Papers by Katharine McIntyre
Freedom from Domination A Foucauldian Account of Power, Subject Formation, and the Need for Recog... more Freedom from Domination A Foucauldian Account of Power, Subject Formation, and the Need for Recognition Katharine M. McIntyre Michel Foucault is criticized for offering an account of power that leaves no room for the freedom of individuals. This dissertation will provide an account of freedom that is compatible with Foucault’s descriptions of the operation of power and its role in the constitution of the subject. First, I clarify Foucault’s own distinction between power and domination, the conflation of which has been the primary source of criticism of his social theory. With this distinction in hand, I address the apparent break in Foucault’s middle and late periods, which, respectively, describe human beings as constituted by power on the one hand and as having the reflective critical capacities necessary for selftransformation on the other. I then explore Foucault’s criticism of the modern concept of autonomy, which he believes to be inherited from the Enlightenment and, more spe...
Philosophy & Social Criticism
Domination as opposed to what? Michel Foucault’s works on power and subject formation uncover the... more Domination as opposed to what? Michel Foucault’s works on power and subject formation uncover the subtle ways in which disciplinary power structures create opportunities for domination. Yet Foucault says little about the forms of freedom that we should prefer. I argue that the proper opposite of Foucauldian domination is a version of the concept of social freedom found in contemporary recognition theory. I establish that Foucault implicitly commits himself to an ontological concept of recognition in which the subject is constituted by acts that affirm particular qualities. On the basis of this ontological commitment, there is room for Foucault to endorse an ethical concept of recognition as well, in which the subject’s freedom is bound to a variety of forms of institutional and interpersonal recognition. Finally, Foucauldian insights regarding the potentially dominating tendencies of genuine acts of recognition lead to helpful modifications of the concept of social freedom.
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Papers by Katharine McIntyre