‘The Care of the Self’ and the Critique of the Present
‘The Care of the Self’ and the Critique of the Present

Summary/Abstract: This paper tries to push further the refl ection inspired by Amy Allen’s conceptual proposal that the Foucaultian notion of the care of the self may help contemporary social critique to overcome the aporia of the subject, that care of the self enables us to transcend the power relations that make us ‘who we are’. To this end, the paper offers a pragmatist reading of Michel Foucault’s later works on what he calls ‘technologies of the self’. Developing this pragmatist line of critical reading of Foucault through the lens of John Dewey’s and George Herbert Mead’s elaborations on the interactive constitution of the self, the author demonstrates the relative weakness of ‘the care of the self’ as a conceptual hope for social critique today. But what is more important, she shows that the practices of the self as a retreat from the political – the form that the idea of ‘care of the self’ practically takes in contemporary societies and especially in certain social movements – are well-suited to certain forms of domination. Finally, she makes the point that critical thinking is uncritically taking an unquestioned concept of domination as its main adversary, and this is diminishing the strength of critique itself.

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