"My Body, This Paper, This Fire"

Abstract

In a lecture from 1978, Foucault suggested that modern reflection on the art of government arose out of a spirit of resistance to practices of early state formation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: not that critics refused government altogether, but that they were confronted with "a perpetual question . . .'how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them'" (1997, 28). The primacy of resistance, epistemological and political, is what links Foucault and Kant in their best moments as in their worst. It strikes me as ironic, therefore, that Foucault is criticized for making inappropriate rhetorical appeals to emotion rather than seeking a dispassionate rational justification for his political perspective-at the same time as he is accused of denying the moral and emotional significance of subjectivity. What brings his critics together is an assumption that emotion, whether morally troubling or morally motivating, is a property of more or less identical subjects, rather than a product of individualizing power relations that cultivate the authority to act or the obligation to accept others' direction. Fraser (1989, 42-43), Habermas (1990, 282-84), Dews (1987), and Hartsock (1989), among others, have criticized Foucault for refusing to ground his histories of the human sciences and his political analyses in the sort of epistemologically and/or normatively universalist frameworks we find in Kant. On the one hand, they contend, Foucault makes normative suggestions about the injustice of certain social practices (past and present) through rhetorical presentation rather than argument, while denying reason's ability to establish the truth behind rhetoric. On the other hand, Foucault's attempt to historicize the subject of knowledge and ethics seems to deny the normative significance of individual emotion and judgment, including his own, thereby "aestheticising" morality.1 For example, Dews (1987) and Levin (1989) have protested that Foucault's account of the human body is too abstract to explain moral evaluation. Megill (1985) and Wolin (1986) tend to interpret "aesthetics" as a state of desensitization rather than a sensibility that reveals worthy situations of moral concern. Far from liberating modern individuals to discover their own forms of agency, they suggest that Foucault imposes the idiosyncratic conditions of his own agency on others to whom it is poorly suited, disempowering and denying them self-defense through mutually valid reasons. For these reasons, he falls victim to the same "fanaticism" (Schwarmerei) or claims of privileged insight into the nature of socio-political "things in themselves" that plagued Kant's rationalist predecessors and Romantic heirs. Despite differences, the abovementioned writers are united by alarm at Foucault's desire to "dispense with the constituent subject" of phenomenological experience and political action, as expressed in The Order of Things 'proclamation of the "death of man," his critique of social contract theory during the 1970s and his 1982 suggestion that "maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are" (1983, 216). Their reasons for defending the subject are twofold. Without a subject, on the one hand, they believe that individuals would be unable to respond to situations with "judgment," not to mention good judgment: to criticize and resist their own emotional impulses and to require others to give reasons for their own actions. On the other hand, the subject is a metaphysical support for emotion, in whose absence actions would lose their existential, if not their moral value. Without a subject, there would be no way to identify emotions as phenomena deserving of moral consideration and protection by others-even if the subject is supposed to ignore its emotions when judging and acting. …