An American Foucault

Author(s): Dan C. Williamson

Source: History of Philosophy Quarterly , Apr., 2009, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Apr., 2009), pp.
189-207
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of North American Philosophical
Publications

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27745156

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 History of Philosophy Quarterly
Volume 26, Number 2, April 2009

AN AMERICAN FOUCAULT

Dan C. Williamson

Introduction

Many of Michel
Foucault's Foucault's
genealogies of power readers in offer
and knowledge America have found that
radical and
transformative possibilities to individuals otherwise marginalized by
society. With the publication of his later works on the epimelia heautou,
the care of the self, his project changed to a consideration of how the
self constitutes, recognizes, and works on itself, rather than how power
and knowledge impose their normative gaze on subjects. This shift in
projects, instead of diverging from his earlier genealogies, intensified
those transformative possibilities by offering an ethics of self-fashioning
that challenges traditional normative structures of the self. These pos
sibilities overlap and reflect a sense of transformation of self that has
been developing in American letters for as long as this country has been
in existence. A large part of Foucault's legacy amplifies and illuminates
a radical, even revolutionary, sense of being and becoming American,
whose trajectory is to become who one is not yet. This legacy is discussed
and argued for here.
Several years ago, Richard Rorty presented a challenging account of
Foucault that echoed a sentiment made by Vincent Descombes. Rorty
writes,
But, as Descombes says, the American Foucault is Foucault with
most of the Nietzscheanism drained away. The French Foucault is
the fully Nietzschean one. For this Foucault, Descombes says, the
project of autonomy requires us to have "inhuman thoughts," to have
no "worries about sharing our beliefs with our fellow citizens." Insofar
as the French Foucault has any politics, they are anarchist rather
than liberal.1

The American Foucault is a Deweyian liberal who does not think

"inhuman thoughts" or, rather, thoughts that have not yet been thought,
possibilities that have not yet been conceived. Still, Foucault's oeuvre

189

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190 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

is far too broad in its discursive compass to be limited by an American

reading that is so different from his reception in Europe. Instead, Fou
cault has and will continue to exert a powerful influence on those who
are seeking to build new identities and new selves and who are willing
to think those "inhuman thoughts." Rorty's liberals are only one group
that Foucault converses with.

1. Transformational Genealogies
A brief consideration of the ideas from the earlier genealogies of power
will be useful here as a way to introduce Foucault's later projects in
ethics. The panoptical apparatus (dispositif)2 of Discipline and Punish3
was quickly taken up by several groups who saw in the gaze of panopti
cal power the gaze of entrenched white male privilege. The body of the
woman is a site, a register, and a biography, where patriarchal power
inscribes simultaneously its lust and its power in the meticulous gray
detail of everyday existence. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction
continued and elaborated this critique of power and knowledge.4 Power
and knowledge conspire together but not solely in the figure of the law
or the police, the barracks or the schoolroom. Rather, discourses are
disseminated in a complex weave of practices and knowledge that are
regulated by power relations, which also produce normative assignments.
Knowledge comes from everywhere in institutional practices that are
formed more from the bottom up than from the top down. The pleasure
of confessing one's sexuality, of talking about it, becomes part of the
widespread examination of sexuality that did not find sexuality in the
human being but rather produced it there, just as the biography of the
prisoner, the schoolchild, and the military man are similarly constructed,
not found. The meticulous recording of the practices of pleasure lead to a
savoir (knowledge overall) of sex that possessed explanatory power over
who, what, and how one is. Its effect is to impose normative assignments
based on supposed factual and objective "natures" about individuals,
their sexual likes and dislikes. Some become normal, whereas some do
not: e.g., homosexuals and the proliferation of deviant categorization
itself produced by what Foucault calls the discourses of sex, Scientia
Sexualis. Sex was simultaneously pathologized and normalized.
In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault offers very
little to fight these apparatuses of power/knowledge. He speaks of lo
calized resistances and, in an almost Epicurean moment, he calls for a
return to "bodies and pleasures."5 He also sees most sexual liberation
movements as part of the apparatuses of sexuality. The appeal to essen
tialized or even constructed sexual categories places such movements
within the orbit of the discourses on sexuality. In effect, it makes them
co-conspirators with the normative and oppressive apparatus o? Scientia

