Delalande, Nicolas. "Thinking about the Self: an Interview with Jerrold Siegel." LA VIE DES IDEES February 6, 2009.

When I first began to read Michel Foucault in the 1970s, I was troubled from the start by what I saw, and still see, as his underlying attempt to show that many of the institutions and ways of thinking that Western thinkers and societies had furthered on behalf of both individual and social liberation were actually vehicles for introducing new forms of subjection, more pervasive and insidious than Old Regime ones. Thought-provoking and original as these ideas were, they seemed to me wrong-headed, and so did the view of the self that went along with them. This was the notion that in modernity the self came to be constructed inside frames of domination, creating a process that Foucault, with Althusser, called “assujettissement” – a difficult word to translate into English – in which the sense of liberation from old forms of oppression becomes itself an instrument for realising the deeper kind of domination modern ideas and institutions brought. By combining this kind of thinking with motifs taken from Nietzsche and certain avant-garde artistic figures, Foucault put forward two opposed views about the self at the same time, one that made it appear as deeply subjected to exterior domination, while the other portrayed it as on the point of some radical kind of utopian liberation. Trying to understand what made it possible to construct and hold such views, and how they influenced ideas bout the history of the self became some of my chief motives. . . . Derrida’s thinking is based on quite different premises than Foucault’s, and his writings have a very different tone, but fundamentally it seems to me to go in the same direction. I know this is not a view that is widely shared in France, and that many French critics think that we Americans are somehow responsible for the idea that there exists a general phenomenon called post-structuralism that includes both of them. They are right of course to insist on the differences between them, but Derrida’s project from the beginning also was intended to show that the claims of autonomy that had developed in the western tradition from Rousseau on down were false claims, and that as a consequence the selves which we thought of as having some degree of autonomy were actually deluded in thinking they could acquire either epistemological or moral clarity through discursive reason. To show these things was a chief motive for Derrida’s developing a notion of the “death of the subject,” and the theory of language that supports it. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Thinking-About-the-Self.html.