Foucault and the imagination: the roles of images in regimes of power and subjectivity

Abstract

The roles of imagination have been largely missed in Foucauldian literatures on subjectivity and constitutive practices of care for the self. His late inquiries into the practices by which the ancients pursued subject-formation have been situated, largely, within the ongoing debate over the relativity of his philosophical position on the question of the subject as such. In actuality imagination is crucial, I argue, for a Foucauldian understanding both of the processes of subjection by which western regimes have sought to govern human life as well as the practices by which we can nevertheless constitute ourselves as free subjects. The relationships between these processes of subjection and practices of freeing up the subject are not binary, however, and the different functions of imagination in these practices are complex. Liberating imagination requires, as argued here, hostility to the function of the image in constitution of the regimes that subject it.