by
Zachary Fouchard
Bachelor in Ethics
April 2008
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Table of Contents.............................................................................................2
Introduction......................................................................................................3
Truth.................................................................................................................7
Archaeology and the Order of Things..........................................................7
Historical Systems of Thought and Regimes of Truth...............................13
Man and the Human Sciences....................................................................18
Power.............................................................................................................26
Genealogy and the Subjugation of Knowledge.........................................26
Power, Knowledge, and the Sciences of the Individual.............................32
The Question of the Human Subject..........................................................38
Bibliography..................................................................................................45
2
INTRODUCTION
1
Michel Foucault, “Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault, October
25, 1982,” in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. L.H.
Martin, H. Gutman and P.H. Hutton (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1988).
3
The main interest of this essay is to present the life and
work of Michel Foucault – whether or not literary,
philosophical, or intellectual – from its beginnings in
psychiatry, medicine, and a critical analysis of the human
sciences, through its development in the history and critique
of juridical and penal institutions, to arrive at Foucault’s “turn
towards subjectivity” (Cook 1993, 121) and the impulse his
thought takes towards ethics. It shall therefore be posited that
three incremental breaks map the development of Foucault’s
thought; of his oeuvre. First, from Foucault’s work in the 1960s
leading up to the publication of Madness and Civilization
(1961), The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The Order of Things
(1966), there is the project of an “archaeology of knowledge”
within which the idea of truth is analysed in terms of historical
systems of knowledge. This first chapter retraces in the
oeuvre of Foucault the human experience of “the order of
things” and posits a set of historical conditions for the
possibilities of objective human knowledge and scientific
discourse. Here, the development of history as a
discontinuous and fragmentary archaeology of knowledge
represents an investigation into the objectivity and truth value
of systematically ordered discourse, and is therefore
concerned with the rules of formation for the production of
statements understood within society as “valid” and
“scientific,” which Foucault uses to map the radically
anthropological limits of human knowledge grounding our
modern understanding of ourselves in the notion of “man.”
4
Then, Foucault’s work shifts away from its archaeological
tendencies towards a genealogical methodology akin to the
work of Friedrich Nietzsche, with the publication of Discipline
and Punish (1975) and the appearance of the first volume to
The History of Sexuality (1976). This second chapter engages
within the oeuvre of Foucault the critical vulnerability of
things, institutions, practices and discourses, which most
intimately characterize our individual selves, our bodies, and
on everyday behaviour. A “genealogy of power” is therefore
developed out of these studies, where Foucault reproduces a
body of subjugated knowledge, of historical struggles, and of
the force of power relations. And in returning to themes
treated previously within the archaeological chapter – namely
that of man as the object of the human sciences –, Foucault
outlines the modern “technologies of the self”, where the
production of truth is governed by a coercion of power and the
question of the human subject emerges in the production of a
certain kind of moral agency.
5
ourselves that has become normative, self-evident, and has
been supposed as universal (Foucault 1988, 15). Thus,
beginning with an account of Foucault’s archaeological
method for the history of truth, on through an account of his
genealogical method for the historical coercion of the human
subject, this essay will ultimately lead up to a description of
Foucault’s ethics as an deep understanding of the various
ways in which the human self is defined as a historical product
of ethical “problematizations.” And in those areas where
developments and technologies of the self have determined
the morality of the human subject, three question emerge,
pertinent to the basic framework of Foucault’s intellectual
legacy:
6
Chapter 1
TRUTH
7
a certain period and analyzing them with regard to their many
different dimensions (philosophical, economic, scientific or
political, among others), in order to finally arrive at the
emergent conditions of discourse particular to the history of
objective knowledge and thought (Revel 2007, 13).
8
concerned with living beings, languages and economic facts –
are tinged with empirical thought, wrought with imagery and
metaphor. Their history, from the Renaissance to the present,
is supposed to be anything but regular (Foucault 1970, ix).
