Foucault's Critical Ethics by Lynch Richard A.;

Author:Lynch, Richard A.; [Lynch, Richard A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2016-09-18T16:00:00+00:00

4

Freedom’s Critique: The Trajectories of a Foucauldian Ethics

Robert Nye observes about Foucault’s history of sexuality that “his scholarly hermeneutic made it possible for him to be both the object and the subject of his investigations, providing him with a way of understanding the discursive influences that shaped his identity as well as the tools for an active self-transformation” (Nye 1996, 225). What is generally characterized as Foucault’s shift from an emphasis on power to an emphasis on ethics is marked by a shift from analysis of the subject as object of power relations to analysis of the subject as an agent. Nye’s insight is that, in fact, both approaches are copresent, even in Foucault’s analyses of sexuality, psychiatry, prisons, and power in the 1970s. Foucault’s ethics clearly emphasizes, as Nye notes, “active self-transformation.” And so, if we wish to understand the evolution of Foucault’s ethical thought, we must look for its roots in his analysis of power.

And we find that Foucault’s ethical emphases evolved along with his understanding of the operation of power precisely because that ethics emerges and is articulated within his then-current understanding of power. Foucault’s ethical thinking can thus be recognized at each stage of his development. The task of this chapter is to trace how his ethical impulses developed in parallel to the analyses of power that we traced up to this point. We shall begin at the end, however, looking at the “new theoretical basis” that he articulated for ethics in the Introduction to The Use of Pleasure (volume 2 of The History of Sexuality, published in 1984, weeks before his death). Just as did his new theoretical basis for analysis of power relations, which emerged only out of his empirical studies, this reconception of ethics, emerging out of his own ethical explorations, will give us the framework in which to understand Foucault’s ethical development. Ethics is, fundamentally, for Foucault, a practice.

In the process of recognizing or discovering this new framework for “what constitutes ethics,” Foucault’s ethical thought developed along four principal trajectories. The first was already telegraphed in the closing pages of La volonté de savoir—the exploration of “bodies and pleasures” as sites of resistance to the disciplinary production of sexuality and desire. This exploration emerged explicitly as an attempt to resist the totalizing effects of disciplinary power, and it came to a focus in Foucault’s engagement with sadomasochism, a site where power is explicitly thematized as an element of pleasure and where pleasure is not reducible to sexuality. This first trajectory serves to authorize speaking about—and exploring—kinds of relations other than power. Thus the second trajectory emerges, again beginning in sexual relationships between men. But what interests Foucault in homosexual relations is not sex but the friendship and caring that emerge within them and that can be transformative for the relations themselves and for larger social norms. Here we can recognize the “active self-transformation” that Nye identified, which will be the springboard for Foucault’s next ethical trajectory.

Both of these first two trajectories, however,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.