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Foucault on Freedom and Capabilities

Saul Tobias Theory Culture Society 2005 22: 65 DOI: 10.1177/0263276405053721 The online version of this article can be found at: http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/22/4/65

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Foucault on Freedom and Capabilities

Saul Tobias

Humanity does not start out from freedom but from limitation . . . (Michel Foucault, Madness, the Absence of Work)

INCE THE appearance of Foucaults last published works and interviews in the 1980s, controversy has raged over the relation between Foucaults ethical writings and his earlier thought, and over how to situate these later writings in the context of contemporary political-theoretical debates. The new emphasis in these works on the self as opposed to the subject, alongside the afrmation of care of the self and self-creation, led to accusations that Foucaults nal thoughts on ethics were incompatible with social activism and political advocacy. Whereas his earlier work was widely viewed as endorsing the hopeless entanglement of political agency in a mesh of social constraints, Foucaults later description of ethics as aesthetics of existence prompted claims that he had now reduced political and moral concerns to matters of aesthetic taste (Hadot, 1992; Norris, 1992; Wolin, 1986). Such political indifference was perceived as a consequence of a political analysis that saw no room for agency within the nexus of institutional, disciplinary and discursive constraints, or provided no normative perspective from which to resist the status quo (e.g. Best and Kellner, 1991; Callinicos, 1989; Eagleton, 1990). Foucault tried to rebuff such accusations of political quietism on a number of occasions. Resisting the temptation of utopian politics and universal moral prescription did not imply, Foucault insisted, that one may as well leave people in the slums thinking that they can simply exercise their rights there (cited in Bennett, 1996: 660). Instead, Foucault argued, it is a matter of:

Theory, Culture & Society 2005 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 22(4): 6585 DOI: 10.1177/0263276405053721

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. . . showing how social mechanisms . . . have been able to work, how forms of repression and constraint have acted, and then starting from there . . . one [leaves] . . . to the people themselves, knowing all the above, the frontier possibility of self-determination. (1989: 452)

But what, exactly, is meant by this possibility of self-determination? And how, precisely, should one approach the relation between constraint and self-determination, beyond simply deprecating the former and celebrating the latter? In what follows, I suggest that a particular dimension of this question, namely, the basic conditions under which a project of selfdetermination can be attempted, is largely absent from the work of contemporary commentators on Foucaults political thought. This dimension becomes visible when one considers Foucaults idea of limit experience in relation to the capabilities approach advocated by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. When the problem of self-determination is considered in this light, a more complex picture of Foucaults approach to freedom emerges, with potentially interesting implications for the relevance of Foucaults thought to questions of social policy. Foucault as a Philosopher of Freedom Among the growing number of theorists who have recently attempted to characterize Foucault as making a positive contribution to political thought, the distinction between freedom and constraint has proved to be an important, but ultimately, I think, inadequate framework. Reacting to preceding negative and dystopian readings of Foucault the Foucault of the prison house of discourse approaches to Foucault that have emerged over the last 10 to 15 years emphasize, in one respect or another, Foucaults commitment to freedom as a political principle. Given the overwhelming forces of constraint that seemed arrayed against the subject and its freedom, the critical pendulum has now swung in favour of a chastened but hopeful assertion of personal agency. The novelty of this new approach lies in recognizing the imbrication of freedom and power, while distinguishing between situations in which this relation is conducive to resistance and those in which resistance is systematically blocked. For these thinkers, freedom is no longer conceived as the absence of constraint, but as the utilization of the power which circulates in all relations, not least repressive ones, and which is productive as much as it is constraining. Hence, the organizing framework for discussions of Foucaults political thought has shifted from the distinction between freedom and constraint, to the distinction between freedom-as-power and domination. In response to earlier critics such as Nancy Fraser and Charles Taylor, who held that the political efcacy of Foucaults thought was limited by the absence of a normative position concerning the legitimate and illegitimate deployment of power, the notion of freedom-as-power is held to constitute a quasi-normative principle underpinning Foucaults work that can orientate political action (see Fraser, 1995; Patton, 1995, 1998; Taylor, 1995).
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Tobias Foucault on Freedom and Capabilities 67

Wendy Brown, in her widely acclaimed account of the problems and possibilities of contemporary political activism, States of Injury, encapsulates this more recent approach to Foucault in her assertion that for Foucault, insofar as power always produces resistance, the disciplinary subject is perversely capable of resistance, and in practicing it, practices freedom. Discernible here is the basis for a curious optimism, even volunteerism in Foucault . . . (1995: 63). Browns position is echoed in the writings of a number of her contemporaries and is part of the concurrence of viewpoints concerning what freedom and its pursuit mean in Foucaults work. First, in contrast to a juridical conception, in which freedom is dened in terms of a legislated set of universal rights or entitlements, the notion of freedom advocated in Foucaults work is described as agent-centred, tending toward individualism more than collectivism, and embodied in the very acts of resistance or transgression carried out by subjugated subjects. For instance, James Bernauer and Michael Mahon write that Foucaults approach focuses upon the dimension of freedom distinctive of an individuals place or role in life (1994: 1534), while David Owen characterizes Foucaults politics as entailing, the activity of self-overcoming [that] is constituted through transgressing social practices (1994: 205). A second feature that supposedly distinguishes Foucaults approach to a politics of freedom from its traditional predecessors is its emphasis on critical analysis and vigilance. The interrogation of power cannot conclude with government, that is, with systems of law and legal or extra-legal forms of repression, but must extend to governmentality, meaning the modes of organizing knowledge and disciplining bodies that state apparatuses may co-opt and employ in the production of subjects. Given this more intricate account of power, Foucaults political philosophy is widely thought to begin with the assumption that a subtler grasp of the forms of social control that constrain and shape the subject empowers the subject to resist these constraints more effectively. In the conclusion to his book, Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom, Thomas L. Dumm emphasizes the importance of vigilance as a precondition for freedom when he writes that:
Foucault . . . taught us to be wary of the institutions through which we are governed. We must always beware of the possibilities that our own institutional arrangements will encourage the rise of new destructive forces inimical to the possibilities of our being free. (1996: 153; also see Smart, 1986)

