DANGERS, POSSIBILITIES: ETHICO-POLITICAL
CHOICES IN THE WORK
OF MICHEL FOUCAULT
Frank Pignatelli
Bank Street College
During the last decade, the work of Michel Foucault has been examined
by critical theorists in education for its insights into the way
power works, its effects on one’s subject status, and its
inextricable relation to knowledge. What these critical theorists
appear to have left unexamined is the attention Foucault paid
to ethical considerations and the importance he placed upon these
considerations as part of a larger ethico-political project.
This is not the case with Foucauldian commentary and analysis generated outside of education.1 Recalling Rorty’s discussion of Foucault, Rajchman, for example, makes this point:
Foucault’s philosophy was a philosophy neither of solidarity nor of objectivity. It was based neither in determining who we really are, nor in identifying with some one embattled group. Rather in analyzing the problematic ways we have been constituted as who we are, Foucault sought to raise questions about who we might become — in our thinking as in our lives…. It is the question of a modern practical philosophy.2As with Dewey,3 Foucault wants to avoid doing philosophy in such a way that his efforts contribute to, or rely upon, grand explanatory models that departicularize and decontextualize one’s experience — ethical or otherwise. But whereas Dewey would choose to make explicit the social and communal possibilities in leading an ethical life and its vital connection to democracy,4 Foucault’s ethical project and its relation to democratic living may not be as apparent. One must look at a variety of sources in the Foucault ouevre to come away with a clearer picture.
Briefly, Foucault’s project is twofold: to demonstrate the historical contingency of ethical practices and problematizations, and governing arrangements; and, to cause us to be suspicious of basing an ethics upon universalizing claims, while not denying the deep effect these practices, problematizations, and governing arrangements have upon us. Our present ethico-political danger, Foucault suggests, is that, typically, concerns of ethico-political well-being are scientifically calibrated: both constituted through and constrained by a discourse-practice regulated by shifting norms of technical efficiency. Considered as a practical project, then, Foucault’s genealogy of ethics can be understood as opportunities or proddings to create, invent oneself differently. Put differently, Foucault seeks to base an ethic of freedom around “choosing forms of possible experience.”5 We can, Foucault contends, “refuse what we are”;6 we can engage ourselves in “struggles against the ‘government of individualization.’”7
In what follows, I will discuss works by Foucault that deal with ethico-political concerns and attempt to demonstrate the extent to which they can inform our understanding of democratic habits, broadly defined as one’s relation to oneself as well as one’s relation to others. Firstly, I will consider transcripts of a series of lectures Foucault gave in 1983 entitled Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of _APPH_IA [Parrhesia] (truth-telling).8 Secondly, I want to develop Foucault’s notion of “governmentality,”9 because I believe it helps luminate in a compelling way the longstanding interconnectedness of ethical and political concerns. Thirdly, a contemporary analysis of governmentality was begun by Foucault in his frustratingly brief discussion of what he called “bio-power,” a power that involves the State in caring for the welfare of its people and, indeed, extends the influence of the State far beyond juridical matters. How “bio-power” frames our current ethical and political dilemmas and opportunities will be discussed. Lastly, given this analysis, I will conclude with some remarks about the role of the educator.
