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Michel Foucault's work on ethics and the care of the self is fertile ground for thinking anew on the subject of willing selves. However, this chapter aims to wed the "practices of freedom" to politics on the basis of Foucault's work, rather than turn as he did toward ethics (Foucault, 1991, p. 3). By drawing out the singularity of reform and highlighting its political dimensions in Foucault's work on the prison and governmentality, I propose that practices of freedom might be grounded in the ever-shifting grounds of what counts as politics. The contingency of politics is captured by the concept of "neopolitics," used here to indicate politics in a state of adaptation and change. In that contingency, I locate the possibility of practicing politics and freedom in ways that can resist the shaping and instrumentalization of the willing self advanced by the forces of neoliberalism and neoconservativism. In defense of that contingency, I combat the chorus of contention alternately threatening and boasting that the present marks the end of political contingency, such as Francis Fukuyama's declaration of the end of history or the many voices announcing the advent of post-modernity. Rather than at the end, I situate the present in terms of its continuity with the past, both in order to claim politics as a practice of freedom and to reclaim the contingency of politics.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230592087_7

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