Foucault and Familial Power

This paper provides an overview of Michel Foucault's continually changing observations on familial power, as well as the feminist‐Foucauldian literature on the family. It suggests that these accounts offer fragments of a genealogy of the family that undermine any all‐encompassing or transhistorical account of the institution. Approaching the family genealogically, rather than seeking a single model of power that can explain it, shows that far from this institution being a quasi‐natural formation or a bedrock of unassailable values, it is in fact a continually contested fiction that masks its own histories of becoming.     

论福柯与遥远的古希腊时代

福柯区分了司法型权力和规训型权力.他指出规训型权力建构了一个涉及社会各方面的严格"规范".人们在这种"规范"下,虽然看似有一系列的自由,但是实质依旧无法获得自主性.因此,我们需要重申古代精神.在古代的语境下,各个层级和身处不同年龄阶段的公民,对自己有严格的规范.他们表面上是被束缚的,但是在这种自我约束后,却是由于他们真正的自由.并能由此发展出一种健康的社会构架.     

Power,Subjectivity, and Agency: Between Arendt and Foucault

The author argues for bringing the work of Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt into dialogue with respect to the links between power, subjectivity, and agency.Although one might assume that Foucault and Arendt come from such radically different philosophical starting points that such a dialogue would be impossible, the author argues that there is actually a good deal of common ground to be found between these two thinkers. Moreover, the author suggests that Foucault's and Arendt's divergent views about the role that power plays in the constitution of subjectivity and agency should be seen as complementary rather than opposed.     

Power,Freedom, and Individuality: Foucault and Sexual Difference

This paper offers a detailed account of Foucaults ethical and political notion of individuality as presented in his late work, and discusses its relationship to the feminist project of the theory of sexual difference. I argue that Foucaults elaboration of the classical ethos of care for the self opens the way for regarding the I-woman as an ethical, political and aesthetic self-creation. However, it has significant limitations that cannot be ignored. I elaborate on two aspects of Foucaults avoidance of sexual difference as a relevant category for an account of political and ethical individuality, which thus implicitly associates individual agency with men. I argue that Foucault implicitly assumes the existence of an ontological desire to become engaged in political self-creation. However, the ethical position of self-knowledge and desire should be understood as a contingent option that depends on material and historical conditions for its realization. Hence, I argue that a feminist reworking of Foucaults notion of political individuality should add a substantial ethical condition to the imperative of self-knowledge and self-creation – making possible the desiring woman subject.     

医学化的权力与经济批判——从伊里奇到福柯

权力与经济是分析当代医学化现象的两个重要维度。医学不只是一种知识和技术,同时也是一种权力规范和经济活动,伊里奇和福柯都对此展开了分析,但是两者的方式与对策有所不同。伊里奇将医学化视为一种文化异化现象,并提出了一种文化主义的消除策略,福柯则将医学化视为权力体系和经济体系的一部分,从而提出了一种基于生命政治批判的反抗策略。两者的解决方案都具有局限性,但两者所开启的权力与经济批判以及对个体自主性的强调,有助于理解当代社会医学化的复杂性,也有助于将医学化批判置于整个社会危机的哲学反思之中。

     

Foucault on the Case: The Pastoral and Juridical Foundation of Medical Power

This paper employs Foucaults concept of governmentality to examine critically the efforts by medical humanists to reform the medical case. I argue that these reform efforts contribute to the individualizing dimensions of medical power through the development of a pastoral technique that medicine has taken over from religious authority. Clinical experiences at this NEH Institute also revealed a juridical dimension of the medical case that treats a patients statements as suspect and in need of corroboration by evidence provided by the patients body. The combination of these pastoral and juridical dimensions of the case contributes to the normalizing power of modern medicine, and medical humanists need to be aware of their own contribution to this form of power as they reform the case.     

Issues of Power, Control, and Status in Group Interaction: From Ferenczi to Foucault

Examination of the issues of power, control, and status in human interaction is made from the works of Kafka, Ferenczi, and Foucault. Ferenczi's confusion of tongues theory as a model is used to describe the dynamics of charismatic group leadership in training group for analyst group candidates.     