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 AN AMERICAN FOUCAULT 191

Sexualis. Some found a lack of grounding for liberation and, thus, rights
as disturbing and a reason to reject Foucault's ideas. Nevertheless, a
great many others found a revolutionary and transformative voice in
the very fact that by revealing the production of norms about sexual
ity, Foucault really shows how no one identity can claim to be "natural"
and, hence, the basis for an objective status of what is right or true;
heterosexuality cannot morally trump homosexuality.
It follows that, for example, a gay man does not have to bow to the
convention that he is a deviant, a pervert, or an abnormal human being
since all of those terms and the essence they presuppose are historically
relative fictions, not truths written in fleshly stone by those who see it
emerging from physical and psychological roots, i.e., essentialism. For
the American audience, David Halperin says it best when he writes that
"the capacity to 'realize oneself by becoming other than what one is" is
at the center of the force of Foucault's trenchant genealogies of power/
knowledge.6 The effect of Foucault's analysis is to urge people to become
who they are not yet, to become who they might be.
However, Rorty's American Foucault does not recognize this. Rather,
Rorty's American Foucault has distilled away the "inhuman thoughts."
As Halperin's comment suggests, the reception of Foucault, including
the reception in America, resonates not with Deweyian liberalism alone.
He also resonates with the more Nietzschean or, if one will, Dionysian,
anarchic moment of self-creation. Its expression in LGBT7 culture
has been legion: in camp, cross-dressing, metrosexuality, and multiple
other expressive forms of identity that disrupt the settled tableaux of,
for example, the "dagger dike" or the furtive gay man in a trench coat,
hanging out near latrines. And it is this moment of self-invention that
is quintessentially American.
Consider as one example here the narrative of Audre Lorde. Lorde
is a feminist, a poor woman, an African-American, and a lesbian; and
she has children by a previous marriage. Some women's conferences are
disturbed when she brings a male child to the conference. It becomes an
issue. Feminist conferences invite her constantly and do not understand
when she does not appear. She does not have the money?she is poor
and also a feminist, a radical, a black person, and a lesbian. Her subject
position while visible as a woman is completely invisible as a poor person.
Lorde is marginalized from all sides. And in the midst of it, she asks what
if any of the master's tools she can use to build the house that is her self.
Lorde suggests a radical reformation, transformation that is summed
up in her taking on a new name, Zami.8 One must reinvent and, in the
process, ask if what was available before, from the discourses of power/
knowledge, can be used again without building a structure that will fail.
It can be said that Lorde is invoking a sense of self that is Dionysian in

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192 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

that it is transformative, its symbolism that of re-membering herself,

torn as she is by the forces of white heteronormative power. Lorde asks
whether she can become who she is not yet. Lorde's journey is not the
only voyage of self-invention in American letters.
Lorde's act of self-invention reflects many other narratives of self
transformation by Americans from many different walks of life. One
should consider the widely disparate lives of Frederick Douglass,
Benjamin Franklin, and Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin) and see that a
single theme remains paramount: the necessity to reinvent, if not sim
ply invent, construct, who one is not yet. Douglass, after finally freeing
himself from slavery, must construct an entirely new life complete with
his name. Zitkala-Sa refuses assimilation into white culture, but when
she returns to her own Native American culture, it has all but vanished.
She has to reinvent herself from the ground up religiously and spiritu
ally by becoming, as she puts it, pagan. Franklin runs away from his
family and his brother's newspaper to make a wholly new start and, in
so doing, has to construct for himself a way of remaking himself that is
not very far from the kind of care of self that Foucault pursues. We will
return to Franklin later.9

The dispositif of power/knowledge operates as domination dissemi

nated throughout a given culture that imposes its norms, its regimes
of truth. But that is not to say that the self is beyond the capacity to
develop through itself, to operate upon itself. This is the theme developed
in Foucault's later work on genealogy and ethics that is clarified with the
publication o? The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College
de France, 1981--1982.10 These lectures illustrate the range and depth
of Foucault's thought on the epimelia heautou, the care of the self, that
leads to his ethics of self-fashioning.11 In this shift of interest, Foucault
presents ideas that reflect a quintessentially American experience among
a wide latitude of American letters, poets and philosophers alike.
Foucault's interest is to provide a hermeneutics of the subject who
is developing the art of becoming a self. It is a hermeneutics insofar as
the self becomes the site of an interpretative struggle by each individual
to construct a self. In reviewing technologies of practical reason that
Foucault is considering in a lecture, he isolates four aspects of an ethics
of the care of the self. The first two are found in the study of science and
linguistics. The third set of technologies is those of power and domina
tion, i.e., genealogies of panopticism and sexuality. The fourth are
. . . technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their
own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations
on their own bodies and souls, thought, conduct, and way of being, so
as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of hap
piness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.12

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 AN AMERICAN FOUCAULT 193

It is easy to see that Foucault's aim is to provide a set of reflections on

how to transform. Its beginning is instruction in how to find in the self
its own resources to live a life that is appropriate to the individual. It
is not how domination, how power/knowledge, imposes that truth on a
subject. Rather, this later work is about how one comes to know truth
about the self, through the self as its own agency and without outward
influences of something like power/knowledge (or at the very least to
suspend it temporarily).

