1.

In The Care of the Self, Foucault posits the imperial era as the crucible for a new ethics and a
new experience of the self. Drawing on this volume, and additional readings on your list, draw
out the key insights of an ethics of caring for the self, and the ambiguous place of the body – its
pains and most especially its pleasures – in the cultivation of the self. How does Foucault’s
articulation of the administration of oneself, varyingly constituted in different historical eras,
speak to your scholarly projects?

Foucault concluded his 1980 lectures at Dartmouth on the hermeneutics of the self proposing
that "one of the main political problems would be, nowadays, in the strict sense of the word, the
politics of ourselves" (p. 223). As Foucault states earlier in the lectures, the “politics of
ourselves” consist not only of “techniques of domination” (which, he admits, he overemphasized
in his earlier work), but also “techniques of the self” by which subjects are able to transform
themselves (203). In this response, I will outline preliminary thoughts regarding how Foucault’s
later work on the care of the self might contribute to critical studies of biomedicine and public
health (including my own work).

Historicizing Foucault
Michelle Murphy (2012: 36) provides a valuable insight when noting the importance of
historicizing Foucault’s work in the context in which it was written. Volumes 2 and 3 of The
History of Sexuality, published in 1984 before his death later that year, were written during a
pivotal moment for the disciplining of sexuality in the interest of public health; the AIDS epidemic
made it clear that “techniques of domination” over sexuality continued to be entangled with the
imperatives of individual and public health. Foucault himself noted that he did not write them for
the liberation movements that emerged at the time but "'as a function of a present situation”
(1993: 139). As Mark Blasius notes in his introductory note to Foucault’s Dartmouth lectures,
the last two volumes of The History of Sexuality can be interpreted as an attempt to formulate
an ethic of sex that would “adapt and direct the power exercised by medical, quasi-medical, and
moral experts in the time” (Ibid.). Given these insights,
It seems that Foucault’s goal was not to liberate sexuality from the disciplinary power of
medicine and public health, but instead to articulate an ethics of the self and sexual practice that
did not outright reject or embrace the imperatives of medicine and health, but that was
positioned in a different relationship altogether that rejected this binary. Thus, Foucault’s later
work appears to align with some of the contemporary work in feminist science studies that I
admire most. Feminist science scholars such as Elizabeth Wilson, Michelle Murphy, and Sarah
Franklin have attempted to articulate a critical relationship with science and technology as
something other than oppositional. Elizabeth Wilson (2010: ix) aims “to see more rather than
less” in the field she studies (computational sciences); in my work, however, I still find it
challenging at times to even recognize the “more” in our relation to biomedicine and public
health, when the biopolitical costs of their “right to make live and to let die” (2003: 241) have
been so great.
Caring for the self

In The Care of the Self, Foucault looks to Greco-Roman works from the 2nd century CE to
articulate an alternative ethical practice. While this period saw an intensification of discourse
regarding the negative consequences of pleasure and the benefits of sexual austerity, Foucault
is emphatic that this was not a precursor to Judeo-Christian restrictions on sexuality. Instead,
Foucault argues it was part of “the cultivation of the self” that was dominated by the principle
that “one must ‘take care of oneself’” (43). Caring for oneself, therefore, was central to the
philosophical “art of existence” (44). Foucault describes the Greco-Roman tradition as distinct
from modern (Judeo-Christian, Western) ethical proscriptions regarding sexuality, and it is clear
that he sees potential in the ancient practice of the self (despite its exclusivity to only a small
portion of society that participated in political life).

1. Ancient practices of caring for oneself, however, were not anything like the practices of self-
care encouraged today, nor were they narcissistic. Foucault makes it clear that technologies
employed towards the care of the self need not reinforce individualism; the early Greco-Roman
care for the self, he argues, resulted in "an intensification of social relations" (p. 53), instead of
an intensification of individualism or private life. The crucial difference is that the “self” of the
care of the self was not the individual autonomous subject of humanism, but was constituted in
practice and seen as always embedded in relations and obligations to others. For Foucault,
therefore, there was no subject but only a process of subjectification: as Agamben notes, “the
‘Self’ for Foucault is not a substance nor the objectifiable result of an operation (the relation with
itself): it is the operation itself, the relation itself’ (101).

2. Significantly for my own work, Foucault makes it clear that the Greco-Roman caring for
oneself and the associated sexual ethic developed at the same time that medicine’s influence in
society intensified. During this period, a “health practice” permeated every aspect of one’s life,
which implied, he notes, a “medical perception of the world, so to speak, or at least a medical
perception of the space and circumstances in which one lived” (101). Within this context, the
sexual ethics that emerged, yes, was increasingly preoccupied with the dangers of (certain)
sexual activity and emphasized its proper place within (heterosexual) marriage. Nevertheless,
sex was not an evil in and of itself, bounded by strict universal laws. Medical texts of the era
treated it with marked ambivalence, as both a “natural act” with potential to heal and cure, but
also as source of illness, depending on the circumstances. The sexual ethics developed,
therefore, "not with a view to the act and its regular and irregular forms, but with a view to the
actor, his way of being, his particular situation, his relation to others, and the positions he
occupies with respect to them" (p. 35). Greco-Roman medicine did not pathologize sexual
behavior and desire in relation to a universal norm; instead, sexual acts could be said to be
pathological in that they were fragile processes that had to occur under the right conditions, and
for the disturbances they induced in the humors of the body. "Those who indulge in sexual
relations and especially those who indulge without much caution need to take care of
themselves in a much more rigorous fashion than others, so that, by putting their body in the
best possible condition, they might experience less the harmful effects of these relations" (123)
Foucault is not, of course, arguing that we return to Greek and Roman sexual ethics, which
required an specific form of social order that excluded the majority of from participating in
political and ethical life. His geneological project of the self, however, demonstrates that things
could be different, that alternative forms of life are possible, and, as Foucault notes in his 1980
Dartmouth lectures, “that the self is nothing else than the historical correlation of the technology
built in our history. Maybe the problem is to change those technologies” (222-223).

The Body and Pleasure

While in his earlier work Foucault seems to understand the body primarily as a site for
disciplinary power, the body is central to the Greek and Roman ethical practice. Practices of
abstinence, self-discipline, and physical training facilitated knowledge and modification of the
self (68). Sexual pleasure and desire was controlled not because of their sinfulness or any
universal rule, but, instead, to enable the subject to “live well” as a citizen, to cultivate a proper
relation to oneself and others. Foucault points to the transformative potential of bodily practice
at the end of Vol. of The History of Sexuality, proposing: “The rallying point for the counterattack
against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex desire, but bodies and pleasures”
(1976: 157).

The term "pleasure" on the other hand is virgin territory, unused, almost devoid of
meaning. There is no "pathology" of pleasure, no "abnormal" pleasure. It is an event
"outside the subject," or at the limit of the subject, taking place in that something which
is neither of the body nor of the soul, which is neither inside nor outside-in short, a
notion neither assigned nor assignable. ”
finds the seeds of transformation in the life of a passion which lives and thrives at the borders of
recognizability, which still has the limited freedom of not being false or true, which establishes a critical
distance on the terms which decide our being.”4

It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim-through a tactical reversal of the various
mechanisms of sexuality-to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and
knowledges, in their mUltiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack
against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex desire, but bodies and pleasures.

The self-transformative potential of bodily practice

dangerous and entailed risk.

I am advancing this term [pleasure], because it seems to me that it escapes the medical
and naturalistic connotations inherent in the notion of desire. That notion has been used
as a tool, as a grid of intelligibility, a calibration in terms of normality: "Tell me what your
desire is and I will tell you who you are, whether you are normal or not, and then I can
validate or invalidate your desire ....

Technology and Care of the Self

relations of power that constitute modem social institutions. A politics of our selves would entail
a recognition that if the self is "nothing else than the historical correlation of the technology" that
has come to create it, then the aim would be to get rid of the "sacrifice which is linked to those
technolo- gies." This sacrifice is twofold: it is the creation of a positive foundation for the self by
means of procedures that at once makes us amenable to social control and dependent upon it,
as well as the production and then marginalization of entire categories of people who do not fit
what the foundation posits as "normal." We can rid ourselves of the imposed sacrifice through
what Foucault called a "critical ontology of ourselves." This is, he wrote, "at one and the same
time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the
possibility of going beyond them . . . in the care brought to the process of putting historico-
critical reflection to the test of concrete practices" (The Foucault Reader, p. 50).
 a medical perception of the world, so to speak, or at least a medical perception of the space and
circumstances in which one lived.

and a medical perception of the world, so to speak, or at least a medical perception of the space and
circumstances in which one lived.

This imperative, however, as Foucault acknowledges, was recognized by only a select group of
(44).

sexuality that was of the AIDS epidemic.

the power exercised by medical, quasi-medical, and moral experts in the time
of the AIDS epidemic. Fi

In particular, Foucault’s analysis of the role of pleasure and

Foucault, Michel. 1986. History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self. Trans. Robert
Hurley. New York: Vintage Books.

----. 1988. "Technologies of the Self.” In Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel
Foucault. Edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton. London:
Tavistock. 16-49.
-----. 1993. “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth,”
Political Theory 21, no. 2: 198-227.
Foucault, Michel. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76.
New York: Picador, 2003.

Wilson, Elizabeth. Affect and Artificial Intelligence. Seattle, WA: University of Washington
Press, 2010.