The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

Johanna Oksala has an ambitious project in this text, covering much more than Foucault's views on freedom. She also focuses on the relationship of his work to phenomenological theory, arguing that though he distanced himself from phenomenology, many of his concerns and methods stemmed directly from his engagement with and criticisms of it. Further, Oksala discusses Foucault's views of subjectivity and agency and explains (in response to criticisms by feminists and others) how his view of the subject as a product of power relations is compatible with his promotion of resistance and practices of freedom. Finally, Oksala addresses the differences as well as the links among three main areas of Foucault's work: archaeology, genealogy, and ethics. The title, therefore, does not do justice to the scope of the text. Though this breadth means that the focus on freedom is at times obscured, on the whole Oksala provides a clear and largely well-supported argument for the various ways in which Foucault discusses and uses the concept of freedom, with several original and promising new readings of parts of his work.

In a brief introduction, Oksala presents the multiple theses of the text and shows how they are meant to fit into her overall argument on Foucault's treatment of freedom. The text is then divided into three parts, entitled "Language," "Body," and "Ethics," in which Oksala (1) outlines the basic method and important arguments of one of three areas of Foucault's work (archaeology, genealogy, and ethics, respectively); (2) explains the main locus of freedom in each area (language, the body, ethics); and (3) explains how Foucault's views in this area are related to phenomenology, focusing on a different phenomenological theorist in each section (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas). [End Page 310]

Oksala argues that there are three main meanings of freedom in Foucault's work. First, there is freedom as "ontological contingency" (189). In parts 1 and 2, Oksala shows how for Foucault, both language (in his archaeological work) and the body (in his genealogical work) are sites of indeterminacy and contingency that allow for transgression of limits, opportunities to "see things differently and expand the domain of what can be thought and imagined" (84). For Foucault, though language can be constraining when it upholds the particular mode of order in a historical period (the episteme as "the historical a priori of an epoch" [22]), it also "demarcates a domain of freedom in the mode of literature" (81). Avant-garde, literary writing can "show the instability of the order of things that we take for granted" and thus the potential for transformation (84). According to Oksala, Foucault also theorizes the possibility of resistance and transgression through the body in his genealogical texts on disciplinary and normalizing power. Though for Foucault power relations serve as "the condition of possibility for the subject" (94) in that they form "the grid of intelligibility for its actions, intentions, desires and motivations" (95), the subject still has the capacity for resistance through experiences and pleasures of the body. Oksala argues that these can transgress limits of discursive intelligibility and thereby contest "discursive definitions, values and normative practices" (132). She notes, however, that Foucault does not provide many details on how this is possible, and she suggests an "uneasy alliance between Foucault and Merleau-Ponty" in order to fill in the gaps: "Phenomenological insights concerning the lived body could enrich Foucault's idea of the body as a locus of resistance" (134). In so doing, Oksala responds to feminist criticisms of both Foucault's and Merleau-Ponty's views of the body and its capacities for engendering freedom.

Foucault also speaks of freedom in a second way as a practice, something deliberately undertaken by subjects through critical reflection on their own beliefs and actions and the power relations that make them possible. This process of reflection can lead to new ways of thinking, being, and acting, in which a subject "materializes the possibilities that are opened...