II. From self-affection to technologies of the self

a) Practices of Freedom VS. Processes of Liberation  

It is very common for the Left today to concern itself with what are seen as liberation struggles, resistance to and refusal of domination.[1] Foucault lived through the heated politics of the 1960’s and witnessed the enormous significance of discourses of liberation on the Left, both in the anti-colonialist struggles, the Western ambivalence towards mass production/mass consumption and the general anti-authoritarian discourse prevailing at the time. Foucault recognised the power of these movements but also addressed the problem of ‘reconstitution’, the question of a positive ontology of ourselves.

The problem of our day is not to try to liberate the individual from the state and its institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualisation which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality that has been imposed on us for several centuries.[2]  

Foucault’s enquiry into the practices of the self is one into the modes of subjectivity that differently posited the question of self-transformation in relation to self-knowledge and truth-telling. These studies do not seem to be ‘immediately’ politicised, but we see their import as profoundly political, both in how Foucault analyses them and in the way we can read them today. Foucault’s preoccupation with ‘ethics’ emerges in the 1980’s. After writing the first volume of the History of Sexuality - a tremendously political intervention on the issues of the anti-authoritarian movements - he turned to the ‘self’ as a category to be analysed and scrutinised closely. The reasons for this are outlined in the essay ‘The Subject and Power’, but a close analysis of the texts on the care of the self highlights a relation of internal dependency of the notion of the self on earlier notions of man (in the Anthropology) and subject (in his writings on Power). In fact what is underlined throughout his writings on the matter is a notion of self/man/subject as a practice in concrete existence.  

What was theorised as man in the early writings on anthropology and psychology is the category of an epistemological paralogisms that underlies practices of government. The concern with self-government and autonomy expressed in the analysis of Kant recurs in the latest writings in the form of an attempt at delineating the task of philosophical exercise. Today we can read his preoccupation with ethics as a monitoring against the politicisation of identity which had occurred, retrospectively, in a form that, in his words, ‘we shouldn’t be proud of’.[3] In fact, identity politics turns to the deciphering of the self in the form of feelings and interiority, a direct consequence of the explosion of psychoanalytic categories onto mass culture. Foucault’s struggle against the philosophy of interiority both in terms of the founding of epistemology and anthropology and in relation to the exercise of power is here translated into an attack on a certain mode of conceiving of self-transformation as the by-product of a search for the truth about oneself. We believe Foucault’s work on the hermeneutics of the self and practices of self-knowledge can fruitfully be inscribed in the wider context of a critique of the politics of identity and its naivety in relation to technologies of self-management and interiorisation of power relation propelled by the innovation of techniques of control. As he asserts:  

I think something is important in the fact that in our society nowadays we know well that for centuries our morals have been linked with religion as well as civil laws and the juridical organisation. Morals took the form of a kind of juridical structure; think of Kant, you know that ethics has been related to science, medicine and psychology. I think these great references: to religion, law and science, have now worn out. We know well that we need an ethics and we cannot ask religion, science or the law to give us this ethics. We have an example in Greco-Roman society where a great ethics existed without these three references. The problem is not to come back to this ancient age but we know that it is possible to research into past ethics to build a new ethics and give a place to what has been called the ethical imagination without any reference to religion, law and science. That is why I think this analysis of Greco-Roman ethics as an aesthetics of existence is interesting.[4]  

The emphasis on practices of freedom rather than processes of liberation is crucial in defining the positive import of his work outside of the contours of negative criticism and defensive postures with respect to power and is an apt continuation of Foucault’s deconstruction of the repressive hypothesis. It also represents a consistent application of his idea that there is an element of freedom in all power relations that meets our concern for what is not immediately political or addresses itself to Power as repression but rather lives in the interstices of the power-resistance symmetry, a practice of existence that we will later look into by drawing on the notions of refusal and exodus.  

The categories of ethical discourse  

One of Foucault’s priorities in this project is to analyse the category of pleasure. He ascribes the overemphasis on desire to a progressive scientisation of the ethical discourse that derives directly from an idea of the subject as practised in early Christianity and will later culminate into the psychoanalytical category of the Ego. This is the subject that has a particular relation to truth and the practice of the self in terms of self-negation and self-deciphering. It is crucial for Foucault to problematise the disappearance of pleasure from philosophical discourse, and we interpret this move as a reinstatement of his criticism of the repressive hypothesis, as well as a formulation of the constitutive aspect of freedom within power relation as opposed to the dwelling on processes of liberation from oppression and those relations. In fact, in recognising that power can only operate on the terrain of freedom, those practices are crucial for our understanding of the forms of subjectivation as well as the possibility of self mastery intrinsic to these power relations themselves.  

