Foucault and Postmodern Conceptions of Reason [1st ed.] 9783030489427, 9783030489434

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-viii
Introduction (Laurence Barry)....Pages 1-19
Early Critiques of Modernity: The Human Sciences Between Knowledge and Discipline (Laurence Barry)....Pages 21-49
Governmentality as a Turning Point (Laurence Barry)....Pages 51-71
From Government to Subjectivity (Laurence Barry)....Pages 73-93
Forms of Subjectivity: Subjection/Subjectivation? (Laurence Barry)....Pages 95-118
The Genealogy of the Modern Subject (Laurence Barry)....Pages 119-144
The “Return to Kant” and Autonomy (Laurence Barry)....Pages 145-174
Foucault, Kant, and Critique (Laurence Barry)....Pages 175-203
Concluding Remarks: Foucault and Contemporary Social Criticism (Laurence Barry)....Pages 205-228
Back Matter ....Pages 229-234

Citation preview

Foucault and Postmodern Conceptions of Reason Laurence Barry

Foucault and Postmodern Conceptions of Reason

Laurence Barry

Foucault and Postmodern Conceptions of Reason

Laurence Barry

ISBN 978-3-030-48942-7    ISBN 978-3-030-48943-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48943-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface and Acknowledgments

The context of this work is the ongoing political debate around the sociological fact of multiculturalism in Western societies, and the criticism of reason and rationality it entails. The novelty of the present-day debates comes from a specific voice heard in the literature, a voice sometimes called postmodern, that questions the very basis on which political answers were traditionally built—reason as a warrant of the possibility to resolve issues of the common good. Liberal thinkers such as Rawls and Habermas intend to rescue from these postmodern attacks a form of modern rationality that preserves the achievability of consensus in the multicultural public sphere. But postmodern criticism counter-questions the very attempt to define common norms, arguing that these thinkers are trying to “commensurate the incommensurable”. In this strand of thought, reason is no longer perceived as the source of the good, but rather as an illegitimate urge to unify, that itself propels injustice. All the questions raised in this debate on the nature of modern rationality also impact on the conception of what social criticism should or could be today. Traditionally, it indeed relied on the assumption that a rational and universally valid standpoint exists together with common norms, an assumption that no longer holds. The postmodern criticism of reason that led to this predicament owes much to Foucault’s early inquiries in modern rationalities and their intertwinement with techniques of power, but usually ignores the recently published later texts on the Greco-Roman and early Christian techniques of the self. This book proposes to follow Foucault’s analyses of reason and rationality in order to show how, in his v

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later studies, he strove to establish a critical rationality that leads to “the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject” (TFR 42). This critical attitude is neither a radical criticism of reason, nor an attempt to reach consensus. It can thus offer an interesting answer to the contemporary absence of an ethical standpoint. This work benefited from the insights of many. My deep gratitude goes first to Dan Avnon at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Bruno Karsenti, at the EHESS in Paris, without whom nothing would have happened; to Nicole Hochner and Christoph Schmidt, who took part in the early stages of the crafting of this project. Some have become friends over the years, and I am grateful for their friendship, the suggestions, and encouragement all along. In this journey, I also had the chance to meet angels on the way; they do not even know how a single positive word, as well as their conversations, was significant in moments often rife with uncertainties. I am particularly grateful to Eran Fisher, Judith Revel, Orazio Irrera, Ilana Kaufman, Guillaume le Blanc, Zeev (Andy) Rosenhek, Nancy Luxon, Guilel Treiber, and Anat Ben-David. At Palgrave Macmillan, my gratitude goes to Phil Getz for his enthusiasm, and an anonymous reviewer whose remarks and comments were particularly insightful. As a non-native English speaker, I owe special recognition to Diana Rubanenko, who helped transform my awkward French English into English. I wish to also thank the library staff at IMEC, where I had the privilege to stay twice; to spend time in an ancient abbey, reading Foucault’s manuscripts and listening to his lectures in a church turned into a library, was an unforgettable, inspiring experience. Finally, I would like to thank Michel Foucault; he asked us to read his texts as experiences, in order to transform who we are and the way we live. They certainly had this effect on me. I thus hope to have been faithful to his words. Laurence Barry

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Background: Post-truth and Justice   1 Foucault and the Reconstruction of Reason   3 Chapter Headings  10 References  15 2 Early Critiques of Modernity: The Human Sciences Between Knowledge and Discipline 21 The Human Sciences in the Modern Episteme  22 Knowledge and Discipline  29 Foucault’s Paradox  39 Conclusion  45 References  46 3 Governmentality as a Turning Point 51 The Order of Things’ Division into Epistemes and the Omission of Probability  53 Modernity in the History of Governmentality  58 Modernity, Political Economy, and the Archaeology of Probability and Statistics  62 Conclusion  68 References  69

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Contents

4 From Government to Subjectivity 73 Power/Knowledge and the First Reading of Homer, 1970/71  75 Jurisdiction and Veridiction  77 The Second Reading of Homer, 1981  86 Conclusion  89 References  90 5 Forms of Subjectivity: Subjection/Subjectivation? 95 Subjectivity and Truth  97 Subjection/Subjectivation 103 Conclusion 114 References 116 6 The Genealogy of the Modern Subject119 From Christian Acts of Truth to Greek Care of the Self 121 Veridiction in Contemporary Societies 132 Conclusion 140 References 141 7 The “Return to Kant” and Autonomy145 Autonomy Reconsidered 146 Greek Subjectivation as Autonomy? 158 Conclusion 169 References 171 8 Foucault, Kant, and Critique175 Kant and the Public 176 The Role of the Critical Thinker 185 Conclusion 198 References 200 9 Concluding Remarks: Foucault and Contemporary Social Criticism205 Diagnoses of Modernity: Foucault Versus Horkheimer and Marcuse 206 Critical Attitudes: Foucault and Habermas 213 Concluding Remarks 222 References 225 Index229

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Background: Post-truth and Justice The Enlightenment project aimed to found a new political order based on universal principles of justice. According to Kant, it summons citizens to “emerge” from intellectual immaturity, defined as “the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.” For Kant, reason could be considered a universal tool, “the use [of which] anyone may make as a man of learning,” that would free mankind from injustice (Kant 1784, emphasis added). Yet today, modern reason with its claims for rationality and universalism is no longer seen as universal, but as solely representing—at best—the values of one particular culture (Gray 1995, 123–125; Habermas 1992, 8; Taylor 1995, 27): multiculturalism is a fact. It has recently become sadly commonplace to speak of our contemporary era as one of post-truth, where what is presented as truth by some is attacked by others as a specific cultural opinion at best, or as fake news in the worst of cases. Such a criticism undermines the very foundation of the modern polis. In this limited sense, we are now in a postmodern era. Indeed, once we admit a multiplicity of worldviews, moral guiding norms also become multivocal. As a result, the articulation of an ethical standpoint “that does not shy away from knocking down the ‘parish walls’” (Benhabib 1992, 228) seems to be beyond reach. Paradoxically, the criticism of the modern paradigm of reason seems to end in the impossibility of any constructive social criticism. The treatment of this problem in the literature is twofold. © The Author(s) 2020 L. Barry, Foucault and Postmodern Conceptions of Reason, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48943-4_1

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In the first strand of thought, that adopts the “multicultural vision,”1 modern “universal reason” and rationality are criticized for imposing a coercive “norm of intelligibility” (Butler 1991, 162; 2006, 23–24), for forcing “behavioral norms of respectability,” for ranking people into hierarchical categories (Young 1990, 122–155), and for serving as an exclusionary tool that proceeds through categorization and essentialism (Mouffe 2000, 29–30). This strand of thought also defends the abandonment of an external ethical point altogether, since it is always a particular viewpoint falsely posited as external and objective (Fish 1997, 2258). Within such a perspective, the ethical standpoint, if it exists, remains embedded within each culture, that is it is never external to the specific community it guides but solely relative to it (Walzer 1988, 20, 33–34; Taylor 1991, 96). This form of cultural relativism is comparable to the current mistrust of science which, for the sake of my argument, is considered just another viewpoint (Latour 2004, 227; Habermas 1992, 49). However, while this position claims to be more inclusive, it thwarts social criticism along the lines of a culturally transversal inquiry that depends on the possibility of abstracting contextual occurrences into broader patterns of injustice (Fraser and Nicholson 1989). The second strand of thought aims to accommodate the multicultural predicament without abandoning some form of universal rationality (Habermas 1998; Rawls 2005). Habermas specifically tackles postmodernism which he defines as “the radical criticism of reason” (1987, 86). He proposes instead to contextualize the modern concept (Habermas 1992, 142), noting that the move from traditional to post-metaphysical philosophy means that, instead of reason, contemporary philosophical currents “converge towards the point of a theory of rationality” (Habermas 1984a, 2, emphasis in the original; see also Schnädelbach 1998, 5–6). Besides instrumental reason, he also tries to present as evidence what he defines as “communicative rationality” (Habermas 1992, 50, 139; Cooke 2003, 283) and its capacity to achieve a context-transcending truth, yet immanent in the inter-subjective experience and in specific social interactions (Habermas 1992, 139–142). Habermas indeed argues that 1  I use here the term “multicultural” in the broad sense proposed by Yonah and Shenhav (2005): in their typology, multiculturalism can be summarized by three main strands: liberal, communitarian, and postmodern (which they further divide into postcolonial, post-national, and feminist). All share the criticism of the Enlightenment developed above (see for instance Benhabib (1992)).

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intercultural encounters can lead to fused horizons and common truth (Habermas 1992, 138; Cooke 2011, 480), thus directly challenging the frequent claims of multicultural thinkers for the incommensurability of cultures.2 Both Habermas and Rawls offer political models that limit the scope of universality to the use of universally acceptable reasons in the political domain (Habermas 1998; Rawls 2005), thus reducing reason to its procedural capacity of giving justifications, for the sake of reaching a consensus.3 Yet both Rawls and Habermas are in turn criticized for not giving voice to the plurality of worldviews in the public sphere and for imposing too strong a norm on the political. These models are all the more inadequate as the current trend seems to lean toward a “post-secular” era, in which both cultural and religious groups tend to re-politicize, or politicize their claims (Eisenstadt 2008; Baumeister 2011, 222).4

Foucault and the Reconstruction of Reason In his analysis of “post-metaphysical thinking,” Habermas traces a pervasive continuity in modern philosophy from Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger to French post-structuralists such as Foucault and Derrida who so strongly influence the current “postmodern mood” (Habermas 1992, 140; 1981; see also Benhabib 1992, 14–15). According to McCarthy (1987, xiv), “in Habermas’s dialogue with French post-structuralism, Foucault is the preferred partner. More than any other radical critic of reason, Foucault opens up a field of investigation for social research.” Foucault specifically tackles Habermas’s focus on communication and the ideal speech condition, supposedly devoid of relations of power, as utopian (F1997e, 298), pointing to this proposition as perhaps being too Kantian after all. 2  In a more recent series of essays on religion, Habermas seems to abandon this strong position on the possibility of common truth, admitting that in the encounter between secular and religious worldviews, only the secular are susceptible to change (Cooke 2011, 480–481). This may show that Habermas himself is inclined after all to abandon strong claims for the context-transcending powers of reason, for the sake of a more multicultural thinking. 3  Kompridis (2006, 239–240) highlights the internal tension in Habermas’s thought between his attempt to reach a contextualized consensual truth, and giving it up in favor of a consensus on procedures alone. 4  The reference to a “post-secular” era in itself acknowledges forsaking the use of reason in the public sphere. See also note 2 above on Habermas.

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Yet if Foucault offers a “radical criticism of reason,” this better qualifies the first period of his work, preceding what the literature has called the “ethical turn” (Bernauer & Rasmussen 1987; Andrieu 2004). A first indication of that change can be seen in two versions of the same text, published six years apart. In 1978, Foucault speaks of “reason – the despotic enlightenment” (F1991a, 12);5 in line with his analyses of power, he presents modern scientific and technical rationality as a source of domination and questions its universal validity. In 1984, by contrast, he refers to reason as both “a despot and an enlightenment” (DE II #361, 1587), showing that at this crucial period, he has retrieved other forms of rationality, recognizing positive sides to reason after all. In another late article, he offers a roughly sketched alternative to Habermas’s communicative reason that is, however, far from a radical criticism: here, reason is a “principle of criticism and of permanent creation of ourselves in our autonomy” (TFR 44, emphasis added). While his early writings convey a picture of modern entrapment (Chowers 2004, 165), toward the end of his life he evolved to a position where a certain activity of thought can lead to “the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject” (TFR 42). Foucault’s position on reason and rationality is, then, far more complex than the postmodern claim for “the crumbling away of reason”6: I am not prepared to identify reason entirely with the totality of rational forms which have come to dominate – at any given moment, in our own era and even very recently  – in types of knowledge, forms of technique, and modalities of government or domination; realms where we can see all the major applications of rationality (…) For me, no given form of rationality is actually reason. (…) I can see multiple transformations, but I cannot see why we should call this transformation a “collapse of reason.” Other forms of rationality are created endlessly. (F1998d, 448–449)

One might be tempted here to conclude that Foucault distinguishes between reason as a capacity of the mind, and the practical manifestations of this capacity, the “form of rationality” that reason takes, in a given time

 The French is, literally, “the despotic light of reason” (DE II #219, 433).  This at least is how the interviewer defines postmodernism “according to Habermas” (F1998d, 448); see Habermas (1987, 86) on this equation of postmodernism and radical criticism of reason. 5 6

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and place. This distinction is correct if one adds that Foucault also refuses to attribute any essential meaning to “reason” per se: I don’t believe one can speak of an intrinsic notion of ‘rationalization’ without on the one hand positing an absolute value inherent in reason, and on the other taking the risk of applying the term empirically in a completely arbitrary way. I think one must restrict one’s use of this word to an instrumental and relative meaning. (F1991b 79, emphasis added)

Reason is only the general term that covers the variety of forms rationality can take in practice; for Foucault it is instrumental to this designation.7 It has no essential value, nor is it an “anthropological invariant” (F1991b, 79) but remains historically and culturally determined. Characteristically, Foucault analyzes these historically determined forms of rationality throughout his work. From this perspective, the last years at the Collège de France, together with the final volumes of the History of Sexuality, offer just another of these inquiries. Devoted to the concept of ancient Greek parrhesia and to the care of the self, Foucault’s last studies analyze practices of thinking and truth-telling (or new rationalities?) that constitute the self as an autonomous subject (TFR 42; TFR 335; HSe 1–25). These claims are at odds with his earlier studies of the power-knowledge nexus in which the individual is produced as a subjugated subject. The manner in which these later studies should be understood in relation to Foucault’s diagnosis of modernity and the type of autonomy they render possible for the modern subject, will be at the center of my demonstration in this work. I would like to suggest that the critical attitude implied by the care of the self, if properly defined for the modern subject, allows Foucault to offer an interesting answer to the contemporary absence of ethical standpoint. He indeed neither limits rationality to the offering of acceptable justifications for the sake of a hypothetical consensus, nor does he fall, despite Habermas’s claims, into a radical criticism of reason. In his own words, he intends instead to perform a “rational critique of 7  This is why Foucault sometimes calls himself a “nominalist;” for instance, speaking of power in the History of Sexuality I: “One needs to be nominalist, no doubt: power is not an institution, not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategic situation in a particular society” (HoS 93). In 1980, he rejects the term for philosophical reasons, yet confirms his refusal of universal categories (GL 80). In 1983, he reaffirms his commitment to a “nominalist negativism” (GSO 5, unread).

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rationality” (F1998d, 441, emphasis added). Furthermore, I would argue that this critical attitude is all the more adequate for our multicultural time, as it stems from a criticism of the normativity of the consensus; while Foucault does associate norms and consensus with rational enterprises, these do not exhaust the “endless, multiple bifurcation – the kind of abundant ramification” of the possible forms of reason (F1998d, 442).8 Foucault’s later analyses of ancient Greece and the reappraisal of reason they implied were for long an enigma. It was indeed very difficult, with the sole help of the published material, to follow Foucault’s thought from a drastic criticism of modernity to the constitution of a moral self in Antiquity. From this viewpoint, the last two volumes of the History of Sexuality were received with bewilderment. As Davidson puts it: Without access to Foucault’s courses, it was extremely difficult to understand his reorientation from an analysis of the strategies and tactics of power immanent in the modern discourse on sexuality (1976) to an analysis of the ancient forms and modalities of relation to oneself by which one constituted oneself as a moral subject of sexual conduct (1984). (Davidson 2011, 25)

For Elden (2016, 3), the lectures “give an invaluable sense of how Foucault’s work was developing.” Elden’s endeavor is to grasp Foucault’s thought and life in general through the lens of the lectures; he also offers a thorough reconstruction of the strata that lead to specific claims or formulations in a given historical context of Foucault’s life. My focus here is narrowed to Foucault’s changing conceptions of reason. The recent completion of the publication of the 1980’s lectures at the Collège de France,9 that focus on the self-constitution of the subject (but no longer how it is subjugated by power), allows such a project. These publications have given way to an extensive literature on “the subject and truth” (Cremonesi et al. 2016) and the relation of Foucault with ancient Greek philosophy (Zarka 2002; Guenancia 2002; Gros (ed) 2002; Gros & Levy (eds) 2003). 8  Hence the somehow provocative title given to this work, Foucault and Postmodern Conceptions of Reason. It is all the more so as Foucault, asked in 1983 to comment on postmodernism, ironically answers: “what are we calling postmodernity? I am not up to date” (F1998d, 447). 9  1979–1980 On the Government of the Living (Palgrave, New York, 2014); 1980–1981 Subjectivity and Truth (Palgrave, New  York, 2017); 1981–1982 The Hermeneutics of the Subject (Palgrave, New York 2005); 1982–1983 The Government of Self and Others (Palgrave, New York, 2010); 1983–1984 The Courage of Truth (Palgrave, New York, 2011).

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The criticism voiced in some of these studies aims at showing how Foucault “missed the Greeks,” either by misinterpreting them or by overlooking some essential part of the Greek culture. My intention is different: I would like to understand why Foucault chose to read the Greeks as he did; what did he find there that seemed to him relevant to our contemporary time? My aim would be to make explicit the consequences of these studies for Foucault’s concepts of modern reason and rationalities. In this endeavor, my work lies along the lines of Allen’s (2008) and Koopman’s (2013) who both consider that the late Foucault should not be read in contradiction to his earlier writings, but rather as rounding out his previous diagnosis of modernity. Yet I would like to show that the 1978 and 1979 lectures on governmentality and the liberal exercise of power play a crucial part in this completion, a point not shared by these authors.10 It is my contention that a focus on the “late Foucault,” as he is revealed by the last years of lectures at the Collège de France, permits a reappraisal of his concepts of reason and rationality—concepts that are omnipresent in his writings. A reappraisal of that kind has not been performed so far; indeed, Foucault’s definition of the care of the self as an aesthetical enterprise led to the overlooking of the rational dimension involved in these techniques. This project seems to me important, since it would enable giving an alternative answer to the present-day crisis of social criticism (Trom 2008). It is my assumption here that by displacing the concept of reason, along the lines offered by Foucault in his later writings, one might be able to retrieve such an ethical standpoint. The aim of this book is therefore to analyze the concepts of reason and rationality as they can be derived from Foucault’s writings, in order to displace his commonly admitted “criticism of rationality” toward a more positive view that would remain compatible with the multicultural predicament. Could Foucault’s late inquiries help define a form of rationality relevant to the constitution of a critical attitude that is so crucially missing today? For two main reasons, this endeavor might initially seem surprising. The first is that the criticism of Enlightenment, to which Foucault himself largely contributed, revealed, according to Benhabib (1992, 4), “the illusions of a self-transparent and self-grounding reason, the illusion of a 10  With the exception of academic years 1970–71, 1971–72, and 1973–74, the lectures always took place from January to March or April (“from the Nativity to the Resurrection,” says Foucault in 1982 (HSe 395)); hence for simplification I will only mention the calendar year of the lectures.

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disembedded and disembodied subject, and the illusion of having found an Archimedean standpoint, situated beyond historical and cultural contingencies.” I would like to argue in this work that the critical rationality that Foucault proposed in his last texts escapes those illusions without abandoning the critical attitude altogether. The second point is that my inquiry intends to give a normative meaning to Foucault’s text, a meaning that he himself painstakingly avoided giving (F2001b, 245, 287; F2001d; TFR 47).11 Yet I believe that such a reading is possible since a norm exists in his text that is not explicitly formulated, precisely because it cannot be encapsulated into normative precepts. Foucault for instance describes his endeavor in a 1983 interview as follows: There is a very tenuous “analytic” link between a philosophical conception and the concrete political attitude of someone who is appealing to it; the “best” theories do not constitute a very effective protection against disastrous political choices (…) I do not conclude from this that one may say just anything within the order of theory, but, on the contrary, that a demanding, prudent, “experimental” attitude is necessary; at every moment, step by step, one must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, with what one is. (…) If I have insisted on all this “practice,” it has not been in order to “apply” ideas, but in order to put them to the test and modify them. The key to the personal political attitude of a philosopher is not to be sought in his ideas, as if it could be deduced from them, but rather in his philosophy-as-life, in his philosophical life, his ethos. (TFR 374, emphasis added)

In the introduction to the last volumes of the History of Sexuality, Foucault mentions that this last work on the care of the self brought him to a point of “looking down on oneself from the above” (UPe 11). This metaphor illustrates, in my view, the fact that the rational techniques through which the subject is actively constituted are very similar to those which create the subjected subject of the disciplines. It is as if the point where Foucault is now standing is at the exact encounter between the two forms of thinking: the one that disciplines the self; the other that constitutes him as an autonomous subject. 11  He has also been criticized for his supposedly “strictly descriptive attitude” (Habermas 1987, 282), and for his “cryptonormativism” (Habermas 1987, 282–286; Fraser 1981, 282). Both Habermas and Fraser however wrote their criticism before the lectures were available. Habermas also consistently avoids directing the later Foucault (see Kelly 1994, 4).

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I will argue here that such an encounter was rendered possible by the concept of governmentality, a concept at the heart of the 1978 and 1979 lectures and in the background of the following years. In a 1980 lecture in Berkeley, Foucault contends that “the point of encounter between the way people are driven to behave in a certain way and the way they conduct themselves is government” (HOW; see also Gros 2001, 507, n. 30). Lemke rightly mentions that “governmentality” appears as “the missing link” between the analyses of power and those of the Greeks’ sexuality (Lemke 2002, 51). This Foucaldian concept became known through the summary of the lectures (published in 1994) and the 1991 book by Burchell, Gordon, and Miller, The Foucault Effect – Studies in Governmentality. But it is only with the full publication of the lectures that the importance of the concept and its relevance for both the analyses of power and those of the subject becomes apparent. While Lemke concentrates on the implications for the contemporary subject of neoliberalism as a novel technique of power (Lemke 2002; see also Lemke 2019), my intention here is to establish how Foucault’s thesis that the neoliberal era marks the entrance into a new regime of truth (BBe 18–20) called for further analyses of processes of subjectivation. Furthermore, the neoliberal techniques of government lift the physical constraint to uniformization, replacing it by other rational injunctions that propel “systems of difference” (BBe 259). Hence Foucault’s endeavor to define “a politics of ourselves” in the form of a new care of the self as an answer to neoliberal governmentality (BHS 223) is both a form of resistance and interestingly adjusted to our multicultural condition.12 Finally, I would like to argue that the critical attitude implied by the care of the self is in fact a form of autonomy that Foucault is claiming as possible, yet not self-evident, for the modern self. According to Allen, one of the main issues of modern political and social sciences is the paradox of theorizing the “massive impact that social, political, cultural, and discursive structures have on the very formation of us as individuals,” without “painting an overly deterministic picture of the role that structures play in constituting individuals, thereby implicitly denying or at the very least undermining the possibility of individual subjectivity, agency, and 12  The publication of the 1979 lectures has led to an acute debate on whether Foucault was a neoliberal enthusiast or a visionary critic of our contemporary modes of government (Lorenzini 2018; Gamez 2018; Zamora and Behrent 2015): I emphatically stand with the second option.

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freedom” (Allen 2000, 128). With the concept of governmentality as “the conduct of conducts,” I would like to argue, Foucault overcomes this paradox. Yet he had to refine his analyses of the processes of subjectivation, in order to show both how one is formed as a subjected subject and under which conditions one might rationally transform one’s self into an autonomous one. The claim that, with his critical rationality, Foucault establishes a form of autonomy goes against recent interpretations of his later writings, that rather emphasize agency (Bevir 2013, 120, 155–156), self-transformation (Allen 2008; Allen 2011), or transformative freedom (Koopman 2013). Yet a reading of the interviews in tandem with the 1980 lectures shows that Foucault is indeed transforming the Kantian concept of autonomy, in order to adjust it to his own time and our own.

Chapter Headings Focused on the new material presented by the Collège de France lectures that started in 1970, this book gives only a short introduction to Foucault’s prior work. The second chapter is dedicated to the understanding of reason as it can be defined within his first writings: from the publication of his thesis as The History of Madness (HM) until Discipline and Punish (DP), reason is identified with scientific discourse; The Order of Things (OT) is a criticism of the human sciences as a modern domain of knowledge, in which man is entrapped in the vicious circle of being both a transcendental subject and an object of knowledge. Foucault’s first understanding of the human sciences is further developed in the analyses of power: sociology, psychology, and criminology now become instruments in the exercise of power, both created by and creating a new kind of regime, that of discipline. Most of what has been said about Foucault’s criticism of reason stems from these writings. Yet I would like to show that Foucault reaches a point of rupture after Discipline and Punish that will force him to revise his stance on modernity, the mechanisms of power, and the type of rationalities they propel. Foucault’s moment of crisis after the publication of the first volume of The History of Sexuality is often mentioned in the literature (e.g. Elden 2016, 79; Eribon 2011, 440–441). This crisis is overcome, I would like to argue, with the 1978 lectures at the Collège de France, Security, Territory, Population (STPe), as a turning point in Foucault’s thought. They indeed announce the focus on governmentality that will be the core of his research until his death, showing that this concept allows him to overcome the

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paradoxes and contradictions of his first analyses of power. It has been less noticed that the first three lessons of the 1978 lectures are in fact a thorough rereading of his own findings on political economy as set out in The Order of Things (OT), continued the following year in the 1979 lectures. The third chapter proposes following that rereading, in order to open a new point of entry into the concept of governmentality: probability and statistics, minorized in OT, give a new grid of understanding to modern phenomena. In this revised analysis, modern power is not solely exercised in the mode of the disciplinary, but also through the production and management of freedom.13 The turn to the studies of governmentality also meant a renewed approach to the relations between truth and power. After 1979, Foucault indeed displaces the description of his work to “the history of the regime of veridictions,” in contradistinction to a history of error or a history of ideology. The fourth chapter shows how Foucault’s late focus on forms of subjectivity stems from his understanding of very specific features of our contemporary, neoliberal world: Foucault was indeed strikingly led to consider, in the course of the 1979 lectures, the possibility that individuals could be governed without any subjection. By recognizing the importance of veridiction (or manners of truth-telling) in the mechanisms of the liberal and neoliberal exercise of power, Foucault shows that social constraints are not necessarily applied to the bodies; as a result, the process of subjectivation as subjection is enlarged to other forms of subjectivity.14 The fifth chapter follows Foucault’s analyses on this point, showing that, in Greco-Roman times, the Christian absolutely subjugated subject had an alternative in the form of a self-mastering subject. In the conclusion to The History of Sexuality, Foucault remarks that if very similar sexual practices, that he identified in the Greeks and Early Christians, led to so different forms of subjectivity, then the effect does not derive from the practice itself but from the mode of thinking which accompanies it, the bind to truth and its content. Hence my argument, rather neglected in existing literature, but which becomes clear with the 1981 lectures: subjectivation is a rational process by which an individual either constitutes himself or is constituted into a subject. Subjectivation appears as the 13  This chapter was published in 2017 in Materiali Foucaultiani, vol. VI, number 11–12, and is reproduced here with their kind permission. 14  An earlier version of this chapter is to be published in M. Faustino & G. Ferraro (eds), 2020, The Late Foucault: Ethical and Political Questions (London, Bloomsbury).

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reflexive capacity to establish a relation between self and truth. With the techniques of the self, Foucault has demonstrated a third dimension to rationality—alongside epistemological knowledge and techniques of power, it points to rationality in relation to self, the effect on the self of the way we think. Furthermore, subjectivation does not necessarily mean subjection, and can also take the form of autonomy. The sixth chapter performs, after Foucault, a genealogy of the modern subject and attempts to retrieve a diagnosis of our current subjectivity. Subjectivation relies on the assumption that the access to truth is conditioned by the transformation of the subject. According to Foucault, our modernity, starting with Descartes, lost that understanding of the care of the self. Once truth is understood under scientific categories, the idea of “a price to pay” in order to gain access to truth becomes incomprehensible. This does not mean that the techniques of the self have stopped functioning; on the contrary, Foucault shows how the human sciences actually incorporated these techniques in order to mold the modern subject. The positivism of the human sciences actually led to the production of a modern self, a subject unaware of the possibility of actively transforming himself. The injunction, at the beginning of the 1982 lectures, to “a politics of ourselves” in the form of a modern care of the self, might then be put in relation with the conceptualizing of power as governmentality, and the possibility opened for the modern individual to constitute himself as an ethical subject, in a manner that remains to be defined. In the last years of his life, and specifically in the first lecture of 1983, Foucault refers time and again to Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?”; it is my contention that Foucault strongly emphasized that text precisely because it deals with the possibility of a modern form of autonomy. Kant’s injunction to “exit from tutelage” echoes Foucault’s interest in the counter-­conducts correlative of governmentality and the conduct of conducts. The seventh chapter aims at retrieving from Foucault’s late reading of Kant the kind of rational transformation that might lead the modern self to autonomy. This autonomy is a work on the self and remains a bind to some truth. Yet in contradistinction to both Kant and the late Stoics, it does not take the form of a universal law. The eighth chapter will analyze the form of critical attitude that Foucault suggests adopting in contemporary times. If, as shown in Chap. 7, autonomy is enabled by proper work on the self, it cannot be obtained without a confrontation with “consensus and stereotypes” as they appeared, in modern times, in “the public.” Hence the importance given

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to the analysis of the public in the 1983 lecture on Kant: alongside considerations on the nature of the disciple’s relations to the guide, Foucault gives it the dual sense of expressing the consensus and confronting it. On the one hand, the ordinary problematizations have to be tackled as what forms us into subjects, always already subjugated in a given regime of truth. On the other hand, Foucault’s own work as critique, and arguably any transformation of the self, would not be possible without this struggle. In any case, this critical attitude as an activity of thought, for the transformation in thought, is the last rationality that Foucault seems to study—a critical rationality. Foucault defines it as “ethical differentiation,” in the striving for one’s own path out of the consensus. Chapter 9 finally compares Foucault’s critical attitude with other contemporary forms of social criticism. Where the Frankfurt School’s tradition is easily discarded because it still takes the modern subject as a given and conceptualizes power as repression, the confrontation with Habermas is more fruitful. Indeed, both Habermas and Foucault recognize in late modernity the importance of the subject’s formation within social norms. But here ends the parallel, since the process of socialization is itself for Habermas the warrant of autonomy, as the acceptance of the moral norm of the consensus. For Foucault, by contrast, autonomy cannot be obtained without a fundamental confrontation with common norms, their consensus never granting them any legitimacy. Foucault offers instead the ethical differentiation of the critical attitude as a work on the self, in thought. * * * In the Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault questions the attempt to look at one author’s writing as an opus, as a unity of discourse (AK, 23–24). My inquiry will not follow his advice: my intention is to mark the discontinuities and track the elements that can explain the shift in his way of thinking, thus respecting his claim to “non-unity.” Yet I do think there is an opus, a story that can be told from the first writings to the last lectures. In 1980, Foucault describes his trajectory as follows: For me theoretical work (…) does not consist in establishing and fixing the set of positions on which I would stand and the supposedly coherent link between which would form a system. My problem, or the only theoretical work that I feel is possible for me, is leaving the trace, in the most intelligible

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outline possible, of the movements by which I am no longer at the place where I was earlier. (GL 76)

I propose in this book to follow that trace, and therefore the chapters are chronologically presented: they can however be read independently. I will crucially rely on the lectures at the Collège de France, making this book one of the first monographs focused on this new material. Harcourt mentions that Foucault used to write three manuscripts of the books he finally published; the first draft concentrated on all “what he did not want to publish” on the issue at stake, the second being the real draft of the final manuscript. Harcourt therefore concludes that “as a historical matter, it is possible that these lectures represent the first draft: what he did not feel that he needed to say or necessarily wanted to say. So that should put us, I think, in a bit of a cautious interpretive position to begin with” (Becker et al. 2012, 8). In the work that follows, I do not adopt this cautious attitude because, contrary to the first draft of a book, the lectures were public, although in an oral format. Nora, Foucault’s publisher,  recalls for instance that Foucault had less reticence concerning their publication than for other unpublished material, yet he considered it “would demand a lot of work for not much” (Nora 2018, personal translation). There is though one kind of occurrence where I think that caution is needed. A quick look at the manuscripts of the lectures shows that Foucault paid great attention to the words of the text; most of them were completely pre-written. In their recent publication, the editors took care to make a comparison between these manuscripts and the audio recording (when it exists). One thus notices that entire passages, although prepared by Foucault in writing, were not in fact read, either due to lack of time or for some other reason. While those passages are especially interesting, because they reveal the hesitations, the issues at stake, and the way Foucault overcomes them—or not—they should definitely be taken with specific caution; I therefore noted in the quote references that the text was unread. Finally, many if not all of Foucault’s demonstrations are based on textual interpretations. These include a wide variety of sources, from Antiquity or Early Christianity to modern texts. While a reading of Foucault with a contextual end might have been a highly interesting enterprise, I did not try here to find out whether “Foucault was right about the Greeks,” or the early Christians. Nor did I try to validate his interpretation of a given text with other contradictory interpretations. My reading is therefore

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text-oriented toward his text, with the limited yet fascinating aim of following Foucault’s own trajectory in his criticism and reconstruction of reason and rationalities.

References Foucault’s Work AK 2002. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge Classics. BB 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics – Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. BHS  1993. About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth. Political Theory 21 (2, May): 198–227. CT 2011. The Courage of Truth – Lectures at the Collège de France 1983–1984. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DP 1995. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage Books. GL 2014. On the Government of the Living – Lectures at the Collège de France 1979–1970. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. GSO 2008. The Government of Self and Others – Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–1983. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. HM 2006. History of Madness. New York: Routledge. HoS 1978. The History of Sexuality I. New York: Random House. HSe 2005. The Hermeneutics of the Subject  – Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. OT 1994. The Order of Things – An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books. ST 2017. Subjectivity and Truth – Lectures at the Collège de France 1980–1981. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. STPe 2009. Security, Territory, Population – Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. TFR 1984. The Foucault Reader, ed. P. Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books. UPe 1990. The Use of Pleasures. New York Vintage Books.

Articles F1991a. 1991 [1978]. Introduction. In The Normal and the pathological, ed. G. Canguilhem, 7–24. New York: Zone books. F1991b. 1991 [1978]. Questions of Method. In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 73–86. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

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F1997e. 1997 [1984]. The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom. In The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.1, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, 281–302. New York: The New Press. F1998d. 1998 [1983]. Structuralism and post-structuralism. In The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Vol.2, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion and Paul Rabinow, 433–458. New York: The New Press. F2001b. 2001 [1978]. Interview with Michel Foucault. In The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.3, Power, ed. James D.  Faubion and Paul Rabinow, 239–297. New York: The New Press. F2001d. 2001 [1981]. Omnes et Singulatim. In The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.3, Power, ed. James D. Faubion and Paul Rabinow, 298–325. New York: The New Press.