2. Epimelia Heautou
Foucault's idea can be seen clearly in Stoic thinkers such as Epictetus.
It follows Epictetus's remark that you have no control over the opinion
of others or what the world may think of you or how it may construct
you (as a product of power/knowledge) anymore than Marcus Aurelius
could one day absolutely shed his role as emperor of the Roman Empire.
Put aside what the world of power and knowledge tells you to see in
yourself, the normative gaze. Those are the opinions of others. Instead,
see what and who you are by examining your own opinions about all
those other things. This you do have control over.13
This is well-known advice to anyone who has studied classical phi
losophy. One cannot control the opinions others have about oneself any
more than one can control automatic bodily functions. What one can
control is the nature of one's own opinions about other things and how
one shall react to those events, people, or knowledge. In doing this, one
also constructs the appropriate way to respond to any outside forces.
For example, in recognizing that one is gay or straight and a male, one
should be able to sort out the important aspects that are to be worked
over. How will one be in any given culture? Will one, for instance, reveal
one's gay sexuality and, if so, in what circumstances and what not? And
one may do this even with a sense of irony and humor. This is where
camp begins, in a willful parody of what otherwise is stereotyped as
"gay." The idea is that, in following advice like that of Epictetus about
caring for oneself, one can willingly give up certain aspects of oneself
while attaining to others that better reflect who one is. This kind of self
knowledge also allows one to judge when certain actions or reactions
are appropriate and when not. Like any virtue ethics, this is a manual
for practical action in the sphere of the political and social. In following
the advice, one sets the self on the road to transformation by balancing
the needs of the self with those of the "other."

As Foucault writes in the Hermeneutics,

It is a question of taking care of oneself as subject of the khr?sis (with

all the word's polysemy: subject of actions, behavior, relationships,

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194 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

attitudes). It seems to me that the outcome of the argument of the

Alcibiades on the question "what is oneself and what meaning should
be given to oneself when we say that one should take care of the self?"
is the soul as subject and not at all the soul as substance.14

Foucault identifies Plato's Alcibiades15 as an important text that elabo

rates the epimelia heautou. Its primary theme is the mentor Socrates
trying to get his pupil Alcibiades to recognize that he has to care for
himself and others, especially so here because of Alcibiades' prominence
in Athenian political life. Plato is not only arguing for a kind of knowledge
of the world?an epistemic and metaphysical knowledge?but he is also
arguing for another kind of knowledge that emphasizes the epimelia
heautou. Under this interpretation, the Delphic pronouncement "Know
thyself" has two implications, not just one.
Foucault in The Hermeneutics of the Subject will emphasize that
one of the implications is the care of the self and that this is unique
or separate from other forms of knowledge. That is, this form of truth
is not the same kind of truth as that which produces truths about the
"objective" nature of something like a Platonic form. Nevertheless, it is
also correct to say that the two forms of knowledge combine in Plato to
create the kind of person who can learn through perfecting his own soul.
Later sciences that take up the self as an objectively knowable thing, as
a psychology?and, hence, a subject of power and knowledge?do not at
the same time take up epimelia heautou.
Instead, this latter kind of knowledge is covered over by modernity.
Foucault says in the first lecture, first hour, "It seems to me that the
'Cartesian moment,' again within a lot of inverted commas, functioned
in two ways. It came into play in two ways: by philosophically requalify
ing the gnothi seauton (know yourself), and by discrediting the epimelia
heautou (care of the self)."16
The philosophical tradition from Descartes onward sheds the classical
world's preoccupation of an art of the self, a techne, in favor of the very
kind of self Foucault studies in the earlier genealogies of power/knowl
edge.17 That is, the Cartesian self is the subject of power/knowledge. No
concept of care of the self is recognizable.
Foucault says,
Let's say, schematically, that where we moderns hear the question "is
the objectification of the subject in a field of knowledge (connaissances)
possible or impossible?" the Ancients of the Greek, Hellenistic and
Roman period heard, "constitution of a knowledge (savoir) of the world
as spiritual experience of the subject." . . . [W]hoever wishes to study
the history of subjectivity . . . will have to uncover the very long and
slow transformation of an apparatus (dispositif of subjectivity, defined

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 AN AMERICAN FOUCAULT 195

by the spirituality of knowledge (savoir) and the subject's practices of

truth, into this other apparatus of subjectivity which is our own and
which is, I think, governed by the question of the subject's knowledge
(connaissance) of himself. . . . 18

The long, slow transformation descends from a tradition in the classical

eras that made care of the self central to their philosophies, as a kind
of subjective knowledge (connaissance) accessible to the pupil through
a master. This form branches off into Christianity and monasticism,
while objective knowledge as a savoir remains to establish itself in
philosophy and the sciences of humankind as the preeminent tool by
which the human being will be understood. The difference between the
two approaches to knowledge is the difference between psychoanalysis
and meditation. The modern theme of knowledge claims to find buried
deep within the psychology of the human the truth of desire that needs
to be revealed and, when revealed, will act as a therapeutic resolution
of who one really is; this is psychoanalysis along with several strains of
modern disciplines, including philosophy. The ancient theme?while not
necessarily rejecting the other forms of what has been characterized here
as modernity?seeks another kind of knowledge, the kind that allows
one to see oneself, how one is, what one will do with oneself, as well as
how one reacts to the world around oneself.

3. Exercises
Foucault through the sheer weight of his study encourages the reader
to understand this other way of seeing the self. He does so in a broad
variety of ways in The Hermeneutics of the Subject going beyond the
limits of this paper. The following examples illustrate this kind of knowl
edge of the self in more detail. Considered are what Foucault calls the
"spiritual" ask?sis as well as the activity and cultivation of parrh?sia.
These examples clearly link Foucault to a tradition of revolutionary
self-transformation that has been in America for some time. This kind
of transformation, as is argued here, is to become what one is not yet, to
think those "inhuman" thoughts. And, as with the old Orphic mysteries, it
is to become the god, here meaning the person who is to be re-membered
and re-born, re-invented, trans-formed, literally.