Yet, Foucault’s Archaeology of the Human Sciences challenges
this traditional hypothesis, in attempting to map the positive
unconscious common the natural history, economics and
grammar over the periods of the Renaissance, threw the
Classical Age, to the Modern Age. Says Foucault, albeit
unknown to the naturalists, the economists and the
grammarians of these periods, scientific knowledge pertaining
to “life, labour and language” operated under very similar
rules of restriction within each domain of definition of each
study’s objects of knowledge:
9
emergences (Revel 2007, 14). The emergent conditions of
discourse particular to the history of knowledge represent the
object and archē of Foucault’s archaeological projects – the
tabula upon which objective knowledge is authorized to
identify, classify and hypothesize (Foucault 1970, xxiii). The
epistemological conditions of knowledge represent the
coherence of epistemic objectivity. Yet, at the same time, such
conditions are “neither determined by an a priori and
necessary concatenation, nor imposed on us by immediately
perceptible contents”; they are a matter of groupings,
isolations and analyses of the contents of knowledge; a
matter of order (Foucault 1970, xix-xx). Knowledge, in this
respect, is understood as a “system of elements” – or, rather,
a systematization of various objects of knowledge. And
conversely, the emergent conditions for the very possibility of
knowledge are then understood as that which is indispensable
for the establishment of even the simplest “system of
elements.” In other words, the human capacity for knowledge
is dependent, in part, on the necessary connection shared
between knowledge and the possibility of a certain order
among things. In turn, Foucault’s archaeology endeavours to
outline the possibility of order, in its relation to knowledge, by
describing the conditions whereby such epistemological
ordering becomes manifest in time.
10
scenario brings to mind the philosophy of Heidegger and the
relation of Dasein to Being. Or is it the case that ‘order’ is
simply a construct of human knowledge in its search to
articulate reality in terms of the contents of the human mind?
This scenario brings to mind the philosophy of Nietzsche, in its
nihilistic tendencies. Foucault, of course, bypasses this
dilemma and proposes an intermediary solution that more
succinctly exemplifies the archaeological propensity towards a
certain experience of order:
Order is, at one and the same time, that which is given
in things as their inner law, the hidden network that
determines the way they confront one another, and
also that which has no existence except in the grid
created by a glance, an examination, a language
(Foucault 1970, xx).
11
hierarchy of practices” (Foucault 1970, xx). On the other
hand, there are also scientific theories and philosophical
interpretations, which explain “why order exists in general,
what universal law it obeys, what principle can account for it,
and why this particular order has been established and not
some other” (Foucault 1970, xx). Foucault’s archaeology is
thus able to articulate the experience of order at two distinct
levels; the practical and the theoretical. Its main objective,
however, – the archē of order – is that domain which hides
imperceptibly between these two regions, the intermediary
domain of the empirical and the rational: that by which things
are, in themselves, capable of being ordered; that which
belongs to a certain unspoken order; the order of order; “the
fact, in short, that order exists” (Foucault 1970, xx). It is in this
middle region that order appears anterior to words,
perceptions and gestures, but at the same time according to a
given culture and historical period as more or less exact and
more or less “true”:
12
of universal laws or meta-philosophical systems for the
interpretation the order of things. The archaeological analysis
of the “modes of being” of order lay no claim to atemporal or
transhistorical essences, but rather situates such modes of
being in their contingent, historical manifestations as
fundamental experiences of the practical and theoretical poles
of knowledge (Sabot 2006, 15). Its attempt is one of bringing
to light the “epistemological field” within which knowledge,
distanced from its rational value and objective form, is
grounded in a “positivity” which is not its history of growing
perfection, but rather its conditions of possibility (Foucault
1970, xxii).
13
which knowledge is grounded; against the description of
knowledge as the process of “an objectivity in which today’s
science can finally be recognized,” towards an analysis of the
epistemological field,
14
universal relation of causality (Foucault 1989, 13). And here,
Foucault’s periodization of historical events as levels of
discontinuity, as episteme, bear upon the analysis of history
as historical research into “systems of thought.” As he
explains in The Archaeology of Knowledge, the problem now
constitutes the proliferation of discontinuities at every and all
levels of historical events, so as “to define the elements
proper to each series, to fix its boundaries, to reveal its own
specific type of relations, to formulate its laws, and, beyond
this, to describe the relations between different series”
(Foucault 1972, 7-8).
15
“simultaneous functioning of these discourses and the
transformations which accounted for their historical changes”
(Foucault 1989, 29). The object of historical analysis therefore
becomes one of accounting for historical change through the
function of a given “system of thought” or episteme as that
which is “capable of uniting, within a given period, the
discursive practices which give rise to epistemological figures”
(Foucault 1972, 250).
16
by Foucault as “a system of ordered procedures for the
production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation
of statements” (Davidson 1986, 221; Foucault 1984, 74).
