Birth of the European individual : Outline of a theory of legal practice

The modern subject is what we can call a self-subjecting individual. This is someone in whose inner reality has been implanted a more permanent governability, a governability that works inside the agent. Michel Foucault s genealogy of the modern subject is the history of its constitution by power practices. By a flight of imagination, suppose that this history is not an evolving social structure or cultural phenomenon, but one of those insects (moth) whose life cycle consists of three stages or moments: crawling larva, encapsulated pupa, and flying adult. Foucault s history of power-practices presents the same kind of miracle of total metamorphosis. The main forces in the general field of power can be apprehended through a generalisation of three rationalities functioning side-by-side in the plurality of different practices of power: domination, normalisation and the law. Domination is a force functioning by the rationality of reason of state: the state s essence is power, power is firm domination over people, and people are the state s resource by which the state s strength is measured. Normalisation is a force that takes hold on people from the inside of society: it imposes society s own reality its empirical verity as a norm on people through silently working jurisdictional operations that exclude pathological individuals too far from the average of the population as a whole. The law is a counterforce to both domination and normalisation. Accounting for elements of legal practice as omnihistorical is not possible without a view of the general field of power. Without this view, and only in terms of the operations and tactical manoeuvres of the practice of law, nothing of the kind can be seen: the only thing that practice manifests is constant change itself. However, the backdrop of law s tacit dimension that is, the power-relations between law, domination and normalisation allows one to see more. In the general field of power, the function of law is exactly to maintain the constant possibility of change. Whereas domination and normalisation would stabilise society, the law makes it move. The European individual has a reality as a problem. What is a problem? A problem is something that allows entry into the field of thought, said Foucault. To be a problem, it is necessary for certain number of factors to have made it uncertain, to have made it lose familiarity, or to have provoked a certain number of difficulties around it . Entering the field of thought through problematisations of the European individual human forms, power and knowledge one is able to glimpse the historical backgrounds of our present being. These were produced, and then again buried, in intersections between practices of power and games of truth. In the problem of the European individual one has suitable circumstances that bring to light forces that have passed through the individual through centuries.

The ship of the soul, and other papers.

Mode of access: Internet.

The birth of the Bill of rights, 1776-1791.

Mode of access: Internet.

A memorial service for the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of the Swiss reformer, Ulric Zwingli.

Mode of access: Internet.

The immortality of the soul : considered in the light of the Holy Scriptures, the testimony of reason and nature, and the various phenomena of life and death /

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

The ancient Egyptian doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul

Includes bibliographical references.

The city of the soul /

"First edition printed May 1899; second edition printed December 1899; third edition printed March 1911."

Death and its mystery : before death, proofs of the existence of the soul /

Mode of access: Internet.

The birth of the Prince of Wales : a poem which obtained the Chancellor's Medal at the Cambridge commencement, 1842 /

Mode of access: Internet.

Beyond. A drama of the soul.

At head of title: "Several days before the death of Edgar Allan Poe he had a dream, which, with characteristic vividness, he related to a friend of his, a Baltimore physician. Poe dreamed he was murdered, and in heaven his soul met that of his murdurer. The dream of Poe has furnished the basis of this drama."

The spiritual combat: to which is added, The peace of the soul, and the happiness of the heart, which dies to itself, in order to live to God.

Translation of Combattimento spirituale.