Date: Mon, 22 Jan 1996 14:57:25 -0500 From: Gabriel Ash <Gabriel.Ash.1-AT-nd.edu> Subject: Re: ethics and poststructuralism At 06:59 PM 1/17/96 -0600, you wrote: I am late to this thread, but later posts made think that it is still alive. >I thought this was a very helful summary. Do others think that the fact >that unlike humanism of, say a Hegelian tradition, autonomy wasn't for >him a matter of being the same as oneself, but is a matter of movement, >of becoming other and ungrounded--do others think this is a valid >response on Foucault's part? Human life as a vector and a velocity? > >Erik > I think that your paraphrasing of the summary is better than the summary. especially the last sentence. The problem with the summary is that the portayal of F's "problem" of how to secure autonomy without theoretical grounding, is a recasting of a liberal problem. I would suggest these points: 1 securing autonomy is not a Foucauldian goal. The question is how to open autonomous spaces, which is not a question of creating a oasis in the midst of power but of reconfiguring power relations so that they define new spaces. I would suggest that F's modernist symphaties should be looked in his barely concealed admiration for the 19th century physicians who defined life as "the sum total of processes that oppose death". One can perhaps devise a working analysis of "autonomy" on the same lines: "a recoding of power relations that resist dissolution". 2 F's work cannot be said to preclude the possibility of autonomy. In fact, if power is "an action upon an action", the whole analysis assumes the existence of an underdetermined (read "free") action. What such analysis seems to preclude is a certain definition of autonomy that requires autonomy to be grounded, that is, to be always already assured, at least at the level of the concept, as if the autonomous individual needs only find in her inner self what has always been there (humanity reaching maturity, in Kant's term). What is left is indeed, a "mere" posibility. >> the source, at least potentially, of auotnmous actions. Foucault is left in >> his latest writings with a call for autonomy and self-determination (remnants >> of humanism's dream of autuonmnous human life), without any theoretical >> subject in which to ground such a hope. Foucault, is thus, left with a >> humanist project of securing autonomy and self-determination (that most human of attributes), grounded in a theory of the subject which denies that autonomy is a possibility,since such a subject is devoid of that essential human >> something that secures, at least potentially, its auotonmy. Gabriel Ash Notre-Dame ------------------
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