Audio Materials Online HOW 1 & 2  Howison Lectures I and II, Audio Version. Available on line at: http://ubu.com/sound/foucault.html

Works

in

French

DE II  2001 [1994]. Dits et Ecrits, II 1976–1988. Paris: Quarto-Gallimard.

Other Authors Allen, Amy. 2000. The Anti-Subjective Hypothesis: Michel Foucault and the Death of the Subject. The Philosophical Forum XXXI (2, Summer): 113–130. ———. 2008. The Politics of Ourselves – Power, autonomy and gender in contemporary critical theory. Columbia University Press: New York. ———. 2011. Foucault and the Politics of Our Selves. History of the Human Sciences 24 (4): 43–59. Andrieu, Bernard. 2004. La fin de la biopolitique chez Michel Foucault: le troisième déplacement. Le Portique 13/14: 2–9. Barry, Laurence. 2017. Foucault’s 1978 lectures and the archaeology of probability and statistics. Materiali Foucaultiani VI (11–12, January–December): 119–139. ———. 2020. From Jurisdiction to Veridiction: The Late Foucault’s Shift to Subjectivity. In The Late Foucault: Ethical and Political Questions, ed. M. Faustino and G. Ferraro. Bloomsbury: London. Baumeister, Andrea. 2011. The Use of “Public Reason” by Religious and Secular Citizens: Limitations of Habermas’s Conception of the Role of Religion in the Public Realm. Constellations 18 (2): 222–242.

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Becker, Gary S., François Ewald, and Bernard E. Harcourt. 2012. Becker on Ewald on Foucault on Becker American neoliberalism and Michel Foucault’s 1979 ‘Birth of Biopolitics’ lectures. University of Chicago Institute for Law & Economics Olin Research Paper No. 614; Public Law Working Paper No. 401, University of Chicago. Benhabib, Seyla. 1992. Situating the Self – Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. Routledge: New York. Bernauer, James, and David Rasmussen, eds. 1987. The Final Foucault. MIT Press: Cambridge. Bevir, Mark. 2013. A Theory of Governance. GAIA Books: Berkeley. Burchell, Graham, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds. 1991. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Butler, Judith. 1991. Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of Post-modernism. Praxis International 11: 150–165. ———. 2006. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge. [1990]. Chowers, Eyal. 2004. The Modern Self in the Labyrinth – Politics and the Entrapment Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cooke, Maeve. 2003. The Weaknesses of Strong Intersubjectivism – Habermas’s Conception of Justice. European Journal of Political Theory 2 (3): 281–305. ———. 2011. Translating Truth. Philosophy and Social Criticism 37 (4): 479–491. Cremonesi, Laura, Irrera Orazio, Lorenzini Daniele, and Tazzioli Martina. 2016. Foucault and the Making of Subjects. London/New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Davidson, Arnold. 2011. In Praise of Counter-Conducts. History of the Human Sciences 24 (4): 25–41. Eisenstadt, Shmuel Noah. 2008. The Transformation of the Religious Dimension and the Crystallization of New Civilizational Visions and Relations. In Religion and Democracy in Contemporary Europe, ed. G. Motzkin and Y. Fisher, 21–31. Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute. Elden, Stuart. 2016. Foucault’s Last Decade. Polity: Cambridge. Eribon, Didier. 2011. Michel Foucault. Flammarion: Paris. Fish, Stanley. 1997. Mission Impossible: Setting the Just Bounds between Church and State. The Columbia Law Review 12: 2255–2333. Fraser, Nancy. 1981. Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions. Praxis International 3: 272–287. Fraser, Nancy, and Linda Nicholson. 1989. Social Criticism without Philosophy: and Encounter between Feminism and Postmodernism. Social Text 21: 83–104. Gray, John. 1995. Enlightenment’s Wake – Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age. Routledge: London. Gros, Frederic. 2001. “Situation du Cours” in L’Herméneutique du Sujet – Cours au Collège de France 1981–1982, 489–526. Paris: Seuil-Gallimard. Gros, Fréderic, ed. 2002. Foucault – le courage de la vérité. Presses Universitaires de France: Paris.

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Gros, Fréderic, and Carlos Levy (eds). 2003. Foucault et la Philosophie Antique. Kimé: Paris. Guenancia, Pierre. 2002. Foucault/Descartes: la question de la subjectivité. Archives de Philosophie 2 (Tome 65): 239–254. Habermas, Jurgen. 1981. Modernity vs Postmodernity. New German Critique 22 (Winter 1981): 1–14. ———. 1984a. I, Theory of Communicative Action, Vol I: The Rationalization of Society. Beacon Press: Boston. ———. 1984b. II, Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Beacon Press: Boston. ———. 1987. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge: MIT Press. [1985]. ———. 1992. Postmetaphysical Thinking. MIT Press: Cambridge. ———. 1998. The Inclusion of the Other. Cambridge: MIT Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1784. What Is Enlightenment? [Was ist Aufklärung?]. http:// philosophy.eserver.org/kant/what-is-enlightenment.tx Kelly, Michael, ed. 1994. Critique and Power – Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate. MIT Press: Cambridge. Koopman, Colin. 2013. Genealogy as Critique  – Foucault and the Problems of Modernity. Indiana University Press: Bloomington. Latour, Bruno. 2004. Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern. Critical Inquiry 30 (2, Winter): 225–248. Lemke, Thomas. 2002. Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique. Rethinking Marxism 14 (3): 49–64. ———. 2019. Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique. London/New York: Verso Books. Lorenzini, Daniele. 2018. Governmentality, Subjectivity, and the Neoliberal form of Life. Journal for Cultural Research 22 (2): 154–166. McCarthy, Thomas. 1987. “Introduction” to Habermas (1987). In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, i–xvii. Cambridge: MIT Press. Mouffe, Chantal. 2000. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso. Nikolas, Kompridis. 2006. Critique and Disclosure – Critical Theory Between Past and Future. MIT Press: Cambridge. Nora, Pierre. 2018. L’histoire était le milieu intellectuel de Foucault. L’Histoire 444 (fév. 2018). Online: https://www.lhistoire. fr /%C 2%AB %C2 % A 0 l h i st o i r e -% C 3 % A 9 t a i t -l e -mi l i e u-i nte l l e c tue l de-foucault%C2%A0%C2%BB Patrick, Gamez. 2018. Did Foucault Do Ethics? The ‘Ethical Turn,’ Neoliberalism, and the Problem of Truth. Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy  – Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française XXVI (1): 107–133. Rawls, John. 2005. Political Liberalism. New  York: Columbia University Press. [1993].

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Schnädelbach, Herbert. 1998. Transformations of the Concept of Reason. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 1: 3–14. Taylor, Charles. 1991. The Malaise of Modernity. Concord: Anansi. ———. 1995. Two Theories of Modernity. The Hastings Center Report 25 (2, Mar–Apr): 24–33. Trom, Danny. 2008. La crise de la critique sociale vue de Paris et de Francfort. Esprit Juillet 2008: 108–126. Walzer, Michael. 1988. Interpretation and Social Criticism. Available online: http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/documents/walzer88.pdf Yonah, Yehuda, and Yehuda Shenhav. 2005. What Is Multiculturalism  – The Politics of Difference in Israel. Hebrew: Tel Aviv, Babel. Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Zamora, Daniel, and Michael Behrent, eds. 2015. Foucault and Neoliberalism. 1st ed. Cambridge, UK/Malden: Polity. Zarka, Yves Charles. 2002. Foucault et l’idée d’une histoire de la subjectivité: le moment moderne. Archives de Philosophie 2 (Tome 65): 255–267.

CHAPTER 2

Early Critiques of Modernity: The Human Sciences Between Knowledge and Discipline

The timespan of this chapter is the longest of the book, as it covers the period from the publication of Foucault’s thesis, History of Madness in the Age of Reason (HM)1 in 1961, until Discipline and Punish (DP) and the first volume of the History of Sexuality (HoS), in 1975 and 1976 respectively. During this period, reason is broadly identified with scientific discourse, in a manner specified below. Foucault’s first two books, History of Madness and The Birth of the Clinic (BC) both focus on the “Classical age,” the period that starts in the middle of the seventeenth century until approximately the end of the eighteenth, when, for Foucault, the modern period begins (OT xxii).2 Both books can be read as examples of more general considerations on knowledge and modernity. The culmination of 1  Foucault’s thesis in French, Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l’Age Classique (HFAC) was published in 1961. An abridged version was translated into English as Madness and Civilization in 1964. Foucault revised the French version (with a new preface) in 1972. A new translation of the complete 1961 texts appeared in English in 2006 as History of Madness. The quotes refer to this last version. 2  The “Classical age” is a common French term to designate the period. According to Vuillemin (2013), while in OT Foucault takes great care to define the meaning of the “episteme,” in contrast he takes for granted the term “classical,” where “Baroque” would be more appropriate. For Vuillemin, the use of “classical” to refer to seventeenth-century France indeed derives from an abuse of the term: originally referring to Antiquity, during the nineteenth century it was enlarged to include seventeenth-century French authors and artists, to grant French culture the same aura as the Greek “Classics.” Madness and Civilization’s subtitle was “a History of Insanity in the Age of Reason,” whereas the French is Histoire de la Folie à l’Age Classique. Unless stated otherwise, since

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these reflections appears in The Order of Things (OT) published in French in 1966, where Foucault sketches the characteristics of three periods in Western thought: the Renaissance, the Classical age, and the modern period. Foucault gives there his first diagnosis of modernity (D 22; AK 131; F1999a, 91), and posits man as the object of knowledge of the newly formed human sciences and the invention of modernity. The Order of Things is thus a criticism of these human sciences that entrap man in the vicious circle of being both a transcendental subject and an object of knowledge. In the introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge (AK), published in 1969, Foucault explains that the book closes the period that started with History of Madness. In its conclusion, he sketches the first inquiries on power that he will indeed broadly perform in the following years. Interestingly, the analyses of power do not abandon the human sciences; to the contrary, sociology, psychology, and criminology are now perceived as instruments in the exercise of power, both created by and creating a new kind of regime, that of discipline. I will try to show in this chapter how Foucault tackles the human sciences from a purely epistemological viewpoint at first, then in a larger criticism of their intertwinement with power: while in The Order of Things man is understood as being created as an object of knowledge in the nineteenth century, it is presented in Discipline and Punish as a product of disciplinary power that creates the subjugated subject needed by industrial societies. Finally, I will show how this latter contention leads Foucault to a dead end, and the need to revise his diagnosis of modernity.

The Human Sciences in the Modern Episteme In his early diagnosis of modern knowledge, Foucault intends to provide evidence for the flaws involved in the modern concept of “a founding subject,” who gives meaning to the world around him. Reflecting on this period in later interviews, he contends that these inquiries can be grouped under the general question: “is the phenomenological, trans-historical subject able to give accounts of the historicity of reason?” (F1998d, 438). This questioning is itself rendered possible by developments in linguistics and psychoanalysis to which Foucault makes frequent references until Foucault consistently uses the “Classical age” for the seventeenth century, I will follow his term.

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1970: on the one hand, the unconscious dimension of language makes apparent the fiction of the “autonomously thinking subject.” On the other hand, Foucault believes that a proper approach to language can deliver us from the philosophy of the subject. One of Foucault’s basic concepts, elaborated on in OT, is the “episteme,” as the epistemological configuration, the general “framework of thought” in a specific historical period (OT 158), that makes knowledge possible (OT 161, 168). Where Kant was seeking the a priori, universal, conditions that make knowledge possible, Foucault is looking for an a priori which is historically determined:3 This a priori is what, in a given period, delimits in the totality of experience a field of knowledge, defines the mode of being of the objects that appears in that field, provides man’s everyday perception with theoretical powers, and defines the conditions in which he can sustain a discourse about things that is recognized to be true. (OT 158, emphasis added)

Moreover, where Kant is looking for the “conditions of validity of a judgment,” that is what is a priori possible in right, “truths that could never be formulated,” Foucault is seeking conditions that render possible what is said in discourses that were enunciated. Furthermore, there is a fundamental difference in the status of truth: in its Kantian meaning, it is an absolute. Foucault is interested in something else—the rules that make a discourse recognizable as true in a given field, time, and place.4 Finally, Foucault is opposed to the idea of a modernity that would result from a linear, millenary process (AK 4, 8–9). There is not one rationality progressing over time, but a change in the form of rationality, that occurs simultaneously in all fields of knowledge and marks a point of

3  See Han-Pile (2002), p. 4, on the paradox implied in defining the a priori as historical. Foucault’s transformation of a Kantian concept leads Deleuze (1989, 67) to speak of the “neo-Kantianism” of Foucault. In DE I #40, p. 574, Foucault seems to agree: “what is designated by this term , is the impossibility for Western thought to overcome the break established by Kant; neo-Kantianism is the endlessly repeated injunction to revive this break (…); in this meaning, we are all neo-Kantian” (emphasis added, personal translation). 4  For a complete development on this point and the difference between Foucault, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty, see Dreyfus & Rabinow 1982, p. 50.

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rupture with the previous period (OT 238). His method, coined “archaeology,” consists therefore of isolating these breaks within discourses.5 The Characteristics of the Modern Episteme Foucault characterizes the modern mode of thinking by contrasting it to the Renaissance’s and the Classical age’s, in the relation established in each episteme between words and things (BC xi). The Renaissance is defined as the episteme of similitude—a world of signs and symbols, left by a divine hand for human beings to decipher. Words and things are all God’s creation. In this episteme, a word designates a thing because it bears a resemblance to it; a flower can cure a disease because in some way it recalls the organ it is meant to heal. The Classical age is the age of representation; language loses its divine origin and is now perceived as an arbitrary human creation. Words thus separate from things, and become the tool for man to represent the world (OT 78–79). The main feature of representation is that it aims at completeness; words represent the world in an exhaustive manner, without residuum: “that which is signified resides, without residuum and without opacity, within the representation” (OT 64, emphasis added). Representation as a thinking process is transparent to the thinker since it is solely the sign of what is represented. This implies a certain relation to being, both of the things pictured in representation and of the thinker: “in the Classical age, discourse is that translucent necessity through which representation and being must pass – as beings are represented to the mind’s eye, and as representation renders beings visible in their truth” (OT 311). The modern episteme happens with the break in the transparent power of representation that occurs with Kant’s Critique (OT 162). Things are no longer entirely graspable through representation. What starts to obtain importance is the organization, the mode of functioning of things which gives them a “thickness.” But with the idea of function and system, it is as if a new dimension was added to the flat description of the world (OT 5  History of Madness (HM) can be read as an archaeology of psychiatry; The Birth of the Clinic (NC), as an archaeology of medicine; The Order of Things (OT) is subtitled An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, and finally the last book of the period is entitled The Archaeology of Knowledge (AS). A further definition of Foucault’s methodological archaeology will be given in the next chapter.

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229), therefore the incommensurability with the previous period: “things take place in another space than that of words” (OT 230). Because “their fundamental truth” (OT 239) now resides in the structure of their functioning, things have acquired a depth that can never be totally rendered into representation. This has two main consequences. The first is that representation cannot exhaust the knowledge of things, which itself becomes an endless task (OT 244). Moreover, there is now an irreducible residuum between the things themselves and what can be thought or said about them: “things  – in fragments, outlines, pieces, shards  – offer themselves, though very partially, to representation” (OT 239). The second consequence is that by becoming disconnected from its immediate relation to things, the representation loses its transparency; the thinking subject cannot but become aware of his own self: “the things address themselves (always partially) to a subjectivity, a consciousness, a singular effort of cognition, to the psychological individual” (OT 240). For Foucault in OT, the modern subject is therefore a consequence of the break from the episteme of representation. “Man” as both subject and object of empirical knowledge appears at the end of the eighteenth century (OT 308–309, 318) with the limit of representation.6 The episteme of modernity is marked, for Foucault, by the Anthropology, “the discourse on man’s natural finitude” (OT 257),7 and the emergence of the human sciences that take man as an object of knowledge, characterized by his finitude (Han-Pile 2010). Kant is also held responsible for this shift: “since Kant, the infinite is no longer given, there is no longer anything but finitude; and it’s in that sense that the Kantian critique carried the possibility – or the peril – of an anthropology” (F1998b, 257). 6  In order to properly understand Foucault’s claim, one should insist, as Han-Pile (2010) does, on the fact that Foucault distinguishes between man as “the revival and reinterpretation of the Ciceronian notion of humanitates in the Renaissance” (Han-Pile 2010, 122) and the modern figure of man. Foucault indeed defines the latter by the fact that he takes himself as an object of knowledge. At the opposite, in the Classical age, “insofar as what existed in classical knowledge were representations ordered in a discourse, all the notions that are fundamental for our conception of man, such as that of life, labour and language, had (…) no place. Man existed where discourse became quiet” (DE I #34, 529, quoted by Han-Pile 2010, p. 122). 7  See also F1998b, p. 250: “by ‘anthropology’ I mean the strictly philosophical structure responsible for the fact that the problems of philosophy are now all lodged within the domain that can be called that of human finitude.”

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The Anthropological Sleep In the Classical age, the concept of finitude already existed, but was expressed negatively, in contradistinction to God’s infinity. With modernity, the thought of finitude is located within the different fields of empirical knowledge: “the experience taking form at the beginning of the nineteenth century situates the discovery of finitude not within the thought of the infinite, but at the very heart of those contents that are given, by a finite act of knowing, as the concrete forms of finite existence” (OT 316, emphasis added). Foucault studied in the Classical age three domains of knowledge: “general grammar,” “natural history,” and the “analysis of wealth.”8 With the turn to the nineteenth century, each of these domains underwent a radical change or left room for a new “empiricity” (OT 250): philology, biology, and economy (respectively) as new empirical sciences, together with new human sciences such as psychology and sociology. These forms of knowledge are rendered possible by the limit of representation on the one hand, but they take this very finitude as their object of inquiry on the other, leading to some paradoxes, all inherent to the modern episteme. First, while the empirical fields of knowledge are built on finitude, they all refer to a “transcendental” which they intend to study; “labour, life and language appear as so many ‘transcendentals’ which make possible the objective knowledge of living beings, of the laws of production and of the forms of language” (OT 244). As “transcendentals,” they have an “unknowable depth” (OT 245) and thus present the constant danger of creating “metaphysical doctrines that, despite their post-­Kantian chronology, appear as pre-critical” (OT 244). This predicament is at the heart of the “anthropological sleep” (OT 340) as a second paradox: modern thought, which first emerged with Kant’s Critique and the limit of representation as a critical enterprise, ultimately fell into the impossible yet never-ending attempt to “know” man. Interestingly, this trap is also attributed to Kant, since

8  The fact that the meaning of these “knowledges” is almost incomprehensible to us results from the break of episteme. Roughly speaking, “general grammar,” for instance occupies in the Classical age the place of philology in the modern one: “its proper object is neither thought nor any individual language but discourse, understood as a sequence of verbal signs” (OT 83).

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He articulated, in a manner that is still enigmatic, metaphysical discourse and reflection on the limits of our reason. However, Kant ended by closing this opening when he ultimately relegated all critical investigations to an anthropological question; and undoubtedly, we have subsequently interpreted Kant’s actions as the granting of an indefinite respite to metaphysics. (F1998a, 76; see also F1998b, 257)

The Human Sciences The human sciences have a special status in The Order of Things. First, in Foucault’s view, the human sciences should not be called sciences. Indeed, while the new empirical (real) sciences—biology, economics, and philology—are always submitted to the temptation of pre-modern metaphysics when they fall into reflections on Life, Work, and Language, they still have a “real” object of inquiry in the functioning of those “transcendentals” (OT 244) that saves them—so to speak—from circularity. But, by repelling considerations on “man” and focusing on function and organization, they also create another “region” in the epistemological space, occupied by the human sciences that develop as a duplication of the empirical sciences at the level of representations (OT 354); psychology for the representations of life, sociology for those of the working individual, and the study of literature and myths for language. The human sciences hence take man and his representations as their object of inquiry and are therefore entirely trapped in the oscillation between the objective and the subjective.9 * * * The “archaeologies” that Foucault pursued until 1970 are best defined, in my view, as inquiries into the nature of knowledge and the way it molds

9  In The Archaeology of Knowledge (AK), Foucault will advance another reason to deny them the status of science; their lack of formalization. In AK he indeed theorizes the distinction between knowledge and science, in the form of epistemological thresholds. The highest threshold is that of formalization, which is passed when “the scientific discourse is able to define the axioms necessary to it, the elements that it uses, the propositional structures that are legitimate to it, and the transformations that it accepts, when it is thus able, taking itself as a starting point, to deploy the formal edifice that it constitutes” (AK, 206).

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our modernity.10 Foucault presents evidence for the varying relations between words and things at different periods of Western culture, and language’s specific status in framing historic periods. Because representation cannot exhaust either the reality of things or the complexity of thinking, the modern condition seems to be doomed to endless work of commentary and interpretation, that takes for granted the founding subject as the origin of discourses.11 This central status of the subject, of man as an empirico-transcendental doublet, is for Foucault the main assumption of the modern episteme, whose fiction he intends to disclose. Until The Order of Things, Foucault’s criticism of modern rationality consists of showing the contingency of this form of thinking and in pointing to a potential future break in the episteme that could allow us to escape the cyclicality of the human sciences. But by focusing on the epistemological domain, Foucault does not explain how the breaks he observes are rendered possible (Mascaretti 2014, 137); human agency seems to have been swallowed by “the unconscious of knowledge” that dictates certain modes of thinking. In The Archaeology of Knowledge (AK), Foucault maintains the primacy of discursive practices over non-discursive ones (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, 79–100). He now distinguishes between knowledge (savoir) as a discursive practice in any domain, and the sciences (AK 182–183, 192–195). He proposes to apply this enlarged definition of knowledge either to the political domain, in order to check the nature of the political articulation of a practice to a theory (AK 194), or to sexuality as a discourse in the domain of ethics (AK 193). Foucault indeed undertakes these two inquiries in the period to come.

10  In this period, there are, of course, already hints of reflections on power. Foucault contends for instance in an interview that History of Madness is about the structure of social segregation (DE I #5, 196), although the focus of the book is more on the divide between reason and unreason—of which social exclusion is only a consequence. 11  This criticism of the founding subject does accompany him till the end, despite the transformations of his conception of the subject. In a 1984 interview, he stated for instance that: “I don’t think there is actually a sovereign founding subject, a universal form of subject that one could find everywhere. I am very skeptical and very hostile towards this conception of the subject. I think on the contrary, that the subject is constituted through practices of subjection, or, in a more autonomous way, through practices of liberation, of freedom, as in Antiquity, starting of course, from a number of rules, styles and conventions that can be found in the culture” (F1996e, 452).

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Knowledge and Discipline Around 1970, Foucault’s focus changes; he becomes involved in political action, specifically with the condition of the prisons in France, and begins lecturing at the Collège de France. In 1984, in a retrospective look, he describes this shift as a displacement from the axis of “the formation of knowledge” to the axis of the “relationships to rules” (TFR 337), a shift from archaeology to genealogy.12 Foucault is replacing the rational structures of the episteme, evidenced in The Order of Things, with that of relations of power in the determination of the individual. The rules have now become rules of conduct imposed by relations of power. The aim of this part is to give an overview of Foucault’s findings in this period that ends with the publication of the first volume of The History of Sexuality. Foucault gives six series of lectures at the Collège de France on various aspects of relations of power. The lectures of 1970/71, entitled Lectures on the Will to Know, have a very specific status, as they propose a Nietzschean analysis of truth in ancient Greece, to which I come back in Chap. 4. In a very schematic and bold way, the lectures from 1972 till 1976 can be said to be incorporated either in Discipline and Punish or in The History of Sexuality I.13 In the first lecture of 1976, Foucault declares that he wants to bring to a close a series of studies that were “very closely interrelated” (SMBD 3). My very arbitrary choice here is to present these studies without respecting the chronology of the lectures, by incorporating the material so as to highlight my main claim: “man” is no longer the object of knowledge created by the human sciences, but a product of disciplinary power that nurtures and is nurtured in return by these sciences. Indeed, Foucault does not abandon his previous focus on knowledge and rationality—to the contrary: he conceives power as rooted in knowledge and vice versa. In the 1974 lectures, for instance, he mentions that what interests him “now” is the way statements are produced from within relations of power: “to what extent can an apparatus of power produce statements, discourses?” (PPe 13).14 This turn to the analytics of power  See Chap. 3 for a further description of genealogy as compared to archaeology.  Or, alternatively, discarded; see for instance Legrand (2004) on how Marx was “erased” from DP. See also Ewald and Harcourt (2015, pp. 262–272) on this point. 14  The term “dispositif”—translated here as apparatus—appears also once in SP (p. 201, translated as mechanism, DP 170). It is used extensively in French in VdS to describe the “deployment of sexuality” (HoS) without ever being formalized, as a complex mechanism of power which works at different levels. Revel (2002, 24) contends that the concept appears 12 13

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thus allows him to explain how new domains of knowledge are formed. Nor does he abandon the position that the modern, founding subject is a fiction; one of his objectives is in fact to reinforce this claim, by arguing that this subject is the product of power, once it is coupled with the human sciences. Furthermore, Foucault’s intention is to provide an analysis of the functioning of power. His basic assumption is that the traditional codification of modern power in the form of the social contract is obsolete (HoS 88–89), whereas a Nietzschean approach might provide an alternative (SMBD 16; see also DE I #139, 1420). It is actually in the 1976 lectures, Society Must Be Defended (SMBD), that Foucault gives the clearest description of his methodology in those years, and how he attempts to apply a Nietzschean approach to the understanding of power. In these lectures, Foucault addresses and criticizes contract theory in general, and Hobbes’s specifically. Both belong in his viewpoint to a certain “juridical and liberal conception of power,” where power is seen as a right, “that one is able to possess like a commodity and can in consequence transfer or alienate (…) through a legal act” (PK 88). This model offers an inaccurate description of modern socio-political relations, as if they were founded on consent and devoid of relations of power. Those are instead, for Foucault, co-extensive with the modern social body.15 Moreover, the legal model actually tends to conceal those relations of power and thus serves the existing hegemony: “the theory of sovereignty (…) and the organization of a legal code with the analyses of power, when Foucault intends to go beyond discursive practices. For Agamben, it is a “heterogeneous set including virtually anything (…) at the intersection of power relations and relations of knowledge” (Agamben 2010, 2–3). But the term remains for him too vague. According to Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982, pp. 120–121), a better translation would be “a grid of intelligibility,” although “it underestimates Foucault’s attempt to reveal something about the practices themselves.” For Deleuze, the “dispositif” is the space created in the dimensions of visibility, discourse (which together constitute knowledge), power, and subjectivation (Deleuze 1989, 185–187). But this definition overly anticipates the future chapters. Irrera (2017) interestingly suggests that the concept comes to fill the place of ideology in the 1969 lectures on sexuality at Vincennes, in an attempt by Foucault to redefine ideology in his own terms. It is in a 1977 interview that Foucault finally gives a definition of the term: it is “firstly a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, scientific statements (…) in short, the said as much as the non-said (…) The apparatus itself is itself the system of relations that can be established between these elements” (PK 194, emphasis added). 15  The model in fact came to legitimize monarchy and was artificially maintained afterward (SMBD 37).

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c­ entered upon it made it possible to superimpose on the mechanisms of discipline a system of rights that concealed its mechanisms and erased the element of domination” (SMBD 37, emphasis added), in a manner that is developed below. A Criticism of the Social Contract Foucault is particularly interested in Hobbes’s analysis of the commonwealth acquired by conquest, because one would have expected in this case at least the description of some form of domination of the victor over the vanquished. But he is surprised to see that even in that case, Hobbes speaks of sovereignty: “Why? Because once the defeated have shown a preference for life and obedience, they make their victors their representatives and restore a sovereign to replace the one who was killed in war” (SMBD 95). At stake here is the formal consent of the vanquished, i.e. their acceptance of the new sovereign. For Foucault, that consent means that Hobbes eliminates the relations of domination. And he concludes: “it is as though, far from being the theorist of the relationship between war and political power, Hobbes wanted to eliminate the historical reality of war” (SMBD 97). Oppression, in this theory, occurs only when the sovereign “oversteps the limits of the contract” (SMBD 17). Until 1976, Foucault held that power should in fact be understood as the opposite; politics is the continuation of war by other means: “the role of political power (…) is perpetually to use a silent war to reinscribe that relationship of force [inherited from the original war]” (SMBD 16— emphasis added; see also DP 168).16 Furthermore, Foucault is against the metaphor of transfer altogether: Power is not that which makes the difference between those who exclusively possess and retain it and those who do not have it and submit to it. Power must be analyzed as something that circulates or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localised here or there, never in anybody’s hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through net-like organizations. (PK 98, emphasis added; SMBD 29; see also DP 28)

16  Actually, in the opening lesson of the 1976 lectures, he questions his own assumption that the repression—struggle alternative to the contract model should be the model through which one should understand the disciplinary regime (see below).

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From this viewpoint, contract theory seems simply to replace the figure of the King by that of the “social body” which must be defended (DP 99–90). And he concludes: power is a practice, an exercise. In order to analyze the mechanics of power, one must abandon the juridico-­ philosophical model of the contract—the model of Leviathan (SMBD 34). The Panopticon The model that Foucault proposes to better grasp the relations of domination is depicted in Discipline and Punish, where he contrasts the penal system of the Classical age with that in place in the early nineteenth century. The book describes the evolution of the techniques of punishment, from torture prior to execution, to the prison’s discipline. A violation of the law, in the Classical age, was a crime against the sovereign himself. The public torture of the criminal, as a political ritual (DP 47–48), came to restore the symbolic body of the sovereign after he had been attacked and injured. To the expensive, spectacular, and punctual manifestations of the King’s power, Foucault contrasts the continuous, regular, invisible regulation of the new regime. The aim of punishment is not the reinforcement of sovereign power but the correction of the criminal, his transformation into a useful individual for society (DP 122–131; PS 91, 177). Foucault finds a model of this technique in Bentham’s Panopticon. The Panopticon is a utopian prison conceived and designed to minimize the cost entailed in controlling large numbers of people. In such a space, the costly ritual of royal execution has been replaced by constant observation of the criminal. The supervisor is situated in a tower in the middle of a circular building where each prisoner is enclosed in his own cell with a large window facing the tower. The prisoner cannot see the supervisor in the tower (power has become invisible); the supervisor himself is interchangeable (power is anonymous) making constant supervision possible (power is continuous). This technique of constant surveillance, that Bentham describes in the prison, can be found for Foucault in many other modern spaces: the asylum, the school, the barracks, and the factory. Hence Foucault speaks of a new “social form” (PS 227; DP 207–208). Discipline is a technique that combines the abovementioned surveillance and punishment defined as “the normalizing sanction” (SP 209,

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personal translation).17 It works on each and every individual’s body in order to render them interchangeable and normalized (DP 145). In the 1973 lectures, Foucault further insists that the acquisition of proper habits is obtained by “coercion and punishments.” The disciplinary regime creates a “fabric” of habits, through which social belonging is defined and measured (PS 240). Power “will take the insidious, quotidian, habitual form of the norm, and in this way it is hidden as power, and passes for society” (PS 240— emphasis added). From this viewpoint: While jurists and philosophers were seeking in the pact a primal model for the construction or reconstruction of the social body, the soldiers and with them the technicians of discipline were elaborating procedures for the individual and collective coercion of bodies. (DP 169)

The end result of this process, for Foucault, is a maximization of collective forces. In the case of the factory, thanks to techniques of discipline, the labour force is maximized to more than the sum total of its individual components (DP 163, 221). In this strand of thought, there is for Gros an “economic relevance” of the disciplines that transform individuals into a productive force, needed with the development of nineteenth-century industrial society (Gros 2010, 10).18 Moreover, what occurs in this regime is an inversion of the “political axis of individualization” (DP 192): while the King was the focus of the sovereign regime, the “social body” is now under scrutiny. With such a 17  The English translation is “normalizing judgment” (DP 177), which does not render the idea of punishment implied by the French “sanction.” 18  Both Gros (2012) and Legrand (2004) insist on Foucault’s “neo-Marxism” in the 1973 lectures (PS); in these lessons, the disciplinary society is explained in terms of “relations of production” and the need, for the capitalist mode of production, to create its productive force, thanks to the disciplines. This Marxist background is intentionally erased from SP, which, in Legrand’s view, blurs Foucault’s argument (Legrand 2004, 43; see also Sabot 2009, 851). This contention should also be nuanced by the fact that while for Marx “work” was the essence of man, Foucault actually strives in this period to explain that “the working man” is in fact created by the disciplinary regime: “The time and life of man are not labor by nature; they are pleasure, discontinuity, festivity, rest, need, moments, chance, violence, and so on. Now, it is all this explosive energy that needs to be transformed into a continuous laborpower continually offered on the market” (PS 232; see also Harcourt 2013, 299–300; Legrand 2007, 111).

