Care for Thyself? An Hegelian Critique of the Foucauldian Subject
Keywords:
ontology, subjectivity, Hegel, Foucault, self-care, relationalityAbstract
In the wake of Foucault’s reproach of all political projects “global and radical”, Foucault resuscitates the Stoic concept of epimeleia heautou (care of the self), suggesting self-transformation—"making one’s life a work of art”—to be a potent antidote to domination. By making one’s life a work of art, which entails disengagement from all things that turn one away from oneself, one can circumvent domination, as well as reduce one’s own inclinations to dominate others. Foucault justifies this by claiming that self-relation is ontologically prior to other-relatedness and thus, ethically prior; however, he neglects to delineate how he derives this assumption, making it little more than an arbitrarily posited axiom. I argue that it is upon this assumption that the legitimacy of Foucault’s final era hinges, and hence its tenability warrants investigation. In this paper, I use Hegel’s immanent ontology systematized in the Science of Logic. I dispute Foucault’s claim regarding self-relation’s primacy by demonstrating how self-relation immanently emerges in the passage through an other and I outline the ramifications of holding fast to an unsustainable categorical assumption.
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