I think we have to get rid of this idea of an analytical or necessary link between ethics and other social or economic or political structures.[5]  

Through the distinction between practices of freedom and processes of liberation Foucault explains best that the study of ethics is really an attempt at delineating the contours of this realm of freedom for the subject involved in power relations, and the possibilities within it to constitute himself autonomously, in the form of a relationship to oneself and a certain attention to oneself. The latter has four interrelated aspects, Foucault calls them respectively: ethical substance [substance éthique], mode of subjectivation [mode d’assujettissement], self-forming activity and telos [téléologie].  

For Foucault, the idea of technologies of the self falls into the second aspect: mode d’assujettissement. Why? Could it not relate to ethical substance, self forming activity or telos?  By mode of subjectivation Foucault aims to expose the necessarily double aspect of technologies of the self: on the one hand, there is something we might call force which establishes a priori the position of one subject objectifying the other; on the other hand, ruling out physical coercion from the concept of power relations, there is a space for breaking this establishment which constitutes the subject matter of his genealogical study of conduct. We will see how in the study of Antiquity and Hellenic philosophy in particular, Foucault seems to run through three possible questions that emerged in the practices of the self. Know yourself, care for yourself and finally confess (tell the truth about) yourself. All these three modes, that respectively related to Plato, the Stoics and Christianity, equally imply a relation of power where the mode of subjectivation requires the active participation of the object of transformation: a simultaneous subscribing to and making of a technology.  Thus, whether through the appeal to a need for proximity to Truth, being part of a higher Rational order, or as a preparatory process of self-purification before the encounter with God, all modes entail the interiorisation of power relations. Technologies of the self develop on the realm left open by the relation between the freedom of the object of a specific ethical discourse with the discourse itself.  

Ethics and morality  

As we have seen, the birth of homo criticus gave rise to a whole range of disciplines that took as their aim to analyse the subject in given societies and historical periods. Sociological and historical traditions influenced by psychoanalysis employed a hermeneutics of desire and focused on the restrictions placed on the subject by moral codes and rules.

In this sense, they primarily conceived of morality as potential for conflict between the subject’s desires and the limitations imposed upon them and, through an analysis of moral behaviours, studied the way in which the subject’s actions are consistent with moral rules of a given period. Historical studies of ideology would investigate different sets of moral codes and the institutional conveyers and policing of these codes, the ways in which they are imposed on the subject, whilst regarding the subject as partially constituted by and operative in this or that moral discourse, possibly a bearer of these rules of conduct. As we have seen, the Annales School undoubtedly opened up the scope for historical research of this kind and influenced a whole generation of French historians and philosophers. But a project of writing histories of mentalities can consist in drawing out a ‘history of codes’ or a ‘history of moral behaviours’.[6]  

In writing a history of ethics, Foucault aims at complementing whilst challenging the above mentioned models. Ethics looks at the positivity of the relation between morality and society, as expressed by the subject. We will later see how his immediately previous work had focused on power from above and on the techniques and exercise of Power as authority, with an emphasis on the formation of codes and discourses of practices that historically shaped power relations. In his works on ethics, as he also affirms in the essay ‘The Subject and Power’, Foucault aims at dwelling on the other side of this relation and his choice of historical period is indicative of a political choice of intervention in the present.  

I wonder if our problem nowadays is not, in a way, similar to this one [the Greeks’], since most of us no longer believe that ethics is founded in religion, nor do we want a legal system to intervene in our moral, personal, private life. Recent liberation movements suffer from the fact that they cannot find any principle on which to base the elaboration of a new ethics. They need an ethics, but they cannot find any other ethics than an ethics founded on so-called scientific knowledge of what the self is, what desire is, what the unconscious is, and so on. I am struck by this similarity of problems.[7]  

Foucault defines ethics as the reflexive practice of freedom, and in distinguishing between ethics-oriented moralities and code-oriented moralities; he wishes to present his project of the last two volumes of the History of Sexuality as a history of the former. Ethics oriented moralities are those where the emphasis is placed upon the relation of the subject with himself, where morality demands a certain work from the subject, which goes beyond the latter’s obedience to a set of rules. In this sense, the course on L’ Herméneutique du sujet is ‘an analytics of certain forms of reflexivity, as constitutive of the subject itself’.[8]

 Philosophy and spirituality

Foucault’s late move towards ethics is a form of critical intervention on actualité and part of the project of an ontology of the present, in a relation of continuity with the exploration of Kantian criticism as exposed in the Commentaire to the Anthropology: an investigation into the social notion of Gemüt, ethical self-affection, that undermines the self identical epistemological subject by positing its relational aspect with the world and its self-transformative potential at the centre of analysis.  Foucault makes a distinction between philosophy and spirituality in modernity. In this set of lectures, he tries to trace the emergence of the separation between the two.  