Thus, as much as a philosophical dimension of inquiry
motivates the intensity of Foucault’s historical analysis, that
which is understood as properly historical remains
nonetheless a philosophical problem. By and large, Foucault’s
historical concerns undertake a history of statements,
relations and ordered procedures that claim the status of
truth. And as a system of ordered discourse, truth is
methodologically isolated in discursive practices – practices
for the production of statements –, which Foucault
characterizes “by the delimitation of a field of objects, the
definition of a legitimate perspective for the agent of
knowledge, and the fixing of norms for the elaboration of
concepts and theories” (Foucault 1977b, 199).
17
Thus, where the objectivity and truth value of a body of
systematically ordered discourse is concerned, the rules of
formation and production of statements delimit the function of
objective knowledge and the transformations that account for
its process throughout history. In sum,
7
Michel Foucault, “The Archeology of Knowledge,” in Foucault Live:
Interviews 1966-84, trans. J. Johnston, ed. S. Lotringer (New York:
Semiotext, 1989), 45-56.
18
H]ow can it happen that real things, things that are
perceived, can come to be articulated by words within
a discourse. Is it that words impose on us the outline of
things, or it that things, through some operation of the
subject, come to be transcribed on the surface of
words (Foucault 1989, 51).
8
Gary Gutting, “Michel Foucault,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy. Stanford University.
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2003/entries/foucault/ (accessed
March 1st, 2008).
19
raises the explicit question of whether or not ideas of the
mind do, in fact, “represent” objects in the world. Taken as
somewhat of the crux of Foucault’s archaeological period, the
order of knowledge belonging to the Classical age – that early
modern period beginning with Descartes and ending with Kant
– was abruptly shifted at the end of the eighteenth century
with Kant’s critique of Classical representation. For during the
Classical age, the complex question of human knowledge was
grounded in a philosophy of representation; to think was to
employ ideas in their representation of object of thought
(Gutting 2003). The representation of objects in seventeenth
and eighteenth century science in no way concerned itself
with the scientist’s own role in the process of representation –
it was simply assumed that objects could be represented in
human language (Cook 1993, 54).
20
understanding the idea of representation outside the
epistemological paradigm of representation itself. For
Foucault, Kant’s critical philosophy clearly outlined this self-
referential characteristic of Classical representation, which led
to important and distinctively modern philosophical systems
of knowledge. Kant himself developed the notion that
representations were a product of the mind and the
transcendental dimension of human subjectivity, thus
maintaining the Classical insistence that knowledge was
neither a physical or historical reality, but nonetheless
locating the grounds of knowledge in a novel domain – the
transcendental – more fundamental than the ideas it enclosed
(Gutting 2003). Others posited a radical historicity to the
grounds of knowledge and representation, developing, as for
instance in Herder, the historical reality of ideas in terms of
their essential tie to language. For Foucault, this linguistic
approach to the reality of ideas, in conjunction with Kant’s
transcendental approach, inaugurated a break within late
Western culture, in which representation loses “the power to
provide a foundation…for the links that can join its various
elements together”: the epistemological condition for these
links resided henceforth “outside representation, beyond its
immediate visibility, in a sort of behind-the-scenes world even
deeper and more dense than representation itself” (Foucault
1970, 238-9). And at the archaeological level, an epistemic
“system of positivity” – a particular condition of the possibility
of objective knowledge – reveals a certain “mode of being” of
human knowledge in which the order of things was divided up
21
and presented to the understanding (Foucault 1970, xxii).
22
supposed by the naïve to be the oldest investigation since
Socrates – is probably no more than a kind of rift in the order
of things” (Foucault 1970 xxiii); as a product of certain
conditions that govern the objectivity of knowledge, “he is a
quite recent creature, which the demiurge of knowledge
fabricated with its own hands less than two hundred years
ago” (Foucault 1970, 308). The discursive event inaugurating
the Modern age, characterized primarily by the emergence of
a radical historicity within the objectivity of knowledge, sees
the abandonment of the space of representation within which
words take up their place in the specific depths of language
(Foucault 1970, 345). And at that, the sciences exemplifying
nineteenth century knowledge – biology, economics, and
philology – begin to study the internal laws of life, labour, and
language which make objective knowledge of these objects
possible.
