Frieder Vogelmann, Im Bann der Verantwortung. Frankfurt/New York: Campus, 2014
Über das Buch
Dass wir verantwortlich handeln sollen, scheint eine selbstverständliche Norm zu sein, die kaum jemand infrage stellt. Doch das war nicht immer so – noch vor 200 Jahren war »Verantwortung« ein marginaler Rechtsbegriff. Was bedeutet die steile Karriere von Verantwortung für unser Denken und Handeln? Was geschieht, wenn Verantwortung in der Arbeitswelt oder in der Kriminalpolitik zu einem verlangten Selbstverhältnis ohne substanzielle Handlungsmacht wird, während die Philosophie Verantwortung an diese Bedingung knüpft?
Content description:
The book demonstrates how large parts of philosophy have fallen under responsibility’s spell, relying heavily on this discursive operator without inquiring into its theoretical and practical consequences. To do so, the book builds on a methodological reading of Michel Foucault’s analysis of practices along the three axes of power, knowledge and self.
Seen from this “archaeological-genealogical” perspective, “responsibility” requires two subject positions: a “bearer” and an “ascriptor” of responsibility. This simple heuristic allows one to analyse the power relations between those two subject positions, the knowledge formations needed to articulate the two subject positions and the self-relation presupposed to occupy them. The book looks into three distinct practice-regimes: of labour (including wage labour as well as the welfare state), of criminality (including policing and punishment practices as well as the criminal trial) and of philosophy.
In all three practice-regimes, there has been a reciprocal transformation of “responsibility” and the practices within which this discursive operator is used. And in all three practice-regimes, responsibility’s self-relation (the self-understanding of those bearing responsibility) has been intensified. But whereas in the non-philosophical practices of labour and criminality, the power relations between the “bearer” and the “ascriptor” of “responsibility”
have been asymmetrically decoupled, thereby dissociating “responsibility” from “agency”, philosophy’s reflections on responsibility have fused both subject positions, thus also fusing “responsibility” and “agency”. This discrepancy, then, leads to philosophy legitimating a discursive operator that works very differently outside of philosophy. Yet philosophy ignores this because “responsibility” (especially as a paradigm for normativity) has become a key term in explicating the specific field of philosophy to itself.
Hence, under responsibility’s spell, philosophy refuses to acknowledge the theoretical and practical effects of its devotion to “responsibility”.
Foucault News 