My dissertation is called "Discourse, Documents, and Counter-Discipline: Michel Foucault's Ethics and the Practice of Writing." It examines the role that writing as an ethical practice plays in Michel Foucault’s work, and analyzes in particular the ways that writing can transform the structure of experience. For Foucault, discourse, power, and subjectivity make up three poles in the structure of experience. Writing promotes the transformation of discourse and the production of knowledge (literature; scientific articles; scholarly books); it documents the control of bodies and allows power to function (files; medical, legal, and psychiatric records; archives); and in documenting the self (diaries; letters; notebooks) it opens the self to knowledge of itself and makes the self an object of others’ knowledge. The importance of the latter function is central to Foucault’s ethics, and it amounts to co-opting a technology of power and turning it to counter-disciplinary ends. Self-writing takes the self as it emerges from discourse and power and works toward new social possibilities.

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