3.1. Spiritual Exercises

Ask?sis means a kind of ensemble of different exercises on the self that
an individual under the care of a master can perform to bring truth
about the self to the self. Foucault draws on a rich variety of ancient
sources ranging from Plato to Plutarch to Seneca and Marcus Aurelius
to illustrate these exercises. Some of the exercises considered here
are "spiritual" kinds of ask?sis.19 The kind of spirituality addressed

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196 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

is not explicitly religious in a manner contemporary readers would

understand, an understanding already formed by the later Christian
version of "spiritual exercises." Those Foucault says are "life denying,"20
whereas classical versions were meant to be the uplifting means by
which the individual in encountering the world encounters him- or
herself.
A simple example will suffice to illustrate the basic sense of this
idea, an example of an experience that many who come to philosophy in
America have. It is no secret that many initially see philosophy a kind
of therapeutic agent that aids in the growth of the self. The young phi
losopher finds herself going through various points of view and systems
of thought to find those ideas that are not only true of the world but are
also reflective of her own disposition, her own place, in the world. Say
this young person finds the rich work in phenomenology and goes on to
study Edmund Husserl. The cry is heard, "To the things themselves!"
She might find not only a way past the old conundrums and skepticism
of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought to a new and refreshing
way of addressing not only science and truth, but life and being itself
embodied in activities, exercises like the especially fascinating rigor
that is implied in phenomenological bracketing and the epoche. The
encounter with the world is also at the same time an encounter with
the self. The same could be said of those who find Friedrich Nietzsche
or S0ren Kierkegaard. All of these philosophers share a strong sense of
self-transformation in their works. The point is that, even in the con
temporary world, vestiges of what is meant by "spiritual exercises" are
present. Of course, for many, this aspect suddenly disappears in the rude
dawn of contemporary academic philosophy, where pursuing the reality
and well-being of the self is not considered professionally academic and
is commonly seen as naive and disingenuous.21
In clarifying the idea of ask?sis, Foucault discusses Seneca's com
mentary on how to view nature, not as way to gain just objective truth
about the world but rather as one of the exercises to gain a truth about
ourselves. Foucault says, "I would like to draw with regard to knowledge
of the self and knowledge of nature, their connection and the fact that
knowledge of the self is not in any way, and in no way resembles, what
will later be the self-exegesis of the subject."22
This will not be an explanation invested by the "Cartesian moment."
This study of nature is self-reflexive: "[Y]ou see the effect of knowing
nature, of this great gaze that scours the world, or which, stepping
back from the point we occupy ends up grasping the whole of nature,
is liberating."23 The soul itself is transformed by its encounter with
nature.

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 AN AMERICAN FOUCAULT 197

Foucault continues,
[T]he knowledge of nature is liberating inasmuch as it allows us, not
to turn away from ourselves, not to turn our gaze away from what
we are, but rather to focus it better and continuously take a certain
view of ourselves, to ensure a contemplation sui in which the object
of contemplation is ourselves in the world, ourselves inasmuch as
our existence is linked to a set of determinations and necessities
whose rationality we understand. You see then that "not losing sight
of oneself" and "exploring the whole of the world" are two absolutely
inseparable activities, on condition that there has been this stepping
back, this spiritual movement of the subject establishing the maxi
mum distance from himself so that subject becomes, at the summit of
the world, consortium Dei, closest to god, participating in the activity
of divine rationality. It seems to me that all of this is perfectly sum
marized in Seneca's letter 66 to Lucilius. . ..24

One sees a stand of trees in the wild, they arrest the attention, they
call, and if one is aware, one must free the mind of all incidentals to
receive what calls one thither. And in the process that unfolds, a certain
elemental sense of self, of what really matters, emerges not in the thing
viewed (which is still going on), but in the viewer in her- or himself. "So
the first effect of this knowledge of nature is to establish the maximum
tension between the self as reason and the self as point."25 You realize
in the relation with that stand of trees, that something is being said to
you as a person, a self, as much as an intellect. If one were to consider
just briefly this in relation to what Foucault addresses in his genealogies,
one can see that, in acquiring this concept of self, one is moving away
from the concretized normative apparatuses of power/knowledge of the
subject to an awareness of self through and with the world.
One does not have to go so far to find American authors of similar
intent who truly have that "virtuous soul" that is "in contact with the
whole universe and careful to explore all is secrets," as Foucault quotes
Seneca as saying.26 Poets such as Gary Snyder come to mind. But one
American poet immediately stands out, the poet of democracy, Walt
Whitman. Where else might one find the soaring soul who sings the
body electric? Whitman's soul joyously records the diversity of America,
root and branch. The following comes from "Salut Au Monde!":
O take my hand Walt Whitman!
Such gliding wonders! such sights and sounds!
Such join'd unended links, each hook'd to the next,
Each answering all, each sharing the earth with all.27

