>Seems to be a difference between a bureaucrat caught up in truth-formation
>which only extends the disciplinary forces and a specific intellectual who
>resists such influences. There are different ways to play within a given
>game of truth. I agree that Foucault tried to in most of his philosophy
>avoid traditional Enlightenment categories of freedom and "liberation," but
>what I'm arguing is that unlike Nietzsche (will-to-power) Foucault lacks any
>foundation for his late emphasis on ethics which is self-mastery or
>self-overcoming.
not quite sure i follow this: foucault lacks any foundation. does he need
one? does he not help us to move beyond philosophic foundations? doesn't he
suggest instead that foundations are tentative, momentary and illusory
positions that are forged for purposes of knowledge production in relation
to the political and power matrix of the speaker?
further, am i to understand that this sensed lack of foundation is the
reason why you want to provide him with one, specifically in the form and
substance of individual choice?
Although the text below that you have cited/quoted is chopped up/off, it
does not convince me that what he is arguing is that the technologies of the
self all the sudden are ripped from any political contexts of power but that
instead the discourse about the self begin to avoid connecting up the issue
of the self with issues of coercive practices. It seems to me that the
"leap" is regarding an analytical style, agenda, methods, procedures, versus
a theoretical/philosophical break from his previous work, on the one hand,
and a difference in the practices of self that he is comparing/contrasting,
on the other hand.
Afterall the great divide between the archeological and genealogical turned
out to not be such a big abyss. do you want to dig a deep trench here
between the genealogical and subjective foucault for the missing discontinuity?
>
>Interviewer: Is there not a 'leap' between your previous thought on this
>problem and that of subjectivity/truth and specifically beginning with the
>concept of care for self?
>
>Foucault: Up to that point, the problem of the relationship between the
>subject and games of truth had been faced in two ways: either beginning
>with coercive practices -- (as in the cased of psychiatry and the
>penitentiary system) -- or in forms of theoretical and scientific
>games...Now, in my courses at the College de France, I try to grasp the
>problems through one might call a practice of the self, a phenomenon which I
>believe to be very important in our societies since Greek and Roman times,
>even though it has hardly been studied. In Greek and Roman civilizations
>these practices of the self had a much greater importance than later on....
>
>Interviewer: There is now a sort of shift: these games of truth no longer
>are concerned with coercive practices but with practices of self-formation
>of the subject?
>Foucault: That is correct. It is what one might call an ascetical
>practice, giving the word 'ascetical' a very general meaning, that is to
>say, not in the sense of abnegation but that of an exercise of self upon
>self by which one tries to work out, to transform
>
>
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