For Paul Patton, this vigilance has wider implications for political activism, for it may assist existing movements for change by distinguishing between those elements of present social reality which remain necessary and therefore unchangeable from those which are open to change (1995: 357). Finally, the characterization of Foucaults politics in the terms suggested above has helped to simplify the question of the relation between Foucaults earlier and later thought. The emphasis on self-scrutiny that
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Foucault draws from the Stoic tradition and which is one of the key features of his ethical writings becomes part and parcel of the broader social analysis of conditions of domination, considered to be an important objective of Foucaults early work. Bernauer and Mahon make this connection when writing, in reference to Foucaults description of the care of the self, that Foucaults ethics is an invitation to a practice of liberty, to struggle and transgression and that only through such an [ethical] inquiry will the emancipatory resources of our specic historical situation be excavated (1994: 142). Patton describes the work of freedom in Foucault as a process of cultural self-creation, one which seeks to expand the space of possibilities for personal identity (1995: 358) and Dumm similarly refers to a conception of politics centred upon the ethical activity of self-fashioning: in seeking to make the world habitable, Foucault enunciates a new political theory of freedom, one that relocates freedom within the realm of politics and in so doing redenes politics as an activity of self-constitution (1996: 3). Through this emphasis on systemic analysis and self-creation, the later ethical writings are smoothly integrated into a picture of politics which privileges localized struggle through critical attention and ongoing resistance to the minutiae of domination over grand emancipatory projects that endorse totalizing visions of social transformation. While contemporary Foucault scholars differ in their specic treatments of these issues, wide agreement on the features that could be said to characterize Foucaults politics include a framing emphasis on the distinction between power and domination as the dening opposition of political life and as the normative basis for political action; an understanding of freedom as self-fashioning or self-determination through resistance and transgression; and a belief in the emancipatory potential of analytical critique and vigilance. William Connolly, whose political writings draw frequently on the work of Foucault, may serve as a nal example of an interpretation that shares in this general picture of Foucaults political thought. Connolly sums up Foucaults ethico-political sensibility as being dened by:
. . . genealogies that dissolve apparent necessities into contingent formations; cultivation of care for possibilities of life that challenge claims to an intrinsic moral order; democratic disturbances of sedimented identities that conceal violence in their terms of closure; practices that enable multifarious styles of life to co-exist on the same territory; and a plurality of political identications extending beyond the state to break up the monopolies of statecentred politics. (1993: 381)

Emphasized here are, first, the distinction between power and domination, conceived as the opposition between expressive and active selffashioning on the one hand, and the foreclosure of such contestation by the hegemony of fixed identities, codes and moralities on the other; genealogical inquiry and transgressive action as the mechanisms by which these
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Tobias Foucault on Freedom and Capabilities 69

identities and moralities may be subverted; and, finally, the pluralization of local projects of self-fashioning against the hegemony of the state. In other words, here as previously, the point of politics is held to be the maximization of freedom as self-definition, a freedom accomplished in and through the very act of personalized creative resistance to the forces of external constraint. In adopting a localized, exible and anti-teleological approach to the promotion of freedom as resistance, current applications of Foucaults thought diverge sharply from a liberal conception of freedom conceived as the universal application of a set of procedural limitations to the coercive power of the state. But contemporary accounts of Foucaults thought also diverge from socialist and social-democratic approaches in their typical silence concerning social policy and legislation. This reticence follows from a theoretical suspicion drawn from Foucaults work concerning the insidious power of the state in its deployment of pastoral power. While state institutions and policies should be engaged, negotiated and, where necessary, resisted or transgressed, there is little sense that a position on social policy can be extracted from Foucault without compromising the critical import of his thought. My assertion is that there is much in Foucault that complicates this current view regarding the political signicance of his work, and that the declaration of Foucault as a philosopher of freedom does not resolve all questions concerning the relation between Foucaults middle and later writings. The persistence of the freedom/constraint framework has led many political theorists into advocating a model of agent-centred selfdetermination limited only by the subjects own submission to or compliance with social or discursive forces. Against this limitation of the sphere of political thought and activity to an account of contesting forces (dened by freedom as the exercise of power on the one hand and domination on the other), the approach I adopt suggests that the promotion of personal freedom is circumscribed by a range of human functionings and needs that dene the parameters and conditions under which any practice of self-creation can take place. Foucaults own work, I will argue, evinces a recognition of these positive conditions of human ourishing, which are irreducible to the notion of agential resistance to constraint, and which are themselves unavoidable and arguably primary objects of political activity. The Capabilities Approach The capabilities approach, as it has come to be known in political theory and development studies, stems from a dissatisfaction with traditional utilitarianism and with the apparently irresolvable impasse between utilitarian and deontological approaches to political decision-making. Most extensively developed in the economic and political philosophy of Amartya Sen, and recombined with Aristotelian principles in the work of Martha Nussbaum to form a somewhat different account, the capabilities approach attempts to walk a line between welfarism and liberalism as the two major competing
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camps of modern political thought. Without sacricing the value of agential freedom, which is the principal commitment of liberalism, the capabilities approach nevertheless insists that the reication of agential freedom abstracts from the concrete context and conditions under which chosen ends can be effectively pursued. Any public policy that sees its task as the removal of external obstacles to the execution of choice without considering the capability of agents to actually pursue those choices is, for capabilities approach theorists, a cynical kind of politics. For all the heady exhilaration and vertiginous delights that agential freedom, as the selection and achievement of personal goals, seems to promise, human beings are not dened or fullled simply on the basis of some implacable will to freedom, but are physical and social creatures whose ambitions and aspirations, even of the humblest variety, require that certain minimal conditions obtain. Hence, the capabilities approach begins, in Nussbaums words, from the intuitive idea of a creature who is both capable and needy (1995: 75). By needy Nussbaum means that people are constitutively vulnerable to a range of conditions that would render them incapable of fullling the functions that are fundamental to the pursuit of any of the human goals that constitute a good life. As we have seen, while contemporary commentators on Foucault are quick to assert that human beings are capable that is, in the absence of domination, able to act on and resist the actions of others current interpretations of Foucault seem to have little use for the idea of a human being who is also needy. This vulnerability of human beings leads Nussbaum to assert the existence of a minimum threshold of capability. As human beings, she suggests:
. . . we do in fact have a broadly shared general consensus about the features whose absence means the end of a human form of life. We have in medicine and mythology alike an idea that some transitions or changes just are not compatible with the continued existence of that being as a member of the human kind. (1992: 215)