In a series of lectures in 1983 at the University of California at Berkeley, Foucault addressed the problem of parrhesia or truth-telling in Ancient Greece through Imperial Rome. This examination is undertaken through a review and analysis of what Foucault considers to be revealing philosophical and literary texts of the time. What he finds in the writings of, for example, Euripides (The Phoenician Women, Electra, Ion and others) and Plato (Gorgias and Phaedrus), and presents in a seemingly dispassionate, disinterested commentary, is that truth-telling, or parrhesia, was a plausible, necessary, practical response to the Ancient Greeks’ concern to insure the polis as a democratic space. The parrhesiastes, or truth-telling speaker, is found to possess certain moral qualities. Foucault elaborates:
[He] uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.10
While Foucault goes on to explain that during the Hellenistic period parrhesia becomes limited to the relationship between the advisor as parrhesiaste and the sovereign (the truth-teller, by definition, always assumes the greater risk), what remains constant is the linkage between ethical and political virtue. Thus, Socrates, playing the role of parrhesiaste, presses Alcibiades to recognize what Foucault takes to be a most significant point about the Greeks: one can not expect to govern or care for the city, Socrates argues, if one has not first cared for or governed oneself. Put differently, for the Greeks, parrhesia, as self-examination and control over what one understands to be one’s pleasures or ambition, as a set of practices organized around the care of oneself, is vitally connected to what it means to be a good citizen or good leader. Care of oneself is, Foucault notes, “a very powerful word [for the Greeks]; it describes a sort of work, and activity; it implies attention, knowledge, technique.”11 In another context, Foucault contends that in our preoccupation with knowing the truth about ourselves, we moderns have forgotten just how important these ethical-political practices and principles concerned with the care of the self were to the Greeks.12
For the Greeks, care of one’s self was used widely to frame one’s ethical conduct in a variety of situations. Again, Foucault refers to Alcibiades and notes that care of the self “is used in reference to the activity of a farmer tending his fields, his cattle, and his house, or the job of the king in taking care of his city and citizens, or the worship of ancestors or gods, or as a medical term to signify the fact of caring.”13
What occurs after the Greeks is a centering of this notion of care completely around the self’s relation to itself, (i.e., the self as ethical subject) and the consequent erosion of its connection to political life. Foucault’s historical commentary is certainly reflected in twentieth-century authors. I see this loss of, and concern for, a public space reflected in writers such as Maxine Greene, Henry Giroux, Hannah Arendt, Sheldon Wolin, and, of course, Dewey. Sheldon Wolin, for example, worries about the silence in America over what it means to be a democratic citizen: one who is engaged in civic activity and is more than the bearer of rights.14 With respect to Foucault’s project, though, this transformation of parrhesia from political-ethical to ethical is viewed as resulting from a crisis in the whole notion of “democratic parrhesia” as essentially being a threat to the well-being of the polis.
What Foucault proceeds to trace, henceforth, is the exclusive attention paid to ways of caring for oneself or one’s soul, i.e., to ethical practices. In 1984, in what was to be Foucault’s last course at the College de France — Foucault died shortly thereafter — this question of ethical practice and the courage to speak the truth despite risk to oneself was addressed. Only now, as Flynn, in attendance at these lectures, tells it, the risk involved loss of one’s self image, not one’s life, as is the case with political parrhesia. Again, Flynn reports, Foucault goes back to Plato to emphasize “a fruitful ambiguity in his issue of ‘parrhesia’ that contributes to this transformation.” In the Apology, for instance, Socrates speaks with risk, but as an ethical parrhesiast. “The mission of Socrates as ethical parrhesiast, is not to do politics,” Flynn argues, “but to awaken others to be concerned with themselves (phronesis/practical reason), with their truth (aletheia) and with their soul (psyche).”15
This movement away from politics and towards the care of the self by the self, in later periods, removes even the necessity for dialogue. In Technologies of the Self, a record of a seminar Foucault gave in 1982 at the University of Vermont on this topic, Foucault commented:
A medical model was substituted for Plato’s pedagogical model. The care of the self isn’t another kind of pedagogy; it has to become permanent medical care. Permanent medical care is one of the central features of the care of the self. One must become the doctor of oneself.16My point, here, is not to try to do a close textual analysis on the veracity of these commentaries, which are, at different points, fascinating, disturbing, utterly foreign to our modern situation, and strangely familiar. As a practical philosopher, Foucault is more concerned with what his histories do to us, with what their value might be to us, now. What is important is that care of oneself remains a preoccupation throughout Western history. But this by no means attests to the universality of ethical conduct. As noted, for the Greeks, for instance, the telos of ethics was to be master of oneself; for them akrasia, or the lack of self-mastery, in matters of pleasure, indicated a weakness of will and a life devoid of ethical and political purpose. This, Foucault argues, is a virile ethics concerned with the deleterious consequences of an excess of pleasurable acts — an ethics incited by the possibility of