Subject who dreams:situating the concept of subject and its construction in Foucault's late projects

Abstract

  This paper aims to situate the concept of subject and its construction process that appear in the late works of Michel Foucault from the point of view of its constitutive nature as subject who dreams. My argument commands a new interpretation of the relationship between power and subject, two of Foucault's fundamental concepts which current studies of Foucault have focused on.

  First, the paper examines the concept governmentality and its development in Foucault's thought seen in the lectures at Collège de France in the late 1970s to the early 1980s. Foucault introduced this notion to analyze the governance of European states after the 17^th century as practices of the political rationality. Soon, however, the concept was generalized as “the junction between the techniques of domination practiced over the others and the techniques of self.” This process enabled Foucault to situate care of the self, another key concept in his final years, as a continuation of his previous analysis on subjection through power-knowledge. We find ourselves before a philosophical as well as practical question about the relationship between self with oneself and between self with others.

  In the second and third chapters, two concepts are used to clarify the nature of the subject who dreams : dream and trace. The former was used in the “Introduction” (1954) to the French translation of Ludwig Binswanger's Dream and Existence, Foucault's earliest piece of work, and in his analysis of Artemidorus's Interpretation of Dreams, the first chapter in The Care of the Self (1984), one of his latest pieces. The latter comes from the article “Lives of the infamous ones” (1977).

  With dream, I illustrate two distinct approaches seen in Foucault's concept of subject with regard to western traditions of dream interpretation : a) that the present status of a dreaming subject can never be reduced to a hidden, traumatic past, repressed desires, or archetype images ; and b) that the subject has the power to make a diagnosis of the present as to its current position and, further, to generate its own future from it.

  With trace, I maintain that, while subjects always and already are constructed as subjects within power relations, in the very process of subjectivation are always found traces that may enable one to imagine not only the cruel practices but also the lives of the affected subjects. Of the characteristics of these two concepts is composed the nature of the subject who dreams. In addition, this way of existence of the subject is directly connected to care of the self through the generalized concept of governmentality.

  The above discussion reveals the following fundamental features of care of the self : that its practice is a) based in the present while concerning the future, b) intrinsically situated in power relations, and therefore c) always act both on oneself and on others. Thus we finally come to see a crucial moment in Foucault's thought. It is when questions posed by the subject about its present position and its self-constitutive practices suggest a positive and constitutive subjectivation in the relation between the future and practices toward others and in a society.