The Spell of Responsibility: Labor, Criminality, Philosophy (Essex Studies in Contemporary Critical Theory)

Most people would agree that we should behave and act in a responsible way. Yet only 200 years ago, ‘responsibility’ was only of marginal importance in discussions of law and legal practice, and it had little ethical significance. What is the significance of the fact that ‘responsibility’ now plays such a central role in, for example, work, the welfare state, or the criminal justice system? What happens when individuals are generally expected to think of themselves as ‘responsible’ agents? And what are the consequences of the fact that the philosophical analysis of ‘responsibility’ focuses almost exclusively on conditions of agency that are mostly absent from real life? In this book, Frieder Vogelmann demonstrates how large parts of philosophy have fallen under responsibility’s spell, and he uses a Foucauldian approach in an attempt to break it. The three axes of power, knowledge, and self are used in a detailed analysis of the practical regimes of labour (including the welfare state), criminality (including policing, punishment practices, and criminal proceedings), and philosophy, and of the two subject positions required by ‘responsibility’ – those of the attributors and bearers of responsibility – within them. The power relations between these positions, which Vogelmann carefully excavates from the grounds of our practices, reveal that the deck is stacked unevenly from the start. The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publisher & Booksellers Association) Acknowledgments 10 Addendum for the English Translation 12 1 Introduction 13 Theses 15 Conceptual History 20 Analyses 26 Diffusion through an Increasing Power to Act 26 Individualization as a Neoliberal Strategy 27 Synopsis 30 Notes 34 2 Michel Foucault’s Practices 37 Three Axes 38 Power 39 Knowledge 49 Relation to Self 57 Recapitulation I: A Critical Assessment of the Present 67 Practices 73 Joseph Rouse’s “Scientific Practices” 74 Recapitulation II: On the Status of the Concept of Practices 87 Responsibility as a Discursive Operator 91 Notes 94 3 The Practical Regime of Labor 101 Wage Labor 103 The Topos “Subjectification of Labor” 104 “Responsibility” in Practices of Wage Labor 107 Recapitulation I: “Responsibility” and the Experience of Wage Labor 118 Unemployment 119 The Questioning of “Individual Responsibility” 120 The “Unemployed” of the Neosocial Society 124 Recapitulation II: “Responsibility” and the Experience of Unemployment 129 Notes 131 4 The Practical Regime of Criminality 136 Foucault and Legal Practices 137 The Responsibility of the “Responsibilization Strategy” 141 On the Transformation of the Experience of Criminality through “Responsibilization” 141 “Responsibility” in the Practices of the Responsibilization Strategy 152 Recapitulation I: “Responsibility” and the Experience of Criminality 164 Responsibility in Court 166 Responsibility and Guilt under the Democratic Rule of Law (Klaus Günther) 167 The Theater of Responsibility 175 Recapitulation II: “Responsibility” in the Context of the Law’s Self-Reflection and Self-Staging 180 Notes 185 5 The Practical Regime of Philosophy 192 The Experience of Philosophical Practices 195 “Responsibility” as a Metaphysical Problem 198 Freedom of the Will as Self-Determination 199 Recapitulation I: “Responsibility and Accountability” 212 “Responsibility” as a Moral Problem 213 The Ambivalence of Responsibility (Friedrich Nietzsche) 215 The Relation to Self of the Philosophical Concepts of Responsibility (I): Being Subjugated 220 Recapitulation II: “Responsibility” and Duty 240 The Relation to Self of Philosophical Responsibility (II): Subjugating 244 Recapitulation III: “Responsibility” and the (Moral) Power to Act 264 “Responsibility” as a Given 268 Language as a Pattern of Relations of Responsibility (Robert Brandom) 268 Responsive Normativity (Joseph Rouse Revisited) 287 Recapitulation IV: “Responsibility” in the Normativist Limit Regime 293 Notes 300 6 Under the Spell of Responsibility 312 “Responsibility” and the Experience of Labor, Criminality, and Truth 313 Analysis and Critique 317 Works by Foucault 325 Bibliography 329 Index 357 About the Author 362 Most people would agree that we should behave and act in a responsible way. Yet two hundred years ago "responsibility" was only of marginal importance in discussions of law and legal practice, and it had little ethical significance. What is the significance of the fact that "responsibility" now plays such a central role in, for example, work, the welfare state, and the criminal justice system? What happens when individuals are generally expected to think of themselves as "responsible" agents? And what are the consequences of the fact that the philosophical analysis of "responsibility" focuses almost exclusively on conditions of agency that are mostly absent from real life? In this book, Frieder Vogelmann demonstrates how large parts of philosophy have fallen under responsibility's spell, and he uses a Foucauldian approach in an attempt to break it. The three axes of power, knowledge, and self are used in a detailed analysis of the practical regimes of labor (including the welfare state), criminality (including policing, punishment practices, and criminal proceedings), and philosophy and of the two subject positions required by "responsibility"-those of the attributors and bearers of responsibility-within them. The power relations between these positions, which Vogelmann carefully excavates from the grounds of our practices, reveal that the deck is stacked unevenly from the start. Book jacket Offering an alternative outlook on contemporary (practical) philosophy, this highly original book provides a conceptual history of responsibility within philosophy, including a critical analysis of the relation between philosophy and its social and political contexts.