Foucault and Ethical Subjectivity

Abstract

ne striking discovery of Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Modernity is that no morality is formulated in modernity. Modernity thinks so much of the unthought that it fails to address the ethical question of how one is to live well.1 Thinking the unthought is constitutive of “modern morality,” which is not morality at all.2 If morality is nothing but the effort to answer how one is to live well, then, modernity fails to address this moral, ethical question. When “man”3 emerges as the positive figure in the field of knowledge, modern thought needs to grapple with those dim, yet positive forces that motivate action. “What is essential [to modern episteme] is that thought, both for itself and in the density of its workings, should be both knowledge and a modification of what it knows, reflection and a transformation of the mode of being of that on which it reflects.”4