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technique, a new “object” becomes visible—the modern man of The Order of Things. New kinds of knowledge develop that take the individual as their object of inquiry: Foucault is explaining here the emergence of the human sciences, this time not as a sudden shift in the episteme, but out of the necessities of the new techniques of power.19 The Subject/Object of Power and the Human Sciences Another criticism that Foucault levels against Leviathan or contract theory, is that it takes for granted the existence of subjects who transfer their original natural rights to a sovereign thus constituted (SMBD 29–30). In a novel manner of denying the existence of a founding subject, Foucault contends that the opposite is the case: power actually constitutes its subjects. The nineteenth century indeed saw the development of the examination of pupils, workers, soldiers, and sick people as a kind of new ritual (DP 184). While sovereign power would underscore the life events of heroes as part of its ritual of power, the constant scrutiny of the disciplinary tends to the opposite: rather than the life of the hero, it is that of the anonymous man, in his individuality, that is now told and documented. The aim is not to produce heroes but “subjugated” individuals, objectified individuals (DP 192).20 This echoes the ideas evoked in The Order of 19  In a 1977 interview, he explains: “This central problem of power, which still remains one that I have not adequately isolated, can be seen, in very different forms, at the meeting point between Madness and Civilisation and The Order of Things” (F1979 134, emphasis added). 20  There is a problem in the translation of words here. The French “assujettissement,” used extensively by Foucault in this period, refers to the way in which people become “subjects” of a king, or a power; obedient, docile, dominated subjects. As Kelly puts it, “assujettissement” usually mean subjection, where “the subject into which we are made in ‘subjection’ is taken to be the passive subject, the test-subject, the subject of the king, rather than the active philosophical or grammatical subject” (Kelly 2009, 87, emphasis added). In this strand of thought, in the early uses of the word Foucault speaks of the subjection (assujettissement) of bodies since in his view the subject does not exist at all prior to the exercise of power: assujetissement is then understood as the process through which “bodies are constituted as subjects by power effects” (SMBD 29; see also DP 25–26; PS 261). However, Kelly rightly notices that in HoS, Foucault speaks of assujettissement as the subject’s constitution “in both senses of the word,” that is the passive and the active one (HoS 60; Kelly 2009, 87). This sentence announces, I suggest, the turn in Foucault’s thought toward active modes of being a subject. Despite this ambiguity, I will use the term “subjection” to render the original idea of submission. Foucault later uses the term “subjectivation” in French, which translates well into English; but in English, says Kelly, “subjectivation only refers to our constitution as subjects

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Things, but with a new meaning: in 1966, Foucault was criticizing the “anthropological sleep” and the confusion of man as subject and object of the human sciences (OT 340–341). This confusion is now seen as inherent to the technique of power that triggered these forms of knowledge: the “subject” shown in nineteenth-century thought, far from being transcendental, is none other than the subjugated individual of disciplinary power, always already an object of inquiry and observation, and an object in the exercise of a power applied to his body (DP 183–184). The “knowing subject” revealing an objective truth is tackled again, this time from a political angle: it is at best an illusion created within the discourse that produces the docile bodies of the discipline, as will be shown below. In Discipline and Punish, the “individual” is indeed not a natural entity but constituted under relations of power. The process is described most compellingly in the 1974 lectures, Psychiatric Power (PPe), where Foucault follows the development of psychiatric discourse during the nineteenth century. Prior to the disciplinary regime, we are left with “somatic singularities,” that is pure bodies (PPe 44): “in actual fact, one of the first effects of power is that it allows bodies, gestures, discourses and desires to be identified and constituted as something individual” (SMBD 29–30). Above those singularities, one encounters “subject-functions,” defined by social roles (PPe 44, 56).21 Prior to the exercise of disciplinary power, the somatic singularities could have fulfilled certain social roles conferring on them, momentarily, the status of subject. But as Foucault contends, there was no permanent adjustment between a given body and a given subjectivity (PPe 55). The modern “individual” is actually constituted by fixing “the subject-­ function” on the somatic singularity (PPe 55–56); as a result, “insofar as power is a procedure of individualization, the individual is only the effect of power” (PPe 15). This is obtained by a pair of techniques. The first is the spatial repartitioning of bodies, the effect of which is to render each visible in its specificity, in contradistinction with sovereign power where “the people” was an opaque mass with emotional group-effects (PPe 103; see also DP 195). The second is the technique of examination, generalized in one sense, namely the active one” (Kelly 2009, 87–88). Therefore “subjectivation” will be kept to translate this kind of subject constitution—see Chap. 5, although, as will be developed there, subjectivation in Foucault’s sense is not devoid of ambiguity either. 21  From this viewpoint, under sovereign power the King’s body is the most individualized entity, precisely because he plays the role of the King (DP 28–29).

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during the nineteenth century. It makes it possible to rank each “body” according to its degree of compliance with a given desired norm. Ranking is actually applied to measure the distance from the norm and therefore determines a penalty, but it also discloses each one’s specificity and difference (DP 182–183): “each individual receives as his status his own individuality, (…) and he is linked by his status to the features, the measurements, the gaps, the ‘marks’ that characterize him and make him a ‘case’” (DP 192). In Psychiatric Power, the examination takes the form of “anamnesis,” that is the way the madman is brought to “remember” his past, to recognize himself in the details of his biography (those specific pieces of knowledge obtained through observation) and his administrative identity (here the norm). Foucault frequently quotes that method, developed by the psychiatrist Leuret.22 It consists of asking biographic questions under the constant threat of a cold shower. Leuret vindicates the patient, and compels him to stick to the details that the doctor wants to hear. The treatment thus consists of a form of truth-telling where, concludes Foucault, the truth at stake is “the truth of a madness agreeing to first person recognition of itself in a particular administrative and medical reality constituted by asylum power” (PPe 161). Disciplinary power produces knowledge (discourse) in the form of the human sciences, but also individuals who are always already subjugated. The subject thus created is therefore a pure product of power: The individual does not pre-exist the normalizing instance (…) It is because the body has been ‘subjectified’, that is to say that the subject-function has been fixed on it, because he has been psychologized and normalized, it is because of all this that something like the individual appeared. (PPe 56)

Moreover, in The Order of Things (OT) Foucault was already questioning the subject as a knowing subject when this subject took himself as an epistemological object. In the History of Sexuality I (HoS), Foucault insists on subjectivity taken as an object of knowledge; psychoanalysis is indeed “the knowledge of the subject” (HoS 70). Furthermore, subjectivity is what is rendered knowable by power: “‘knowable’ man (soul, individuality, 22  Besides PPe, Foucault comes back to this example in a series of lectures at Berkeley and Dartmouth (BHS) in 1980, and in 1981 in Louvain (see WDTT 11–13). See also DE II #208, F1997b.

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consciousness, conduct, whatever it is called) is the object-effect of this analytical investment, of this domination-observation” (DP 305). At the same time, the knowing subject is itself formed in those relations of power-­ knowledge (DE I #139, 1406). Hence, the human sciences and knowledge about “man” appear as a corollary of the disciplinary regime, in its attempts to control individuals. Power: Knowledge The implication of the human sciences in the production of the subjugated modern subject further questions the traditional modern assumption that knowledge means the suspension of power relations: It is not the activity of the subject of knowledge which produces a corpus of knowledge (savoir), useful or resistant to power, but power-knowledge, the processes and the struggles that traverse it and of which it is made up, that determine the forms and possible domains of knowledge (connaissance). (DP 28; SP 36)23

Foucault is less interested in the power effect of existing knowledge (that would have been constituted outside or in other forms of power relations), but in knowledge as produced within a power relation, to serve the exercise of power, as expressed in the human sciences and the disciplinary power.24 From this viewpoint, he maintains the distinction introduced in The Order of Things, between “real” sciences and knowledge as “savoir:” A “real” science would then be independent of power relations, whereas knowledge-savoir would always be involved in the exercise of power.25 His 23  The distinction between knowledge as “savoir” and knowledge as “connaissance” (which translates into the same English word) is first introduced in The Archaeology of Knowledge (AK 247); see also the translator’s note, (AK, 15) and Chap. 4 for a further development of this point. 24  With the exception maybe of the true story about the Japanese emperor and mathematics (OD, 39–40; DE I # 119, 1282): mathematics were brought to the shogun by a foreigner. Mathematics appears here as a ready-made knowledge brought from outside to the emperor, i.e. not created in his own juridical-political system. The shogun still recognized the potential of power involved and kept the knowledge secret, for his own personal use. 25  In his analysis of psychiatric power (the 1974 lectures), Foucault distinguishes between medicine (a growing science?) and psychiatry (a power-knowledge?). At the beginning of the nineteenth century medicine was starting to develop “an epistemological model of medical truth, observation, and objectivity that will make possible the real insertion of medicine within

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main interest lies in the human sciences, this time understood as instruments of modern power; this can be related to his contention that knowledge as “savoir” is always the will to control and dominate (LWK 200–209).26 In the 1974 and 1975 lectures, Foucault insists on the actually little, if any, scientific value of those “sciences employing the root ‘psycho’-” (DP 193): he mentions, among those pseudo-sciences, psychology, psycho-­ sociology, psycho-criminology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy (PPe 85). The 1975 lectures start, for instance, with the reading of psychiatric expert opinions used in trials in France of his days. What he points out is “the grotesque” epistemological content of these opinions on one hand, and on the other, since the life of the accused depends on them, the tremendous power they have (Ae 11–12; PPe 268–269; HoS 54).27 Another example of the intertwinement of power with knowledge can be taken from Psychiatric Power. The psychiatrist’s first goal is indeed to vindicate his patient, in a series of strategic games devoid of theoretical knowledge (DP 181). Yet in order to ensure his victory, the doctor needs a “surplus of power” (DP 39) and will use in this endeavor the information he has managed to gather on the patient, biographic elements given by the family, or the pieces of information obtained by the constant surveillance of the madman. Hence the technique of permanent observation, as a way to build knowledge, comes from the need to exercise power through observation. This cycle is named by Foucault “power-knowledge:” the mutual reinforcement of power and knowledge, starting from the exercise of a power that needs a certain type of knowledge in its mode of functioning (DP 224). Disciplinary power functions indeed as an “epistemological thaw” (DP 261) for the human sciences:28 the need for control is the engine of their a domain of scientific discourse” as compared to psychiatry, which, under the cover of medicine, was entirely non-scientific (PPe 11, emphasis added). But this distinction is not always maintained, and in DP it seems that any type of knowledge-connaissance is for him intertwined with power (DP 28). 26  See also Chap. 4 on this point. 27  Lagrange (2009) rightly notices that Foucault is contradictory on this point, since he denounces the lack of scientific value of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, as if his genealogy could function as “an epistemological tribunal” (Lagrange 2009, 24). 28  The French is “déblocage épistemologique,” literally epistemological unblocking, or releaser. I would suggest that Foucault is actually addressing here Bachelard’s notion of epistemological obstacle. For Bachelard who, like Foucault in OT, recognizes the existence of epistemological breaks, the break results from human capacity to overcome “epistemological

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development. Hence while the archaeology of The Order of Things could isolate the emergence of these pseudo-sciences as a break of episteme—but without explaining the break—Foucault now offers an explanation. It is the development of practices of examination in schools, hospitals, and factories that enabled the development of psychology, psychiatry, etc. Structuring themselves on observation at the micro level, these sciences further develop by the collection of information and their synthesis. Each individual becomes “a case,” in the process of elaborating “a population” (DP 190–191). * * * Foucault has thus isolated multiple ways in which contract theory comes to mask the real effects of power. Most strikingly, contract theory seduces our imagination with the fictive, always existing, rational subject of rights and founder of meaning, while in practice the techniques of discipline and the human sciences create both man as an object of knowledge and the subject as subjugated (SMBD 37).

Foucault’s Paradox At this point though, I believe Foucault encounters a paradox. It is indeed one of the central arguments of Discipline and Punish (DP) that power should not be understood as exercised centrally by an entity like “the state” that was aimed at replacing the King (DP 208, 307; HoS 88–89). The metaphor of the Panopticon partially achieves this goal, since the King has indeed disappeared from the central tower, and power has become anonymous. Foucault actually has in mind power as coming “from below” (SP 243, personal translation)29 in a network-like organization (DP 26, 307; SMBD 29), applied in a capillary manner at the periphery (PPe 40; Ae 47; SMBD 27). According to Ewald (1989), disciplinary power functions on visibility, on “being seen;” the gaze itself, and the one who sees, has become obstacles.” These take the form of unquestioned concepts that block the development of new modes of thinking. Foucault seems to answer that the obstacle is not overcome by an exercise in thought but rather by the emergence of new practices, accompanied by new forms of exercising power. For an analysis of Bachelard’s influence on Foucault, see Gutting 1989, 14–32. 29  The “lower region” (DP 208) does not completely render the original meaning.

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invisible. Ewald concludes: “visibility has no other source than those it renders visible” (Ewald 1989, 199, personal translation). While this claim might indeed reflect the “web-like organization of power,” it contradicts other claims of DP, such as “the inversion of the axis of individuation” described above; the gaze, along this axis, has not disappeared, but its direction is reversed. And indeed, in all the examples studied, the gaze remains very tangible: the supervisor’s in the prison, the master’s at school, the doctor’s in the psychiatric hospital (see for instance PS 23). Moreover, Foucault also remains attached to the idea that power is “in the hand of the bourgeoisie” and applied “asymmetrically” by one class to the other (DP 222–223; see also PS 164–166; F1996c, 117, 119; F1996d, 195; Ae 88). Therefore the configuration of the panoptic circle does not completely satisfy him, and he also evokes the pyramid to render the persisting hierarchy in his disciplinary regime (DP 174).30 But then, again, the pyramid implies a summit, as if Foucault himself could not ultimately behead the King.31 I would like to argue in this part that Foucault does not manage to get rid of the contradiction because of his conceptualization of the modern subject, that actually remains very close to a simple object. From this viewpoint, there is a slight displacement between Discipline and Punish (DP) and the History of Sexuality I (HoS), that does not, in my view, remove the paradox.

30  In PS, Foucault speaks of power as having the spatial form of a star, “with a center that is the point of constant and universal surveillance” (PS 226–227). 31  In a 1977 interview, Foucault comes back to this idea of hierarchy and summit, taking the specific example of the army: “this summit does not form the ‘source’ or ‘principle’ from which all power derives as though from a luminous focus. The summit and the lower element of hierarchy stand in a relationship of mutual support and conditioning” (PK 159); yet the mutual conditioning does not erase the hierarchy. In another interview about HoS, Grosrichard objects, in a manner valid also for DP, that “the language you use still suggests a power beginning from a single center”; Foucault answers: “I inwardly blushed while listening to you, thinking to myself, it’s true, I did use the metaphor of the points which progressively irradiates its surroundings” (see PK 199). Furthermore, in 1978, when describing the attempts to rationalize sovereignty in the Classical age, Foucault describes the ideal territory in the form of a circle, with the capital city in its center (STPe 14); hence by that year it has become clear to Foucault that the circular configuration is problematic when describing modern power, modelled now as a combination of discipline and liberal governmentality; see Chap. 3.

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The Subject as a Docile Body Bentham explains that the efficiency of the circular Panopticon stems from the fact that, at some point, the disciplined prisoners take care of themselves. Hence in Bentham’s own understanding, the tower is in the end almost superfluous; what counts is that the prisoners have interiorized power so as to act on their own selves as supervisors. Commenting on Bentham, Foucault says: “he who is subjected to a field of visibility and who knows it, assumes the responsibility for the constraints of power (…). He inscribes in himself the relations of power in which he simultaneously plays both roles: he becomes the principle of his own subjection” (DP 202–203, emphasis added). But this explanation is problematic in Foucault’s perspective for two main reasons. First, it is almost a psychological explanation of power, that recalls too strongly Freud’s “interiorization of the law” in the super-ego.32 As I have tried to show in the previous part, Foucault actually tackles the psychological pseudo-sciences as lacking scientific value, as being solely instruments of disciplinary power. Such an explanation in terms of interiorization is thus contradictory from the perspective of Discipline and Punish, and is further criticized in the first volume of the History of Sexuality, as I show in the next section. Second, it grants a primary role to the psyche, whereas Foucault insists that the disciplinary regime is exercised on the body; as shown in the previous part, Foucault considers the psyche to be produced by the human sciences, whereas the primary material on which power is exercised is the body: “power penetrates the body in depth, without depending even on the mediation of the subject’s own representations” (PK 186). It is indeed a major argument of Discipline and Punish and the lectures on this issue that disciplinary power is “merely physical” (DP 221, 261; PPe 14; SMBD 35–36). The technique of discipline is applied to the body, and not to “something else”—such as the soul of the individual: “the point of application of the penalty is not the representation, but the body, time, everyday gestures and activities; the soul too, but in so far as it is the seat of habits” (DP 128—emphasis added). Performing a “psychoanalytic criticism” of Foucault, both Lagrange and Butler remark that Foucault abusively reduces the psyche to what he 32  In a series of lectures in 1980, Foucault will also state: “we have to get rid of the more or less Freudian schema – you know it – the schema of the interiorization of the law by the self” (HBS 204).

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calls in DP the soul, as a “normalizing ideal.” In a sharp distinction from Foucault’s own position in The Order of Things, this reduction simply denies the individual’s unconscious (Butler 1997, 86–87; Lagrange 2009, 22).33 Surprisingly, Foucault indeed concludes the 1973 lectures by adopting Durkheim’s definition of the social as a social consciousness (PS 240), at complete odds with his own criticism of Durkheim in The Order of Things. It is this reduction of the modern subject to its normalized consciousness, I would like to argue, that flaws Foucault’s demonstration. It indeed leads to a picture of the modern individual as a “somatic singularity,” endowed by power with some mental capacities that only serve to reinforce the discipline. But this in turn tends, as in The Order of Things, to over-determine the individuals thus created. In the words of Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982, 182), “it seems that the only logical way to achieve a fully objective science of human beings would be with the totally successful production of human beings as objects.” There is no subject whatsoever; for Habermas “the concept of individuation is purified of all connotations of self-determination and self-realization, and reduced to an inner world produced by external stimuli” (Habermas 1987, 287–288; see also Legrand 2007, 51). The web-like organization of power that Foucault has in mind couldn’t function on these premises; how indeed could individuals thus described react and “resist the grip has on them” (DP 27)? Butler rightly asks—”Who is fighting? Who resists?” (Butler 2009, 104). Who or what is the nodal point of Foucault’s web, if individuals are solely docile bodies? As Butler puts it, the body for Foucault has become the site of power, as a “power to act” (Butler 2009, 106–107). But can there be a power to act with no agent?34 33  For Cronin, who compares Foucault’s disciplines to Bourdieu’s habitus, both authors understand the importance of bodily coercion as incorporation of the social constraint. But Bourdieu avoids Foucault’s reduction by “integrating the body into the circuit of symbolic power” (Cronin 1996, 73), which is again an unconscious dimension that Foucault rejects. 34  Actually, Foucault seems to have first answered this question affirmatively; it is indeed possible to read the analyses of hysteria in the 1974 lectures from this perspective. The physical demonstration of hysterical women is understood by Foucault as a “sexual pantomime,” their reaction and struggle against the psychiatric power. This struggle is not rational but tactical and physical (PPe 136, 308–309, 322–323). It forced the appearance of the sexual body to the side of the useful one (PPe 323). It is then possible for Foucault to present psychoanalysis as a tactical reaction aimed at neutralizing the phenomenon, by a reconstruction of the medical power on other terms, namely sexuality (PPe 323; Lagrange 2009, 30–31). In any case, this episode is given only little importance in HoS (55–56).

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Moreover, this picture of the modern individual as limited to his physical dimension also contradicts the existence of what Foucault calls in 1976 “subjugated forms of knowledge” (SMBD 7), as points of struggle against hegemonic expressions of truth. He indeed mentions on various occasions “the knowledge of the workers” (DE I #117, 1267), the “memory of the criminal” (DE I #116, 1263–65), that are silenced by what is legitimate, or recognized as scientific and true. In the 1976 lectures he insists, as if in fact addressing his own work: “what speaking subject, what discursive subject, what subject of experience and knowledge are you trying to minorize?” (SMBD 10, emphasis added). In order for a subjugated knowledge to exist, there must be a “speaking subject” to elaborate its discourse, even if this subject remains anonymous, “minorized,” or silenced.35 Such a subject cannot be explained through the model of the “docile bodies” because it demands a way of thinking that escapes the modes imposed by disciplinary power. Besides, the subjugated knowledges are described as “knowledges from below” (SMBD 7), as if there was a layer untouched by the mechanisms of power, which again contradicts the disciplinary regime as having “no outside” (DP 301). Some displacement occurs in the History of Sexuality I. But I would like to show below that the description of this speaking subject does not change the overall picture of entrapment. The Modern Speaking Subject In The History of Sexuality I, I would like to contend here, Foucault seems to partly review his description of power as a purely physical power leading to total obedience. Subjection is not questioned but becomes multiple (HoS 98, 140; see also SMBD 27, 45). From this viewpoint the book can be read as complementary to Discipline and Punish since it broadens the disciplining of the body to include the injunction of speech, as if Foucault understood that the description of disciplinary power as working on somatic singularities could not function without the dimension of language. Foucault now tackles the different instances of the modern “ritual 35  One might argue here that the subject in question remains anonymous, as explained in The Archaeology (AK). The point though is that in AK the subject was anonymous because he was solely repeating the structures of recognized true discourse; it is more difficult to understand how such a subject could be denied authorship once he resists and opposes existing social structures.

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of something close to confession” (PPe 176) which contribute to the formation of the modern subject, in two related fields: sexuality and justice. Foucault explores the mechanisms of confession as they developed first in ascetic and monastic institutions and later in psychoanalysis as a generalized “almost infinite task of telling – telling oneself and another, as often as possible, everything that might concern the interplay of innumerable pleasures, sensations and thoughts” (HoS 20). Speech is a coercive instrument that creates a new subjection through multiple discourses on sex, which “did not multiply apart from or against power, but in the very space and as the means of its exercise” (HoS 32, emphasis added). If, in Discipline and Punish, the “psychologized individual” was closer to an object than a real subject, the injunction to speech seems to create a relation to self as a form of refinement in the psychologization of the individual and in his subjection. Indeed, the discourse on sex takes place at the “meeting line of the body and the soul” (HoS 20), “at the point where soul and body meet, in the space of the body and at the very root of consciousness” (Ae 192). Body and soul now have the same importance for the effective subjection of individuals. This does not mean, though, that Foucault admits the existence of a subject prior to the exercise of power: but both body and soul take part in this production.36 The psychological dimension of the normalizing power, described in DP as a means to render the bodies docile and useful, now obtains another stratum. As Lagrange puts it: “there is another investment of the body, not on the level of the capacities but on the level of sensations and pleasure” (Lagrange 2009, 32, personal translation). Sexuality derives from the Christian control of the flesh and takes the form of a deciphering of desire and decency: “facing the political anatomy of the body [the one described in Discipline and Punish], there is a moral physiology of the flesh” (Ae 193). In the History of Sexuality I, the individual’s normalized subjectivity thus has a sexual dimension, a relation to one’s body, which Lagrange describes as “the historical constraint which weighs on our body and its pleasures” (Lagrange 2009, 23). The subjects thus now appear as entrapped in the quest for the intelligibility of their sexual self: 36  For Butler, there is an ambiguity in Foucault’s text as concerns the status of the body; while it is clear that the soul is produced in the mechanisms of power, Foucault’s “body” appears for her sometimes as given prior to the exercise of power, sometimes as produced by it—as “the disciplinary production of gender” (Butler 1997, 85–86). If one admits—as I did—that the “somatic singularities” described in PPe are “the body,” then for Foucault the body exists prior to the exercise of power.

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Sex is the most speculative, most ideal, and most internal element in a deployment of sexuality organized by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensations and pleasures. (HoS 155)

Hence the refinement of subjectivity introduced in HoS misses the goal of lifting the paradox; while sexuality’s emergence as a modern relation to self escapes the too-limited definition of individuals as docile bodies, it still depicts modern subjects as always already subjugated subjects of the “dispositif” of sexuality (HoS 74).

Conclusion After a decade focused on the study of the structures of knowledge, Foucault’s thought undergoes a major shift during the 1970’s toward analysis of power. Discipline and Punish, published in 1975, describes the disciplinary regime accompanying the development of industrial society. This regime functions with the help of the human sciences, through constant control and sanction, imposing a normalized behavior on the bodies. That model, as I have tried to show here, led Foucault to a dead end. It indeed leaves no margin of action to the individual who is “psychologized and individualized” under mechanisms of power. It thus contradicts Foucault’s awareness of the existence of “subjugated knowledges,” of voices articulated against the system, even if they went unheard. The modern rationality presented in OT has been radically modified by the analysis of discipline: Foucault has shown in the latter that the episteme’s discontinuities are linked to changes in the exercise of power. At the level of the apparatus (the “dispositif”), rationality appears as the structure of the system of surveillance through which the bodies’ utility is maximized. But while the diagnosis of modernity pointed to the unconscious modes through which our thoughts are oriented, the analysis of power has added an important dimension. Rationality is not only what passes through individuals in the structure of the episteme; it seems to have penetrated the bodies, denying the possibility of autonomy even more strongly than The Order of Things did. It is often mentioned that Foucault had a moment of crisis after publication of the first volume of The History of Sexuality (Elden 2016, 79). According to Eribon (2011, 440–441), it was linked to the book’s reception and the too-strong emphasis on power in the previous years’ analyses. Lemke (2004, 16–17) contends that it was rather the focus on discipline

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that was under question. Both Habermas and Taylor criticize Foucault for the one-sidedness of his description of modern power, downplaying the rise of democracies during the nineteenth century (Habermas 1987, 290; Taylor 1984, 164). Indeed, the liberal creed in human freedom and autonomy is reduced, in Foucault’s analyses, to “an ideology of parliamentary democracy” (SMBD 33). In DP, he also insists that “the ‘Enlightenment,’ which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines” (DP 222). Reason is thus described in that period as “despotic enlightenment” (F1991a, 12); for Taylor, the power-knowledge entanglement so strikingly described by Foucault, comes to support the Frankfurt School’s radical thesis that practical rationality, aimed at the domination of nature, also leads to the domination of man (Taylor 1984, 159). Foucault’s crisis also stemmed, I have argued here, from the fact that he was starting to realize that his conceptualization of power was not completely appropriate and lacked an important dimension for the understanding of subjectivity, since it more or less reduced the subject to an object produced by power mechanisms. As a form of confirmation, in the lectures from 1978 and 1979, he continues to analyze power, but with a major shift: it is no longer power as discipline, but rather power as government. This shift will lift the paradox exposed above, in a manner that will be explained in the next chapters.

References Foucault’s Work AK 2002. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge Classics. BC 2003. The Birth of the Clinic. London: Routledge Classics. BHS  1993. About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth. Political Theory 21 (2, May): 198–227. DP 1995. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage Books. HM 2006. History of Madness. New York: Routledge. HoS 1978. The History of Sexuality I. New York: Random House. LWK 2013. Lectures on the Will to Know  – Lectures at the Collège de France 1970–1971. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. OT 1994. The Order of Things – An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books. PK 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon Books.

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PPe 2006.  Psychiatric Power  – Lectures at the Collège de France 1973–1974. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. PS 2015.  The Punitive Society  – Lectures at the Collège de France 1972–1973. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. RC  1999. In Michel Foucault, Religion and Culture, ed. J. Carette. New York: Routledge. SMBD 2003. Society must be defended  – Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976. New York: Picador. TFR  1984. In The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books.

Articles F1979. 1979 [1977]. Truth and Power, an Interview with Michel Foucault. In Critique and Anthropology, ed. Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino 4 (13–14): 131–137. F1991a. 1991 [1978]. Introduction. In The Normal and the Pathological, ed. G. Canguilhem, 7–24. New York: Zone books. F1996c. 1996 [1974]. Michel Foucault on Attica – An interview by J.K. Simon. In Foucault Live (Collected Interviews, 1961–1984), ed. S. Lotringer, 113–121. New York: Semiotexte. F1996d. 1996 [1976]. The Politics of Soviet Crime. In Foucault Live (Collected Interviews, 1961–1984), ed. S. Lotringer, 190–195. New York: Semiotexte. F1996e. 1996 [1984]. An Aesthetics of Existence. In Foucault Live (Collected Interviews, 1961–1984), ed. S. Lotringer, 450–454. New York: Semiotexte. F1997b. 1997 [1981]. Sexuality and Solitude. In The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.1, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. P. Rabinow, 175–184. New York: The New Press. F1998a. 1998 [1963]. A Preface to Transgression. In The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Vol.2, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. J.  D. Faubion and P. Rabinow (General editor), 69–88. New York: The New Press. F1998b. 1998 [1965]. Philosophy and Psychology. In The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Vol.2, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. J. D. Faubion and P. Rabinow (General editor), 249–260. New York: The New Press. F1998d. 1998 [1983]. Structuralism and Post-structuralism. In The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Vol.2, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology edited by J.  D. Faubion and P.  Rabinow (General editor), 433–458. New  York: The New Press. F1999a. 1999 [1967]. Who Are You, Professor Foucault? Interview with P. Caruso. In Michel Foucault, Religion and Culture, ed. J. Carette, 87–105. New York: Routledge.

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Works in French DE I  2001 [1994]. Dits et Ecrits, I 1954–1975. Paris: Quarto-Gallimard. DE II  2001 [1994]. Dits et Ecrits, II 1976–1988. Paris: Quarto-Gallimard. HFAC  1972 [1961]. Histoire de la Folie à l’Age Classique. Paris: Tel-Gallimard. OD 1970. L’Ordre du Discours. Paris: Gallimard. SoP 2013. La Société Punitive – Cours au Collège de France 1972–1973. Paris: Seuil-Gallimard. SP 1975. Surveiller et Punir. Paris: Tel-Gallimard.

With Other Authors D 2007. Raymond Aron, Michel Foucault  – Dialogue, Analyze de J-F.  Bert. Paris: Lignes.

Other Authors Agamben, Giorgio. 2010. What is an apparatus? In What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, 1–24. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Butler, Judith. 1997. Subjection, Resistance, Resignification. In The Psychic Life of Power – Theories in Subjection, 83–105. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2009. Corps et Pouvoir. Foucault et la Psychanalyse, Inc 4–5 (2008/2009): 103–116. Cronin, Ciaran. 1996. Bourdieu and Foucault on Power and Modernity. Philosophy and Social Criticism 22 (6): 55–85. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif? In Foucault Philosophe – Rencontre Internationale Paris 8–10 janvier 1988, 185–195. Paris: Seuil. Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Paul Rabinow. 1982. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago. Elden, Stuart. 2016. Foucault’s Last Decade. Polity: Cambridge. Eribon, Didier. 2011. Michel Foucault. Flammarion: Paris. Ewald, François. 1989. Un Pouvoir sans Dehors. In Foucault Philosophe –Rencontre Internationale Paris 8–10 janvier 1988, 196–202. Paris: Seuil. Ewald, François, and Bernard Harcourt. 2015. Situation de cours. In Théories et Institutions Pénales  – Cours au Collège de France 1971–1972, ed. Michel Foucault, 243–282. Paris: Seuil-Galimard. Gros, Frederic. 2010. Foucault et la Société Punitive. Pouvoirs 4: 5–14. ———. 2012. Foucault, penseur de la Violence? Cités 2 (50): 75–86. Gutting, Gary. 1989. Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. Habermas, Jurgen. 1987 [1985]. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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Han-Pile, Béatrice. 2002. Foucault’s Critical Project – Between the Transcendental and the historical. Stanford University Press: Stanford. ———. 2010. “The Death of Man:” Foucault and Anti-Humanism. In Foucault and Philosophy, ed. O’Leary and Falzon, 118–142. Oxford: Blackwell. Harcourt, Bernard E. 2013. Situation du Cours. In Michel Foucault, La Société Punitive – Cours au Collège de France 1972–1973. Paris: Seuil-Gallimard: 273–314. Irrera, Orazio. 2017. L’idéologie et la préhistoire du dispositif. In La pensée politique de Foucault, ed. Orazio Irrera and Salvo Vaccaro, 137–152. Paris: Kimé. Kelly, Mark. 2009. Subjectivity. In The Political Philosophy of M. Foucault, 78–104. New York: Routledge. Lagrange, Jacques. 2009. Versions de la Psychanalyse dans le Texte de Foucault. Incidences 4–5: 11–54. Legrand, Stéphane. 2004. Le Marxisme oublié de Foucault. Actuel Marx 2 (36): 27–43. ———. 2007. Les Normes chez Foucault. PUF: Paris. Lemke, Thomas. 2004. Marx sans Guillemets: Foucault, la Gouvernementalité et la Critique du Néolibéralisme. Actuel Marx 36: 13–26. Mascaretti, Giovanni. 2014. Michel Foucault on Problematization, Parrhesia and Critique. Materiali Foucaultiani III (5–6 (janvier–décembre)): 135–154. Revel, Judith. 2002. Le vocabulaire de Foucault. Ellipses: Paris. Sabot, Philippe. 2009. Foucault avec Marx et au-delà de Marx. Critique 10 (749): 848–859. Taylor, Charles. 1984. Foucault on Freedom and Truth. Political Theory 12 (2, May): 152–183. Vuillemin, Jean-Charles. 2013. Foucault et le classicisme: les œillères de l’histoire (littéraire). Fabula-LhT 11, ‘1966, annus mirabilis,’ Dec. http://www.fabula. org/lht/11/vuillemin.html, downloaded 22 May 2014.

CHAPTER 3

Governmentality as a Turning Point

In the years he dedicated to analyses of power, Foucault published two books—Discipline and Punish (DP) in 1975 and History of Sexuality I— The Will to Know (HoS) in 1976. Both deal, as shown in the previous chapter, with the intertwinement of knowledge with power: DP linking the human sciences with the disciplinary apparatus, HoS—psychiatry, and the sexual apparatus. But if Foucault’s interest in power first appears in the 1970’s publications, his enquiries into knowledge have a longer history; those culminated with The Order of Things (OT), presented as an archaeology of the human sciences. Discipline and Punish further links these human sciences with disciplinary mechanisms. The emergence of man as an object of knowledge, the main thesis of The Order of Things, is now considered a correlate of the disciplinary techniques. Yet Foucault’s argument that each form of power nourishes and demands its own form of knowledge (DP 226) seems to imply that a broader historical application is possible: how then, one might ask, did the Renaissance and the Classical age epistemes develop in relation to power in the same period? I would like to contend here that the 1978 lectures at the Collège de France entitled Security, Territory, Population (STPe) are also a re-reading

This chapter is a slightly revised version of my article, published in Materiali Foucaultiani VI (11–12): 119–139 (Barry 2017). Permissions were kindly granted by Materiali Foucaultiani. © The Author(s) 2020 L. Barry, Foucault and Postmodern Conceptions of Reason, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48943-4_3

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of The Order of Things that answers this question. Foucault’s habit of reinterpreting his work in light of new inquiries is well-known; yet the 1978 lectures are specific on this matter, since they constitute a thorough and lengthy re-examination of each period in The Order of Things, that both supplements it with a genealogy of government and also displaces the archaeology itself. The argument of the lectures centers on the emergence of the population as a “subject-object of knowledge” (STPe 77, 275, unread) and power within modernity.1 Many have already situated this claim in relation to Foucault’s earlier works (Gordon 1991; Curtis 2002; Tellmann 2013) or in relation to the genealogy of liberal government (Paltrinieri 2014; Mitchell 2015), showing the importance of the concept for the contemporary exercise of power. My argument in this chapter focuses instead on the omission of probability and statistics in The Order of Things, and that omission’s consequences for Foucault’s later analyses of modern power. In the 1978 lectures, Foucault depicts a history of governmentality as it unfolds from the Renaissance until the nineteenth century which awards central importance to the conceptualization of the population. This genealogy marks a shift in Foucault’s analyses of modern power (Senellart 2009, 382): the disciplinary regime described in Discipline and Punish is now only one aspect of liberal government, which is described instead mainly as the management of the population as a whole. The archaeology of the modern episteme is also modified; it is not the appearance of man that characterizes modernity, but the slow isolation of the population as the collective level of reality that probability and statistics enabled. One might then suggest that the omission of these knowledges in The Order of Things, that led to the elision of the population as a consequence, also explains the primary focus on disciplinary techniques until the 1978 lectures.

1  Actually, Foucault isolates in the lectures how the population was created as an object of knowledge; the expression “subject-object” appears a few times though, explained when he mentions the emergence of the public and its opinions as another dimension of the population in need of government: “The public as subject-object of a knowledge (savoir): subject of a knowledge that is ‘opinion’ and object of a knowledge that is of a different type, since it has opinion as its object and the question for this knowledge of the state is to modify opinion, or to make use of it, to instrumentalize it” (STPe 275, unread. See also Chap. 8).

