Inhabiting Power
Foucault, Identitarianism, and the Politics of Self-Cultivation
From Tarka Vol. 9: On Power, by Jacob Kyle
If you’ve spent any time in academia or in progressive political circles, you’ve probably heard the name “Foucault.” A charismatic thinker often cited when discussing questions of ‘power,’ Michel Foucault has acquired a sacred status in recent decades, joining the ranks of the Western philosophical canon. However, with canonization comes the tendency to compress a philosopher’s nuance into doctrine – transforming a body of work into something closer to a catechism than a corpus. In the case of Foucault, the ‘catechism’ that has emerged belies a recognizable political sensibility: one that finds oppressive power everywhere it looks — in institutions, language, bodies, and social norms — and that reflexively interprets virtually every human relationship through the lens of domination and subjugation.
Those who traffic in this sensibility will sometimes invoke Foucault’s authority as they simultaneously speak through a doctrine that was alien to him. Citing Foucault as a formative figure in their political awakening to ‘power structures,’ they reify an ideology that is unfaithful to what Foucault actually thought. As harbingers of a doctrine I refer to in this essay as identitarianism, they have become a consolidating force of intellectual and discursive power in their own right, blithely unaware of just how vulnerable their theory is to the destabilizing force of Foucault’s own thinking. What follows in this essay is less a refutation than a recognition – what is signified in the Sākta-Śaiva philosophy as pratyabhijñā. In the technical way this term is developed by the Kashmir Śaiva philosophers Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta, I aim to highlight what was always already present in Foucault’s work, but which has been obscured by the conflation of his legacy with a contemporary doctrine.
Identitarianism is a contemporary ideology that frames all legitimate claims to political authority as matters of identity. In this framing, politics is progressive insofar as it strives toward the emancipation and inclusion of previously marginalized identities – a phenomenon often colloquially referred to as “identity politics.” Given this term’s recent appropriation by right-wing ideologues who have used it as a term of abuse against liberals and leftists, “identity politics” has become a potentially confusing and imprecise category; adding to the confusion, both left-wing and right-wing movements now traffic in their own respective forms of identity politics. I therefore opt for the less loaded term ‘identitarianism’ to refer to what underwrites the moral vocabulary and political doctrine that I analyze below.
While “identitarian” as a term has a long history that extends to the early half of the 20th century, the most politically sober version of its critique comes from thinkers who argue that, when the left organizes primarily around identity categories rather than class, it structurally accommodates neoliberalism rather than challenges it. The argument is that identity-based redistribution operates within, rather than against, existing modes of production. Political theorist Nancy Fraser specifically argued that political mobilization based on identitarian affirmation leads to surface redistribution — redistribution that does not challenge the status quo; a deconstruction of identitarianism rather than its affirmation is thus more conducive to goals of economic redistribution and justice.
The Phases of Foucault’s Philosophy
From the earliest period of Foucault’s corpus, he addressed – initially indirectly – the shifting norms that were instantiated in cultural institutions. His first book, Madness and Civilization, was an adaptation of his doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne. Published in 1961, Foucault’s breakout contribution asked the questions: How did ‘madness’ become an object of knowledge? When did it become something to confine, classify, and treat? Rather than accepting ‘madness’ as a perennial psychological category or condition, Foucault traced the ways in which it hardened into a mode of identity – the “mad subject” – and was consolidated through what he refers to as the “Great Confinement.”
In 17th century European society, large numbers of people were newly confined to an emerging institution: the asylum. Groups affected by this institutionalization included the poor, the unemployed, the sexually ‘deviant,’ the criminal, and the mentally ill. Foucault aimed to demonstrate that this institutional marginalization was not rooted in a medical decision, but in a moral and economic one that effectively (re)structured the social order. The new social category of ‘madness’ was predicated upon conceptions of unreason, irrationality, idleness, and vice. What the “Great Confinement” reflected was therefore not so much a benevolent acknowledgment of ‘differences’ that necessitated specialized treatment, but a growing social consensus and institutional conformity around a particular conception of normality. Whatever identity or set of behavioral patterns did not fit this conceptual picture were deemed ‘abnormal.’ As such, they were seen as exhibiting symptoms of a ‘madness’ that society was suddenly compelled to ‘treat’ through a new ‘clinical gaze’ of medicalization, isolation, and scientific discipline. The irreverent and satirical ‘voice of madness’ that was previously represented in the Classical Age was later silenced during the Renaissance period.
While he referred to his first book as a “history” of madness, Foucault soon adopted the term “archeology” and then later “genealogy” to refer to his philosophical method — the latter being inspired by the 19th century German philosopher, Freidrich Nietzsche, and his work On the Genealogy of Morals. In what we’ll refer to as his “archaeological phase” of the 1960s, Foucault was concerned with discourse, implicit rules governing what counts as knowledge, and the historical conditions of possibility that permit various normative statements to arise – grounded in particular notions of ‘truth,’ ‘fact,’ and ‘common sense.’ During this period, he was not explicitly concerned with power relations, but rather with epistemes — the underlying structures that determine what can, must, or should be thought at any given time.
The 1970s marked the beginning of his subsequent “genealogical phase,” which introduced what the archaeological analysis had largely bracketed out: bodies, power relations, institutional practices, and the agonistic dimension of history. He shifted from an analysis of the conditions of discourse to an analysis of the effects of power. He asked questions regarding how socio-political systems emerge through conflict, contingency, and force. To summarize, if his ‘archaeology’ emphasized broader epistemic ruptures extending over long historical periods, his ‘genealogy’ emphasized accidents, struggles, and localized instances of ‘non-necessity’ – his goal being to show that what seemed inevitable was in fact contingent.
In the early 1980s, just prior to his death, he entered what is sometimes referred to as his ‘ethical phase.’ During this short period, something shifted in Foucault’s work. He became interested in disciplines of self-cultivation (askēsis), self-writing, care of the self, and ‘courageous truth-telling’ (parrhesia). He explored power not as something that institutions do to our bodies, but as something that individuals do with, for, and to themselves. The individual subject became a site of practice, a locus of stylization, and a participant in her own process of creative self-formation. While this does not make subjectivity entirely exempt from the effects of power relations and their constraining influence, nevertheless the individual became acknowledged, in these later works, as a unique site of empowerment.
Thank you for reading this excerpt from a much longer essay.
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About the author: Jacob Kyle, MPhil, is a meditation teacher, writer, philosophy educator, and the Founding Director of Embodied Philosophy. He is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford, where he researches the Pratyabhijñā philosophical tradition under the supervision of Diwakar Acharya and Monima Chadha. He holds an MPhil in Classical Indian Religions from Oxford (2023), an MA in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research (2017), and an MSc in Political Theory from the London School of Economics (2007). A student of Kashmir Śaivism schol ar-practitioner Paul Muller-Ortega, Jacob is a devoted practitioner of the Śaiva-Śākta Darśana. He writes overly pedantic essays on the divine, yoga, philosophy, politics, and the dysfunctional relationship between scholarship and mysticism at jacobkyle.com.