living one’s life with style, an aesthetics of existence. As will be shown in a later section, this is not the case today. Foucault’s project to do a genealogy of ethics is to demonstrate just this. This also means that there was, and is, no golden age, no past situation that we can apply to our present ethical or political dilemmas, since our problems were not the Greeks’, nor the Romans’, nor the early Christians’. But it is precisely the contingency of ethical matters that underscores the possibility of conducting ourselves differently. In order to do this, Foucault might argue, we need to understand how and why our current and dominant ethico-political problematizations are different from those of the past. It is the self-evidence of how we understand our well-being that Foucault prods us to think about. His is an analysis intended to spark a practice of freedom marked by the challenge to be other than what we are, or as Foucault put it, “to get free of oneself.”17
What are the constraints as well as the possibilities that shape who we are and how we relate as ethical persons? How do we live ethical lives given our present circumstances? These are, I would argue, questions proper to a Foucauldian examination of ethics. And they suggest to us that the problem of our ethical self-constitution emerges out of and extends political interests, arrangements and concerns. Foucault himself suggests the same in his reference to a key but underdeveloped concept of his, governmentality, which he defines as “this contact between technologies of domination of others and those of the self.”18
In a 1979 essay entitled, appropriately enough, “On Governmentality,” Foucault argues that by the middle of the sixteenth century a series of treatises on the problem of government begin to emerge that do not take the form of advice to the prince or ruler. These treatises, concerned with what Foucault refers to as “the art of government,” last until the end of the eighteenth century and embrace a wide understanding of government that includes government of oneself, other lives and souls, children, as well as the State. “How to govern oneself, how to be governed, how to govern others.” In place of the prince, “who occupies a position of externality and transcendence” vis-a-vis his subjects, the art of government is practiced, as it were, in a variety of locations and forms and by a host of people — teachers, parents, clergy, sovereign.19
While Foucault addresses this “headless” form of government in his discussion of how modern power works in his first volume of his History of Sexuality,20 there is something else or more that is being raised in this essay. It is the problematization of government as care, and the recognition that matters of ethics and politics are entwined with this issue. For the good leader, concerned with the art of government, the challenge is to tactically deploy the available goods and services in order to be of service to those he governs. In what Foucault takes to be a representative text of the time, the good leader is likened to “the head of the family who is the one who rises first in the morning, and goes to bed last, he is the one who takes care of everything in the household because he considers himself as being in its service.”21
However, Foucault goes on to argue that an understanding of the art of government as “family” — and, similarly, understanding economy as a matter of family management — remained in the shadow of government as law embodied in the will of the sovereign until the end of mercantilism. What occurs thereafter is most significant. For family becomes subsumed under a more powerful organizing principle for the art of government, that of population. Most importantly, population serves as “the ultimate end of government,” making possible systematic, extensive interventions into the lives of the people in order to know what their interests, aspirations, and needs are. Population encourages and makes possible the invention of an array of tactics and techniques deployed upon both individuals and en masse.22
What I believe emerges around the art of government as population, and remains with us, is a set of complex, often subtle relationships framed by ethical, political, and scientific considerations. Put differently, ethical issues need to be seen within what Dreyfus and Rabinow aptly call “our regulative and welfare-oriented understanding of reality.”23
Care is implicated in what we can know about ourselves and others. It operates in a space whose elements include both the official governmental-administrative apparatus (sovereignty, of course, is not dead), as well as in allegedly disinterested, legitimatizing norms of science. Thus, in our modern context, ethical conduct, our caring for and being cared for by others, becomes nearly impossible to disentangle from how power in its modern form largely operates. In a later piece that considers the question, “How is power exercised?”, Foucault returns to this issue of governmentality. He writes: “The exercise of power consists in guiding the possibility of conduct and putting in order the possible outcome. Basically power is less a confrontation between two adversaries or the linking of one to the other than a question of government.” And he continues: “This word must be allowed the very broad meaning which it had in the sixteenth century…. To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others.”24
