scholarly journals Michel Foucault: Subjectivity and Ethics of the Self as Practice of Freedom

MELINTAS ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 108-121
Author(s):  
Konrad Kebung
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The Self ◽  
Unstable Condition ◽  
The Past ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Practices Of The Self ◽  
Cultural Historian

This article presents the thoughts of Michel Foucault, a cultural historian, philosopher, and intellectual, who brilliantly analyses the historical events of the past as creative criticisms for shaping human attitudes today. Through this historical analysis, Foucault examines the ways in which subjects were formed from classical times to the present. Foucault sees how this process takes a long time, starting from the subject as formed through various discourses to the subject as forming itself. To arrive at the latter, Foucault brings his readers to the classical Greco-Roman era to see how humans live their freedom and responsibilities. He also shows them various practices of the self through meditation and inner examination, as well as the practice of telling the truth (parrhesia) to oneself and to others. All this in the era was known as ethics and also seen as a practice of freedom. For Foucault, life must always be seen as a work of art that requires the attention of the artist from time to time in order to arrive at an art level considered useful and valuable to many people. Foucault calls this an aesthetic of existence, where life is not merely seen as something given, but also that must always be fought for creatively from day to day. Life must be seen as an unstable condition in which there are always cracks, therefore it has to be fixed from time to time. This is what Foucault calls a model of human existence.

scholarly journals The Theme of Subjectivity in Foucault's Lecture Series 'Herméneutique du Sujet'

2005 ◽  
pp. 75-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Harrer
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
The Self ◽  
Spiritual Guidance ◽  
Art Of Living ◽  
The Past ◽  
Lecture Series ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Practices Of The Self

The 'late' Foucault and his purported 'return to the subject' is a much discussed issue. Over the past twenty years, various suggestions have been made as to how to integrate Foucault's ethics into his oeuvre as a whole. This paper holds that there is a 'conceptual continuity', rather than a break, between Foucault's earlier works on normalizing power, and his later works on ethical self-constitution. On the basis of a conceptual framework, which is developed in Section II, a reading of two themes concerning certain practices of the self is offered in the following sections (namely, dietetics and spiritual guidance). The material, drawn from the recently published lecture series L'herméneutique du sujet as well as from other published works, is related back to Foucault's ideas on the process of 'subjectivation', in order to support the claim that 'fabrication' and 'self-constitution' are but two aspects of subjectivation. Keywords: late Foucault, ethics, practices of the self, self-constitution, discipline, power, surveillance, spiritual guidance, meditation, parrhesia, dietetics, art of living, aesthetics of existence, return of the subject, subjectivation, relation to self.

scholarly journals Critical agency in education: a Foucauldian perspective

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk Postma
Keyword(s):  
Social Transformation ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
The Self ◽  
Alternative Mode ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Educational Implications ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Mode Of Being

While the neoliberal order is associated with the economy, government and globalisation, as a form of governmentality it effects a particular subjectivity. The subject is the terrain where the contest of control plays out. The subject is drawn into the seductive power of performativity which dictates its agency, desires and satisfactions and from which escape is difficult to imagine. Neoliberalism is particularly interested in an education which provides it with the much needed powers of production and consumption. This dependency of the neoliberal order on a particular kind of agential subjectivity is also its weakness because of the indeterminacy of the self. Within this openness of the human subject lies the possibility to be different and to escape any form of subjectification. Foucault’s account of the critical agent portrays a form of difference that opposes and transcends neoliberal ordering. Foucault finds the principle of practices of freedom in the Greco-Roman ethics of the care for the self. It is an ethics where the subject gains control of itself through the ascetic and reflective attention in relation to available ethical codes and with the guidance of a ‘master’. Such as strong sense of the self is the basis for personal and social transformation against neoliberal colonisation. The development of critical agency in education is subsequently investigated in the light of Foucault’s notions of agency and freedom. The contest of the subject is of particular importance to education interested in the development of critical agency. The critical agent is not only one who could identify and analyse regimes of power, but also one who could imagine different modes of being, and who could practice freedom in the enactment of an alternative mode of being. The educational implications are explored in relation to the role of the teacher and pedagogical processes.

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.