We will return to the idea of certain transitions or changes as being incompatible with human functioning and freedom, indeed with being human tout court, when we reconsider Foucaults understanding of the ethical and political subject. For Nussbaum, the features that constitute a human life must be determined on the basis of cross-cultural and historical discussion, rather than metaphysical assertion, and vary widely in terms of cultural expression, but a provisional list of such features would include: mortality; physical needs such as shelter and nutrition and the avoidance of pain; cognitive capacity and practical reason; afliation and community; and humour and recreation (1993: 2636, 1995: 7680). These basic functions allow the capabilities approach to propose a standard against which to assess the success and failures of political and social policy in the light of human functions and capabilities:
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Tobias Foucault on Freedom and Capabilities 71

The idea is that once we identify a group of especially important functions in human life, we are then in a position to ask what social and political institutions are doing about them. Are they giving people what they need in order to be capable of functioning in all these human ways? And are they doing this in a minimal way, or are they making it possible for citizens to function well? (Nussbaum, 1992: 214)

As David Crocker notes, the notion of capabilities in the work of Nussbaum and Sen implies slightly different things. Whereas for Nussbaum, the concept denotes more a persons valuable powers and faculties that can and should be realized in human activity, for Amartya Sen, capabilities imply real opportunities and actual freedoms to achieve desired ends (Crocker, 1992: 599). While Sen insists that Nussbaums attempt to catalogue the basic human functionings that hold universally across cultures represents a possible, but not necessary, position within a broader capabilities approach, he agrees that the determination of a set of minimal functions conducive to well-being provides a basis for public policy. The object of public action, Sen writes, can be seen to be the enhancement of the capability of people to undertake valuable and valued doings and beings (Sen and Drze, 1989: 12). The capabilities approach is no less freedom-centred than traditional liberal political conceptions. But it differs in its conception of freedom by emphasizing not only the right to do or be, but also the actual capability to do or be. In other words, the question is whether any given person is really able to pursue a chosen activity or life-path, even in the absence of external social or legal constraints. Sen helps to crystallize this distinction by distinguishing between two types of freedom, which he calls agent freedom and well-being freedom. Agent freedom is the conception of freedom familiar to the liberal tradition, that is, the right to choose for oneself, from the widest available set of actions without the determination or manipulation of ones choice by external forces. As a dening conception of freedom for politics, the notion of agent freedom has as its logical object the resistance to and removal of constraints to individual choice and action. The notion of wellbeing freedom, however, begins from a different political intuition, namely that while people have in common the desire to maximize their freedom of decision and action (a point with which many Foucault commentators, notably Paul Patton, concur), they also share the aspiration to live under conditions of at least functional economic, physiological and psychological well-being. Well-being freedom is dened as the capability to achieve this set of functions. There are two especially important differences between agency and well-being freedom as far as our further discussion of Foucault is concerned. The rst is that, while agency freedom has potentially limitless objects agency freedom is freedom to achieve whatever the person . . . decides he or she should achieve (Sen, 1985: 2034) well-being freedom, at least in Sens view, relates to a broad and changeable, but nonetheless
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limited set of objects, namely that set of functions understood to constitute well-being. The other important distinction between these two conceptions of freedom concerns the legitimization of social policy and state intervention. Well-being freedom can at least to some degree be pursued on ones behalf by others (and can hence form the basis of social policy), to the extent that others may have some knowledge of the capabilities that one requires in order to attain the set of functions that would constitute ones well-being. Agency freedom, on the other hand, is non-transferable. The idea of another assuming your freedom to pursue whatever aims you wish, on your behalf, is to make nonsense of the idea of agency freedom. The difference between these two senses of freedom is summarized by Sen as follows: In one perspective a person is seen as a doer and judge, whereas in the other, the same person is seen as a beneciary whose interests and advantages need to be considered (1985: 208). While the idea of delegating well-being freedom to others may raise the hackles of libertarian philosophers, it is in fact a common, and commonsensical, practice. Situations regularly arise in which it is not useful to talk of rational agency freedom, for example, in the case of a child. Here the responsible guardian does not assume the childs agency-freedom, deciding for the child what the child wants. Rather, agency freedom gives way to wellbeing freedom which is less dependent on individual subjective choices and desires, and which is more amenable to reasonable calculation by others. Sen explains in relation to such persons that, in the absence of the relevance of their agency aspect, it is their well-being aspect that uniquely commands attention (1985: 204). The notion of well-being freedom offers something of a bridge between liberalism and welfarism, for while agency freedom remains privileged in a political vision grounded in Sen and Nussbaums writings, the capabilities approach nonetheless insists that wide agreement can be reached on the set of functions that would constitute at least the basis of a persons well-being, and that the object of politics should include the enhancement of other persons capability to attain these functions. Limit Experience and Human Fragility The capabilities approach rejects an understanding of politics that begins and ends with agential freedom. It insists that such a conception of politics must be complemented by recognition of the person as subject to a particular set of needs that are prerequisites for human functioning and ourishing. Such requirements would at rst glance put Foucaults work squarely in the opposite camp, on the side of those for whom politics entail the anti-essentialist recognition and defence of the human capacity for innite self-redenition. But Foucaults work may be more compatible with the capabilities approach than previously recognized. One may rst observe that the genealogical approach adopted by Foucault does not bear out the assumption that his antiessentialism goes all the way down. Genealogy takes as its starting point not
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the social and historical construction of human characteristics and capacities, be these reason, sex or illness, but the social and historical variability of their articulation in discursive and institutional practices. The point is not to show that reason, sex or illness are peculiar to certain social and historical contexts only, but rather that these apparently trans-historical human concerns are given very specic historical and cultural forms. For instance, Foucault insists that the expression of sexual desire is inseparable from its imbrication with specic regimes of knowledge and power, and the codes and practices that dene our relation to our own sexuality. He does not suggest that sex, as such, is purely an effect of discourse or power. When Martha Nussbaum writes that while less urgent as a need than the needs for food, drink, and shelter . . . sexual need and desire are features of more or less every human life (1995: 77), Foucault would seem to concur. Both would insist, however, that sex does not naturally or essentially entail genitality, heterosexuality or monogamy, or that its problematization would take the same form across diverse cultural ethics or discursive regimes. One may conjecture that Foucaults interest in exposing the contingency of sexual practices in order to allow for newer and different forms of sexual expression derives from this recognition, however implicit, that sex has an importance that crosses cultures and epochs. Much the same can be said for Foucaults account of medical practice. That all illness can only be understood in relation to the epistemological and institutional frameworks that determine its meaning and treatment does not reduce illness to a product of those frameworks, or dissolve the historical fact of illness as an object of trans-historical and transcultural human concern. More than this shared interest in certain basic human concerns, however, the compatibility of Foucaults thought and the capabilities approach can be shown at a more theoretical level when one considers more closely the theme of limit experience in Foucaults work. In 1978, in the period between the publication of The History of Sexuality vol. 1 (1978 [1976]), the last of Foucaults genealogical studies, and the publication of The History of Sexuality vol. 2 (1985 [1984]), the rst of Foucaults booklength discussions of ethics as care of the self, Foucault gave an interview to the Italian journal Il Contributo (Foucault, 2000a; also see Gutting, 2002). Referring to Nietzsche, Blanchot and Bataille, Foucault returns in the interview to the idea of limit-experience, a concern of his earlier literary studies. In characterizing the inuence of Nietzsche and Bataille on his political development and that of his contemporaries, Foucault comments that:
. . . we wanted to be completely other in a completely different world. . . . The Nietzschean theme of discontinuity . . . the theme of an overman who would be completely different from man, and in Bataille, the theme of limit-experiences through which the subject escapes from itself, had an essential value for us. (2000a: 248)