23
“the condition for the possibility of all knowledge about man
and the object of that knowledge” (Cook 1993, 55); “he
became, a fortiori, that which justified the calling into question
of all knowledge of man” (Foucault 1970, 345). In turn, this
conditioning of man as both ground and object of knowledge
brought about a set of anthropological and historical concerns
that remain today, late in the Modern age. For when
knowledge acquired the general character of being a
knowledge of man, there arose the modern controversy
between the natural sciences and the sciences of man, as well
as the controversy between philosophy and the human
sciences. In a first instance, the conditioning of the ground of
knowledge as anthropological – as based in man – forces the
natural sciences of mathematics and physics to question,
reformulate and justify the ground of their methods in a
similarly anthropological fashion – “in the teeth of
‘psychologism’, ‘sociologism’ and ‘historicism’,” as Foucault
describes it (1970, 345-6). And in a second instance, the
hostility on behalf of philosophy towards what Foucault
describes as “the naïveté with which the human sciences try
to provide their own foundation” protests the use – and more
to the point, the misuse – of man as that object formerly
constituted within the domain of philosophy (1970, 346).
24
sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century European
culture affecting the knowledge of things and their order – the
discursive practices emphatically located between language
and objective knowledge –, the emergence of a radically
historicised, anthropologically driven foundation for the
possibility of knowledge takes its place at the heart of the
Modern era, governing the epistemological conditions of the
human sciences. It is in this sense that man and his science,
the grounding representation of objective knowledge today, is
a no more than the product of certain epistemological
conditions, certain historical systems of thought and regimes
of truth. His appearance is no “transition into luminous
consciousness of an age-old concern” as much as his
historical entry into objectivity as a discursive event is
“something that had long remained trapped within beliefs and
philosophies” (Foucault 1970, 387). Man did not exist between
before the transparency of Classical representation was called
into question at the end of the eighteenth century. And as
Foucault famously concludes his piece The Order of Things:
25
Chapter 2
POWER
9
Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by A.
M. Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977); originally published under the
title Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (1975).
10
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, translated
by A. M. Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1978); originally published under
the title La volonté de savoir, Vol. 1 of Histoire de la sexualité (1976).
26
Foucault’s genealogy refuses to engage in the pursuit of
origins for, as explained above, such a pursuit presupposes
some idyllic initiation in the past which the present attempts
to recapture. In opposition to a “metaphysics of the return,”
the genealogical method makes a return to the past by
revealing strategic historical connections that have become
invisible with the passing of time instead of describing what
would amount to a kind of hermeneutics (Barker 1993, 65).
And in conjunction with Foucault’s archaeological method,
genealogy takes hold of discontinuity and dispersion,
improbable beginnings and accidental developments, in order
to “record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous
finality” (Foucault 1977b, 139). It therefore less a movement
away from an archaeology of the discursive as it is an
illumination of the non-discursive in its various arrays of
visibility, of novel connections and relations, and of revealed
and renewed objects placed in relation to each other
throughout the entire field (discursive and non-discursive) of
human thought. “Gray, meticulous, and patently
documentary” (1977b, 139), Foucault’s genealogy is a method
for the analysis of a history with no essential continuity or
unity; a history, in fact, which produced and induces certain
effects on the things it encompasses – developments,
accidents, coincidences, historical events placed in relation to
each other in particular ways (Barker 1993, 66). For it is using
the method of genealogy that Foucault argues for a function
of history hitherto concealed: history as a struggle for
domination.
27
Arguing for the critical vulnerability of things,
institutions, practices and discourses, Foucault’s
archaeological method discovered the fragility which grounds
“the very bedrock of existence” – in particular, “those aspects
of it that are most familiar, most solid and most intimately
related to our bodies and to our everyday behaviour” (1980,
80). This sense of instability within history – archaeologically
described as discontinuous, genealogically analyzed as
without teleological origin – had the effect of further inhibiting
recourse to global totalitarian theories within Foucault’s
thought. As Foucault himself outlined in two key lectures given
at the Collège de France in 197611, the reactionary effect that
the archaeological method and other similarly critical tools
have had on the local character of theoretical research
translates into “an autonomous, non centralised kind of
theoretical production” – a condition for both theoretical and
practical research which curtails, overthrows and caricaturizes
the singular truths and absolute unities determining those
historical developments posited as the traditional objects of
theoretical and practical analysis (1980, 80-1). What is meant
by local in this context is that differential mode of human
knowledge incapable of unanimity and absolute coherence, a
knowledge “which owes its force only to the harshness with
which it is opposed by everything surrounding it” (Foucault
1980, 82). Thus, the non-centralized and discontinuous
theorizing Foucault sees as the novel character of local
11
Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Power/Knowledge, transcribed by A.
