Socializing Empowerment: An Early Buddhist Perspective on the Last Michel Foucault

After having investigated for the greater part of his career the disciplining function of discourses and practices, in his later years, French philosopher Michel Foucault turned his attention to the ways in which individuals may autonomously determine themselves as free subjects.

Inspired by Graeco-Roman sources on the care of the self, he developed a model of empowerment that, by neglecting the interpersonal dimensions of emancipation, largely shares in the same inspiration and limits of (neo-)liberal ethics.

This talk draws from the early Buddhist notion of sati (‘awareness’) to revise and implement the Foucauldian model, arguing that effective personal empowerment always needs to proceed from a deep social embedding. Bringing into the debate on care of the self a tradition such as early Buddhism, which vocally counters individualism with the notion of nonself, allows us both to correct the theoretical flaws of Foucault’s framework and to rephrase it in a cross-cultural fashion.

Federico Minzoni is an Italian Master of Arts in History of Philosophy. He is currently employed as an interfaculty PhD Candidate at the University of Groningen (Faculty of Philosophy — Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society). Before moving to Groningen, he worked for a decade as a high school teacher of Philosophy and History in his home region, South Tyrol. Didactical and pedagogical concerns are still central to his life, both on a professional and personal level.