The anti-subjective hypothesis: Michel Foucault and the death of the subject

Philosophical Forum

Volumn 31, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 113-130

  Allen, Amy ^a  

^a DARTMOUTH COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 35548994441     PISSN: 0031806X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0031-806X.00031     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. Michel Foucault, "The Minimalist Self," in Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 9.
2. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 12.
3. See Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), chaps. 9, 10;
4. Axel Honneth, The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory, trans. Kenneth Baynes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), chaps. 4-6;
5. Thomas McCarthy, "The Critique of Impure Reason: Foucault and the Frankfurt School," in McCarthy, Ideals and Illusions: On Deconstruction and Reconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991);
6. Michael Walzer, "The Politics of Michel Foucault," in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Hoy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986);
7. Charles Taylor, "Foucault on Freedom and Truth," in Foucault, ed. Hoy;
8. Nancy Hartsock, "Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?" in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990);
9. and Linda Alcoff, "Feminist Politics and Foucault: The Limits to a Collaboration," in Crises in Continental Philosophy, ed. Arlene Dallery and Charles Scott (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1990).
10. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1970), 387.
11. Honneth, Critique of Power, 112.
12. McCarthy, "The Critique of Impure Reason," 59.
13. Alcoff, "Feminist Politics and Foucault," 71.
14. On this point, see McCarthy, "The Critique of Impure Reason," 56-58,
15. For example, see Foucault, "Power and Sex," in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, 122.
16. Alcoff, "Feminist Politics and Foucault," 76.
17. Hartsock, "Foucault on Power," 163.
18. On this point, see also William Connolly, "Taylor, Foucault, and Otherness," Political Theory, 13 (1985): 365-76.
19. Foucault is not claiming here that the subject literally invents itself (for clearly this would presuppose a subject who is doing the inventing); instead, he claims that the subject defines itself in terms of "patterns that he finds in his culture and which are proposed, suggested and imposed on him by his culture, his society, and his social group." Foucault, "The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom," in The Final Foucault, ed. lames Bernauer and David Rasmussen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 11.
20. On this point, see James Johnson, "Communication, Criticism, and the Postmodern Consensus: An Unfashionable Interpretation of Michel Foucault," Political Theory. 25 (1997): 578, n. 20.
21. Richard Bernstein, The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/ Postmodernity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 154.
22. For variations of this argument, see Jana Sawicki, "Foucault, Feminism, and Questions of Identity," in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. 1994);
23. Thomas Flynn, "Truth and Subjectivation in the Later Foucault," Journal of Philosophy, 82 (1985): 531-40;
24. and Lois McNay, Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender, and the Self (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992).
25. Flynn, "Truth and Subjectivation in the Later Foucault," 538.
26. For this argument, see Peter Dews, "The Return of the Subject in Late Foucault," Radical Philosophy, 51 (1989): 37-41. Bernstein acknowledges this problem as well, when he notes that Foucault's notion of ethics "presupposes the notion of an ethical or moral agent that can be free and that can 'master' itself. But Foucault not only fails to explicate this sense of agency, his genealogical analyses seem effectively to undermine any talk of agency which is not a precipitate of power/knowledge regimes" (Bernstein, The New Constellation, 164).
27. Foucault, "Afterword: The Subject and Power," in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 208.
28. Foucault, "Two Lectures," in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 98.
29. Foucault, "Truth and Power," in Power/Knowledge, 117.
30. See, for example, Alcoff's reading of this passage in "Feminist Politics and Foucault," 71.
31. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 16.
32. Foucault, The Order of Things, xiii.
33. Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?" in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984). 118.
34. See also Foucault, The Order of Things, xiv.
35. Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment?" in The Foucault Reader, 45-46.
36. Ian Hacking, "Self-Improvement," in Foucault, ed. Hoy, 238.
37. Derrida makes a similar sort of claim about Foucault in an interview with Jean-Luc Nancy: "we would appear to have a history of subjectivity that, in spite of certain massive declarations of the effacement of the figure of man, certainly never consisted in 'liquidating' the Subject" (quoted in Peter Dews, "The Truth of the Subject," in Deconstructive Subjectivities, ed. Peter Dews and Simon Critchley (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1996), 149.)
38. Mario Moussa, "Foucault and the Problem of Agency: Or, Toward a Practical Philosophy," in Ethics and Danger: Essays on Heidegger and Continental Thought, ed. Arleen Dallery and Charles Scott (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press. 1992).
39. Foucault, "Afterword," in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 209.
40. For this account, see Jürgen Habermas, "Individuation through Socialization: On George Herbert Mead's Theory of Subjectivity," in Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).
41. Nancy Fraser, "False Antitheses: A Response to Seyla Benhabib and Judith Butler," in Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1995), 67.