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modern edition of the Dialogues, as the work is also known, is by Michel Foucault.
In it Foucault emphasizes both Rousseau's creation of the Romantic self ("a pattern
that is unified and at the same time unique") and the subsequent dissolution of that
self ("the dissociated subject, superimposed on himself, a lacuna whom one can only
call present by a sort of addition never achieved: as if he appears at a distant
vanishing point which only a certain convergence allows the reader to ascertain"),
pp. xv-xvi; translation mine.
10 These late works are often described, appropriately, as paranoid. Paranoia, the
delusion of self-reference, is but an exaggeration of the self as arbiter of order, value,
and meaning. That concept of self has its roots in the Reformation's stress on the
individual's unmediated relation to God and reaches an apotheosis in tile Romantic
era, when the self replaced divinity as the arbiter of order, value, and
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meaning. Paranoia would seem to be a historically defined disorder, for it is
dependent upon the development of the sense of self that came into being with
Rousseau and the Romantics. The paranoid stance derives not from some erroneous
sense of self but from an exaggerated notion of the importance of the Romantic self.
11 Rousseau has anticipated these questions. It is, after all, he who speaks of the
"labour" required by writing the self. "Some of my paragraphs I have shaped and
reshaped mentally for five or six nights before they, were fit to be put down on
paper" (114). It is he who warns us that "Being forced to speak in spite of myself, I
am also obliged to conceal myself, to be cunning, to try to deceive" (263).
12 Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (1776-78; pub. posthumously 1782),
trans. Charles E. Butterworth ( New York: Harper, 1982).
13 Ibid., 67-69.
14 Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents ( 1930), in The Standard Edition, vol. 21 (
London: Hogarth, 1961).
15 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan ( New York: Pantheon, 1977),
p. 191.
16 The traversing of tile individual by power has been the subject of much of Foucault's
later work. Discipline and Punish investigates the ways in which individuals have
been subjected by the gaze of the other. The History of Sexuality examines the place
of confession in making man and woman into subjects. Michel Foucault , Power and
Knowledge:Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (
84
New York: Pantheon, 1980), pursues the notion that "the history which bears and
determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of
power, not relations of meaning."
17 In a lecture at a conference on "Knowledge, Power, History: Interdisciplinary
Approaches to the Works of Michel Foucault" (University of Southern California,
October 31, 1981), Foucault stated that his aim "is to create a history of the different
modes by which the human being has been made a subject." This historical process,
he explained, takes three forms: the objectivizing of the speaking subject by the
sciences of language, work, and life; the objectivizing of the subject by the dividing
practices; and the self-objectification whose workings become visible when one
examines the historical struggles "against a technique, a form of power, which
applies to everyday life, attaches him [the individual subject] to his identity, attaches
a load of truth to him which he and others must recognize," which in short makes
him both a subject to power and an object to himself. Portions of the lecture have
been reprinted as part of an essay, "The Subject and Power", Critical Inquiry 8 (
1982): 777-97.
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Seven FOUCAULT,' FREUD, AND THE TECHNOLOGIES OF THE SELF
PATRICK H. HUTTON
Michel Foucault's intellectual odyssey is not unlike the history of the topics he has
studied. Both take unexpected turns. Foucault has ranged from historical investigations of
insane asylums to. prisons, to sexual issues, to techniques of self-care. Yet a continuous
path runs through this historical journey that concerns the making of the human mind, a
subject that invites discussion of Foucault's relationship to Sigmund Freud. Foucault
never discussed the significance of Freud's work in any depth. His remarks consist of
scattered and usually oblique references. 1 Yet Foucault's work is heavy with Freud's
unstated presence. His authorship, considered in its ensemble, might be interpreted as an
apostrophe to Freud, for their methods of approaching the mind are diametrically
opposed. Whereas Freud provides a method for investigating the internal workings of the
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