Powers of Practice: Michel Foucault and the Politics of Asceticism

Abstract

This dissertation offers a novel re-reading of Michel Foucault’s oeuvre from 1975 – 1984 oriented by his late theory of asceticism. My reading reveals in the late Foucault a method for analysing ethical phenomena founded in a close examination of ascesis. This term is to be understood in its pre-Christian, etymological sense as all of those activities, in domains as diverse as sport and rhetoric, the practice of which has as its direct effect the transformation of the practitioner. An ‘ethnography of the ascetic,’ as Foucault refers to his late project, always looks at these practices in their social-political context to understand how practices of the self inflect relations with others and are in turn mediated by the ideational and material contexts in which they are undertaken. As such, a Foucaultian theory of asceticism pulls us not away from but directly towards the political: asceticisms are always entangled in relations of power that they reinforce or resist. A theoretically rich understanding of asceticism is crucial if we are to diagnose and specify the political role that the self and self-development do and might play in contexts and problems as diverse as neoliberal lifestyle capitalism and contemporary disciplinary procedures. The first half of this dissertation reconstructs a general theory of asceticism in Foucault’s late works by situating them in biographical and historical context, analysing the anthropological dimensions of his exploration of asceticism, and exploring the concepts of ‘critique’ and ‘parrhesia’ as hinges between habitual inertia and self-(re)creation. The second half of the dissertation applies this theory of ascesis to contemporary issues of interest to Foucault himself, by rethinking discipline and neoliberalism as part of an ‘ascetic renaissance’ in late modernity that simultaneously provides new and productive tools for the development of political and ethical capacities and risks submerging these capacities in alienating and coercive structures of power. The concluding chapter extrapolates a set of theses from the preceding chapters regarding ascesis and politics and sets the groundwork for a future political theory of asceticism and historical study of ascesis.