Freedom as critique: Foucault beyond anarchism

Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique

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Critique and Experience in Foucault

It is widely known that by the end of the 1970s, Foucault had begun to refer to ‘experience’ to account for his intellectual trajectory and to redirect the work on The History of Sexuality. However, the interest in experience also decisively shaped Foucault’s analysis of the ‘critical attitude’ that he explicitly started to address at about the same time. The article argues that Foucault’s noti...

Critique of Foucault on Iran

Foucault, Freedom, and the Limits of Modernity

In order to locate and understand a notion of freedom in the later works of Michel Foucault, I will first offer a discussion of delinquency as described in Discipline and Punish. Within this discussion I will argue against Thomas Dumm’s characterization of the delinquent as emblematic of freedom on the grounds that such a characterization is implicitly contested in Discipline and Punish. I will...

Revising Foucault: The history and critique of modernity

I offer a major reassessment of Foucault’s philosophico-historical account of the basic problems of modernity. I revise our understanding of Foucault by countering the influential misinterpretations proffered by his European interlocutors such as Habermas and Derrida. Central to Foucault’s account of modernity was his work on two crucial concept pairs: freedom/power and reason/madness. I argue ...