Let’s call philosophy the form of thought that enquires into what allows the subject to have access to truth, the form of thought that attempts to determine the conditions and the limits of the access of the subject to truth. Well, if we define philosophy in such a way, I believe we can call ‘spirituality’ the sets of researches, the practices and experiences through which the subject carries out on itself the necessary transformations to have access to truth. Spirituality is the ensemble of researches that constitute for the subject and its being, rather than for knowledge, the price to pay to have access to truth.[9]

Therefore truth is not revealed to the subject who simply waits to find truth in knowledge, but is gained through the subject’s own self-transformation. This is where the critical relation between truth and subjectivation is established. For Foucault, the working premise of such relation is that ‘what is, is not capable of truth’.  

It is necessary for the subject to modify itself, to transform itself, to become to a certain extent other than itself for it to have the right to access truth. The conversion and transformation of the subject can take different forms. The movement of eros and ascesis are examples of ways in which the subject can modify itself through labour on himself and raise him to the level where truth can be revealed to him.[10]

Thus, a transfiguration of the subject is necessary for accessing truth. How this transfiguration operates in different moments of history is the object of Foucault’s investigation into the processes of subjectivation and practice of the self. Foucault notes that in ancient thought philosophy and spirituality are never separated and that an act of knowledge is always accompanied by an act of self transformation that entails some kind of action on one’s very being. These actions are technologies of the self and establish a mode of conduct that is also a self-affection tightly linked to the emergence of a discourse of truth and objectivity that is made dependent on the workings of interiority. As we shall see, the questions of being and knowledge, of experience and existence are here posed in relation to ethics as a matter of conduct. Surely the fact that experience and being is detached from knowledge since Kant and reposed as a possible question is indicative. Foucault criticises the notion underlying modernity whereby the legitimacy of claims to truth is a concern that remains separated from ontology.  

I believe that the modern history of truth begins the moment when what allows access to truth is knowledge itself and alone.[11]  

This investigation into the problems arising from the separation of philosophy and spirituality relates to the project of an ontology of ourselves: modern philosophy, in so far as it limits itself to determining the conditions and frontiers of a knowledge of objects, designs the theoretical tools for the policing of statements and the establishment of regimes of truth. On this rests his early definition of the axis of knowledge-power in modern thought. Through the wider notion of governmentality, Foucault is also shifting the focus from an analysis of the status of objective knowledge in relation to power, to an analysis that questions the status of the subject in relation to truth.  

If one takes the question of power or political power and replaces it with the more general question of governmentality –governmentality intended as a strategic field of power relations, in the broader, not simply political, sense of the term-, if one takes governmentality as the strategic field of power relations, in so far as they are mobile, transformable and reversible, I think that the reflection on this notion of governmentality must go through, both  theoretically and practically, the element of a subject that would be defined by the relation of the self to the self. In so far as the theory of political power as institution normally refers to a juridical conception of the subject of rights, it seems to me that the analysis of governmentality –i.e. the analysis of power as an ensemble of reversible relations-must refer to an ethics of the subject defined by the relation of itself to itself. I simply want to say that in the kind of analysis that I have tried to propose for some time, you see that: relations of power-governmentality; government of oneself and others and relation of oneself to oneself, all these constitute a chain, a web. It is there, around these notions, that one must be able to, I think, articulate the question of politics and the question of ethics.[12]  

Foucault urges us to take up a theoretical analysis that makes political sense: ‘it makes sense for that which we want to accept, refuse and change in ourselves in our actuality’. This is a political and theoretical analysis that aims to determine the ‘conditions and possibilities of the transformation of the subject’.[13]  

Marxism and psychoanalysis see a resurgence of the preoccupation with spirituality. In both camps, this resurgence occurs at the price of reducing the subject and truth to a mere question of ‘belonging’. Spirituality in the ancient form saw its demise due to a fundamental separation between the process of accessing truth and that of the subject’s self-transformation. On the one hand, access to truth was granted by modern philosophy to the knowing subject, on the other hand, spirituality was translated in a necessity of a labour on the subject itself. Theology rather than sciences started off this separation. Extrinsic conditions for accessing truth are not identified in the structure of the subject as such, but rather in the concrete forms of existence of the subject in question. Platonism reabsorbs the exigencies of spirituality within epistemology, by relating the question of the care of the self to the know yourself (to know oneself, to know the divine, to recognise the divine in oneself: this is fundamental to the platonic and neo-platonic forms of the care of the self).  

