Power and Ethics: Finding Freedom through Critique

Power and Ethics: Finding Freedom through Critique

In this book, the authors review Foucault’s philosophy on power and ethics to investigate the possibility of restructuring freedom available to the subject. Foucault’s Kantian inspired view of critique as an art of voluntary inservitude, of reflective indocility is discussed in relation to biopolitics, bioethics, artificial intelligence, and bureaucracy. This work of freedom is a process of self-creation where the subject seeks to rearrange power relations and open possibilities for autonomy and agency. This book shows how the critical attitude identifies limitations of power to open the possibility for transgression as an escape from normalised submission. This involves revealing and exposing unrecognised forms of power manipulating the subject to uncover and enable new ways to think differently. Psychoanalysis combined with Foucault is also applied to enhance an understanding of power relations and the task of an ethics of freedom. This is then integrated with a philosophy of place to better understand the relationship between home, self-creation, ethics, and freedom. The book shows that Foucault’s philosophy has important relevance to the writings of Heidegger, Lacan, Kafka, Freud, Aristotle, Jung and Arendt and is essential reading for students and professionals in politics, ethics, phenomenology and psychoanalysis.

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