Repository | Book | Chapter

A defining characteristic of Foucault's thought prior to the 1980s is its hostility toward the Enlightenment conception of autonomous subjectivity, or the idea that human beings provide, from within themselves, the conditions required for conduct independent of either overt or covert mechanisms of coercion. "Nothing is more foreign to me than the question of a constraining sovereign and unique form," he says in 1968.¹ Four years later he describes his "radical critique of the subject by history" as undermining the 200-year-old "postulate" that there are universal features of the subject from which it could supply itself with the conditions of its freedom.² Surprise is therefore licensed when Foucault declares his membership in the Kantian tradition of critical philosophy and describes the purpose of his labors as identifying that which "is no longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects [sujets autonomes]."³ How could Foucault's critical philosophy possibly uphold the value of autonomy if, as he seems to have once maintained, the subject is not capable of conducting itself independently of mechanisms of coercion because the subject does not provide itself with the required conditions of such independence?⁴ Now, in the 80s Foucault is quite happy to admit that the subject is self-constituting. But if his considered philosophy of the subject cannot support an account of autonomy, then the stated goal of his critical efforts — liberating the subject from the contingent and unnecessary constraints upon its conduct — is either double-speak or self-delusion.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137472427_7

Full citation: