The critical impact of Michel Foucault's philosophy is not based on the explicit theories or judgements he makes, but rather on the approach that he adopts to analysing our present. While science and much of philosophy aim to decipher from among the confusion of events and experiences that which is necessary and can be articulated as universal law, Foucault's thought moves in exactly the opposite direction. He attempts to find among the apparent necessities that which upon closer philosophical scrutiny turns out to be contingent, historical and culturally variable. Everything, especially those things that we are convinced do not have a history, is scrutinized.

This method is also utilized regarding Foucault's conception of the body. He does not present a theory of the body anywhere, or even a unified account of it, and his conception of it has to be discerned from his genealogical books and articles. Yet his philosophical approach to it is distinctive. The body is central for understanding the influence of history and the mechanisms of modern power. Its intertwinement with practices of power means that it has a central role in practices of resistance too: it is capable of displaying a dimension of freedom.

According to Foucault, we believe that the body obeys only the necessary and universal laws of physiology, and that history and culture have no influence on it. In reality, bodies are shaped by society: they are used and experienced in many different ways and their characteristics vary according to cultural practices.

Gérard Lebrun (1989/1992) suggests in an article on Foucault's archaeology that it is worth rereading The Order of Things, at least once, as an anti-Krisis. To present such a reading will be my aim in this chapter. Lebrun points out that The Order of Things and Husserl's Crisis of European Sciences bear many rhetorical, thematic and structural affinities. Both Foucault and Husserl engage in a constructive rereading of the history of philosophy, both prepare their main arguments about modern and contemporary thought with careful analyses of seventeenth-century thought, and both set as their task the elucidation of the fundamental conditions of possibility of scientific knowledge. Some of Foucault's key concepts in OT, such as ‘historical a priori’ originate from Husserl (Lebrun 1989/1992, 32). Yet despite the similarity of their tasks, themes and vocabulary, the two thinkers end up with fundamentally different understandings of the historicity of reason, the conditions of possibility of knowledge, and the development of the sciences. OT sets out to ultimately reveal the failure of phenomenology and to chart a way out the impasse.

Foucault's criticism of phenomenology in OT can be divided roughly into two different types. I will present his discussion here according to this twofold schema, although the issues in question necessarily overlap. Firstly, there is implicit criticism of the phenomenological understanding of the philosophy of science as presented in Husserl's Crisis.

Freedom is a concept that it is repeatedly used today in discourses ranging from political philosophy and rhetoric to self-help guides, yet it seems that it has never been less clear what it means. This is not only due to conceptual confusion or lack of philosophical precision. The effects of the rapid process of economic and cultural globalization have made many of our traditional ways of thinking and living redundant, and have raised critical questions about our ‘freedom’ to command our lives. On the other hand, neo-liberalism and the extreme individualism characterizing our culture have made ‘freedom’ itself a contestable value.

One strand in this present ‘crisis’ of freedom is the critique of an autonomous subject which characterizes post-structuralist thinking. Michel Foucault's thought – and post-structuralist thinking as a whole – is often read as a rejection of the subject. This ‘rejection’ is interpreted in varying terms. The subject cannot ground knowledge, meanings or morality. It is not the agent of social or epistemic changes, but rather the effect of them. There is no subject in itself prior to the normalizing cultural coding that turns the human being into a subject. All possible ways to comprehend oneself and to act in a coherent fashion are conditioned by a historically varying cultural matrix.

The charges against Foucault's thought in contemporary debates often focus on the question of the freedom of the subject and the notions that are understood as intrinsically tied to or dependent on it: autonomy, authenticity, responsibility, political agency.

For Foucault, freedom refers to the indeterminateness of the constitutive matrix and to the contingency of all structures. It is the virtual fractures that appear in the invisible walls of our world, the opening up of possibilities for seeing how that which is might no longer be what it is. Freedom does not mean that everything is possible, but neither is the present a necessity. Foucault writes:

Even though freedom for Foucault is thus not an attribute of the subject, this does not commit us to political apathy and cynicism. Freedom is anarchic in the sense that it disturbs and even breaks every totality, but it must nevertheless not be understood as some absolute and mystical outside. The virtual fractures for thinking and being otherwise will not just appear in the invisible walls of our world, they can only emerge from our practices. We must try to open up possibilities for seeing to what extent that which is might no longer be what it is.