Fontana and P. Pasquino, translated by K. Soper (New York: Pantheon,
1980), 78-108.
28
research is truly autonomous in the sense that its validity is
wholly free of the approval of pre-established systems of
thought and regimes of truth (1980, 81). And arising out of
this thematic is one of the grounding features constituting
Foucault’s later method of historical/philosophical analysis:
genealogy as witness to the insurrection of subjugated
knowledge.
29
thing from an empiricism or positivism in the ordinary sense of
these terms: it has nothing at all to do with the “opposition
between the abstract unity of theory and the concrete
multiplicity of facts”:
30
the nature of this power” (1980, 87) – the nature of historical
mutations and disruptions that are ignored by the functionalist
tradition of the history of knowledge and disqualified by the
systematizations and hierarchizations of human thought. An
investigation into the power of ordered discourse therefore
creates a “genealogical recoil,” in the sense of a falling back
onto the discontinuous structure of history and knowledge,
that forms a springing, self-overcoming movement whereby
the truth of historical knowledge is consigned to a discursive
order that can be critically interrogated (Scott 1990, 58-9).
Foucault’s genealogical project is, at this point, preoccupied
with a dramatic reversal of traditional discursive, epistemic
analysis. For the springing, self-overcoming movement of
genealogy produces within historical knowledge an inversion
of the docile nature of knowledge, bringing forth and exposing
“its latent nature and its brutality” (Foucault 1980, 95). It is
motivated by a need to show how, and in what ways, truth is
an instrument of domination in its relation to knowledge; how
truth is a power put into motion through relations of
domination. Therefore, contrary to the tendency to inscribe
knowledge into “the hierarchical order of power associated
with science,” genealogy endeavours to emancipate
knowledge from this subjugation, rendering it capable of
emancipation from “the coercion of theoretical, unitary, formal
and scientific discourse” (Foucault 1980, 85). Based on a
reactivation of local knowledge against the scientific
hierarchisation of knowledge and its intrinsic power to
dominate and subjugate. For where knowledge is a
31
fundamental device for the production of relations of
domination, a fundamental struggle emerges around terms of
meaning, unity, interpretation, and truth:
32
historical relation to truth – the relation of power to knowledge
in the production of epistemic discourse. The studies forming
Foucault’s genealogical period concern themselves therefore
with power and its formal delineation, on the one hand, but
also the production of truth this power transmits in
knowledge. Describing the genealogy of power, Foucault
elaborates:
33
power invests itself in institutions – where it “becomes
embodied in techniques and equips itself with instruments
and eventually even violent means of material intervention”
(1980, 96). Foucault is thus less concerned with power at the
individual level of intention or decision than with the
investment of its intention at the level of “effective practices”
– where power is advanced immediately and directly in its
object and field of application (1980, 97). On the one hand,
then, power is studied in its pervasiveness, not as a
phenomenon of an individual’s domination over another but of
subjugated knowledge employed and exercised in circulation
between individuals. Simultaneously positioned to undergo
and exercise this power, individuals are conceived as the
vehicles of power, not its points of application (Foucault 1980,
98). On the other hand, though, power is studied in its
infinitesimal mechanisms, each with their own history of
techniques and procedures, invested within more general
mechanisms and forms of domination (Foucault 1980, 99).
Foucault’s genealogical examination of the nature of power is
therefore directed towards “domination and the material
operators of power, towards forms of subjection and the
inflection and utilisations of their localised systems, and
towards strategic apparatuses” (1980, 102).
34
right – “whose principle of articulation is the social body and
the delegative status of each citizen” – as well as the
discourse of disciplinary power, whose purpose is to “assure
the cohesion of this same social body” (1980, 106). Moreover,
the genealogy of this social body and the discourses of public
right and disciplinary power are held at the same level as the
archaeology of the human sciences, within which man
emerges as the object of knowledge for a discourse claiming
scientific status (Foucault 1977a, 24). Foucault’s study then,
within Discipline and Punish, examines at the genealogical
level of criticism the insertion of man into the scientific
complex of social institutions from which power derives its
basis, its justifications, and its rules. More concretely, it is “a
genealogy of the present scientifico-legal complex from
which…power extends its effects and by which it masks its
exorbitant singularity”; and its aim is “to study the
metamorphosis of punitive methods…in which might be read
a common history of power relations and object relations”
(Foucault 1977a, 23-24).