I don’t believe that Foucault is minimizing the usual forms of political action as a way to change things, but I do think he is making an argument for the importance of trying to get around narrow, prescriptive agendas, fixed and rather vague goals, and a limited set of options when one is acting political. For Foucault, “to determine which is the main danger” is “the ethico-political choice we have to make every day.”25 The ethical part of the decision affords Foucault the opportunity to go beyond mere acknowledgement that the social system, as Rawls has argued, “determines in large part the kind of persons [its members] want to be as well as the kind of persons they are.”26 Further, Foucault avoids resorting, as Rawls does, to a universalizing set of principles intended to regulate issues of social justice. This is because Foucault refuses to collapse the question of our personal ethical conduct completely into a question of power, despite the individualizing, restless operation of power. Instead, a personal ethics of agency and refusal exists, which is separate from some obligatory link with political, economic or social structures.27 Foucault says that he is more interested in “politics as an ethics” than politics.28 The political has not been discarded, but it has been extended, stretched out over a wider, deeper field to include everyday matters and mundane governing practices that tell us who we are and what we can do. Following Foucault, one may be more suspicious about more things, but one also has more opportunities to practice freedom, to exercise one’s inventiveness, to assert possibilities and, therefore, to change oneself. About the question of philosophical activity, Foucault had this to say: “In what does it consist, if not in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known?”29 Similarly, our ethico-political choices are opportunities to take up the matter of designing our lives differently, given what we believe to be a current danger. But to refuse what we are takes courage, risk, and a testing of our limits.
A vibrant civic culture is predicated upon the ability and willingness of its members to speak with courage, conviction, and understanding about things held in common. Ten years ago the political theorist Sheldon Wolin investigated the relationship between political passivity and victimization. He wrote:
Despite the deepening unemployment, the irrational level of defense expenditures, the utter hopelessness for millions of Blacks and many Hispanics, and the brazenly business oriented bias of the Reagan administration, there is an astonishing passivity among those who have been hurt most by the current policies. All of the elements for radical political protest appear to be present. And yet there has been no general mobilization of outrage, only a few parades.30The conditions he delineated then have not changed for the better; indeed, the situation has worsened. Ironically, amidst the attention paid to the poor through governmental policies, their being targeted on the basis of need and well-being erodes their ability to be politically active, to protest. They undergo a process of depoliticization. The citizen is replaced by “a conception of a wholly new kind of being whose existence consisted of indices which told him what his condition was objectively…a ‘misery index.’”31 What worries Wolin the most is what he refers to as a loss of the self, or the absence of the ability and will to imagine things differently and work collectively toward changing intolerable conditions.
Foucault shares a similar concern. He argues that our current ethical and political danger occurs around the operation of a power whose overriding effect is the ability to categorize, regulate and, if necessary, rehabilitate individuals on the basis of a set of shifting scientific claims about normality and deviance. It is a power generated and extended by the State and by the expert: a power that “invests in,” polices, operates upon, and administers the lives of people in a deep ontological way in order to insure their well-being. Foucault calls this bio-power.
As with his earlier work on “population,” Foucault considers this form of power as a political rationality (raison d’état) that explains in a more comprehensive way than ideology, self-interest, or moral-legal political theory how and why the modern State does what it does. Foucault suggests that the administration or care of life is the fundamental imperative — not the proper execution of the law. In order for this to occur the State is deeply affiliated with the work and “progress” of the social sciences. Hence, the severe limitations of neat dichotomies between State and society. Further, since care, not law, is most significant, there exists a plurality of loci of power that extend, and even originate beyond, the official State apparatus and are found in places such as the family, schools, hospitals, charitable organizations, and private foundations.
An important consequence of bio-power, Foucault tells us, is normalization. He contrasts the sovereign model of power to what he finds as power’s distinctly modern form:
The law always refers to the sword. But a power whose task is to take charge of life needs continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms…. Such a power has to qualify, measure, appraise, and hierarchize, rather than display itself in its murderous splendor;…. A normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centered on life.32Modern power is intimately tied to the construction of the self. In Foucault’s work on power, he develops the important but controversial argument that the subject does not exist prior to power. There is no autonomous, ahistorical entity or transcendent identity that exists outside of relations of power. Indeed, the construction of persons occurs under power’s gaze, making, as he put it, individuals into subjects. For Foucault, “there are two meanings of the word subject: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to.”33 Foucault raises through this comment a few significant points in this conceptionalization of the subject that bear upon our discussion of normalization: first, that there is a politics of identity; second, that there exists with respect to this identity a collusive relationship between power and knowledge; third, that we carry with us and sustain, perhaps unknowingly, internalized forms of control.