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The Order of Things’ Division into Epistemes and the Omission of Probability In his introduction to The Order of Things, Foucault explains that his interest does not lie in the description of the slow progress of a given field of knowledge toward scientific objectivity; rather, he intends to disclose the common epistemological field on which different knowledges of a given period “ground their positivity” (OT xxii).2 Rather than the vertical and continuous perspective on one field of knowledge over time, he focuses on the study of the horizontal commonalities of various knowledges in a given historical period. The definition of the type of “positivities” at stake can be found in The Archaeology of Knowledge: the positivities are “discursive formations” as the interplay of rules that creates a space for discursive practices. Looking at discourses as positivities means highlighting their materiality rather than their “rational value” (OT 13); specific epistemological objects appear in the spaces thus created, although archaeology is not concerned with the correspondence between the text and a supposed referent (AK 32–33, 89–90).3 Therefore, archaeology is not about the objects of knowledge per se; rather, it focuses on scientific discourses themselves, as “practices linked to specific conditions and subject to certain rules,” and the historical form they can take in a given time and place (DE I, # 58, 721, personal translation).4 While a general description of the various epistemes is given in the previous chapter, a focus on the archaeology of political economy as exposed in OT is necessary for my argument here. Mercantilism, Physiocracy, and Political Economy in the Order of Things The analyses of mercantilism, physiocracy, and political economy—three knowledges to which Foucault returns in depth in the 1978 lectures— form part of the general description of The Order of Things: mercantilism 2  For Paltrinieri (2012, 140) the “positivity” in OT is the mode of being of objects when they enter a scientific domain, and of statements when they qualify as true or false. 3  This method implies treating statements as historical facts, without any transcending rules underlying them; for Gutting it thus applies a “positivist” approach to discourse (Gutting, 1989, 242). 4   For a further distinction between Foucault’s archaeology and epistemology, see Macherey (2017).

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and physiocracy as two moments of the Classical age, and political economy as a knowledge within the modern episteme. The break between the Renaissance and the Classical age is visible in the theory of money and trade introduced by the mercantilists. In the Renaissance, money was a sign of wealth, conditional on its having an intrinsic value in itself (OT 169). Its status changed with the advent of the Classical age and the break from the episteme of similitude to that of representation. Mercantilism seems to inaugurate this period in the economic domain, and indeed for the mercantilists money represents value, in analogy with words that represent things (OT 175). In the Classical age, convention and practice attributed the metal its value, without reference to its intrinsic properties. This in fact launches a series of new issues. In the Renaissance, gold had a true, although hidden, value; it also fixed the true value of things, as the amount of gold according to which they were exchanged. With the advent of the Classical age, money comes to solely represent wealth. There is no longer any intrinsically fair price, and the value of things becomes a source of enquiry in itself. Foucault analyzes two theories of value, one of them being the physiocrats’.5 Their main claim (conditioned by the episteme) is that land (and God) is the source of wealth; the value of things comes from some people’s need for the surplus of others; money represents the wealth in circulation in these exchanges (OT 199). The break between the Classical and modern episteme in the economic domain occurs in two stages. First with Adam Smith, who replaces need by labor in the theory of value, thus radically changing its equation. Yet the unit of labor, that now measures the value of goods, remains in Smith’s model a fixed entity; the amount of work still “represents” the value of the object in a monolithic way. Hence for Foucault, Smith remains at the threshold of modernity, actually opened by Ricardo. Like Smith, Ricardo considers labor as a measure of the value of things. Yet, by contrast with Smith, for Ricardo work does not represent but in fact produces value— hence the break with the episteme of representation, in three main ways. First, work is defined as a process, whose value depends on the conditions of production that determine the value of the final product (OT 255). This new understanding is the mark of the modern episteme, according to which things are no longer entirely graspable through 5  Among the physiocrats, Foucault quotes Cantillon and Mirabeau, but also Quesnay’s article “Hommes,” to which he returns in 1978 (OT 192).

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representation. What gradually assumes importance is the organization, the mode of functioning of things which gives them a thickness (épaisseur), a “depth,” and a “density” (OT 239, 304, 313). But with the idea of function and system, it is as if a new dimension was added to the flat description of the world, hence the break with the Classical period: words can no longer represent things with no residuum (OT 267–268). Second, while scarcity in the Classical age might occur temporarily, it is easily overcome: the abundance of nature offers goods far exceeding human needs and can cover them through exchange (OT 256). For Ricardo, by contrast, scarcity is an essential condition of human existence. It is also a characteristic feature of the modern episteme, where man is understood as a finite being, in relation to the scarcity of nature. Work in this predicament is a necessity as “the only means of overcoming the fundamental insufficiency of nature and of triumphing for an instant over death” (OT 257). Finally, exactly as the episteme marks the entry of man into history, economics is understood as having its own temporality. Mankind has an economic history, leading either to a pessimistic ending, with Ricardo,6 or an optimistic one, with Marx (OT 258–262).7 Probability, Statistics, and the Episteme of Representation As is hitherto discernible, Foucault’s description of the emergence of political economy is devoid of reference to probability or statistics, as if these knowledges had no influence on the former. While there is a short mention of probability in the Classical age, strangely enough it is not connected to the economic field, nor even directly to Pascal’s games of chance where it took shape.8 Foucault speaks instead of the arbitrariness of 6  Ricardo’s pessimistic history is very close to Malthus’s on this matter. However, Malthus is mentioned only once in The Order of Things and again fleetingly in the 1978 lectures. 7  For a full description of the opposition between Ricardo and Marx in OT and Foucault’s own historical context, see Sabot (2006, 78–87). Sabot characterizes the emergence of political economy by two main points; the historicity of processes and the finitude of man at work. He thus encapsulates in one single phenomenon the appearance of processes and their temporality, here taken as separate elements. 8  Hacking sees in the last chapters of The Logic of Port-Royal the starting-point of probability (Hacking 1975, 12). Strikingly, Foucault uses the same text for his own analyses of the Classical episteme, focusing rather on the theory of signs. He seems to ignore the probabilistic chapters and their importance for the understanding of modernity.

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l­anguage in the episteme of representation, leading to the relative certainty or sole “probability” of a sign in its capacity to represent things (OT 59–60). Yet the emergence of probability in the Classical age enabled the conceptualization of various new problems in different domains, creating new epistemological objects that did constitute a break with the previous period (Hacking 2006, 99–115; Rabouin 2015, 424–25).9 As for statistics, they are completely absent from The Order of Things. One could argue that the first statistics were not considered at the time as a domain of knowledge but solely as a tool of government, and hence would not fall within the purview of Foucault’s study (Le Bras 2000, 123). Foucault actually provides another, methodological, reason for the omission, a reason that might hold for probability too: his intention is to avoid a retrospective reading of earlier knowledges, one that would retro-­ project on the past the beginning of modern forms of knowledge. Instead he centers his inquiries on “the appearance of figures peculiar to the Classical age (…) An analysis of wealth that took little account of the ‘political arithmetic’ that was contemporary with it” (OT x, emphasis added).10 Therefore Foucault does not actually omit probability and statistics as classical knowledges, but simply focuses on other, in his view more specific to the age, discursive formations. Yet as Canguilhem remarks, their later transformation does not mean they were not in conformity with the previous episteme: Among the theoretical discourses produced in conformity with the epistemic system of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, certain ones, such as that of natural history, were rejected by the nineteenth-century episteme, but others were integrated. Even though it served as a model for the eighteenth-­ century physiologists of animal economy, Newton’s physics did not go down with them. (Canguilhem 2005, 87–88)

The same would hold with statistics and probability; some knowledges, so it seems, do escape their encapsulation in one single episteme, a characteristic that places them outside of the scope of archaeology. Yet this 9  Rabouin highlights the fact that the emergence of probability in the Classical age was a significant break with the previous period, which rendered thinkable new objects of knowledge. 10  Interestingly, each time he rejects the continuous approach that dictates a retrospective reading, Foucault mentions Petty as an example (OT 166–168; AK 31).

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contradicts some explicit formulations of The Order of Things, where Foucault contends that “in any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge” (OT 183, emphasis added). Another possible explanation could be that, in Foucault’s view at the time, probabilities give a mathematicized formalization to existing epistemological problems or, as Canguilhem puts it (2005, 88), simply function as a new language. In the case of Condorcet’s use of probabilities, Foucault indeed contends: It is no doubt of interest historically to know how Condorcet was able to apply the calculation of probabilities to politics (…) But despite the specificity of the problems posed, it is unlikely that the relation to mathematics (the possibilities of mathematicization, or the resistance to all efforts at formalization) is constitutive of the human sciences in their particular positivity. (OT 349, emphasis added)

For Foucault, the novelty of the modern episteme stands in its positing man as an object of knowledge. The “particular positivity” of the human sciences, in this respect, designates mainly the one posed by psychology and psychiatry, with almost no reference to the social sciences.11 As a corollary, Foucault misses the emergence of collective objects of knowledge such as the population, in which probabilities and statistics are paramount. Furthermore, both statistics and probability seem for him to belong to specific areas of the discursive formation of mathematics. In The Archaeology of Knowledge (AK), Foucault defines mathematics as an exception to his analyses. Most discursive formations evolve indeed along various thresholds toward a final formalization that would define them as sciences; yet some of these discourses will never become sciences, while others will. Archaeology focuses on knowledges as “savoir”–before they turn into sciences. Contrary to all other discourses, mathematics was a science from the start, hence its exclusion from archaeology (AK 186–189). Interestingly, Rabouin further tackles Foucault’s “an-historicity of mathematics:” it should have been treated as a knowledge—“savoir,” with

11  The repeated minimization of the social sciences in Foucault’s diagnosis of modernity has been frequently noticed; see for instance Salmon (2016, 82); Karsenti considers that Foucault in fact strategically avoids the social sciences (Karsenti 2013, 171).

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its impurity and dependence on cultural circumstances.12 In the same strand of thought, Le Bras insists on the historical development of statistics and probabilities, showing how some conceptualizations and developments could not occur until the nineteenth or twentieth century (Le Bras 2000, 172). Hence the “scientificity argument,” that discards sciences as outside the scope of the archaeology, does not seem to hold, neither for mathematics, nor for statistics, or probability. Such an archaeology of statistics will be performed, as I argue in the last part of this chapter, in the 1978 lectures.

Modernity in the History of Governmentality During the 1970’s Foucault supplements the archaeology as a method with genealogy; the productivity of power also exposes the political and historical conditions of the formation of knowledge (PS 93, n.2). In 1976, he summarizes “genealogy has to fight the power-effects characteristic of any discourse that is regarded as scientific” (SMBD 9). In 1978 he then contends that “the development of scientific knowledge” cannot be understood “without taking into account the changes in the mechanisms of power. The typical case would be economic science” (DE II #231, 533, personal translation). The renewed diagnosis of modernity developed in Discipline and Punish is formulated in terms of the entanglement of the human sciences and the disciplinary regime that pervades modern institutions (DP 191–193). The emergence of man as an object of knowledge, which is the main thesis of The Order of Things, is now seen as a correlate of the disciplinary techniques: the constant observation and measurement of bodies in their compliance with the norm, and the discipline that renders them docile and useful to the power apparatus, also create this figure of man.13 In the 1978 lectures, Foucault sketches a history of governmentality14 that, I would like to suggest here, is actually a political rereading of The Order of Things, one that shows that the intertwinement of knowledge and power exceeds the modern era evoked in Discipline and Punish; this 12  Rabouin contends that with mathematics Foucault actually falls into the exact discourse on the origin that he rejected in the introduction of the Archeology (Rabouin 2015, 422). 13  See Chap. 2. 14  At the end of the lesson on February 1st, 1978, Foucault says that if he could, he would change the lectures’ title to “a history of governmentality.”

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finding opens the way for more general contentions on the exercise of power. It also recognizes the importance of statistics and probability in the Classical and modern epistemes, as I will show below, a finding that significantly modifies Foucault’s own depiction of modern and contemporary functioning of power. The “history of governmentality” (STPe 108) starts with the description of the pastoral power of the Church, namely God’s government over the world, which coincides with the episteme of similitude. In the lectures, Foucault indeed states that: A world subject to pastoral government, (…) was a book, an open book in which one could discover the truth (…) in the form of resemblance and analogy. At the same time it was also a world in which it was necessary to decipher hidden truths that showed themselves by hiding and hid by showing themselves, that is to say, it was a world that was filled with ciphers to be decoded. (STPe 236, emphasis added)

Pastoral power rather appears as the ancestor of disciplinary power: it functions through complete subordination and absolute obedience, by extracting from each individual a truth about himself that helps individualize him, by subjection (STPe 175–185). The Renaissance decipherment of the cosmos described in The Order of Things is now broadened to apply also to the individual under pastoral scrutiny. One of the effects of the epistemological shift in the Classical age is that God is understood to “rule the world through general, immutable and universal laws” (STPe 234). God reigns over the world, but he no longer governs it. Foucault calls this turn “the de-governmentalization of the cosmos” (STPe 236). As a result, the specificity of the king’s role becomes a concern: the king, not God, should govern according to a rationality yet to be invented, which Foucault coins Raison d’État (STPe 236).15 At a very early stage (in the sixteenth century), this new rationality, strongly influenced by mercantilist principles, takes the economy as a model (STPe 95). In La Perrière’s text, Foucault indeed finds the contention that government should deal with “the complex of men and things,” a characteristic he attributes to the modern techniques of liberal governmentality. Yet in his view this form of government remains “blocked” until 15  Interestingly, at the dawn of modernity, Thiers will state the same for the king—“the king reigns but he does not govern,” a famous sentence cited by Foucault at the end of the January 25th 1978 lecture (STPe 76).

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the eighteenth century (STPe 96), for two main reasons. First, the “institutional and mental structures” were such that the exercise of power continued to be problematized as sovereignty. Hence mercantilism “is the first rationalization of the exercise of power as a practice of government (…) but I think that mercantilism was blocked and halted precisely because it took the sovereign’s might as its essential objective” (STPe 102). Second, mercantilism lacked a proper concept of the population and considered the family as the model for good government (STPe 104). Raison d’État therefore remains a first stage toward modern liberal governmentality. It establishes the police as a tool for controlling the subjects of the kingdom. The police, says Foucault, empowers the state as “a power of rational and calculated intervention on individuals” (STPe 327). The interesting point, from this chapter’s perspective, is that the “partitioning grid” (quadrillage) of the population, a distinctive practice of both the police (STPe 10, 325–326) and the disciplinary regime (DP 195–200), needs and creates the first kind of statistics. Statistics hence develop as a necessary tool for the police: “police and statistics mutually condition each other” (STPe 315). It consists initially of knowing the number of inhabitants, for the sake of taking charge of the necessities of life (STPe 341–347). Statistics is initially the “knowledge of the state on the state,” which intends to represent exhaustively (with no residuum) the people in the kingdom. It is therefore a knowledge in conformity with the epistemological configuration of the Classical age as diagnosed in The Order of Things. The shift from the mercantilist approach to the modern one is initiated by the physiocrats’ conceptualization of the population, which has a few characteristics that strikingly link it to modernity as defined in The Order of Things. Indeed, the population is now seen as constituted by a collection of individuals, each with their own immutable desires. At the collective level, these versatile desires turn into the general interest and show a constancy that did not appear at the individual one (STPe 74–75). Population is no longer “a collection of subject wills” (as with mercantilism) but “a set of processes” (STPe 70). This in turn imbues the concept with depth and thickness, in line with other objects of knowledge in the modern episteme. This novel understanding of the population allows the appearance of a new form of governmentality technique, liberal governmentality, that Foucault will study further in 1979:

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To say that population is a natural phenomenon that cannot be changed by decree does not mean, however, that it is an inaccessible and impenetrable nature, quite the contrary. And this is where the analysis of the physiocrats and economists becomes interesting, in that the naturalness identified in the fact of population is constantly accessible to agents and techniques of transformation, on condition that these agents and techniques are at once enlightened, reflected, analytical, calculated, and calculating. (STPe 71, emphasis added)

The fact that the population “cannot be changed by decree,” means that new methods and techniques of power are emerging. The link with The Order of Things remains tacit until the 1979 lectures where, coming back to the emergence of liberal governmentality with political economy, Foucault notes that “Kant, a little later moreover, had to tell man that he cannot know the totality of the world. Well, some decades earlier, political economy had told the sovereign: not even you can know the totality of the economic process. There is no sovereign in economics” (BB 283).16 Following Desrosières, I suggest that political economy results from the application of probabilistic models to the descriptive statistics of Raison d’État (Desrosières 2010, 26–50). The concept of population in its modern meaning thus appears: it becomes the set of observations of a given probabilistic law, distributed accordingly. This has a first and drastic consequence: while the disciplinary norm still entailed the imposition of an arbitrary will on the individual, the statistical law includes in the normal curve the whole distribution of behaviors. Foucault now distinguishes between disciplinary “normation,” that posits the norm first, and statistical normalization which starts from the observation of behaviors, all considered natural, in order to deduce the adequate probabilistic law (STPe 57). Modern liberal governmentality is therefore founded on the statistical analyses of the processes running through the population. It integrates the opacity of the phenomena and tries to overcome it with proper analytical techniques. These techniques further enable prediction and forecast in an uncertain environment (STPe 1–27). From the perspective of the 16  In 1978, the physiocrats seem to mark the entrance into modernity. In the 1979 lectures, Foucault corrects this point by stating that what is lacking in the physiocrats’ conception of government is the opacity introduced by Adam Smith in political economy: “The invisible hand posits (…) that there cannot be a sovereign in the physiocratic sense and that there cannot be despotism in the physiocratic sense, because there cannot be economic evidence” (BB 286).

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power-knowledge analysis, statistics allows a rereading of The Order of Things and the characterization of Renaissance, Classical, and modern epistemes through a political lens, while reinterpreting the role of mercantilism, physiocracy, and political economy. This reading enlarges the intertwinement of modern knowledge and power with earlier periods. As Karsenti puts it, “from knowledge to power, the transposition has no residuum” (Karsenti 2013, 170, personal translation); the two epistemological shifts of The Order of Things are now entirely “translated,” so to speak, into techniques of power. But this genealogy is also and maybe more fundamentally a displacement of the diagnosis of modernity as sketched in Discipline and Punish. Indeed, while the disciplines were presented as a modern power technique originating in the monasteries of the Middle Ages, they appear in the lectures as somehow having far more in common with sovereign power and the Classical age. Foucault says, for instance: The idea of the panopticon is a modern idea in one sense, but we can also say that it is completely archaic, since the panoptic mechanism basically involves putting someone in the center– an eye, a gaze, a principle of surveillance – who will be able to make its sovereignty function over all the individuals [placed] within this machine of power. (STPe 66, emphasis added)

In many occurrences in the lectures he further insists on the novelty represented by the security mechanisms founded on probability and statistics: these techniques are “absolutely modern” or “relatively new” (STPe 11, 76), and introduce a kind of power very different from discipline (STPe 66). While he insists that they do not function without discipline but in conjunction with it (STPe 106–107), the first three lessons are dedicated to showing how these techniques are in fact “radically different” from those involved in discipline and sovereignty. Isolating the specificity of these techniques implies an archaeology of statistics that I will try to retrace in the next part.

Modernity, Political Economy, and the Archaeology of Probability and Statistics The genealogy sketched above makes the modern conceptualization of the population pivotal in the transformation of power techniques. Prior to the 1978 lectures, Foucault ascribed little or no importance to it, although

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he had already discussed the physiocrats’ texts at length. The shift from archaeology to genealogy does not, by itself, explain the sudden emergence of the concept of population in Foucault’s thought (Paltrinieri 2014, 261); actually, the history of governmentality hints at an archaeology slightly different from that in The Order of Things. In a way, this alternative archaeology is also pivotal, I argue, to the shift in Foucault’s theory of modern power. Population as a Concept and the Archaeology of Statistics As Curtis noticed, early uses of the word “population” in Foucault’s texts do not refer to population as a concept, in its statistical meaning.17 In The Order of Things, “population” is mentioned a few times mainly in relation to the mercantilists, for what Curtis takes to be “populousness” (Curtis 2002, 507), as in “the number of individuals making up the population of a state” (OT 201).18 The term does not even appear in relation to the physiocrats, whereas in the 1978 lectures Foucault stated that they promoted a transformation of the term (STPe 104). In the modern episteme, Malthus is mentioned only once, as actually doubling Ricardo’s analyses of the human species. His theory of population and its critique by Marx are ignored (Paltrinieri 2014, 251; Mitchell 2015, 20),19 or reduced to the abovementioned opposition between an optimistic or pessimistic vision of human history. Tellmann therefore contends that “Foucault never truly ventured to understand the figure of population in terms of the ‘anthropology of finitude’” (Tellmann 2013, 139). One might actually argue the opposite; the lens of the episteme of finitude allowed the conflation of Malthus and Ricardo on the notion of scarcity, and downplayed the role of the population in these analyses. Another reading of Malthus, that positions demography and statistics at its center, would have been possible, but it would not have matched the thesis of The Order of Things (see for 17  Prior to the 1978 lectures, Foucault mentions once the population as a statistical notion (F2014, 129). 18  Actually, it is the attempt to determine this number which motivated Graunt’s inquiries (See Le Bras 2000, 23). 19  A convincing explanation for this omission comes from what Revel calls Foucault’s “politics of quotation” (Revel 2002, 79 n.2) and, as Tellmann among others has noted: “It is thus in a way apt to say that Foucault circumvents rather than takes up the issue of economy in his attempt to dislodge the economistic and totalizing strands of the Marxist tradition” (Tellmann 2013, 9; see also Legrand 2004).

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instance Le Bras 2000, 217–219). Foucault does give some indications of such an alternative reading in 1976 with the analyses of bio-power, where the family is taken as an instrument to implement “a Malthusian control of the birthrate” (HoS 100).20 Given the centrality of population in the 1978 lectures, one might be surprised by the limited importance accorded, again, to Malthus. He is briefly compared to Marx in the field of political economy, in order to show two opposite interpretations that Foucault does not actually agree with; on the one hand Malthus as pointing to issues of bio-economy, on the other hand Marx as promoting a historico-political approach through the concept of “class” (STPe 77).21 In the next passage, Foucault further shows that the population actually appeared in the nineteenth century as an object of knowledge in a variety of domains (biology, natural history, and philology); accordingly, he had claimed in The Order of Things that man was the epistemological invention of modernity. The population in Foucault’s definition of liberal government is in fact larger than its limits in bio-power; he further clarifies this point in the 1979 lectures, The Birth of Biopolitics, stating that “only when we understand what is at stake in this regime of liberalism (…) will we be able to grasp what biopolitics is” (BB 21–22). In the first three lessons of 1978, Foucault provides examples of this new technique of government called liberalism that takes the population as its relevant level of intervention. Focusing on the issues of healthy circulation, vaccination, and scarcity, Foucault isolates a new “level of reality” (STPe 95, 104) for the exercise of power. Such a level takes shape, I argue, thanks to statistics: Statistics (…) now discovers and gradually reveals that the population possesses its own regularities: its death rate, its incidence of disease, its regularities of accidents. Statistics also shows that the population involves specific, aggregate effects and that these phenomena are irreducible to those of the family (…) Statistics [further] shows that, through its movements, its customs, and its activity, population has specific economic effects. Statistics 20  Paltrinieri also mentions Foucault’s displacement from archaeology to genealogy on the Marxian notion of “the floating population” in the 1973 lectures (Paltrinieri, 2014, 251). But here, Curtis could argue that it is rather the population as part of the social body which is at stake; indeed, Foucault speaks of the “floating population” as opposed to the working population (PS 171), as a “a stratum of population still close to instinct” (PS 162, emphasis added). 21  For an elaboration on the (in)-accuracy of this claim, see Sibertin-Blanc (2015).

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enables the specific phenomena of population to be quantified and thereby reveals that this specificity is irreducible [to the] small framework of the family. (STPe 104, emphasis added)

The existence of a regularity at the collective level triggers the use of probabilistic models that characterizes the rationality applied to these phenomena. Foucault defines the security mechanisms in the first lesson as the use of the probabilities of future events in order to make decisions in the present: “I think the management of these [open] series (…) that can only be controlled by an estimate of probabilities, is pretty much the essential characteristic of the mechanism of security” (STPe 20, emphasis added). This is indeed the common feature of circulation, scarcity, vaccination, or prediction in general; the individual reaction remains impossible to predict, but the average on the aggregate is known well enough to allow an accurate estimate of future results. The modern treatment of these phenomena thus takes probabilities into account in order to decide on a course of action. According to Ewald, the widespread use of these techniques by the late nineteenth-century inaugurates a new “social regime of truth. They imply a new manner for men to manage the causality of their behavior, to think their (…) conflicts, and to define their mutual obligations” (Ewald 1986, 26).22 He further defines those societies “insurance societies,” and shows their flourishing throughout the twentieth century. Statistics and probability appear therefore as the knowledges that frame the security mechanisms at the heart of political economy and liberal governmentality. Foucault’s use of the term “population” in the 1978 lectures derives from this statistical meaning (rather than the sole bio-economical earlier use):23 the object of knowledge is the aggregate, and not the individual. This defines the “level of reality” now pertinent for the exercise of power: “within the economic technology and management, there is this 22  Foucault also uses the expression “insurance societies,” for societies where individuals “are guaranteed against uncertainty, accident and damage risk” (DE II #213, 385–386). He had previously used the expression, in the 1976 lectures, albeit with a slightly different meaning, about Nazism (SMBD 259). 23  See Curtis (2002, p. 509): the “management” of the phenomena is rendered possible by the law of large numbers. Actually, Curtis claims that Foucault did not isolate this statistical and probabilistic definition of population (Ibidem, p. 511). But he appears not to have had access to the 1978 lectures (except for the fourth lesson) which, I would argue, significantly changes the picture on this matter.

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break between the pertinent level of the population and the level that is not pertinent, or that is simply instrumental. The final objective is the population” (STPe 42, emphasis added). The Emergence of a Collective Epistemological Object and the Diagnosis of Modernity When Foucault decides to approach the government/population pair from the viewpoint of the “genealogy of the technologies of power,” he also chooses to downplay the archaeological approach that would have emphasized the emergence of certain objects such as the population, within domains of knowledge such as probability and statistics (STPe 35–36). My contention here is that his genealogy still bears consequences for the epistemological configuration of modernity he described in The Order of Things. Neither Foucault nor the editors of the lectures mention the existence of Hacking’s book, The Emergence of Probability;24 published in 1975, it makes explicit references to Foucault. Drawing on The Order of Things, it argues that probability “emerged” in the Classical age as a break in rationality.25 In analogy with Foucault’s 1978 lectures, Hacking gives an account of how the first mortality tables, as descriptive statistics of the population, were immediately linked to probabilistic considerations on “chances of dying” (Hacking 2006, 99, 109, 115). Strikingly, both problems of gambling and mortality rates were raised as specific issues of the theory of value, yet not the value of material goods dealt with in The Order of Things. Probabilities were indeed elaborated in order to determine the value of lotteries (Hacking 2006, 95), and mortality tables were needed to understand the value of life annuities (Hacking 2006, 101); Foucault would have probably qualified these problems as purely mathematical at the time. Interestingly enough, statistics had been mentioned in 1963, in The Birth of the Clinic (BC). Foucault observed that nineteenth-century 24  The editorial notes on the lectures indeed mention V. John and a volume published by INSEE in 1977 (STPe 114, n.31). 25  This point came from Foucault’s obvious influence on Hacking. It was further criticized since probability did not create a sharp break but an “increasing sophistication” in mathematical thought (Hacking 2006, viii). Yet an important element of the episteme of representation, namely the vexing issue of how to represent uncertain events, is missing in The Order of Things.

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medicine relies on probabilistic thought and that “in clinical experience, variations are not set aside, they separate of their own accord; they cancel each other out in the general configuration, because they are integrated into the domain of probability; (…) the abnormal is still a form of regularity” (BC 102, emphasis added). In 1978, Foucault uses the exact same term referring to the phenomena treated by security techniques: “there is a progressive self-cancellation of phenomena by the phenomena themselves” (STPe 66). This self-cancellation allows for the regularity of the phenomenon in the aggregate. As mentioned before, Foucault contends in the 1978 lectures that the population, as a new subject/object of the exercise of power, explains the shift in all epistemological domains with the advent of modernity. More crucially, Foucault even links the human sciences to this emergence of the population. He concludes: Hence the theme of man, and the human sciences that analyze him (…) should be understood on the basis of the emergence of population as the correlate of power and the object of knowledge. After all, man, as he is thought and defined by the so-called human sciences of the nineteenth century, and as he is reflected in nineteenth century humanism, is nothing other than a figure of population. (STPe 79, emphasis added)

With this conclusion, Foucault admits that the population, and not man, should be put at the heart of the modern episteme. Besides, I wonder if Foucault’s contention that “man is a figure of the population” should not be understood as meaning that the modern episteme is in fact driven by the knowledge of collective phenomena. The 1978 lectures would then sketch an alternative archaeology where, within the human sciences, social sciences would have greater importance. Paltrinieri suggests that for Foucault the population is transformed into its modern meaning thanks to the collection of data for the sake of the police; it thus conditions the development of knowledges rather than being constructed by them, and further renders possible biopolitics (Paltrinieri 2014, 256). I would argue that the collected statistics could not be imagined in terms of “population” until the regularity of the underlying phenomena was isolated. This could not happen without the application of technical tools and

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calculation on the data collected (Hacking 1991, 182).26 The concept of population therefore appeared within the discursive formations of probability and statistics. Hence the real condition of possibility for the conceptualization of the population seems to be the emergence of probability in the Classical age. The exhaustive “transposition from knowledge to power” is now achieved within the modern episteme itself; while psychology and psychiatry are entwined with disciplinary techniques applied at the level of the individual body (DP 135–139), the social sciences such as sociology, demography, and modern statistics nourish the security mechanisms and the management of the collective level that characterizes modern political economy. This alternative archaeology, that gives probability its place in the Classical episteme and leads to the isolation of the population as a modern object of knowledge, entails a different description of modern power than the one sketched in Discipline and Punish. At the end of the 1976 lectures, Foucault seems to criticize his own work in the following terms: “the normalizing society is therefore not (…) a sort of generalized disciplinary society whose disciplinary institutions have swarmed and finally taken over everything – that, I think is no more than a first and inadequate interpretation of a normalizing society” (SMBD 253, emphasis added). I have tried to show above that the inadequacy of the description might be in fact the consequence of his omission of probability in the Classical age in The Order of Things.

Conclusion By associating each epistemological period of The Order of Things with a certain form of power-exercise (all of which continue to co-exist nowadays), Foucault widens to earlier periods the scope of the modern entanglement of power with knowledge as described in Discipline and Punish. In the ensuing years, Foucault returns infrequently to this genealogy of government. In the last lesson of 1979 for instance, he opposes the Renaissance period, where the Prince governs “by divine truth,” to the Classical and the modern ones, where government is “adjusted to rationality”—first, with Raison d’État, on “the rationality of the sovereign 26  For Le Bras, Petty’s science both transforms the exercise of power and allows for the emergence of the idea of mortality as a collective phenomenon (Le Bras 2000, 256).

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himself,” and then with liberal governmentality, on the rationality of “those who are governed as economic subjects” (BB 311–312). The isolation of the statistical dimension of the population in the 1978 lectures thus leads Foucault to a series of displacements. It first implies a revision of the epistemological characteristics of the Classical and the modern age, in order to include probability and statistics as important domains of knowledge, that shaped, and were in turn shaped by, the techniques of power. Besides, Foucault’s description of modern power is also deeply modified by this alternative archaeology, in a manner that helps him lift the paradox described in the previous chapter. The security mechanisms sketched in the lectures form indeed a new political rationality intertwined with liberal government, with a focus on collective processes rather than the individual body, as in discipline. The population is thus a new level of intervention for modern power, which accommodates the distribution of behaviors. Those are not perceived as disciplined within an arbitrary sovereign will, that  would be imposing a singular norm for all: this insight changes Foucault’s perception of modern subjects and their mode of formation. How this is done in practice is the object of the next chapter.

References Foucault’s Work AK 2002. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge Classics. BB 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics – Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. BC 2003. The Birth of the Clinic. London: Routledge Classics. DP 1995. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage Books. HoS 1978. The History of Sexuality I. New York: Random House. OT 1994. The Order of Things – An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books. PS 2015. The Punitive Society  – Lectures at the Collège de France 1972–1973. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. STPe 2009. Security, Territory, Population – Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. SMBD 2003. Society must be defended  – Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976. New York: Picador.

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Articles F2014. 2014. Bio-history and Bio-politics. Foucault Studies 18 (October): 128–130.

Works

in

French

DE I  2001 [1994]. Dits et Ecrits, I 1954–1975. Paris: Quarto-Gallimard. DE II  2001 [1994]. Dits et Ecrits, II 1976–1988. Paris: Quarto-Gallimard. STP 2009. Sécurité, Territoire, Population  – Cours au Collège de France 1977–1978. Paris: Seuil-Gallimard.

Other Authors Canguilhem, George. 2005 [1967]. The Death of Man or Exhaustion of the Cogito. In The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 74–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Curtis, Bruce. 2002. Foucault on Governmentality and Population: The Impossible Discovery. The Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie 27 (4, Autumn): 505–533. Gordon, Colin. 1991. Governmental Rationality: an Introduction. In The Foucault Effects  – Studies in Governmentality, ed. Gordon Burchell and Miller, 1–52. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Gutting, Gary. 1989. Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. Desrosières, Alain. 2010 [1993]. La Politique des Grands Nombres – Histoire de la Raison Statistique. Paris: La découverte. Ewald, François. 1986. L’Etat Providence. Grasset: Paris. Hacking, Ian. 1991. How Should we do the History of Statistics? In The Foucault Effects – Studies in Governmentality, ed. Gordon Burchell and Miller, 181–196. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 2006 [1975]. The Emergence of Probability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Karsenti, Bruno. 2013. Gouverner la Société. In D’une Philosophie à l’Autre, 155–174. Paris: Gallimard. Le Bras, Hervé. 2000. Naissance de la Mortalité. Paris: Gallimard/Le Seuil. Macherey, Pierre. 2017. Subjectivité et normativité chez Canguilhem et Foucault. Materiali Foucaultiani 11–12: 15–38. Mitchell, Dean. 2015. The Malthus Effect: Population and the Liberal Government of Life. Economy and Society 44 (1): 18–39. Paltrinieri, Luca. 2012. L’expérience du concept. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne.

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———. 2014. Foucault et l’histoire de la démographie. In Michel Foucault. Un héritage critique, ed. J.-F. Bert and J. Lamy, 245–262. Paris: CNRS Éditions. Rabouin, David. 2015. L’Exception Mathématique. Les Etudes Philosophiques 3 (153): 413–430. Sabot, Philippe. 2006. Lire Les Mots et les Choses. Presses Universitaires de France: Paris. Salmon, Gildas. 2016. Foucault et la Généalogie de la Sociologie. Archives de Philosophie 1: 79–102. Sibertin-Blanc, Guillaume. 2015. Race, population, classe: Discours historico-­ politique et biopolitique du capital de Foucault à Marx. In Marx et Foucault, ed. Christian Laval, Luca Paltrinieri, and Ferhat Taylan, 228–243. Paris: La Découverte. Senellart, Michel. 2009. Situation des cours. In Michel Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population – Cours au Collège de France 1977–1978. Paris: SeuilGallimard: 381–411. Tellmann, Ute. 2013. Catastrophic Populations and the Fear of the Future: Malthus and the Genealogy of Liberal Economy. Theory, Culture and Society 30 (2): 135–155.

CHAPTER 4

From Government to Subjectivity

The “late Foucault” was for a long time an enigma. After the publication of the first volume of the History of Sexuality in 1976, in which he announced a series of books that ultimately never appeared,1 Foucault remained silent for eight long years. And then, a couple of weeks before his untimely death, two books were released, formally as the second and third volumes of the History. But these new volumes had nothing to do with the first, except for their title: the first volume dealt with the modern era and mechanisms of power, whereas the last two books dealt with the Greek period and the care of the self. How and why did Foucault shift his interest from power to subjectivity? Some of the interviews and articles published between 1976 and 1984 contain elements of this evolution in his thinking (see for instance F1997c; F1997e). But it was only the publication of the lectures at the Collège de France that has made it possible to fully follow Foucault’s train of thought during this period. My purpose in this chapter is to demonstrate the crucial impact of the lectures on liberal and neoliberal governmentality in 1  For a thorough reconstitution of the material gathered on each of the planned volumes, and a sketch of what each could have contained—see Elden (2016) pp. 62–71.

