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The Emergence of Desire: Notes Toward a Political History of the Will
... La pregunta por el lazo entre subjetividad y verdad lo lleva a estudiar cánones éticos y morales desde donde se ha buscado conducir al sujeto hacia determinada producción de sí mismo. El proyecto de la genealogía del sujeto de deseo, por ejemplo, o la genealogía de la moral, de la ética, y más generalmente de la subjetividad moderna (Foucault, 2013(Foucault, , 2014Lorenzini, 2019;Sferco, 2020;Irrera, 2021) persiguen esta impronta. Frente a una pretensión de dar forma a la subjetividad del sujeto, Foucault abre la vía de la subjetivación como experiencia de un descalce posible respecto de los códigos de conducta ya estipulados. ...
Este artículo parte de una problematización del campo de pensamiento político posfundacional a partir de la deriva nietzscheana. Desde allí busca poner en valor la perspectiva histórico-crítica de Michel Foucault. El examen de las categorías tradicionales de sujeto y de poder, tanto como su elaboración de la noción de «modos de subjetivación», nos permitirá calibrar en clave posfundacional la potencia práctica de su pensamiento.
... He counts on a will to resist the current regime of subjectivation. 70 Subjective conduct is purportedly weighed down by regimes of subjectivation that produce only particular subjectivities while discouraging others. Foucault, on the other hand, encourages practices of desubjectivation that allow subjects to differ from themselves, to reinvent themselves and their relations to themselves. ...
Michel Foucault's genealogy of neoliberalism in Naissance de la biopolitique is surprisingly lacking in critical acumen vis-à-vis neoliberal rationality. Several interpretations explain Foucault's appreciative tone by hypothesising about Foucault's supposed conversion to neoliberalism. In this article, I argue that the problem lies not in Foucault's personal politics but in a disappointing application of the genealogical method. Compared to previous works, Foucault's lectures on neoliberalism focus exclusively on neoliberalism's self-presentation by the likes of Hayek, Becker, and Friedman. It does not explore the subjective effects of neoliberalism on the governed, which would have been impossible for Foucault in 1979. I argue that, by taking into consideration the negative effects of actually-existing neoliberalism, one reveals an immanent critique of neoliberalism at the heart of genealogy. Neoliberalism promises a post-disciplinary order conducive to subjective freedom, but actually requires subjects to adapt to the discipline of free market competition.
Los estudios foucaultianos sobre la gubernamentalidad neoliberal han prestado mucha atención a la tercera parte de Las confesiones de la carne, en la que Foucault traza la arqueología del “hombre de deseo” y del sujeto jurídico. Sin embargo, la literatura ha tendido a prestar poca atención a la segunda parte del libro, dedicada al estudio de la virginidad. Es esta parte la que este trabajo pretende estudiar, reconstruyendo críticamente los argumentos de Foucault y mostrando el lugar que la virginidad cristiana ocupa en la genealogía del sujeto moderno y de la gubernamentalidad liberal. Por último, el trabajo pretende mostrar que la virginidad cristiana primitiva, tal y como la presentan Brown y Foucault, puede definirse como lo que este último denominó una “contraconducta”.
O trabalho pretende, a partir da publicação das “Confissões da Carne”, analisar o impasse que diz respeito a sua não publicação em vida por Foucault, em especial em função da entrada do sujeito como terceiro componente do triângulo arqueológico-genealógico, impondo uma reviravolta decisiva em sua pesquisa. A força aletúrgica do sujeito implica uma definitiva dessoberanização do dispositivo de poder. Por um lado, se a forma moderna prevê a sua transferência de um poder sobre si próprio aos outros, o complexo de estratégias governamentais, que «orientam» a direção da consciência, não implica a abdicação da liberdade por parte da pessoa a qual foi dirigida; por outro, uma segunda operação surge da diferenciação específica entre o modelo antigo e o modelo cristão, quer dizer, se o antigo modelo de direção funciona com vistas à autonomização do sujeito, aquele exame de consciência cristão estabelece como eixo a dependência e desenvolve uma racionalidade pastoral. Assim Foucault chega a uma estética da existência que é puro exercício de liberdade e perfeita atitude, que se oferece aos outros como prova do seu próprio valor. É com isso que o volume quarto da história da sexualidade é confrontado. O que muda drasticamente na experiência cristã da carne é a relação do sujeito com a verdade. A confissão, mais do que expiação dos pecados, neste quadro intervém como atestado e como testemunho de si próprio. Em conclusão, para Foucault, conotado pela imperfeição que o domina, o sujeito cristão liga-se a uma interminável direção de consciência cujo preço é uma perda de identidade indefinida. Assim, a partir deste recorte, o problema que passa a enfrentar é como encontrar uma forma de fundamentar a hermenêutica de si, não no sacrifício, mas numa “emergência positiva”, teórica e prática, de si, expondo tanto o momento transicional das “Confissões da Carne” quanto a própria razão pela qual renuncia à sua publicação.
