3
And for a theory of politics that is intended to inform liberation and freedom, a subject capable of
conscious reflection is a necessity. Many political theorists and philosophers have analyzed
Foucault’s work in an effort to understand the extent to which the individual subject is free or has
agency. By focusing on individual agency and self-reflection, however, these studies have failed
to point out Foucault’s unsatisfactory account of an important component of subjectivity: the
inter-subjective relations of individuals. This aporia is particularly significant because of the
contextually embedded subject posed by Foucault. In Foucault’s work inter-subjectivity matters
because it is the source of unconscious effects on the individual, and therefore, the domain of
power and conformity. But for politics of liberation and practices of freedom in mass society the
inter-subjective must be a site of conscious reflection too. But what is free inter-subjectivity? Is
it possible to think of “the masses” as people capable of being conscious and self-reflective even
as they engage with each other? Despite Foucault’s personal political engagements with various
communities of people, in much of his writing the effort to find critical positions against
discourses of power seems to be a solitary project.
The control and construction of the individual self through self-consciousness and unique
individual imperatives, opposed to dominant discourses, has been a common philosophical goal
since Nietzsche. Foucault’s genealogies of madness, sexuality, and discipline contribute to the
image of inter-subjectivity as the site of conformity. And so we have a political philosophy of
self-overcoming in the face of disciplined and unconscious masses. When Foucault did speak of
mass action, his ideas reflect a structuralist perspective that ignores the idea of individual
conscious reflection, but instead reifies the idea of mass behavior. And from the
phenomenological perspective, Foucault glorifies the mad literary figure as having direct access
to being and existence. The disparate philosophies of phenomenology and structuralism (both of
Convention