Foucault and Postmodern Conceptions of Reason

✍ Scribed by Laurence Barry

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 237
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

​For decades Foucault was mostly known for his diagnosis of modernity as a form of entrapment, both in our modes of thought and our behaviors. This book argues that Foucault's reappraisal of modernity occurs with the 1978 and 1979 lectures, in which he sketches modern power as governmentality and neoliberalism. From this perspective, Foucault’s once surprising studies on the Greeks' constitution of the ‘self’ can be seen as a continuation of his diagnosis of late modernity, and as an attempt to retrieve a form of autonomy for our modern selves. One finds in the late Foucault a postmodern conception of reason and not a destruction of reason; but this is possible only if postmodernity is seen as a critical exercise of reason in the analysis of norms.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter ....Pages i-viii
Introduction (Laurence Barry)....Pages 1-19
Early Critiques of Modernity: The Human Sciences Between Knowledge and Discipline (Laurence Barry)....Pages 21-49
Governmentality as a Turning Point (Laurence Barry)....Pages 51-71
From Government to Subjectivity (Laurence Barry)....Pages 73-93
Forms of Subjectivity: Subjection/Subjectivation? (Laurence Barry)....Pages 95-118
The Genealogy of the Modern Subject (Laurence Barry)....Pages 119-144
The “Return to Kant” and Autonomy (Laurence Barry)....Pages 145-174
Foucault, Kant, and Critique (Laurence Barry)....Pages 175-203
Concluding Remarks: Foucault and Contemporary Social Criticism (Laurence Barry)....Pages 205-228
Back Matter ....Pages 229-234

✦ Subjects

Philosophy; Critical Theory; French; Comparative Politics