Care for Thyself? An Hegelian Critique of the Foucauldian Subject
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the wake of Foucault’s reproach of all political projects “global and radical”, Foucault resuscitates the Stoic concept of epimeleia heautou (care of the self), suggesting self-transformation—"making one’s life a work of art”—to be a potent antidote to domination. By making one’s life a work of art, which entails disengagement from all things that turn one away from oneself, one can circumvent domination, as well as reduce one’s own inclinations to dominate others. Foucault justifies this by claiming that self-relation is ontologically prior to other-relatedness and thus, ethically prior; however, he neglects to delineate how he derives this assumption, making it little more than an arbitrarily posited axiom. I argue that it is upon this assumption that the legitimacy of Foucault’s final era hinges, and hence its tenability warrants investigation. In this paper, I use Hegel’s immanent ontology systematized in the Science of Logic. I dispute Foucault’s claim regarding self-relation’s primacy by demonstrating how self-relation immanently emerges in the passage through an other and I outline the ramifications of holding fast to an unsustainable categorical assumption.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.106 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".