ABSTRACT
The main emphasis of this chapter is already contained in its title; not selfenlightenment but therapeutic enlightenment. Instead of working out sociological and other kinds of theories of the self, a critical attitude to the kinds of enlightenment that we direct at ourselves needs to look at the forms of authority that have been constructed to arbitrate as to what the self actually is. I claim that any approach to such forms of authority actually requires critical perspectives that have elements in common with nominalist and anti-foundationalist outlooks; that such outlooks are actually the correlate of the kind of authority represented by therapeutic forms of enlightenment themselves. What a critique of enlightenment requires with regard to this field of the politics of subjectivity and selfhood is not another theory of the self, but the means to avoid the requirement for such a theory. The task is, rather, simply to map some of the forms of enlightenment that are already directed at selfhood. That would involve investigation of the extent to which the human sciences have already been engaged in the great project of discovering, liberating and managing the self. A critique of enlightenment might then be in a position to develop something like a strategic response to the contemporary politics of selfhood.
