Paul Rabinow - Anthropos As A Problem

Anthropos As A Problem

Rabinow’s work on the anthropology of the contemporary was formally initiated by his diagnosis of anthropos (Greek, “the human thing”) as a problem today for thought, equipment, and venues. This diagnosis is carried out most systematically in his works Anthropos Today (2003) and Marking Time (2007). Rabinow describes anthropos as a being which today is burdened with a multiple and heterogeneous truths about itself, a being of hetero-logoi. Modes of inquiry, methods of narration, and principles of verification must be designed in view of the “apparently unavoidable fact that anthropos is that being who suffers from too many logoi.”

It follows that in order to pose and eventually to answer the question “what is anthropos today?” modes of thought are needed which not only open up new possibilities, but also discriminate significance, and forms truth claims into practices for the ethical life. Using a classical formulation, Rabinow argues that anthropos today is in need of paraskeue or equipment for forming logos into ethos. In his 1981-82 lectures at the Collège de France Michel Foucault provided an extensive meditation on the classical notion of equipment. In those lectures Foucault shows that in antique thought the mandate to “know thyself” was connected and oriented to an imperative to “care for thyself.” Ramifying Foucault’s insight in new directions, Rabinow has posed the challenge of inventing equipment adequate to ethical and scientific problems today—contemporary equipment.

If the challenge of contemporary equipment is to develop a mode of thinking as ethical practice, it also involves the design or redesign of venues within which such formation is possible. Rabinow deals directly with the problem of venues in the work Synthetic Anthropos (with Gaymon Bennett) (2009). In that work Rabinow and Bennett argue that the question of where and how the composition of equipment takes place is itself a primary problem site.