In this statement, the notion of limit-experience designates a reexive and creative relation to the self that opens the possibility for a Foucauldian
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ethics, as well as designating the mechanism for this freedom to be actualized in the face of the subjects determination by discursive and institutional constraints. Another name that Foucault gives to this mechanism is desubjectivation:
For Nietzsche, Bataille and Blanchot . . . experience is trying to reach a certain point of life that is as close as possible to the unlivable, to that which cant be lived through. . . . In Nietzsche, Bataille and Blanchot, experience has the function of wrenching the subject from itself, of seeing to it that the subject is no longer itself, or that it is brought to its annihilation or its dissolution. This is a project of desubjectivation. (2000a: 241)

It is not difcult to see how such a notion of limit-experience as desubjectivation accords with the development of Foucaults later attitude to ethics. One of Foucaults biographers, James Miller, explicitly relates this conception of limit-experience to Foucaults ethic of self-creation and makes it the key to understanding both Foucaults life and work (Miller, 1993). But the identication of limit-experience solely with liberating selftranscendence overlooks the ambivalence inherent in the term, an ambivalence that points towards Nussbaum and Sens concern with both capability and fragility. While the extremely destructive aspects of limit-experience are only alluded to by Foucault in the 1978 interview, these are nevertheless suggested in his descriptions of the term, which carry associations of death, physical dismemberment and psychological disintegration. Such aspects are noted by Martin Jay, who characterizes Foucaults account of limit-experience as an experience that undermines the subject . . . because it transgresses the limits of coherent subjectivity as it functions in everyday life, indeed threatens the very possibility of life or rather the life of the individual itself (1995: 158). At this point we should recall Martha Nussbaums insistence that there are certain changes or transformations in a human life that are simply not compatible with the continuation of that life as human; that existence in the wake of such changes would, by general agreement, be characterized as non-human or sub-human at best. Though Nussbaum and Sen are more likely to use the terms human beings or persons than subjects, Foucaults notion of desubjectivation or limitexperience as a certain point of life that is as close as possible to the unlivable, to that which cant be lived through clearly resonates with their own concerns regarding a minimal level of human functioning below which a life is somehow less than human. Foucaults interest in limit-experience has implications for how we view the relation between his genealogical and ethical work. His writings in the 1960s and 1970s were concerned largely with clarifying the role of discourse and disciplinary practice in the process of subjectivation. However, the notion of desubjectivation or limit-experience suggests how fragile this constitution of subjectivity may be. Foucaults later ethics of self-creation, and its extension to a politics of freedom, must be read with
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an awareness of both subjectivation and desubjectivation kept firmly in mind. The relation between the former and latter work of Foucault can be further elucidated by considering how Foucaults analysis of desubjectivation raises the question of human functioning and capabilities in at least two important ways: concerning cognition and practical reason on the one hand, and action on the other. Foucault suggests in the 1978 interview that the notion of limit-experience undermines the idea of the subject by revealing its contingency and fragility. The effect of the thought of Nietzsche, Blanchot and Bataille, according to Foucault, is to provoke a transformation in ones relation to knowledge, and hence to oneself as a knowing subject:
What did they represent to me? First, an invitation to call into question the category of the subject, its supremacy, its foundational function. Second, the conviction that such an operation would be meaningless if it remained limited to speculation. Calling the subject into question meant that one would have to experience something leading to its actual destruction, its decomposition, its explosion, its conversion into something else. (2000a: 247)

