Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject
"virtue ethics" generally argues for the reinstatement of the priority of virtue as the central ethical concept over the concept of "the good" or "the right" in contemporary moral thought. On virtue ethics, see Anscombe 1981; Foot 1978; Lovibond 2002.
For a contrasting reading that combines Foucault's work on ethics with the scholarship on virtue ethics, see Lovibond 2002.
    50 Although Foucault draws a distinction between "code..oriented" and "ethics..oriented" moralities, he does not consider them incommensurable. For example, he argues that Christianity has had both moralities fu side by side, even if, during diff periods, the relative em.. phasis on each has varied (Foucault 1990, 30).
    sumes that there are many diff ways of forming a relationship with a moral code, each of which establishes a particular relationship between ca.. pacities of the self (will, reason, desire, action, and so on) and a particular
    norm. The precise embodied form that obedience to a moral code takes is not a contingent but a necessary element of ethical analysis in that it is a means to describing the specifi constitution of the ethical subject. In other words, it is
    only through an analysis of the specifi shape and character of ethical prac.. tices that one can apprehend the kind of ethical subject that is formed. These practices are technical practices for Foucault and include corporeal and body techniques, spiritual exercises, and ways of conducting oneself-all of which are "positive" in the sense that they are manifest in, and immanent to, every..
    day life. Notably, the importance of these practices does not reside in the meanings they signify to their practitioners, but in the work they do in consti-
    tuting the individual; similarly, the body is not a medium of signifi on but the substance and the necessary tool through which the embodied subject is formed.
    I fi Foucault's analysis of ethical formation particularly helpful for con- ceptualizing agency beyond the confi of the binary model of enacting and subverting norms. Specifi ly, he draws our attention to the contribution of external forms to the development of human ethical capacities, to specifi modes of human agency. Instead of limiting agency to those acts that disrupt existing power relations, Foucault's work encourages us to think of agency: (a) in terms of the capacities and skills required to undertake particular kinds of moral actions; and (b) as ineluctably bound up with the historically and cul- turally specifi disciplines through which a subject is formed. The paradox of subjectivation is central to Foucault's formulation in that the capacity for ac- tion is ·enabled and created by specifi relations of subordination. To clarify this paradox, we might consider the example of a virtuoso pianist who submits herself to the often painful regime of disciplinary practice, as well as to the hi.. erarchical structures of apprenticeship, in order to acquire the ability-the requisite agency-to play the instrument with mastery. Importantly, her agency is predicated upon her ability to be taught, a condition classically re - ferred to as "docility." Although we have come to associate docility with the abandonment of agency, the term literally implies the malleability required of someone in order for her to be instructed in a particular skill or knowledge a meaning that carries less a sense of passivity than one of struggle, effort, ex- ertion, and achievement.51

    51 One of the meanings listed for docility in the Oxf English Dictiona is: "the quality of teachableness, readiness and willingness to receive instruction, aptness to be taught, amenability to training" (OED 1999 ).

modes ofsubjectivation and the mosque movement

    The approach I am suggesting can be further elaborated by reference to the four elements Foucault posits as central to the study of ethics. This fourfold scheme, however, cannot be taken as a blueprint for the study of ethics; rather, the utility of Foucault's

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