Foucault’s Critical Ethics

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, draw directly from the micropractices of very personal experience—sexual practices and practices of friendship. But Foucault’s ethical trajectories are not exclusively personalist. The last two trajectories that I will outline are both much more general (and macro) in their scope and significance—these latter trajectories allow Foucault to give an account of ethical validity or justification from within these practices.

The third trajectory is an exploration of “critique” as an attitude. As an attitude, critique begins in the personal (as had the first two trajectories), but critique’s scope encompasses how one ought to be governed in the most general sense, including societies’ norms and states’ techniques as well as individuals’ self-government. Kant’s “What Is Enlightenment?” is a key text for Foucault’s articulation of this attitude. And very interestingly, Foucault took up this theme in his last years (especially the 1983 and 1984 Collège de France courses) but also in 1978, just after he had completed the elaboration of his expanded analysis of power in terms of governmentality. There he even proposes that we should understand “the critical attitude as virtue in general” (OT-78-01ET, 383).

A critical attitude would be an essential virtue precisely because “everything is dangerous” (DE326.4, 256), and everything is dangerous because the myriad power relations within which we are inescapably situated themselves necessarily presuppose freedom. Understanding the ethical import of this ontological freedom constitutes the fourth and final trajectory that I will trace in Foucauldian ethics. Foucault’s argument here, which is most developed in the 1984 interview on “The Care of the Self as a Practice of Freedom” and is very close to a line of argumentation that Simone de Beauvoir develops in The Ethics of Ambiguity, gives a Foucauldian ethics the resources to ground context-transcendent justifications, answering his most significant critics.

APPROACHING ETHICS FROM A NEW THEORETICAL BASIS

One of Foucault’s most important contributions to social theory is the reconceptualization of power that he articulated in the 1970s, which we’ve traced in this book’s earlier chapters. We see a parallel reconceptualization in his ethical thinking, too: not only must we understand ethics from within power relations, but we must also reimagine what constitutes “doing ethics,” just as Foucault had reimagined what constitutes “using power.” And just as Part 4 of La volonté de savoir was the key text for his articulation of his new theory of power, the Introduction to the second volume of The History of Sexuality, The Use of Pleasure (1984a) gives us his clearest elaboration of how ethics is to be reconceived.

The second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality appeared in the spring of 1984—months before his death and eight years after the first volume had appeared. These two volumes were nothing like what had been originally projected for the series. It was to have been a six-volume study of sexuality in the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, historically parallel to his study of prisons in Discipline and Punish. Instead, the last two volumes discuss classical Greek and Roman practices of self-formation—practices in which sex is often less important than dietetics and marriage. “I had to choose: either stick to the plan I had set . . . or reorganize the whole study around the slow formation, in antiquity, of a hermeneutics of the self” (1984a, 6). Clearly, the questions that were most urgent in Foucault’s thinking, as well as the historical periods in which he oriented his studies, had shifted—which we saw heralded even in the 1978 Collège de France course. This means that the final two volumes of The History of Sexuality pose certain hermeneutical challenges. They attempt to do justice to two different projects—the original and the new—which now have been superimposed, rendering both partial and incomplete. Rather than a study of sexual discourse in modernity or of practices of self-formation in antiquity, we get a study of sexual discourses in antiquity. This “overlapping segment” does not fairly represent either the original study of sexuality nor the later study of antiquity.

Foucault’s introduction to The Use of Pleasure begins by explicitly acknowledging these lacunae. This introduction is of critical importance because it articulates an important theoretical reorientation that has emerged from his work in the intervening years—a reorientation with respect to both the constitution of the subject, individual, or self and the development of an ethics. Just as Foucault had remade the theoretical landscape when he began his explicit analysis of power in the mid-1970s, he does the same here. Arnold Davidson observed that Foucault’s “conceptualization of ethics . . . is as potentially transformative for writing the history of ethics as, to take the strongest comparison I can think of, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice is, in its cultural context, for articulating the aims of political philosophy” (Davidson 1994, 115). We shall begin with a discussion of this new theoretical approach to ethics and then turn in the next sections to trace the development of Foucault’s ethical thinking in the last decade of his life.

In this reconception, Foucault frames ethics as a kind of practice that presupposes (or requires as a condition for its possibility) both a critical attitude toward oneself and a certain kind of freedom. First, ethics must be understood not as being about “moral codes,” nor even the evaluation of particular behaviors, but rather a practice of “self-fashioning.” Thus, ethics is about practices of the self upon the self—practices that are thus orthogonal or eccentric relative to the power relations that are exercised upon the self. And so “ethics is a practice; ethos is a manner of being” (DE341.1, 377). As such, ethics is fundamentally a practice that demands a critical at titude toward oneself (as well as toward others, external powers, those that govern, etc.). Ethics is also a fundamentally a practice that presupposes a certain kind of freedom (a freedom to change, to resist, not being entirely determined by the grid of power relations in which one is situated—in part because one is situated in other types of relations as well). Elaborating these last two fundamental attributes of the practice of ethics constitute the final two trajectories that I will discuss.

In “Morality and Practice of the Self,” the third chapter of the Introduction to The Use of Pleasure, Foucault begins, as with his retheorization of power, by couching his shift in perspective as a series of “methodological considerations” (1984aET, 25).

A theoretical shift had also been required in order to analyze what is often described as the manifestations of “power.” . . . It appeared that I now had to undertake a third shift, in order to analyze what is termed “the subject.” It seemed appropriate to look for the forms and modalities of the relation to self by which the individual constitutes and recognizes himself qua subject. (1984aET, 6)

To identify these forms and modalities, the first things to note are the different senses—Foucault will delineate three, which collapse to two—of the term “morality.” First, “morality” refers to a code, “a set of values and rules of action that are recommended to individuals through the intermediary of various prescriptive agencies” (1984aET, 25); second, the term “also refers to the real behavior of individuals in relation to the rules and values that are recommended to them” (1984aET, 25). These two senses can in fact be merged, since particular sorts of behaviors will be closely wed to the codes by which they are judged. Third and finally, “morality” can refer to ethical self-fashioning. “Another thing still is the manner in which one ought to form oneself as an ethical subject acting in reference to the prescriptive elements that make up the code” (1984aET, 26). This third sense (self-fashioning) is broader or deeper than the second sense (behavior)—it is a question that goes beyond mere activity and points to the creation of ethical subjectivity.

In these three definitions, Foucault notes, we can recognize two basic orientations toward moral problems and problematizations: one emphasizes the codes and behaviors, and from this view “subjectivation occurs basically in a quasi-juridical form” (1984aET, 29); another emphasizes “the forms of subjectivation and the practices of the self” (1984aET, 30).

This first orientation, comprising the first two elements (code and behav ior), will be present, broadly speaking, in every morality. This is not to say that the relationship between code and behavior or even between different aspects of code will necessarily be straightforward or simple: it is often the case that “far from constituting a systematic ensemble, they form a complex interplay of elements that counterbalance and correct one another, and cancel each other out on certain points, thus providing for compromises or loopholes” (1984aET, 25). Examples of this interplay, and of the domination of this first orientation, can be readily recognized—the sixteenth-century formalization and codification of the practice of penitence following the Council of Trent and the subsequent development of minutely negotiated casuistry are perhaps paradigmatic; certain neo-Kantian or utilitarian approaches to morality may also share this basic orientation. Moreover, this first orientation uses the same kind of language as, and hence could be reduced to, an analysis in terms of power relations. For example, Foucault had noted in Discipline and Punish how the new disciplinary techniques of power were promulgated through “the formulation of explicit, general codes and unified rules of procedure” (1975ET, 7).

The second general orientation emphasizes the third definition, in which practice of the self on the self, ascesis, ethical self-fashioning, is the dominant theme. Foucault characterizes this orientation as “ethics oriented,” and it may be useful thus to distinguish between ethics and morality. (This distinction, obviously, is not the same as the Habermasian distinction between ethics and morality.) Just as the code-oriented morality will provide some account of subjectivity (but subjectivity would be a secondary or derivative concern), adopting an ethical orientation does not entail that codes are unimportant. Rather, from this view, the codes will be secondary, and the question of how one produces one’s subjectivity as an ethical subjectivity becomes the encompassing or framing context in which codes must be situated and assessed. It is clear that Foucault wants to adopt this second orientation in his approach to ethical and moral problems. This shift holds out the possibility that ethics conceived along the second orientation would not be reducible to power relations—though modern punitive methods had constructed or fashioned the “delinquent” as a correlate of certain kinds of power relations, this approach seeks to transcend particular arrangements of power. It is also important to note that a shift from a code-oriented morality to an ethics- or subjectivity-oriented morality marks a certain revolution in moral thinking and will require a rethinking of the demands of justification.

Foucault discovered examples (perhaps themselves paradigmatic) of this ethics orientation in the ancient Greek attitudes and practices with respect to what we would anachronistically call “sexuality.” What Foucault termed a “male ethics”

spoke to them concerning precisely those conducts in which they were called upon to exercise their rights, their power, their authority, and their liberty. . . . These themes of sexual austerity should be understood, not as an expression of, or commentary on, deep and essential prohibitions, but as the elaboration and stylization of an activity in the exercise of its power and the practice of its liberty. (1984aET, 23)

We can recognize a shift paralleling Foucault’s retheorization of power here: as with power, the conducts are not the expression of “deep and essential” prohibitions. Further, as Foucault understands these practices, the power that one does exercise and the liberty that, given Foucault’s analysis, that very power presupposes, are situated within elements of a larger framework of aesthetico-ethical activity and practice. And so the articulation and elaboration of these examples became the new task of his reconceived History of Sexuality series.

It thus seemed to me that a whole recentering was called for. Instead of looking for basic interdictions that were hidden or manifested in the demands of sexual austerity, it was necessary to locate the areas of experience and the forms in which sexual behavior was problematized, becoming an object of concern, an element for reflection, and a material for stylization. (1984aET, 23–24)

Note how in this “recentering” Foucault is now interested in “sexuality” not as the correlate of and hinge between various micro and macro power relations (interdictions, codes, normalizations) but as an area of experience. This experience is an object of concern—that is, the object (the construct or correlate) of practices of caring; it is an element for reflection—that is, it is something to be critically assessed and evaluated; last, it is a material for stylization—that is, it can be taken up aesthetically, as part of one’s self-fashioning according to an art of existence.

Foucault’s emerging analysis of this ethical practice of self-fashioning is built around four distinct aspects of its “relationship to oneself” (DE326.4, 263)—and he articulates these four aspects in both The Use of Pleasure and a 1983 interview with Paul Rabinow and Bert Dreyfus, “On the Genealogy of Ethics” (DE326). These four aspects are ethical substance, a mode of subjectivation, the ethical work (“self-forming activity” or “asceticism”), and the telos toward which the work aims. “Ethical substance” is “the aspect or the part of myself or my behavior which is concerned with moral conduct” (DE326.4, 263). This framework is schematic and adaptable: these substances could be one’s acts or one’s intentions, thoughts, or desires, etc. The “mode of subjectivation” is “the way in which people are invited or incited to recognize their moral obligations” (DE326.4, 264), “the way in which the individual has to constitute this or that part of himself as the prime material of his moral conduct” (1984aET, 26). Here, too, a number of modes are possible. And the Stoic idea of an “aesthetics of existence” has been displaced by a Kantian “idea that we must do such and such things because we are rational beings—as members of the human community, we must do them” (DE326.4, 264). “Ethical work” is “the means by which we can change ourselves in order to become ethical subjects” (DE326.4, 265); it is the ascetic (in the broad sense) practice of self-fashioning. Finally, ethical subjects will have a “telos”: “the kind of being to which we aspire when we behave in a moral way” (DE326.4, 265), for “an action is not only moral in itself, in its singularity; it is also moral in its circumstantial integration and by virtue of the place it occupies in a pattern of conduct” (1984aET, 27–28).

This four-part analysis of what constitutes ethical self-fashioning both emerged from and served to guide Foucault’s historical research into ancient, Hellenistic, and early Christian practices. In the last two volumes of The History of Sexuality, he discusses four particular areas or domains in which the aphrodesia (or “pleasures”) became problematized in these practices. These domains include one’s body (tied to questions of health, life, and death), relations to the other sex (especially one’s spouse and the familial and social institutions thus produced), relations to members of one’s own sex (and questions about who were appropriate sexual partners), and one’s relations to truth (and what spiritual conditions were necessary for wisdom) (1984aET, 23). So the final two volumes of The History of Sexuality are framed around a series of key questions:

Why was it in those areas—apropos of the body, of the wife, of boys, and of truth—that the practice of pleasures became a matter for debate? . . . How did sexual behavior, insofar as it implied these different types of relations, come to be conceived as a domain of moral experience? (1984aET, 24)

I will not go into a detailed discussion of these domains nor how they illustrate the four aspects that organize Foucault’s analysis. This brief outline serves to show, however, “that every morality, in the broad sense, comprises the two elements . . . : codes of behavior and forms of subjectivation; . . . [and that] they can never be entirely dissociated, though they may develop in relative independence from one another” (1984aET, 29), and that the latter was primary in these ancient cultures. In the pre-Christian practices, Foucault argues, “more important than the content of the law and its conditions of application was the attitude that caused one to respect them” (1984aET, 31, my italics). This notion of an attitude at the core of the practice of ethical self-fashioning is an important one that will allow Foucault to connect this analysis to his analysis of modern power relations.

Nevertheless, there are important limitations to Foucault’s (and our) use of the ancient Greek practices. First of all, we cannot simply import these ancient practices as some sort of “solution” for our contemporary challenges: “you can’t find the solution of a problem in the solution of another problem raised at another moment by other people” (DE326.4, 256). Second, even if we could, we shouldn’t want to do so. For even though the ancient Greek practices reveal a reprioritization in which things we take for granted in modernity are explicitly rejected (and thus help us imagine ourselves differently), many of the ancient Greek values were themselves very troubling. It was a misogynistic culture that embraced slavery, among many other dissymmetries. Foucault puts his rejection of these values quite bluntly: “All that is quite disgusting!” (DE326.4, 258). So, even if the particular Greek practices are merely reference points, not “solutions,” the general framework that they reveal is nevertheless not foreclosed to us—and in particular, it might give us resources to resist a certain kind of negative “subjectification” in terms of “desire” and “sexuality.”