A slightly different version of this chapter is forthcoming in M. Faustino and G. Ferraro (eds), 2020, The Late Foucault: Ethical and Political Questions (London, Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc). Permissions were kindly granted by Bloomsbury. © The Author(s) 2020 L. Barry, Foucault and Postmodern Conceptions of Reason, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48943-4_4

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1978 and 1979 on the shift from analyses of power to analyses of subjectivity. In one of his first lectures of Lectures on the Will to Know (LWK) in 1970, Foucault outlines the general framework of his future studies and explains that “the aim of the research will be to identify the function and assess the effect of a discourse of truth in the discourse of law” (LWK 2, emphasis added). His studying of neoliberal governmentality led, however, I would suggest, to a reversal in his thought: in the contemporary exercise of power, the dimension of “veridiction”—the discourse of truth—was identified as becoming predominant over jurisdiction, the discourse of the law.2 One might even argue that the discourse of the law is just one historical instance of the discourse of truth. Consequently, Foucault revises his first description of modern power as discipline exercised on docile bodies: governmentality, the “conduct of conducts,” implies subjects acting on their own. I suggest that in order to better comprehend the nature of the constraints imposed by neoliberal governmentality, Foucault turns to the relations between subject and truth. Much has been written on subjectivation and truth-telling (see for instance Harrer 2005; Landry 2009; Butler 2016; Lorenzini 2016). However, little attention has been given to the interplay between the notions of veridiction and jurisdiction, to which Foucault turns repeatedly in his texts. I suggest that analyzing this interplay will shed light on why the study of neoliberal government led Foucault to consider that antique processes of subjectivation bore relevance to the understanding of Western societies. The shift from jurisdiction to veridiction implies first a renewed approach to truth. In the first lecture of the 1980’s, On the Government of the Living (GL), Foucault indeed insists that his move from the concept of power to that of governmentality entails a shift from power-knowledge to the more general notion of “government by the truth” (GL 11), further linked in the remainder of the lectures to processes of subjectivation. The veering of Foucault’s interest toward subjectivity in the 1980’s can be illustrated by comparing two readings of Homer’s text on the judgment between Menelaus and Antilochus. The first reading is in the 1971 lectures at the Collège, which I analyze in the first part of this chapter; the 2  The term “veridiction” is Foucault’s creation. It is a neologism that results from the combination of the Latin root veri for truth, and diction for speaking, pronouncing, or telling. It captures best this notion of truth-telling (see Becker et al. 2012, 5, n. 9).

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second is in the 1981 lectures at Louvain, to which I refer in the concluding part. In the middle section, I will try to show how between those two readings, the 1978 and 1979 lectures on neoliberal governmentality triggered a shift in Foucault’s analysis of modern power that implied giving veridiction precedence over jurisdiction.

Power/Knowledge and the First Reading of Homer, 1970/71 The analysis of the relations between power and knowledge started with the 1970/71 lectures entitled Lectures on the Will to Know, where Foucault studies texts of Nietzsche and questions knowledge as “connaissance.”3 These lectures indeed frame the power-knowledge analyses that followed, since they claim that the truth imposed by knowledge as connaissance implies specific mechanisms of power, exclusion, and domination (Beistegui 2014). For Lorenzini, Foucault does not offer an alternative conceptualization of truth, but shows that the objective truth under the assumption of knowledge as “connaissance,” should be seen as one form of the archaic modes of truth, shaped in the dreadful and unpredictable will of the gods (Lorenzini 2016). While this claim suits Foucault’s later conception of truth as will be shown in the last part, I suggest that in the 1970/71 lectures he does contrapose two distinct forms of truth, one masking the other; behind the so-called objective, scientific split between true and false, there is always a struggle and the imposition of a will (LWK 202–208). To demonstrate that truth is an arbitrary and sheer force, in these lectures Foucault refers to Homer’s text on the judgment between Menelaus and Antilochus for the first time, in the terms set out below. In a race between warriors, Antilochus uses a stratagem to pass another competitor, Menelaus. Menelaus appeals the result. He suggests that Antilochus take the “purgatory oath.” In the archaic procedure, if Antilochus accepts, he puts himself in the hands of the gods: “The truth is 3  First introduced in The Archaeology of Knowledge (AK 247), the distinction between knowledge as “savoir” and knowledge as “connaissance” is also one of the main objects of inquiry of the 1970/71 lectures. See for instance in the first lesson: “Let us say that we will call knowledge-connaissance the system that allows desire and knowledge-savoir to be given a prior unity, reciprocal belonging, and a co-naturalness. And we will call knowledge-savoir that which we need to drag from the interiority of knowledge-connaissance in order to rediscover in it the object of a willing, the end of a desire, the instrument of a domination, the stake of a struggle” (LWK 17, emphasis added).

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not what one says … It is what one confronts, what one does or does not accept to face up to. It is the formidable force to which one surrenders” (LWK 75). The gods themselves are not bound by truth, and the punishment of one who takes a false oath is neither necessary nor immediate. “Nothing is said about what will happen to the person who swears after the test of the oath; we know only that he is in the hands of the gods, that they may punish him or his descendants” (LWK 76). Archaic justice is therefore presented in the 1970/71 lectures in the form of a contest, whose result is completely arbitrary. Foucault concludes his reading by stating that in Homer’s episode, truth itself is the result of a fourfold confrontation: the initial confrontation in the race; the contestation of the race’s results by Menelaus; the latter’s challenging of Antilochus to take an oath; and the final confrontation with the gods. Both in 1971 and 1981, Foucault quotes the work of Gernet as the source of his reading. However, Gernet concludes his own study of the Antilochus and Menelaus episode with the remark that what negatively defines the pre-law (pré-droit) in Greece is that the judicial decision is not based on truth: “In this case, there is not even a sentence; the contest between the adversaries is decided simply through the process of proof (épreuve)” (Gernet 1982, 95, personal translation). Gernet speaks less of two kinds of truth than of two kinds of right, one of which is devoid of any reference to objective truth. Furthermore, Gernet explicitly rejects the contention that archaic justice was based on an arbitrary and violent confrontation between two parties. On the contrary, he insists that the ritual itself, and not brutal force, produces the justice’s efficacy (Gernet 1982, 64–65). By contrast, Foucault in 1971, and in the following years, challenges the common understanding of truth and knowledge as “connaissance”— the Aristotelian model—with the aid of a Nietzschean one: behind the mask of “connaissance” one finds the will to knowledge and the instincts aiming for domination and control (LWK 17, 197–198, 209). In archaic times, truth is not something waiting outside to be discovered as the order of the world. Instead, truth is something that happens arbitrarily as a dreadful event, such as a bolt of lightning or a thunderclap (LWK 203–204, 116–117). The 1970/71 lectures are designed to show how the discourse of truth as we know it imposed itself historically, while masking the arbitrary distribution of wealth and power in archaic times (LWK 193). The following year, continuing his studies of different legal systems, Foucault insists that

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in a system regulated by “proof” (l’épreuve), the issue is one of peace and victory (i.e., a vocabulary of war) and not one of demonstration and truth (TIP 129).4 The founding of the polis on law, money, and religion meant also establishing a new order based on truth as purity, where the impure was excluded and truth had to be known. After the 1970/71 lectures and until roughly 1979, Foucault continued to follow this approach. Focusing on the modern exercise of power, he aimed to indicate its entanglement with knowledge and to question one of the basic credos of modernity: that knowledge is situated in a field devoid of power relations and that it would bring about emancipation. For Foucault, knowledge is not “connaissance”—the discovery of an objective and scientific reality unveiled in discourse—but “savoir,” that is always involved in struggles and power relations; power is always “founded on truth” (LWK 193).5

Jurisdiction and Veridiction In 1978, right after the first series of lectures on liberal governmentality ended, Foucault defines his work as the analysis of “regimes of practices.” In his words, the analysis refers to “programmes of conduct which have both prescriptive effects regarding what is to be done (effects of ‘jurisdiction’), and codifying effects regarding what is to be known (effects of ‘veridiction’)” (F1991b, 75, emphasis added). The two axes of jurisdiction and veridiction can easily be associated with power and knowledge: power as the prescription for a conduct, and knowledge as the determination of “a domain of objects about which it is possible to articulate true or false propositions” (F1991b, 79). Yet in the course of the study of modern governmentality, both terms shift and take on a new meaning. In this part I aim to follow that shift and show why veridiction and subjectivity finally take precedence over jurisdiction in the inquiries of the late Foucault.

4  In addition, Defert (2011, 259) reminds us that in his interpretation of the split between archaic and classic Greece forms of truth, Foucault was also clearly influenced by the work of Detienne, who claims that the “true” in archaic times was not opposed to the “false”; “the only significant opposition was between Aletheia and Lethe” (Detienne 1994, 69–70, personal translation). 5  For Defert, in the 1970/71 lessons and onward, Foucault is actually conducting “a genealogy”—in a Nietzschean mode—but a genealogy of knowledge rather than morals (Defert 2011, 260).

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Jurisdiction Up to the 1978 lectures, Foucault discussed jurisdiction in terms of two distinct poles: on the one hand, there is law as the “will of the king” or the expression of the authority of the sovereign, also coined “the juridical” (HoS 144; DP 47–50; see also Ewald 1990, 138–161); on the other hand, there is the norm of modern disciplinary power, which Foucault sees as slowly replacing the former jurisdiction. He thus claims in the History of Sexuality I (HoS) that we are facing a “regression of the juridical” (HoS 144). As described in Chap. 3, in the 1978 lectures Foucault takes two further steps in the analysis. First, he recognizes that the disciplinary norm and the sovereign law had more in common than originally stated. In a 1977 interview he had already admitted that his analysis “was still held captive by the juridical conception of power” (PK 190). In the lectures, he explains that both law and norm determine what is permitted and forbidden but in opposite ways. The sovereign law determines what is forbidden and permits whatever is left unsaid; the disciplinary norm, by contrast, codifies precisely what must be done, while all that is left unstated is prohibited (STPe 45–46). Second, Foucault now distinguishes between the law and disciplinary norm on the one hand, and the statistical norm on the other. The statistical norm escapes the dichotomy between permitted and forbidden. It takes a distance from what is desirable, and instead tries to work within the reality of “things as they are.” Both the law and the disciplinary norm impose an arbitrary and sovereign will on the subject. The statistical norm, by contrast, has no prescriptive dimension with regard to the conduct of the individual. It accepts any of the phenomena as natural and integrates them into the statistical distribution of behaviors (STPe 62–63). The “regression of the juridical,” as defined by Foucault in HoS, reaches therefore an additional stage with the statistical norm; while the disciplinary norm still functions as a law (by being prescriptive), the statistical norm— that Foucault originally saw as complementary to the disciplinary norm in the exercise of modern power—is a norm of regulation (HoS 145–146). The nature of the law is actually at the heart of Foucault’s analyses in the 1979 lectures on neoliberal governmentality, entitled The Birth of Biopolitics (BB). More precisely, the first lesson is devoted to showing how liberalism as a modern mode of government implied a redefinition of the nature of the law. At the time of Raison d’État, power was exercised within

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the kingdom through the unlimited action of the police. The only limit placed upon that action originated from external jurisdiction formalized in Natural Law. Surprisingly, Foucault shifts the meaning of the “juridical,” that in this case is not the will of the king but rather the natural rights and the principles of the social contract, which both limit sovereign power (BB 11–13).6 With the advent of liberalism, the rules and limits of power change fundamentally and are now derived from the knowledge of political economy; they are thus codified along the true/false dichotomy rather than the allowed/forbidden one (BB 18). The function of law therefore changes for both the governors and the governed. Indeed, if to govern is “to structure the possible field of action of others” (SaP 221), then law becomes the main tool to build such a structure. Yet, it is strikingly different from the will of the king: the laws now function to regulate the environment in which individuals are expected to make rational decisions. Foucault insists that: It is necessary to change the conception of law, or at least elucidate its function. In other words, not confuse its form (which is always to prohibit and constrain) and its function, which must be that of rule of the game. The law is that which must favor the game, … enterprises, initiatives, changes. (BB 260, emphasis added, unread)

In the summary of the 1979 lectures, Foucault claims that liberalism found in law a useful tool “because the law defines forms of general intervention excluding particular, individual, and exceptional measures, and because participation of the governed in drawing up the law in a parliamentary system is the most effective system of governmental economy” (BB 321, emphasis added). Foucault immediately adds that this does not mean that democracy and the rule of law were necessarily liberal, nor that liberalism was always democratic. Yet this statement is still remarkable when compared to the texts dating back to the early 1970’s. Instead of the sovereign law as prohibiting and the disciplinary code as prescribing behavior—both applied at the level of the individual body7—Foucault sees 6  Actually Foucault distinguishes for the first time the “juridical” from the will of the king and presents Natural Law as a counter-conduct, in a lecture that follows the end of the 1978 ones at the Collège de France, entitled What Is Critique? (WIC). 7  See Chap. 2.

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the liberal rule of law as having precisely the opposite characteristics, that is excluding intervention at the level of the individual. In this description of the rule of law, one finds it difficult to recognize any form of physical constraint. However, Foucault rejects the possibility that modern subjects might be “atoms of freedom” (BB 271) in the game defined by liberal law. Indeed, he rhetorically asks at the end of a long and fascinating unread passage whether “this means that we are dealing with natural subjects?” (BB 261, unread).8 In the following lesson, Foucault gives a clear and negative answer to this question, explaining: “Homo oeconomicus is someone who is eminently governable” (BB 270). I would suggest that in the following years Foucault tried to grasp precisely the modes of constitution of this specific subjectivity that functions without the constraint of a prescriptive jurisdiction, and yet allows the exercise of power as neoliberal governmentality as its counterpart. This might well be the major implication of the conceptualization of power in terms of government: “In effect, what defines a relationship of power is that it is a mode of action which does not act directly and immediately on others. Instead, it acts upon their actions: an action upon an action” (SaP, 220, emphasis added). The disciplines as described in Discipline and Punish are still very close, perhaps too close, to a mode of power acting directly on people. Government as “the conduct of conducts” (F2001f, 341),9 in contradistinction to the discipline of the bodies, operates differently: A relationship of violence acts upon a body or upon things; it forces, it bends (…) it destroys. (…) A power relationship can only be articulated on the basis of two elements which are each indispensable if it is really to be a power relationship: that “the other” (the one over whom power is exercised) be thoroughly recognized and maintained to the very end as a person who acts. (SaP, 220, emphasis added)

8  The question had already appeared in somewhat different terms in the 1978 lectures: “the pastorate was a factor and agent of individualization, it created a formidable appeal (…) how to become subject without being subjected?” (STPe, 231, unread, emphasis added). 9  The term “conduct of conducts” is a literal translation of the French “conduite de conduites”; in the first English version of the text (SaP), revised by Foucault in 1982, “conduct of conducts” does not appear. Foucault uses instead “guiding the possibility of conduct” (SaP 221). In The Essential Works, vol. 3, the translation has been reestablished to the literal one.

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The existence of “persons who act” within power relations is the major shift introduced here as compared to Discipline and Punish: power is not exercised on bodies but on persons, that obviously become in need of further enquiries. This shift lifts the paradox of discipline10 and allows a reinterpretation of resistance and “subjugated knowledges” within the broader concept of “conduct of conducts.” With Christian pastoral power as its first form, Foucault shows indeed that it was accompanied by a series of counter-conducts as points of rebellion to this specific form of conduct (STPe 195–202; WIC). The counter-conducts are correlative, co-­extensive to government or, as Haber puts it, both concepts “belong together” (Haber 2012, 61 n. 6; see also Davidson 2011, 27; Haber 2013). These counter-conducts are not a reaction against pastoral power per se, but always an attempt to replace one type of conduct by another, one type of pastoral power by another.11 At the same time, these counter-conducts add an interesting element to the analysis. They have indeed the specificity of being rational by themselves, of offering alternative rationalities: Every transformation that modifies the relations of force between communities or groups (…) calls for the utilization of tactics which allows the modification of relations of power and the bringing into play of theoretical elements which morally justify and give a basis to these tactics in rationality. (STPe 216, unread, emphasis added)

The crucial point in my view is that instead of a disciplinary power exercised on the bodies, we now have various conducts and counter-conducts founded on rationality. The “subjugated knowledges” are tactics of opposition of one conduct to another, justified by a certain discourse, a rationality according to which one accepts, or not, to be governed. But this in

 See Chap. 2.  In STPe, Foucault gives as examples of counter-conducts to pastoral power: Christian asceticism as a reaction to the Early pastoral power; religious communities in the Middle Ages; mysticism; the return to the scriptures and eschatological beliefs. In each example, pastoral power is countered by another religious code of conduct (STPe 204–216; see also WIC 45–47). Lorenzini further shows that in each of his historical analyses of power, Foucault takes care to describe one or more counter-conduct (Lorenzini 2020, 9–10). 10 11

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turn implies a major shift in Foucault’s conceptualization of the subject and a revision of modern political rationality, as will be shown below.12 In his studies of neoliberal governmentality, Foucault hints that the action upon actions, unlike discipline or sovereign power, is obtained not by way of jurisdiction but through veridiction. In the first lesson of the 1979 lectures, Foucault indeed insists that liberalism should be looked upon as a practice regulated by a veridiction, as if the jurisdiction dimension did not exist at all. He also mentions in his notes that “instead of running into limits formalized by a jurisdiction, it gives itself intrinsic limits formulated in terms of veridiction” (BB 21, emphasis added). Would this mean that the code of conducts has been absorbed, so to speak, into the heart of knowledge and political economy? Obviously not; yet what kind of acts do neoliberal subjects do, that maintain them as subjects of power? Veridiction Until 1979, the veridiction axis that constitutes one of the two axes of the regime of practices is readily identified as knowledge in the sense of “savoir,” or the field where “the practice of true and false can be made at once ordered and pertinent” (F1991b, 79). Foucault easily identifies the type of veridiction associated with liberalism: it is political economy and the forms of knowledge based on statistics and economics that he analyzed in the 1978 lectures. In 1979, he insists that the market becomes a place of validation, a place of “verification-falsification” for the practice of government (BB 32). Yet just as the juridical changed in form and is no longer the dichotomous split between the allowed and the forbidden, so does veridiction shift away from knowledge as the distribution of true and false propositions. Foucault indeed describes the process through which the market, as well as the asylum or the prison, became places of veridiction, after having been historically places of jurisdiction. He then states the following: A certain practice of veridiction was formed and developed in these penal institutions that were fundamentally linked to a jurisdictional practice, and this veridictional practice —supported, of course, by criminology, ­psychology, and so on, but this is not what is essential— began to install the 12  On the importance of the counter-conducts for Foucault’s later interest in subjectivity, see also Senellart’s note in STP (Senellart 2009), n.5 p. 221 and Davidson (2011).

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veridictional question at the very heart of modern penal practice, even to the extent of creating difficulties for its jurisdiction, which was the question of truth addressed to the criminal: Who are you? (BB 34, emphasis added)

Foucault seems to have abandoned here the epistemological domain of knowledge-savoir per se. Indeed, “veridiction” does not refer to the content of the human sciences (criminology or psychology) nor to political economy as a new field of knowledge. In other words, it does not refer to the split between true and false within the exercise of power (“this is not what is essential”). Rather, what becomes important in these sciences, or in their practice, is veridiction as an act of truth, as truth-telling; veridiction is indeed redefined above as truth as told by the individual.13 Interestingly, in Abnormal (Ae), the 1975 lectures, the emergence of the normal, rational individual (as opposed to the abnormal one) in the practices of justice in the course of the nineteenth century was shown to imply such a veridiction. Since according to French law only the mentally healthy could be judged, a definition of “normal” individuals was called-­ for. Motivated by their interests, “normal” individuals were defined as those who were able to give meaning and reasons for their own actions. The disciplinary regime intertwined with the human sciences thus needs the practical rationality of subjects: they are supposed to have an identity, as shown in Chap. 2, but also conscious reasons for their acts. Foucault explains further that some of the major problems for criminal psychiatry in the nineteenth century were posed by “motiveless acts committed by a subject endowed with reason” (Ae 117), acts performed by individuals who were obviously not mad, but had neither subjective nor objective motives for their crimes.14 The necessity to explain those acts led in fact to the incorporation of psychiatric experts within the judicial system. This had two consequences. 13  It can be argued that the importance of truth-telling was already highlighted, albeit with regard to sexuality, in The History of Sexuality I (HoS). Davidson, for instance, shows that when tackling the repressive hypothesis, Foucault rejects the juridical model of power and proposes instead a mechanism that puts “the discursive ritual of confession” at the center (Davidson 2016, 58). Yet, the notion of “subjectivation” is absent from this text; telling the truth about one’s sexuality is not (yet) the active constitution of a subject in relation to truth, but the production of a subjected subject within the sexual apparatus. With regard to the important shift from subjectivity to subjectivation in Foucault’s late inquiries, see Revel (2016). 14  Beistegui (2016) further shows that the physiocrats were the first to posit that desires should not be opposed but governed; with the advent of liberal governmentality, a distinction was thus made between licit desires (interests) and illicit ones (instincts).

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First, the psychiatrists invented “instinct” as a concept with a “regulated use within a discursive formation” to explain acts that lacked a motive (Ae 131; HoS 153). Later in the nineteenth century, sexual instincts were codified as an alternative to the logic of interest, under the internal “economy of pleasure” (Ae 311).15 Second, the penal system where the “abnormal” appeared was also the site for the emergence of a new veridiction: it no longer centered on the imputation of the crime but on “criminal subjectivity.” The judgment was based on the avowal of the individual, but this avowal did not concern the admission of what one did, but what one is. The liberal subject is thus a subject formed in the expectation that he is able to tell the truth about himself, to express his interests and desires, sexual or others (WDTT 223–229). There is, therefore, a strong association between the emergence of the “rational individual,” the homo oeconomicus (who is “governed through economic principles”) and his capacity to give reasons for his acts. These acts of truth are the subject matter of the lectures starting in the 1980’s: veridictions—or forms of “truth-telling”—as government, in different historical periods. The 1980 lectures are focused on “the government of men through the manifestation of truth in the form of subjectivity,” and link, for the first time, government, truth, and subjectivity. Foucault further explains that he is interested in “acts of truth,” where truth is manifested through a subject, who appears either as the operator, the witness, or as the object of this truth (GL 81–85). He first discards the acts of truth in the form of acts of faith, since the truth at stake is a revealed and dogmatic truth (GL 85; see also WDTT 188). He wants instead to focus on those specific acts where the subject tells the truth about himself, as in the act of confession (or in the judicial avowal). These are reflexive acts of truth, where the subject is at the same time the operator, the witness, and the object of truth. They are very different from acts of faith since the act of truth “is not at all a matter of adhering to a content of truth, but of exploring individual secrets, and of exploring them endlessly” (GL 84). The practice of confession was already dealt with by Foucault in the 1975 lectures, in 1976’s the History of Sexuality I (HoS) and again in the 1978 lectures, all showing the specificity of the Christian direction of conscience. It consists in “starting from oneself, extract and produce a 15  Strikingly, Foucault’s claim that “instincts” are social/cultural constructions constitutes a major departure from the Nietzschean lessons of 1971 (see Butler 1989, 604–605).

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truth which binds one to the person who directs one’s conscience” (STPe 183). The 1980 lectures come back to pastoral power, yet what is being discussed now is Christianity as an example of power exercised through the establishment of a relationship of self to truth. This relationship appears in different forms in different periods, and early Christianity is just one of those periods. Besides the above-mentioned differences between acts of faith and reflexive acts of truth, Foucault clearly identifies here acts of truth and “the point of subjectivation.” Government asks of individuals certain acts of truth, by which they constitute themselves as subjects of a certain exercise of power. This actually seems to be the heart of the art of government: We have now more or less tightened up the problem: why and how does the exercise of power in our society, the exercise of power as government of men, demand not only acts of obedience and submission, but truth acts in which individuals who are subjects in the power relationship are also subjects as actors, spectator, witnesses, or objects in manifestation of truth procedures? (GL 82)

If power solely asked for obedience and submission, then it would function in the mode of discipline. As previously mentioned, Foucault understands that in contrast to what he stated in Discipline and Punish, power does not simply function by the imposition of force on bodies. Rather, it functions by recognizing and maintaining individuals as “persons who act” and acts of truth are one such form of action. In 1980, Foucault is interested in the reflexive form of acts of truth—the act of avowal—to which he accorded genealogical importance. The disciplinary regime, creating subjugated subjects under the scrutiny of the human sciences, is now subsumed under a more general investigation of the subjectivity implied by each mode of government. In 1980 for instance, Foucault states that he intends to analyze the type of government in early Christianity that “does not just require one to obey [along the prescriptive axis of jurisdiction] but also to manifest what one is by stating it [in a veridiction]” (GL 321). The analysis of government turns therefore into an analysis of the relations between the subject and truth. It seems that the modes of constitution of the subject through veridiction turn central to the analysis, following the understanding that in the current neoliberal exercise of power, the role of law is to determine the rules of the game and does not imply any action or any physical constraint on the individual body. The social constraint

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thus has to be found not in the prescription of the sovereign law or the disciplinary norm, but elsewhere. If the subject is still constituted within the mechanisms of power, this subjection needs to have other sources. It is for this reason, I suggest, that Foucault turns to acts of truth as a form of obligation on the self. While Foucault arrived at the issue of acts of truth and modes of subjectivation via the analysis of liberal governmentality, it is the concept of government in general as the conduct of conducts, and not solely its liberal form, which in the 1980’s is associated with truth. Government always implies a relation to the self: “the reflection on this notion of governmentality cannot avoid passing through, theoretically and practically, the element of a subject defined by the relationship of self to the self” (HSe 252).16

The Second Reading of Homer, 1981 In a series of lectures given at the University of Louvain in 1981 entitled Wrong-Doing Truth-Telling (WDTT), Foucault fascinatingly weaves together elements from the 1970/71 lectures on archaic truth and justice, reflection on the disciplinary psychiatric power he studied in 1974 and 1975, and his most recent inquiries on subjectivity and confession. His stated aim is to do “a political and an institutional ethnology of truth-­ telling,” which gives an account of the practice of avowal in judicial procedures over time, including our own (WDTT 28). Interestingly, he goes on to say that he intends to study the relationships between “what Georges Dumézil called ‘truthful speech’, (…) veridiction, and that other form of speech one might call speech of justice, (…) Veridiction and jurisdiction.” One should note that jurisdiction here is not exactly the prescription of a code, but rather the judicial sentence that says “what is just and what has to be done [in order] for justice to be established or restored” (WDTT 28, emphasis added). Dealing with archaic Greece, the first two lessons seem 16  In the lectures at Dartmouth in 1980, government is presented as the point of encounter between the technique of the self (“how the self constitutes himself”) and the way this technique is integrated into structures of coercion: “The contact point, where the individuals are driven by others is tied to the way they conduct themselves, is what we can call, I think, government (…) Governing people is not a way to force people to do what the governor wants; it is always a versatile equilibrium, (…) between techniques which assure coercion and processes through which the self is constructed or modified by himself. (…) I insisted too much on techniques of domination. Discipline is only one aspect of the art of governing people” (BHS 203–204, emphasis added).

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to illustrate the shift from the 1970/71 lectures, and to provide Foucault with an opportunity to revise his original reading of the episode between Menelaus and Antilochus. Most probably, returning to this text was not a coincidence, and it is therefore interesting to trace the manner in which he adjusts this re-reading to his new concerns. First, as in the 1971 lecture, the race and the judicial procedure are seen as part of a sequence, that is, the oath is the continuation of the confrontation that started with the race: “there is a continuity between the agon and the judicial” (WDTT, 37). But in 1981, Foucault says that the race itself is not a sportive confrontation of heroes, with unpredictable results. In fact, he contends the opposite: the race is a ceremony where the existing order, the hierarchy between the heroes is made visible, as “the visible ceremony of a truth already visible” (WDTT 39, emphasis added). This completely overturns the 1971 interpretation of the race. Indeed, as presented in the 1970/71 lectures, the tragic truth of archaic Greece could never have coincided with order and hierarchy. Truth was supposed to be unpredictable, the same way that the winner of the race is not known in advance. However, in 1981 Foucault specifically indicates that this is not the case. The race, in fact, is supposed to be “the liturgical unfolding of a truth already known.” (WDTT 39, emphasis added). The maneuver of Antilochus actually disturbs a well-ordered ceremony, where truth as order is supposed to be exposed. Indeed, when reaching Menelaus at a point in the road where only one could pass, Antilochus should have shown his respect for the best warrior, and let Menelaus pass first. Instead, he confronts him and passes first; here the contest does not reveal the truth, but masks it (WDTT 39)! Truth is not created in the confrontation; it is only expected to become manifest, as something that existed prior to the race. Antilochus did wrong by disturbing the manifestation of truth as “the order of reality” (WDTT 42).17 Foucault seems therefore to abandon his 1971 Nietzschean interpretation of truth as an event or a lightning bolt. The distinction between two different types of truth—the scientific split between true and false and the tragic dreadful truth of the Ancients—characteristic of the analysis of power-knowledge, now becomes irrelevant: “science, objective knowledge (connaissance) is only one possible case of all these forms by which truth can be manifested” (GL 7, emphasis added). Indeed, in 1981 the 17  This contradicts almost point for point the February 17th 1971 lecture: Homeric justice in the contest is precisely not in accordance with the order of the world (see LWK 111–112).

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quasi-avowal of Antilochus is not about the recognition of factual evidence (as opposed to the lightning bolt); it is about “letting truth be manifested” (WDTT 39). This manifestation of truth, the alethurgie,18 is henceforth Foucault’s central preoccupation. It is defined as “the set of possible verbal or non-­ verbal procedures by which one brings to light what is laid down as true as opposed to false, hidden, inexpressible, unforeseeable, or forgotten” (GL 7, emphasis added): all of these are opposed to “what is true.” True is opposed to false (as in the scientific/rational approach) the same way that it is opposed to the hidden or the dreadful (as in the archaic/mythological one). The form of the alethurgie or the truth act, as much as truth itself, is thus historically and culturally determined. When Antilochus renounces the taking of the oath, he demonstrates that he recognizes and accepts the existing hierarchy between the protagonists: it is “the renunciation of what had for a moment veiled the truth and the true brilliance of the heroes” (WDTT 43, emphasis added). This manifestation of truth, in archaic times, respects the structure of society: “the avowal consists in restoring, within an agonistic structure, the forms in which the truth of their strength was supposed to appear” (WDTT 42). We are thus in a veridiction process, a truth-telling, which is adjusted to the society in which it takes place. The discourse of law, jurisdiction, is now presented as an instance of veridiction.19 The power-effect of (modern) knowledge as the setting of the rules of true and false that was Foucault’s focus in the 1970’s, has thus turned into a much larger issue—the way in which a subject binds himself to a manifestation of truth, an alethurgie as an act of truth, whatever the type of truth at stake. Foucault intends at this point to study the “power of the truth” on the subject (GL 101). Interestingly enough, in his criticism of Foucault’s power-knowledge entanglement Habermas challenges Foucault because he “abruptly reverses power’s truth dependency into the power-­ dependency of truth” (Habermas 1990, 274). Foucault seems here to agree with Habermas on “power’s truth dependency” and to hold that power resides in the manifestation of truth. The point though, as I have 18  According to Senellart (2012, 325), Foucault created the word; therefore, I kept the French orthography. In the lecture, Foucault explains that it is developed from the Greek “alethourges,” the veridical (GL 8). 19  Similarly, in Les Aveux de la Chair, Foucault describes David’s avowal as a veridiction that includes the constitutive elements of a judicial procedure (AC 399).

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tried to show here, is that Foucault does not assume that “truth” is objectively valid, nor that it is established by consensus. This significantly changes, I suggest, the meaning of Habermas’ assertion.

Conclusion In the introductory lesson of the 1980 lectures, Foucault states that his aim is now to study the fundamental link between power and truth: It is often said that, in the final analysis, there is something like a kernel of violence behind all relations of power and that if one were to strip the power of its showy garb one would find the naked game of life and death. Maybe. But can there be power without showy garb? (…) Can there be an exercise of power without a ring of truth, without an alethurgic circle that turns around it and accompanies it? (GL 17)

While the “undressing” of power, for the sake of exposing its violence on the bodies might well have characterized Foucault’s project up until 1976, from then on he moves to a new topic of interest: the ways in which power is exercised in terms of truth. He also insists that any form of government, from the most ancient to the most recent, including the government of self or government of others, is always an alethurgie, a manifestation of truth: For the link between manifestation of truth and exercise of power to be made, we don’t have to wait for the constitution of these new, modern relations between the art of government and, let’s say, political, economic, and social rationality. The link between exercise of power and manifestation of truth is much older and exists at a much deeper level. (GL 17)

Interestingly enough, at the very end, Foucault returns to the two axes of jurisdiction and veridiction for the government of men, but in a different formulation. In the introduction to The Use of Pleasures (UPe), the issue in question is morality, with the code of conduct, namely, jurisdiction, and with what Foucault now terms “the forms of subjectivation,” instead of veridiction. Different moral practices could emphasize either one axis or the other. The Christian penitence system of the thirteenth century focused almost all its effort on the juridical side, developing a very strict code of conduct (UPe 29–30; see also GL 211; WDTT 174–182).

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At the other end of the spectrum, the “moral reflections of Greek or Greco-Roman Antiquity were far more oriented towards practices of the self and the question of askesis” (UPe 30). The “turn to the Greeks” therefore, might well be explained by the fact that with some similarity to neoliberal governmentality and the accompanied “regression of the juridical,” in Greco-Roman antiquity, the conduct of conducts was not obtained by sovereign law, nor by the norm of discipline.20 Rather, it was obtained by forms of veridiction: I wonder if our problem nowadays is not in a way similar [to that of the Greeks] since most of us no longer believe that ethics is founded on religion, nor do we want a legal system to intervene in our moral, personal, private life. (F1997c, 255, emphasis added)

Furthermore, the turn to acts of truth is a novel manner, I would like to argue, to approach rationality. Indeed, while until 1980, truth was produced in rational processes intertwined with power, or as political rationalities, Foucault now becomes interested in the manner in which truth, involved in truth acts, produces specific subjectivities. The next couple of chapters are thus dedicated to showing how processes of subjectivation are rationally produced through acts of truth.

References Foucault’s Work Ae 2003. Abnormal – Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975, ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni. General Editors: Francois Ewald and Alessandro Fontana. English Series Editor: Arnold I. Davidson. London: Verso. AK 2002. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge Classics. BB 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics – Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979. New York, Palgrave Macmillan. BHS  1993. About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth. Political Theory 21 (2 May): 198–227. DP 1995. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage Books. GL 2014. On the Government of the Living – Lectures at the Collège de France 1979–1970. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. HoS 1978. The History of Sexuality I. New York: Random House.  This point is further developed in Chap. 7.

