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Madness and Political Philosophy: Beiner on Foucault

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 April 2016

Emma Planinc*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto

Extract

Beiner's discussion of Foucault is grounded in the effort to “deconstruct” Foucault's mask “as a mere historian” (152). Beiner unpacks Foucault's Panopticon of post-Enlightenment society which, in a dynamic of power/knowledge, crafts the soul in a “regime of surveillance and discipline” that “maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection” (155, 158). Beiner forcefully contends that behind Foucault's language in Discipline and Punish there must be some account of the human being that would prefer to be outside of this seemingly dystopic society—one that is entitled “not to be subject to such a regime of normalization and control” (153). There is something disingenuous, Beiner claims, about Foucault's fidelity to the idea that “his intellectual enterprise [as a historian] requires him to disavow the normative power of his own theorizing” (164). I propose an interpretation that will perhaps rescue Foucault from Beiner's accusation of disingenuousness, and simultaneously establish a kinship between Beiner's lament for political philosophy and Foucault's own. The proposal is that Foucault is a madman.

Type
Symposium on Ronald Beiner, Political Philosophy: What It Is and Why It Matters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. lv, 304.)
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2016 

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References

1 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1988 [1965]), ix.

2 Ibid., x.

3 Ibid., xi.

4 Ibid., 22, 14.

5 Ibid., 288.

6 Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 19.

7 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 21.

8 Ibid., 35.

9 Blaise Pascal, Human Happiness, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 81.