From: brehkopf-AT-nexus.yorku.ca Date: Sun, 6 Apr 1997 10:52:05 -0400 Subject: Re: Subjectivization Morten, If I understand your question, I think you've put your finger on an important point -- one that may even be said to characterize MF's work. I'm not sure that there's an easy answer to your question, as evidenced by the controversy over much of MF's work. Nevertheless, the question is worth thinking about. But I want to point out a possible misreading of MF. Well...to my mind it is a misreading. MF wanted to reject universalizing ethics -- those ethics that ultimately would be "acceptable by everyone" -- as you nicely point out. And in the course of doing so, he shifts from somewhat "mechanistic" examinations of the history of humans as objects within various disciplines (sexuality, criminality, medicine...) and begins to write (albeit near the end of his life) about the ways "in which the individuals *as subjects* can and must be recognized." This shift to a focus on individuals as subjects seems to mark MF's turn to a focus on ethics. If most of MF's work prior to his ethics (namely, the archaeologies and genealogies) had attempted to dissolve questions of normativity and the subject itself, the final turn would appear to recenter normativity and the subject. However, it is worth remembering that for his part, MF took himself to be doing something other than seeking to replace modern ethics with ancient ones. In Dreyfus and Rabinow, MF states explicitly (p.231, 2nd ed) that he is *not* "looking for an alternative" to contemporary ethics, even though it may seem to the reader that he is championing the ancient regard for the "care of the self." Nevertheless, MF does note that he sees similarities between the problems encountered by (i) contemporary society and "recent liberation movements," on the one hand, and (ii) those considerations encountered by the ancient Greeks, on the other hand. He points to two factors that influence his thought in this direction. First, he notes that "in Greek ethics people were concerned with their moral conduct, their ethics, their relations to themselves and to others much more than with religious problems." Second, he notes the lack of an institutional system or systems poised to intervene and enforce conduct within Greek society: "For instance, the laws against sexual misbehavior were very few and not very compelling." Thus, MF wonders "if our problem nowadays is not, in a way, similar to this one, since most of us no longer believe that ethics is founded in religion, nor do we want a legal system to intervene in our moral, personal, private life." I suggest that while this indicates MF's willingness to recenter the subject and questions of normativity, it would be misleading to say that he is suggesting a return to ancient forms of ethics. Rather, I think he is looking for similarities between contemporary and ancient questions about ethics -- but his focus is on much broader, perhaps *formalistic* questions rather than on the *content* of those ethics. After all, he does point out that we are deceiving ourselves if we simply adopt one system of ethics in place of another, for we simply adopt as part of that alternative system all of its attendant problems. So his point isn't to embrace the ethics of the Ancients, only to learn what we can from those ethical systems. To me, this is what makes MF well worth studying: the fact that he seems to be willing to learn from history without falling prey to the deceptions of nostalgia. Peace, Blaine Rehkopf Philosophy York University CANADA --
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