Foucault never developed a theory of ethics, yet his two last books, The History of Sexuality, volumes ii and iii, could be characterized as being concerned primarily with ethics. They deal with the sexual morality of ancient Greece and the Roman Empire. The question that guides Foucault's inquiry is: ‘How, why and in what form was sexuality constituted as a moral domain?’ (UP, 10). The focus of the inquiry is thus on the manner in which sexual activity was problematized, mainly by philosophers and doctors in texts written as guides for others. In the second volume of The History of Sexuality, The Use of Pleasures, the period under study is the classical Greek culture of the fourth century bc.

The Order of Things has been severely criticized by both historians and philosophers. Since its publication, the philosophical criticism has centred around two themes. Firstly, a common charge is that Foucault does not problematize his own position, but assumes it to be situated outside of the epistemic orders he studies. This means that he ends up reiterating the problem of empirical/transcendental circularity of which phenomenology stands accused. Secondly, it has been claimed that Foucault's alternative to the subject-centred approach of phenomenology leads to serious difficulties in conceiving change and consequently also freedom. Archaeology is therefore a step backwards rather than a step forwards from phenomenology: it does not manage to solve the problems with which phenomenology is riddled, but rather adds to them by creating a host of new ones.

Both strands of the criticism are connected to the question of the subject. On the one hand it raises questions about the subject as the writer of its own history. Who is the writer of archaeology? To what extent was Foucault himself determined by the discursive structures under study? The other strand concerns the subject as the agent of change. How can we understand change if we do not study the intentions and motives of the subject? Does freedom not become an impossible idea?

My aim in this chapter is to explicate the question of the subject in connection with the criticism of OT. I will not attempt to clear up all the ambiguities in Foucault's archaeology, however.

Iris Marion Young's book Throwing like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory represented one of the most notable efforts to apply Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body to explicitly feminist issues. The essay ‘Throwing like a Girl’ traces some of the basic modalities of feminine comportment, manner of moving and relation in space. With the help of these modalities Young seeks to make understandable the ways in which women in our society typically comport themselves and move differently from the ways in which men do. She argues, with the help of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body, that the modalities of feminine comportment, motility and spatiality are restricted modes of embodiment. According to Young, Merleau-Ponty describes the lived body as a transcendence that moves out from the body in its immanence in an open and unbroken directness upon the world in action. The lived body as transcendence is pure fluid action, the continuous calling forth of capacities that are applied to the world. In the case of feminine movement the most primordial intentional act – the motion of the body orienting itself with respect to and moving within its surroundings – is inhibited (Young 1990,148). A woman ‘lives her body as a thing, she remains rooted in immanence, is inhibited, and retains a distance from her body as transcending movement and from engagement in the world's possibilities’ (150).

Foucault's understanding of the historical constitution of the body through the network of power/knowledge has influenced feminist theory profoundly: it has provided a way to theorize the body in its materiality while avoiding all essentialist formulations, and has given tools for understanding the disciplinary production of the female body. While a shared focus on bodies has opened up important connections between feminist theory and Foucault's thought, Foucault's apparent denial of the body's capacity for resistance has also been critically pointed out by several feminist writers. It has been argued that Foucault understands the body as too culturally malleable, and that his conception of it is thus one-sided and limited for feminist purposes.

In order to evaluate Foucault's account of the body from the perspective of feminist theory, we must first ask what exactly is meant by the Foucaultian body. The feminist appropriations are based on varying readings of it. Foucault did not present a theory of the body anywhere, or even a unified account of it, and thus his conception of it has to be discerned from his genealogical books and articles, which aim at bringing the body into the focus of history.

In an interview conducted in 1983, Foucault situates his thought, as well as the trends of thought influenced by structuralism, linguistic theory and psychoanalysis in the 1960s as explicit efforts to rethink the phenomenological subject. The phenomenological theory of the subject was his point of departure, and his thought has been an effort to make distance from it (SPS, 442).

The linguistic turn of structuralism and post-structuralism in French thought was thus, according to Foucault, a reaction to phenomenology. The importance of the structuralist method and also of Nietzsche's thought to Foucault lay in the fact that they provided ways of rethinking the phenomenological subject and the historicity of reason as forms of rationality.

Unlike the claim of some of his critics, Foucault's ethics is not a solitary pursuit, nor does he prioritize isolated individuality. Ethical subjectivity is given a form in the practices of the self, but these practices always take place and derive their meaning from an interpersonal situation. Care for the self, according to Foucault, implies complex relationships with others: relationships and duties towards one's family members, society at large, one's spiritual master or guide. The ethos of freedom and self-mastery can only take concrete shape and become a style of life in a particular interpersonal situation in which the ethical acts become ways of dealing with the surrounding community. The self that is cared for is never isolated, but always linked to larger societal structures.

Moreover, the ethical relationship always exists between free individuals.