As with many poems in the earlier editions ofLeaves of Grass, the poet as
self and soul soars above the world but only to look down into it, finding

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198 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

as he does this, the register of his own soul in a unlimited celebration

of the world, the earth and America. Each poem has a unique register
that addresses many varied phenomena and people intertwined. The
journey, however, is not a mere description as much as it is an open road
that Whitman's soul traverses to learn and be, the same road he tells his
readers they should follow as well. It is also worth noting, in the pas
sage quoted above, the idea that all is linked together. There is no part
left aside in Whitman's poems: observer, nature, observed. This is very
reminiscent of the Stoic idea that all humans are linked together with a
divine soul of which all humans are a part. This was surely Whitman's
intent with the reader as well. They may have objected to the poetic
form, but the thought remains that Whitman's poems are a therapeutic
agent that aim at the perfection of the self, the soul.
Pierre Hadot sees similar aspects of the care of the self in Henry David
Thoreau, certainly an early American philosopher and naturalist and one
of the first, if not the first, to present a radical environmentalism. Hadot
challenges the academic establishment of philosophy with the idea that
we may be professors of philosophy, but not philosophers.28 Thoreau, on
the other hand, is a philosopher insofar as he is as much guided by his
care of the self and ask?sis as he is by any formal naturalism. Hadot
likens in Thoreau a mixture of the Epicurean and Stoic. Thoreau's joy,
like Whitman's, is of the natural as an instructor of the soul in search
of answers; this is somewhat more Epicurean, per Hadot. And so,
[a]lso Stoic in Thoreau, are both his joyous acceptance, professed
throughout the pages of Waiden, of nature and the universe, in all
their aspects, whether they are graceful, terrifying, or hideous, and
the idea that each reality has its usefullness when one considers it
from (dans) the perspective of totality. . . .29

One could easily see in these ideas the linkage of Whitman and
Thoreau along with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Arnold Davidson writes as
much in the following:
When Cavell portrays Emersonian self-reliance as "the mode of the
self's Relation to itself" ... he is working toward a conceptualization
of ethics that shares with Foucault and Hadot the idea that what is
at issue is not only a code of good conduct, but also a way of being
that involves every aspect of one's soul.. . . [H]e is pursing the ancient
conception of the sage or daimon in us, that self-reliance both within
and beyond one's self.30

Foucault brings to all those involved in philosophy, literature, and

humanities a reinvigorated sense of the singular connection between
American thinkers and poets and an ancient set of disciplines that have
at their center a radical revisioning of the self.

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 AN AMERICAN FOUCAULT 199

3.2. Parrh?sia
The ask?sis is one among many self-disciplines that a mentor and master
may use to get the neophyte to recognize him- or herself with the aim of
controlling the self, not as a sort of internalized panopticon but rather
as way of opening up the soul to the world and the self. The beginner is
taught to emulate virtues that Benjamin Franklin also found important,
such as silence and the ability to listen. The goal of ask?sis, what Fou
cault later reluctantly calls ascetics,31 is to instill in the neophyte what
the master already has. The master has the ability to tell the truth: he/
she possesses parrh?sia.
Foucault in talking of the relation between the "auditor"?neophyte
here?and the master defines parrh?sia:
Parrh?sia (libertas, speaking freely), then, is this form that is essential
to the guide's speech.. . . [PJarrh?sia is free speech, released from the
rules, freed from rhetorical procedures, in that it must.. . adapt itself
to the auditor. But above all and fundamentally, on the side of the
person who utters it, it is speech that is equivalent to commitment,
to a bond, and which establishes a certain pact between the subject
of enunciation and the subject of conduct.32
And a little later,
I tell the truth, I tell you the truth. What authenticates the fact that
I tell you the truth is that as a subject of my conduct I really am, ab
solutely, integrally, and totally identical to the subject of enunciation
I am when I tell you what I tell you.33

There is no guile, there is no duplicity, there is no Socratic irony. The

speech the mentor gives, as would be said contemporaneously, is from
the heart without concealment. It is authentic speech. Its truth is not
based in what is said as much as how it is said and with what modality,
in this case a modality o? parrh?sia. A teacher may use several techniques
and exercises to bring the auditor along. But at the end, it is this kind
of speech that embodies a relationship that can now utter truth, free of
constraints, to the student.
This kind of speech is meant to convey to the "auditor" how to exercise
parrh?sia in him- or herself. As a way of explaining this idea as well as
providing an idea of its usefulness, one might see in these exercises an
approximation to the controversial existential theme of authenticity. In
existentialism, authenticity is where an individual is fully aware of his
or her being and accepts it as a matter of commitment and thus avoids,
in Jean-Paul Sartre's reading of the idea, bad faith.34 But existential
authenticity may fail because it itself appeals to kinds of knowledge
that are external to the individual who otherwise should instantiate

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200 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

authenticity. So, for example, Sartre's characterization of the gay man

in Being and Nothingness already relies on a negative assessment of
being gay.35 Foucault's treatment of parrh?sia, however, avoids this by
not assuming any absolute metaphysical or epistemological content that
regulates the discourse. Instead, parrh?sia becomes the possibility of the
self's recognizing authenticity in itself. The self, in fact, constructs its
own authenticity as it engages the world and self.