In his earlier work Foucault had examined more closely this relation of co-constitution between the subject of experience and the subject of philosophical or scientic knowledge. In an essay written in commemoration of Bataille, the Preface to Transgression (1999), Foucault explores the increasing vulnerability of the philosophical subject as conceived and defended by philosophers from Descartes to Husserl as the metaphysical and practical ground of reason. Foucault argues that while the avant-garde literature of writers such as Bataille, by invoking an experience of the subjects nitude, was effective in exposing the limits of the philosophical subject, the question of these limits had already been posed by Kants critical philosophy, resulting in a breach that dialectics and the human sciences have been attempting to close ever since. It is to this fundamental challenge to the integrity of subjectivity that Foucault refers when he writes that:
. . . the breakdown of philosophical subjectivity and its dispersion in a language which dispossesses it while multiplying it within the spaces created by its absence is probably one of the fundamental structures of contemporary thought. (1999: 79)

The decline of this sovereign philosophical subject as the apodictic ground of knowledge partly accounts for the inauguration of the modern scientic disciplines and the human sciences, which attempted to reconstitute a stable conception of the subject. This, Foucault insists, was not merely an intellectual project, but a process in which the increase in practical and scientic knowledge was essential to peoples ability to dene and situate themselves in relation to a network of discursive practices. In the 1978 interview, Foucault provides examples of procedures whereby a functional
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sense of subjectivity is reconstituted on the basis of scientic knowledge. These include:

. . . knowing madness while constituting oneself as a rational subject; knowing illness while constituting oneself as a living subject; or the economy, while constituting oneself as a laboring subject; or as an individual knowing oneself in a certain relationship with the law. . . . So there is always this involvement of oneself within ones own savoir. (2000a: 257)

In each of these examples, the delineation and investigation of a eld of knowledge is part of a process by which we come to constitute ourselves as subjects not as apodictic transcendental subjects but rather as living, labouring, rational and political beings. The elds of psychology, medicine, economics and law, and the social practices and systems that they inaugurate, help construct the experience of the modern subject, dening her place in the fabric of social and political relations. But these social practices and bodies of knowledge are also premised on the recognition of the subjects nitude. For example, as far as practical reason is concerned, madness marks the limits of self-constitution as a rational subject. This designation of madness as an instance of desubjectivation is repeated throughout Foucaults work, as in this discussion of the literature of limit-experience in The Order of Things:
. . . it is inevitable that this new mode of being of literature should have been revealed in works like those of Artaud or Roussel and by men like them; in Artauds work, language, having been rejected as discourse and reapprehended in the plastic violence of the shock, is referred back to the cry, to the tortured body, to the materiality of thought, to the esh; in Roussels work, language . . . recounts interminably the repetition of death. (1971: 383)

Hence, in his earlier writings on madness, Foucault already evinces the recognition that in the absence of rational discourse, however this is to be understood, the active agency of the subject is reduced to a passivity most closely associated with torture, materiality and death. In fact, it is not merely literature but all language that is haunted by this threat of a descent into irrationality. Foucault hints at this threat in his inaugural address to the Collge de France, The Order of Discourse, where he suggests that:
. . . beneath this apparent veneration of discourse, under this apparent logophilia, a certain fear is hidden. It is just as if prohibitions, thresholds and limits have been set up in order to master, at least partly, the great proliferation of discourse in order to remove from its richness its most dangerous part. (1984b: 125)