There is, to many philosophers’ ears, a tension between Foucault’s uses of the terms “ethical” and “aesthetic” to describe these practices: is “the ethical” merely “aesthetic”? Part of our resistance to this stems from a presupposition that ethical or moral norms or codes should be universal whereas the aesthetic seems “merely” preferential. But Foucault is quite clear that we cannot expect to find transcendental universals—all of our norms (even if we can justify their general acceptance) emerge from historically contingent circumstances and remain subject to reconsideration and alteration. Thus, for Foucault, the term “aesthetic” serves to remind us of the historically contingent and tentative character of our values and norms, our ethics. Indeed, Foucault made this point in the prefatory remarks that open his 1978 Collège de France course:

However, in the theoretical domain, the imperative discourse that consists in saying “love this, hate that, this is good, that is bad, be for this, beware of that,” seems to me, at present at any rate, to be no more than an aesthetic discourse that can only be based on choices of an aesthetic order. (CdF78ET, 3)

Interestingly, his caveat that it seems so “at present at any rate” holds out the possibility that some other basis could be found. I’ll suggest that for Foucault, the fact of freedom can provide something like such a basis. In any case, this is the rationale for his bringing together of the ethical and the aesthetic. On the one hand, “ethics” need not be reduced to codes and normalization: “I don’t think one can find any normalization in, for instance, the Stoic ethics . . . the principal aim, the principal target of this kind of ethics, was an aesthetic one” (DE326.4, 254). This claim that there was no normalization in the Stoics is frankly problematical; nevertheless, it illustrates the important shift in which the ethical/aesthetic is not reducible to normalizing techniques of power. On the other hand, this insight has implications for our contemporary situation, in which much of our self-understanding and subjectivity has been constituted through power relations: “From the idea that the self is not given to us [as an a priori], I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art” (DE326.4, 262). And we can only effect this self-creation or self-fashioning through a ethical practice: “No technique, no professional skill can be acquired without exercise; neither can one learn the art of living, the tekhne tou biou without an askesis which must be taken as a training of oneself by oneself” (DE326.4, 273). There are two important and related ideas here. First is the idea that one’s life or bios can be taken “as a material for an aesthetic piece of art” (DE326.4, 260), but it is connected to another important insight: “that ethics can be a very strong structure of existence, without any relation with the juridical per se, with an authoritarian system, with a disciplinary structure” (DE326.4, 260). Foucault gives a concise definition of these “arts of existence” in The Use of Pleasure:

What I mean by the phrase are those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria. (1984aET, 10–11)

Foucault then gives us a sense of the historical itinerary that he outlined in the 1978 Collège de France course, when he immediately adds that

These “arts of existence,” these “techniques of the self,” no doubt lost some of their importance and autonomy when they were assimilated into the exercise of pastoral power [pouvoir pastoral] in early Christianity, and later, into educative, medical, and psychological types of practices. (1984aET, 11; trans. mod.)

So a certain kind of self-fashioning, a certain kind of ethical practice, was transformed and displaced with the introduction and rise of pastoral power into Rome—the very root of the modern modes of disciplinary power and biopower. And thus, understanding this ancient ethical practice could help us grasp the possibilities for reimagining ourselves—constituting a source of resistance to the ways that modern power serves to construct our subjectivities. As Sandra Bartky incisively argues, “there is nothing in Foucault’s account of the social construction of the subject that threatens the concept of agency or compels us to abandon, in principle, the idea of a subjectivity free enough to build a freer society” (Bartky 1995, 32).

This reconception of ethics as a practice also allows Foucault to redefine philosophy as philosophical activity. In his 1978 Collège de France course, he had defined philosophy (which, he added, was “what I am doing”) as “the politics of truth” (CdF78ET, 3). Here, in The Use of Pleasure, he further specifies, in the form of a rhetorical question, that “philosophy today—philosophical activity, I mean— . . . [is] the critical work that thought brings to bear upon itself” (1984aET, 8–9). Thus, philosophy is “an ‘ascesis,’ an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought” (1984aET, 9). In a 1982 interview, Foucault notes that “this transformation of one’s self by one’s own knowledge is, I think, something rather close to the aesthetic experience” (DE336.3, 131). He adds in a 1984 interview that this gives us the means to “speak the truth”: the truth is spoken by “free individuals who establish a certain consensus, and who find themselves within a certain network of practices of power and constraining institutions” (DE356.4, 297). This language, recalling Foucault’s earlier analysis of power, reminds us that the philosophical activity of critique is not merely focused on oneself, however. It is also oriented toward the power relations (practices and institutions) in which one is immersed—up to and including the contemporary macro forms of the state and biopower: “the role of philosophy is also to keep watch over the excessive power of political rationality” (DE306.4, 328).

This philosophical—ethical, political—project is inherently dangerous. Most of all, it recognizes that it works in a field devoid of certainties. It means that he (and we) must be willing “to work hard, to begin and begin again, to attempt and be mistaken, to go back and rework everything from top to bottom, and still find reason to hesitate from one step to the next— . . . in short, . . . to work in the midst of uncertainty and apprehension” (1984aET, 7). These uncertainties do not mean that the project is doomed to failure—on the contrary, Foucault explicitly denies that view 1—but rather that it is an ongoing challenge, and we must always maintain a sense of our own limitations, frailties, and humility. We can give answers right now, but we may have to revise those answers in light of new evidence tomorrow. This also means that ethical prescriptions will always be tentative and contingent—as he put it in 1978, these imperatives will always be hypothetical, aesthetic, “tactical pointers” (CdF78ET, 3). And so he notes in a 1982 interview that:

It is one of my targets to show people that a lot of things that are a part of their landscape—that people think are universal—are the result of some very precise historical changes. All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence. They show the arbitrariness of institutions and show which space of freedom we can still enjoy and how many changes can still be made. (DE362.1, 11)

This “politics of truth” is, at its core, a pragmatic, fallibilist philosophy. “The object was to learn to what extent the effort to think one’s own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently” (1984aET, 9). We might add that this has been Foucault’s object all along, and we can hear this effort to “free thought from what it silently thinks” even in the closing pages of the first volume of The History of Sexuality, eight years earlier.

“BODIES AND PLEASURES”

In a November 1976 interview, Foucault explained that “Sex is the hinge between anatomo-politics and bio-politics, it is at the intersection of disciplines and regulations” (DE297.1, 162). So if we want to resist these hinged mechanisms of power, if, in other words, we want to “enable [ourselves] to think differently” (1984aET, 9), we might want to start with sexuality. Indeed, this is what Foucault did, in the first of the four ethical trajectories that we shall trace. And though it begins from within the analyses of power that he has constructed—sexuality is, after all, the hinge where the micro and macro forms are conjoined—it also begins in an area that will lead Foucault toward his reconceptualization of ethics as a practice of self-fashioning.

This project comes into focus in the closing pages of La volonté de savoir:

By creating the imaginary element that is “sex,” the deployment of sexuality established one of its most essential internal operating principles: the desire for sex. . . . And it is this desirability of sex that attaches each one of us to the injunction to know it, to reveal its law and its power; it is this desirability that makes us think we are affirming the rights of our sex against all power, when in fact we are fastened to the deployment of sexuality . . . (1976ET, 156–157)

“Sex” and the desire for sex bind us to certain kinds of truth discourses (the “injunction to know it”) through confessional practices (which are themselves, as Foucault will later show us, the legacy of earlier forms of pastoral power). “Sex” and the desire for sex “fasten” us to deployments of power, to what in Discipline and Punish he termed “mechanisms of ‘incarceration’” (1975ET, 308), even as they give us a false consciousness of liberating ourselves. “Sex” and the desire for sex are thus the linchpins as well as the hinge of these power relations—how then could it be challenged and resisted? Foucault’s answer comes in a famous passage:

It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim—through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality—to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures. (1976ET, 157)

There are several things to note in Foucault’s phrasing here. First, what he gives us is explicitly a hypothetical imperative—we should do this only if we share a certain aim or goal of countering the grips of power. Next, these are, as he would note in 1978, only “tactical pointers”—a “tactical reversal,” not necessarily a solution for all people or all time. Finally, we can recognize all four elements of ethical self-fashioning implicit in this characterization: we have an aim or telos, our bodies themselves constitute the ethical substance, our mode of subjection will be manifest in a resistance to sex-desire, and the development of bodies’ pleasures will constitute the ethical work.

Robert Nye situates this vision explicitly in terms of Foucault’s own homosexuality:

He was not willing to engage in narrow or confrontational identity politics, which offended him both personally and philosophically. On the other hand, he had no desire to repudiate his own (homo)sexual self, and so he applied himself to the delicate task of reconfiguring a new kind of identity out of the wreckage of the one he had spent a considerable part of his life trying to escape. The famous passages at the end of La Volonté de Savoir about “bodies and pleasures” were his first efforts to deal with this problem intellectually. (Nye 1996, 235)

Nye’s reading of these passages is not incorrect—questions of reconstructing identities and embracing his own homosexuality are present in Foucault’s evocation of “bodies and pleasures,” and (as we shall see) Foucault will draw from his own experience of homosexual relationships in his exploration of ethics. But Nye’s assessment does not appreciate the full depth of Foucault’s concern with either bodies or pleasures: Foucault’s ethical itinerary begins with bodies precisely because bodies are the locus or material upon which disciplinary power operates to construct subjectivities. For “deployments of power are directly connected to the body—to bodies, functions, physiological processes, sensations, and pleasures; far from the body having to be effaced, what is needed is to make it visible” (1976ET, 151–152). So looking to bodies themselves—and to their pleasures, something that might be (in some sense) prior to bodies’ immersion within the particular power relations that condition them in ways we want to resist—give Foucault, at the very least, an opening, a possibility for a kind of practice or relation that would not be reducible to power.

But as David Halperin (a much stronger reader of Foucault than Nye) reminds us,

The very possibility of pursuing such a body- and pleasure-centered strategy of resistance to the apparatus of sexuality disappears, of course, as soon as “bodies” and “pleasures” cease to be understood merely as handy weapons against current technologies of normalization and attain instead to the status of transhistorical components of some natural phenomenon or material substrate underlying “the history of sexuality” itself. (Halperin 1998, 95)

Halperin’s worry is warranted because Foucault’s evocation of “bodies and pleasures” here is immediately followed by what could well be characterized as a “utopian vision” (indeed, one that recalls the closing lines of The Order of Things):

Perhaps one day people will wonder at this. . . . Moreover, we need to consider the possibility that one day, perhaps, in a different economy of bodies and pleasures, people will no longer quite understand how the ruses of sexuality, and the power that sustains its organization, were able to subject us to that austere monarchy of sex, so that we became dedicated to the endless task of forcing its secret, of exacting the truest of confessions from a shadow. (1976ET, 157, 159)

This vision is utopian in part because Foucault will refuse to prescribe how this “different economy” is to be brought about. (He explains in a 1981 interview that “the idea of a program of proposals is dangerous. As soon as a program is presented, it becomes a law, and there’s a prohibition against inventing” [DE293.3, 139].) But, it is also utopian in that it could be read as reifying bodies and pleasures, in contrast to sex, in precisely the ways Halperin warns against. However, even if we constantly recall that even these “bodies and pleasures” are themselves contingent constructs, they can still function as the site and material for resistance, invention, and transformation. Foucault explains in a 1975 interview that “once power produces this [contingent] effect [of bodies and pleasures], there inevitably emerge the responding claims and affirmations, those of one’s own body against power, of health against the economic system, of pleasure against the moral norms of sexuality, marriage, decency” (DE157.1, 56).

Indeed, the roots of “bodies and pleasures”—contingent constructs that they are—nevertheless go quite deep as a possible source and route forward for resistance to power. Foucault had, for example, highlighted pleasure’s complicated relationship to power at least as early as the 1973–1974 Collège de France course. There are, in fact, many kinds of pleasure that go far beyond sex. In developing his treatments for “the mad,” the psychiatrist François Leuret had “identified something in his patient that had three forms: the pleasure of the asylum, the pleasure of being ill, and the pleasure of having symptoms” (CdF74ET, 162). Pleasure is something that power (such as the psychiatrist’s attempt to effect a cure of madness) must grapple with; pleasure can also become a source of resistance to power: “the cure must not only work at the level of reality, but also at the level of pleasure, and not only at the level of the pleasure the patient takes in his madness, but at the level of the pleasure the patient takes in his own treatment” (CdF74ET, 163).

What, then, is the significance of Foucault’s quasi-utopian evocation of “bodies and pleasures”? Though he says very little (and, for him, necessarily little) about how to go forward, “bodies and pleasures” are posited as the site where such a way forward could begin, a locus for resistance, for what he will later describe (and we have discussed in the preceding section) as an ethical practice. Thus, “bodies and pleasures” represent Foucault’s first ethical trajectory, as he attempts to explore what kind of an ethics could emerge in the face of modern power. As Foucault elaborates in a 1977 interview, “the monarchy of sex,” as he characterized it both in this interview and La volonté de savoir, can be resisted by “inventing other forms of pleasures, of relationships, coexistences, attachments, loves, intensities” (DE200.3, 116).2 And in a 1978 interview, Foucault explicitly identified homosexuality (as an activity and a community) as a means to develop this ethical trajectory: “Today, homosexuality can become intelligible to itself by thinking of itself simply as a certain relationship between bodies and pleasures” (BdS-B46, 34). He continues that “For several years now, [in homosexuals’ practices] we have been witnessing a kind of enlargement of the economy of pleasure” (BdS-B46, 35). Foucault explored these possibilities for invention: “You find emerging in places like San Francisco and New York what might be called laboratories of sexual experimentation” (DE317.4, 151). Foucault will take on this ethical work of inventing pleasures, relationships, intensities—in ways that yield theoretical fruit—in a practice that at least appears to be all about sex and desire: sadomasochism (S&M).³

(Though Foucault had begun his initial articulations of biopower in La volonté de savoir, at that point he still understood modern power as essentially disciplinary. So it is not at all surprising that he would look for resistance to discipline and the possibility of an ethics that cannot be reduced to power relations in micropractices. And given the pattern of Foucault’s “Hobbesian hypothesis,” in which he uses modus tollens to justify positing something positive of which he would otherwise have to be doubtful, it is not at all surprising that Foucault would begin in a microrelation that appears to be the sexualization of power.4)

Foucault’s exploration of S&M accomplishes three things. It will explore a relationship that appears to be thoroughly defined in terms of power relations and show that in fact those power relations are subordinate to other relations of pleasure. It will demonstrate that bodies’ pleasures are not all about sex. So S&M shows us that bodies and pleasures take us beyond the scope of sex-desire and can even serve as a(n ethical) frame for relations of power. And finally, in exploring what those relations of pleasure demand, S&M will move Foucault’s ethical itinerary forward, from its initial starting point in pleasure relations to the broader category of caring relations.

