Foucault, Freedom, and Critical Ethics

Michel Foucault's conception of resistance is a notoriously broad concept, and perhaps one that is too implicated in the functioning of power. Power and resistance are contingent upone another; without resistance, power solidifies into domination, and without power, resistance loses coherence. Further, resistance does not indicate an intention to resist, only the location of gaps within power relations. Despite these issues, Foucault's conceptions of power and resistance retain value in that they expand the political from the communication of preferences to actions and ways of living that resist power relations. It is here that Foucault's deifnition of critique might be useful. Describing a set of resistant behaviors and actions that are still not outside of power, but functioning as intentional, directed ways of living, Foucault offers an understanding of resistance that remains within power relationships but at the same time is aimed at disrupting them. In this paper, I argue that a conception of critical ethics radically expands the scope of the political while at the same time retaining the local, heterogenous, and subject-constituting features of resistance