Ethics of security: A genealogical introduction

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 48-71
Author(s):  
Andrea Rossi
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
The Self ◽  
Economic Governance ◽  
Ethical Dimension ◽  
Western Thought ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Pierre Hadot

This article analyses the set of ethical questions underlying the emergence of the modern politics of security, as articulated, in particular, in the work of Thomas Hobbes. An ethic is here understood – in line with its ancient philosophical use and the interpretation advanced by authors such as Michel Foucault and Pierre Hadot – as a domain of reflections and practices related to the cultivation and conversion of the self ( askēsis, metanoia). The article aims to demonstrate that, besides attending to the physical safety of the state and its citizens, modern apparatuses of security are also crucially implicated in the formation of their subjects as ethical and autonomous individuals. To substantiate this thesis, the article first illustrates how, since the first appearance of the term in the vocabulary of Western thought – and in Seneca’s work in particular – theories of security have been intimately tied to the cultivation of the self. It thus interprets Hobbes’s reflections on the subject as the upshot of a substantive, if implicit, re-articulation of Seneca’s ethic of security, by focusing on the two authors’ respective understandings of (a) autonomy, (b) the world, (c) ascesis, and (d) politics. Overall, it is suggested that the differences between the two authors testify to a wider political-historical shift: in modern regimes of governmentality, the ethical dimension of security no longer defines the rightful exercise of political power, but rather appears as an object of social and economic governance.

Het ‘niet-fascistische leven’: identiteit, subjectiviteit, verzet

2020 ◽  
Vol 112 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-154
Author(s):  
Lars Cornelissen
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
The Self ◽  
Philosophical Practice ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Artistic Resistance

Abstract ‘Non-Fascist Living’: Identity, Subjectivity, ResistanceThis article explores a recent form of academic and artistic resistance to contemporary modalities of fascism. This form of resistance is premised upon the argument that fascism lodges itself in the deepest recesses of the self, manifesting as fascist desires and beliefs. As such, traces of fascism are present in everyone, including people who do not otherwise hold fascistic ideas. This position goes on to argue that any critic of fascism must accordingly identify and eradicate such traces inside her own subjectivity, by means of an ethics of ‘non-fascist living’. Critically examining the philosophical presuppositions of this position, the article asks what implicit conception of the subject and its relation to resistance is at work here. It brings this position into conversation with Michel Foucault, upon whose work it draws but whose understanding of resistance, it is argued, it reconceptualises. The article concludes by reflecting on the implications of this form of resistance for critical philosophical practice.

scholarly journals A CONSTITUIÇÃO DO SUJEITO EM MICHEL FOUCAULT A PARTIR DA HISTÓRIA DA SEXUALIDADE

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 158
Author(s):  
Ketlin Kroetz ◽  
José Luis Schifino Ferraro
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
The Self ◽  
History Of Sexuality ◽  
Care Of The Self ◽  
Single Reading ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

RESUMOEste ensaio objetiva discutir o modo como Michel Foucault abordou a constituição do sujeito a partir de a História da Sexualidade em seus volumes (I) A vontade de saber, (II) O uso dos prazeres e (III) O cuidado de si. O trabalho utiliza aportes teóricos de autores que trabalham “com” o filósofo francês em torno dos processos de subjetivação. Sem querer fechar conclusões e/ou propor uma leitura unívoca sobre o tema, o texto que segue conduz o debate em torno da invenção do sujeito e dos distintos modos de constituir-se/devir-a-ser sujeito da experiência no interior dos estudos foucaultianos e seu entrecruzamento com a Educação.Palavras-chave: Constituição do sujeito. História da sexualidade. Michel Foucault.ABSTRACTThis essay aims to discuss how Michel Foucault approached the theme of the subject constitution from the History of Sexuality in its volumes (I) An Introduction, (II) the use of pleasure and (III) The care of the self. The work use a series of theoretical contributions from authors who works “with” the French philosopher around the subjectivation processes. Without any pretention of closing conclusions and/or propose a single reading about the theme, the following text lead us to the debate around the invention of the subject and the different ways to constitutes/becomes the subject of the experience in the field of the Foucauldian studies and its intersection with Education.Keywords: Subject constitution. History of sexuality. Michel Foucault.

scholarly journals Existential Dilemma in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 110-117
Author(s):  
Manu ◽  
Dr. Abha Shukla Kaushik
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
African American History ◽  
Local Area ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Song Of Solomon ◽  
The Past ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Traumatized Self