First, Foucault’s discussion of sadomasochistic practices suggests that there is a relation more important than power in these practices: pleasure. Foucault explicitly notes that power plays an important role in practices of S&M—for most people uninitiated in these practices, in fact, S&M seems to revolve around the exercise of power—but Foucault explains that power relations are not the most important element in these practices. Rather, pleasure, distinct from power, is the most important element. Though S&M is a practice that very explicitly employs power relations—prima facie, in inflicting pain or asserting discipline, the “top” or “master” exercises power upon and against the “bottom” or “slave”—the exercise of power plays a situated role within these practices. “One can say that S&M is the eroticization of power. . . . What strikes me with regard to S&M is how it differs from social power” (DE358.2, 169). Rather, the organizing relations in S&M are relations of pleasure. “The practice of S&M is the creation of pleasure, and there is an identity with that creation. . . . S&M is the use of a strategic relationship as a source of pleasure (physical pleasure)” (DE358.2, 169–170).

Power relations are present in the practice of S&M but are situated within the practice as a means for the creation of physical pleasure. But S&M is identified with the creation of this pleasure. The important relation in the practice of S&M is the creation of pleasure. Power relations are only an aspect of these relations. Further, power relations do not delineate the possibilities for these relations of pleasure because the power relations themselves are altered in the course of the practice. “Sometimes the scene begins with the master and slave, and at the end the slave has become the master. Or, even when the roles are stabilized, you know very well that it is always a game” (DE358.2, 169). The power relations and their transformations are subordinate to the relations of pleasure creation, and it is these pleasure-creating relations that are of most importance in the analysis of practices of S&M.

In Foucault’s analysis of S&M, then, an analysis of the power relations involved in the practice is insufficient for an understanding of the practice. But could these relations of pleasure creation be reducible to power relations? Foucault’s discussions of the relationship between pleasure and power in La volonté de savoir indicate that it is not: there he discusses the family as “a network of pleasures and powers linked together at multiple points and according to transformable relationships” (1976ET, 46). This suggests not a reduction of pleasure relations to power relations but rather that two distinct, mutually irreducible kinds of relations, both immanent in the social relations of the family, interact in various ways dependent upon the contexts in which they arise. In a context of S&M, the relations of pleasure are the more important organizing relations, and power relations are subordinated to them.

Foucault also notes that “what interests the practitioners of S&M is that the relationship is at the same time regulated and open” (DE317.4, 151). This openness is interesting—Foucault explains that since S&M is a game, either the master or the slave could “lose” the game if he or she “is unable to respond to the [partner’s] needs and trials” (DE317.4, 152). He continues that

This mixture of rules and openness has the effect of intensifying sexual relations by introducing a perpetual novelty, a perpetual tension and a perpetual uncertainty, which the simple consummation of the act lacks. The idea is also to make use of every part of the body as a sexual instrument. (DE317.4, 152)

As he speaks of making “every part of the body” into a sexual instrument, Foucault means that every part of the body can be explored as a source of pleasure in S&M—that pleasure is not restricted to the genitalia. Homosexual practices in general and S&M in particular provide opportunities “for inventing oneself, for making one’s body a locus for the production of extraordinarily polymorphous pleasures, and at the same time moving away from emphasis upon the sex organ and particularly the male sex organ” (BdS-B46, 34). “By taking the pleasure of sexual relations away from the area of sexual norms and its categories, and in so doing making the pleasure the crystallizing point of a new culture—I think that’s an interesting approach” (DE313.2, 160). Though he is still speaking in terms of sex, in fact, S&M moves pleasure beyond sex toward something that Foucault characterizes as “mythical relations” (DE317.4, 151) since it involves the assumption of identities and roles. And so “sexuality is something that we ourselves create—it is our own creation, and much more than the discovery of a secret side of our desire” (DE358.2, 163). S&M is better understood as

a creative enterprise, which has as one of its main features what I call the desexualization of pleasure. The idea that bodily pleasure should always come from sexual pleasure as the root of all our possible pleasure—I think that’s something quite wrong. (DE358.2, 165)5

Bodies and their pleasures cannot be reduced to sex, just as pleasure cannot be reduced to power—all of this emerges from Foucault’s experiments with S&M. Sex is just one aspect of pleasure (indeed, he catalogued other pleasures in his 1973 discussion of Leuret’s treatment of “the mad”), and the exploration of pleasure constitutes “a possibility for creative life” (DE358.2, 163). Ladelle McWhorter nicely summarizes Foucault’s argument:

Pleasure figures prominently, then, in Foucault’s understanding of power as normalization, but it also figures prominently in his excursions into discourses and practices having to do with shaping an ethos, with leading a good or beautiful life. . . . Pleasure, like power, is creative. . . . Foucault advocates the use of pleasure and the expansion of our capacities for pleasure as a means of resisting sexual normalization and creating different lives for ourselves. (McWhorter 1999, 177)

McWhorter brings out both sides of this first trajectory. On the one hand, as she notes, pleasure functions as a means of resisting sexual normalization and the power relations and deployments of sexuality that are involved in that normalization. On the other hand, bodies and pleasures also open up new possibilities for the creation of “a good or beautiful life,” “an ethos.” As Foucault notes:

Still, I think we have to go a step further. I think that one of the factors of this stabilization will be the creation of new forms of life, relationships, friendships in society, art, culture, and so on through our sexual, ethical, and political choices. (DE358.2, 164)

This “step further”—from bodily pleasures to relationships, friendship, and society—brings us to Foucault’s second ethical trajectory.

FRIENDSHIP AS A PRACTICE OF CARE

In the game of S&M, both partners must be attentive to the other’s pleasure, because the other’s pleasure is necessarily a constitutive element of their own pleasure. As Leo Bersani characterizes this fact, “the practice of S/M depends on a mutual respect generally absent from the relations between the powerful and the weak, underprivileged, or enslaved in society” (Bersani 1995, 87). Looked at from the outside, this may seem surprising; nevertheless, this notion of mutual respect is at the heart of S&M—without it, none of S&M’s possibilities for pleasure or creation can be realized. And this insight led Foucault to a new problem and a new question, which he articulated in the 1983 interview “On the Genealogy of Ethics”:

What I want to ask is: Are we able to have an ethics of acts and their pleasures which would be able to take into account the pleasure of the other? Is the pleasure of the other something that can be integrated in our pleasure, without reference either to law, to marriage, to I don’t know what? (DE326.4, 258)

These questions raise several issues. First, and importantly, Foucault explicitly links pleasures with ethics—one’s pleasures ought to take into account the other’s pleasures. (The second question here highlights Foucault’s desire to create such an ethics without recourse to laws or institutions.) But implicit in this orientation—taking an other’s pleasure into account as part of one’s own pleasures—are notions of responsiveness, reciprocity, and mutual recognition. (Practices of S&M, Foucault’s analysis suggests, presuppose this kind of responsiveness and recognition, for neither role—master or slave—can achieve its own pleasure without taking the other’s into account. They are, we might say, constitutive values of the practice.) These notions emerging out of Foucault’s engagement with S&M—these values of responsiveness, reciprocity, and recognition—will direct Foucault to another kind of relationship that homosexual men may be in a privileged position to explore and develop: friendship. And friendship will, in its turn, serve as a bridge from pleasures (the starting point of this ethical itinerary) to a broader conception of caring—practices of epimeleia heautou, “care of the self,” which in ancient cultures were understood as a prolegomena to caring for and governing others, but also a contemporary development of caring practices within feminist ethics.

The connection between S&M and friendship is not haphazard. For Foucault, homosexuals, who have been explicitly excluded from the normalization of institutions like courtship and marriage, are thereby freed to explore a variety of alternative kinds of relationships. In an interview published in 1981, “Friendship as a Way of Life” (DE293), Foucault notes:

Another thing to distrust is the tendency to relate the question of homosexuality to the problem of “Who am I?” and “What is the secret of my desire?” Perhaps it would be better to ask oneself, “What relations, through homosexuality, can be established, invented multiplied, and modulated?” The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one’s sex, but, rather, to use one’s sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships. (DE293.3, 135)

This characterization of the value of homosexuality—that it is a means through which one can invent oneself and one’s relationships—closely mirrors Foucault’s later characterization of “the dandy” in “What Is Enlightenment?” (DE339):

The dandy . . . makes of his body, his behavior, his feelings and passions, his very existence, a work of art. Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself. (DE339.2, 312)

“The development toward which the problem of homosexuality tends is the one of friendship,” which Foucault defines as “the sum of everything through which they can give each other pleasure” (DE293.3, 136). Homosexual men, excluded from traditional rituals and institutions of courtship and marriage (and their accompanying normalization), have no codes to guide or determine how they will relate to each other. On the contrary, “they have to invent, from A to Z, a relationship that is still formless, which is friendship” (DE293.3, 136). Foucault could just as well have said “they get to invent” as “they have to invent,” for this exclusion also produces a freedom for creation. What is threatening about homosexuality for “normal” society, Foucault suggests, is not that men have sex with each other. It is rather that they would walk down the street hand in hand. “To imagine a sexual act that doesn’t conform to law or nature is not what disturbs people. But that individuals are beginning to love one another—there’s the problem” (DE293.3, 136–137). Moreover, as Marilyn Friedman notes: “No consanguineous or legal connections establish or maintain ties of friendship” (Friedman 1989, 286), so these relations of friendship are external to the institutions of law. This kind of love, of creation of oneself and one’s relationships, can be a potent source of resistance to power, for it brings with it

everything that can be troubling in affection, tenderness, friendship, fidelity, camaraderie, and companionship, things that our rather sanitized society can’t allow a place for without fearing the formation of new alliances and the tying together of unforeseen lines of force. (DE293.3, 136)

Indeed, Foucault hypothesizes, the two issues are historically conjoined. “The disappearance of friendship as a social relation [in the eighteenth century] and the declaration of homosexuality as a social/political/medical problem are the same process” (DE358.2, 171). Thus, Foucault’s exploration of friendship continues along two dimensions: a contemporary one, in which the creative possibilities of homosexual friendships are explored and developed, and a historical one, in which Foucault will investigate the much richer institutional framework for friendship in ancient Greece and Hellenistic Rome.

Richard White notes that “the ideal of friendship had a privileged place in the ancient world” (White 1999, 19), in an essay that highlights some of the key differences between ancient and modern conceptions of friendship and identifies some of the essential characteristics that constitute an “ethical” friendship. White notes two complementary dangers that confront any attempt to define friendship. On the one hand, “we must avoid simply legislating the nature of friendship in the absence of any empirical support” (White 1999, 21). On the other hand, however, “the discussion of friendship cannot be merely empirical or ‘value-free.’ The account of friendship that emerges . . . must be critical and self-questioning” (White 1999, 22). We can note that Foucault’s account circumnavigates between both of these dangers. He was able to draw on rich (if anecdotal) empirical support for his conclusions from his experience of friendship in the homosexual community, and he certainly was not interested in legislating particular forms but rather in the creation of new possibilities for friendship. And as we shall see, the values of critical self-questioning are at the heart of Foucault’s ethics as well as of his understanding of friendship.

White identifies three key differences that distinguish modern from ancient conceptions of friendship. First, friendship has declined or disap peared as an ideal in modernity, replaced by romantic love. Foucault notes how romantic or “courtly love” is itself a kind of “strategic relation in order to obtain sex” (DE358.2, 170), and, by contrast, gay men’s relationships displace this game—strategic games emerge “inside sex” in the case of S&M, but more generally questions of what affection one partner will have for another often only arises after the consummation of sexual acts. “Now, when sexual encounters become extremely easy and numerous, as is the case with homosexuality nowadays, complications are only introduced after the fact” (DE317.4, 151). Thus, Foucault suggests, it is possible for friendship to reemerge as an ideal in a homosexual practice that displaces the rituals and strategies of courtly love.

White’s second key difference between modern and ancient friendship is precisely its “essentially moral aspect” in the ancient tradition, for “from a contemporary perspective friendship is not obviously about virtue in the first instance” (White 1999, 20). Foucault’s renewed interest in friendship, however—and his interests in investigating ancient conceptions as well as contemporary practices of friendship—is as an ethical practice. Our friendships, he suggests, are practices that contribute to our self-fashioning; what is more, friendship, like S&M, carries within it certain substantive ethical commitments—such as a “concern for the pleasures of the other” rooted in a responsiveness, reciprocity, and recognition of the other.

The third distinguishing mark between ancient and modern accounts of friendship, White argues, is that the ancient account “is a very limited and ideologically burdened account” bound up with other ancient practices and norms that would no longer be acceptable (20). Here, too, I think Foucault is in agreement with White. This is why Foucault insists that many of the ancient Greek values (in particular, nonreciprocity) were “quite disgusting!” and that those ancient practices cannot be a “solution” for contemporary problems (DE326.4, 256–258). Nevertheless, White finds Aristotle’s account of friendship to be worth exploring—Books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics are, after all, still the canonical discussion of friendship. A key problem emerges from his reading of Aristotle:

The question that emerges from all this is whether friendship really is based upon an absolute concern for my friend as an unconditional end [an end-in-itself], or whether friendship is, on the contrary, just another (albeit higher) manifestation of self-concern that only accepts the friend in a conditional sense. (White 1999, 25)

(On White’s reading, Aristotle seems to argue for the latter position.) This tension within friendship is an important element for Foucault’s discussion, for it brings to light a dialectical balance between concern for one’s self and concern for the other—precisely the kind of concern that Foucault’s study of S&M highlighted. And as Foucault examines and appropriates the ancient concepts of epimeleia heautou (“care for oneself”), it will be interwoven with concern for the other. Concern for oneself is not in contradiction with concern for others. White concludes that

What is most basic here is that friendship involves caring about the well-being of another person and cherishing this [caring] as an end in itself. This involves a more or less profound knowledge of who each is and an awareness of what each seeks and values, as well as a willingness to reflect upon oneself and to overcome any inner obstacles. (28)

We can recognize several key Foucauldian elements in this summary. First, the connection of these practices of caring with knowledge, both of oneself and the other and what we value, brings this into a framework that can fit within Foucault’s analysis of power. Second, friendship as caring about another entails a commitment to critical self-reflection and a willingness to refashion oneself—central elements of Foucault’s understanding of ethics as a practice of self-fashioning.