3.3. Ethics and the Care of the Self

With these basic notions of ask?sis in mind, we get a clearer focus on
one of the last interviews Foucault gave. This interview is "On the Ge
nealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress."36 Several of his
later lectures and articles could and should be elaborated in light of
The Hermeneutics of the Subject. But a set of themes on an ethics of the
self that are presented only schematically in this interview are of direct
concern here. There he lists four major aspects of an ethics coming from
what he calls his current interests in a genealogy: the ethical substance,
the mode of subjectivation, the mode of self-forming activity, and telos.
Without the extensive treatment of the care of the self and parrh?sia in
the College de France lectures, much of this remains something of an
open question. The Hermeneutics clarifies these four modes as exten
sions of how a person can go about constructing a genealogy from what
Foucault calls there "a historical ontology in relation to ethics through
which we constitute ourselves as moral agents."37
The ethical substance is what one needs to work over. Persons who
are learning to care for themselves must identify what it is that must
be concentrated on, including an ethics of sexuality. And it must be done
with utmost clarity, with parrh?sia. So, as with the informal example
provided earlier, a gay person must reflect on how his or her identity
will be fashioned. How will it take place in the world? What points of
resistance should it maintain against normative assertions of power/
knowledge? The idea is that this kind of question contains a kind of
resistance in a self-fashioning that takes as its starting point the in
dividual who has cultivated strengths like parrh?sia so that he/she is
not compelled to listen to the demands of an invisible collectivity like
Scientia Sexualis.
The next is what Foucault calls mode d'assujettissement,38 the
mode of subjectivation. One takes up how to act and be with what is
otherwise given to one as the way in which to be moral, as a "natural
law" or a "rational rule." The idea is that the self freely contests what
that will be. So, if it is the issue of how to become gay, then this is an
understanding of how power and its discourses ask certain questions

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 AN AMERICAN FOUCAULT 201

that have philosophical themes of commitment and expression that

may, for example, include kernels of Kantian obligations alongside
more utilitarian conventions. This mode looks at what provides certain
limits or available criteria from which to work. The point here is that
the individual goes about selecting how, what mode, one will pursue
the ethical substance. One cannot help but think here of a figure like
the gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk who, against any other
forces, put himself forward as a populist candidate. His mode of sub
jectivation demanded of him a duty that he saw clearly as the one he
must follow. But it is important to note that this aspect still remains
an open question insofar as genealogies do not provide which moral
and philosophical fulcrum to use. That is for the individual who has
parrh?sia to decide.
The third is the means to this way of changing oneself, what Foucault
calls the "self-forming activity [pratique de soi] or Vasceticism?as
ceticism in a very broad sense."39 In the Hermeneutics, Foucault calls
the activities of self-forming, askesis an ascetics. As above, he does so
reluctantly in the lectures but seems to have accepted it as a valid
term by the time of this interview. It is also worth noting here that
Foucault in this essay makes it clear that his intent is not to template
all ancient Greek and Roman notions onto the contemporary world.
Rather, he invites us in this later essay to learn from it instead, to take
up what he says and refashion it in a modern context. So, one might
say as a gay man that the modalities already taken up are part of
that application in that an individual who has or may still be seeking
parrh?sia?not with a foregone set of conclusions, but rather by being
able to tell the truth of oneself?may find the authenticity of oneself,
one's central tonality, as it were. This is where one is able to exceed
the boundaries of whatever school of ethics and "gay conduct" there
might be in the "discursive mix" of the day. That is, as Halperin says,
to become who one is not yet.
The goal of it all is what Foucault calls the telos. For him, as well as
the Hellenists, Plato and Aristotle, it is to have a beautiful life, a life
motivated by an aesthetics of existence. As Aristotle would say and Plato
would agree, the individual must have a certain state of mind to recognize
how to act virtuously, and that state of mind, in turn, is derived from
an inward balance of the soul with itself. This creates the conditions for
an aesthetics of existence. A gay man might aspire to become a teacher
in the higher academic "arts" while still keeping alive his love of other
things like music, poetry, painting, photography, etc. Another may want
to become an auto mechanic. The point is not that there is one type of
life that is right or wrong; rather, it is how the life is lived.

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202 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