Toni Morrison verbalizes in novel manners the pain and battle of a traumatized self and local area. In her novels, the traumatic truth of a dark self shows itself in the characters' self-hatred and self-disdain, and in the deficiency of their individual and cultural identity. Her fiction resolves issues of African American history, traumatizing experience and identity, often additionally captivating with inquiries of sex and sex, and, less significantly, class. When writing in a climate where everything except a couple of dark writers battled for acknowledgment, presently the subject of much recognition, Morrison’s work has provoked various and assorted basic reactions. The Beloved and Song of Solomon utilize the devices of disruption, corruption and sensuality to portray the traumatic encounters of the Black ladies’ heroes. During the last fifteen or so years grant treating the Morrison oeuvre has blossomed, making her clearly quite possibly the most talked about creators of the contemporary time frame. Toni Morrison’s In her novel, Beloved (1987), Toni Morrison shows the overwhelming impacts of slavery and its specialist disasters as these impacts show themselves through numerous ages of one family. The trauma of slavery is with the end goal that nobody contacted by it can break liberated from the past, even a long time after actual freedom. This is valid for the novel's hero, Sethe, a once in the past oppressed lady living in Cincinnati after the Civil War and third novel Song of Solomon (1977) goes about as a milestone in her profession, since it uncovers the imaginative development she has acquired, and furthermore presents the arrangement she has observed to tackle the overwhelming issues she depicts in her initially traumatizing novel. The distinctive traumatic occasions make Morrison's novels appropriate for logo helpful perusing and examination.

Gatekeepers of (Non-)Knowledge: Aleksei Balabanov’s Morphine (2008)

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vlad Strukov
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Discourse ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Self Organisation ◽  
The Continuum

Balabanov’s Morphine is concerned with cultural memory conceived as a continuum; not as identity but rather subjectivity in construction. The concepts relates to Badiou’s study of subjectivity. It determines existence in a world where the horizon of knowledge is always disappearing and is never available to us in its integrity whereby the subject is barred from the infinite. Different directions and speeds of movement generate the transcendental subject in that the subject is in relation to the variations of the lived. One of such states implies a continuum, or becoming without determination, whilst the other, refers to the imperative to construct knowledge out of the elements of the continuum. Such assemblages, rituals and rites allow the subject to access the ‘beyond’, a different realm, where the elements of the past are positioned towards the future. The transcendence of the subject is coded as an unstoppable flow of imagery—a hallucination—divided into sequences by reiterations and references to the cultural discourse: an introspective vision produces not self-organisation but self-destruction as the subject becomes aware of its own infiniteness. I showcase how Balabanov’s Morphine captures the brutality of such openings and the self-annihilating impact of nothingness.

I’m holding a gathering

2021 ◽  
pp. 5-8
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Family ◽  
Freedom Fighters ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Village ◽  
Brothers And Sisters

This chapter sets the scene for Ti difé boulé. The text begins with a folkloric tone: it is nighttime after people in the village have finished work. Fireflies are flitting about. A woman called Lamèsi announces that Grinn Prominnin, who has been absent for a long time, has returned with news and ideas. This visionary calls a gathering to find out what happened to the narrator’s brothers and sisters—that is, to understand the crises that have occurred within the family over the past two hundred years and to identify “the traces they have left in our blood” (14). The narrator has learned to speak “tongues” and emerges from “the realm of the past” to tell his audience the story of Haiti’s history and what went wrong. The narrator situates the book’s focus in the revolutionary crucible of the years 1789-1820 when the ascendant indigenous elite snatched up the unprecedented successes of the self-emancipated revolutionaries and freedom fighters.

scholarly journals Questioning the Subject in Biographical Interviewing

2006 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 16-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Harding
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
University Students ◽  
The Self ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Training Video ◽  
The Past ◽  
Emotional Aspects ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Recent Project

This paper considers how different approaches to interviewing and styles of questioning produce different sorts of biographical subjects and accounts. It compares styles of biographical interview (chronological and narrative) and types of question (narrative and explanatory), and presents an approach, which treats the interview as a collaborative co-production primarily concerned with the present and subjectivity, rather than the past and fact. It also considers how biographical interviewing may direct and contain narratives of the self through the subject positions it creates and offers interviewees. Discussion is grounded in reflection on a recent project involving university students in interviewing young people leaving care about their care experiences and making a training video for professionals. The paper highlights the inter-subjective and emotional aspects of interviewing in this context.

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