White is thus able to define friendship as “a relationship that is grounded in recognition” (29) and to identify four essential features—implicit ethical commitments—of friendship. They are equality, reciprocity, solidarity, and alterity. The last is perhaps most surprising—we must recognize that our friend is different from ourselves, as part of that friendship. “These four conditions,” White concludes, “must be regarded as the essential conditions for recognition which must therefore be present in order for friendship to exist” (30). He adds that “the most intimate knowledge and involvement with another that is offered by friendship is more likely to provoke a deeper level of self-awareness and self-esteem; hence, it is productive of autonomy itself” (33). Thus, White’s analysis nicely articulates the ethical substance within Foucault’s discussion of friendship—we can see how this rich account of friendship could emerge in marginalized homosexual communities and how it would become a source for autonomy, for the construction of subjectivity not entirely conditioned by the normalizing power relations that Foucault wants to resist. Correspondingly, gay communities would be optimal laboratories for the development of friendship, since (as both White and Foucault note and has been well documented elsewhere) heterosexual men often have very few genuine friendships (cf. White 1999, 32n17). These four key ethical values, as well as the constitutive tension between caring for oneself and caring for others, are important elements of Foucault’s ethical trajectory.

Relations of friendship for Foucault, then, are framed in terms of reciprocity and concern for the other. We will return to the theme of reciprocity shortly, but first I would like to examine more carefully the notion of concern for the other. This moral commitment has been theorized in feminist ethics of care, the foundational works of which are Nel Noddings’s Caring (1984) and Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1983), which were published at the same time that Foucault’s own work was shifting to questions of care of oneself and others. Just as Foucault has argued that homosexuals may have a privileged access to relations of friendship precisely because of their exclusion from heterosexual institutions and norms of courtship, Noddings and Gilligan have argued that women may have had a privileged access to the moral orientation of caring because of their exclusion from the institutions and norms of what they characterize as an ethic of justice. Indeed, these feminists’ articulation of the principles of an ethics of care are consistent with, and can be integrated into, Foucault’s larger critical theory of society.

An ethics of care, Noddings notes, occurs between at least two parties, the one caring and the cared for. As such, the ethics of care takes “relation as ontologically basic” (Noddings 1984, 4), paralleling, we can add, Foucault’s reframed understanding of power as, in essence, a relation rather than a thing. She continues that “the ethic to be developed is one of reciprocity” and that in it the “focus of our attention will be upon how to meet the other morally” (4). We can hear this focus in the question Foucault asked: “Are we able to have an ethics of acts and their pleasures which would be able to take into account the pleasure of the other?” (DE326.4, 258). Joan Tronto, whose 1993 book Moral Boundaries moved the discussion forward, specifies four “elements of care”—caring about, taking care of, care giving, and care receiving—to each of which corresponds an ethical commitment: “attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness” (Tronto 1993, 127). She thus describes “care as a practice” that “requires a deep and thoughtful knowledge of the situation, and of all of the actors’ situations, needs and competencies” (136). This is how Foucault will describe epimeleia heautou, “which means ‘working on’ or ‘being concerned with’ something . . . ; it describes a sort of work, an activity; it implies attention, knowledge, technique” (DE326.4, 269). For Noddings, the ethics of care will reject “principles and rules as the major guide to ethical behavior” as well as “the notion of universalizability” (Noddings 1984, 5). This parallels Foucault’s reframing of ethics as primarily a practice of self-fashioning—not in the first instance concerned with codes, rules, or universals. And he finds an example of this in the ancient care of the self: “In antiquity, this work on the self with its attendant austerity is not imposed on the individual by means of civil law or religious obligation, but is a choice about existence made by the individual” (DE326.4, 271).

Of course, there is an important divergence between these two accounts of an ethics of care: the feminists’ account has emphasized caring for others while the ancient practices that Foucault explores are explicitly cases of caring for oneself. These are not, however, diametrically opposed orientations. Indeed, as Gilligan articulates an arc of moral development and maturity from within women’s ethical language, what she discovers is that a fully developed ethic of care demands both care for others and care for oneself. A simple illustration of this fact would be a woman who is so devoted to caring for others that she neglects to care for herself: over time, this neglect will render her ill, exhausted, or otherwise unable to give proper care to others. Gilligan summarizes that “responsibility now includes both self and other, viewed as different but connected, rather than as separate and opposed” (Gilligan 1983, 147). This brings us back to what Richard White described as a constitutive tension within friendship, between concern for the other as an end in itself and concern for the other as an especially noble manifestation of concern for oneself. Clearly, there is a delicate balancing act that has to be maintained between caring for oneself and caring for others—they are, however, not opposed but intertwined and mutually dependent practices: we cannot care for others without caring for ourselves, and vice versa.

Tronto maintained that “to take moral arguments more seriously . . . we have to understand them in a political context” (Tronto 1993, 3). And discussion of care ethics within feminism has steadily moved from personal contexts toward larger social, political, and even international contexts—even Noddings has moved in this direction (cf., for example, Noddings 2002). For Tronto, this means “that we need to take seriously the political context, and the inherent power relationships, within moral theories and situations” (Tronto 1993, 5). Thus within feminism, care ethics has had to begin to grapple with the issues of its integration within myriad institutions and power relations—precisely the direction that a Foucauldian would anticipate and a project for which the Foucauldian framework of ethics within power can be a great resource. To be sure, this movement toward direct engagement with the political has shown that an ethics of care is not a simple panacea for all problems. Indeed its value and its dangers are still a subject of considerable debate (cf. Narayan 1995 and Beasley and Bacchi 2005, for just two examples). Tronto poses one of the questions at the heart of these debates:

What would it mean in late twentieth century American society [or, we could amend this, in twenty-first century global societies] to take seriously, as part of our definition of a good society, that values of caring—attentiveness, responsibility, nurturance, compassion, meetings others’ needs—traditionally associated with women and traditionally excluded from public consideration? (Tronto 1993, 2–3)

Her answer is that it “requires a radical transformation in the way we conceive of the nature and boundaries of morality, and an equally radical rethinking of structures of power and privilege in this society” (3). This radical reconception is precisely what Foucault has been trying to effect—and he has given us a framework for both sides of this task in his retheorizations of “structures of power” (and subjectivity) as fundamentally relational and of “the nature and boundaries of morality” and ethics as a practice.6

This is why Foucault’s “interest in friendship has become very important” (DE293.3, 137). For gay men, Foucault observes, “one doesn’t enter a relationship simply in order to be able to consummate it sexually, which happens very easily” (DE293.3, 137). Rather, these relationships, born on the other side of the threshold of sex, are an opportunity to develop friendships that are undefined by larger (and heterosexual) cultural institutions and norms. This leads Foucault to ask: “Is it possible to create a homosexual mode of life?” (DE293.3, 137). He continues:

A way of life can be shared among individuals of different age, status, and social activity. It can yield intense relations not resembling those that are institutionalized. It seems to me that a way of life can yield a culture and an ethics. To be “gay,” I think, is . . . to try to define and develop a way of life. (DE293.3, 138)

A way of life can lead to an ethics—through a practice of ascesis: “Yet it’s up to us to advance into a homosexual ascesis that would make us work on ourselves and invent—I do not say discover—a manner of being that is still improbable” (DE293.3, 137). Though this new ethics must be invented, not discovered, Foucault did find useful (if not unproblematic) examples of ascetic ethical practice that were not conditioned by modern forms of normalizing power in the ancients’ forms of epimeleia heautou, or care of the self.

The practice of taking care of oneself “does not mean simply being interested in oneself, nor does it mean having a certain tendency to self-attachment of self-fascination” (DE326.4, 269)—which again underscores the connection between caring for oneself and caring for others. Indeed, this term was used in a number of political or power-laden contexts: agricultural management, doctors’ care of patients, and a monarch’s responsibility to his or her citizens. In the adoption of certain ascetic themes, ancient practitioners of epimeleia heautou “acted so as to give to their life certain values. . . . It was a question of making one’s life into an object for a sort of knowledge, for a tekhne—for art” (DE326.4, 271).

The ancient practice of caring for oneself, at least in authors like Seneca, Foucault notes, “can be, if not a care for others, at least a care of the self which will be beneficial to others” (DE356.4, 289). Foucault notes in an 1984 interview that despite the limitation and problems inherent in the ancient practice of epimeleia heautou—and despite the fact that it cannot be a “solution” but merely an alternative perspective that may help us produce something new: “I would very much like to come back to more contemporary questions to try to see what can be made of all this in the context of the current political problematic” (DE356.4, 294). One of the ways that it could be particularly useful is that this care of the self serves to create limitations upon power:

In fact, it is a way of limiting and controlling power. . . . In the abuse of power, one exceeds the legitimate exercise of one’s power and imposes one’s fantasies, appetites, and desires on others . . . such a man is the slave of his appetites. And the good ruler is precisely the one who exercises his power as it ought to be exercised, that is, simultaneously exercising his power over himself. And it is the power over oneself that thus regulates one’s power over others. . . . But if you take proper care of yourself . . . you cannot abuse your power over others. (DE356.4, 288)

Thus, in this ancient schema, “care for oneself is ethically prior [to care for others] in that the relationship to oneself is ontologically prior” (DE 356.4, 287).7 This ancient practice thus illustrates one side of the woman’s dialectic that Gilligan had described, that caring for oneself is a prerequisite for caring well for others. It also marks a clear line by which caring for oneself and for others is directly associated with the good exercise of political power. “Care of the self enables one to occupy his rightful position in the city, the community, or interpersonal relationships, whether as a magistrate or a friend” (DE356.4, 287)—this care of the self is important for both friendship and governing well. Foucault adds here that “the man who cares about others . . . is the particular position of the philosopher” (DE356.4, 287). This suggests another connection with the present, for as he put it in the 1979 Tanner Lectures (and again, verbatim, in 1982), “since Kant . . . the role of philosophy has also been to keep watch over the excessive powers of political rationality” (DE291.4, 299 = DE306.4, 328).

And so, in our contemporary context, Foucault argues, a new variation of this ascesis, this concern for the self, can contribute to the kind of “radical rethinking of structures of power” that Tronto advocated. As such, a contemporary concern for the self will be situated within relationships such as friendship, within newly constructed “cultural forms” (DE313.2, 157): “Because it seems to me that the ‘we’ must not be previous to the question; it can only be the result—and the necessarily temporary result—of the question as it is posed in the new terms in which one formulates it” (DE342.2, 114–115). Our “we” s, our identities, are themselves in part a function of the questions that we pose, and they, too, are transformable. Thomas Brennan, a gay Jesuit, acutely observes in his own life how the recognition and the integration of different “we” s within oneself (oneself as gay man, oneself as celibate priest, etc.) is part of a practice of freedom—freedom for oneself and for others: “Only by recognizing this ongoing play of identities—and the need to negotiate among them—can we then experience freedom ourselves and empower others to take on the same work” (Brennan 2006, 184).

Tom Roach recognizes the connections for Foucault between ancient practices of care for oneself and contemporary homosexual friendship: “friendship becomes not merely a relation but a practice: part of a regimen of self-care through which one can attain an immanent salvation” (Roach 2012, 34). And this practice of friendship also brings out the critical—politically critical—elements of a Foucauldian ethic. This practice, and the communities that are built through the practice of friendship, were put to the test in the face of AIDS. In the preface to the French edition of his Saint Foucault, David Halperin observes that a “Foucauldian political model could be seen in action at each ACT-UP meeting that I attended, where those who were normally objects of expert’s discourse—the homosexuals, the seropositive, PWAs—reversed the power/knowledge dispositif and gave themselves the means to powerfully resist the authorized discourses of doctors and politicians” (Halperin 2000, 16; cited and translated by Roach 2012, 82). Andrew Sullivan, an HIV-positive gay man who survived the AIDS crisis (and who brings a quite different political perspective than Halperin), concurs about the central importance of friendship and the impact of AIDS on the gay community:

The deepest legacy of the plague years is friendship. The duties demanded in a plague, it turned out, were the duties of friends. . . . In this sense, gay men were perhaps oddly well prepared for the trauma, socially primed more than many others to face the communal demands of plague. Denied a recognized family, often estranged from their natural one, they had learned in the few decades of their free existence that friendship was the nourishment that would enable them to survive and flourish. (Sullivan 1998, 175)

Sullivan’s impressions—based upon his own first-hand experience of the ongoing crisis and surviving as HIV-positive—are confirmed in Randy Shilts’s history of the early phases of the AIDS epidemic, And the Band Played On. (Shilts’s history ends before the establishment of ACT-UP.) Shilts reports that Jim Foster, a major figure in San Francisco gay politics who had founded the Alice B. Toklas Memorial Democratic Club in 1972,

certainly had not helped build a gay community so that his generation would spend its middle age in death vigils. Yet, through the ordeal, Foster had seen the incredible courage of people like Larry [Ludwig, his lover of twelve years, who died of AIDS on January 29, 1985], and he had experienced the compassion with which gay men were helping each other through this collective trauma. Foster sensed that there was a new community emerging from the AIDS tragedy. It was not the community of politicians or radicals talking about bathhouses, but of people who had learned to take responsibility for themselves and for each other.

This is what a community really is, Foster thought. And ultimately, that is what he had been fighting for in all those years of gay politicking: the opportunity for gay people to enjoy their own community. Now, against this backdrop, that community was being forged. (Shilts 1988/2007, 523–524)

Echoing Foucault’s understanding of homosexuality as a development toward friendship (DE293.3, 136), Sullivan argues throughout his reflections that “the trajectory of a homosexual life often places, in a way unique to itself, a focus on friendship that many heterosexuals, to their great loss, never quite attain” (Sullivan 1998, 230). He continues that “What gay culture really is, before it is anything else, before it is a culture of desire or a culture of subversion, or a culture of pain, is a culture of friendship” (Sullivan 1998, 231). We can recognize these three alternatives to friendship in Foucault’s own analyses, too: his originally conceived History of Sexuality project was designed as a critique of the “culture of desire,” his work on power and resistance is an exploration that goes well beyond mere “subversion,” and his own analysis of the interior dynamics of sadomasochism show that it is not best framed as a culture of pain.