Foucault seems to be saying that the scientific rationality employed in the social or human sciences, legitimated and extended by the State and internalized by the individual/population both subject (in the sense of being both exposed to and deeply affiliated with) and subjugate (in the sense of being controlled by and dependent upon) us to “empty, expanding, regulative norms.”34 The scope and depth of this norm-governed penetration cover both ethical and political aspects of our being. What is being suggested, here, is more than a power that disciplines and limits; rather, it is a power that constitutes or produces identities that are situated in a field of ethical and political choices and dilemmas.
In the conclusion to volume three of his History of Sexuality series, Foucault remarks that “problematization and apprehension go hand in hand; inquiry is joined to vigilance.”35 If our contemporary ethical worry or problematization occurs around knowing what it means to live a normal life, to be normal, our vigilance is expressed through the extending reaches of bio-power. To suggest an alternative to this current arrangement of care of the self and body-politic is to question how and why we have internalized and submitted to normalizing policies and programs. Our interrogation pushes at the limits, tests the self-evidence of who we are, how we come to recognize ourselves as subjects of our own experience, what it means to improve, reform or remain deficient, and the means by which our so-called progress is determined.
Rorty, Cherryholmes, Merquior, Habermas and others would have us consider whether a Foucauldian analysis as a deep critique discourages hope and denies the possibility of a progressive politics.36 Foucault offers a response: “My position,” he argues, “leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism.”37 His is, as Flynn puts it, “a cautious skepticism with regard to utopian politics and a neostoic almost Camusian ‘pessimistic activism’ in the face of ultimate meaninglessness.”38 Foucault does want to preserve the possibility of agency and choosing to be otherwise, of moving against a life constructed through, and regulated by, a normalizing mode of discourse-practice. But, in the face of a form of governing that remains shrouded in the naturalistic garb of the everyday and stubbornly invisible, he also wants us to be aware of what is at stake if we choose to remain silent and inattentive. An index or a rank, for example, is a mundane practice that could also be an ethico-political danger. For as a technique of power, it risks reducing the self to a target or object of care and occludes the possibility of seeing oneself as an active participant in the making and remaking of oneself and one’s polity.
Freedom is a practiced attitude toward life and not simply a cognitive mapping and execution of intentions, or a series of emotive expressions. The educator practices freedom by resisting the tendency to naturalize or make appear as inherently evident to oneself and others what are “invented internalizing procedures of self-identification,” by interrogating those “games of truth by which human beings come to see themselves as individuals.”39 Put differently, freedom is a refusal to identify in a deep ontological way with fabricated subject categories one learns and is led to rely upon to make sense of one’s experiences. Schurmann frames the issue for educators well: “There are heteronomous voices that tell us our identity. To learn from the soft sciences who and what we are, and to recognize ourselves in their dicta, is to interiorize power in the form of knowledge.”40 Moreover, freedom requires that we be critically pragmatic. It exists in tension with the safety of discrete ideological identifications (radical, reformer, conservative), as it resists reducing itself to what Cherryholmes has referred to as a “vulgar pragmatism, wherein standards and criteria are not problematic.”41
Are there, within the tensions of present circumstances that position us ethically and politically, opportunities to think ourselves differently and be otherwise? It may depend upon whether we care enough to frame and to interrogate the context within which ethico-political choices are typically made; and it may require that we test the limits of the prevailing narrow understandings of what we mean by ethics and politics and demonstrate what Bernstein calls the “symbiotic relation”42 between the two.