4. An American Foucault
One cannot escape the idea that, in all this, there is the kernel of a highly
prized American ideal of the first order: in any occupation and way of life,
an American chooses his or her life freely and?just as important?he/
she will do it in a way that is honorable and honest, with something like
a care of the self that involves knowing the truth of oneself, parrh?sia.
There may be those who see in this an exclusively Puritan or Protestant
influence. But that is a mistake. Foucault through his studies reminds
us of its classical Greek and Hellenist roots.
And here immediately the founding fathers come to mind. Nearly
all of them, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin certainly, were
versed in the classics, including Socrates, Plato and the Stoics. Jeffer
son is not hard to place here as a revolutionary. But one could hardly
find someone who took radical transformation of the self as a series of
exercises as seriously as did Benjamin Franklin. Franklin might seem
to be an odd choice now that he has been canonized. But who can deny
the revolutionary impact this polymath had on American culture and
the whole idea of becoming American? His own transformation becomes
a portrait of someone who is not yet, that is, not British or exclusively
continental, but rather uniquely American. These sentiments and more
are found in The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.^
Franklin addresses his work to his illegitimate son. But it is not
an autobiography, a new word invented after Franklin had died. It is
really a memoir. As a memoir, it is similar to Augustine's or Rousseau's
Confessions .41 Franklin's work is an ethical tract devoted to telling his
son where he, the father, succeeded and where he did not. It is really a
memoir entirely devoted to how to become a free man and what lies in
store for someone who does. He admits, for example, that friendships
were often difficult for him; he was taken advantage of as a youth,
and yet, through it all, he managed to secure his own sense of a self
that was totally his own. He flees his abusive brother first for New
York and then ultimately Philadelphia, where he eventually becomes
a printer and then a man of great political influence, a life that leads
to the Declaration of Independence and his being our first ambassador
to France and the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. To say
that Franklin is a part of American as well as of French history is an
understatement.
The Autobiography breaks earlier in Franklin's life and is resumed
at Passy in France while he is ambassador in the 1780s. He undertakes
his narrative at the behest of Benjamin Vaughn who urges Franklin to
write about himself and his "art of virtue,"42 such that other Americans

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 AN AMERICAN FOUCAULT 203

can emulate his growth and changes, his transformation and the ethi
cal components of same. Franklin thus continues the memoir beginning
with an account of his attempt to become a better ethical person by the
use of a table of thirteen virtues that he exercises each day with the
use of an ivory tablet where he can monitor his own progress. He soon
becomes disillusioned with the demands of the project and quips that
"a speckled axe" is better rather than one turned to a brilliant shine by
the smith; perhaps a slightly flawed person?who knows his character,
nonetheless (parrh?sia)?is better than a perfect person.43
The table of virtues is not really of deep philosophical significance
perhaps, but some elements of it are distinctively in the tradition of a
care for the self. Franklin sets about to purify himself ethically. The
ethical principles are ones such as "moderation," "temperance," "silence"
(meaning listening, holding one's tongue), "sincerity," and "justice." Fou
cault's account of care of the self, o? parrh?sia, and of the four aspects of
a genealogy of ethics is reflected here. For example, the idea of "silence"
is reflective of what Foucault later in the Hermeneutics identifies as
one of the exercises an "auditor" must cultivate to develop a care of the
self and its culmination in parrh?sia.44 One may go further to say that
Franklin's entire memoir embodies the whole sense of Foucault's four
ethical aspects for a genealogy of the self, an ask?sis.
Many commentators see in Franklin's list of virtues a Puritan streak,
especially with virtues like "industry" and "humility." But one can also
arguably see a definitive influence with classical roots. Franklin, like
Jefferson and many others of the founding generation, including Abigail
Adams, was no stranger to classical thought. Moderation, temperance,
and humility are all virtues discussed within the context o? epimelia
heautou. Franklin was himself a student of care of the self without
being one in name, if one takes as evidence not only the list of virtues
but all the anecdotes, stories, and epiphanies that Franklin has as
part of a memoir that is supposed to have, like confessions before it,
an ethical impact.
What this amounts to is the idea that at the heart and soul of a pre
eminent American is a sense of continuation of the classical tradition
Foucault discusses. Franklin, like others discussed here, is willing to
embark on a voyage whose compass directs change and whose heading is
toward becoming an individual with sense of moral self-awareness. But
there is no specific heading. It is revolutionary in that the American it
addresses is not yet, but only becoming so. If Franklin were a liberal, he
would have been a loyalist. As it is, history beckons to us with a different
example, one more of a transformative American whom the Nietzschean
reading of Foucault would immediately recognize.

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204 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

Conclusion
One may get the impression that those who pursue an ethical and aes
thetic transformation of the self are intensely self-interested people, if
not selfish. This may send the wrong message. The example of Franklin,
however, reflects another side to the care of the self, especially among
the Stoics, that might otherwise be lost. Franklin, like the Stoics, was
a devoted person whose ethical substance included a telos that almost
always aimed at the social good. Even when Franklin was making
money through his franchising of printing presses and his own incessant
workaholic schedule, he was organizing street sweepings, employing
more efficient street lighting based on an English design, designing a
stove that he refused to patent because he wanted all to use it, continu
ing his scientific experiments, and pursuing his activities instrumental
in establishing a free press in America, the first public university, and
the model for the first public libraries. These are not the activities of
a selfish man anymore than are Thoreau's naturalist and poetic mus
ings, Whitman's poems, or Audre Lorde's writings to all the sisters and
brothers, gay, lesbian, and bisexual, waiting to be born into a new life
through a transformative ethics and aesthetics.
To conclude, these American individuals are strongly reflected in
what Foucault shows in his many later works and especially the The
Hermeneutics of the Subject. They illuminate the possibilities that these
ancient exercises have for a contemporary world. P^oucault's Americans
are radical, transformative, and revolutionary as they are individuals in
search of a new self that has ethical and aesthetic content. An American
Foucault is not just a Deweyian liberal. She or he is a person searching
for what is not yet, the direct embodiment of the American Dream.