The rational agency that works through language and is dependent on its rational containment and deployment glimpses its own fragility in the speech of the mad. While traditional moral philosophy has assumed the
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rationality of the subject as a basis for ethics, Foucaults work on madness and discourse points to the construction and hence deconstructibility of this rationality through forms of knowledge and institutional practice: Corresponding to the construction of madness as an object, there was that [construction] of a rational subject who was cognizant of madness and understood it (2000a: 254). Foucaults recognition of the co-constitution of knowledge and subjectivity, and the contingency of this process, has implications for an assessment of his notion of ethics as care of the self. We are constituted as knowing, active subjects in the world to the extent that we relate to, and participate in, the regimes of knowledge and praxis that orientate us as rational, sexual, cultural, biological and economic beings. Ethics, for Foucault, are in this sense parasitic on the existing arrangements of knowledge and power, for these are the webs of force and meaning in and through which the subject may relate to and reshape itself. Arnold Davidson, commenting on Foucaults later conception of ethics, emphasizes this point in stating that, ethics, or the selfs relation to itself, is therefore part of both the history of subjectivity and the history of governmentality (1994: 119). Because these discursive regimes are important aspects of the subjects ethical relation to itself, limit-experience becomes significant in delimiting the subjects capacity for such ethical ascesis. In an interview published under the title On the Genealogy of Ethics, Foucault describes four aspects of any relation to the self that must be considered constitutive of ethical practice: the ethical substance, the mode of subjection, self-forming activity and the telos of ethical activity (1984a: 3525). Of these, at least two the ethical substance and the ethical telos involve a relationship to the self reliant on the rational capacity of the subject. The subject must have an account of human nature and its ends in terms of which a rational articulation of the programme of ascesis may be carried out. This cognitive component of Foucaults account of ethics follows from his insistence that the domain of ethics can never be separated from the domains of power and knowledge. Yet in conceding the necessity of this rational or intellectual dimension of ethical subjectivity, we are also alerted to the limits that this imposes on the practice of self-determination. As a construction, the rational human subject can, so to speak, be deconstructed, that is, undergo a process of desubjectivation. And like all instances of limit-experience, madness highlights the ambivalent nature of this desubjectivation. On the one hand, the mad are sometimes celebrated as liberated and liberating the gure of Nietzsche that Foucault recalls in the interview with Trombadori (Foucault, 2000a) but there is also, as Foucaults work on madness implies, the risk that madness poses as a mechanism of complete desubjectivation: the decline of Nietzsche into dementia and helplessness, Raymond Roussels death by suicide. Without prescribing the form that practical reason should take, Martha Nussbaum suggests that:
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. . . all human beings, whatever their culture, participate (or try to) in the planning and managing of their lives, asking questions about how one should live and act. This capability expresses itself differently in different societies, but a being who altogether lacked it would not be likely to be acknowledged as a human being, in any culture. (1993: 264)

Foucault, perhaps more than Nussbaum, is sensitive to the degree to which the denition of these functions is discursively and institutionally determined, yet there remains in Foucaults work a clear sense that, however dened, the incapacity to participate in reasonable discourse undermines the ability of the subject to engage in the kind of critical interrogation of power and productive self-creation that Foucault upholds as the model of active ethical and political practice. In this sense, the aforementioned importance of vigilance and critical analysis for an ethics of self-determination is dependent on the capacity to engage in such reection. Foucaults own efforts for psychiatric reform, which he insisted should not be construed as a celebration of madness, attest to this recognition that, for the insane, the assuming of active agency depends on the reinsertion of the mentally ill into the circuits of communication. Irrationality may signify a transgressive and experimental relation to the self, but if such desubjectivation is not followed by the reinstatement of subjectivity in a coherent form, then ethical practice, as a rational relation to oneself and ones ends, is not possible. As praxis, ethics also necessarily implies the capacity for action on the self self-forming activity being one of the four components of Foucaults conception of ethics (1984a: 355). Whereas madness exemplies a mode of desubjectivation that undermines the subject as a knowing subject, capable of functioning in and through the network of discourses that constitute social life, powerlessness does the same to the subject as an acting subject. It is in fact Foucaults insistence on the contingency of subjectivity as opposed to its apodictic or natural unassailability that makes powerlessness such a real possibility. In his treatise on the emergence of the human sciences, The Order of Things, Foucault acknowledges this contingency of the human subject in his concluding discussion concerning the death of Man, that is, the demise of the human subject as constituted through modern forms of scientic and institutional practice. This demise is conceived in relation to the destabilizing possibilities of limit-experience as the experience of death . . . of unthinkable thought . . . as the experience of nitude and as such, portends a fate that is as threatening as it is potentially liberating (1971: 3834). The contingency of powerknowledge and their attendant forms of institutional practice were also the focus of Foucaults earlier archaeological and genealogical work. In texts such as The Birth of the Clinic, Madness and Civilization and Discipline and Punish, Foucault explored exactly how the possibility of agency depended on the coordinated construction of subjectivity in relation to existing regimes and networks of power and knowledge. Because subjects cannot be thought of as voluntarist egos beneath their social and institutional activity, the
