The possibility of the female subject in Foucault’s isomorphic theater (H.S. V. III)
I have preparatory materials to do research on the third volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality: The Care of the Self. I aim to demonstrate that in this book, Foucault argues that—while the prescriptive codes we find in classical Greek antiquity superficially resemble that of later Christian morality—Greek stylizations of the sexual subject cannot fully account for the emergence of Christian emphasis on what Foucault calls a “decipherment of the soul,” a “purificatory hermeneutics of desires,” or its “mode of ethical fulfillment that tends toward self renunciation.” I closely examine how Foucault establishes this disjuncture vis-a-vis archaeological and genealogical methodologies of inquiry, and argue that further work to find, not disjuncture, but continuity between the two systems of ethics is a valuable parallel undertaking which is fully commensurable with Foucault’s analysis and account of the divergence.
Christianity itself has recently birthed the self-governing scientific conscience of neoliberalism. This neoliberalism continually reactivates Christianity’s principle of self-renunciation, even if, for example, a theology is absent. Similarly, we can look back and see Christianity has clearly grounded the primary strategies by which it vies for dominance in certain analogous strategies and stylizations from Greek antiquity. There appear to be differences. It can be argued that Christian ethics, which for example include as a moral figure the woman known as “the Virgin Mary,” represent a shift from am intrinsically masculine model of the self to one which can demonstrate virtue through the feminine, and therefore can deploy systems of ethics that hold criteria before men and women alike—universal ethics.
Nonetheless, we can see the foundations of this ethics in the masculine Grecian model. Therefore we should not find it surprising if this ethic, like the Greek model before it, is fundamentally solipsistic towards the existence of women as such, despite using a symbology of the feminine in order to conceal the specific techniques of power by which a masculinist Christian subject maintains its normative dominance within the concept of the “ethical.” We must abandon the pretense of seeming progress towards a form of universal virtue in Christianity accessible to a woman subject. Tracing the genealogical roots of modes for self-knowledge back to Grecian ethics, we establish how concepts such as “nature,” the “body,” “mastery” (i.e. of slaves), and “self-knowledge” function to preserve the opacity of the male subject as an object of knowledge from without. We can then ask whether any possibilities of self-subjectification at all, opened even peripherally or by extrapolation in this lineage from Greek to Christian virtue, are of utility towards establishing not a universal, but distinctly female concept of virtue.
Aristotle seemed to argue for the existence of ethical standards which bear upon all human beings. Even if the forms of an ethic varied in their manifestation, certain codes allegedly applied to all groups of persons. Yet the highest forms of self-subjectification, all techniques for demonstrating fitness of character for entering the political sphere, seem oriented around a concept of self-mastery linked to self-knowledge in the abstract but grounded in the material practice of slave-holding, including the slave known as the “wife.”
While it is considered “common sense” that Greece was a slave economy and women were subordinate, my scholarship seeks to establish detailed, concrete evidence of the impact this material contingency had upon the codes of ethics operating in Athenian time. These contingent historical realities among the Greeks either constitute an absolute conceptual limit point for all claims about ethical universality made from these premises, or the foundational forces which constitute the subject are plastic or otherwise possessing attributes which can be repurposed meaningfully in a mode of life absent the practice of slave=holding per se. The claim that, at first blush, these systems of ethics postulated a world in which anyone besides the property-owning Athenian man could be a “person,” and therefore be ethical or virtuous, is false. That falsity cascades to mean that all supposed “universality” in Christian ethics also must grapple with its lack of structural integrity.
Derrida and others have questioned the desirability of “universalism” qua. enlightenment and its third guise of secularism to begin with. But whether or not the ruins of these systems of human morality contain artifacts salvageable for a project of virtue with distinct utility for constituting Woman as a virtuous subject remains to be determined, both in overview of historical life for women in Greece, such as Sappho, and in confronting an ominous philosophical aporia, asking after the premise suspended: we no longer live in a moral universe. The inevitability of inequalities and exploitation in human civilization assumed by a Nietzschean view (cf. Genealogy of Morals) is indifferent to the contingent form taken by one or the other instance of historical subordination of a specific enslaved group. The concern is deeper—with the possibility that human civilization was so centrally founded upon enslavement and subordination of groups of people as subhuman classes, that there is absolutely no cause for optimism that some philosophical ethical remedy nor promise of political utopianism can rehabilitate the soundness of human moral codes. When the virtuous subject looks into the abyss of this post-masculinist, but also posthumanist moral universe—what does she see?
Princess Giulia Ricci 