The emphasis put upon what it is possible to do — what one can do — locates the ethico-political efforts of educators in a realm of embedded, barely perceptible dangers too often shrouded by a discourse-practice of unquestioned benevolence. What, for example, do we do with all that we know and are told about our students? Can we care without silencing? Can we, as Greene puts it, “struggle with them as subjects in search of their own projects, their own ways of making sense of the world?”43 What is called for, on the part of educators, is a refusal to restrict ethico-political choices to the dictates of scientifically regulated norms and a regimen of cost-benefit calculations, and the courage and skill to patiently and continuously labor to shape creative and liberating alternatives.
For a
response to this essay, see Ford.
1 See, for example, Hubert Dreyfus & Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Thomas Flynn, “Foucault as Parrhesiast: His Last Course at the College de France (1984),” Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2-3 (1987): 213-29; Jurgen Habermas, “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Re-reading Dialectic of Enlightenment,” New German Critique 26 (1982): 13-30; Ian Hacking, “Self-improvement,” in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 235-39; John Rajchman, “Ethics after Foucault,” Social Text 13-14 (1986): 165-83; Reiner Schurmann, “On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject,” Praxis International 6 (1986): 294-310.
2 Rajchman, “Ethics after Foucault,” 179; emphasis added. See also Richard Rorty, “Solidarity or Objectivity?” in Post-Analytic Philosophy, ed., John Rajchman and Cornell West (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 3-19.
3 See, for example, John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920; reprint, Boston: The Beacon Press, 1959).
4 See, for example, John Dewey and James H. Tufts, Ethics (1908; rev. ed. 1932; reprint, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1936), 385-89; John Dewey, “The Ethics of Democracy,” in John Dewey, The Early Works, 1882-1898, vol. 1, 1882-1888: Early Essays and Liebniz’s New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding, ed. George E. Axtelle, et al. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 240-49.
5 Rajchman, “Ethics after Foucault,” 178.
6 Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism, 216.
7 Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 212.
8 Michel Foucault, Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of [Parrhesia], [Transcriptions of a seminar given 1983] (Evanston: Department of Philosophy, Northwestern University, 1983).
9 Michel Foucault, “On Governmentality,” Ideology and Consciousness 6 (1979): 5-21; Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 208-26.
10 Foucault, Discourse and Truth, 8.
11 Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: Am Overview of a Work in Progress,” trans. Leslie Sawyer in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism, 243.
12 Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault [Transcripts of a seminar given in 1982], ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 19.
13 Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” 24-25.
14 Sheldon Wolin, “Revolutionary Action Today,” in Post-Analytic Philosophy, ed. John Rachman and Cornell West (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 245-47.
15 Flynn, “Foucault as Parrhesiast,” 216-19.
16 Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” 31.
17 Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, volume 2, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 8.
18 Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” 19.
19 Foucault, “On Governmentality,” 5-9.
20 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980).
21 Foucault, “On Governmentality,” 14; emphasis added.
22 Foucault, “On Governmentality,” 17-18.
23 Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism, 261.
24 Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 221.
25 Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 232.
26 John Rawls, “A Kantian Conception of Equality,” in Post-Analytic Philosophy, ed. John Rachman and Cornell West (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 204.
27 Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 236.
28 Michel Foucault, “Politics and Ethics: An Interview,” in Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Catherine Porter (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 377.
29 Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 9.
30 Wolin, “Revolutionary Action,” 251.
31 Wolin, “Revolutionary Action,” 251-52.
32 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 144.
33 Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 212.
34 Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism, 260.
35 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 239.
36 Rorty, “Solidarity or Objectivity?”; Cleo H. Cherryholmes, Power and Criticism: Poststructural Investigations in Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1988); J.G. Merquior, Foucault (London: Fontana Press, 1985); Habermas, “The Entwinement of Myth.”
37 Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 232.
38 Flynn, “Foucault as Parrhesiast,” 227.
39 Rajchman, “Ethics after Foucault,” 168; emphasis added.
40 Schurmann, “On Constituting Oneself,” 303.
41 Cherryholmes, Power and Criticism, 163.
42 Richard J. Bernstein, The New Constellation: The Ethico-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992), 9.
43 Maxine Greene, The Dialectic of Freedom (New York: Teachers College Press, 1988), 120.