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inability to operate within these networks contributes to a fundamental undoing of the subject itself. The disciplining practices of schools and other social institutions exert power over us but also enable us to function within society as actors skilled in the forms and practices of social interaction. Hence, the existence of these networks of power and discipline represents not only a starting point but also a quasi-normative requirement of Foucaults political theory, if an ethics of care of the self is to be pursued. While the capacity for action is emphasized by contemporary Foucault commentators, their tendency to view this capacity, inhibited only by the mechanisms of domination, as sufciently denitive of a Foucauldian notion of the subject leaves little place for a fuller view that holds powerlessness (in Nussbaums terms, fragility or neediness) to be an important aspect of the human. When the human subject is dened purely on the basis of its capacity to act on self and others, powerlessness is either ruled out of the political equation, because the denition of repression itself implies the possibility of countervailing resistance or, as more fully elaborated by Paul Patton, this sense of powerlessness is conceived as the provisional effect of domination, as a second order reection by subjects on their situation, and not as an antecedent limit to activity as such (Patton, 1998: 65). Yet, as we have seen, Foucaults conception of the subject evinces some recognition of powerlessness as a limit to the self-forming activity that he posits as the aim of political action. Insofar as human beings we, as living, speaking, working beings (Foucault, 2000b: 417) perform our subjectivity in relation to the institutions and discourses that give this subjectivity form and substance, the destruction of that subjectivity, or its failure to be constituted fully and effectively, undermines our agency in ways that cannot be understood purely as a result of domination. Pain, illness and extreme economic and social deprivation can all erode the capacity of the subject to function as an active agent within the networks of power. For instance, Elaine Scarrys discussion of torture in The Body in Pain forcefully depicts the intimate relation between subjective agency and the depersonalizing power of physical pain, a process she describes as the unmaking of the victims sense of world and self, the reduction of the victim to a state of experienced powerlessness and passivity (1985: 35). The distinguishing features of torture indeterminable duration, lack of control, senselessness point to its difference as a mode of limit-experience from ritual or purposeful pain. This is not the kind of desubjectivation that opens new possibilities of self-constitution to the experiencer, but the loss of a sense of self, of world and of agency. For what is encountered here is precisely the inability of the subject to act upon itself, to open a eld of understanding and action whereby a meaningful relation to self can be conceived and enacted. While torture is clearly an instance of what Foucault would call domination, protracted, debilitating illness and physical and material deprivation can contribute to a condition of desubjectivation not unlike that of torture, in which the agential freedom of the subject becomes severely compromised. The limits of agency freedom and
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of self-forming activity are evident in the cases of terminally ill and often severely incapacitated patients whose nal expression of agency may consist in the desire to end their own life, a desire usually phrased in terms of wellbeing and what constitutes a human life or a life worth living. The fact that the fullment of this wish usually requires the assistance of others is a further indication of the severe limitations on agency freedom in such cases. The desubjectifying effects of physical and material deprivation become even more apparent as one moves beyond the relative comforts of the so-called developed world. The anthropologist Nancy ScheperHughes, in her study of the squatter populations of the Alto-Cruzeiro shantytowns in northeast Brazil, examines the ways in which the physical violence of the state as external force or constraint constitutes only one element in the marginalization of vulnerable populations. Material deprivation (more than half of all deaths in the municipality are of children under the age of ve), the inadequacy of religious discourse, including liberation theology, legal disenfranchisement and, indeed, demographic invisibility (these populations do not appear in the census, nor are their homes marked on maps) have produced a situation in which locals refer to themselves as the anonymous, the nobodies (1992: 231). This sense of desubjectivation, of the sustained inability to bring about real change in ones own life situation, illustrates the limits of conceptualizing desubjectivation as a positive transgressive act. As Scheper-Hughes remarks at the end of the book, the goal of the moradores [residents] of the Alto-Cruzeiro is not resistance but simply existence (1992: 533). Here undoubtedly is an instance of the abhorrence of what Foucault described as thinking one may as well leave people in the slums thinking that they can simply exercise their rights there. What studies such as that by Scheper-Hughes make clear is that, in the absence of the physical, economic and social well-being as a basis for effecting real change in ones circumstances, the removal of external repression or constraint to free activity may amount to no more than a gesture of goodwill. As a nal example of the dehumanizing or desubjectivizing potential of powerlessness one may consider the situation of many of the worlds more than 20 million refugees. It is undoubtedly true that many refugees have found creative and effective ways to resist the appalling constraints of their situation but, in many cases, this depends on some access to political and media networks that are unavailable to most. Because the meaningful application and enforcement of political and social rights, so central to the constitution of subjectivity in modernity, remain largely tied to nation-states, refugees who nd themselves outside of the protection of the nation-state are often also excluded from the channels of action open to national citizens. Despite the work of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees and a host of international treaties, the impotence of international bodies in the face of nation-state recalcitrance or arbitrariness has not changed fundamentally since Hannah Arendt characterized the situation of refugees 50 years ago:
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Neither physical safety being fed by some state or welfare agency nor freedom of opinion changes in the least their fundamental situation of rightlessness. The prolongation of their lives is due to charity and not to right, for no law exists that could force the nations to feed them; their freedom of movement, if they have any at all, gives them no right to residence which even the jailed criminal enjoys as a matter of course; their freedom of opinion is a fools freedom, for nothing they say matters anyhow. . . . The fundamental deprivation of human rights is manifested rst and above all in the deprivation of a place in the world which makes opinions signicant and actions effective. (1958: 296)

