Abstract
I began my first chapter with a series of Aime Cesaire-inspired staccato lines—foreboding lines pulsating with an internal dissonance and sounding a warning against, as Foucault might say, discourses of progress masking violence and operating not coercively or covertly but openly, endorsed willfully by our own collaborative actions. In an era when American exceptionalism is a constant refrain, when new wars are initiated before prior “interventions” have ceased, and when the terrorist other is the new scripted subjectivity we are told to fear and hate, perhaps we ought to pause to consider whether our so-called destiny is in fact a flawed destiny. Moreover, following the lead of Douglass and Fanon, perhaps we need to critically examine the sociopolitical and religious narratives and subnarratives of our day, asking ourselves whether they in fact promote freedom for all and the genuine flourishing of human beings.
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Notes
See, e.g., Charles Taylor, “Foucault on Freedom and Truth,” Political Theory 12 (1984), 152–83;
and Jürgen Habermas, “Some Questions concerning the Theory of Power: Foucault Again,” in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 266–93.
Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1982), 789.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 95.
Kevin Jon Heller, “Power, Subjectification and Resistance in Foucault,” SubStance 79 (1996), 99.
Michel Foucault, “Self Writing,” in The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 1: Ethics: Subjectivity, and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 2001), 207.
Michel Foucault, “An Aesthetics of Existence” (An Interview with Alessandro Fontana, 1984), in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 50.
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© 2013 Cynthia R. Nielsen
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Nielsen, C.R. (2013). Recapitulation: Humans as Socially Constructed and Free, an Ongoing Improvisation. In: Foucault, Douglass, Fanon, and Scotus in Dialogue. New Approaches to Religion and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137034113_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137034113_6
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