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Ethics as Politics: Foucault, Hadot, Cavell and the Critique of Our Present

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Foucault and the History of Our Present

Abstract

In a couple of previous articles I have tried to show why it is possible, interesting and philosophically crucial to tie together the perspectives on ethics and politics developed by Pierre Hadot, Stanley Cavell and Michel Foucault (Lorenzini, 2010a; 2010b). These three thinkers have indeed in common the effort to consider ethics as a non-teleological and non-deontological field (Cavell, 1990: 46), and they allow us to explore the link between ethical subjectivation and a politics of resistance — which is, in my opinion, one of the most urgent challenges for contemporary philosophy as well as one of the most important stakes of our global present. More specifically, in this chapter I will argue that Foucault’s, Hadot’s and Cavell’s perspectives on ethics and politics — or better, on ethics as politics — provide us with fundamental tools to conceive and practice philosophy as a ‘critical attitude’ (Foucault, 2007).1

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© 2015 Daniele Lorenzini

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Lorenzini, D. (2015). Ethics as Politics: Foucault, Hadot, Cavell and the Critique of Our Present. In: Fuggle, S., Lanci, Y., Tazzioli, M. (eds) Foucault and the History of Our Present. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137385925_15

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