The friendship at the heart of the gay community, for Sullivan, embodies the four ethical commitments that White had identified—equality, reciprocity, solidarity, and alterity. He and his friends discovered “a new kind of solidarity—not one of painful necessity, but of something far more elusive. Hope, perhaps? Or merely the shared memory of hopelessness?” (Sullivan 1998, 63). And central to the community created through homosexual friendship was responsibility:

But with AIDS, responsibility became a central, involuntary feature of homosexual life. Without it, lovers would die alone, or without proper care. Without it, friends would contract a fatal disease because of lack of education. Without it, nothing would be done to stem the epidemic’s wrath. In some ways, even the seemingly irresponsible outrages of ACT-UP were the ultimate act of responsibility. They come from a conviction that someone had to lead, to connect the ghetto to the center of the country, because it was only by such a connection that the ghetto could be saved. (Sullivan 1998, 65)

Sullivan recognizes that this constitutes a kind of “new politics,” an inversion of stereotypical expectations:

Before AIDS, gay life—rightly or wrongly—was identified with freedom from responsibility, rather than its opposite. Gay liberation was most commonly understood [by others, from the outside] as liberation from the constraints of traditional norms, almost a dispensation that permitted homosexuals the absence of responsibility in return for an acquiescence in second-class citizenship. (Sullivan 1998, 65; my italics)

The key point to note however is that in Sullivan’s reflections upon friendship in the face of AIDS, the act of assuming responsibility toward others and toward oneself, taking care of oneself and others, is enabled and sup ported through a community and a “way of life . . . shared among individuals of different age, status, and social activity” (DE293.3, 138). For both Sullivan and Foucault, “to be ‘gay,’ I think, is not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual but to try to define and develop a way of life” (DE293.3, 138).

Sullivan’s observations about freedom and responsibility bring us back to Foucault’s view of the nature and role of rights (which the feminist ethics of care has often been cast against), in conjunction with the theme, which we discussed above, of reciprocity in friendship. Foucault suggests that “if what we want to do is to create a new way of life, then the question of individual rights is not pertinent” (DE313.2, 158). He makes this claim—discounting the importance of individual rights 8—because he wants to emphasize the development of relationships:

We live in a relational world that institutions have considerably impoverished. Society and the institutions which frame it have limited the possibility of relationships because a rich relational world would be very complex to manage. We should fight against the impoverishment of the relational fabric. (DE313.2, 158)

This fits with a distancing from rights that can be heard in the feminist ethics of care, too:

This conception of morality as concerned with the activity of care centers moral development around the understanding of responsibility and relationships, just as the conception of morality as fairness ties moral development to the understanding of rights and rules. (Gilligan 1983, 19)

But we should not read these remarks to mean that Foucault is against rights in any sense at all. On the contrary, “in the serious play of questions and answers, in the work of reciprocal elucidation, the rights of each person are in some sense immanent in the discussion. They depend only on the dialogue situation” (DE342.2, 111). These relational rights emerge from the relationship and situation—the rights of each role in S&M, the rights of each interlocutor in dialogue, and the rights of each person in friendship. Foucault adds—recalling his own “categorical imperative” never to engage in polemics, from the 1978 Collège de France course—that “the polemicist, on the other hand, proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question” (DE342.2, 112). So polemics is, at root, a denial or violation of the relational rights immanent in dialogue.⁹ Thus “we should consider the battle for gay rights as an episode that cannot be the final stage” because, importantly, “a right, in its real effects, is much more linked to attitudes and patterns of behavior than to legal formulations” (DE313.2, 157; my italics). Foucault will have much more to say about what constitutes these attitudes, but we can already note that they can constitute part of the ethical substance upon which ethics will practice. And the new possibilities, the new cultural forms and ethics, that could be created through a homosexual ascesis of friendship, Foucault suggests, “would create relations that are, at certain points, transferable to heterosexuals” (DE313.2, 160). Thus, “by proposing a new relational right, we will see that nonhomosexual people can enrich their lives by changing their own schema of relations” (DE313.2, 160).10 Thus, “the problem of relationships with others is present throughout the development of the care of the self,” for the “care of the self is ethical in itself; but it implies complex relationships with others insofar as this ethos of freedom is also a way of caring for others . . . It is also the art of governing” (DE356.4, 287).

In just a few short years, Foucault’s thought has undergone a profound reorientation: from “politics as the continuation of war” to “caring for oneself and others as the art of governing.” Foucault’s movement is perhaps nicely captured in a remark by the fictional founder of the utopian community “Walden Two” in B. F. Skinner’s novel: “We are only just beginning to understand the power of love because we are just beginning to understand the weakness of force and aggression” (Skinner 1948, 97). Foucault’s observation about the role of philosophy since Kant (in the 1982 version only) is prefaced by noting that “what we need is a new economy of power relations” (DE306.4, 328), paralleling his call in La volonté de savoir for “a different economy of bodies and pleasures” (1976ET, 159). Consistent throughout these shifts is the view that “the question of what kinds of institutions we need to create is an important and crucial issue. . . . I think that we have to try to build a solution” (DE358.2, 172). Foucault adds, in closing this interview, that many such exploratory movements—like civil rights, the student revolts in France, second-wave feminism, and gay liberation—“have really changed our whole lives, our mentality, our attitudes, and the attitudes and mentality of other people—people who do not belong to these movements. And that is something very important and positive” (DE358.2, 173). Understanding the critical importance of attitudes is the third trajectory in Foucault’s ethical itinerary.

CRITIQUE AS ATTITUDE AND VIRTUE

A human being lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconsciously, the lives of his epoch and contemporaries; and although he may regard the general and impersonal foundations of his existence as unequivocal givens and take them for granted having as little intention of ever subjecting them to critique as our good Hans Castorp himself had, it is nevertheless quite possible that he senses his own moral well-being to be somehow impaired by the lack of critique. (Mann 1924, 31)

At several points I have cited Foucault’s remark about philosophy’s role after Kant. The full passage reads thus:

Since Kant, the role of philosophy is to prevent reason from going beyond the limits of what is given in experience. But from the same moment—that is, since the development of the modern state and the political management of society—the role of philosophy is also to keep watch over the excessive powers of political rationality. (DE291.4, 298–299 = DE306.4, 328)

For Kant, philosophy’s role in demarcating reason’s metaphysical limits is what he calls Kritik, critique. But, Foucault argues, keeping watch over excessive power in politics is also critique. He traces a direct linkage between these two senses of the term in Kant’s 1784 essay “What Is Enlightenment?”—and Foucault discussed this text, which, he rightly notes, “is not always very clear despite its brevity” (DE339.2, 305), on several occasions. His four major engagements with this text were a May 1978 lecture, “What Is Critique?”(OT-78–01, given just a few months after he had completed that year’s Collège de France course but unpublished until 1990 and thus excluded from Dits et écrits), more briefly in a 1979 book review (DE266), again in the opening lecture of his 1983 Collège de France course (excerpts of which were published as DE351), and in a 1984 text “What Is Enlightenment?” (DE339), which Foucault selected especially for inclusion in Paul Rabinow’s The Foucault Reader, one of the first comprehensive anthologies of Foucault’s work. I will focus on the first and last of these four texts.

Foucault begins by summarizing Kant’s understanding of Enlightenment as

the moment when humanity is going to put its own reason to use, without subjecting itself to any authority; now, it is precisely at this moment that critique is necessary, since its role is that of defining the conditions under which the use of reason is legitimate in order to determine what can be known, what must be done, and what may be hoped. (DE339.2, 308)

What intrigues Foucault about Kant’s definition of Enlightenment is that it explicitly “raised the philosophical question of the present day” (DE339.2, 305). This philosophical question of the present raises the second task that Foucault highlighted above—keeping watch over political rationality—and underscores a view of philosophy that Foucault had held since at least 1967: “philosophy’s function is diagnosis. In effect, philosophy is no longer about what exists eternally. It has the much more difficult and much more elusive task of describing what happens in the present” (DE047, I-581). Indeed, the first chapter of Discipline and Punish closes with the note that what Foucault is trying to do is a “history of the present” (1975ET, 31)—underlining its philosophical and critical import. In his other engagements with this text, Foucault will speak of it as at the juncture between philosophy and journalism, between critically drawing the limits of (political) reason and critical engagement with the events of the current day (DE266.2, 443; OT-78-01ET, 386).

As Foucault’s summary highlights, “the ‘way out’ which characterizes Enlightenment is a process that releases us from the status of ‘immaturity.’ And by ‘immaturity,’ he [Kant] means a certain state of our will which makes us accept someone else’s authority to lead us in areas where the use of reason is called for” (DE339.2, 305). Kant goes on to discuss the conditions that would make possible this release from immaturity; these conditions are, Foucault notes, “at once spiritual and institutional, ethical and political” (DE339.2, 306). These conditions constitute, as Foucault characterizes them, “a point of departure: what one might call the attitude of modernity” (DE339.2, 309). This notion of an attitude as the condition for, indeed the embodiment of, a critical exit from immaturity is key for Foucault’s reading of Kant’s text.

Foucault goes on to define and develop this notion of “modernity as an attitude”:

And by “attitude,” I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of think ing and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. No doubt, a bit like what the Greeks called an ethos. (DE339.2, 309)

No doubt. Indeed, we should recognize here the core of what Foucault defined in the introduction to The Use of Pleasure as ethics as a practice of self-fashioning. We should also recognize it in the spirit of ongoing self- and community fashioning that Foucault explored in homosexual friendship.

These connections become clear as Foucault goes on to illustrate this notion of modernity as an “attitude” in the next parts of this essay. His example here is Charles Baudelaire’s “man of modernity,” the dandy. For Baudelaire, as Foucault reads him, the “deliberate, difficult attitude” (DE339.2, 310) of modernity—a characterization that parallels his description decades earlier of the “much more difficult and much more elusive task” of philosophy—

is an exercise in which extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it. . . . However, modernity for Baudelaire is not simply a form of relationship to the present; it is also a mode of relationship that must be established with oneself. The deliberate attitude of modernity is tied to an indispensable asceticism. (DE339.2, 311)

This attitude thus is constituted through a relationship to oneself and the exercise of a practice of liberty. Though he does not make the link to his larger conception of ethics explicit here, it is quite apparent. This attitude of modernity, of Enlightenment, is an ethical practice, and like the ancient epimeleia heautou, and all imperatives (as Foucault described them in 1978 [CdF78ET, 3]), it is an aesthetic and ascetic practice of self-fashioning. This is what Foucault finds in “the dandy who makes of his body, his behavior, his feelings and passions, his very existence, a work of art. . . . This modernity . . . compels him to face the task of producing himself” (DE339.2, 312). (In the 1984 Collège de France course, Foucault will also link this spirit with the ancient school of Cynicism.11)

In short, Foucault tells us, “the thread which may connect us with the Enlightenment is not faithfulness to doctrinal elements but, rather, the permanent reactivation of an attitude—that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era” (DE339.2, 312). As a permanent reactivation, this attitude will be constantly in the process of being reinvented, reinvigorated, and reassessed. In the course of such a project, we will not necessarily be committed to any particular doctrinal element—be it Kant’s or Foucault’s, for that matter—but rather an attitude of critical assessment of our era.

Foucault did some work to elucidate the content of this attitude in his 1980 course at the Collège de France, On the Government of the Living. The initial lecture of this course begins with themes of “raison d’état” (from the 1978 and 1979 courses) but then introduces a significant shift—looking instead at the relations that obtain between practices of government and truth: “So there are two successive shifts if you like: one from the notion of dominant ideology to that of knowledge-power, and now, a second shift from the notion of knowledge-power to the notion of government by the truth” (CdF80ET, 11). He then devotes the course’s next three lectures to an interpretation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex in order to highlight several key themes in the relationship between power and truth.12 And this is where he introduces the concept of an “attitude.” In the fourth lecture (30 January 1980), he asks: “What does the systematic, voluntary, theoretical and practical questioning of power have to say about the subject of knowledge and about the bond with the truth by which, involuntarily, this subject is held?” (CdF80ET, 77). His answer is that “it is the movement of freeing oneself from power that should serve to reveal the transformations of the subject and its relations with the truth. . . . This form of analysis . . . rests much more upon an attitude than upon a thesis” (CdF80ET, 77; trans. mod., my italics; cf. CdF80, 76). We can hear here an early formulation of what he will speak of as an ethical “relationship of the self to the self”; we can even understand Foucault to be speaking of his own work when he discusses “this form of analysis.”

He goes on to specify that this attitude “consists, first, in thinking that no power goes without saying, that no power, of whatever kind, is obvious or inevitable, and that consequently no power warrants being taken for granted” (CdF80ET, 77). This attitude that no particular power has to be accepted as a given is an ethical attitude, not an ontological thesis, that ought to be at the basis of our judgments. And this attitude is fundamentally a critical one: no power is justified in advance, we must examine each case, and we must look beyond each case. He continues:

Let us say that if the great philosophical approach consists in establishing a methodical doubt that suspends every certainty, the small lateral approach on the opposite track that I am proposing consists in trying to bring into play in a systematic way not the suspension of every certainty, but the non-necessity of all power of whatever kind. (CdF80ET, 78)

This “non-necessity of power” is another (admittedly awkward) way of describing freedom.

Foucault here echoes Viktor Frankl’s experience as a survivor of the Holocaust. In his memoir, Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl asks, “But what about human liberty? Is there no spiritual freedom . . . ?” (Frankl 1946, 65). He responds unambiguously:

The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. . . . Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress. . . . Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. (Frankl 1946, 65–66)

Frankl continues that “there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man’s attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces” (Frankl 1946, 67; my italics). To paraphrase Frankl’s experience in Foucauldian language, this choice of attitude is an ethical self-fashioning by which one makes one’s life into a work of art—and this ethical practice is available even in the absence of creation or pleasure, even in the depths of despair in a death camp. “It is this spiritual freedom—which cannot be taken away—that makes life meaningful and purposeful” (Frankl 1946, 67). The adoption of a critical attitude is a practice, an enactment, of spiritual freedom—it is the assertion, not as a thesis but as an attitude, of the “non-necessity of power.”

Foucault notes that this attitude toward the “non-necessity of power” is akin to anarchism and regrets that anarchism is so badly misunderstood and held in such low esteem. This leads him to the second feature of this attitude—in the description of which Foucault makes a surprisingly frank comment about his own ethical project or attitude:

One can define anarchy by two things: [a] first, the thesis that power is essentially bad; and [b] second, the project of a society in which all relations of power would be abolished and annulled. What I propose is clearly different from this. [A] The point is not to have a society free of power relations, but rather to make the non-power, or the non-acceptability of power, at the beginning of work in the form of a calling into question of all the forms in which power is in actual fact accepted. [B] Second, it does not suffice to say that power is bad, but one must say, or at least start from the point, that no power, in whatever form, has the right to be acceptable or is absolutely, necessarily inevitable. (CdF80ET, 78; trans. mod. based on audio recordings; cf. CdF80, 76–77, BdS-C62, cass. 4, side A)

In other words, we cannot simply say “power is bad,” but we will be able to say that “everything is dangerous” (DE326.4, 256). And we start from a position that will be (at least initially) suspicious and critical of all forms of power—we start from an attitude that questions and critiques all these forms of power. This “philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era” is “the thread which may connect us with the Enlightenment” (DE339.2, 312).

In “What Is Enlightenment?” Foucault notes that this critique is both negative and positive. In its negative aspect, it is a “mode of reflective relation to the present” that “will be oriented toward the ‘contemporary limits of the necessary,’ that is, toward what is not or is no longer indispensible for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects” (DE339.2, 313). It will therefore be wary and suspicious of supposed necessities—including demands that one must be either “for” or “against” Enlightenment (we could be both, in different respects) and the claims of humanism, which is “in itself too supple, too diverse, too inconsistent to serve as an axis for reflection” (DE339.2, 314). Hence the suspicion voiced in Discipline and Punish toward humanist and humanitarian explanations of the shift from torture to imprisonment.

On the other hand, this critique must also have some positive content—what are the values or norms that it would advocate? Foucault suggests that this critical attitude

is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal structures with universal value but, rather, as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying. (DE339.2, 315)

Discipline and Punish and La volonté de savoir are both apt illustrations of this sort of historical investigation—they indicate directions to be explored (“bodies and pleasures,” in the latter example, which as we have seen led him to a number of emergent values), even if they will not assert that these directions have a universal or eternal validity. In a May 20, 1978, conversation, Foucault described the positive content of Discipline and Punish like this:

It’s true that certain people, such as those who work in the institutional setting of the prison—which is not quite the same as being in prison—are not likely to find advice or instructions in my books that tell them “what is to be done.” But my project is precisely to bring it about that they “no longer know what to do,” so that the acts, gestures, discourses that up until then had seemed to go without saying become problematic, difficult, dangerous. This effect is intentional. (DE278.5, 235)13

This fits with his 1980 Collège de France description of an attitude that announces the “non-necessity of power.” And it anticipates language he will use one week later, in “What Is Critique?,” when he defines this critical attitude as “the art of not being governed, or the art of not being governed like that and at this price” (OT-78-01ET, 384).

For critique is also historically tied to that “ars artium,” the art of arts, “the art of governing men” (OT-78-01ET, 383). Critique and a critical attitude arises in opposition to this art, as a counterart, so to speak:

as at once partner and adversary of the arts of governing, as a way of suspecting them, of challenging them, of limiting them, of finding their right measure, of transforming them, of seeking to escape these arts of governing or, in any case, to displace them, as an essential reluctance, but also and in that way as a line of development of the arts of governing (OT-78-01ET, 384)

As he put it in describing homosexual friendship, this art of not being governed this way is expressed as a “No!”: “‘No! Let’s escape as much as possible from the type of relations that society proposes for us and try to create in the empty space where we are new relational possibilities’” (DE313.2, 160). But it also points to several positive ways of resisting, which serve as “historical anchoring points” (and various historical forms) for this critical attitude. Foucault mentions three: spiritual resistance, which took the form of alternative biblical hermeneutics as ways of challenging “the ecclesiastical magisterium”; the use of “universal and indefeasible” or natural rights as a source of resistance to tyranny; and finally Kantian maturity, “not accepting as true what an authority tells you to be true. . . . Rather, it is to accept it only if one thinks oneself that the reasons for accepting it are good” (OT-78-01ET, 385). And so the positive content of this critical attitude may vary, and it emerges from its context of origin, whose frameworks have been the target of Foucault’s own inquiries: “The focus of critique is essentially the cluster of relations that bind the one to the other, or the one to the two others, power, truth, and the subject” (OT-78-01ET, 385–386).

But Foucault also gave us a radically different illustration of how positive content can emerge in a critical attitude and practice, in an example from antiquity that he discussed on numerous occasions—the evening examination that Seneca describes in De Ira, Book III, Chapter 36.14

Seneca tells us that before retiring to sleep, one should ask oneself, “What evils have I cured today? What vices have I cured? In what respects am I better?”—thus examining and criticizing all of the day’s activities. “I spoke too brusquely with so-and-so, so that they were more offended than enlightened by my comments,” etc. Thus, tomorrow, I will be able better to respond in a similar situation. This kind of concern for oneself, Foucault tells us in the 1980 Collège de France course, is

not a question of judging acts in terms of a code, but of developing, exercising, ascesis, to make oneself stronger, better adapted to deal with situations. So the point is to discover the rational principles in the soul that will better adapt one to deal with such situations. An autonomous conduct, and therefore a rational conduct, is the goal of this examination. This has virtually nothing to do with the exploration of the secrets of the heart, or the origins of one’s faults. It is a question of an examination of oneself insofar as one is a rational subject, inasmuch as one proposes one’s proper ends, and can only achieve these ends through an autonomous activity. (CdF80, March 12; my transcription of audio recordings. Cf. CdF80ET, 245–246; BdS-C62, cass. 10, side B)

This critical attitude toward oneself thus leads one to positive content, in the question “How can the subject act as she should, how can she be as she ought to be?” It thus functions, Foucault notes in 1982, “as a test of the reactivation of the fundamental rules of action, of the rules we should have in mind, and of the means we should employ to achieve these ends and the immediate objectives we may set ourselves” (CdF82ET, 483). Two points in Seneca’s discussion are particularly relevant in illustrating the positive content of critique. First, the ethical problem of which “rational principles” or norms one should adopt is explicitly raised in these questions; second, Foucault characterizes this care of oneself as a tactic to be adopted within the play of power and resistance that frames his discussions of modern society. Seneca’s self-examination is a tactic, but it is centered within a practice of self that reveals an underlying attitude or ethos. At the heart of creating one’s subjectivity and practicing this care for oneself, then, is an attitude, a preparation for and orientation toward the moral demands of one’s culture, its codes, and one’s behavior.

In sum, this critical attitude (which does not simply follow Kant’s doctrine) “is not seeking to make possible a metaphysics that has finally become a science; it is seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom” (DE339.2, 316) that, as Frankl noted, “makes life meaningful and purposeful” (Frankl 1946, 67). As such, “this historico-critical attitude must also be an experimental one” (DE339.2, 316). Finally, it constitutes a “philosophical ethos appropriate to the critical ontology of ourselves as a historico-practical test of the limits we may go beyond, and thus as work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings” (DE339.2, 316).

Consider what this experimental attitude entails. First, “we have to give up hope of ever acceding to a point of view that could give us access to any complete and definitive knowledge of what may constitute our historical limits” (DE339.2, 316). This means that we will never achieve a “God’s-eye” view “from nowhere”; our knowledge will never be “complete and definitive.” Second, “the theoretical and practical experience we have of our limits, and of the possibility of moving beyond them, is always limited and determined; thus, we are always in the position of beginning again” (DE339.2, 316–317). Because our knowledge is necessarily incomplete, and because it is determined in part by our position within the matrices of power relations, we are always in the position of starting over, of calling our own presuppositions into question just as we call external structures of power into question.

This is a pragmatist epistemology.15 Louis Menand succinctly characterizes pragmatism in his description of William James’s view of belief: “there is no noncircular set of criteria for knowing whether a particular belief is true, no appeal to some standard outside the process of coming to the belief itself. For thinking just is a circular process, in which some end, some imagined outcome, is already present at the start of any train of thought” (Menand 2001, 353). As Otto Neurath puts it, “for those who are of the opinion that complete insight can never be reached [i.e., both Neurath and Foucault], these preliminary rules [a critical attitude] become definitive ones” (Neurath 1913, 2). He continues that this is the necessary condition of science:

we do not arrive at “one” system of science that could take the place of the “real world” so to speak; everything remains ambiguous and in many ways uncertain. “The” system is the great scientific lie. . . . Multiplicity and uncertainty are essential. . . . The progress of science consists, as it were, in constantly changing the machine and in advancing on the basis of new decisions. (Neurath 1935, 116)

Or, as Foucault put it, “we are always in the position of starting over.” In other words: “If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do” (DE326.4, 256). And hence Foucault’s much-reiterated refusal to “tell us what to do” (cf. DE157.1, 62; DE218.1, 144–145, etc.). Cornel West characterizes the pragmatic project like this:

The community understands inquiry as a set of social practices geared toward achieving and warranting knowledge, a perennial process of dialogue which can question any claim but never all at once. This self-correcting enterprise requires neither foundations nor grounds. It yields no absolute certainty. The social or communal is thus the central philosophical category of this pragmatist conception of knowledge. It recognizes that in knowledge the crucial component is not intuition but social practice and communal norm. (West 1982, 21)

This “self-correcting enterprise” is a community undertaking and a “perennial process of dialogue”—which is exactly what Foucault was describing as he discussed the possibilities for the “creation of cultural forms” through the practice of friendship. Neurath continues: “Still, the result in fact is far-reaching unity that can not be deduced logically” (Neurath 1935, 116). For Foucault, this unity takes the form of a “work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings” (DE339.2, 316). And thus, he tells us, the critical attitude “is undergirded by a more general sort of imperative—more general still than that of warding off errors. . . . What I wanted to speak to you about was the critical attitude as virtue in general” (OT-78-01ET, 383).

PARRHESIA AND PRAGMATIC JUSTIFICATION

This means that this attitude, this virtue, this practice of “critique is the movement through which the subject gives itself the right to question truth concerning its power effects and to question power about its discourses of truth” (OT-78-01ET, 386). The subject gives itself the right to question and challenge—this is an act of freedom, which freedom is present in the situation to be questioned and challenged. Recall Foucault’s observations about dialogue and polemics: “the rights of each person are in some sense immanent in the discussion. They depend only on the dialogue situation” (DE342.2, 111). (“I will therefore propose only one imperative, but it will be categorical and unconditional: Never engage in polemics” [CdF78ET, 4].) What emerges as immanent in discussion is, in effect, the right to engage in critique—the enactment of a critical attitude, which can question both truth and power. This questioning of truth and power constitute another illustration of this critical attitude in practice: parrhesia. Foucault introduces this illustration in his 1982 Collège de France course, The Hermeneutics of the Subject; it then emerges as the central theme of Foucault’s last two courses, The Government of Self and Others (1983) and The Courage of Truth (1984).

Here is how Foucault frames his discussion of parrhesia, in the first lecture of The Courage of Truth:

With the notion of parrhesia, originally rooted in political practice and the problematization of democracy, then later diverging towards the sphere of personal ethics and the formation of the moral subject, with this notion with political roots and its divergence into morality, we have, to put things very schematically—and this is what interested me, why I stopped to look at this and am still focusing on it—the possibility of posing the question of the subject and truth from the point of view of the practice of what could be called the government of oneself and others. And thus we come back to the theme of government which I studied some years ago. It seems to me that by examining the notion of parrhesia we can see how the analysis of modes of veridiction, the study of techniques of governmentality, and the identification of forms of practice of self interweave. Connecting together modes of veridiction, techniques of governmentality, and practices of the self is basically what I have always been trying to do. (CdF84ET, 8)

Parrhesia, “frank speech” or “truth telling,” is both an attitude and a dialogical practice—one speaks the truth to an interlocutor who is affected by this truth, affirming that one is committed to this truth as a personal conviction. In so speaking, one puts oneself at risk, minimally of disrupting the relationship (of trust, friendship, vassalage, etc.) in which one is speaking, maximally risking one’s own life (CdF84ET, 10–11). It is, as it were, “speaking truth to power.” Or, we could say, it is “the right to question truth concerning its power effects and to question power about its discourses of truth” (OT-78-01ET, 386). This “fundamental philosophical attitude” (CdF84ET, 67; trans. mod.; cf. CdF84, 64) of parrhesia thus commits one to a frank and critical assessment of what the truth is, both with respect to oneself and to one’s interlocutor and to the subject at hand (whatever norms or practices are being spoken about). This ethos, seeking to speak the truth, thus also seems to commit one (at least provisionally) to whatever forms of rationality are the binding ones in one’s culture or discourse—perhaps even if one wishes to criticize frankly the currently practiced norms or rationalities.

Parrhesia is an ascesis—it is “both the moral quality, the moral attitude or the ethos, if you like, and . . . the technical procedure or tekhne” (CdF82ET, 372). This practice of parrhesia is also intimately interwoven with what Foucault described as the care of the self, in ways that facilitate a shift from speaking of ancient practices to our contemporary situation. For, first, the critical practice upon oneself of care of the self must be broadened. It does not suffice simply to question one’s actions according to a given set of moral or ethical norms and principles—rather, these norms and principles must themselves be subjected to the same critical examination, as must the actions that follow and the ends they serve. These actions must be carefully scrutinized, too, at the level of their consequences, because an action may not lead to the desired end, or may lead toward other, unanticipated and undesirable ends, and the ends themselves may need to be reconsidered. Further, the deployment of strategic relations of power institutionalized in one’s society should also come under this critical gaze. Thus, we have a critical attitude, an ethos, and it is in this attitude that the moral and ethical quality of one’s practices inheres. (Taking up the ancient distinction between friendship and flattery, Foucault gives the practice of friendship as an example in which parrhesia is a distinguishing characteristic.) And so this critical examination stems from and is oriented toward the complex interrelationships that constitute one’s social roles, position, and responsibilities. This brings us to the cusp of “the arts of governing,” the proper direction and guidance of oneself and others, exactly what a parrhesiastic critical ethos of care for the self should equip one to do.

Let me try to pull all of this together with an extended quotation (the last part of which I cited in Chapter 3) from the 1982 Collège de France course:

And in this series of undertakings to reconstitute an ethic of the self, in this series of more or less blocked and ossified efforts, and in the movement we now make to refer ourselves constantly to this ethic of the care of the self without ever giving it any content, I think we may have to suspect that we find it impossible today to constitute an ethic of the self, even though it may be an urgent, fundamental, and politically indispensible task, if it is true after all that there is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than in the relationship one has to oneself.

In other words, what I mean is this: if we take the question of power, of political power, situating it in the more general question of governmentality understood as a strategic field of power relations in the broadest and not merely political sense of the term, if we understand by governmentality a strategic field of power relations in their mobility, transformability, and reversibility, then I do not think that reflection on this notion of governmentality can avoid passing through, theoretically and practically, the element of a subject defined by the relationship of self to self . . . the analysis of governmentality—that is to say, of power as the ensemble of reversible relations—must refer to an ethics of the subject defined by the relationship of self to self. Quite simply, this means that in the type of analysis I have been trying to advance for some time you can see that power relations, governmentality, the government of the self and others, and the relationship of self to self constitute a chain, a thread, and I think it is around these notions, that we should be able to connect together the question of politics and the question of ethics. (CdF82ET, 251–252; trans. mod.; cf. CdF82, 241–242)

In other words, we must adopt an ethical orientation, a critical relationship to ourselves, rather than a code-oriented moral orientation, if, on Foucault’s view, we will be able to articulate, and to think, politics and ethics. And the critical attitude that we adopt will always be situated within practices, practices already inflected by relations of power, which may themselves be the very object of critique.