The status of the conditions of knowledge is important: Foucault establishes two sets of conditions for the attainment of knowledge. First, there are conditions that are internal to the act of knowing and rules that one has to follow in order to have access to truth. These are objective conditions, formal rules of method that determine the structure of the object of knowledge. The problem for Foucault is that these are all defined from within knowledge itself. As Foucault had attacked the circularity of the human sciences in The Order of Things and the notion of finitude as one that posited man as the object of knowledge whilst simultaneously establishing the structural impossibility for grasping such object, here we see the repercussions of this notion on practices of self-transformation and the ethical dimension.   Second, Foucault outlines a series of extrinsic conditions. They are related to ‘health’, (madness makes it impossible to access truth), culture (education and the participation to a certain scientific consensus are required), and morality (practical financial interests for instance would be an obstacle to accessing truth). But he notes that even though the second order of conditions is extrinsic to the act of knowledge, they are nonetheless indifferent to the subject in so far as they simply consider the individual in his concrete existence, rather than the structure of the subject as such. The conclusion of this process is that ‘truth cannot save the subject anymore. As a result of its neglect of the being of the subject, Modernity has achieved nothing but an endless accumulation of knowledge.’[14]   We can see that Foucault is tracing the genealogy of the subject by going back to the moment where a ‘culture of the self’ first emerges, where the technology of the self and the art of life become entangled. This moment he ascribes to Hellenistic and Roman periods, the Epicureans and Stoics being the most cited philosophers in his lectures. But the reason for first exploring Plato’s Alcibiades is that in this text one finds the contradiction which will be taken up and developed in neo-Platonism and in early Christianity, and which, in a relation of rupture and continuity, will also adopt the Hellenistic technology of the self for an entirely different purpose. As we shall see, in the paradox of Platonism Foucault finds the main contradiction, between the γνώθι σεαυτόν and the επιμέλεια εαυτού. These two elements, so intertwined in Plato and the Hellenists, are separated by early Christianity with the birth of theology, which also sanctions the end of philosophy as spirituality. All this is crucial, for Foucault is not only tracing a history of the subject and his relation to truth, but also an ontology of self-transformation that escapes the capture of either religion, science or the law.[15] This is the foundation, the prequel, rather than sequel, to his previous works on modernity. Thus the platonic rationalité, the beginning of which he recognises in early Christianity, is worth discussing in some length alongside the subsequent clarifications made during the lectures about the role of Descartes and Kant.[16] Foucault notes that Neo-Platonism reabsorbs exigencies of spirituality within an epistemology – whereby the latter outlines rules for the process of accessing truth.[17]  

The main reason for which the care of the self has been neglected is the Cartesian moment. Since then know yourself has become decoupled from the care of the self and the latter has been disqualified as a philosophical practice. The Cartesian path has made evidence (what appears, what is ‘given’ just as it is to consciousness, without any doubt) the starting point, the origin of philosophy. Thus it is to self-knowledge that the Cartesian path refers itself to, at least as form of consciousness. Moreover, given that the evidence of the existence of the subject is turned into the principle of the access to being, it is this self-knowledge (no longer in the form of the testing of an evidence but in the form of the indubitability of my existence as a subject) that transforms the ‘know-yourself’ into the foundation of any access to truth.[18]  

In this set of lectures we find continuous references to the present, the problem of actualité in philosophical criticism, and the path taken by the Cartesian tradition and the philosophy of the subject in the centuries that are closer to us than those analysed. We should not underestimate the pregnancy of Foucault’s analysis of Hellenistic philosophy for today, as a call to resistance to forms of morality and identity politics, which the 1980s are so imbued with. Foucault keeps writing an ontology of his present, which transpires from these lectures and takes issue with the problem of the ‘obsession’ with the self he witnesses. As with the interview on identity politics and the gay movement, Foucault shows discomfort with the idea of a juridical subject, of the juridification of life, and of the biopolitical forms of control enacted on the subject through scientific, religious and juridical discourses, thus searching for autonomous practices of ethical self transformation in the writings of Hellenistic philosophers.

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