Paul Patton

Taylor and Foucault on Power and Freedom

The sense in which Foucault’s work functions as criticism has long been a source of puzzlement to his readers and the concept of power a focal point for their concern. His apparently neutral accounts of techniques of power lead to complaints that he is normatively confused or that he deprives himself of any basis for criticism of the social phenomena he describes.’ For most critics, power is an irreducibly evaluative notion and moreover one which is negatively valued. Since it sets limits to the free activity and self-expression of the individual, power is that which must be opposed. This humanist consensus is neatly summed up in David Hoy’s remark that ‘the antithesis to power is usually thought to be freedom’. * The argument of this paper is that Foucault uses concepts of both power and freedom which do not conform to this view: his descriptive analyses are based upon a concept of power which is neither evaluative nor antithetical to freedom. To show this, I take as a basis for comparative discussion Charles Taylor’s article, ‘Foucault on freedom and t r ~ t h ’ . ~ This provides a useful point of comparison because Taylor is such a strong exponent of the humanist ‘approach which Foucault eschews. He also goes further than most critics in turning the differences between Foucault’s approach and his own into criticisms, charging him with an incoherent theory of power. Others have argued that Taylor’s criticisms do not always fully address Foucault’s po~i t ion.~ In what follows, I try to advance this argument by bringing to the surface some of the underlying differences in their respective concepts of power, freedom and subjectivity. My aim in doing so is not only to refute the charge of incoherence but also to restore

Foucault, Critique and Rights

Abstract This paper outlines Foucaults genealogical conception of critique and argues that it is not inconsistent with his appeals to concepts of right so long as these are under stood in terms of his historical and naturalistic approach to rights. This approach is explained by reference to Nietzsches account of the origins of rights and duties and the example of Aboriginal rights is used to exemplify the historical character of rights understood as internal to power relations. Drawing upon the contemporary ‘externalist’ approach to rights, it is argued that the normative force of rights can only come from within historically available moral and political discourses. Reading Foucaults 1978-1979 lectures on liberal governmentality in this manner suggests that his call for new forms of right in order to criticise disciplinary power should be answered by reference to concepts drawn from the liberal tradition of governmental reason.

Mabo, freedom and the politics of difference

This paper attempts to demonstrate the applicability of certain themes from post‐structuralist theory to issues raised by the Mabo judgment and the subsequent debate over native title. It outlines some common features of a post‐structuralist conception of society, commenting particularly on conceptions of freedom and the shared concern with difference. It then shows how questions of difference and identity raised by Mabo may be described in post‐structuralist terms, and contrasts the treatment of difference by Derrida and Deleuze from a political point of view. Finally, the paper suggests ways in which Mabo may be seen as a significant event, and an exercise of freedom, in Deleuzian terms.

Foucault and the Strategic Model of Power

Abstract Allen criticizes Foucault for having a “narrow and impoverished conception of social interaction, according to which all such interaction is strategic.” I challenge this claim, partly on the basis of comments by Foucault which explicitly acknowledge and in some cases endorse forms of non-strategic interaction, but more importantly on the basis of the significant changes in Foucault’s concept of power that he elaborated in lectures from 1978 onwards and in “The Subject and Power.” His 1975–1976 lectures embarked upon a critical re-examination of the “strategic” concept of power that he had relied upon up to this point. However, it was not until 1978 and after that he outlined an alternative concept of power as government, or more broadly as “action upon the actions of others.” After retracing this shift in Foucault’s understanding of power, I argue that the concept of power as action upon the actions of others does not commit him to a narrow conception of social interaction as always strategic. At the same time, Foucault’s concept does not answer normative questions about acceptable versus unacceptable ways of governing the actions of others.

Concept and Politics in Derrida and Deleuze

Abstract This paper points to significant similarities between the political orientations of Deleuze and Derrida. Derridas appeal to a pure form of existing concepts (absolute hospitality, pure forgiveness, and so on) parallels Deleuze and Guattaris distinction between relative and absolute ‘deterritorialisation’. In each case, the absolute form of the concept is a condition of the possibility of change.

Deleuze and Naturalism

Abstract Against the tendency to regard Deleuze as a materialist and a naturalistic thinker, I argue that his core philosophical writings involve commitments that are incompatible with contemporary scientific naturalism. He defends different versions of a distinction between philosophy and natural science that is inconsistent with methodological naturalism and with the scientific image of the world as a single causally interconnected system. He defends the existence of a virtual realm of entities that is irreconcilable with ontological naturalism. The difficulty of reconciling Deleuze’s philosophy with ontological naturalism is especially apparent in his recurrent conception of pure events that are irreducible to their incarnation in bodies and states of affairs. In the last section of this essay, I canvass some of the ways in which Deleuze’s thought might be reconciled with a more liberal, pluralist and ethical naturalism that he identified in an early essay on Lucretius.

