Constructing Foucault's Ethics: A Poststructuralist Moral Theory for the Twenty-first Century

361 Pages·2021·2.082 MB·English

by  Mark Olssen

Constructing Foucault’s ethics

Constructing
Foucault’s ethics
A poststructuralist moral theory
for the twenty-first century
Mark Olssen

Manchester University Press
Copyright © Mark Olssen 2021
The right of Mark Olssen to be identified as the
author of this work has been asserted by him in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
Published by Manchester University Press
Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 5660 0 hardback
First published 2021
The publisher has no responsibility for the
persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or
third-party internet websites referred to in this book,
and does not guarantee that any content on such
websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Cover credit: Michel Foucault at home in Paris,
April 1984. Roger-Viollet / TopFoto.
Cover design: Abbey Akanbi, Manchester
University Press
Typeset by
Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire
This book is dedicated to the memory of
David McKenzie
Barbara Calvert
John Codd
James D. Marshall
Peter Jarvis
and
Judith McFarlane
When today we see the meaning, or rather the almost total absence
of meaning, given to some nonetheless very familiar expressions
which continue to permeate our discourse – like getting back to
oneself, freeing oneself, being oneself, being authentic, etcetera …
I think we may have to suspect that we find it impossible today to
constitute an ethic of the self, even though it may be an urgent, fun-
damental, and politically indispensable task, if it is true after all that
there is no first or final point of resistance to political power other
than the relationship one has to oneself.
Michel Foucault
Foucault allies himself with the critical tradition, but will anyone
extend him a welcoming hand?
Judith Butler
Success is not final, failure is not fatal, it is the courage to continue
that counts.
Winston Churchill
Contents
Preface viii
Introduction 1
1 Foucault and normativity 31
2 Life and error: Foucault, Canguilhem, Jacob 56
3 Nietzsche’s life philosophy: naturalism, will to power,
normativity 85
4 Continuance ethics, objectivity, Kant 116
5 Foucault, Hegel, Marx 157
6 Hobbes, God, and modern social contract theory 187
7 A politics of pluralism 220
8 Democracy, education, global ethics 243
9 Ethical comportment 262
Appendix 1: A reading list for Foucault’s ethics 292
Appendix 2: The Anglo-American and Continental
traditions on Nietzsche scholarship, a note 295
References 298
Index 329
Preface
Writing this book has been somewhat experimental, an approach
I justify with reference to Foucault and Nietzsche, who saw
experimentalism as methodologically central to ethics in a world
as uncertain as the one we live in. Although I have read Foucault
for some thirty years and have already published two books where
his name warrants a place in the title (Olssen, 1999; 2006; 2009),
I had become increasingly dissatisfied at the lack of an explicit nor-
mative perspective on his work. This book is my attempt to correct
that lacuna. Although it doesn’t pretend to be a work in advanc-
ing Foucault scholarship, and in this sense does not claim to be an
exegesis of his oeuvre or any of his central concepts, it does seek
to construct a normative theory, complete with a perspective on
ethics and morality, that is consistent with the core principles that
have guided Foucault’s approach. It therefore seeks to elaborate
an ethics that is not explicitly stated, or even implicitly embodied,
in Foucault’s work, but is consistent with his approach overall. It
starts from the acknowledgement that Foucault didn’t develop an
ethics, and hence this book is my attempt to construct one for him.
This is my effort to render Foucault as normative.
It is experimental in another sense; in the sense that it has
meaning for me, and assists in helping me to resolve some of the
‘nagging doubts’ that I have had in adhering to Foucault’s approach
over thirty odd years. This, however, can also be justified with
reference to Foucault: As he says:
[I]t would probably not be worth the trouble of making books if
they failed to teach the author something he hadn’t known before, if
Preface ix
they didn’t lead to unforeseen places, and if they didn’t dispense one
toward a strange new relation with himself. This pain and pleasure of
the book is to be an experience. (1984a: 339)
These ‘nagging doubts’ led me to formulate a basis for making
normative sense that, even before I attempted to think the issues
through in any coherent way, was of assistance in justifying the
types of normative claims that one unwittingly makes. The types of
formulas and answers I adopted developed quite independently of
writers such as Badiou, who was also influenced by Foucault and
who has also written on ethics. I have read Badiou only recently,
and his insights and views have subsequently provided a rich source
of inspiration and encouragement. In my own views, I have tried
to utilize Foucault’s approach as a dispositif in a way that links
him with Nietzsche and Heidegger to provide an approach to
ethics that is novel and quite different to existing models on offer
in the Anglophone world – Kantianism, Hegel or Marx, Bentham,
Aristotle, alterity, multiculturalism/difference, or identity. I try as
best I can to relate these ideas to my own in order to show how they
can work to arbitrate ethical dilemmas.
This book is also an extension of my previous one, Toward a
Global Thin Community (2009), in that it constitutes part of a
series rather than standing alone. In that book I first introduced the
concept of life continuance to express a normative orientation to
the future in terms of the quest for survival and well-being, giving
rise to irreducible normative values as part of the discursive order
of events (Olssen, 2009: esp. ch. 6). This book seeks to develop
that conception further and, in this sense, it is a continuation of
my writing. Given that, as stated, I am not primarily concerned to
advance a faithful summary or compendium of Foucault scholar-
ship, I have decided not to reference citations in both English and
French, in the way that some authors have done in recent years (see
O’Leary, 2002; Eldon, 2016). In this book, I will reference using
the English translations, or English originals where the text was first
published in English.
The section of the introduction on complexity builds on analy-
ses in my essays ‘Foucault as Complexity Theorist: Overcoming
the Problems of Classical Philosophical Analysis’, in Mark