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HSe 2005. The Hermeneutics of the Subject  – Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. LWK 2013. Lectures on the Will to Know  – Lectures at the Collège de France 1970–1971. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. PK 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon Books. PTI 2019. Penal Theories and Institutions  – Lectures at the Collège de France, 1971–1972. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. SaP  1982. The Subject and Power. In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Dreyfus H.L. & Rabinow P., 208–226. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. STPe 2009. Security, Territory, Population  – Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. UPe 1990. The Use of Pleasures. New York: Vintage Books. WDTT 2014. Wrong-Doing Truth-Telling – The Function of Avowal in Justice, ed. Fabienne Brion and Bernard E.  Harcourt. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. WIC  2007 [1978]. What Is Critique? In The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth, 41–81. Harvard: Semiotext(e), MIT Press.

Articles F1991b. 1991 [1978]. Questions of Method. In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 73–86. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. F1997c. 1997 [1983]. On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress. In The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.1, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. P. Rabinow, 253–280. New York: The New Press. F1997e. 1997 [1984]. The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom. In The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.1, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. P. Rabinow, 281–302. New York: The New Press. F2001f. 2001 [1982]. The Subject and Power. In The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.3, Power, ed. J.  D. Faubion and P.  Rabinow (General editor), 326–348. New York: The New Press.

Works in French AC 2018. Les Aveux de la Chair. Paris: Gallimard. GV 2012. Du Gouvernement des Vivants – Cours au Collège de France 1979–1980. Paris: Seuil-Gallimard. LVS 2011. Leçons sur la Volonté de Savoir – Cours au Collège de France 1970–1971. Paris: Seuil-Gallimard.

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STP 2009. Sécurité, Territoire, Population  – Cours au Collège de France 1977–1978. Paris: Seuil-Gallimard. TIP 2015. Théories et Institutions Pénales – Cours au Collège de France 1971–1972. Paris: Seuil Gallimard.

Other Authors Becker, Gary S. and François Ewald and Bernard E. Harcourt. 2012. Becker on Ewald on Foucault on Becker American Neoliberalism and Michel Foucault’s 1979 ‘Birth of Biopolitics’ Lectures. University of Chicago Institute for Law & Economics Olin Research Paper No. 614; Public Law Working Paper No. 401, University of Chicago. Beistegui, Miguel. 2014. The Subject of Truth: On Foucault’s Lectures on the Will to Know. Quadranti  – Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia Contemporanea II (1): 80–99. ———. 2016. The Government of Desire: A Genealogical Perspective. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 47 (2): 190–203. Butler, Judith. 1989. Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions. The Journal of Philosophy LXXXVI (11, Nov): 601–607. ———. 2016. Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling, the Case of Sexual Avowal. In Foucault and the Making of the Subjects, ed. Laura Cremonesi, Orazio Irrera, Daniele Lorenzini, and Martina Tazzioli, 77–93. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Davidson, Arnold. 2011. In Praise of Counter-Conducts. History of the Human Sciences 24 (4): 25–41. ———. 2016. From Subjection to Subjectivation  – Michel Foucault and the History of Sexuality. In Foucault and the Making of the Subjects, ed. Laura Cremonesi, Orazio Irrera, Daniele Lorenzini, and Martina Tazzioli, 55–62. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Defert, Daniel. 2011. Situation du Cours. In Michel Foucault, Leçons sur la Volonté de Savoir – Cours au Collège de France 1970–1971. Paris: Seuil-Gallimard, 257–279. Detienne, Marcel. 1994 [1967]. Les Maîtres de Vérité dans la Grèce Archaïque. Paris: Pocket. Elden, Stuart. 2016. Foucault’s Last Decade. Polity: Cambridge. Ewald, François. 1990. Norms, Discipline and the Law. Representation 30 (Spring): 138–161. Faustino, M., and G. Ferraro (eds). 2020. The Late Foucault: Ethical and Political Questions. Bloomsbury: London. Gernet, Louis. 1982 [1968]. Droit et Institutions en Grèce Antique. Paris: Flammarion.

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Haber, Stéphane. 2012. Du Néolibéralisme au Néocapitalisme? Quelques Réflexions à partir de Foucault. Actuel Marx 51 (2012/1): 59–72. ———. 2013. Le néolibéralisme est-il une Phase du Capitalisme? Raisons Politiques 52 (Nov): 25–37. Habermas, Jurgen. 1990. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge: MIT Press. Harrer, Sebastian. 2005. The Theme of Subjectivity in Foucault’s Lecture Series L’Herméneutique du Sujet. Foucault Studies 2 (May): 75–96. Landry, Jean-Michel. 2009. Confession, Obedience, and Subjectivity: Michel Foucault’s Unpublished Lectures – “On the Government of the Living”. Telos 146 (Spring): 111–123. Lorenzini, Daniele. 2016. Foucault, Regimes of Truth and the Making of the Subjects. In Foucault and the Making of the Subjects, ed. Laura Cremonesi, Orazio Irrera, Daniele Lorenzini, and Martina Tazzioli, 63–75. London, Rowman & Littlefield. ———. 2020, On Possibilising Genealogy. Inquiry. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 0020174X.2020.1712227, 1–22. Revel, Judith. 2016. Between Politics and Ethics – the Question of Subjectivation. In Foucault and the Making of the Subjects, ed. Laura Cremonesi, Orazio Irrera, Daniele Lorenzini, and Martina Tazzioli, 163–173. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Senellart, Michel. 2009. Situation des cours. In Michel Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population – Cours au Collège de France 1977–1978. Paris: SeuilGallimard, 381–411. ———. 2012. Situation du cours. In Michel Foucault, Du Gouvernement des Vivants – Cours au Collège de France 1979–1980. Paris: Seuil-Gallimard, 323–450.

CHAPTER 5

Forms of Subjectivity: Subjection/ Subjectivation?

Starting in 1980 and until the end of his life in 1984, Foucault was focused on “the technologies of the self”: at the side of scientific knowledge and techniques of power, these are techniques “recommended or prescribed to individuals for fixing, maintaining, or transforming their identity” (ST 293), “to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves” (F1997b, 177; BHS 203). The active part played by individuals in these techniques points to the fact, developed in Chap. 4, that government asks from individuals certain acts of truth, by which those individuals constitute themselves as subjects of a certain exercise of power. I have argued in the previous chapters that the studies on governmentality triggered Foucault’s reorientation after The History of Sexuality  I (HoS), from a conceptualization of power in terms of discipline to “the conduct of conducts,” implying the active role played by the individual, and leading to the studies on subjectivation. In the 1980 lectures, On the Government of the Living (GL), Foucault insists that the subjectivity of the governed is driven by certain manifestations of truth (alethurgies).1 As I show below, Foucault draws a comparison in these lectures between the Greco-Roman and the Christian directions of conscience as acts of truth (GL; HOW; BHS; WDTT). This practice is actually called in Greek kubernai—the government of the souls (GL 229), therefore superposing the 1

 See Chap. 4.

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activity of government as the conduct of others to the direction of conscience that creates individual subjects. Government can indeed have multiple faces: besides working at different levels (the self, the others, the family, etc.), its effect on the subject is widely varied. Already in the 1978 lectures (STPe), Foucault noted that while the Greeks aimed at self-mastery, early Christians sought total obedience (STPe 175–180). In the 1981 lectures, Subjectivity and Truth (ST), Foucault explores the link between subjectivity and truth, this time as regards sexual codes of conduct in late Antiquity. In 1982, the comparison between Greeks and early Christians is enlarged to other practices of the self in the Greco-Roman period, one of them being the direction of conscience, studied in 1980.2 In 1982, Foucault isolates for the first time the “parrhesia,” as the speech used by the Greek philosopher to teach and guide his disciple toward self-sovereignty; it is parrhesia, as a very specific form of discourse characteristic of the Greco-Roman mode of subjectivation, that will be at the heart of the 1983 and 1984 lectures (The Government of Selves and Others (GSO) and The Courage of Truth (CT) respectively). Hence until 1983, Foucault studies these techniques in a constant comparison between the early Christian and the Greco-Roman practices, insisting on their radically different effect on the subject.3 The techniques of the self are indeed techniques by which individuals constitute themselves into specific subjects, ranging from absolutely subjugated disciples (Christian subjectivation through confession) or self-mastering individuals (through the Greek direction of conscience). All of them are rational techniques; I hope to make this point clearer in this chapter, so as to better grasp how rationality should be understood in relation to the modern self. Yet some forms of subjectivation lead to subjection. This chapter is centered on this argument; I would like here to sketch the general lines of the subjectivation process, whereas in the next chapter I will try to follow some of its specific historical developments. 2  The period covered extends from Plato to the late Stoics of the Roman period (mainly Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius). So the exact description should be “GrecoRoman,” although sometimes I use “Greek” for simplicity. 3  Until 1981, the focus is on the Christian techniques, with points of comparison with the Greeks; after 1981, when the self-mastering subject becomes his point of interest, the focus shifts to the Greeks with points of comparison with the Christians. I believe it is important to remain with the order of appearance in Foucault’s studies because it explains his so-called return to the Greeks; this point is further developed in the next chapter.

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This chapter hence intends to describe after Foucault the manner in which the subject constitutes himself in different ways through “acts of truth,” through veridiction.4 The first part deals with the relation between subjectivity and truth, a point that Foucault treated both in 1980 (GL) and 1981 (ST). The second part intends to describe the general process of subjectivation as it emerges both from the lectures (1980–1984) and the last two volumes of The History of Sexuality (The Use of Pleasures (UPe) and The Care of the Self (CS) respectively).

Subjectivity and Truth The study of neoliberal governmentality has clearly shown the fact that law, in this type of government, cannot be taken to impose a strong constraint on individuals.5 As a result, Foucault turns to the link between subjects and truth, in a renewed definition of veridiction as acts of truth, in which he is now looking for the constraint: in Chap. 4, I tried to show how Foucault initially defined veridiction as a scientific knowledge, entangled with power, then later as telling the truth about oneself (see also Senellart 2012, 341–343). The techniques of the self should not therefore be considered as functioning autonomously, but as embedded in a web of power relations (F1997b, 177–178). In the first 1980 lectures, he asks: “why, after all, not to speak of the obligations of truth in the same manner as one speaks about political constraints or juridical obligations?” (GL 94, emphasis added). As mentioned already, the acts of truth are processes where the subject is brought to constitute himself in a certain relation to truth, through truth-telling, veridiction. This is at the heart of the government of men: “in our type of society, power cannot be exercised without truth having to manifest itself, and manifest itself in the form of subjectivity” (GL 75). In a first attempt, one can define subjectivity as the relation of self to truth, or his truth: “the subjectivity is what constitutes itself and transforms itself in its relationship to its own truth. No theory of the subject independent of the relationship to the truth” (ST 12, emphasis added). This relation to truth is thus described as a constraint: “in every culture, I think, this self technology implies a set of truth obligations: discovering the truth, being enlightened by truth, telling the truth. All these are considered important either for the constitution of, or the 4 5

 See Chap. 4 for a definition of “veridiction.”  See Chap. 4.

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transformation of, the self” (F1997b, 177–178, emphasis added).6 It is the nature of this constraint that I would like to study in this part. The Obligation of Truth At first sight, one might argue that “truth” can be a constraint only so long as it is not “really true” as, for instance, the revealed truth of faith; once one moves to scientific truth, the obligation is lifted in the evidence of truth itself. Foucault gives at this stage the counter-example of a discussion between two logicians, where, at the end of the demonstration, one is led (by the demonstration of truth itself) to admit that “it is true, therefore I submit” (GL 96–97). Foucault distinguishes here between the rules of logics and the rules of the game in which the logicians are involved: He does not utter this “therefore” because it is part of the logic. It is not part of the logic, for it is not the truth of the proposition that in fact, actually constrains him, it is not because it is logical, (…) but because he is doing logic, that is to say, because he constitutes himself, or has been invited to constitute himself as operator in a certain number of practices or as a partner in a certain type of game. (GL 97–98, emphasis added)7

As Chevallier puts it, by distinguishing between the two sets of rules, Foucault is in fact “giving back to scientific discourse the autonomy of its internal coherence (…), irreducibly from social circulation and regulation of discourses” (Chevallier 2011, 95, emphasis added, personal translation). The power-knowledge entanglement, in which truth was assumed to be the contingent product of power relations, is abandoned here. This does not mean that Foucault gives up the idea of a constraint produced by scientific discourse, to the contrary: but he separates the political constraint, the game of truth that is super-imposed on truth, and my  The word “constraints” is omitted in the English translation.  For Lorenzini (2015), this last sentence means that “while the rules of each game of truth define autonomously, within this specific game, the partage between true and false statements, Foucault makes it clear that these rules are not themselves autonomous: on the contrary, they are always the result of a historical, social, cultural and ultimately ‘political’ production.” This interpretation would reduce logics to a power-knowledge circle, where the rules of logics themselves are the result of a political production. Following Chevallier, I would rather suggest that there is in Foucault’s text a distinction between the rules of logics (which produce the partage between true and false) and the rules of the game between the logicians, which is indeed a political production. 6 7

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suspicion is that he arrived at precisely this point in 1980 because he admitted in 1979 that “there is no sovereign in economics” (BB 285). In 1980, using different arguments, he concludes the example on logics with: “there is no king in geometry, that is to say no supplement of power is useful or necessary for doing geometry” (GL 99). Yet what is irreducibly necessary for doing geometry is that “there has to be a subject who can say: when it is true, and evidently true, I will submit” (GL 98). There is no king in science because the bind of the subject to truth is rendered implicit to the demonstration of truth itself, yet “the regime of truth is not reduced to the intrinsic character of truth” (GL 98) and therefore exists all the same: “every regime of truth, whether scientific or not, entails specific, more or less constraining ways of linking the manifestation of truth and the subject who carries it out” (GL 100). Very generally, all the sciences (such as logic, geometry or economics) belong to this same regime of truth “where the power of truth is organized in a way such that constraint is assured by truth itself” (GL 99). Hence the apparent absence of obligation of scientific evidence is for Foucault a trap, where the transparence of the obligation (there is no king) mistakenly leads us to think that it does not exist at all (GL 96–97). Chevallier concludes that in some regimes of truth, such as in logics, the obligation of truth “cancels itself out” (Chevallier 2011, 102). I would rather stick to Foucault’s text and insist that even if the constraint has become transparent to the subject, it remains present all the same. This point will become crucial, I believe, for the understanding of modern subjectivation which functions almost entirely with “scientific” discourse, as will be shown in the next chapter. Actually one should distinguish between the truth value of the truth at stake—the fact that it is really true or not—and the act, the ritual of the manifestation of this truth, in which the individual binds himself to its constraint; the bind is indifferent to the truth value of the truth (WDTT 19–20).8 Foucault repeats this point in 1981, stating: Truth is essentially conceived as a system of obligations, independently of the fact that it may or may not be considered true from this or that point of view. Truth is above all a system of obligations. Consequently it is c­ ompletely 8  In WDTT, Foucault puts this distinction under Nietzsche’s aegis: “one must distinguish the assertion (which is true or false) from the act of truth-telling, from the veridiction (the Wahrsagen, as Nietzsche would say)” (WDTT 20).

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immaterial that something may be considered true at one moment and not at [another]. And we may even accept this paradox [, namely:] that psychiatry is true. I mean that seen as systems of obligations, even psychiatry, even criminology are analyzed as true, inasmuch as the systems of obligations peculiar to true discourse, to the enunciation of the truth, to veridiction, are in actual fact present at the root of these types of discourse. What is important in this question of truth is that a certain number of things actually pass for true, and that the subject must produce them himself, or accept them, or submit to them. (ST 12–13, emphasis added)

* * * In 1971, Foucault describes the sophistic struggle, where the victory does not go to the one who is right, but to the one who silenced the other (LWK 46–48); the sophist does not enter any of the regimes of truth described by Foucault in 1980, since it is not truth which binds him but solely the rhetoric power of his adversary. In 1980, the power relations that created truth are irrelevant to the fact that, however established, truth itself has a power. Truth is now tackled as whatever is taken as true in a given time and place. Foucault is no longer interested in showing the arbitrariness of what is taken as true. But, given a certain truth, as recognized by the individual in the process of alethurgie, he wants to analyze the consequences of this recognition on the individual. The constraint of power as government, which seemed to vanish under its neoliberal form, should therefore be studied under the terms of alethurgie and its effects on the subject. This appears as a generalization or a displacement of the power-­ knowledge analyses. Foucault actually indicates the condition under which the modern power-knowledge entanglement is functioning. Indeed, in order for certain domains of knowledge to emerge within certain relations of power, one needs subjects to accept to be bound to what is recognized as true. One needs a “‘you have to’ of the truth” (GL 97), an obligation on the subject, whatever the kind of truth at stake. It is a “you have to” which “does not arise from the truth itself in its structure and content” (GL 97; see also ST 12–13).

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Subjectivation in Veridiction It is Foucault’s contention that subjectivation passes by acts of truth, acts of “truth-telling.” In 1981, he studies sexual codes of conducts, showing the astonishing proximity between the Ancient and Christian codes; what creates the difference is therefore the discourse that accompanies the practice: “exactly the same system of prohibitions and permissions is transcribed within what could be called a philosophical or theological terminology, analysis, or discourse that is entirely different” (ST 230, emphasis added). The bind results from the enunciation of this discourse, whose content creates a specific subjectivation, hence the importance of veridiction. But what does Foucault mean by these veridictions? In 1980, he is essentially focused on early Christian confession, where the subject is obliged to speak the truth about himself, to the priest who listens. This appears actually as a continuation of a theme first evoked in 1976 in The History of Sexuality, where Foucault tackled the “deployment of sexuality” (dispositif de sexualité). He contends that through psychoanalysis, modern individuals are obsessively trying to tell their “sexual truth” to the psychoanalyst. But this is only one possible type of veridiction. In 1982, he insists on the fact that truth-telling about oneself is a specificity of Christianity and, later on, of our own societies; it did not exist in ancient Greece (HSe 408–409). He therefore displaces (again) the meaning of veridiction. After 1982, it is changed into “truth-telling” in general (and not truth-­ telling about oneself) which is identified, in the 1983 lectures, The Government of Self and Others (GSO), as “parrhesia:” it is first the free speech of the citizen in the agora, then the free speech of the philosopher to the Prince or to his pupils.9 Any of these veridictions imply a bind of the subject and an effect on his being: “I would like to try to see how truth-telling, the obligation and possibility of telling the truth in procedures of government can show how the individual is constituted as subject in the relationship to self and the relationship to others” (GSO 42, emphasis added). In the first 1981 lesson, Foucault also defines his question on subjectivity and truth both as a possibility or an obligation, which points to another distinction one should keep in mind: “what experience may the subject have of himself when 9  Foucault will establish in FS and CT that historically, the political parrhesia—as the courage to speak the truth in the agora—came first. Following the “crisis of the democratic institutions” (FS 75; CT 34–36), parrhesia was used by the philosopher to educate the soul of the prince and later on, to educate any citizen who chose to take care of himself.

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faced with the possibility or obligation of acknowledging something that passes for true regarding himself?” (ST 10, emphasis added). I believe one should connect here the formation of the subject with an obligation of veridiction, whereas his active transformation is linked to the chosen possibility of truth telling, as will be shown below in this section. Moreover, as mentioned in the previous chapter, in this definition of “truth” Foucault includes any discourse recognized as true in a given time and place, ranging from the prophecy of the soothsayer to the testimony of the slave in Oedipus, or the modern medical discourse classifying who is mad and who is not; his actual point of research is the effect on the subject of these “true” discourses. Foucault continues as follows: In our culture, in our civilization, in a society like ours there are a number of discourses on the subject that are recognized institutionally or by consensus as true. And the historical problem to be posed is this: (…) In what ways is our experience of ourselves formed or transformed by the fact that somewhere in our society there are discourses considered to be true, which circulate and are imposed as true, based on ourselves as subjects? (ST 11, emphasis added)

As examples of these “true discourses” in his own time, Foucault quotes psychoanalysis and criminology, insisting that “truth is essentially conceived as a system of obligations, independently of the fact that it may or may not be considered true from this or that point of view” (ST 12). The distinction between “possibility of” or “obligation to” true discourse is important because, besides the obligation inherent to the alethurgie— which always binds the subject to a certain truth—there is also an obligation, or freedom, to participate in the alethurgie. In most of the cases studied by Foucault, the early Christian confession, the self-examination, or the Greek parrhesia, the alethurgie is an act chosen by the individual; so that he is “willingly binding himself,” a proposition which has strong Kantian echoes, a point studied in Chap. 7. In a few cases, such as the slaves’ avowal in Oedipus, the Middle Ages institutionalized confession of pastoral power, or the Inquisitional avowal, the individual is forced into telling the truth. But in all of these cases, “the avowal is an act through which the subject affirms who he is, binds himself to this truth” (WDTT 7), hence initiating the process of subjectivation, as will be defined below.

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* * * The picture at this stage seems clear; government functions through acts of truth, acts by which individuals bind themselves to a certain truth which constitute them as specific subjects; the acts of truth, whatever their content, exercise a constraint on the individual, resulting in his transformation into a certain subject. This seems to hold both for the religious truth of Christian pastoral power and modern forms of rationality, with a twist for these latter forms, as will be shown in the next chapter. In any case, Foucault now focuses on the subject, a major shift of perspective: in The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault placed himself “at the level of discourse,” with the explicit intention of ignoring the enunciating subject. There was no author in his view (F1998c), only an anonymous category of persons who could utter a given statement leading to the same practical effect. But the study of the bind between subject and truth means turning to the effects of the utterance of certain statements on the enunciating subject. I would now like to compare the effects of two specific statements, the avowal and the parrhesia, to show how different the bind can be.

Subjection/Subjectivation Subjection, in French “assujettissement,” is a recurring term in Foucault’s texts in the power-knowledge analyses; one of the theses of Discipline and Punish is that power should not be understood in negative terms as what forbids, but also in positive ones as what creates. Power creates subjects as always already subjugated; power is subjection, it transforms “somatic singularities” into subjugated individuals, that is subjects.10 Starting in 1980, Foucault becomes interested in “subjectivation” as the self-constitution of the subject, that is to say the process of subject formation—this time not as passively created in the power-knowledge entanglement, but as individuals taking an active part in their own constitution into subjects. Yet as will be shown below, these two forms are not opposed; the subjection is indeed understood as a specific form of subjectivation. Generally speaking, the process of subjectivation, the active constitution of the individual as subject, occurs when the individual binds himself to a certain truth, in what Foucault calls an act of truth or a “truth act” (GL 83–85). In 1980, Foucault insists that the bind exists however  See Chap. 2.

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transparent the content and whatever the truth at stake. Yet the subject thus constituted is very different, according to the content of truth and the truth act implied. The most extreme acts of truth, in terms of their respective effect on the enunciating subject, I would like to suggest, are the Christian confession and the Greek parrhesia. Indeed, as will become clearer in the next chapter, while Foucault’s original intention was to make apparent “the basic form of our obedience” (GL 313), he comes to recognize that other acts of truth, performed in very similar practices, led to radically different subjectivations. As Gros puts it: “a true subject was possible, this time not in the sense of subjection but of subjectivation. The felt shock must have been both important and stimulating” (Gros 2001, 493, personal translation). This contention seems to associate subjection with the Christian subject and subjectivation with the Greek one. Yet the picture that Foucault wants to draw is much more complex; I would like here to first make that contrast apparent, to show the rationality implied by both truth acts, and then finally turn to the process of subjectivation per se. Avowal Versus Parrhesia as Speech Acts According to Senellart, the auditors of the 1980 lectures, On the Government of the Living (GL), were very surprised by the period and corpus of texts that Foucault studied (Senellart 2012, 333)—early Christianity, after a year dealing with neoliberalism. Yet from the genealogical perspective, the History of Sexuality I (HoS) had already placed the contemporary practice of psychoanalysis in the lineage of the Christian obligation of confession, dated to the thirteenth century (HoS 58, 116). From this viewpoint, Foucault in 1980 is only going back to the point at which confession emerges as a practice of the pastoral direction of the souls (GL 257–258). But what appears about this direction, as becomes clear a year later with sexual codes of conducts (ST 229–230), is that it is actually the reappropriation of a far more ancient practice, the Greek philosophical direction. Yet despite the similarity of the practices, the nature of the speech act and its circumstances are drastically different, leading to opposed forms of subjectivity, as will be shown below. Foucault’s main point in his study of the Christian avowal as a speech act is that this type of veridiction, as mentioned above, is a truth-telling about oneself: “the subject of the enunciation has to be the referent of the statement” (HSe 409; see also HoS 61). The specificity of avowal is its auto-reference, the fact that the speaking subject takes himself as an object

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of discourse. For Landry, in the 1980 lectures, Foucault already perceives in the Christian confession the seeds of the modern subject described in The Order of Things as taking himself as an object of knowledge (Landry 2007, 38). This auto-reference poses a difficulty, tackled by Foucault in 1980 as being close to the “paradox of the liar,” or the paradox of “the effect of the enunciation on the statement” (GL 214, emphasis added). This paradox can be summarized as follows; by stating his sins, the sinner detaches himself from them. The statement of the sins is indeed the starting point of the sinner’s conversion: “I am all the less a sinner as I affirm that I am a sinner” (GL 215). So the veridiction’s bind has the contradicting effect of constraining the subject into a certain being, while transforming him into something else: “the Christian humility affirms a truth and at the same time erases it” (GL 215, emphasis added). The Christian is asked to utter his thoughts in order not to think them any longer: “the revelation of the truth about oneself cannot be dissociated from the obligation to renounce oneself” (BHS 221, emphasis added). Interestingly, Foucault finds in Louvain in 1981 the same mechanism in psychiatric power; Leuret indeed asks the madman to recognize, under a cold shower, that he is mad: “the explicit affirmation of his madness is his cure,” the starting point of the therapy, of his getting out of madness (HOW; WDTT 12, 16–17). This paradox, I believe, is at the heart of the Christian confession and later forms of avowal; the act of truth marks the first step toward the erasure of this truth said, so that the aim of the speech act is the renunciation of what is said and, as a consequence, of the self enunciating it. The speech act of the Greco-Roman parrhesia is very different in both the relation between the subject and the spoken truth, and the relations of power involved in the enunciation. First, the coincidence is not between the speaking subject and the referent of discourse. Here indeed the subject binds himself to something in which he believes: “there is a fundamental bond between the truth spoken and the thought of the person who spoke it” (CT 11, emphasis added).11 In the Socratic parrhesia, one is asked to show “the relation between himself and the logos (reason) (…) Can you 11  The adequacy between speech and thought is also described in the type of language used by the parrhesiast: “The mode of being of philosophical language is to be etumos, that is to say, so bare and simple, so in keeping with the very movement of thought that, just as it is without embellishment, in its truth, it will be appropriate to what it refers to” (GSO 314–315, emphasis added).

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give the logos of yourself?” (CT 144, emphasis added; see also F1997e, 286). The speaking subject thinks that what he says is true, and is not asked to speak his thoughts in order to renounce them: “in fact one genuinely thinks, judges, and considers the truth one is saying to be genuinely true” (GSO 64). This leads to a second level of coincidence: in the parrhesia, the subject binds himself not only to the statement (as in the avowal) but also to its enunciation: “I am the person who has spoken this truth” (GSO 65, emphasis added). Finally, the coincidence of speech and thought leads to a last adequatio: “Let us say what we think and think what we say; let speech harmonize with conduct” (HSe 402, 406). The aim is “to become the ethical subject of the truth that we think” (HSe 460), that is to become a subject who acts and behaves according to his spoken truth—at the exact opposite of what is expected in the Christian avowal process. The Greek veridiction is therefore a subjectivation of discourse, “that enables us to become the subject of these true discourses” (HSe 332), whereas the Christian veridiction is an objectivation of the speaking subject, since he takes himself as an object of discourse, with subjectivity being erased in the very process of enunciation (HSe 333). As a result, the parrhesiast constitutes himself as an ethical subject (HSe 463), whereas the Christian veridiction leads to the mortification of the subject (GL 156–161), a point to which I will come back in the next chapter. The second major point to consider is the relations of power involved in the speech acts. Already in HoS, Foucault noticed the curious situation in which the avowal occurs: “the agency of domination does not reside in the one who speaks (for he is the one who is constrained) but in the one who listens and says nothing; not in the one who knows and answers, but in the one who questions and is not supposed to know” (HoS 62). The same is true of the madman; while the avowal is freely stated, it is still the recognition of the psychiatrist’s power over the madman: “when the patient finally says ‘Fine, yes, I am mad,’ he is giving in” (WDTT 16, emphasis added). At the opposite, the parrhesia is first cited by Foucault in the Greek procedures of self-examination, where the disciple listens to a master. It is a technique used by the master in order to transmit the truth to the disciple and transform him into a sovereign subject (HSe 242, 366, 372).

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Truth-telling is thus not to be looked for in the one submitted, but in the one that temporarily guides the other.12 For Foucault, both speech acts are not performative acts: avowal is not, because “the affirmation destroys in the speaking subject the reality that made the same affirmation true” (F1997b, 176). Nor is the parrhesia, since the speaking subject does not know in advance the consequences of his speech.13 He consents to bind himself all the same, sometimes risking his own life: Whereas the performative utterance defines a definite game in which the status of the person speaking and the situation in which he finds himself determine precisely what he can and must say, parrhesia only exists when there is freedom in the enunciation of the truth, (…) To that extent, it is not the subject’s social, institutional status that we find at the heart of parrhesia; it is his courage. (GSO 66)14

In both cases, there is a cost of enunciation, which is the transformation of the speaking subject. The subject indeed commits to behaving in accordance with the implications of the statement, which further implies, in the case of avowal alone, that he will start to no longer be what the statement says he is (WDTT 16–17).15 The relation to the enunciated truth and, as a result, the relation to self in the bind, is thus very different in each of the two speech acts: one subject will strive for renouncing what he is, while the other will affirm himself in the enunciation. This comparison shows that there are different forms of subjectivation, depending on the veridiction, the mode of enunciation, its context, and the relation to truth. It is to this transformation into specific subjects that the next section is devoted.

12  Later, in 1983, Foucault comes back to the political parrhesia, the truth-telling of the citizen who takes the risk of speaking in front of the agora or the tyrant. In this case, the parrhesiast is not the one who holds power. Yet the agonistic situation is not ended by his submission. The parrhesiast agrees to take the risk of speaking a truth that goes against the ordinary opinion (GSO 56–57, 64–65, 106). I will come back to this point in Chap. 8. 13  Under Foucault’s definition of performative utterances, the performative act has an effect codified in advance; this prior codification ensures the performativity (GSO 62). This follows Austin’s definition of performative utterance as a “verbal procedure” (Austin 2013, 23). 14  In Chap. 8 I will come back to parrhesia as a demonstration of courage. 15  Parrhesia remains an obligation of being, because by committing to behaving in a certain manner, one modifies what one is (GSO 68; WDTT 16–17).

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The Rational Process of Subjectivation In the practices of subjectivation studied in the 1982 lectures, The Hermeneutics of the Subject (HSe), Foucault distinguishes the injunction to care for oneself (epimeleïa heauthou) from the more familiar “know thyself” (gnothi seauthon, HSe 2–3). The Greco-Roman practice of the care of the self, the epimeleïa, is what interests him in these lectures. It comprises a series of techniques, aimed at transforming the self in order to gain access to truth; this transformation is what Foucault terms a spirituality (HSe 15).16 This does not mean however that the care of the self, in contradistinction from the knowing of the self, would not be rational. This point is of course crucial from the perspective of my inquiry since it shows that, through the issue of the care of the self, Foucault is actually exploring new rationalities. In 1981, he explains that the arts of living he wants to study are “a technique, a considered and rational transformation of one’s life” (ST 34, emphasis added)17; in interviews he defines this technique as “what the Greeks called techne, i.e. a practical rationality governed by conscious goal” (F2001g, 364, emphasis added). In the introduction to The Use of Pleasures (UPe), he makes an explicit reference to Hadot (UPe 8), who mentions in his own book that the origin of these spiritual exercises might well be found in shamanic respiratory techniques and memory

16  In 1981, Foucault contends that there is in Plato a superposition between the “gnothi seauthon” and the “epimeleïa” (HSe 68, 76); he actually turns to the Stoics’ care of the self in order to avoid this “entanglement” (HSe 68, 461–462) and to show, in the Stoic exercises, the askesis as “a meditation which is precisely not a memory” (HSe 456). The “spiritual transformation of the self”—the object of Foucault’s analysis—is indeed difficult to isolate in the form of reminiscence because the soul recovers its essence, so to speak (HSe 459–460), that is something it has never stopped being. I believe Foucault will revise his position toward Plato in 1983 with the reading of the Seventh Letter; the knowledge of “the thing itself in its own being” is not that much a reminiscence, as advanced in HSe, but a practice (GSO 250–251). “The light will come on in the soul” (GSO 248), neither in the listening to the logos of the philosopher, nor in reading the written word, but in the practice of philosophy. As Avnon puts it, Plato’s “refined selfknowledge” of “gnothi seauthon” is a “wordless insight” (Avnon 1995, 312) which is also an “experience of transition between states of being” (Avnon 1995, 310), that is in Foucault’s words, a spirituality. 17  The French audio lecture held at IMEC (FCL.63, C63.2.1) has “reflexive” instead of “considered.”

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exercises.18 But “the spiritual exercises which interest us are precisely mental exercises which have nothing to do with cataleptic trances. They answer instead a rigorous need of rational control, a need which emerges for us with Socrates” (Hadot 2002, 38–39, n.4, emphasis added). It is probably not a coincidence that Foucault starts his own analyses in 1982 with a reading of Alcibiades, where Socrates describes the care of the self (HSe 45–78; CS 45). Foucault insists, in reading Alcibiades, that the self implied in the care of the self, the subject in our terms and the soul in Plato’s (HSe 55), is the one who “makes use” (in Greek—khresthai). For Foucault, the term “khresthai” is at the heart of the care of the self, up to the theory later developed by Epictetus: the subject is “the subject of khresis” (HSe 55–56).19 The reference to “khresis” in Epictetus is actually developed in CS: human reason “is the faculty that enables one to use at the right time and in the right way, the other faculties. In fact, it is this absolutely singular faculty that is capable of making use of itself, for it is capable of ‘contemplating both itself and everything else’” (CS 47, emphasis added; see also HSe 456). The self thus appears as reason. Moreover, from both Epictetus’ and Plato’s texts, the care of the self in antiquity can be associated with the reflexive use of reason on itself. Interestingly enough, when studying the political parrhesia in 1983, Foucault finds in Euripides a definition of parrhesia as “logo khresthai” (GSO 157), this time the logos being “the reasonable discourse, the true discourse.”20 Parrhesia appears here as this reflexive use of reason on itself—logo khresthai—so to speak, the use of reason (or reasonable discourse) by reason, mentioned by Epictetus. This reflexivity of reason on itself is, for Foucault, both the relation to self and the self: “the self with which one has the relationship is nothing other than the relationship itself… it is in short the immanence, or better, the ontological

18  For a description of the fundamental importance of Hadot’s work for Foucault’s own analyses of techniques of the self, see Davidson 990. 19  Elden (2016, p. 175) also notices that khresis is a key concept of UPe. He insists however on how little of the material of the book can be found in the lectures; as concerns the notion of khresis, that appears both in UPe and CS, a discussion exists, I contend, in the 1982 lectures, as briefly sketched here. 20  In UPe he also states: “I will start from the then common notion of the ‘uses of pleasures’ − chresis aphrodision – and attempt to determine the modes of subjectivation to which it referred” (UPe 32); again, subjectivation is tied to khresis (written this time chresis).

