freedom from domination

The mainstream Anglo-American philosophical tradition has only recently begun to break away from an unfortunate caricature of Michel Foucault's accounts of power and subject formation in which life in contemporary Western society is a state of perpetual domination from which individuals are helpless to escape. But for many Foucault scholars, this caricature is startling and even bizarre. In the first place, this pessimistic view is contradicted by Foucault's own politically engaged life. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that Foucault would dedicate such time and care to writing about domination and freedom only to declare that the former is inescapable and the latter an impossible ideal. The problem, as I see it, stems from confusion regarding Foucault's use of the terms 'power', 'domination', 'resistance', and 'freedom'. This confusion is no doubt fueled by Foucault's own lack of clear, systematic definitions of these terms. Moreover, Foucault devotes significantly more time to the discussion of domination than he does to the discussion of freedom in modern contexts. His most notable analyses of freedom focus on the ancient Greek ethics of the care of the self, on the one hand, and a criticism of the Enlightenment concept of autonomy, on the other. Readers are therefore left to speculate as to what freedom from modern forms of domination could be on Foucault's account