of continually discharging our responseability for) that freedom. This rare thing nonetheless arises daily in the manifold doings of human beings in all parts of their worlds.’ Dillon, Politics of Security (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 59.
28. Lawrence Hass also draws a parallel between Foucault and Heidegger in terms of understanding freedom (and for Foucault, power) as ‘our “being situated” in a “field” of open possibilities and with others’, in ‘Beheading the King: Foucault and the Limits of Juridical Thought’, in Reinterpreting the Political, p. 243.
29. Thomas L. Dumm, Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), p. 77. I take people like May, Dumm and Connolly to be the most talented contributors to what I have been calling the construction and maintenance of the ‘American Foucault’.
30. David Couzens Hoy and Thomas McCarthy, Critical Theory (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994), p. 259.
31. Michel Foucault, ‘Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations: an Interview’, in Foucault Reader, ed. P. Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 385;
32. quoted in Hoy and McCarthy, Critical Theory, p. 258.
33. Or of a rationality set within the terms fixed by what Connolly calls ‘the ontopolitical matrix of Anglo-American discourse in the late-modern time’. See The Ethos of Pluralization, p. 16. For a discussion of this matrix, and more generally of the ‘ontopolitical’, see the first chapter (called ‘Nothing is Fundamental’) in The Ethos of Pluralization.
34. Jon Simons concludes his book on Foucault ‘with a discussion of how Foucault's political thought contributes to a radical transformation of liberal democratic theory’. Simons, Foucault and the Political (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 116ff.