Pushing against an open door: Agamben on Hadot and Foucault

This article provides a rejoinder to Giorgio Agamben’s interpretation of the Hadot-Foucault dialogue, which appeared in the pivotal ‘Intermezzo’ of The Use of Bodies. In ‘Pushing against the open door’ section, we provide a close reading of Agamben’s claims about Hadot’s alleged misreadings of Foucault on the ancients and on subjectivity more widely. We demonstrate how, far from rebutting Hadot, these claims end up confirming the latter’s positions on Foucault malgré Agamben. In ‘Wisdom, the cosmic dimension, and the “objectivist-exercisant” self’ section, we draw on classicist Christopher Gill’s notion of the ‘objectivist-participant’ self in Greco-Roman Antiquity, to argue that the deepest stakes of the debate between Foucault and Hadot do not implicate Hadot’s incompetence, as Agamben suggests. They concern Foucault’s unease, as well as Agamben’s misunderstanding, of the objective and participative dimensions of ancient conceptions of selfhood. In ‘The ghosts of christianities past’ section, we contest the recurrent tendency of commentators, like Agamben, to assume latent carry-overs of Hadot’s early religiosity in his later works on Greek and Roman philosophy and spiritual exercises as reflecting the long shadow of Christianity in postmodern thought.