Free Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject by Saba Mahmood Page A

ethics," Foucault's use of Aristotelian ethics is not geared toward asserting its universal validity, or recuperating its various
    elements for solving contemporary moral problems-such as reclaiming the idea of telos or a collective notion of the good life (see, for example, Macintyre

    signifi and to pose a challenge to its logic. From the standpoint of my argument here, it is interesting to note that while Butler wants to emphasize how the body becomes a site of resis- tance to social inscription, and Bourdieu stresses the constraining aspects of embodied social power, both analyze the body through the binary logic ofsubversion and/or consolidation of social norms. What is elided here are the diff modalities through which the body comes to inhabit or live the regulative power of norms, modalities that cannot be captured within the dualistic logic of resistance and constraint.
This should not be taken to mean that Foucault's conception of ethics is anti-- in any
    simple sense. For an insightfu discussion of Kant's infl on Foucault's later work on ethics, in particular the conjoining of ethics and freedom, see the chapter entitled "Self Improvement" in Hacking 2002.
Colebrook argues that Foucault's account of ancient ethics is "a positive ethics in which ac-
    tions are evaluated according to what they do rather than what they mean, 'each having its specifi character or shape"' ( 1998, 43 ) .
    1984; Taylor 1 995 ) .48 Instead, for Foucault, this tradition allows us to think of ethics as always local and particular, pertaining to a specifi set of procedures, techniques, and discourses through which highly specifimoral sub.. jects come to be formed.49 In what follows, I will pursue the direction opened up by this approach-not only because I fi it analytically rich but also be.. cause, as I will explain in chapter 4, aspects of the Aristotelian tradition have been infl ntial in shaping the pietistic practices of Islam.
    Foucault distinguished ethical practices from "morals," reserving the latter to refer to sets of norms, rules, values, and injunctions. "Ethics," on the other hand, refers to those practices, techniques, and discourses through which a subject transforms herself in order to achieve a particular state of being, hap.. piness, or truth (Foucault 1990, 1997a, 1 997b, 1 997c; Martin, Gutman, and Hutton 1988; see also Davidson 1994, Faubion 2001 , and Rabinow 1 997).50 For Foucault, ethics is a modality of power that "permits individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being" ( Foucault 1997b, 225 ) in order to transform themselves into the willing subjects of a particular moral discourse. Despite his attention to the individual's eff at constituting herself, the subject of Foucault's analysis is not a voluntaristic, autonomous subject who fashions herself in a protean manner. Rather, the subject is formed within the limits of a historically specifi set of formative practices and moral injunctions that are delimi®e in advance-what Fou.. cault characterizes as "modes of subjectivation." Foucault thus treats subjec.. tivity not as a private space of self..cultivation, but as an effect of a modality of power operationalized through a set of moral codes that summon a subject to constitute herself in accord with its precepts. "Moral subjectivation," in tum, refers to the models available "for setting up and developing relationships with the self, for self..refl ion, self..knowledge, self..examination, for the de.. cipherment of the self by oneself, for the transformations that one seeks to ac.. complish with oneself as object" ( Foucault 1990, 29 ).

    For Foucault, the relationship between moral codes and modes of subjecti.. vation is not overdetermined, however, in the sense that the subject simply complies with moral codes (or resists them) . Rather, Foucault's framework as.-
Th neo..Aristotelian tradition of