Note on this edition: this is an electronic version of the 1999 book ...

The Demonic in the Self 55Individuality carries enormous ideological and legal weight in our culture.Economic and legal systems are based on the assumption that citizensare autonomous individuals, in full possession of themselves, and thereforealso legally responsible for all their actions. Philosophy is here the other sideof the political; broadly speaking, the “subject” and “subjectivity” evolvedinto central concepts as political power was given over from the hands of asingle sovereign to the “people” – in other words, to the diverse economicaland political structures of a modern society, and to the individuals operatingwithin these structures. 5 Michel Foucault extensively studies the historicalprocess whereby the modern individual was produced. The development of“self” meant, among other things, increasing awareness and control by anindividual towards his or her own behaviour. Everything in the life of amodern individual came under growing attention and scrutiny – from theorganisation of daily life into a regulated timetable to the development ofdiscursive forms for “private” experience, such as sexuality. The individualswere, according to Foucault, “urged to constitute themselves as subjects ofmoral conduct” during this process; they were involved with “the modelsproposed for setting up and developing the self, for self-reflection, selfknowledge,self-examination, for the decipherment of the self by oneself,for the transformation that one seeks to accomplish with oneself as object.” 6Examination and cultivation of one’s own individuality, one’s self, hasbecome one of the central concerns for modern individual. “One can neverknow too much concerning human nature,” claimed the anonymous authorof My Secret Life (1882), a massive autobiography mainly concerned withthe author’s various sexual experiences. 7 As Nikolas Rose has written, the“citizens of a liberal democracy are to regulate themselves”, and in this processthey are assisted by different ‘techniques of the self,’ employed by themselves,or by some of the new classes of professionals dedicated to the examinationand manipulation of the self. 8 Rose summarises :Through self-inspection, self-problematization, self-monitoring, and confession,we evaluate ourselves according to the criteria provided for us bytween the older (‘Elizabethan’) self-assertiveness and the new (‘Puritan’) self-criticism”(Kavolis 1984, 137).5 The creation of modern subjectivity has received a great deal of theoretical attention,especially during the last three decades. The Subject of Modernity (1995) by Anthony J.Cascardi serves as a good example of this discussion. Cascardi takes his starting pointsfrom the critique of Western rationalism by Max Weber and Jürgen Habermas, and criticallyreads the works of such thinkers as Descartes, Hegel, Heidegger, Benjamin, Rorty,and Lyotard. Discussions of art and entertainment, such as Cervantes’s Don Quixote andthe myth of Don Juan, are approached through philosophical discourse, and used partlyas illustrations. Theoretical works of this nature are useful as analyses of our intellectualhistory, but also demonstrate the constant danger – of becoming an endless commentaryof only the canonised philosophers and authors.6Foucault 1986, 29.7 Quoted in Foucault 1978, 22.8Rose 1990, 10.