Within Michel Foucault’s own conceptualization of governmentality, there is little room for something like ‘ungovernable life’. The latter seems to hint at a form of social conduct beyond power-relations, which would offend Foucault’s basic philosophical postulates. I argue that this identification between governmentality and power as such demonstrates a one-sided focus on the history of Western power-relations. By opposing Foucault’s genealogy of governmentality to Ivan Illich’s critical history of government, I delineate indigenous struggles against governmentalization as a form of ungovernable counter-conduct. Throughout his books from the 1970s to 1990s, Illich wrote a critical history of government surprisingly similar to Foucault’s, from the pastorate to modern political economy. However, rather than merely describing this history, Illich argued governmentalization alienated human beings from their autonomy. As a former missionary priest, he criticized the Church’s and modern governments’ attempts to subsume populations under a conduct of conducts. He advocated anticolonial resistance to subsumption under Western governmental regimes. In Illich’s appreciation of decolonized life, an ungovernable form of life can be discovered, which I defend with the example of Zapatismo and indigenous self-government through mandar obedeciendo.
Within Michel Foucault's own conceptualization of governmentality, there is little room for something like 'ungovernable life'. The latter seems to hint at a form of social conduct beyond power-relations, which would offend Foucault's basic philosophical postulates. I argue that this identification between governmentality and power as such demonstrates a one-sided focus on the history of Western power-relations. By opposing Foucault's genealogy of governmentality to Ivan Illich's critical history of government, I delineate indigenous struggles against governmentalization as a form of ungovernable counter-conduct. Throughout his books from the 1970s to 1990s, Illich wrote a critical history of government surprisingly similar to Foucault's, from the pastorate to modern political economy. However, rather than merely describing this history, Illich argued governmentalization alienated human beings from their autonomy. As a former missionary priest, he criticized the Church's and modern governments' attempts to subsume populations under a conduct of conducts. He advocated anticolonial resistance to subsumption under Western governmental regimes. In Illich's appreciation of decolonized life, an ungovernable form of life can be discovered, which I defend with the example of Zapatismo and indigenous self-government through mandar obedeciendo.
This paper argues that the concept of sexual abstinence in early Christianity was not based on biblical proof-texting, but rather resulted from constructive theological efforts in response to the socio-political reality of the time and the early Christians’ aspirations towards women and the marginalized. By exploring the discourse surrounding marriage and sexuality in the Greco-Roman world and its impact on early Christianity, this paper highlights how the teaching on sexual abstinence challenged the imperial philosophy of desire and control. The paper posits that celibacy and sexual abstinence served as a social counter-conduct practice in response to the little appreciation for women’s bodies and the marginalized. In short, the teaching of Christian chastity addressed the elitism that pervasive in Greco-Roman philosophy of marriage and sexuality. Ultimately, the debate about celibacy in early Christianity was about the nature of human solidarity.
This paper argues that the concept of sexual abstinence in early Christianity was not based on biblical proof-texting, but rather resulted from constructive theological efforts in response to the socio-political reality of the time and the early Christians' aspirations towards women and the marginalized. By exploring the discourse surrounding marriage and sexuality in the Greco-Roman world and its impact on early Christianity, this paper highlights how the teaching on sexual abstinence challenged the imperial philosophy of desire and control. The paper posits that celibacy and sexual abstinence served as a social counter-conduct practice in response to the little appreciation for women's bodies and the marginalized. In short, the teaching of Christian chastity addressed the elitism that pervasive in Greco-Roman philosophy of marriage and sexuality. Ultimately, the debate about celibacy in early Christianity was about the nature of human solidarity.
Achille Mbembe desplaza y reformula la hipótesis foucaultiana que diagnostica el presente según el modo de veridicción gubernamental que desde el siglo xix se dirige hacia la vida, contraponiendo la idea de un necropoder soberanista productor de muerte. Si Foucault advierte que cierta idea de “deseo” sirve de sustento e impulso a la comprensión del biopoder, ¿podríamos decir que existe algo similar en caso del necropoder, pero dirigido hacia la muerte? A través de un recorrido crítico del planteo de ambos autores, se examinará cuál es la especificidad deseante del necropoder y sus efectos ético-políticos.