This orientation—and the critical attitude at its core—gives us certain resources for a pragmatic justification of the values that we embrace. In moving toward this different orientation, we’ll have to give up certain notions that traditionally constitute our understanding of what justification entails. These would include both universality and the idea of transcendental foun dations or grounding. All moral and ethical norms of behavior (or codes) are situated within particular practices and hence are themselves necessarily provisional—this provisional character was an element of the pragmatic epistemology of the critical attitude. Even the ethical subjectivity, or identity, which frames our orientation to these practices is so limited: “We must not think of identity as an ethical universal rule” (DE358.2, 166).

Giving these up, however, does not mean that we lose the capacity to claim that ethical evaluations or moral norms are justified—rather, it means that justification itself must be reconceived as provisional and, as it were, “deflated.” Let me give you a very rough sketch of what justification will entail:

The ethical orientation and the critical ethos that Foucault seeks to excavate from antiquity—and from his contemporary exploration of pleasures and friendships—can be seen as one level removed from any particular (coded) claim that “x is right” or “p is wrong.” One must take a critical attitude towards oneself and the codes and norms that one adopts (following the example of Stoics such as Epictetus: challenging one’s motivations, the ends that one seeks, one’s position in society, one’s behavior toward others) as well as a critical attitude toward society (following the example of the ancient Cynics: challenging the networks of power relations that are institutionalized, the intended and unintended consequences of political decisions, etc.), in order to allow oneself to act toward whatever one will affirm, as a result of this critique, as “a good” or “a better.”

Now, as we have seen, Foucault has explicitly refused to specify a program by which to define this “good.” Such a program, too, emerges out of the critical practices of one’s orientation. (We’ve seen how certain “goods” emerge for Foucault out of, for example, the practices of S&M and friendship. Of course, these “goods” themselves remain necessarily provisional.) Thus, each moral actor will define this term herself through her decisions and actions, as well as her interactions with others, and will have to adopt the same critical, challenging attitude with respect to this definition as she has done with respect to herself and society. Our critical ethos must be at once Janus faced—oriented forward toward the actions guided by the norms and oriented backward toward the norms themselves. Thus, an ethical norm or vision of the good will be prima facie justified after it has passed a certain number of such challenges (and this norm or vision will be perpetually subject to revision or rejection in light of the next challenge—hence provisional and nonuniversalizable—no matter how many such challenges it has met). One of John McDowell’s characterizations of what it means to be rational fits this Foucauldian view of justification very well—where he speaks of reasons, add “and norms or values”:

Being at home in the space of reasons includes a standing obligation to be ready to rethink the credentials of the putatively rational linkages that constitute the space of reasons as one conceives it at any time. This leaves exactly as much room for innovation as there is. (McDowell 1996, 186)

McDowell’s phrase “exactly as much room for innovation as there is” is, to be sure, tautological. But it is also liberating, for the space for innovation is not delimited in advance. Hence Foucault’s suggestion in “What Is Enlightenment?” that “this philosophical ethos may be characterized as a limit-attitude . . . we have to be at the frontiers. . . . The point, in brief, is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible crossing-over” (DE339.2, 315). Thus, justification will emerge not from “formal structures with universal value” but from historical investigations that are “genealogical in [their] design and archaeological in [their] methods” (DE339.2, 315)—the very critical work from which this view of justification has emerged.

In a certain sense, this altered conception of justification may not be completely satisfying—it may take some getting used to. This may indicate some of the critical work to be done in our relationships to ourselves. As Otto Neurath observes for the doing of science, “One’s back is never completely free, and working with ‘dubious’ statements has to be learned” (Neurath 1935, 118). Such a Foucauldian ethics remains ungrounded and seems unable to address all of the different difficulties with which it might be confronted. But this is precisely what I think we have to see: no ethics ever will be justified or grounded in an absolute sense, but difficulties can still be addressed. It simply won’t be possible to express in advance what one should do in any imaginable situation. No ethic could be complete in this fashion without becoming empty. Hence, our standard of justification must be altered because demands for more than this now appear unreasonable.

One consequence of the inherently provisional nature of ethical and moral norms is that, since every norm’s claim to validity may later turn out to be unwarranted, everything is dangerous. “My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do” (DE326.4, 256). So all of our actions will remain “dangerous” in two senses: they may or may not achieve their intended aim (since there are always unanticipated effects), and, in the end, the aim itself may not prove to be an ethically laudable one. This double danger does not mean that we should not act on the norms that have been prima facie justified (for this suffices to justify our action now); it reiterates the continuing importance of the critical, challenging attitude that Foucault put forth as an ethical orientation, as we find ourselves constantly “work[ing] in the midst of uncertainty and apprehension” (1984aET, 7).

In sum, then, a new ethical orientation is realized when one fashions oneself such that one can critically, parrhesiastically, confront oneself and others and speak truly about the practices and discourses that condition and norm our behavior. We have come full circle: parrhesiastic justification as part of a critical attitude constitutes a practice that Foucault identified as ethical. So this ethical orientation becomes the basis, as it were—or better, the delimiting context—for justification. All justified claims are “for now” and cannot be universalized in anything like a “permanent” or “eternal” sense. This, in fact, doesn’t seem all that radical or new. An obvious historical antecedent suggests itself—and this should not be a surprise, given Foucault’s interest in the ancients—the Aristotelian conception of phronesis. And as in a pragmatist view of truth, all such claims are fallible, subject to being discarded, perhaps for something radically different (as well, Foucault suggests, as should be our very conceptions of ourselves), and we shall never achieve an endpoint where the constant inquiry could cease. I think that this pragmatic attitude and approach toward justification can also explain a puzzle in Foucault that Charles Taylor has pointed out. For Taylor, one of the disconcerting features of Foucault’s work is that he never quite comes out and affirms what seem to be his implicit goods, his implicit critical metersticks—in Foucault, everything that we could apparently affirm as a good, upon subsequent analysis, disappears and seems to be replaced by another, which itself in turn disappears (Taylor 1984, 152). Given this pragmatic view of justification as dynamic and unmoored, the problematization of each preceding “solution” is precisely to be expected, and one cannot affirm any of these goods except in the provisional way that I’ve tried to describe.

Difficulties can still be addressed, and values can still be asserted, even though those values remain provisional. As Thomas Nagel has argued, “progress in particular areas of ethics and value theory need not wait for the dis covery of a general foundation (even if there is such a thing)” (Nagel 1977, 137). On the contrary, “there can be good judgment without total justification, either explicit or implicit” (134). For Nagel, “provided one has taken the process of practical justification as far as it will go in the course of arriving at the conflict, one may be able to proceed without further justification, but without irrationality either” (135). For Neurath, “there is no tabula rasa for us that we could use as a safe foundation on which to heap layers upon layers” (Neurath 1935, 118). This means, of course, that “we always have work to do” (DE326.4, 256). For we must always critically and parrhesiastically assess ourselves—have we really taken the process as far as it can go?—and the conflict of values itself. “What makes this possible,” Nagel suggests (a connection that will sound familiar), “is judgment—essentially the faculty Aristotle described as practical wisdom” (Nagel 1977, 135) and that Foucault has described as the virtue of critique. Nagel continues that this view “does not imply that we should abandon the search for more and better reasons and more critical insight in the domain of practical decision” (135). This means, as Foucault has noted, that the process will be ongoing, that even when we have justification “for now” we must continue critically to reevaluate those reasons.

In a 1979 book review (which he opened by citing Kant’s “What Is Enlightenment?” as straddling philosophy and journalism), Foucault praised Jean Daniel’s L’ere des ruptures [The Age of Ruptures] as an example of this critical attitude of reevaluation. (Daniel was one of the founders of Le Nouvel Observateur, and this book critically engaged the French Left of the early 1970s.) What Foucault finds compelling in Daniel’s work is that “his whole book is a quest for those subtler, more secret, and more decisive moments when things begin to lose their self-evidence” (DE266.2, 447). This moment of losing one’s self-evidence is a moment that opens up spaces of freedom “on the frontier,” when gestalt shifts become possible. He closes the review by invoking Merleau-Ponty and “what was for him the essential philosophical task: never to consent to being completely comfortable with one’s own presuppositions” (DE266.2, 448). This remark is both epistemological and ethical: it is epistemological in that we must recognize the provisional nature of our presuppositions and hence not become too comfortable with them. It is ethical because to become comfortable with one’s own presuppositions is to become polemical—and this is exactly what transcendental justifications would seem to allow us to do. Rather, we must always “be mindful that everything one perceives is evident only against a familiar and little-known horizon, that every certainty is sure only through the support of a ground that is always unexplored” (DE266.2, 448). For as he notes in “What Is Critique?”: “Bringing out the conditions of acceptability of a system and following the lines of rupture that mark its emergence are two correlative operations” (OT-78-01ET, 395). And hence, “no founding recourse, no escape into a pure form—that is no doubt one of the most important and most contestable points of this historicophilosophical approach” (OT-78-01ET, 395)—that is one of the main dangers of Foucault’s ethics. But “if it is necessary to pose the question of knowledge in its relation to domination, it would be first and foremost on the basis of a certain decisive will not to be governed, this decisive will, an attitude at once individual and collective of emerging, as Kant said, from one’s immaturity” (OT-78-01ET, 398). And “ethics is the considered form that freedom takes when it is informed by reflection” (DE356.4, 284), that is, critique.

BOOTSTRAPPING FREEDOM

Foucault’s critics would likely reply that this notion of pragmatic justification does not yet address their central worries. However, I think that Foucault’s account of ethics emerging within power relations has additional resources that can in fact answer the most compelling objections. Mark Bevir has characterized most criticism of Foucault as “highlight[ing] two main aporias that bedevil his work” (Bevir 1999, 357).

The first aporia is: if the subject is a product of a regime of power, how can he act innovatively, and if he cannot act innovatively, how can we explain changes within a regime of power? The second aporia is: if all claims to truth merely hide a will to power, if we reject all notions of objectivity, then on what grounds can we assert the superiority of our preferred theories and values? (357–358)

Both of these aporias, in fact, dissolve. Enough has been said here for us to see how to answer the first:16 subjects are not exclusively the products of a regime of power even as they are never exempt from regimes of power. And those very regimes, themselves fundamentally relational, are themselves necessarily subject to resistance, transformation and change.

The second aporia that Bevir identifies is, I think, the more serious one. Indeed, I think the most important criticisms of Foucault’s ethical project revolve around this second aporia. Charles Taylor’s worry, discussed above, speaks to this concern; Jürgen Habermas’s central criticisms of Foucault, too, drive at this aporia.17 Foucault himself recognizes the concern behind this aporia: “Recent liberation movements suffer from the fact that they cannot find any principle on which to base the elaboration of a new ethics” (DE326.4, 255–256). He goes on: “They need an ethics, but they cannot find any other ethics than an ethics founded on so-called scientific knowledge of what the self is, what desire is, what the unconscious is, and so on” (DE326.4, 256). An ethics founded on any particular constructs of power relations, as Bevir rightly notes, would be ungrounded and problematical. An ethics founded on the principle of freedom, however, which itself must be posited for power relations to obtain, would avoid this trap.

The ethical values that have emerged from Foucault’s ethical trajectories—reciprocity, responsiveness, concern for the other—have all emerged out of the logic of the relationships in which they obtained. But, to rephrase Bevir’s second aporia, couldn’t we look to dissymmetrical or unresponsive relationships to justify other kinds of values? How are we to determine which relationships ought to be valorized? Part of the answer to this question reflects Foucault’s pragmatism: we’ll never have a final answer and may in fact have chosen poorly right now. So we must maintain the vigilance of our critical attitude, and we have to be always willing to abandon the values we currently embrace. This is analogous to the point that John Stuart Mill makes in On Liberty, that

Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action. . . .

The steady habit [or, Foucault would call it, attitude] of correcting and completing his own opinion by collating it with those of others, so far from causing doubt and hesitation in carrying it into practice, is the only stable foundation for a just reliance on it. . . .

The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded. . . . This is the amount of certainty attainable by a fallible being, and this the sole way of obtaining it. (Mill 1859, 23–24)

But, as the analogy with Mill suggests, there is another important part of the answer, which has to do with the essentially relational character of power and its presupposition of freedom: the second part of the answer brings freedom forward as a basis for evaluation. And this is also the reason for Foucault’s insistence on a distinction between “power relations” and “domination” (DE356.4, 299)—“domination” suggests a complete absence of freedom, which Foucault calls “intolerable:”

the important question here . . . [is] whether the system of constraints in which a society functions leaves individuals the liberty to transform the system. . . . [A] system of constraint becomes truly intolerable when the individuals who are affected by it don’t have the means of modifying it. (DE317.4, 147–148; my italics)

Systems are intolerable precisely when they eliminate freedom, the freedom that must be presupposed for power relations to obtain. Foucault had used this word “intolerable” before, in the early 1970s during his work with the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (GIP), to describe prisoners’ conditions. “Let what is intolerable, imposed by force and silence, cease to be accepted. Our inquiry is not done in order to accumulate information, but to heighten our intolerance and to make it an engaged intolerance” (DE087, II-176). In the GIP, we could say, the task of Foucault’s philosophy-journalism was to “keep watch over the excessive powers of political rationality” (DE306.4, 328) within French prisons: “It is a matter of alerting public opinion and keeping it on the alert” (DE086, II-175).

Nevertheless, the strongest, most direct statement of Bevir’s second aporia was made by Nancy Fraser in 1981. (Indeed, both Taylor and Habermas, whose respective critiques were published in 1984, essentially echo Fraser’s argument. Likewise, Charles Scott’s argument that Foucault’s work “put[s] in question the normative status of the values that find expression in his thought” [Scott 1990, 52] is but another variation on Fraser’s critique.) However, there is a coherent and satisfying resolution to this second aporia, and Fraser’s criticism in particular, within Foucault’s own work. The key concept that I’ll use to explain how Foucault can resolve this aporia is “bootstrapping”—defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “To make use of existing resources or capabilities to raise (oneself) to a new situation or state; to modify or improve by making use of what is already present.” To be clear, I do not mean by this term something like the Horatio Alger myth of a “self-made” man who pulls himself up by his bootstraps.18 On the contrary, I am drawing on the notion as it is used in developmental and linguistic psychology: young children “bootstrap” more complex linguistic functions and learn entirely new grammatical forms by building them out of the linguistic experience they have already acquired.