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adequacy of the self to the relationship” (unpublished, quoted by Gros 2001, 514, emphasis added, personal translation). Moreover, the care of the self also relies on a knowledge that has to be acquired; it is the mathemata (CT 338–339, unread), which can take the form of a useful theoretical knowledge about the cosmos, the mathesis (HSe 315) or the logoi, elements of rationality, precepts to be learnt as practical knowledge (HSe 322–323; F1997c, 279). In the 1981 lectures, Subjectivity and Truth (ST), in The Use of Pleasure (UPe), and in The Care of the Self (CS), this knowledge takes the form of the rules fixed by codes of sexual conduct. Foucault then details the three stages of the process for the care of the self: first the disciple has to listen to the true discourse of the master (mathesis)21; second, he has to make his own the taught precepts (melete, the meditation); and third, he has to practice them in exercises and check the extent of adequacy between his acts and the truth he already knows (askesis).22 The code to be respected is relatively loose when compared to the strict juridical codification imposed by pastoral power (UPe 30–31). In 1981, Foucault concludes that for the Greeks, the valorization of sexual acts does not obey the form of law; one finds instead “a distribution of principles” (ST 83), defined in UPe as “nomoi” (UPe 31). In the 1981 lectures Foucault explains that “the Greek notion of nomos does not correspond solely, exclusively, or even fundamentally to the juridical form of law as we know it. The nomos is also, it is fundamentally, a mode of distribution: (…) the nomos as a principle of repartition (…) and not as juridical law, division between permitted and prohibited” (ST 83). As a principle of distribution, it leaves to the individual the task of measuring the distance between his conduct and ontological status on the one hand, and the goal he has set for himself on the other. I believe this point to be very interesting because it actually brings us back to the 21  The precepts of the master studied in 1981 would fall, under later typology, into logoi and not mathesis. In 1981, I believe, Foucault implies by the term “mathesis” any knowledge involved, whatever its theoretical or practical nature. 22  See the example of Serenus, often studied by Foucault: Serenus writes to Seneca about himself. He feels dissatisfied with his own conduct, in relation to precepts he already knows (WDTT 102–103, FS 159): “he has not yet succeeded in harmonizing his actions and thoughts with the ethical structure he has chosen for himself” (FS 160). The same process is described in 1983 with the philosophical parrhesia and philosophy as a practice of the self: the first circle is a circle of listening; the second is a circle of practice on the self; the third is the access to philosophical knowledge (GSO 235–252).

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normalization practiced through the human sciences in the modern period: it consists in measuring and correcting the gap between a given norm or rule (DP 177–183). But there are two major differences; the first is that the judgment of modern discipline, as I already underscored, does not relate to the acts but to the individuals “in truth” (DP 181). The second major point that Foucault mentions in 1981 is that in madness, sickness, or death, both the true discourse and the diagnosis of the gap between actual and desired behavior, are given from the outside (ST 12): the truth of the individual under scrutiny is, in the end, said by the disciplinary system through and through.23 Actually, in Foucault’s 1983 discussion at Berkeley’s Department of History (BHIST), a student asks him to assess the similarity between the discipline and the care of the self. Foucault answers that at the beginning, the care of the self was very different from the discipline of the army for instance, but that there is a “relationship between the techniques,” in certain religious institutions (such as the Benedictine monastic institutions of the Middle Ages or the Jesuits’ colleges of the seventeenth century) for instance. In order to better understand Foucault’s answer, I think it important to distinguish between the techniques of the self, already presented in 1980 and the care of the self, which preoccupies him since 1981. As techniques of the self, they produce a subject who is not necessarily playing an active part in the process (F1997e, 291); as care of the self, a certain active relation to self is necessarily established (UPe 28). It is of course the techniques which are common to the disciplinary regime and the care of the self. Subjectivation/Subjection The veridiction, the truth-telling, at the heart of subjectivation therefore takes the form—in the Greco-Roman direction—of the logoi/nomoi of the master to his disciple. Interestingly enough, this renders subjectivation, the active transformation of the self, just another form of rational practice as defined in Chap. 4, though with one difference. In 1978, Foucault 23  This does not however contradict the fact that the individual is under the obligation to speak about himself: “truth is constituted in two stages: present but incomplete, blind to itself, in the one who spoke, it could only reach completion in the one who assimilated it and recorded it. (…) the revelation of confession had to be coupled with the decipherment of what it said. The one who listened was not simply the forgiving master (…) he was the master of truth. His was a hermeneutic function.” (HoS 66–67, emphasis added).

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defined regimes of practices as taking place along two axes, one being the jurisdiction, and the other the veridiction: both axes cover the power-­ knowledge entanglement in which modern subjects are produced. The jurisdiction created the constraint imposed by power, the norm of conduct, or the law, whereas the veridiction summarized the knowledges involved in its exercise. Yet the study of neoliberal governmentality revealed the “regression of the juridical,” the fact that the jurisdiction axis is in fact losing its power in contemporary societies, leading Foucault to look for the constraint in the axis of veridiction. This further meant displacing the meaning of veridiction as knowledge-savoir to the “truth acts” studied in 1980 in the Christian confession.24 In UPe, the active constitution of the subject is also described along two axes: first, the code of conduct prescribing a series of principles—the logoi/nomoi evoked in the previous section constitutes the jurisdiction axis—unchanged as compared to 1978 (UPe 29). Second, the axis of “veridiction” is now replaced by an axis of “subjectivation,” or “the manner in which one ought to form oneself as an ethical subject acting in reference to the prescriptive elements that make up the code” (UPe 26). One easily understands why: in the case of the Greek codes of conduct, as well as in other practices for the care of the self explored in 1982, the veridiction as true discourse has been held by the guide, and not the disciple telling the truth about himself. As a result, the veridiction is in this case doubling the jurisdiction in enunciating the precepts to follow.25 In all these practices, the subject constitutes himself, or is constituted, in a certain way, in relation to the truth. Hence the displacement from “veridiction” to “subjectivation:” the latter now holds the constraint. It is not the code itself, insists Foucault, that creates the subjection, although it sometimes does—when for instance (as in the case of Christian subjectivation)26 the code becomes omnipresent and takes the form of law (UPe 29–30). It is rather the subjectivation that creates the constraint, in its process of constitution of the subject. In the introduction to UPe, Foucault suggests analyzing this process according to four characteristics. The first is the “ethical substance,” the part of the self that is identified with the moral  See Chap. 4.  Interestingly enough, what is coined “nomoi” in UPe is actually called “logoi” in the 1982 lectures (HSe 323), showing the superposition between the rule, expressed by “nomoi” and the true speech as rational speech, the “logoi.” 26  In the introduction of UPe, Foucault warns the reader that there are many Christian forms of subjectivation, a distinction that I’ll omit here (UPe 30). 24 25

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conduct (the acts, the desires, the pleasures, the intentions, or the thoughts, to name a few)27; second, the mode of subjection as the manner in which the relation to the rule is established; the third is the type of ethical exercises demanded, the askesis; the fourth is the teleology, the telos or the goal the individual intends to reach (UPe 26–28; F1997c, 263–265). Hence the subjectivation always includes a subjection (assujettissement), in the form of the acceptance of a bind to a certain truth. But as Karsenti rightly insists, the opposite is also true; subjection is a form of subjectivation, a point that reconciles the thesis of Discipline and Punish (DP) with Foucault’s inquiries into practices of the self; the subjugated subject is not solely a product of power but also plays an active role in his subjectivation as subjection (Karsenti 1992). Foucault even uses a reflexive form of the verb “subjugate,” “to subjugate oneself to rules” (s’assujettir, SS 131, personal translation).28 Such an individual indeed becomes “the principle of his own subjection” (DP 203), a sentence in DP which did not make much sense prior to these later studies in subjectivation.29 These studies indeed render possible a new reading of DP, as proposed by Koopman; for him, Foucault in DP criticizes the juridical model of the contract because it dichotomously separates power and freedom; one should understand instead that “power and freedom can be neither dissociated nor assimilated. They must be deployed simultaneously” (Koopman 2013, 169). Discipline as the exercise of modern power can, then, be reinterpreted as the exercises by which the modern individual constitutes himself as a subjugated subject. As Tully (1999, 133) notices, the focus has thus been shifted “from the background ‘strategy without a strategist’ to the foreground of those who exercise power and those over whom power is exercised:” the “strategy without a strategist” is the paradoxical disciplinary power with no king, that I have tried to depict in Chap. 2. The studies of the techniques of the self cancel the “objectified subject” and replace it by a subjugated subject who actively participates in his subjection. This in turn implies, I would like to argue, a parallel shift in the concept of rationality involved; from passive processes of normalization imposed on docile bodies to an active 27  Acts are the object of scrutiny of the Stoic self-examination (HOW); the desires and the thoughts—that of the Christian one (BHIST; WDTT 101–102; GL 299–301); the pleasure, in the Greek aphrodisia (UPe); the intentions are mentioned about Kant (in F1997c, 263). 28  The English has: “to submit to rules” (CS 95), whereas the French is “s’assujettir à des règles.” 29  See Chap. 2.

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individual whose rationality is built so as to make him actively behave in conformity to a normal behavior.30 In the conclusion of the third volume of The History of Sexuality (CS), Foucault specifically compares the pastoral power mode of subjectivation to the Greek one: while the codes of sexual conduct are quite close, the ethics has completely changed. The most extreme form of subjection, the renunciation of self and total obedience demanded by pastoral power, is only one point on the axis of the care of the self. Located at the other extremity is the Greek self-mastery and parrhesia. For Chevallier, “instead of a qualitative separation between autonomy and dependence, Foucault proposes a progressive gradation of dependence within the relation to self” (Chevallier 2011, 105, personal translation). Subjectivation leads either to obedience (CS 239), our transformation into “normal subjects” (F1997c, 265, translation amended),31 to the Greek mastery of the self (HSe 184–185), or to any level of dependence in between these two extreme points. But in any subjectivation, a subjection is always involved. In relation to the question asked in 1979 about the possibility opened by governmentality of a “natural” subject that would escape subjection,32 Foucault’s answer is therefore highly nuanced: any subjectivation, any self-­ constituted subject, passes by a subjection, a bind to some truth. Following Chevallier (2011, 105), one can say that what defines subjectivity is rather reflexivity; the self is constituted in relation to a historically determined truth, grasped within a given rational discourse. The effects on the subject thus created depend on the content of this truth.

Conclusion Foucault’s studies of the techniques of the self reveal, in my view, two main points. The first is that subjectivation always implies a subjection, and vice-versa. The bind to truth is independent from the content of the truth, and it is what creates the subjection. This bind, first isolated in the early Christian confession leading to total submission, is later generalized to other Greco-Roman practices of the self, the aim of which is the self-­ sovereignty of the subject.

 See the next chapter.  See DE II #344, 1439; the English translation has “ethical” instead of “normal.” 32  See Chap. 4. 30 31

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In the conclusion to The History of Sexuality, Foucault remarks that if the very similar sexual practices that he identified in the Greeks and Early Christians led to such different forms of subjectivity (CS 239–240), then the effect does not derive from the practice itself but from the mode of thinking which accompanies it, the bind to truth, and its content: “there is no experience which is not a way of thinking and which cannot be analyzed from the point of view of the history of thought” (TFR 335, emphasis added). This leads to my second point, rather forsaken in existing literature: subjectivation is a rational process by which an individual either constitutes himself or is constituted into a subject. The rationality is here threefold; first, this relation is conditioned on the acquiring of a certain knowledge, either theoretical or practical, the mathemata; second, it is obtained through techniques of the self, which are themselves a form of knowledge: “man, human life, and the self were all objects of a certain number of ‘tekhnai’ that, with their exacting rationality, could well be compared to any technique of production” (F1998d, 442, emphasis added; see also BHS 202 n.4). The third is more general; subjectivation is also the reflexive capacity to establish a relation between self and truth. With the techniques of the self, Foucault has thus demonstrated a third dimension to rationality—alongside epistemological knowledge and techniques of power, it points to rationality in relation to self, the effect on the self of the way we think. In many instances, subjectivation is indeed described as “the experience the subject has of himself” (ST 10); in the second introduction to UPe,33 experiences are defined as “understandings of a certain type, rules of a certain form, certain modes of consciousness of oneself and others” (TFR 335, emphasis added). In a 1983 lecture at Berkeley, Foucault insists: I don’t want to analyze what people think as opposed to what they do but what they think when they do what they are doing. What I want to analyze is the meaning they give to their own behavior, the way they integrate their behavior in general strategies, the type of rationality they recognize in their different practices, institutions, models and behaviors. (REG, emphasis added)

33  Actually it is the first version, published in English in The Foucault Reader (TFR). It is published as “the original version,” (see note in DE II #340, 1397). The “first” introduction, from my viewpoint, is the one published in French in UP.

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A “history of thought” or a “history of subjectivity” (HSe 319) is the new manner in which Foucault defines his work. For Chevallier, after a decade concerned with practices of power alone, Foucault is again focusing on thought: “the government of selves and others takes place in thought” (Chevallier 2011, 117, personal translation). I think that the government of selves and others is better described as a practice of the self organized by a rationality; it is an exercise in thought. In HSe, Foucault briefly describes such a history of thought as follows: The very long and slow transformation of an apparatus (dispositif) of subjectivity, defined by the spirituality of knowledge (savoir) and the subject’s practice of truth, into this other apparatus of subjectivity which is our own and which is, I think, governed by the question of the subject’s knowledge (connaissance) of himself and of the subject’s obedience to the law. (HSe 319)

It is this history that I wish to trace in the next chapter, in order to isolate the form of subjectivity and rationality which characterizes our current relation to self.

References Foucault’s Work BB 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics – Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. BHS  1993. About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth. Political Theory 21 (2, May): 198–227. CS 1986. The Care of the Self. New York: Pantheon Books. CT 2011. The Courage of Truth – Lectures at the Collège de France 1983–1984. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DP 1995. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage Book. FS 2001. Fearless Speech. Los Angeles: Semiotext. GL 2014. On the Government of the Living – Lectures at the Collège de France 1979–1970. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. GSO 2008. The Government of Self and Others – Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–1983. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. HoS 1978. The History of Sexuality I. New York: Random House. HSe 2005. The Hermeneutics of the Subject  – Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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LWK 2013. Lectures on the Will to Know  – Lectures at the Collège de France 1970–1971. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ST 2017. Subjectivity and Truth – Lectures at the Collège de France 1980–1981. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. STPe 2009. Security, Territory, Population  – Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. TFR 1984. The Foucault Reader, ed. P.  Rabinow. Chicago/New York: Pantheon Books. UPe 1990. The Use of Pleasures. New York: Vintage Books. WDTT 2014. Wrong-Doing Truth-Telling – The Function of Avowal in Justice, ed. Fabienne Brion and Bernard E.  Harcourt. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Articles F1997b. 1997 [1981]. Sexuality and Solitude. In The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.1, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. P. Rabinow, 175–184. New York: The New Press. F1997c. 1997 [1983]. On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress. In The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.1, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. P. Rabinow, 253–280. New York: The New Press. F1997e. 1997 [1984]. The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom. In The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.1, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. P. Rabinow, 281–302. New York: The New Press. F1998c. 1998 [1968]. What Is an Author? In The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Vol.2, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. J.  D. Faubion and P. Rabinow (General editor), 205–222. New York: The New Press. F1998d. 1998 [1983]. Structuralism and Post-structuralism. In The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Vol.2, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. J.  D. Faubion and P.  Rabinow (General editor), 433–458. New  York: The New Press. F2001g. 2001 [1982]. Space Knowledge and Power. In The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.3, Power, ed. J.  D. Faubion and P.  Rabinow (General editor), 349–364. New York: The New Press.

Works in French DE II  2001 [1994]. Dits et Ecrits, II 1976–1988. Paris: Quarto-Gallimard. GV 2012. Du Gouvernement des Vivants – Cours au Collège de France 1979–1980. Paris: Seuil-Gallimard. HS 2001. L’herméneutique du Sujet  – Cours au Collège de France 1981–1982. Paris: Seuil-Gallimard.

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SS 1984. Histoire de la Sexualité III – Le Souci de Soi. Paris: Tel-Gallimard. UP 1984. Histoire de la Sexualité II – L’usage des Plaisirs. Paris: Tel-Gallimard.

Audio Recordings BHIST  Talk with the History Department at Berkeley, 19, April 1983. Available online at: http://ubu.com/sound/foucault.html HOW 1 & 2.  Truth and Subjectivity. Howison Lectures I and II, held at Berkeley, 20–21 October, 1980. Audio version. Available online at: http://ubu.com/ sound/foucault.html REG  Regent’s Lecture at Berkeley, 12, April 1983. Available online at: http:// ubu.com/sound/foucault.html

Materials at IMEC (Following Their Reference at IMEC) FCL.63  1981. Subjectivité et Vérité. Audio version of the Cours au Collège de France (C.63.1 to C.63.7).

Other Authors Austin, John L. 2013. Performative Utterances. In The Semantics-Pragmatics Boundary of Philosophy, ed. Ezcurdia and Stainton, 21–31. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Avnon, Dan. 1995. ‘Know Thyself:’ Socratic Companionship and Platonic Community. Political Theory, Vol. 23, No. 2 (May, 1995): 304–329. Chevallier, Philippe. 2011. Michel Foucault et le Christianisme. ENS Editions: Lyon. Elden, Stuart. 2016. Foucault’s Last Decade. Polity: Cambridge. Gros, Frederic. 2001. Situation du Cours. In Michel Foucault, L’herméneutique du Sujet – Cours au Collège de France 1981–1982. Paris: Seuil-Gallimard, 489–526. Hadot, Pierre. 2002. Exercices Spirituels et Philosophie Antique. Albin Michel: Paris. Karsenti, Bruno. 1992. Pouvoir, Assujettissement, Subjectivation. http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Pouvoir-assujettissement Koopman, Colin. 2013. Genealogy as Critique  – Foucault and the Problems of Modernity. Indiana University Press: Bloomington. Landry, Jean-Michel. 2007. Généalogie politique de la psychologie. Une lecture du cours de Michel Foucault du gouvernement des vivants. Raisons Politiques 1 (25): 31–45. Lorenzini, Daniele. 2015. What Is a “Regime of Truth”? Le Foucaldien 1 (1): 1–5. Senellart, Michel. 2012. Situation du cours. In Michel Foucault, Du Gouvernement des Vivants – Cours au Collège de France 1979–1980. Paris: Seuil-Gallimard, 323–450. Tully, James. 1999. To Think and Act Differently. In Foucault contra Habermas, ed. S. Ashenden and D. Owen, 90–142. London: Sage Publications.

CHAPTER 6

The Genealogy of the Modern Subject

Foucault’s studies of governmentality have established that power functions with acts of truth, through which individuals are constituted into specific subjects. The constraint passes via the subjectivation of the subject, a rational process through which the individual establishes a historically specific bind to a historically determined truth. As Davidson (2005, xxi) puts it, Foucault actually analyzes “the historically different forms of experience of the relation between the subject and truth.” Hence one of the major consequences of studies on subjectivity is that they render possible the genealogy of our subjectivity, back to the Greeks. This radically changes Foucault’s perspective when compared to The Order of Things (OT). One might recall that for Foucault in 1966, “the subject” was a modern invention that was about to vanish. The subject had appeared as a consequence of the major shift in episteme generated by the nineteenth century and the human sciences. Beforehand it simply did not exist (OT 16). Most of his inquiries into language aimed at revealing “the fiction of the subject.” In Discipline and Punish, he had tried to show how this fictitious subject was created under the power-knowledge entanglement of discipline and the human sciences as almost an object really, as an always already subjugated subject, this time in its passive form (and not as actively subjugating himself to a rule, as described in the previous chapter). Already in a 1978 article, however, the position of OT is revised: If the promise of the human sciences had been to make us discover man, they had certainly not kept that promise; but, as a general cultural ­experience, © The Author(s) 2020 L. Barry, Foucault and Postmodern Conceptions of Reason, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48943-4_6

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it had been more a matter of constituting a new subjectivity through an operation that reduced the human subject to being an object of knowledge. The second aspect that I confused with the preceding one is that, in the course of their history, men have never ceased to construct themselves, that is, to continually displace their subjectivity, to constitute themselves in an infinite, multiple series of different subjectivities that will never have an end and never bring us in the presence of something that would be “man.” (F2001b, 275–276, emphasis added; see also F1997e)

Hence if man does not exist, the subject does, in changing and multiple ways. The interesting point, as noted by Allen (2000), is that this new position does not in fact contradict Foucault’s previous inquiries, but only requalifies them; what was tackled in OT is not the subject in its generality, only this specific form of subjectivity which emerged in modernity, in the form of the transcendental subject. Hence Allen can conclude that “Foucault’s archaeologies and genealogies reveal his work to be an elaboration of the historically, culturally, and socially specific conditions of possibility for subjectivity” (Allen 2000, 114; see also Allen 2008, 37). In 1981, Foucault reiterates that his intention is not a universally valid theory of the subject—thus remaining loyal to his own previous work: Subjectivity is not conceived of on the basis of a prior and universal theory of the subject, it is not related to an original and founding experience, it is not related to an anthropology that has universal value. Subjectivity is conceived as that which is constituted and transformed in its relationship to its own truth. No theory of the subject independent of the relationship to the truth. (ST 12)

Foucault explained in 1980 that his project is a history of truth; the link between truth and subjectivity implies that it is also a history of subjectivity or, as he sometimes says, “a genealogy of the subject” (BHS 202). The early definition of “genealogy” implied defining the point of emergence of certain phenomena, simultaneously disclosing their contingency (TFR 45–46). From this perspective, “one of the basic forms of our obedience” (GL 313) shows its point of emergence in Early Christianity and, when compared to the Greek practice of the self, the contingency of this obedience. Genealogy, in later texts, is also defined as the analysis of historical phenomena with a present-day questioning (F1996f, 460); the study of the Greco-Roman techniques of the self should therefore be grasped in

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relation to Foucault’s attempt to better understand the modern self. It is this double genealogy that I would like to sketch here. The first difficulty is to resist the temptation to transpose to our own selves Foucault’s findings in the Greek period. The point though is that he easily accepts the link between the early Christian and the modern self (GL 313), whereas he insists on the irreducibility of the Greek subjectivity to ours (HSe 319), contending that “the subjectivation of the Western man is Christian and not Greco-Roman” (GL 236). At the same time, if his aim is clearly the genealogy of the modern self, looked for in Christian practices, he also contends: “I do not think we can understand the verbalization of sin in Christianity unless we go back a bit and look at what happened in Greek and Roman philosophy” (GL 228). The second difficulty is that after the first volume of the History of Sexuality (HoS), except for some parenthetical remarks, Foucault never really tackles the modern self, while his understanding has necessarily evolved (UPe 8–9). The genealogy is therefore interesting in two ways: first, since the Greeks are not directly relevant to our own experiences as subjects, there is another reason that explains his inquiries into the culture of the self in Antiquity, which I hope to illuminate in the first part of this chapter. While the previous chapter approached confession and parrhesia as speech acts, this part intends to highlight the practices of the self involved in these truth acts. Second, this genealogy highlights the issues concerning modern subjectivity that interested Foucault toward the end of his life, as will be shown in the second part.

From Christian Acts of Truth to Greek Care of the Self The Christian direction of the soul is first mentioned in the 1974 lectures in relation to the power exercised by the psychiatrist. Foucault then states that “some of these techniques and objects , along with the practice of direction, were imported into the psychiatric field” (PPe 174). In 1975, Foucault spends two classes on Christian spiritual guidance, mainly after the Renaissance. The thesis is that, besides the production of the docile and utile bodies of the discipline, with the Church actually “appeared the body of pleasure and desire” (Ae 201): alongside “the political anatomy of the body” (the discipline), the practice of confession created the “moral physiology of the flesh” (Ae 193), references

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which already point to the thesis of History of Sexuality I (HoS). The grid of surveillance described in Discipline and Punish (DP) finds its origin in both “the discursive grid” of confession (Ae 202) and the “institutions of power and specializations of knowledge that developed in the seminaries and colleges” (Ae 193). The Christian origin of disciplinary power is also mentioned a few times in DP (DP 140, 143, 149, 161, 180), whereas pastoral power—as the power of the priest over his flock—appears in HoS (61). Hence both the continuity between modern discipline and the Christian practice of confession on the one hand, and Foucault’s contention in the 1980’s that “the subjectivation of the Western man is Christian” (GL 236) on the other, were clearly established prior to the 1980 lectures; the Greek genealogy is less evident. Pastoral Power in 1978 Foucault comes back to pastoral power in the 1978 lectures, as the starting point of his genealogy of governmentality (STPe).1 Alongside discipline, the first lectures isolate another technique for the exercise of power—government, based on regulation; besides the norm of discipline, another type of norm, immanent to the phenomena observed, the statistical norm of regulation, takes shape with the nineteenth century. The turn to pastoral power in the lecture of 8 February 1978 is therefore at first sight contradictory: it associates the new concept of government—defined previously in contradistinction to discipline—with the Christian government of the souls, itself already traced as the source of the disciplinary regime.2 The genealogy of governmentality actually comes to affirm that, despite the novelty of the techniques of power correlative to liberal governmentality, obedience and renunciation are still characteristics of the liberal subject (BB 67; Karsenti 2005). Moreover, when compared to previous descriptions of pastoral disciplinary power, the 1978 lectures establish for the first time a comparison with the Greeks. The strange result is that while Foucault is still speaking of Christian obedience, he is already pointing to something completely new in his analyses: the self-mastery of the Greeks. This tension between  See Chap. 3.  This should not be interpreted as a reappraisal of Christian pastoral power, to the contrary: Foucault reaffirms the same disciplinary characteristics already described in DP or HoS (STPe 183–184). 1 2

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the well-established Christian genealogy of our modern subjectivity and a Greek counterpoint in the background, recurs over 1980 to 1982. Foucault further insists on the heterogeneity introduced by Christianity into the exercise of power with respect to the Greco-Roman practices (STPe 169–173; HSe 319; Karsenti 2005). This “heterogeneity” can be interpreted along the archaeological metaphor: “these are two modes of thought that are not on the same plane,” belonging to different strata and epistemes (F2001h, 389). But the “heterogeneity” is actually defined at length in the 1979 lectures when comparing two heterogeneous concepts of law, a definition which actually refutes the dichotomy: We should keep in mind that heterogeneity is never a principle of exclusion; it never prevents coexistence, conjunction, or connection. And it is precisely in this case, in this kind of analysis, that we emphasize, and must emphasize a non-dialectical logic if we want to avoid being simplistic. (…) I suggest replacing dialectical logic with what I would call a strategic logic. A logic of strategy does not stress contradictory terms within a homogeneity that promises their resolution in a unity. The function of strategic logic is to establish the possible connections between disparate terms which remain disparate. The logic of strategy is the logic of connections between the heterogeneous and not the logic of the homogenization of the contradictory. (BB 42, emphasis added)

If such is the case, and heterogeneous forms of subjectivation can co-­ exist with one another, would it not mean that a modern subjectivation aiming at self-mastery could be possible? This is not the perspective adopted by Foucault in HSe: “where we, moderns, hear ‘subjection of the subject to the order of law,’ the Greeks and Romans heard ‘constitution of the subject as final end for himself, through and by the exercise of the truth’” (HSe 319). Yet his interest in the Greek direction of conscience should be understood in “connection” with the genealogy of our obedience incepted in 1980. It is the possibility of parrhesia, I would like to argue, as a “genealogy of the critical attitude” (FS 170–171), which attracted Foucault to the study of the Greeks. If this interpretation is correct, then the Greek subjectivation, while being radically at odds with the Christian one, to which the modern subject does belong, can be connected to our obedience, in order—maybe—to show its contingency.

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The development on the pastorate just after the description of the regulative norm which lifts the constraint on the bodies in the 1978 lectures thus becomes less surprising: while liberal governmentality does not by itself operate a change in the modes of subjectivation, it still opens the way for something new. Hence the necessity to put the Christian subject in the perspective of the Greek one: “to try to rethink the Greeks today consists (…) in seeing to it that European thought can get started again (redémarrer) on Greek thought” (F1996g, 469–470). The studies of the Christian techniques of the self and the Greco-­ Roman ones are therefore constantly compared to one another. Foucault starts with the Christian direction of the souls, briefly sketched in 1978 (STPe). He comes back to early Christian acts of truth in 1980  in the conversion, penitence, and direction of the soul. At each step, Foucault gives as a counterpoint the equivalent technique in Greek philosophy. Starting in 1981, the focus is reversed to Greek techniques of the self, compared now to the Christian ones (Gros 2018, v–vi): in 1981, the sexual codes of conducts in Antiquity (compared to Early Christianity) are studied as a specific example of how a true discourse is related to a practice. In 1982, Foucault turns to the conversion and the direction of the soul, split between the philosophical direction per se and self-examination, all treated from the perspective of Greek practices. Crucially, there does not seem to be an equivalent to penitence in Greek techniques of the self, nor is there a Christian equivalent to the parrhesia treated in 1983–1984. Foucault’s general thesis in these studies is already clear in 1980: “there is the transfer of a number of fundamental techniques of ancient philosophical life into Christianity. But this transfer (…) is brought about (…) with a veritable inversion of all the effects produced by this technique” (GL 274, emphasis added). Besides the thesis itself, the manner in which Foucault “is brought,” from one year to the next to go further back into the Greek period shows how surprised he was by his own findings (CT 8); it deserves to be respected here. As mentioned in Chap. 5, Foucault distinguishes four aspects in the constitution of the moral subject: the teleology, the askesis, the ethical substance, and the relation to truth (UPe 26–28). I will follow these points here to describe both the Christian constitution of the self and the Greco-Roman one.

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The Christian Confession In the case of the Christian subject, the teleology is conversion, the transformation of the individual that lends him access to the truth. But, in contrast to the Platonic conversion in which the soul actually recalls the truth of being, to which it belongs, in Christian conversion the truth of the self and the divine truth are two different things. In order to get access to the truth of God (truth as dogma), the Christian must first submit to the obligation to tell the truth about his soul (GL 145), to know himself through exegesis (HSe 255–256); but the individual—both prior to and after his conversion—and divine truth remain separate (GL 187). The conversion itself is a mortification of the existing subject; the individual has to prove that he is no longer the sinner he once was, in order to gain access to the divine truth and, even then, he is always liable to relapse into sin (GL 187). In this Christian conversion, the accent is on the infinite task of knowing one’s soul, in its innermost secrets and desires, in order to renounce them (WDTT 92; GL 309; HSe 254–255); it takes the form of a “structural subjection” (GL 309, unread, emphasis added). The “care of the self” is in fact the injunction, valid for the sole shepherd, to take care of the others (F1997c, 278).3 At a second level then, the teleology is also the renunciation of the prior self and the total submission to the authority of the priest. The conversion, whatever its type, cannot be obtained without the intervention of a guide (HSe 133, GL 229), who will lead the askesis, the exercises performed by the disciple in order to reach the truth. In the Christian direction, the aim is pure obedience, as a state of being (GL 269). Both the competence of the master and the quality of the order received are irrelevant to the process: “any order, however absurd, simply by the fact that it is given and that one obeys it, is what constitutes the useful effect of the direction relationship” (GL 270; WDTT 136). The aim is pure subjection (assujettissement), in Latin subditio “the fact of being subject” (GL 271), also described by Foucault as “letting the principle of obedience penetrate one’s entire behavior; one not to do anything that not commanded by someone else” (WDTT 138).4 3  In 1983, Foucault slightly modifies this point, stating that Christian conversion was initially also a form of care of the self (REG). See also note 33 in Chap. 7. 4  From a purely etymologic viewpoint, Foucault mentions in HSe that the Greek did not have a concept of “subject,” and used instead “auto,” the self, to refer to “what we would call the subject” (HSe 38; See also F1996g, 473; WDTT 100). In 1981, the bios is taken to

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The ethical substance lies in the thoughts of the disciple, the logismoi, submitted to an examination in the confession.5 “Logismos” means in Greek reasoning, “the way the logos is employed in order to arrive at the truth.” In its Christian understanding (in the texts of Tertullian) by contrast, “logismos is thought that comes to the mind with all the uncertainties of its origin, nature, and content” (GL 298–299, emphasis added). There is indeed always a possibility that Satan is at the origin of the thought; hence where the Greek saw a co-naturality between human and cosmic reason, the Christian sees a common origin to man and the devil (GL 296). Therefore the practice of examination consists in the exhaustive, infinite, avowal of one’s inner thoughts, in order to purify oneself from the presence of evil (GL 290, 296; WDTT 149–151; BHS 217). Senellart interestingly notices that the figure of Jesus has been completely omitted from this description of Christianity(!); this comes in his view from Foucault’s focus on techniques of government, on acts of truth (the confession) and not acts of faith (the dogma, which would have brought him to Christ).6 From this perspective, for Foucault the decisive moment of Christianity is not Jesus but Tertullian as “the point of emergence of the principle of fear in the Christian subject’s relation to self” (Senellart 2013, 6–7).7 Hence for Foucault the relation to truth characteristic of the Christian subjectivation is a relation of doubt and fear. The doubt is all the more easy to establish, I would like to suggest, since the Christian subject is play the part of the subject for the Greeks (ST 253–254). The term “subject” seems therefore to first appear in Latin. This would imply that indeed the “subject” has a Christian origin, and is correlated to this notion of subditio, mentioned by Foucault about Christian conversion. It also shows that Foucault was right when, in HoS, he insisted on the dual meaning of the term “subject” (HoS 60): it has the meaning of subject as the active speaker of the avowal (the act of truth) but, more fundamentally, the subject as “subjected,” from the practice of subditio. 5  In the study of Christian confession, the direction of the soul and the self-examination are not studied separately, whereas for the Greeks, in HSe, these practices are treated in different chapters. I believe that it comes precisely from the fact that, in the Christian direction, the disciple is also the one who speaks; therefore, the direction and examination converge into a single practice. 6  See Chap. 4. 7  According to Schmidt (2014), Foucault’s omission of Jesus should be paralleled to his omission of Kierkegaard in modern times. For Schmidt, Foucault is doing the opposite of Kierkegaard and aims at denying the possibility of “an alternative Christian exodus from metaphysics.”

