Nancy Luxon

Ethics and Subjectivity : Practices of Self-Governance in the Late Lectures of Michel Foucault

Contemporary accounts of individual self-formation struggle to articulate a mode of subjectivity not determined by relations of power. In response to this dilemma, Foucaults late lectures on the ancient ethical practices of “fearless speech” (parrhesia) offer a model of ethical self-governance that educates individuals to ethical and political engagement. Rooted in the psychological capacities of curiosity and resolve, such self-governance equips individuals with a “disposition to steadiness” that orients individuals in the face of uncertainty. The practices of parrhesia accomplish this task without fabricating a distinction between internal soul and external body; by creating not a “body of knowledge” but a “body of practices”; and without reference to an external order such as nature, custom, tradition, or religion. The result is an “expressive subject” defined through expressive practices sustained by a simultaneous relationship to herself and to others. Individuals develop themselves not through their ability to “dare to know” but as those who “dare to act.”

Foucault on Freedom and Trust

Charles Taylor opens the essay “Foucault on Freedom and Truth” with the stark claim: “Foucault disconcerts.” Foucault disconcerts, on Taylors reading, because he appears to repudiate both freedom and truth. Where other Western thinkers have sought to “[make] ordinary life the significant locus of the issues that distinguish the good life,” the Foucault of Discipline and Punish seems to refuse this Enlightenment valuation. After puzzling alongside Foucault, and the implications of his thought for freedom and truth, Taylor finally queries what drives Foucault to adopt a Nietzschean model of truth and argues to the contrary that we can trust in progressive change from one form of life to another because its politics intuitively derive from our personal discovery of “our sense of ourselves, our identity , of what we are.” These changes entail that “we have already become something. Questions of freedom can arise for us in the transformations we undergo or project.” For Taylor, the link between personal and political discovery is so tight, so intuitive, and such a clear barometer for progress and change, that the insistence on incommensurability, let alone its use to challenge Enlightenment values, simply is perverse. And so Taylor concludes his essay by asking of the late Foucault two questions: “Can we really step outside the identity developed in Western civilization to such a degree that we can repudiate all that comes to us from the Christian understanding of the will?” and “Is the resulting ‘aesthetic of existence’ all that admirable?”

Teaching What We Don’t Know

© American Political Science Association, 2015 doi:10.1017/S1049096514001589 ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Risk and Resistance The Ethical Education of Psychoanalysis

Agonistic theories of democratic practice lack an explicit model for ethical cultivation. Even as these theorists advocate sensibilities of “ethical open-ness and receptivity,” so as to engage in the political work of “maintenance, repair, and amendment,” they lack an account of how individuals ought be motivated to this task or how it should unfold. Toward theorizing such a model, I turn to Freud and clinical psychoanalytic practice. I argue that Freud’s “second-education” (Nacherziehung) offers an ethical cultivation framed around a “combative collaboration” between analyst and patient that teaches tolerance of discomfort; endurance of uncertainty; and narrative capacity. This second-education suggests two lessons for politics. First, that we might do well to reproduce its relational form more broadly across politics. And second, that we cultivate those “sacral spaces” capable of challenging the conditions for symbolic meaning as it stretches between personal and collective practices.

The Disordering of Discourse: Voice and Authority in the GIP

In January 2000, Dr. Veronique Vasseur published an account of the conditions she saw daily while working at the Prison de la Sante from 1992 to 2000.1 Her account caused no small amount of scandal, prompting Le Monde to report on the difficulty of journalistic access to the prison; Le Figaro to call her alternately courageous and defamatory, even as its editors lamented the breakdown in internal oversight within the prison; and if Liberation’s editorial board described Vasseur’s account as awkward, its reporter argued that a scandal was necessary to break the opacity of the penal system. Many lamented the very real absence of substantive change in prison conditions since the pivotal prison revolts at Nancy and Toul in the winter of 1971–1972. Yet, what is most striking about her account is the register in which it is made: Vasseur speaks from a position authorized by her personal experience working at La Sante, by her medical training, and by a moral indignation that fueled an act of testimony under the banner of unmasking. The voice of this testimonial, moving as it is, shifts across these different registers—that of individual experience, the expert, the scandalized—but always remains rooted in an order seemingly apart from the prison. No doubt Vasseur sought to use her intervention to call attention to a broken system of incarceration in which she could no longer have substantive, professional effect.

Crisis of Authority: Risk and Resistance

Agonistic theories of democratic practice lack an explicit model for ethical cultivation. Even as these theorists advocate sensibilities of “ethical open-ness and receptivity,” so as to engage in the political work of “maintenance, repair, and amendment,” they lack an account of how individuals ought be motivated to this task or how it should unfold. Toward theorizing such a model, I turn to Freud and clinical psychoanalytic practice. I argue that Freud’s “second-education” (Nacherziehung) offers an ethical cultivation framed around a “combative collaboration” between analyst and patient that teaches tolerance of discomfort; endurance of uncertainty; and narrative capacity. This second-education suggests two lessons for politics. First, that we might do well to reproduce its relational form more broadly across politics. And second, that we cultivate those “sacral spaces” capable of challenging the conditions for symbolic meaning as it stretches between personal and collective practices.