Foucault, Freedom, and the Limits of Modernity

In order to locate and understand a notion of freedom in the later works of Michel Foucault, I will first offer a discussion of delinquency as described in Discipline and Punish. Within this discussion I will argue against Thomas Dumm’s characterization of the delinquent as emblematic of freedom on the grounds that such a characterization is implicitly contested in Discipline and Punish. I will use aspects of Dumm’s characterization of freedom to transition into my own reading of late Foucault as thoroughly attentive to historical limits. It is my reading of Foucault that, through a critical and continued engagement with the limits of modernity, one may able to work towards personal freedom. Freedom will be understood, here, as one’s ability to enact some degree of autonomy. Indeed, in the face of the supposedly ubiquitous influence of power, I do not find this definition to be too modest. In locating this sort of freedom in late Foucault, I will draw upon Foucault’s specific discussions each of genealogy, space, modernity, and the cultivation of the self, and will relate each to a notion of historical limits. It is my aim with this paper to articulate the importance, for Foucault, of a critical recognition of these historical limits towards a cultivation of possible freedom. Delinquency, as defined by Foucault, is an effect of incarceration, as it is produced within the prison itself, and is a tool used for the supervision of illegalities. A cyclical relationship exists between the prison, the police, and the delinquent, as “police surveillance provides the prison with offenders, which the prison transforms into delinquents, the targets and auxiliaries of police supervisions, which regularly send back a certain number of them to prison”i. In this way, the prison system has succeeded in creating its own politically usable object of knowledge in the production of delinquency. As an object of knowledge, the delinquent is produced by the prison as the paradigmatic illegality, which acts as the pathologized subject of criminal behavior. Put another way, delinquency is that form of illegality that the prison is able to isolate, organize, and penetrate. The delinquent is useful to disciplinary power, then, as it