Giorgio Agamben, en la saga homo sacer, desarrolla el modelo de la biopolítica a partir del análisis arqueológico de figuras caracterizadas por simbolizar en sí mismas la dinámica inclusión-exclusión: el soberano, el estado de excepción, la nuda vida y el homo sacer. La integración de estos conceptos permite al filósofo italiano concebir el paradigma biopolítico de Occidente: el estado de excepción como el umbral en el que se suspende la ley haciendo posible la regulación política de la vida en cuanto nuda vida que le pertenece al homo sacer, al que cualquiera puede dar muerte sin ser considerado homicidio. De tal modo, puede distinguirse el modelo biopolítico agambiano centrado en la politización de la vida potencialmente en riesgo de muerte, debido a que desde este enfoque la biopolítica se dirige siempre a fijar los sujetos cuya vida es tenida en cuenta simplemente para darles legalmente muerte. En este sentido, el objetivo del escrito consiste, por medio de un enfoque interpretativo, en analizar la óptica biopolítica desde el mencionado filósofo a partir del concepto de riesgo.
Although Foucault presented History of Sexuality Vol. 4: Confessions of the Flesh as a crucial part in the study of the genealogy of the subject of desire, Foucault’s analyses of early Christian doctrine and pastoral technologies do not support the claim that an analytic of the subject of desire was established in early Christianity. This can be shown through a reconstruction of his readings of Augustine and Cassian. Augustine’s doctrinal views of the human condition and the association of libido and disobedience to law are not accompanied by the production of technologies for the hermeneutics of desire. Cassian’s pastoral technologies of obedience and subjection to the will of the spiritual director are organized around the hermeneutics of thoughts, and they aim at establishing an inner detachment from misleading thoughts through examination of conscience. This reconstruction opens new trajectories for a genealogy of the subject of desire and for a genealogy of pastoral power and governmentality.
The publication of Michel Foucault’s Les Aveux de la chair (History of Sexuality, Volume 4: Confessions of the Flesh) thirty-four years after his death highlights and complicates the relevance of Christian texts—notably from the second through fifth centuries—to Foucault’s forms of critical analysis between 1974 and 1984, as his interests migrate from monastic disciplines to pastoral power to governmentality to the care of the self. What begins as suspicion towards confession as a tool of Catholic power anticipating modern psychoanalysis becomes a critical genealogy of subjectivity from western antiquity to modernity. To frame Foucault’s dynamic engagement with forms of Christianity, I establish three stages over his last decade as he moves from diagnosing mechanisms of power to analyzing ethics as care of the self. Tracing Foucault’s textual and critical developments enables better analysis of Confessions of the Flesh and affirms methodological possibilities in the study of religion today.
This article investigates Foucault’s account of desiring man by drawing upon History of Sexuality vol. 4, Confessions of the Flesh. In order to do so, the article focuses on Foucault’s diagnosis of the Christian elaboration of “the analytic of the subject of concupiscence” that closes Confessions of the Flesh. As the article shows, “the analytic of the subject of concupiscence” inspires Foucault’s account of desiring man. However, Foucault’s diagnosis of the Christian elaboration of “the analytic of concupiscence” proves to be debatable as it relies on a problematic interplay between Cassian’s and Saint Augustine’s account of concupiscence. The article exposes the problems that such interplay supposes by addressing the contrast between Cassian’s and Augustine’s perspective on both concupiscence and the human condition. Despite this problematic aspect of Foucault’s investigation of Christianity, the article argues that the publication of Confessions of the Flesh is central to understanding Foucault’s History of Sexuality. By providing new elements of analysis, the book reopens Foucault’s genealogical diagnosis of the formation of the medical account of sexuality and allows us to problematise new avenues for developing Foucault’s investigation in depth.
The fourth and final volume of The History of Sexuality offers the keystone to Michel Foucault’s critique of Western neoliberal societies. Confessions of the Flesh provides the heretofore missing link that ties Foucault’s late writings on subjectivity to his earlier critique of power. Foucault identifies in Augustine’s treatment of marital sexual relations the moment of birth of the modern legal actor and of the legalization of social relations. With the appearance of the modern legal subject, Foucault’s critique of modern Western societies is complete: it is now possible to see how the later emergence of an all-knowing homo œconomicus strips the State of knowledge and thus deals a fatal blow to its legitimacy. The appearance of both the modern legal actor and homo œconomicus makes it possible to fold the entire four-volume History of Sexuality back into Foucault’s earlier critique of punitive and biopolitical power. And it now challenges us to interrogate how we, contemporary subjects, are shaped in such a way as to implicate ourselves—both willingly and unwittingly—in the social order within which we find ourselves and that, through the interaction of knowledge-power-subjectivity, we reproduce.
