ABSTRACT
As we have seen, the Nietzschean theory of the subject situates subjectivity within a constellation of power and value. Taking on the position of subject of knowledge, experience, politics, law, etc. implies situating oneself within a complex of power relations in which subjectivity is a practice of exercising power, channelling and repositioning it, and an assignment of social, cultural, political and moral values. Already in Foucault’s early work on the history of madness from 1961 (Foucault, 1989: 25), and on the birth of the clinic from 1963 (Foucault, 2003a) we can clearly detect the Nietzschean imprint upon the theses about the subject as an effect of power, its theoretical development and its traces in the archival discoveries of his historical empirical research. In this chapter we will examine three fundamental conceptual insights
from Foucault’s thought of particular relevance for our theory of the ethical subject of security. They stem from three general Foucaultian genealogies of the subject in general. The first concerns the general historicity of the subject. By this we mean the historical variation in the way both the subject is perceived and understood, by itself and by others, as holder and purveyor of truth. The second concerns the evolution in the way power regulates the terms under which the subject constitutes itself as subject. This is the specific genealogy we have been considering so far in our analysis of Nietzsche. The third genealogy, in some ways the conjunction of the first two, regards the evolution of the subject as the seat of the ethical, the centre of the correlation of values and the position from which ethical judgement is translated into action.
