ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I develop the nature of a framework congenial to freedom and the creative exercise of subjectivity. In order to do so, we need to identify two main enemies of such a framework. They may be found first in the traditional framework as it was described, which works by producing subjection, not by opening possibilities of freedom; the second is in a certain shape taken by medical technologies in alliance with scientific research in the service of normalization. Subjection and normalization are two key concepts elaborated by Foucault that may be profitably used in this context. Positively stated, a framework hospitable to freedom and subjectivity requires that care is taken for the subtler texture of life and for how an interest in freedom and giving a personal form to one’s life is the result of social conditions that open the space for truly individual work on oneself. A key author here is Mill. Mill offers instruments in order to criticize the appeal to normative dispositives conceived of as self-standing and sufficient notions. He does this by rethinking the notion of rights and other juridical forms in terms of the conditions of experience which they both make possible and are answerable to. In order to do this, he criticizes the traditional framework and shows that a new framework needs to take place, which produces freedom as its effect, and thus identifies a further enemy—which can be added to the two already explored—in the power of conformity that the majority of people exercise over the individual, which can make it impossible to think, feel, and make choices by oneself. A framework congenial to freedom, therefore, creates the conditions in which continuous experimentation of life is not only possible but actively searched for as individuals and groups. Experimentation here is not for its own sake but aimed at happiness and truth, and at the good life tied to a veritable account of how things are in the world. This realistic version of the defense of individual experimentation is the solution Mill elaborates.