35
productive, but also to be subjected to production (Foucault
1977a, 25-26). But at the same time, power exercised on the
body is not a property of the individual, but a force acted upon
it – the analyzable effects of domination are attributable to
dispositions, functionings, tactics, and techniques located at a
level where “power and knowledge directly imply one
another” (Foucault 1977a, 27). For where “power-knowledge
relations” are analysed on the basis of the individual as an
object of scientific discourse, historical transformation in
knowledge are at all times a function and modality of power.
The political economy of the body, then, as an analysis of the
“body politic” of the self, is elaborated as a set of techniques
through which the social body of society is divided into “cells”
of individual selves, made objects of power-knowledge.
36
body had achieved a power so subtle that the “signifying
elements of behaviour” and “language of the body” that
grounded the human sciences of the seventeenth century
were replaced outright by a political economy of the body
governing the efficiency of bodily movement and the internal
organization of bodily exercise at an infinitesimal level
(Foucault 1977a, 137).
37
work in genealogy leads back to themes previously
encountered in the archaeological period, in particular that of
the modern discourse of the human sciences and the fixation
of the individual self in the subject, man. For the scientific,
calculated, technical domination of human behaviour is not
the product of an advancement in the rationality of the
sciences of man, but a complexification of scientific discourse
at the level of the relationship shared between power and
knowledge: the mechanics of coercive forces present within
the human sciences take on a novel, disciplinary form,
situating man, the modern object of scientific knowledge, in a
complex web of disciplinary normalisation.
38
The objectivizing of the speaking subject in…
philology and linguistics…; the objectivizing of the
productive subject…in the analysis of wealth and
of economics…; the objectivizing of the sheer fact
of being alive in natural history or biology
(Foucault 1983, 208).
39
determines individuals as concrete subjects (Foucault 1983,
212). Says Foucault, “There are two meanings of the word
subject: subject to someone else by control and dependence,
and tied his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge”
(1983, 212), and both take the form of subjugating power.
Foucault’s work therefore takes on many descriptions of those
struggles which illuminate the effects of power as such, those
“immediate” struggles of the individual against the instances
of power closest to them (1983, 211). And genealogy
responds in opposition to the effects of power liked with
knowledge, the “struggles against the privileges of
knowledge” (Foucault 1983, 212), through critical analysis of
history as a production of truth governed by modalities of
power relations.
12
Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, volume II of The History of Sexuality (New York:
Random House, 1985); The Care of the Self, volume III of The History of Sexuality
(New York: Random House, 1986).
40
individual rights and self-relation” (Scott 1990, 87). In
Foucault’s own words, governmentality is defined as,
41
Foucault describes as a new elaboration of the same ethical
problematization:
42
In conclusion, it may be said that Foucault’s ethics is
genealogical in design and archaeological in method. Its
critical mode of analysis centers on “a historical investigation
into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to
recognize ourselves as subjects” (Foucault 1984, 46). It does
no endeavour to outline universal structures of moral
knowledge, but rather the instances of discourse, belonging to
a given historical period, which articulate that manner within
which the individual self is problematized as an object of
scientific studies governed by modalities of power. This
historical/critical attitude puts the individual self to the test of
a historically situated experiential reality, and reorients the
ways in which that self is determined as a product of moral
problematizations. Foucault’s ethics are, in this sense,
grounded in a study of “practical systems” for the production
of truth and the coercion or power, centered on the human
self (1984, 48-9). His ethics answer to a series of open
questions and make an indefinite numbers of inquiries which
address the ethical problematization of the self in connection
with the previous archaeological and genealogical studies.
Thus, Foucault asks:
43
And through a historical/critical investigation of the
materials, epochs, and bodies of determined practices and
discourses grounding the ethical problematization of the
human subject, the very heart of human subjectivity is
grasped “to the extent to which what we know of it, the forms
of power that are exercised in it, and the experience that we
have in it of ourselves” as human beings. Here, the
philosophical domain of ethics is determined by historical
figures that define certain objects, certain actions, and certain
modes of relation to one’s self (Foucault 1984, 49).
44
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45
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