3 - Foucault's genealogy and the undefined work of freedom

Summary

It is a central claim of this book that one of the most important challenges for an anthropology of ethics is to develop the conceptual resources to enable us to think both about and with freedom; to make freedom both object and instrument of anthropological thought. This chapter begins by seeking to explain and develop the resources for doing this that we find in the later writings of Michel Foucault. This work will continue in Chapter 4. But Foucault also provides a starting point for thinking about some other general questions about the ethical dimension of human conduct, such as, ‘What constitutes an ethical subject?’, ‘Through what kind of social relations might a free subject be formed?’, ‘Can we usefully distinguish different aspects of moral life?’, ‘What place has reflective thinking in ethical life?’, and ‘What are the limits of the ethical?’.

The Foucault whose thought will be introduced in this chapter differs markedly from the figure still cited regularly under that name, in anthropology and in the other human and social sciences. The latter figure is routinely credited both by admirers and detractors with a set of views almost all of which Foucault himself explicitly repudiated. (MacIntyre's portrayal of Foucault, mentioned in Chapter 2, falls into this large category.) It must be that this much-cited ‘Foucault’, for whom power is ‘a system of domination that controls everything and leaves no room for freedom’ (1997: 293), and who subscribed to a neo-Marxist sociology and a neo-Freudian psychology, is somehow necessary to maintain certain ingrained habits of thought in the human sciences, or he would not have been so vividly imagined or profusely influential. But whatever those needs might be – we shall not be concerned here further with their diagnosis – they are not those of an anthropology of ethics. What Foucault does provide is a rethinking of the concepts of power and freedom, such that they are not each defined negatively as what the other excludes, and such that freedom emerges as a central term in the analysis of how subjects are constituted. So, far from it being the case, as Charles Taylor (1984) influentially decreed, that Foucault's thought ‘leaves no place for freedom or truth’, he in fact gives us what we might call an ethnographically usable understanding of freedom and its place in ethical life.