Taught by ICLS Visiting Professor Simona Forti. She is a Professor of History of Political Philosophy at the Università del Piemonte Orientale, Italy.
Contemporary political-philosophical debate revolves around the question of new forms of power, from biopower to governmentality. Many authors involved, from Giorgio Agamben to Nikolas Rose, claim to be developing core ideas put forward by Michel Foucault: mainly, Foucault’s insight concerning the inextricable tangle of subjectivity and power relations which, accordingly, dismantles the classical liberal and juridical view of the face-off between “the individual – the state.” While they provide original analyses of the functioning of the new forms of power, they nevertheless neglect to delve deeply into the folds of subjectivity.
The course traces a philosophical genealogy of the interrelation between subjectivity, power, and domination in order to shed light on the subjective side of this relation. Readings from Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Primo Levi, Jacques Derrida Judith Butler, will allow us to raise questions that often remain unthought, such as: What is the structure of a subjectivity that easily slides into domination? What desires motivate our attachment to constraining powers, and from where does our anxiety to conform stem? At the same time, drawing on the writings of these authors, we will ask ourselves how to envisage the conditions of possibility for a resistant subject, for an idea of the Self that is capable of creating friction with domination. Far from being a return to the monism of individualism, this Self will turn out to be an “an-archic” subject that blurs the boundaries between ethics and politics.
