What thus emerges in my discussion of Foucault’s understanding of Enlightenment is a
theory of Enlightenment as a biotechnic, a technique of taking care of one’s life. Enlighten-
ment is theorized by Foucault as a technique of care-taking. In the next section of this essay, I
discuss further the place of technics and specifically of technology in both Kant’s and Fou-
cault’s essays, in order to then turn towards the third text in the constellation that is under
discussion here: Agamben’s ‚What is an Apparatus?‛ Indeed, while Agamben cites the first
volume of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, specifically its closing section on biopower, as
one of his major influences in the introduction to his study of sovereign power titled Homo
Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Foucault’s shift in the third volume of The History of
Sexuality from biopolitics to biotechnics remains largely unthought in his writings. Instead,
whenever Agamben is forced to address it, a careful thought of technics, technology, and the
care of the self is pushed aside in favor of what Stiegler has characterized as a mystical politics
of the Ungovernable, marked for example in Agamben’s book on Saint Paul, by his embrace of
messianism.
35
Foucault, Gouvernement, 22.
36
Foucault, ‚Enlightenment,‛ 119.
37
Foucault, Technologies, 43.
38
Foucault, Care, 43.
39
Ibid., 45.
40
Ibid.
41
Ibid., 50.
42
Ibid., 53. One of the many valuable points made by Jeffrey Nealon in his recent Foucault Beyond Foucault—
a book that reexamines Foucault’s importance today, and turns to Foucault’s Enlightenment essay through-
out its argument—is that this enlightened care of the self should not be understood as theory’s version of
Nike’s ‚Just Do It‛ motto. Indeed, as my discussion of the tension between potentiality and actuality in
Foucault shows, the ‚doing‛ of ‚care‛ and the ‚labor‛ or ‚work‛ it implies might ultimately have more to
do with an ‚undoing‛ or ‚unworking‛—with the ‚worklessness‛ and ‚inoperativity‛ evoked by Agamben
—than with Nike’s sweatshop-tainted imperative. See Jeffrey Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2008), especially the first chapter.
De Boever: The Allegory of the Cage
Elena: Interesting that the author is split between the extremes of doing or not doing when what does is not done while what is done, is passively accomplished, that is, without identification.
This same mistake is made in cults in which people's possibility of taking responsibility for their act is taken away from them and they are turned into machines doing what the guru wishes them to do: work like slaves to carry out his personal agenda.
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