Foucault's Concretions

Abstract

Foucault's Concretions Karen S. Feldman (bio) Care of the Self? As Paul Allen Miller recounts in Foucault's Seminars on Antiquity: Learning to Speak the Truth, volumes 2 and 3 of Foucault's History of Sexuality produced widespread dismay when they appeared in 1986 in English. Foucault's earlier analyses of medical, psychiatric, and penal internment, with their systemic focus and their dialectical strands, exposed productive contradictions. His work generated further study among scholars across disciplines in similar veins, looking at biopower, compulsory discourses, enforcements of norms, and the intersections of institutional and individual practices. Volume 1 of The History of Sexuality, along with Discipline and Punish and other earlier works, had made their arguments about impersonal and dispersed agency, on a structural-dynamic level. In all of these respects, I would suggest, they rendered Foucault a "Frankfurt-adjacent" thinker. I use the term "Frankfurt-adjacent" to capture the dialectical, radical, critical force of Foucault's pre-1980s work. Although not a historical materialist by any means, and not a thinker of class distinctions and conflicts, and not a teleological thinker, and not a liberal thinker, Foucault was nonetheless obviously a thoroughly radical thinker, pulling out by the roots our beliefs about our own intellectual categories and illuminating a deracinated power not held by individuals over others. He was a dialectician of power dynamics and institutions, whose genealogies led to revolutionary conceptions of authority, everyday disciplinary practices, and the regimentation of the body for instrumental purposes. Foucault's analyses made for sweeping systemic and epochal critiques, along both synchronic and diachronic axes. And then in the 1980s lectures and publications, he turns to the care of the self—the self? The individualized practices described in volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality—including parrhēsia, spiritual practices, and the emphasis on freedom—rendered this late Foucault potentially less a radical than a classical liberal. His 1980s concern for the individual self, seemingly removed from the biopower-institutional-normative constraints, was startling. Criticizing governmentality while extolling individual self-fashioning—these gestures struck [End Page 405] readers as consummately liberal rather than radical. Care of the self, and the use of pleasure, in antiquity? Where was the Foucault of power as a dynamic network, of discursive layers, and of the human sciences in modernity? There is, of course, substantial debate around the continuity or discontinuity between Foucault's later work versus the earlier work on punishment, madness, clinics, and so on. The earlier work's proximity to the Frankfurt School is obvious in the exposure of the micro-control of the body of the soldier and the description of the famous panopticon, for instance. These were indictments and even deconstructions of power insofar as Foucault was showing that power is not a top-down force but a dynamic network. Foucault produced broad phenomenological-political analyses that called into question traditional authorities, ingrained habits, and pillars of conventional social and political thought. After all that exhilarating, eviscerating analysis, how should we find such radicality in care of the self and a focus on individual practices? It was astounding that the thinker of counterintuitive productions of discourse by repression turned to writing about self-care. Miller's book on the 1980s lectures specifically evokes the dismayed reader, even ventriloquizes him lamenting that this Foucault sounds like the stuffy old philosopher Mortimer Adler (Miller 2021, 186). Miller's argument in the book, however, is that we must see not just the later work but indeed Foucault's entire corpus as concerned in different ways with what it means to tell the truth about oneself. Miller's argument insists on a continuity in Foucault's work, but the dimensions of the differences—regarding "what it means," "tell," "truth," and "oneself"—are nonetheless dramatic when we shift from Frankfurt-adjacent dialectical analyses of institutional and normative discourse to individual experiences of truth-telling about a self. I argue that the lectures and the emphasis on telling the truth about oneself are less continuous with the earlier work than Miller suggests. Certainly there are points of continuity: discursive regimes, self-productions, and confession are at issue in both the earlier work and the 1980s lectures...