Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity

6. Foucault’s Reconstruction of Modern Moralities: An Ethics of Self-Transformation

6 Foucault’s reconstruction of modern moralities An Ethics of Self-Transformation Foucault’s Responsive Ethics in the later years of his foreshortened life, Foucault began to elaborate a conception of ethics that might have functioned as a serious alternative to the behemoth moral systems that have thoroughly dominated the ethical practices of our modernity . Foucault in this work was doing nothing less than challenging the past few centuries of modern moral philosophy and the dominant forms of moral practice that philosophy has aimed to systematize and sustain. As i have described Foucault’s problematizations of modernity in Discipline and Punish and History of Madness, a core tension constitutive of our practices of modernity involves the problematization of the purification of power and freedom. it is from our perspective within this problematization that we find it incredibly difficult to determine if our actions are exercises of self-constraint (the exercise of power) or of self-constitution (the exercise of freedom). it is in response to this problematization that Foucault sought to elaborate the possibility for alternative ethical practices in which power and freedom would no longer be parceled out—for example, in their familiar forms of discipline and liberation—but would rather be integrated as a simultaneous practice of the co-transformation of powers and freedoms. in a summary account of his 1981 Collège de France lecture course titled “subjectivity and truth,” Foucault offered this striking description of his future research plans: “the history of the ‘care’ and the ‘techniques’ of the self would thus be a Foucault’s Reconstruction of Modern Moralities 183 way of doing the history of subjectivity; no longer, however, through the divisions between the mad and the non-mad, the sick and the non-sick, the delinquents and the non-delinquents . . . but, rather, through the putting in place, and transformations in our culture, of ‘relations with oneself.’”1 in the face of purification and against it, Foucault sought to elaborate an alternative ethics of the transformation of ourselves. Foucault rejected the suggestion that an easy solution could be found here and that any easy determinations are to be had here. What he claimed was that the reciprocal incompatibility of discipline and liberation, despite its difficulty, is our task and our problem. Foucault’s ethics, accordingly, is best read as a kind of prognostic response to the problems featured in his earlier diagnoses of the constitutive tensions of modernity. if Foucault’s earlier works traced the formation of the modern moral subject, then his later works outlined possibilities for the selftransformation of that selfsame subject. though this way of reading Foucault’s late works is nonstandard, it is also not without warrant. near the end of Chapter 4 i cited two of Foucault’s closest interlocutors , namely Gilles deleuze and Georges Canguilhem, with claims to this effect.2 Further recent scholarship has seen a growing chorus of voices now supporting this underappreciated interpretation of Foucault’s ethical inquiries. John rajchman writes, “the Foucauldian history of ethics is a history not of principles and their mode of legitimation, but of ways of replying to specific or individual problems.”3 edward mcGushin describes Foucault’s late work in similar terms as a “response to a modern problematic of power and knowledge.” mcGushin distinguishes two “moments” in Foucault’s work: “a diagnostic moment and an ethopoetic moment.”4 Adopting this terminology, we can say that the Foucaultian diagnostic with which i have thus far been concerned should be seen as preparing the ground for the Foucaultian etho-poetic in which is elaborated a response to the difficult problematizations of discipline and biopower rigorously diagnosed in earlier work. most helpful for my purposes is a label proposed by erinn Gilson, in discussion of both Foucault and deleuze, of an “ethic of problem and response” or a “responsive ethics.”5 in describing Foucault’s ethics as responding to his earlier diagnostic problematizations , my claim is that his ethical work is not a principled conception of what must be right in a given situation but rather a melioristic conception of how to respond to the specific problematic situation in which we find ourselves. ethics for Foucault was neither a systematic project nor an attempt to develop rules for moral judgment, but rather a form of practice for responding to the problematizations we find ourselves facing. this underscores, once again, that the logic of 184 Genealogy as Critique thought and...