San Jose State University

NOTES

1. Richard Rorty, "Moral Identity and Private Autonomy: The Case of Fou
cault," in Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 193.
2. On this, see Gilles Deleuze, "What is a dispositif?" in Michel Foucault:
Philosopher, trans. Timothy J. Armstrong (New York: Routledge, 1992), 159-68.
3. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans.
Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).

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 AN AMERICAN FOUCAULT 205

4. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans.

Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990).
5. See ibid., 95-96, for the idea of resistance and 157 for "bodies and
pleasures": "The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment
of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures."
6. David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 74-76.
7. Adopted here is the convention LGBT for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and
transgender individuals.
8. Audre Lorde, Zami, Sister Outsider, Undersong, Triangle Classics (New
York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1993). See especially, "The Master's Tools
Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," 110-13; and "The Uses of Anger:
Women Responding to Racism," 124-33.
9. The texts of these authors all appear in Classic American Autobiogra
phies, ed. and with an introduction by William L. Andrews (New York: New
American Library, 2003).
10. Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College
De France, 1981-1982, ?d. F. Gros, trans. Graham Durcheil (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005).
11. See especially Michel Foucault, "On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Over
view of Work in Progress," in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow,
trans. Robert Hurley and others, vol. 1, The Essential Works of Foucault
1954-1984 (New York: The New Press, 1997), 253-80.
12. Michel Foucault, "Technologies of the Self," in Ethics: Subjectivity and
Truth, 225.
13. See, for example, Epictetus, "The Handbook of Epictetus," in The Dis
courses, The Handbook, Fragments, ed. Christopher Gill, trans. Robin Hard
(Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1995), 287, epigram 1.
14. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 57
15. Ibid., 31-60.
16. Ibid., 14.
17. While Foucault says this, he also acknowledges the fact that there were
elements of Descartes' Meditations that were concerned with a Christianized
version of the care of the self. See Hermeneutics, 294.
18. Ibid., 319.
19. Pierre Hadot also discusses these spiritual exercises at length in two
texts: The Inner Citadel, trans, by Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1998), esp. chap. 3; and Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. and
with an introduction by Arnold. I. Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge:
Blackwell, 1995), chap. 3.

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206 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY
20. Ibid., 333: "... whereas it seems to me that Christian ascesis will have
a completely different function, which is, of course, self-renunciation."
21. Foucault recognizes something similar when he says directly after com
menting on Hegel's The Phenomenology of Mind,

The entire history of nineteenth-century philosophy can, I think, be thought

of as a kind of pressure to try to rethink the structures of spirituality within
a philosophy that, since Cartesianism, or at any rate since seventeenth
century philosophy, tried to get free from these self-same structures. Hence
the hostility, and what's more profound hostility, of all the "classical" type
of philosophers?all those who invoke the tradition of Descartes, Leibniz
etcetera?towards the philosophy of the nineteenth century that poses, at
least implicitly, the very old question of spirituality and which, without saying
so, rediscovers the care of the self. (Hermeneutics of the Subject, 28)

Foucault mentions others striving for something like a care of the self,
"Schelling, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, the Husserl of Krisis, and Heidegger as
well.. ." (ibid, 28).
22. Ibid., 279.
23. Ibid., 279.
24. Ibid., 279-80.
25. Ibid., 279.
26. Ibid., 280.
27. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York: Bantam Books, 1983),
109-10.
28. Pierre Hadot, "There Are Nowadays Professors of Philosophy, But Not
Philosophers," trans. Aaron Simmons and with Notes by Mason Marshall,
Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19, no. 3 (2005): 229-37.
29. Ibid., 232.
30. Arnold I. Davidson, "Ethics as Ascetics: Foucault, Ethics, and the His
tory of Ancient Thought," in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 2d ed., ed.
Gary Gutting (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 139.
31. Foucault, Hermeneutics, 416. He does not wish to call it that only be
cause of its negative connotations with the Christian absorption of the epimelia
heautou, and the ". . . attitude of renunciation."
32. Ibid., 406.
33. Ibid., 407.
34. See the classic of this idea by Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and
Human Emotions, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, The Wisdom Library (New York,
Philosophical Library, 1957).

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 AN AMERICAN FOUCAULT 207

35. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenologi

cal Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956),
63-65.
36. Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, 253-80.
37. Ibid., 262.
38. Ibid., 264.
39. Ibid., 265.
40. Classic American Autobiographies, 70-228.
41. See Classic American Autobiographies, 7-9. Andrews notes that the
whole idea of an autobiography was known neither to Rousseau nor Franklin
(let alone Augustine). The word itself was a coinage made in 1809, long after the
deaths of both. It was a put-together word from Greek meaning "self-life-writing."
The publishers were undoubtedly unaware of the practice of "self-writing" that
is a part of the exercises o? epimelia heautou. See Foucault, "Self Writing" in
Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, 207-22.
42. Autobiography, 135-41.
43. Ibid., 153.
44. Foucault, Hermeneutics, 341-43.

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