On the Government of the Living plays a pivotal role in the evolution of Foucault’s thought because it constitutes a “laboratory” in which he forges the methodological and conceptual tools—such as the notions of anarcheology and alethurgy (or, better, what I call here the “alethurgic subject”)—necessary to carry on his study of governmentality independently from his History of Sexuality project. In this paper, I argue that Foucault’s projects of an anarcheology of the government of human beings through the manifestation of truth in the form of subjectivity and of a genealogy of the subject of desire, albeit essentially linked to one another, are conceptually autonomous. These projects are both part of a genealogy of the modern subject but should be treated independently insofar as it is the former, elaborated in On the Government of the Living, that provides us with the key to understanding Foucault’s interest in the care of the self and parrhesia as an integral part of his analyses of governmentality and the critical attitude from the late 1970s.
In this paper, I argue that the vindicatory/unmasking distinction has so far prevented scholars from grasping a third dimension of genealogical inquiry, one I call possibilising. This dimension has passed unnoticed even though it constitutes a crucial aspect of Foucault’s genealogical project starting from 1978 on. By focusing attention on it, I hope to provide a definitive rebuttal of one of the main criticisms that has been raised against (unmasking) genealogy in general, and Foucauldian genealogy in particular, namely the idea that Foucault’s genealogical project lacks normative grounding and is therefore ultimately incapable of telling us why we should resist and fight against the mechanisms of power it nevertheless reveals in an empirically insightful way. This conclusion, I argue, is mistaken because it conceives of Foucauldian genealogy exclusively as an unmasking or problematising method, whereas I claim that Foucault’s genealogical project possesses a possibilising dimension that provides his work with sui generis normative force.
In this article I reconstruct the philosophical conditions for the emergence of the notion of counter-conduct within the framework of Michel Foucault's study of governmentality, and I explore the reasons for its disappearance after 1978. In particular, I argue that the concept of conduct becomes crucial for Foucault in order to redefine governmental power relations as specific ways to conduct the conduct of individuals: it is initially within this context that, in Security, Territory, Population, he rethinks the problem of resistance in terms of counter-conduct. However, a few months later, in What is Critique?, Foucault (implicitly) replaces the notion of counter-conduct with that of critical attitude, defined as the particular form that counter-conduct takes in modern times. This notion allows him to highlight the role played by the will (to be or not to be governed like that) in resistance to governmental strategies. But since the notion of counter-conduct is conceptually wider than that of critical attitude, I suggest in conclusion that it could be worth reactivating it as a "historical category which, in various forms and with diverse objectives, runs through the whole of Western history.
Entre l'époque de Cicéron et le siècle des Antonins, il s'est passé un grand événement ignoré : une métamorphose des relations sexuelles et conjugales ; au sortir de cette métamorphose, la morale sexuelle païenne se retrouve identique à la future morale chrétienne du mariage. Or cette transformation s'est faite indépendamment de toute influence chrétienne ; elle est terminée quand la nouvelle religion se répand et il y a même lieu de croire que les chrétiens n'ont fait que reprendre à leur compte la nouvelle morale de la fin du paganisme. Nous allons esquisser ici quelques traits de cette évolution. Comme on voit, l'histoire que nous allons raconter est très différente de ce à quoi on réduit trop souvent l'histoire de la famille romaine : à un émiettement du système gentilice et à l'affaiblissement de la puissance paternelle. Il faut réserver pour une publication plus ambitieuse le détail des faits et l'appareil des preuves.
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Without access to Michel Foucault's courses, it was extremely difficult to understand his reorientation from an analysis of the strategies and tactics of power immanent in the modern discourse on sexuality (1976) to an analysis of the ancient forms and modalities of relation to oneself by which one constituted oneself as a moral subject of sexual conduct (1984). In short, Foucault's passage from the political to the ethical dimension of sexuality seemed sudden and inexplicable. Moreover, it was clear from his published essays and interviews that this displacement of focus had consequences far beyond the specific domain of the history of sexuality. "Security, Territory, Population" (Foucault, 2007) contains a conceptual hinge, a key concept, that allows us to link together the political and ethical axes of Foucault's thought. Indeed, it is Foucault's analysis of the notions of conduct and counter-conduct in his lecture of 1 March 1978 that seems to me to constitute one of the richest and most brilliant moments in the entire course. Is is astonishing, and of profound significance, that the autonomous sphere of conduct has been more or less invisible in the history of modern (as opposed to ancient) moral and political philosophy. This article argues that a new attention should be given to this notion, both in Foucault's work and more generally.
The Care of the Self
- Foucault
On the Government of the Living
- Foucault
Dire vrai sur soi-même
- Foucault
although individuals are no longer conducted against their desires but through the circulation, the multiplication, and the management of them in the space of the market
- Foucault
On the Government of theLiving: Lectures at the Collège de France
- Foucault
- Security
- Territory
Sexuality and Solitude
- Foucault
Augustine opens a distinctly new chapter in the history of the will by describing it as a precognitive, pre-emotional faculty, partly beyond the control and understanding of man's conscious self"-this is why, for Augustine
- Albrecht Dihle