After Desire

Michel Foucault is perhaps most famous for his historical-genealogical critique of sexuality in the first volume of his History of Sexuality. But as Arnold Davidson has shown, Foucault also presented a more fundamental critique of “desiring” or “psychological” subjectivity as such.1 This latter critique informed Foucault’s late-career “ethical turn”—his theorization of a much-debated, radical “ethics of the self.” The following study will investigate the relationship between Foucault’s conceptualization of the desiring subject and his ethics of the self in order to reach a standpoint by which the latter can be evaluated. Over the course of unfolding these concepts, we will find something familiar about Foucault’s ethical vision: it represents an uncanny formalization of many features of contemporary life in the age of the smartphone—that is, his ethical ideal has in important ways been involuntarily realized by emergent social practices that have little to do with sexuality. Therefore, although the local stimulus for Foucault’s critique was in part a form of vulgar Freudianism2 that has been out of vogue for decades, critiquing Foucault’s critique provides a vantage point from which to grapple with contemporary sociopolitical reality

Aesthetics · Conceptualization · Epistemology · Ethos · Human sexuality · Michel foucault · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Subject (documents · Subjectivity · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology