Which society? Whose power? What nationalism? A response to and questioning of Siniša Malešević and Dominic Hewson

Abstract

The late Foucault's relative lack of attention to such ‘imagined' categories as nationalism/ideology and modernity, as diagnosed by Malešević and Hewson respectively, and his subsequent veering off toward ancient ‘techniques and cultures of the self’, ought to be linked to his profound dissatisfaction with those modern categories’ totalizing and ‘downwardly’ determinative logic. Although undoubtedly important, each such general category constitutes a dimension, not the sole explanans of cultural processes. It seems that such categorical master tropes reached, in Foucault's view, a point of diminishing returns, especially when treated as the factors in interpretive practice of the sociological understanding. At the end of his life, Foucault bypassed positivist preoccupations of his day and focused instead on explicitly existential problems of personal ethics through his theme of 'cultures of the self’. Can we blame Pablo Picasso that he did not do landscapes and was not a Eugène Boudin of his time? Should we reprimand James Joyce for not being a Thomas Mann of a subsequent generation? We believe that the answer to both questions is negative. Criticizing a thinker like Foucault for gravitating toward existential and ethical questions rather than to traditional macro-sociological ones might be to miss the point of his transformative late labor.