afterword the subject and power michel foucault but i can''t help finding it very interesting and puzzling because it was the first time a philosopher proposed as a philosophical task to investigate not only the metaphysical system or the foundations of scientific knowledge, but a historical event-a recent, even a contemporary event. when in 1784 kant asked, was heisst aufkhirung?, he meant, what''s going on just now? what''s happening to us? what is this world, this period, this precise moment in which we are living? or in other words: what are we? as aujkliirer, as part of the enlightenment? compare this with the cartesian question: who am i? i, as a unique but universal and unhistorical subject? i, for descartes is everyone, anywhere at any moment? but kant asks something else: what are we? in a very precise moment of history. kant''s question appears as an analysis of both us and our present. i think that this aspect of philosophy took on more and more importance. hegel, nietzsche. . . . the other aspect of & quot;universal philosophy & quot; didn''t disappear. but the task of philosophy as a critical analysis of our world is something which is more and more important. maybe the most certain of all philosophical problems is the problem of the present time, and of what we are, in this very moment. maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are. we have to imagine and to build up what we could be to get rid of this kind of political & quot;double bind, & quot; which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures. the conclusion would be that the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the state, and from the state''s institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state. we have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries. afterword q f} how is power exercised? for some people, asking questions about the & quot;how & quot; of power would limit them to describing its effects without ever relating those effects either to causes or to a basic nature. it would make this power a mysterious substance which they might hesitate to interrogate in itself, no doubt because they would prefer not to call it into question. by proceeding this way, which is never explicitly justified, they seem to suspect the presence of a kind of fatalism. but does not their very distrust indicate a pre- 216 links with information about foucault and his work: stanford encyclopedia of philosophy entry on michel foucault http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/ biography of foucault http://www.egs.edu/resources/foucault.html the foucault society http://www.foucaultsociety.org/about/default.asp foucault’s career: a quick overview http://www.lawrence.edu/dept/english/courses/60a/handouts/foudates.html nice overview of foucault’s work from the perspective of the arts by john haber http://www.haberarts.com/foucault.htm foucault’s work online: excerpt from discipline and punish http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~felluga/punish.html “panopticism” from discipline and punish http://foucault.info/documents/disciplineandpunish/foucault.disciplineandpunish.panopticism.html “preface” to the order of things http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/sci_cult/evolit/s05/prefaceorderfoucault.pdf good set of notes on the order of things by john protevi, louisiana state university http://www.protevi.com/john/foucault/ot_i.html and http://www.protevi.com/john/foucault/ot_ii.html introduction to the archeology of knowledge http://foucault.info/documents/archaeologyofknowledge/foucault.archaeologyofknowledge.00_intro.html the first three chapters of the archeology of knowledge http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/foucault.htm some interesting articles applying foucault’s work: “foucault in guantanamo: national, sovereign, disciplinary exceptionalism” an essay by andrew neal (draws connection between foucault, carl schmidtt, and “the war on terrorism” -- looks interesting, but i cannot vouch for the site or the author). http://www.libertysecurity.org/article199.html “the seductions of islamism: revisiting foucault and the iranian revoution” by janet afary and kevin b. anderson, from [new politics, vol. 10, no. 1, whole no. 37, summer 2004] http://www.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue37/afary37.htm i send the frist page it was 216 if you want me to send all the page let me know thanks