by Kevin Magill
Published in Moya Lloyd and Andrew Thacker eds, The Impact of Michel Foucault on the Social Sciences and Humanities. Macmillan 1996. ISBN 9780333631263
http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?PID=256691
From the Introduction to the volume:
'... focuses upon the problems raised by Foucault for one central problem in... more
From the Introduction to the volume:
'... focuses upon the problems raised by Foucault for one central problem in philosophy, the question of freedom. One traditional philosophical position argues that in order for an individual or a collectivity truly to be free there must be an absence of power relations, or at leas a sufficient diminishment of them in order that freedom can be articulated fully. Foucault's work questions this assumption and Magill examines Foucault's ambivalent attitude towards the relationship between freedom and power by situating his work within the philosophical tradition of Stoicism. For the Stoic tradition freedom is a quality obtained through certain practices of goodness and reason which are identified as a person's essential self. Foucault's work challenges this idea in his insistence that there is no essential self, only a self constructed as an effect of power by modern disciplinary technologies, and thus hampered in their ability to be a 'free self'. Magill offers a strong defence of the Stoic conception of freedom by identifying weaknesses in Foucault's account of power and subjectivity. Despite these criticisms Magill suggests that philosophical conceptions of freedom have much to learn from Foucault’s work: if we cannot escape from power perhaps we are able to utilise the monitoring mechanisms of modern forms of power in order to create new forms of freedom. Foucault's work, concludes Magill, reminds us that philosophical questions such as the nature of freedom must be framed within a discussion of what we are, and what we might become, as human subjects.'
Download (.docx)