Foucault And Identity Analysis

Every type of person struggles with a thing we call, identity. Personal identity come from multiple factors from our race to our own personal beliefs. Some people say we have the choice to choose our own identity, but is that always true? No, in fact other people can affect how we look and essentially identity our self’s. In the article called.

Frenchie's internal struggle represents the challenges many individuals face when confronting their place in society and the sacrifices they must make to protect what they hold dear, even in the face of intimidating

Athena Kennedy Philosophy Professor Berendzen Kant vs. Foucault December 1, 2015 Kant vs. Foucault Humans question their surroundings every day, weather it is “is how I am acting the way I want to portray myself,” “am I doing the right thing in this situation?” All questions can and should be debated, In philosophy we find new ways to questions everything, weather it is another’s opinion or our own, we form new ways of thinking critically and new ways to obtain answers that will satisfy our thirst for knowledge. Philosophers believe that you need to be able to question everything because there is always new knowledge out there for us to absorb and to question. In critical thinking you evaluate an issue you believe is present in order

He believed in the whole modern society, diffuse power has been immersed in all aspects of life. It can be captured in the small places. This diffuse power is not necessarily rely on the unified state machine, but in various specific areas. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the mechanisms of discipline gradually extended throughout the entire society. As we can see, modern factories, schools, military barracks, hospitals and prisons are to some extent similar to each other; this is what Foucault calls “the advent of disciplinary society”.

MICHEL FOUCAULT ON SEXUALITY Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, philologist and social theorist. He made discourses on the relationship between power and knowledge and about how they are utilized as a form of social control through social establishments. This essay talks about Michel Foucault’s discourse on sexuality. He put forward his theory of the history of sexuality.

He was born to a wealthy family on September 6, 1757, in Chavaniac, France( 2015, December

The autobiography, The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, provides a vivid insight into the complicated, yet exhilarating, life of Rousseau. The beginning of his life was filled with misfortunes, such as the death of his mother which was quickly followed by a distraught and self-sabotaging attitude which his father adopted. This led to his father’s involvement in illegal behaviors and the subsequent abandonment of Rousseau. His mother’s death was the catalyst for his journey to meet multiple women who would later affect his life greatly. The Influence of Miss Lamberciers, Madame Basile, Countess de Vercellis, and Madam de Warens on the impressionable adolescent mind of Rousseau led to the positive cultivation of self-discovery and the creation of new experiences, as well as the development of inappropriate sexual desires and attachments towards women.

For many years, the issue of self-identity has been a problem that philosophers and scholars have been to explain using different theories. The question on self –identity tries to explain the concept of how a person today is different from the one in the years to come. In philosophy, the theory of personal identity tries to solve the questions who we are, our existence, and life after death. To understand the concept of self-identity, it is important to analyze a person over a period under given conditions. Despite the numerous theories on personal identity, the paper narrows down the study to the personal theories of John Locke and Rene Descartes, and their points of view on personal identity.

It can be quite easy to make assumptions about one’s character upon first glance or first encounter, but often these first assumptions are not a direct representation of a person’s true disposition. In the short story, “The Diary of a Madman” by Guy de Maupassant, an esteemed magistrate is being remembered for the model citizen he was, having lived a life that no one could subject to criticism. However, a notary uncovered his diary in a drawer in his home, in which he entailed his tendencies and cravings for murder that no one had expected of him. Within this text, the author uses the character of the magistrate to convey the theme that one’s true character cannot be decided from external appearance or actions. From the beginning of the text, it is made evident that this man was revered as the most well-respected judge in all of France.

Based on Stuart Hall’s (2006) discussion of Foucault’s theory of discourse, a discourse is generally consisting of a group of statements that together offer a way of talking about a par-ticular knowledge on a certain topic. Many individuals can produce it together, in different institutional settings. The discourse thereby enables the construction of a topic in a specific way which at the same time limits other constructions of the same topic. A discourse is made up not only from one but a multiplicity of statements that all share the same style to talk about the same topic. However, it is not a closed off system, it draws statements from and into other discourses.

This is a fatal event in Rousseau’s mind as unlike ‘the savage’ who ‘lives in himself’, an individual in society ‘is always outside himself and knows how to live only in the opinion of others’. Very unlike the Hobbesian war-like state of nature where ‘vainglory’ cause people to act like barbarous beasts, Rousseau argues that egocentrism derives solely from social interaction believing that his predecessors were projecting ideas of modern corruption onto the state of nature. Therefore, Rousseau’s analysis of moral psychology reveals how humans have become duplicitous and false through socialisation as the foundations of competition and bettering people are laid and consequently, a ‘desire for inequality’ governs the

Giorgio Agamben, whom furthers Foucault’s notion in his book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998). Thus, focusing specifically on Sovereign Power; the shift of Bio-Power to Bio-Politics through the Western Law. In his provocative study, he brings his main attention to the concept of bio-politics by Foucault in the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976) and argues the relationship between sovereign power and naked human existence to what Agamben refers to as the ‘bare life’ (Agamben, 1998: 1). Thus, for Agamben, stigmatisation is a natural occurrence and this nature activity is consistent with Agamben’s metaphor of a ‘wolf-man’ experience. He argues that some individuals simply do not fit into society, such as obese individuals

Although the bourgeois and capitalist society regarded sexuality to be taboo because it was not economically productive, sexuality was being studied in order to categorize sexual behaviors and label individuals, since “homosexual was now a species.” (“History of Sexuality” 43) With the medicalization of sexuality, the “machinery,” society’s social institutions produced discourses to constitute a controlled knowledge which affected the thoughts and behaviors about it in different contexts. However, the “true discourses” Foucault mentions, are not actually real or true as it would imply these discourses would stay constant even in different

Beyond his existentialist contributions and literary accomplishments, Sartre’s theories towards political and societal structures, as well as human rights, influenced the minds of many and built itself into the fabric of its time period. Sartre was a major intellectual figure of his century and to many, including Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, his bibliographers, he was, “uncontestably the most outstanding philosopher and writer of our time” (Contat, Rybalka.xiii).This admiration is shared by literary critics as well, as Thomas Flynn, author of “Jean-Paul Sartre” of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, had this to say about Sartre’s life work, “Sartre (1905–1980) is arguably the best known philosopher of the twentieth century. His indefatigable pursuit of philosophical reflection, literary creativity and, in the second half of his life, active political commitment gained him worldwide renown, if not admiration” (Flynn). However, this recognition and praise was not always the case for Sartre, as it was through a lifetime of ambition and reflection that he acquired the knowledge and attention he amassed by the time of his passing. In his youth, he attended prestigious Parisian schools with traditional philosophical education stressing Cartesianism, neo-Kantianism, and Bergsonism.

This is my very first time reading this text, so I am completely enthralled by the paradox of sexual discourse that Foucault sets up. I always did think of our society as sexually repressed. In fact, medicine and psychiatry has named (entered into writing) so many categories of sexual preferences and behaviors, that it shows our society is incredibly sexual activity, experimental, and perverse. I think the issue is not at all that we are repressed but that sex is managed and oppressed by being associated with unhealthy and negative behavior. I also always assumed that the current state of sex and sexuality stems from religion.