Power is not an object out there, but rather an ethically problematic presence where we are. Properly
assuming our roles requires us to confront it in others and ourselves.
What sort of ethics can Foucault recommend? Foucault’s conception of power derives from
modern naturalism, which rejects the ancient and medieval conceptions of nature derived from Aristotle.
Modern theories of nature repudiate teleology. Nature may behave lawfully, but it does not behave
purposefully. There may be purposes in nature, but nature has no purpose. Some modern theorists are deists
who assume that nature has a purpose extrinsic to it assigned by God. This conception of nature eliminates
“final causes” or intrinsic purposes from consideration, thus, rejecting the Aristotelian conception of nature.
Foucault works against a Nietzschean backdrop where God is an inessential hypothesis for understanding
nature. Consequently, teleology disappears altogether from the process of natural forces in his
understanding.
One can, of course, promote positive ethics using modern naturalism as a starting point, but
Foucault’s approach to power makes such ethics difficult. By practicing the hermeneutics of suspicion
inaugurated by Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, Foucault asks us to view all pretensions to harmony as masks
for domination.
20
Following Nietzsche, Foucault practices the most radical version of the hermeneutics of
suspicion. Unlike Marx and Freud, Foucault systematically develops the suspicion that there is no human
nature buried beneath our masks of power waiting to be liberated.
21
Power simply engenders a series of
identities that are inherently unstable. No sort of identity is privileged. Since power is productive of an
innumerable range of identities, no appeal to human nature as a standard for right order can succeed as
anything more than another mask for power. Furthermore, the ontological resistance that is inherent in
identity formation disallows appealing to desires or needs as a standard for “oneself” or for others.
Foucault’s radical anti-humanism also appears to rule out Kantian universal duties, since there are no stable
others to whom we might owe universally lawful actions.
Once Foucault jettisons nature and duty - - nodal points in western ethical thought -- what is left to
affirm? Foucault affirms a willingness to transform oneself to find more satisfying ways of living –
practicing technologies of the self, as he phrases it.
22
These have no clear political significance (at least for
politics in our second sense), since redoing ourselves is not necessarily doing public business. Foucault
provides tools for transgression that are more pertinent for citizenly politics, allowing us to escape
normalization. Transgression is a political tool. It is also a tool for resisting politics. We discuss it as a tool
for resistance below.
Arendtian Politics
Foucault’s claim that power is everywhere is a powerful claim. While using Foucault, we must
resist him. Not all forms of power are equally present in all situations; consequently, the claim that power is
everywhere requires qualification. Cooperative power is so far from being everywhere that Foucault gives
us reason to doubt that it exists at all. Affirming Arendtian politics requires relieving those doubts and
affirming unforced agreement (at least as a possibility to be strived for if not a reality to be achieved).
Furthermore, the power of being is, as Foucault demonstrates quite well, distributed unevenly. Some have
more power to persevere in their beings than others. Foucault also shows that many of our identities are
imposed by power beyond us and subject to instability and internal conflict. His demonstrations do not
relieve us of the task of finding, inventing and preserving the most satisfying identities our power of being
power are not only instrumentally good, but also intrinsically good. Nevertheless, thinking of power first as
an accusation has great ethical and pedagogical value.
20
Paul Ricoeur applied the phrase “hermeneutics of suspicion” to these seminal figures in modern thought.
See Conflict of Interpretations: Essays on Hermeneutics (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1974).
21
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: the Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage,
1970), 303-343. For a discussion of Foucault’s anti-humanism, see Soper, Humanism and Anti-Humanism.
22
Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton, eds., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with
Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).
Convention