Consumerism and the Post-9/11 Paranoia: Michel Foucault on Power,Resistance, and Critical Thought

This paper intends to closely examine Michel Foucault’s take on power, resistance, and critical thought in the modern state, using the market-driven consumer economy and the paranoia-induced post-9/11 national security rhetoric as background. It will argue that on both domains, knowledge as similitude comes to be represented as part of the repressive configuration in the order of things. In retracing the technology of discipline where the individual unknowingly participates in his latent subjugation, the author thinks that critical thought—one that diverts power away from the center to the peripheries is the only effective way of resistance against forms of social control and domination.     

Performativity: Lyotard and Foucault Through Searle and Austin

Lyotard talks of performativity or the subsumption of education to the efficient functioning of the social system. Education is no longer to be concerned with the pursuit of ideals such as that of personal autonomy or emancipation, but with the means, techniques or skills that contribute to the efficient operation of the state in the world market and contribute to maintaining the internal cohesion and legitimation of the state. But this requires individuals of a certain kind -- not Kantian autonomous persons but Foucault's normalized and governable individuals. In constituting such individuals discourse is critically important. But how discourse effects this through the force of language is not fully developed by Foucault. This paper draws upon the performative account of language offered by John Austin to develop more fully comments made by Foucault on the force or effects of language in constituting normalized and governable individuals for the march of performativity.     

Between fiction and reflection: Foucault and the experience-book

Foucault notoriously suggests that his historical analyses are fictions. Commentators typically interpret this claim in a negative light to mean that Foucault's works are not, strictly speaking, true. In this paper, I present a positive interpretation of Foucault's claim, basing my argument on a hitherto marginalized aspect of his work: the experience-book. An experience-book is defined as a use of fiction in the practice of critique with desubjectifying effects. My argument for this interpretation proceeds in three steps. First, to prepare a preliminary account of Foucault's concept of fiction and its effects, I look at Blanchot's ontological interpretation of the work of literature in The Space of Literature. Blanchot, I suggest, provides a template for understanding Foucault's concept of the experience-book. Second, I identify traces of Blanchot's concept of fiction in Foucault's study of Jules Verne, Behind the Fable. I argue that Foucault's critique of fiction, in this paper, anticipates and prefigures his later use of fiction in the practice of critique. Third, pursuing this intuition, I develop an interpretation of Discipline and Punish understood as a use of fiction and experience-book. This interpretation provides a new, immanent perspective on Foucault's critique, and mitigates the epistemological skepticism of the claim that his works are fictions.     

康德与福柯:启蒙与现代性之争

自1784年康德在<柏林月刊>提出并回答什么是启蒙的问题之后,200年来,西方哲学就一直以不同的方式直接或间接地面对启蒙问题,甚至福柯断言:"现代哲学,这正是试图对两个世纪以前如此冒失地提出的那个问题(启蒙问题,笔者注)做出回答的哲学"[1].然而,福柯更深刻地感受到的是对启蒙的疑惑:"所谓‘启蒙'的事件究竟是什么?它至少在某方面决定了我们是什么,我们想的是什么以及我们所做的是什么"[2],进而引发了福柯对探寻"现代性是否构成启蒙的继续和发展或是否应当从中看到对于18世纪的基本原则的断裂或背离"[3]的诉求,公开了当代挥之不去的启蒙与现代性之间的哲学争论.     

黑格尔与福柯:迈向不见人影之历史

20世纪历史哲学在上半叶由黑格尔式的思辨历史哲学转向历史认识论研究。之后 ,自 1 970年开始 ,它又经历了语言学转折。后者的表现便是叙述主义历史哲学的兴起。它注重分析历史文本的语言风格这类形式要素中表现的本质内涵 ,也在认识论的层面彻底消解了传统实在论意义上的历史客观性。人们对历史叙述过程诸要素有了越来越多的了解之后 ,对某一历史主题确立的目的和效果也就有了更有效的解析方法 ,进而为当代历史哲学重新深入历史本体 ,探讨宏大历史叙事与叙述权力创造了条件。当代历史哲学正以 2 0世纪历史认识论的成就为依据 ,在推进历史 /史学观念分析之时 ,也表现出一种重新步入思辨历史哲学领地的倾向。此时 ,具有前瞻性的世界史家也像当代历史哲学家那样 ,注意到了世界历史观念的现实意义。本栏选取的 4篇文章 (另外两篇将以后刊出 )便分别涉及到构成上述倾向的某些特定层面。