The return of the subject in michel Foucault

American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 76, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 255-280

  Devos, Rob ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LEUVEN   (Belgium)

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EID: 84880536493     PISSN: 10513558     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/acpq20027623     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences (London: Travistock, 1970), 386-7;
2. Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 398.
3. M. Foucault, Dits et écrits (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), vol. 1, 514-5. Translations from Dits et écrits are my own.
4. M. Foucault, "The Subject and Power", in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 208-26, at 209. In a conversation with Duccio Trombadori, dating back to 1978, Foucault still reconstructed his whole oeuvre in terms of the power issue: "My real leitmotiv was the problem of power⋯ Basically I did nothing else than write a history of power"
5. (Dits et écrits, vol. 4, 82).
6. "The Subject and Power", 208.
7. Here, Foucault rather uncritically adopts Nietzsche's genealogy of the modern soul (see Genealogy of Morals, II).
8. M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 200;
9. Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 202.
10. Foucault himself comes across this problem in a text by Leuret from 1848: Du traitement moral de la folie. After a first shower with cold water, the patient confesses: "I am mad, but I confess because I'm forced to do so." After a second treatment he confesses without any qualification. Not until the patient identifies himself with his confession and experiences his sentence as truth-telling, can healing occur
11. See his study on Cassian of 1982: "The Battle for Chastity", in M. Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and other Writings 1977-1984 (London: Routledge, 1988), 227-41.
12. In "The Subject and Power" Foucault typologically opposes pastoral power to political and judicial forms of power. In "Omnes et singulatim" he researches the origins of pastoral power in the Egyptians, the Assyrians, and the Jews and focuses on differences with the Greeks. See "Omnes et singulatim: Towards a Criticism of Political Reason", in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 2, ed. S. McMurrin (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1981), 223-54.
13. M. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 4;
14. Histoire de la sexualité, vol. 2: L'usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 10.
15. The Use of Pleasure, 5.
16. M. Foucault, "Sexuality and Solitude", London Review of Books 3(1981):3-6, at 5.
17. "Die Macht und die Norm", in M. Foucault, Mikrophysik der Macht. Über Strafjustiz, Psychiatrie und Medizin (Berlin: Merve, 1976), 114-23, at 117 (my trans.).
18. Foucault refers to the political interpretation of crime by the adherents of Charles Fourier in La Phalange as "a happy expression of the untamable human nature", a natural strength that rejects the regulations, rebellious energy, a "spectacular protest of human individuality." Crime is both a result of civilization and protest against it. Major crimes are not interpreted as bestialities, but as the fatal rebellion of the oppressed, and minor infringements as a rumbling from the midst of the battlefield (see Discipline and Punish, 290).
19. See Dits et écrits, vol. 3, 793.
20. Foucault had prepared a first version of a study on techniques of the self in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation era. See "On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress", in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1986), 340-72, at 342.
21. "On the Genealogy of Ethics", 343.
22. "The Return of Morality", in M. Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, 242-54, at 244.
23. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, no. 290: "One thing is needful-To 'give style' to one's character." Foucault refers to this text in a conversation with Dreyfus and Rabinow in 1984: "On the Genealogy of Ethics", 351.
24. See M. Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment?" in The Foucault Reader, 32-50.
25. M. Foucault, "Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution", Economy and Society 1(1986):88-96, at 95.
26. This seems an implicit referral and criticism of Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, or of Habermas, "Modernity: An Unfinished Project."
27. M. Foucault, "The Political Technology of Individuals", in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. P. H. Hotton, H. Gutman, and L. H. Martin (Armherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts, 1988), 145-162.
28. "Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution", 90.
29. "What Is Enlightenment?" 39.
30. (see "The Political Technology of Individuals", 146).
31. Ch. Baudelaire, "On the Heroism of Modern Life", in Charles Baudelaire, The Mirror of Art (London: Phaidon, 1955), 127.
32. See Ch. Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (London: Phaidon, 1964), 13.
33. Dits et écrits, vol. 4, 41, 44.
34. "The Concern for Truth", 265.
35. Foucault warns: anyone who wants to avoid Hegel should take care not to fall inadvertently into the pitfalls of Hegelianism (see The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language [New York: Vintage Books, 1979], 235).
36. In a conversation with C. Bonnefoy from 1966 Foucault says about Sartre: "The Critique de la raison dialectique is the most brilliant and pathetical effort of a nineteenth-century man to think the man of the twentieth century. In this sense Sartre is the last Hegelian and I even maintain: the last Marxist" (Dits et écrits, vol. 1, 542-3).
37. See "Sexuality and Solitude", 3.
38. See The Order of Things, xv.
39. See Dits et écrits, vol. 1, 518-39.