Foucaults own political interventions in debates about asylum indicate a sense on his part that powerlessness may require the intervention of others with the objective of changing state policy. In an open letter to leaders of the French left, Foucault castigates politicians for not defending two women charged with giving asylum to a German lawyer accused of abetting a terrorist organization. What is striking about the letter is, rst, Foucaults appeal to a sense of moral obligation on the part of the political leadership and, second, the characterization of the obligation in terms of an age-old responsibility to give comfort to those in need: Because they allegedly harboured the legal defender of terrorists, the state is prosecuting two women who did nothing else . . . but one of the oldest acts of comfort that time has bequeathed to us (2000c: 428). Foucaults appeal to the principle of asylum as that generosity which goes back to a time beyond memory (2000c: 427) suggests his recognition of a basic human obligation to support those in need and, what is more, his willingness to justify this obligation on the basis of its long historical, even pre-historical, provenance. The themes of psychological and physical incapacity, and economic and political powerlessness each indicate a possible way in which the human capabilities of thought and action necessary for the pursuit and attainment of basic well-being, and hence for the project of agential selfdetermination, may be compromised or undone. These themes and their signicance can be usefully understood in terms of capabilities and wellbeing freedom: the capabilities of practical reason, of basic levels of health and physical well-being, of belonging to a community that affords powers of expression and action. Foucault touches on all these themes at points in his work, and in the concepts of limit-experience and desubjectivation emphasized in the transitional period between the earlier and later works, they are given theoretical form. In pointing to the ways in which the constitution of the subject can be inhibited or undone, Foucaults account of desubjectivation signals the limits of the notion of power-as-freedom and indicates that a politics of freedom can apply only to a subject sufciently integrated into existing circuits of knowledge and power so as to be not only constrained by these circuits but empowered by them. It is only in the midst of such a network of relations that Wendy Browns claim that insofar as power always produces resistance, the disciplinary subject is perversely capable of resistance holds true. Similarly, in contrast to the viewpoint of
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Bernauer and Mahon, who maintain that, for Foucault, a recognition of the limit . . . need not entail the abandonment of ethics [for] the encounter with the limit creates the opportunity for its transgression (1994: 143), we now see how some boundaries are beyond the possibility of transgression, for they mark the very limit of effective human action. Conclusions and Implications In light of the notion of desubjectivation, the problem of the normative basis of political action in Foucaults work can be relocated from the power/domination distinction, which still leaves unresolved the question as to why and which forms of domination ought to be resisted, to the normative highlighting of the conditions of possibility of action as such. Wendy Brown, for example, suggests that one of the dening features of Foucaults genealogical politics as an approach to political engagement is its displacement of policy advocacy centred on the state (Brown, 1998: 34). While it would be wrong to insist that Foucaults work, on the contrary, be read as advocating a particular public policy regarding the aims of human life and action, the logic of his own analysis makes the provision of the conditions for wellbeing freedom, as the enabling framework for resistance and self-forming activity, at least compatible with his more explicit pronouncements on the practice of freedom. While certain critics might nd this inimical to the spirit of Foucauldian analysis, a reluctance to endorse even a minimum threshold of public provision risks, as Foucault puts it, leaving people in the slums thinking they can exercise their rights there. Of course, it is precisely in gauging the point at which our deference to human agency must be tempered by our concern for human well-being that debates over the nature and extent of public policy arise. In his always carefully considered decisions to intervene in the practical political issues of his day, whether these concerned mental illness, the status of refugees or national health policy, Foucault exhibited a keen recognition of precisely this fraught but inescapable dimension of politics. But what becomes evident in pointing to the relation between Foucaults earlier accounts of subject constitution and his later ethical writings is a variable but nonetheless real dissymmetry between agents and patients of ethical praxis, demanding a sober if illiberal recognition that our obligation to certain people may at times consist in working for their psychological, material or physical rehabilitation as a condition for the exercise of their freedom rather than in the well-meaning but in certain cases ineffective insistence on their autonomy and capacity for resistance. For those detached from the circuits of effective social interaction by virtue of their economic or physical condition, and for those free of subjection to the dictates of rational discourse, the capacity to creatively reshape ones life may be diminished to the point of inconsequence. It is this reality which is insisted upon in the capabilities approach of Sen and Nussbaum, and which constitutes that part of their programme critical of liberalism. Taking Foucaults account of ethical practice seriously means
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recognizing the limits that are built into its very description. It entails recognizing that dimension, however prudent, of altruistic concern for the other that is implied by Foucaults analysis of the contingency and fragility of the human subject, and of the various conditions under which the constitution of the rationally, economically and socially capable subject can go awry. The advantage of such an account is that it provides at least a theoretical marker of the division between an ethics of concern for what Sen has described as the well-being freedom of the other and an ethics of autonomy and selfcreation. It suggests that persons capable of forging their own ethicalpolitical project should be left to do so, but it recognizes that not all persons, at all points in their life, may be so capable.
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Foucault and his Interlocuters. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. (1999) A Preface to Transgression, in J. Faubion (ed.) Essential Works of Foucault, vol. 2. New York: The New Press. Foucault, M. (2000a) Interview with Michel Foucault, in J. Faubion (ed.) Essential Works of Foucault, vol. 3. New York: The New Press. Foucault, M. (2000b) The Political Technology of Individuals, in J. Faubion (ed.) Essential Works of Foucault, vol. 3. New York: The New Press. Foucault, M. (2000c) Letter to Certain Leaders of the Left, in J. Faubion (ed.) Essential Works of Foucault, vol. 3. New York: The New Press. Fraser, N. (1995) Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions, in B. Smart (ed.) Michel Foucault: Critical Assessments, vol. 5. London and New York: Routledge. Gutting, G. (2002) Foucaults Philosophy of Experience, boundary 2 29(2): 6985. Hadot, P. (1992) Reections on the Notion of the Cultivation of the Self, in T. Armstrong (ed.) Michel Foucault: Philosopher. New York: Routledge. Jay, M. (1995) The Limits of Limit Experience, in Constellations 2(2): 15574. Miller, J. (1993) The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Anchor. Norris, C. (1992) Uncritical Theory. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Nussbaum, M. (1992) Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism, Political Theory 20(2): 20246. Nussbaum, M. (1993) Non-relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach, in M. Nussbaum and A. Sen (eds) The Quality of Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Nussbaum, M. (1995) Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings, in M. Nussbaum and J. Glover (eds) Women, Culture and Development. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Owen, D. (1994) Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason. London: Routledge. Patton, P. (1995) Taylor and Foucault on Power and Freedom, in B. Smart (ed.) Michel Foucault Critical Assessments (2), vol. 5. London and New York: Routledge. Patton, P. (1998) Foucaults Subject of Power, in J. Moss (ed.) The Later Foucault. London: Sage. Scarry, E. (1985) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press. Scheper-Hughes, N. (1992) Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sen, A. (1985) Well-being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984, Journal of Philosophy 82(4): 169221. Sen, A. (1993) Capability and Well-being, in M. Nussbaum and A. Sen (eds) The Quality of Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sen, A. and J. Drze (1989) Hunger and Public Action. Oxford: Clarendon. Smart, B. (1986) The Politics of Truth and the Problem of Hegemony, in D.H. Hoy (ed.) Foucault: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Taylor, C. (1995) Foucault on Freedom and Truth, pp. 32651 in B. Smart (ed.) Michel Foucault Critical Assessments (2), vol. 5. London and New York: Routledge. Wolin, R. (1986) Foucaults Aesthetic Decisionism, Telos 67: 7186.
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Saul Tobias is Visting Assistant Professor in the Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University. His publications have appeared in the Oxford Literary Review, Philosophical Writings and Arcadia, and in the edited volume, Cultural History after Foucault (ed. J. Neubauer, New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1999).

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