Michel Foucault’s Theory of Practices of the Self and the Quest for a New Philosophical Anthropology

2018 ◽  
pp. 218-247
Keyword(s):  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
The Self ◽  
Practices Of The Self

scholarly journals FLEKSITARER OG PURISTER: Eksistensæstetiske spisepraksisser i Cambridge, Massachusetts

1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dil Bach
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Expert Advice ◽  
Natural Food ◽  
Food Stores ◽  
Practices Of The Self ◽  
Eating Practices

Dil Bach: Flexitarians and Purists: Aesthetic Existential Practices of the Self in Cambridge, Massachusetts This article suggests that some of the insights developed by Foucault in his analysis of antiquity can provide an alternative perspective on modem health-oriented eating practices. The author demonstrates this through field material from Cambridge, MA, USA. In her analysis of two local natural food stores, the author shows that the stores do not impose ultimate prescriptions, but rather encourage an “aesthetics of existence”. The shoppers thus engage in voluntary “practices of the self’ in which expert advice participates in a reflexive interplay between the shoppers and their bodies. In conclusion the author notes that the aesthetics of existence should not be seen as a “pure” expression of autonomy and freedom. Not only are the expert discourses deeply embedded in commercial relations, they also forcefully place people in the role of reflexive subjects.

scholarly journals Computer Gameplay and the Aesthetic Practices of the Self: Game Studies and the Late Work of Michel Foucault

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Feng Zhu
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Computer Games ◽  
The Self ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Work ◽  
Practices Of The Self ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

This paper aims to critically introduce the applicability of Foucault’s late work, on the practices of the self, to the scholarship of contemporary computer games. I argue that the gameplay tasks that we set ourselves, and the patterns of action that they produce, can be understood as a form of ‘work on the self’, and that this work is ambivalent between, on the one hand, an aesthetic transformation of the self – as articulated by Foucault in relation to the care or practices of the self – in which we break from the dominant subjectivities imposed upon us, and on the other, a closer tethering of ourselves through our own playful impulses, to a neoliberal subjectivity centred around instrumentally-driven selfimprovement. Game studies’ concern with the effects that computer games have on us stands to gain from an examination of Foucault’s late work for the purposes of analysing and disambiguating between the nature of the transformations at stake. Further, Foucault’s tripartite analysis of ‘power-knowledge-subject’, which might be applied here as ‘game-discourse-player’, foregrounds the imbrication of our gameplay practices – the extent to which they are due to us and the way in which our own volitions make us subject to power, which is particularly pertinent in the domain of play.

The Face of the Contemporary: Lost World Fantasies of Finding Lot’s Wife

Sodomscapes ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lowell Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cautionary Tale ◽  
Intercultural Contact ◽  
The Face ◽  
Incarnational Theology

Chapter six examines a relatively unknown Victorian lost-world romance fantasy, Alfred Clark’s The Finding of Lot’s Wife (1896). The novel converts the legend of Lot’s wife, traditionally a cautionary tale of moral turpitude, into a stark lesson on the perilous consequences of intercultural contact in the Orientalizing theatre of colonial Palestine. Clark’s central contribution to the Sodom archive, however, resides in the novel’s prescient staging of a world in which insights associated with Hans Blumenberg’s philosophical anthropology of myth converge with the theological residue in Levinas’s writings – notably, the self-emptying action of kenosis, which Levinas takes from Pauline incarnational theology. Clark is no theologian, but his interest in the ethical provocations of kenosis is as keen as Levinas’s—and perhaps more viscerally arresting because of its narrative immediacy. This feature powerfully contributes to the innovation The Finding of Lot’s Wife brings to the Sodom archive. Clark’s ingenious intertwining of Blumenbergian and Levinasian treatments of myth effectively imagines the urgent contemporariness of the legacy of Lot’s wife. Clark shows how the lethal and reparative dimensions of that legacy asymmetrically impinge on each other, producing an arresting narrative image of dread commingled with hope and urgent consequence.

Practices of the self

2013 ◽  
pp. 173-186
Author(s):  
Dianna Taylor
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Practices Of The Self

Impossible Descriptions, Superfluous Descriptions, and Mead’s “I”

1998 ◽  
pp. 52-57
Author(s):  
Ingvar Johansson
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
The Self ◽  
Grammatical Form ◽  
General Characterization ◽  
Reflective Consciousness ◽  
The World ◽  
Definition Of

Some kinds of utterances which have an indicative grammatical form seem, for different reasons, to be unable to say something true of the world. Logical contradictions are only the prime example of something the author baptizes impossible descriptions. So-called performative contradictions (e.g., "I do not exist") make up another kind, but there are at least two more such kinds: negating affirmations and performatives which cannot be explained within the philosophy of language. Only philosophical anthropology can explain their feature of "impossibleness," and a distinction between unreflective and reflective consciousness is central to the explanation. Particularly important here is G. H. Mead's distinction between two aspects of the self: the "I" and the "me." Each of the four kinds of impossible descriptions distinguished has its own contrary opposite. These are, in turn, logical tautologies, performative tautologies, affirming negations, and omissive performatives. The last three types as types have not received the philosophical recognition that they deserve. All four fit a general characterization which is given as a definition of the concept of superfluous description.

The Practices of the Self

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Larmore ◽  
Sharon Bowman
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Practices Of The Self

Foucault, Flying Discs and Calling Fouls: Ascetic Practices of the Self in Ultimate Frisbee

2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hamish Crocket
Keyword(s):  
Instrumental Rationality ◽  
The Self ◽  
Moral Code ◽  
Sociological Analysis ◽  
Sociology Of Sport ◽  
Practices Of The Self ◽  
Ultimate Frisbee

Dominant analyses of sporting subjectivities suggest the contemporary athletic subject embodies a win-at-all-costs instrumental rationality. Yet, as Carless and Douglas (2012) argue, athletes are able to find less problematic alternatives to this understanding of sport. In this article, I use Foucault’s concept of “practices of the self” to undertake a sociological analysis of ethical subjectivities within Ultimate Frisbee. I focus specifically on ascetic, or self-controlling, practices of the self through which players create relationships between their self, Ultimate’s moral code and others. I use this case study to argue that ethical subjectivities offer a productive perspective for sociology of sport.

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