"Грижата за себе си" и критиката на настоящето
The "care of the self" and the critique of the present

Summary/Abstract: The paper tries to push further the refl ection inspired by Amy Allen’s conceptual suggestion that Foucault’s notion of the care of the self might take the contemporary social critique out of the aporia of the subject, that care of the self enables us to jump beyond the power relations that make us “who we are”. The refl ection goes along the lines of a pragmatist reading of Foucault’s later works on what he named “technologies of the self”. Developing this pragmatist line of critical reading of Foucault through the lens of Dewey’s and Mead’s elaborations on the interactive constitution of the self, the relative weakness of the “care of the self” as a conceptual hope for social critique today is demonstrated. But what is more important, the practices of the self as withdrawal from the political – the form that the idea of the “care of the self” practically takes in contemporary societies and especially in certain social movements – is shown to be well suited to certain forms of domination. Then the point is made that critical thinking is uncritically taking a non-questioned concept of domination as its main adversary which is diminishing the strength of critique itself.

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