What emerges from Foucault’s ethical trajectories (we have already seen ethical values and norms emerging from the practices of S&M and friendship)—and what he explicitly clarifies in the January 1984 interview “The Ethics of the Care of the Self as a Practice of Freedom” (DE356)—is a conceptual bootstrapping, where the grounding for ethical evaluative and normative judgments are found within the critical attitude and social practices themselves. More particularly, ethical content can emerge from and be grounded in the conditions of possibility for power relations, namely, from freedom.

Nancy Fraser’s critique that Foucault is “normatively confused” is, I find, one of the most compelling and difficult to address of the various criticisms of his work. Nancy Fraser famously criticized Foucault for being guilty of “normative confusion,” of “inviting questions that [his work] is structurally unequipped to answer” (Fraser 1981, 27). Foucault is guilty, she argues, of implicitly appealing to normative standards that he cannot justify (and sometimes even seems to reject), in particular the liberal framework built around the notion of freedom. In the absence of an explicitly articulated criterion according to which he can distinguish between “good” and “bad” forms of power, Fraser argues, “it follows, in his view, that one cannot object to a form of life simply on the ground that it is power-laden. Power is productive, ineliminable, and therefore normatively neutral” (31). She concludes that “clearly, what Foucault needs, and needs desperately, are normative criteria for distinguishing acceptable from unacceptable forms of power” (33). This is the essence of Bevir’s second aporia.

Though she offered this critique over thirty years ago, I find that Fraser’s remains one of the most significant criticisms of Foucault’s project, one for which I have not yet seen an entirely adequate and direct answer. Ultimately, however, I think Fraser’s analysis is mistaken—Foucault’s project does provide the normative resources to justify a critique of domination and other “evils.” It is in his discussion of freedom that the internal “bootstrapped” resources for normative and ethical judgments become clear.

I want to show here how ethical or normative claims can emerge in a justified or “grounded” way, given Foucault’s structural analysis of power. The key for this development is Foucault’s claim that freedom and power relations are mutually constitutive for each other, a claim that we have seen emerging throughout my argument.

Before we look at how bootstrapping works in Foucault, I find it’s quite helpful to look at another, remarkably similar, ethical bootstrapping project—Simone de Beauvoir’s in The Ethics of Ambiguity. Her argument aims to establish freedom as the basis and justification for normative judgments. She begins from an existential analysis of the human condition—thrown into the world with others, we are necessarily free to choose how we shall act in that world—and uses this fact of freedom as a source for valuation and moral judgment: “Freedom is the source from which all significations and all values spring” (de Beauvoir 1947, 24). “To will oneself free is to effect the transition from nature to morality by establishing a genuine freedom on the original upsurge of our existence” (25). Like Foucault, de Beauvoir recognizes that an ethics cannot make universal precepts but rather offers a method, one that is constantly subject to error and revision. Given the inherent ambiguity of the human condition, this ethics is necessarily provisional: “Ethics does not furnish recipes. . . . It is impossible to determine this relationship between meaning and content abstractly and universally: there must be a trial and decision in each case” (134). As such, this ethics is, like Foucault’s, an always ongoing project; it does not and cannot offer a “final” verdict. Finally, here in contrast to Foucault, de Beauvoir’s presentation directly and explicitly confronts the justification problem: Our normative judgment “has no reason to will itself. But this does not mean that it can not justify itself, that it can not give itself reasons that it does not have” (12). And, she continues, “this justification requires a constant tension. My project is never founded, it founds itself” (26). This “founding itself” is the bootstrapping moment in de Beauvoir.

Two strikingly important parallels emerge between Foucault’s and de Beauvoir’s ethical projects. First, both owe a profound debt to Kant, even as they both explicitly reject Kant’s attempts to ground morality on a universal basis in reason. As Kant observes in his essay “To Perpetual Peace,”

To be sure, if neither freedom nor the moral law that is based on it exist, and if everything that happens or can happen is mere mechanism of nature, then politics (as the art of using that mechanism to govern men) would be the whole of practical wisdom, and the concept of right would be a contentless thought. (Kant 1795, 128; Ak. 8:372)19

Kant notes in the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals that “It is not enough to prove freedom from certain alleged experiences of human nature (such a proof is indeed absolutely impossible, and so freedom can be proved only a priori)” (Kant 1785, 50). Nevertheless, Kant continues, “we must presuppose it [freedom]” (51). Foucault’s (and de Beauvoir’s) bootstrapping project shows us not only that we must presuppose freedom but that this presupposition is both necessary and justified. Its logic is as follows: Begin with an account that does not presuppose but rather denies freedom. This account proves unable to account for the world as we find it. Therefore, we cannot deny freedom but must posit it. Indeed, as I have tried to demonstrate in the earlier chapters, this is what Foucault’s extended analysis of power relations has shown us. So Foucault’s refutation of the “Hobbesian hypothesis” is in effect an argument to show the Kantian point that freedom must be presupposed. (This insight also does much to explain Foucault’s continuing fascination with Kant and with the particular Kantian texts that most intrigued him—the texts that emphasized the interface with actual, empirical life rather than a priori deductions—the Anthropology, which Foucault translated, and “What Is Enlightenment?”)

Foucault’s articulation of an ethical framework, too, is already situated in his prior analyses of power—the linchpin of the ethical shift is the concept of freedom at the structural core of Foucault’s understanding of power. All power relations do—and, significantly, must—presuppose freedom: these relations are only possible on the hypothesis that resistance to the initial force, a kind of freedom, is possible. This concept provided the basis for Foucault’s refutation of what I have called the “Hobbesian hypothesis”; it also becomes the basis for ethical or moral action (which, initially framed within power relations, now is able to become the frame for relations of power and government).

This is the second parallel between Foucault’s and de Beauvoir’s projects: they share a structural core, and as such, they each must employ what I call a “bootstrapping” technique—to effect the move from, as Kristina Arp puts it, an “ontological” account of freedom (in power relations, or in humans’ “thrown” condition) to a “moral,” normative, notion of freedom.20 Both projects draw upon internal resources—namely freedom as a necessary precondition of social relations or the human condition—with which they can “pull themselves up by the bootstraps” to generate normative criteria.

When I talk about “bootstrapping” in Foucault’s ethical thinking, there are really two senses in which this is going on. First, there is what we could call “theoretical” bootstrapping—this is the project, which we’ve seen quickly sketched in de Beauvoir, of constructing ethical freedom from ontological freedom, of a project “founding itself” from within its own resources. This is by far the most important sense and is what I generally mean when I say “bootstrapping.” But there is a second sense, call it “discovery” bootstrapping, which is the process of adopting a concept as a central organizing or framing lens for one’s analyses, discovering its inadequacies through its articulation and use, and then revising or recasting that concept in favor of another “framing” lens—one that was perhaps itself also already employed in one’s earlier analyses. This process of “discovery” bootstrapping was Foucault’s modus operandi throughout his career, and it accounts, in part, for his constant “recasting” of earlier work in his presently current terms—for example, in the 1970s recasting his work on madness as “always having been about power” and, on the very first page of an 1984 interview, “The Care of the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” recasting his 1970s work on power relations as “always concerned with subjectivity and truth” (DE356.4, 281).

So let’s look at how Foucault’s ethics “pulls itself up by the theoretical bootstraps” in this January 1984 interview. It is especially helpful because it synthesizes ideas from throughout the last decade of Foucault’s work and thus gives us an important overview of the arc of his entire project. He begins with certain general claims about power relations (claims that were clarified in 1975 and 1976), moves to situate his more recent (since 1981)21 discussions of “the subject” within the framework of power relations, and pulls these two strands of thought together through the related concepts of “governmentality” and “ethics as a practice of freedom.”

Early in the interview Foucault makes a quite striking claim: “Freedom,” he says, “is the ontological condition of ethics” (DE356.4, 284). Ethics is built upon freedom, in other words—ethics constructs itself, or founds itself, upon resources that are internal to it, normative resources that are interwoven in the ontological fabric of the world. For indeed, we might add that freedom is the ontological condition of power relations. As he says several pages later, “power relations are possible only insofar as the subjects are free” (DE356.4, 292). And he reiterates, “if there are relations of power in every social field, this is because there is freedom everywhere” (DE356.4, 292). This is not a new idea for Foucault—these are core tenets of the theory of power that he had laid out in 1975 and 1976, particularly, as we have seen, in La volonté de savoir. He elaborates:

When I speak of relations of power I mean that in human relationships, whether they involve verbal communication such as we are engaged in at this moment, or amorous, institutional, or economic relationships, power is always present: I mean a relationship in which one person tries to control the conduct of the other. (DE356.4, 291–292)

Note what he’s included in this list—institutional and economic relationships but also amorous relationships. Even if he would later say that “sex is boring” (DE326.1, 229), we have seen how amorous relationships have been a site for his analysis of both power (think S&M) and ethics (think friendship) for at least the last decade—here we can see more of the “discovery” bootstrapping at work. The point, however, is clear enough: power is omnipresent because freedom is omnipresent.

At the very end of the interview, Foucault pulls these two strands—freedom as the basis of ethics and as the condition of possibility for power relations—together in the concept of “governmentality” (used in the broader sense that emerged in 1978):

I am saying that “governmentality” implies the relationship of the self to itself, and I intend this concept of “governmentality” to cover the whole range of practices that constitute, define, organize, and instrumentalize the strategies that individuals in their freedom can use in dealing with each other. Those who try to control, determine, and limit the freedom of others are themselves free individuals who have at their disposal certain instruments they can use to govern others. Thus, the basis for all this is freedom, the relationship of the self to itself and the relationship to the other. (DE356.4, 300)

Let me stress the “thus” here. Freedom is the condition that makes power relations possible, the basis in an ontological sense. But it is also—simultaneously—the criterion by which we reflectively evaluate those power relations, the basis in a moral sense. Foucault adds:

I believe that this problem [that is, abuses of power, or “bad” power] must be framed in terms of rules of law, rational techniques of government and ethos, practices of the self and of freedom. (DE356.4, 299)

It is an interesting conjunction here: rules of law and practices of the self—certainly not what we’re used to hearing from Foucault, and almost recalling his discussion of “relational rights.” But the important point is that an ethos of freedom is the frame for normative evaluation of “good” and “bad” exercises of power. The interviewer immediately follows up with another question:

Q: Are we to take what you have just said as the fundamental criteria of what you have called a new ethics? It is a question of playing with as little domination as possible . . .

MF: I believe that this is, in fact, the hinge point of ethical concerns and the political struggle for respect of rights, of critical thought against abusive techniques of government and ethical research that makes it possible to ground individual freedom. (DE356.4, 299; trans. mod.)

Freedom is the hinge point, the (as the interviewer put it) “fundamental criterion.” The very last phrase in Foucault’s response I find particularly striking, and I’ve altered the English translation: “la recherche éthique qui permet de fonder la liberté individuelle” (DE356, IV-728)—“ethical research that makes it possible to ground individual freedom.” What I understand this to suggest is that our individual freedom—subjects’ freedom, our individual choices and actions, even given an understanding of our “selves” as in part socially constructed—is grounded in ethical reflection, which itself begins in the (ontologically necessary) space of freedom, just as our selves are in part constituted through relations of power (which themselves begin in a space of freedom). In other words, freedom is the criterion for ethical evaluation. (Here we are very close to what de Beauvoir was saying, too.) I’ll happily concede that I’m stretching and pushing what is literally said here—but I’ll also insist that this move is within the spirit and trajectory of the larger Foucauldian ethical project. Much earlier in the interview (near its beginning and, in fact, at the point from which our discussion began), Foucault had asked, “for what is ethics, if not the practice of freedom, the conscious practice of freedom?” (DE356.4, 284). After a quick interjection from his interviewer,22 Foucault continued, “Freedom is the ontological condition of ethics. But ethics is the considered form that freedom takes when it is informed by reflection” (DE356.4, 284). “What is ethics but the conscious practice of freedom” and “ethics is the considered form that freedom takes”—as I understand these remarks, freedom is the criterion, the content, for ethical reflection and judgment. And note that Foucault characterizes it in this way immediately after his stipulation that it is the “ontological condition” of ethics—just as it is for power relations. We have in these two sentences the “bootstrapping moment” by which Foucault can provide justification for freedom as a norm without merely “positing” it or uncritically adopting it from the Western liberal tradition. The ethical resources are in fact implicit in the very conditions of possibility of power relations, and they give us a criterion with which we can evaluate others’ and our own exercises of power. As such, Foucault’s ethical project is profoundly Kantian in character: the normative resources are internal to the project, and they turn out to be the very conditions of possibility for the social relations that are to be normatively evaluated.

So how does this help us answer Nancy Fraser’s criticism? In her view,

He fails to appreciate the degree to which the normative is embedded in and infused throughout the whole of language at every level and the degree to which, despite himself, his own critique has to make use of modes of description, interpretation, and judgment formed within the modern Western normative tradition. (Fraser 1981, 30–31)

On the contrary, I think we see in this interview precisely how Foucault does appreciate that the normative is embedded in and infused throughout the social relations that frame and define our selves. Indeed, “freedom is the ontological condition” of power relations and ethics. Furthermore, that Foucault’s critique makes use of elements formed within the Western tradition should be unsurprising and uncontroversial—for the essence of any bootstrapping project is to make use of the resources that are available to it at a given moment. Foucault (and we) can make use of concepts while simultaneously subjecting them to critique and even suspicion—indeed, any pragmatist project would do so. What I find so fascinating is that the Foucauldian ethical project simultaneously fuses both this pragmatic, provisional, bootstrapped facet and a Kantian quasi-transcendental facet—not merely taking us beyond Fraser’s criticism but also, perhaps, showing us a new face for embodied, engaged ethical thinking that avoids the Scylla and Charybdis of universalism and relativism.

With this understanding of freedom, Foucault’s ethical trajectories have come full circle: initially arising spontaneously from resistance to power, from “not wanting to be governed like this,” through caring for oneself and others to governing oneself and others, this ethics is embodied in a critical attitude that always remains aware of its own situated provisionality, its own dangerousness, revealed and justified in the freedom for resistance that is a necessary condition for the very existence of power, and it also gives us the tools to evaluate the exercise of that power. In the end, this ought not surprise us. For, as Foucault described it, “the care of the self is ethical in itself; but it implies complex relationships with others insofar as this ethos of freedom is also a way of caring for others. . . . It is also the art of govern ing” (DE356.4, 287, trans. mod.). This critical ethics of freedom, this art of governing, is a practice we are all called to engage in, even as Foucault will steadfastly refuse to tell us precisely how or what we should do. We cannot rely on Foucault to do our thinking for us but rather must act in accord with the motto of Enlightenment—“Sapere aude!” or, as he entitled his final course at the Collège de France, the “courage of truth”—if we are actively to create a Foucauldian ethics.