Government, rights and legitimacy: Foucault and liberal political normativity

One way to characterise the difference between analytic and Continental political philosophy concerns the different roles played by normative and descriptive analysis in each case. This article argues that, even though Michel Foucault’s genealogy of liberal and neoliberal governmentality and John Rawls’s political liberalism involve different articulations of normative and descriptive concerns, they are complementary rather than antithetical to one another. The argument is developed in three stages: first, by suggesting that Foucault offers a way to conceive of public reason as a historical phenomenon. Second, it is suggested that both Rawls and Foucault allow us to consider rights as historical and particular rather than a-historical and universal. Third, it is argued that Foucault’s genealogy of modern liberal government illuminates some of the tensions and some of the alternatives within the liberal tradition in relation to the concept of political legitimacy.

Liberalism and Its Future

This volume collects ten essays, mostly published over the previous decade, dealing with the diverse relationships between liberalism and the British Empire. Their overriding ambition is “to probe the intellectual justifications of empire during a key period in modern history” (2). Together, they explore the interconnections between the growth of empire and liberal political thought in nineteenth-century Britain. Although the focus is on the later part of this “age of empire,” some chapters explore earlier approaches to empire while others address the resonance of liberal thought across the twentieth century and beyond. The first section includes a long framing chapter on Liberalism and Empire, a chapter on Ideologies of Empire and another on the nature of Liberalism. The second section includes four chapters on themes related to the history of the British Empire in the long nineteenth century. These include the temporality involved in understandings of empire, the role of the monarchy, and the different forms of constitutional order that might unite the globally dispersed British diaspora. The third section is devoted to key philosophical and historical thinkers of the British Empire such as John Stuart Mill, T. H. Green, Herbert Spencer, Henry Sidgwick, and the influential historians John Robert Seeley, J. A. Froude and A. E. Freeman. A final chapter in this section is devoted to the turn of the century liberal anti-imperialists, J. A. Hobson and L. T. Hobhouse. Two overarching themes run through the book: one is the role of historians and more generally “historical consciousness” in structuring the forms of predominantly proimperial discourse during this period. Duncan Bell notes that not all liberals were imperialist and that the languages of imperial justification in Victorian Britain were “complex, contested, and frequently inconsistent” (298). There were two predominant forms of justification. One defended empire as a civilizing mission primarily for the benefit of those populations subjected to colonial rule. John Stuart Mill, one of the best known and most forceful advocates of this approach, famously argued in his Considerations on Representative Government that imperialism was as legitimate as any other mode of government so long as “it is the one which in the existing state of civilization of the subject people, most facilitates their transition to a higher stage of improvement” (302). The other prevailing form of justification focused on the benefits of empire for the imperial power such as national honour, the glory of its people and the

Sovereignty Conditioned and Unconditioned

The publication of lectures inevitably raises questions about their place in the “work” of the author. How do these lectures relate to Derrida’s published works and what status should they be accorded within the corpus of his work? It is apparent that they are not texts fully worked up for publication, although some parts of them were published. As successive sessions within a year-long course, they are less formal and more discursive, if that is the right word, than many of the published works. They traverse a variety of themes, philosophemes, topics and concerns, with many digressions, including more than the occasional anecdote, personal remark or piece of Parisian gossip (such as the account in the Fifth Session of what Lacan supposedly said about Derrida, Abraham and Torok in a seminar “that has never been and no doubt never will be published” (BS As we shall shortly show” (7). We also see the occasional use of self-referentiality as in the Third Session, when he refers to his own power to defer the proposed demonstration of the thesis of Fontaine’s fable, and points out that he has already made use of

Review of 'Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960', by Gary Gutting

countenance some claims or possibilities (the ‘unthinkable’). An appraisal of the shortcomings in Gaita’s thought is not appropriate here. Suffice to say of him what he has written of Elizabeth Anscombe, that his faults are his own, not those of the zeitgeist—and to realize how high this praise is. As a public figure, Gaita’s life has not been that of the quiet and cloistered academic. There have been bruises, but it is a life in which he can take not only pride in the number of his enemies, but joy both in the number of his friends and in the affection and gratitude expressed by those collected in this book. It is a fine tribute, which we should be grateful to Christopher Cordner for editing, and even more to Rai Gaita for occasioning.