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trapped in the attempt to decipher this secret, deeply hidden, and inaccessible truth about himself: “what is in question is not the truth of my idea; it is the truth of myself who has an idea. It is not the question of the truth of what I think, but the question of the truth of I who thinks” (GL 303, emphasis added; see also BHS 217). The Christian subject is therefore formed under the exhaustive saying of his thoughts to the other and the hermeneutics of his self; it is an endless exploration of the self in search for an unknown, hidden truth to be deciphered (WDTT 165–168, 96; GL 309). This doubt, in return, reinforces the necessity of an external authority and the dependence on one’s master. As Landry puts it, “to reach the ‘truth’ of what he is, the cenobite must submit to a moral authority and obey him unconditionally (…) through a relationship of submission.” Christian confession, as a technique of government, is therefore “a political technology of obedience” (Landry 2009, 122). The endless search for the truth of the self is articulated to an absolute submission and total obedience to the Priest, in the renunciation of one’s own will. The Greco-Roman Philosophical Guidance In his introduction to UPe, Foucault justifies his “turn to the Greeks” by the fact that the techniques of the self are most evident in the Greco-­ Roman period, since at that time they appear in “their autonomy,” prior to their assimilation “into the exercise of priestly power in early Christianity, and later, into educative, medical, and psychological types of practices” (UPe 11; see also ST 35). Yet I believe that the study of the Greco-Roman direction proposed by Foucault also serves another purpose; since, as I will show below, Foucault forces the contrast, he is in fact trying to establish the contingency of our obedience. The Greek direction also has as its teleology the transformation of the individual. Foucault is most interested in the Stoic conversion since it is neither reminiscence (as in its Platonic version) nor exegesis (as in the Christian one), and gives predominance to the care of the self per se. Instead of turning his back on this world in order to see the light—as in Plato’s cave metaphor—the Stoic distances himself from his own self in this world in order to reach a perspective on this world and his own self within in it (HSe 276); “being for ourselves, in our own eyes, what we are, namely a point, ‘punctualizing’ ourselves in the general system of the universe” (HSe 278). From Seneca’s viewpoint, the “general system of the universe” is a synonym for the reason of the cosmos, co-natural with

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human reason (HSe 275, 278, 282). The second level of teleology—the type of subject obtained by the transformation—“self-sovereignty” (FS 144), is understood as “making an autonomous use of the reason that he shares with the whole world” (GL 246, emphasis added), that stands in sharp contrast to Christian renunciation. The guide, in the Greek direction, is “an effective agency (opérateur) for producing effects within the individual’s reform and in his formation as a subject” (HSe 130). While the will of the guided individual had to be annihilated in the Christian direction, it now has to be “focused.” Prior to the direction, the individual is not a subject at all, he is in a state of “stultus:” he is “someone who remembers nothing, who lets his life pass by, who does not try to restore unity to his life by recalling what is worth memorizing, and [who does not] direct his attention and will to a precise and well-determined end” (HSe 131). In this stage, he is the slave of himself (HSe 272). The stultitia is the agitation of the thoughts before they are focused by the will (HSe 130–131). The self is this polarization of the will in its thoughts, “the will’s free, absolute, and permanent object and end” (HSe 133; BHS 210).8 The Greek direction is founded on the precepts of the master, transmitted to the disciple. These precepts, presented as nomoi in 1981, are called logoi in HSe, rational propositions, “elements of discourse, of rationality: of a rationality that states the truth and prescribes what we must do at the same time” (HSe 323). The disciple’s duty in askesis is first to memorize the precepts through daily exercises in order to get to the point where the principles are incorporated.9 It is the point of “transformation of logos into ethos,” a mode of conduct and of being (HSe 327). The second stage of

8  At this point I cannot help but mention that Foucault in HM used the Stultifera Navis, the Ship of Fools, as an example of the treatment of madness in the Middle Ages. If the state of “stultus” characterizes the status of the individual before it constitutes himself as a subject, then, contrary to what Foucault first contended (DE I # 4, 188), the Greek did have an equivalent to our madness in the end, an opposite to logos! Moreover, the stultus as “agitation of the thoughts” describes pretty well the Neveu de Rameau, the last fool heard in literature at the dawn of modernity (HM 344–352). 9  Foucault uses twice the term “incrusted” (BHS 210, HS 308—the English translation in the latter being “embedded,” see HSe 323) and thus avoids the term “interiorization,” which is both too much associated with the Freudian concept of the interiorization of the law (BHS 204) but also, more fundamentally I believe, implies an undefined interiority (see FCL.63, C63.2.1: Foucault says, “let’s use the term ‘interiorize’ in quotation marks” (this sentence does not appear in the published version); see also HSe 11).

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askesis consists then in the daily examination of one’s actions, to examine their compliance with the rule and logos. Hence the ethical substance in the Greco-Roman technique of the self is composed either of the thoughts (Epictetus)—as for the Christians—or the individual’s acts (Seneca). But in both cases the veridiction is completely different from the Christian one, where the issue is the inner truth of the self. In the case of Epictetus, the examination of the thoughts consists in being able to distinguish thoughts or events that depend on my acts and will, from others over which I have no power and should therefore be discarded (HSe 197–198, 286; FS 160–162). Foucault insists again that this exercise is both similar in practice but very different in content from its Christian counterpart, found in Cassian’s texts: the problem for Cassian is not to know the nature of the object of representation but the purity and the origin of the representation per se (HSe 300; FS 161–162). The second example is Seneca’s examination, where the object of examination is not thoughts but the distance between acts and learned principles (HSe 480–484). The exercise consists in presenting one’s acts “at own court” (HSe 481). The judgment does not consist in establishing one’s sins or the due punishment, but rather in reinforcing the true principles that should guide one’s actions, “to reactivate various rules and maxims in order to make them more vivid, permanent, and effective for future behavior” (FS 149–150; HSe 482–484). With the Greeks, the relation to truth also takes a new form. Since truth consists of rational principles to be mastered (and not an inner truth to be sought), their mastery brings trust into one’s capacity to behave as desired. Hence where the Christian relation to truth was a relation of suspicion, the Greek one is of confidence. As I have tried to show in the previous chapter, in parrhesia the Greek subject is brought to a reinforcement of the self. The parrhesia realizes the adequacy of the self with truth, in both speech and acts: “let us say what we think and think what we say; let speech harmonize with conduct” (HSe 402, 406). The specificity of the Stoic subjectivation when compared to the Christian one is that it remains reflexivity on the self, obtained with non-reflexive truths. As Benatouil noticed: “non-reflexive knowledges and truths deeply affect the manner in which the one who possesses them thinks of his self, works on his self and acts” (Benatouil 2003, 40, personal translation). Therefore the truth of the self is not an inner truth but lies instead purely in the relation to truth: “the truth of the self in these exercises is nothing other than

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the relation of the self to truth” (FS 165, emphasis in the text), where truth is both a set of rational principles and practical rules for behavior in accordance with these principles (FS 165–166). Reflexivity itself, that builds the subject, thus seems to have for Foucault a cultural and historical dimension (Butler, quoted in Allen 2008, 6). The absence of penitence in the Greek practices of the self is now clear: the subject does not have to mortify himself in order to access the truth, but should rather focus his will on true principles of conduct. The incompatibility of parrhesia with Christianity is also explained: Parrhesia – confidence will be replaced by the principle of a trembling obedience in which the Christian will have to fear God (…) Parrhesia, as that openness of heart, that relationship of confidence which brought man and God face to face, is increasingly in danger of appearing as a sort of arrogance and presumption. (CT 333)

* * * As a conclusion to the Howison Lectures in 1980, which fairly summarize the above, Foucault distinguishes between three modes of subjectivation: the Platonic and neo-Platonic conversion create a Gnostic self, realizing “the ontological unity between the knowledge of being and the knowledge of the soul;” the Stoic conversion creates a Gnomic self, where “the force of the truth is one with the form of the will” (BHS 210).10 The latter is further opposed to the Gnoseo-logical self of Christianity, where “thoughts are constituted as subjective data which are to be interpreted. The role of the interpreter is assumed by the work of a continuous verbalization of the most imperceptible movements of the thought” (FCL 3.4, f. 18).11 10  In the course of the lecture, Foucault defines gnome as “the unity of the will and knowledge. It is also a brief piece of discourse through which truth appeared in all its force and encrusts itself in the soul of people” (BHS 209–210): Gnome, logoi, and nomoi are, I believe, three ways of defining the precepts of the Greek master transmitted to the disciple. 11  This part does not appear in the BHS article which is supposed to be a transcription of the lectures. It is audible at 55:15 of HOW2. The dictionary definition of gnoseology takes it as a synonym of epistemology; and indeed, in the lecture at Berkeley, Foucault continues as follows: “there has been in Early Christianity a perpetual oscillation, between a truth-technology of the self oriented towards the manifestation of the being, with the exomologesis , an ‘ontological’ temptation of Christianity; and a truth-technology oriented towards discursive

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The picture of (and opposition between) Christianity and Greco-­ Roman forms of subjectivation is clear; as Senellart puts it, one is dependence, the other self-mastery (Senellart 2003, 159). Yet some commentators insist on the inaccuracy of Foucault’s presentation. For Jaffro, his description of stoicism suffers from the elision of the notion of “prohairesis:” Foucault replaces it by the periphrasis of “relation to self,” where in fact “prohairesis is not the self per se but the divine element in the self, which is capable of the care of the self” (Jaffro 2003, 66). Hadot has the same type of argument stating that Foucault’s presentation of the techniques of the self are too much centered on the self and not enough on divine reason and the feeling of belonging to a Whole (Hadot 2002, 325–326; see also Pradeau 2002, 138–146; Davidson 2006, 129). Actually, Foucault does mention that Seneca sees a co-naturality between human reason and the reason of the cosmos (HSe 275, 278, 282);12 it is actually that unity of truth and the identity of the logos which ensures that once incorporated, the logoi do not produce a subject submitted to the master who uttered them, but a subject in harmony with the universe. The Stoic government of the self is indeed for him a work on the self in order to reason in analogy to divine reason (HSe 457–459). It is one further difference between the Greek and the Christian conversions, since the truth of the Christian subject is crucially different from the truth of God. But it is also where the Greek subjectivation is necessarily most different from the modern one, as shown in the next chapter. In any case, if Foucault did force the difference between the Greco-­ Roman direction and the Christian one, it is to serve his own project: to establish an alternative to absolute Christian subjection (Hadot 2002, 325; Jaffro 2003, 69; Pradeau 2002, 147). In my perspective, it is important to notice the shift of focus; while he is drafting the genealogy of our obedience, he also points to a possibility for a rational building of an autonomous self. Moreover, as Gros mentions, Foucault is interested in the Greco-Roman subject because its autonomy is created with no transcendence: “the self with which one has the relationship is nothing other than the relationship itself... it is in short the immanence, or better, the ontological adequacy of the self to the relationship” (unpublished, quoted by Gros 2001, 514). Yet at the same time, this relation to self cannot be analyses of thought: this is the epistemological temptation of Christianity which, in the end, became victorious” (emphasis added). 12  The 1982 lectures were not available to Hadot at the time he published his article.

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established without a relation to truth, that is “the existence of a discourse that claims to tell the truth about subjectivity” (ST 11). This relation to truth links this form of autonomy to Kantian autonomy, a theme developed in the following chapter. It is on the basis laid down by Christianity, with the practice of avowal and the valorization of renunciation, that the modern subject can be understood. Yet the Greek genealogy of the modern subject offers the lost parrhesia as an alternative discourse and practice, in order “to get started again on Greek thought” (F1996g, 470). It is important to insist that Foucault rejects the idea of applying, as is, the Greek techniques of the self: “you can’t find the solution of a problem in the solution of another problem raised at another moment by other people” (F1997c, 256). Yet if the processes cannot be re-activated, they “at least constitute, or help to constitute, a certain point of view which can be very useful as a tool for analyzing what’s going on now  – and to change it” (F1997c, 261). In Veyne’s metaphor, the columns of old pagan temples can be used for new buildings (Veyne 1993, 7). It is to the modern subject, grasped from this viewpoint, that I now turn.

Veridiction in Contemporary Societies Starting with Descartes (or at the time of Descartes), the doubt about one’s thoughts at the heart of the Christian ritual of veridiction is lifted with the exclusion, in the First Meditation, of the evil genius: “the evidence of the cogito allowed Descartes to dismiss this danger which was posed, marked, and indicated by Christian spirituality” (WDTT 170). This opens for Foucault a new era, where truth is understood in a scientific manner, in the form of evidence: “starting when we can say: ‘as such the subject is, anyway, capable of truth’ (…), we have entered a different age of the history of relations between subjectivity and truth” (HSe 18, emphasis added). At first sight, this shift seems to reconcile the subject with the confidence taken from him by Christianity, and could have opened the way to a new form of parrhesia. In fact it is the opposite that happens, and the introductory lesson of the 1982 lectures, The Hermeneutics of the Subject (HSe), should probably be understood as a warning. Modernity has made parrhesia inaccessible to us by an additional twist in the effects of veridiction: indeed, its modern form being scientific discourse, truth becomes accessible without any transformation of the subject. Therefore the first

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lesson is focused on the loss of the precept epimeleia heauthou (take care of yourself) in favor of the gnothi seauthon (know thyself). One should not transpose as is the analyses of the Greeks onto our time. It is later in this course that Foucault insists on the fundamental “heterogeneity,” or disparity between our mode of thought and the Greek one (HSe 319), making the notion of parrhesia difficult for us to recapture (CT 6). I would like to first examine the meaning of this argument, and to further analyze its consequences for the modern self. “Epimeleia Heautou vs. Gnothi seauthon” Foucault’s lectures in 1982 are focused on the relation between the subject and truth in the dimension of the care of the self (the epimeleia heautou), understood as a spiritual activity. The main argument of the first lesson is that, if one calls “spirituality” the process through which the individual transforms himself in order to have access to truth (HSe 11–12; HSe 14), spirituality disappears with Descartes. Modernity (understood here as starting with Descartes, and not Kant)13 is marked by the fact that the care of the self, the epimeleia heauthou has been covered up by the gnothi-seauthon: knowledge-connaissance gives access to truth without any prior transformation of the subject.14 Indeed, the truth of pure connaissance is manifested through procedures that are “auto-indexations of truth:” these might represent a constraint, but do not really pass through the subject. This is already Foucault’s point in a 1978 interview: “ indicates a process by which the subject undergoes a modification through the very thing that one knows (…) maintains the fixity of the

13  Foucault in The Order of Things (OT) distinguishes between the Classical age, starting in the seventeenth century and heralded by Descartes, and Modernity at the end of the eighteenth century with Kant—see Chap. 2 and Han-Pile 2006, p. 198. 14  According to Monod (2013, 354–357), here Foucault is conducting an implicit dialogue with Heidegger. In the Howison lectures in 1980, Foucault makes a precise reference to Heidegger, as follows: “For Heidegger, it was through an increasing obsession with techne as the only way to arrive at an understanding of objects, that the West lost touch with Being. Let’s turn the question around and ask which techniques and practices form the Western concept of the subject, giving it its characteristic split of truth and error, freedom and constraint” (HOW, BHS p.  223–224, n. 4, emphasis added). Hence, in comparison with Heidegger, Foucault does not limit techne to the understanding of objects.

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inquiring subject” (F2001b, 256).15 This point was further developed in the 1980 lectures and evoked in the previous chapter: the alethurgie, the manifestation of truth, is always an obligation to truth. But the modern alethurgie takes the form of evidence, making the obligation transparent to itself; Foucault claims about Descartes that “there is no king in geometry,” showing that the bind to truth has become transparent. The act of truth takes the form of a scientific demonstration and seems to imply truth alone, leaving the subject unaffected. From a theoretical viewpoint then, knowledge-connaissance does not suppose the transformation of the subject: with modernity, the link between “the access to truth (…) and the subject’s transformation of himself and of his being” is broken (HSe 25–26). Would this mean that the modern subject is not subject to transformations? I do not think so. As explained in Chap. 5, the transparence of the bind to scientific truth does not cancel the constraint. Moreover, in 1982 Foucault immediately adds: “when I say ‘the link was definitively broken,’ I don’t need to tell you that I don’t believe any such thing, and that what is interesting is precisely that the links were not broken abruptly as if by the slice of a knife” (HSe 26, emphasis added). Were they even broken? Foucault’s studies of modernity are focused on knowledge-savoir: “I am not trying to do history of sciences in general,” which could fit to the definition of knowledge-connaissance, “but only of those which sought to construct a scientific knowledge of the subject,” which he always identified as knowledge-savoir (HOW; BHS 223, n. 4). It is his contention that most of the modern so-called sciences are in fact forms of knowledge-savoir, not knowledge-connaissance, hence involving some transformation of the subject. He even insists that “we can recognize a false science by its structure of spirituality” (HSe 28). He further gives two examples, Marxism and psychoanalysis: both claim to be sciences, while in fact they conceal their actual transformation of the subject (HSe 29). The modern subject remains subject to transformation, yet the dimension of the care of the self, the epimeleia, has been lost. What was at stake in the Greek care of the self was the active work on the self in order to access truth. Epimeleia comes from the Greek verb meletan, which designates an activity, a practice, an exercise: “meletan is a sort of mental 15  As mentioned in Chap. 2, Foucault introduces the distinction between knowledge-savoir and knowledge-connaissance in The Archaeology of Knowledge (AK 247). The distinction takes an obviously different meaning over time.

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exercise, rather an exercise ‘in thought’ (…) Meletan is to perform an exercise of appropriation, the appropriation of a thought (…) It is a game that thought performs on the subject himself” (HSe 356–358, emphasis added). Once truth is taken as evident and self-indexed, the subject of knowledge is taken as a given. This is Foucault’s main argument in this first 1982 lesson: the modern focus on the gnothi seauthon instead of the epimeleia heauthou accompanies the emergence of truth in its scientific, self-evident form. As a result, the relation to self takes the form of knowledge instead of self-transformation; once truth is taken to be immediately accessible, the subject has lost the means to actively transform himself. Yet if the techniques of the self as epimeleia—as care of the self, for the individual’s active and ethical transformation—might be lost, the practices of veridiction, these acts of truth through which a subject is constituted, continue to exist; after all, Foucault came to the study of the techniques of the self through the isolation of veridiction as one main axis in the exercise of contemporary power. In the lesson of 13 January 1981, when studying sexual codes of conduct in Antiquity, he insists that such codes disappeared later on, but it does not imply that the modes of conduct are not “absorbed;” the schemes of conduct considered as good conduct are nowadays transmitted through school, social stereotypes, and the human sciences (UPe 11; REG; ST 27). This would mean that the modern subject is entrapped into practices of the self which form him in a certain way, without having the possibility of transforming himself. In 1982, he gives a hint of such an interpretation: “I think we may have to suspect that we find it impossible today to constitute an ethic of the self, even though it may be an urgent, fundamental, and politically indispensable task” (HSe 252, emphasis added). Hence the study of the Greek techniques of the self has two main points of interest. First, it gives evidence for the transformative effect of these techniques—as absorbed in “social stereotypes”—on the modern subject, who otherwise takes himself as a given. The processes of active subjectivation in the Greek practices indeed appear clearly (to our contemporary eyes) because they are not “taken over (…) by religious, pedagogical, medical, or psychiatric institutions” (F1997e, 282; see also ST 35). In this respect, these studies also allowed him to pinpoint, within modernity, specific philosophical experiences that were aimed at “re-establishing the spiritual self-transformation of the subject as the end and condition of possibility of knowledge” (Han-Pile 2006, 201). Second, they also reveal the hollowness of so-called current practices for the care of the self,

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precisely because the scientific approach deprives the modern subject of the ability to actively transform his self. Modern Forms of Veridiction Foucault turned to “veridiction” as an exercise of power after isolating the concept of governmentality and studying its practice in contemporary societies.16 But which are the acts of truth, performed by the modern individual, that contribute to his formation as a subject? Where is the subject of veridiction in this contemporary form of government? In the 1980 lectures, he claims that the study of Christian acts of truth should be placed in a history of “the injunction, ‘tell me who you are,’ which is fundamental in Western civilization” (GL 146), an injunction of which the confession is the point of emergence. Modern veridiction should therefore be understood as the prolongation of the Christian renunciation through avowal: I think that one of the great problems of Western culture has been to find the possibility of founding the hermeneutics of the self not, as it was the case in early Christianity, on the sacrifice of the self but, on the contrary, on a positive, on the theoretical and practical, emergence of the self. That was the aim of judicial institutions, that was the aim also of medical and psychiatric practices. (BHS 222, emphasis added)

This directly links Foucault’s inquiries in the technologies of the self to his prior studies on discipline: “from the eighteenth century to the present, the techniques of verbalization have been reinserted in a different context by the so called human sciences in order to use them without renunciation of the self but to constitute, positively, a new self ” (TS 49, emphasis added). The human sciences are now interpreted as the incorporation (réinsertion) of Christian techniques of the self, this time for the sake of the production of the modern self, studied mainly in Discipline and Punish (DP) and History of Sexuality I (HoS). Let’s follow Foucault’s reappraisal of his own work, first regarding the penal system, then psychoanalysis, showing in both cases how the turn of veridiction into a scientific discourse accompanied the production of the modern subject.

 See Chap. 4.

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The Christian practice of avowal was introduced into the procedures of justice as early as the seventh or eighth century, and further elaborated with the Inquisition (WDTT 203). With the nineteenth century, juridical avowal becomes primordial both as the restoration of the social pact breached by the crime, and as a first step in the punishment and amendment of the criminal (WDTT 208–209). It is actually so important that when the avowal is deficient—as in the case of the motiveless acts evoked in Chap. 4—the need is filled by “this sort of hetero-veridiction,” found in the psychiatric examination (WDTT 211–214). The modern penal system indeed attempts to build “a knowledge of the criminal subject,” where the avowal and the psychiatric opinion are both supposed to provide the judge with this “inner truth” about the individual, without which the judgment is deemed impossible (WDTT 215, 224, 227; see also BB 249–250). The interesting point is that the “inner truth,” first elaborated in early Christianity, now becomes the object of a scientific inquiry. It leads to two different acts of veridiction: the first takes the form of the criminal’s avowal, requested not only to relate his crime but also to say who he is (WDTT 16, 227); the second is found in the true/false discourse of a knowledge-savoir (psychiatry, criminology, psychology—WDTT 224). As Landry (2007, 44) puts it: “where early Christianity established a dependence towards the master, psychology inaugurated a dependence towards the expert.” In this strand of thought, Legrand (2007) interestingly reads Discipline and Punish in the light of Foucault’s later analyses of modes of subjectivation. This reading elicits that the disciplinary techniques of constant measurements of the distance to the norm (DP 192) are the modern version of the Stoic daily examination, with two major twists: the first is that the norm, which functions here as the code of conduct, is universally imposed by the scientific discourse of the human sciences. But at the same time, as Legrand rightly remarks, it is also chosen and incorporated by individuals (Legrand 2007, 155). Second, the examiner is not solely the one in power (the school teacher, the doctor, etc.), but also the individual himself. This leads to a subject formed with the same techniques of subjectivation as those described in the 1982 lectures. But it happens in a more complex manner than in the ancient care of the self, because the active role of the individual in the process is blurred in the consensual imposition of the norm. In Legrand’s words:

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If there is such a thing as what Foucault calls “subjection,” it is because the subject in question reflects and problematizes (or, is put under the constraint to reflect and problematize) what he is, with the same norms and the same code through which or within which he is reflected or problematized by those who act upon his acts. (Legrand 2007, 308, emphasis added, personal translation)

Moreover, since the disciplinary norms are organized into a system by the psychiatric discourse,17 the individual is brought to “problematize” and understand “what he is” within this pseudo-scientific discourse, that is by looking for truth in his “inner self,” using the same rationality within which he was originally formed as a subjugated subject. It is also possible to read in this way the criticism of psychoanalysis started in HoS, which prolongs the analysis of the nineteenth century’s modes of subjection described in DP, to our time. Foucault’s main thesis is against the “repressive hypothesis,” that the “deployment of sexuality” (dispositif de sexualité) is actually the manner in which modern subjects are produced by the pseudo-scientific psychoanalytic discourse and not solely repressed in their sexuality (as most psychoanalysts would contend—see HoS 72). Sexuality can indeed be regarded as the contemporary “ethical substance,” “the seismograph of our subjectivity,” as Foucault says, quoting Brown (F1997b, 179). In the 1981 lectures, Foucault links the modern discourse on sexuality to earlier practices of avowal as follows: In the case of sexuality, true discourse has been institutionalized, to a large extent at least, as the subject’s obligatory discourse about himself. That is to say true discourse about sexuality is not organized on the basis of something given as observation and examination according to accepted rules of objectivity, but is organized around the practice of confession (aveu). (ST 14)

The accent in HoS on a secret truth to be discovered in the self (HoS 60) should therefore be regarded as a modern form of the hermeneutics of the self, this practice of constant decipherment of the thoughts that Christianity inaugurated. This Christian heritage leads us to look within the self for an “authenticity” to be discovered (ST 253; F1997c, 271, 262), rather than to work on the self for the sake of its transformation (ST 254). In the 1982 lectures he further tackles the emptiness of the current “cult of the self:”  See Chap. 2.

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Getting back to oneself, freeing oneself, being oneself, being authentic, etcetera—when we see the absence of meaning and thought in all of these expressions we employ today, then I do not think we have anything to be proud of in our current efforts to reconstitute an ethic of the self. (HSe 251)

Finally, with Freud the hermeneutics of the self has taken a new direction; with Christianity (except for the Reform), the hermeneutics of the self was indeed different and separate from the hermeneutics of the text, themselves borrowed from Judaism and the Hellenist tradition (WDTT 167–168). With Freud, the self is approached and interpreted as a text (WDTT 225).18 As in the case of the juridical veridiction, psychoanalysis incorporates earlier practices of avowal in order to form a “science of the subject” (HoS 70): “by making sexuality something to be interpreted, the nineteenth century gave itself the possibility of causing the procedures of confession to operate within the regular formation of a scientific discourse” (HoS 67, emphasis added). In HSe, Foucault briefly evokes Lacan’s attempt to reintroduce into psychoanalysis the issue of “the price the subject must pay for telling the truth” (HSe 30). Yet the problem of psychoanalysis is its “positivism,” that is, its self-understanding as a science (HSe 30, unread). Foucault then wonders whether it is even possible, within the structure of a science, “under the terms of knowledge-connaissance,” to grasp the relations of subject and truth (HSe 30; ST 10). This remark should be read in relation to the “transparency of the bind to truth” evoked in 1980 when truth is understood as scientific.19 In 1981, Foucault insists that instead of asking “the positivist” question of the legitimacy of a science of the subject, his questioning is rather turned toward the understanding of “what the effects on subjectivity are of the existence of a discourse that claims to tell the truth about subjectivity” (ST 11), in a scientific form. Hence while 18  In several instances, Foucault also compares the Christian “censorship on the thoughts,” whose function is to discriminate between the true thoughts and the illusory/malicious ones, with Freudian censorship, whose function is the reverse: it unconsciously disguises the original thoughts to render them acceptable at the conscious level – it is therefore “a falsehood operator through symbolisation” (FCL 3.4, f12; HOW 2; BHS 218; WDTT 164; GL 241). Freudian hermeneutics thus consists of “reading” the symbol as one reads a text, by attempting to restore an assumed original meaning. The Christian hermeneutics of the self was more rudimentary and limited to the discrimination between good thoughts and bad ones, recognized according to the blushing of the speaker (WDTT 167; see also GL 324). 19  See Chap. 5.

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Foucault discloses “with the Greeks” a possibility for self-mastery and autonomy instead of submission and dependence, his diagnosis of the modern self definitely remains within the genealogy “of our obedience” (GL 313).

Conclusion Subjectivation is a form of rational practice obtained through an obligation to truth; either the external principles given by the master, or the inner truth of the Christian. It always includes subjection but, depending on the teleology, the subject constituted takes a different form. In the case of the Greek examination, the aim is a self-governing subject who has incorporated the principles of reason, that are also the principles governing the world. In the case of Christianity, the aim is absolute obedience and the renunciation of self, the absence of will. Hence the subjectivation can either lead to self-sovereignty of the subject or to his absolute subjection. Both modes of subjectivation rely on the assumption that the access to truth is conditioned by the transformation of the subject. According to Foucault, our modernity, starting with Descartes, has lost this understanding of the care of the self. Once truth is understood under scientific categories, the idea of “a price to pay” in order to gain access to truth becomes incomprehensible. This does not mean that the techniques of the self have stopped functioning; on the contrary, Foucault shows how the human sciences actually incorporated these techniques in order to mold the modern subject. It is then possible to reinterpret Foucault’s thought from The Order of Things: “the anthropologism of the Western thought is linked to the deep desire to substitute the figure of man for the Christian sacrifice” (BHS 222). The positivism of the human sciences led to the production of a modern self, a subject unaware of the possibility of actively transforming himself. Interestingly enough, most of the techniques evoked in this chapter can be put in relation to techniques used by the disciplinary regime and the apparatus of sexuality. In a 1983 interview, when reflecting on Habermas’s definition of modernity as the bifurcation of reason, he could therefore speak of “an endless, multiple bifurcation – a kind of abundant ramification” of reason (F1998d, 442). The injunction at the beginning of the 1982 lectures to “a politics of ourselves” in the form of a modern care of the self (see also BHS 223), might then be put in relation with the

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awareness that conceptualizing power as governmentality opens the possibility for the modern individual to constitute himself as an ethical subject, in a manner that remains to be defined. This issue of the government of the self in the form of parrhesia is at the heart of the last two years of lectures at the Collège de France and motivates, I believe, the “return to Kant;” this point is the theme of the next chapter.

References Foucault’s Work Ae 2003. Abnormal – Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975, ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni. General Editors: Francois Ewald and Alessandro Fontana. English Series Editor: Arnold I. Davidson. London; Verso. AK 2002. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge Classics. BB 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics – Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. BHS  1993. About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth. Political Theory, 21 (2): 198–227. CT 2011. The Courage of Truth – Lectures at the Collège de France 1983–1984. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DP 1995. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage Books. FS 2001. Fearless Speech. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). GL 2014. On the Government of the Living – Lectures at the Collège de France 1979–1970. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. HM 2006. History of Madness. New York: Routledge. HoS 1978. The History of Sexuality I. New York: Random House. HSe 2005. The Hermeneutics of the Subject  – Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. OT 1994. The Order of Things – An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books. PPe 2006. Psychiatric Power  – Lectures at the Collège de France 1973–1974. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ST 2017. Subjectivity and Truth – Lectures at the Collège de France 1980–1981. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. STPe 2009. Security, Territory, Population  – Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. TFR 1984. The Foucault Reader, ed. P.  Rabinow. Chicago: Pantheon Books, New York.

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TS  L.H. Martin and H. Gutman (eds.). 1988. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. London: Tavistock. UPe 1990. The Use of Pleasures. New York: Vintage Books. WDTT 2014. Wrong-Doing Truth-Telling – The Function of Avowal in Justice, ed. Fabienne Brion and Bernard E.  Harcourt. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Articles F1996f. 1996 [1984]. The Concern for Truth. In Foucault Live (Collected Interviews, 1961–1984), ed. S. Lotringer, 455–464. New York: Semiotext(e). F1996g. 1996 [1984]. The Return of Morality. In Foucault Live (Collected Interviews, 1961–1984), ed. S. Lotringer, 465–474. New York: Semiotext(e). F1997c. 1997 [1983]. On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress. In The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.1, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. P. Rabinow, 253–280. New York: The New Press. F1997e. 1997 [1984]. The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom. In The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.1, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. P. Rabinow, 281–302. New York: The New Press. F1998d. 1998 [1983]. Structuralism and Post-structuralism. In The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Vol.2, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. J.D.  Faubion and P.  Rabinow (general editor), 433–458. New  York: The New Press. F2001b. 2001 [1978]. Interview with Michel Foucault. In The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.3, Power, ed. J.D.  Faubion and P.  Rabinow (general editor), 239–297. New York: The New Press. F2001h. 2001 [1984]. What is Called Punishing. In The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.3, Power, ed. J.D.  Faubion and P.  Rabinow (general editor), 382–392. New York: The New Press

Works

in

French

DE I  2001 [1994]. Dits et écrits, I 1954–1975. Paris: Quarto-Gallimard.

Audio Recordings HOW 1 & 2  Howison Lectures I and II, Audio Version. Available online at: http://ubu.com/sound/foucault.html REG  Regent’s Lecture at Berkeley, 12/04/1983. Available online at: http:// ubu.com/sound/foucault.html

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Materials at IMEC (Following their Reference

at

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FCL.63  1981. Subjectivité et Vérité. Audio Version of the Cours au Collège de France (C.63.1 to C.63.7). FCL3.4  Auditor’s Transcription of the Howison Lectures at Berkeley – Lecture II 21/10/1980.

Other Authors Allen, Amy. 2000. The Anti-Subjective Hypothesis: Michel Foucault and the Death of the Subject. The Philosophical Forum XXXI (2, Summer): 113–130. ———. 2008. The Politics of Ourselves  – Power, Autonomy and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory. Columbia University Press: New York. Benatouil, Thomas. 2003. Deux usages du stoïcisme  – Deleuze, Foucault. In Foucault et la Philosophie Antique, ed. Frederic Gros and Levy Carlos, 17–49. Paris: Kimé. Davidson, Arnold. 2005. Introduction. HSe, pp. xix–xxx. ———. 2006. Ethics as Ascetics: Foucault, the History of Ethics, and Ancient Thought. In The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. G. Gutting, 123–148. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gros, Frederic. 2001. Situation du Cours. In L’Herméneutique du Sujet – Cours au Collège de France 1981–1982, 489–526. Paris: Seuil-Gallimard. ———. 2018. Avertissement. In Histoire de la Sexualité 4 – Les Aveux de la Chair, ed. Michel Foucault, i–xi. Paris: Gallimard. Hadot, Pierre. 2002. Exercices Spirituels et Philosophie Antique. Albin Michel: Paris. Han-Pile, B. 2006. The Analytic of Finitude and the History of Subjectivity. In The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. G. Gutting, 176–209. Jaffro, Laurent. 2003. Foucault et le Stoïcisme  – sur l’Historiographie de l’Herméneutique du Sujet. In Foucault et la Philosophie Antique, ed. Gros Frederic and Lévy Carlos, 51–83. Paris: Kimé. Karsenti, B. 2005. La Politique du Dehors – une Lecture des cours de Foucault au Collège de France 1977–1979. Multitudes 22, Automne: 37–50. Landry, Jean-Michel. 2007. Généalogie politique de la psychologie. Une lecture du cours de Michel Foucault du gouvernement des vivants. Raisons Politiques 2007/1 (25): 31–45. ———. 2009. Confession, Obedience, and Subjectivity: Michel Foucault’s Unpublished Lectures  – “On the Government of the Living”. Telos 146 (Spring): 111–123. Legrand, Stéphane. 2007. Les Normes chez Foucault. PUF: Paris. Monod, Jean-Claude. 2013. La Méditation Cartésienne de Foucault. Les Etudes Philosophiques (3, Juillet): 345–358.

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Pradeau, Jean-François. 2002. Le Sujet Ancien d’une Ethique Moderne. In Foucault – Le courage de la Vérité, ed. F. Gros, 131–154. Paris: PUF. Schmidt, Christoph. 2014. The Empty Grave – Between Socratic Dramaturgy of Truth and the Christian Theo-Dramaturgy of Love. Unpublished manuscript. Senellart, Michel. 2003. La Pratique de la Direction de Conscience. In Foucault et la Philosophie Antique, ed. Gros Frederic and Levy Carlos, 153–171. Paris: Kimé. ———. 2013. Michel Foucault: une autre histoire du christianisme?. Bulletin du Centre d’Etudes Médiévales d’Auxerre BUCEMA, Hors-série no. 7 2013: 2–15, online: http://cem.revues.org/12872; https://doi.org/10.4000/ cem.12872. Veyne, Paul. 1993. The Final Foucault and His Ethics. Critical Inquiry 20 (1, Autumn): 1–9.

CHAPTER 7

The “Return to Kant” and Autonomy

Foucault’s interest in Kant goes back to his secondary thesis, that consisted of the translation of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, with an introduction to the text (IAe) which already announces the broad lines of The Order of Things (OT). In both IAe and OT, Kant is presented as inaugurating modernity and “the anthropological sleep” that Foucault tackles in his early work.1 In the following years, dedicated to analyses of power, he would continue questioning some assumptions of the Kantian system, mainly its concept of the modern subject as capable of an autonomy that would cancel relations of power. Yet just after the first studies on governmentality in 1978 (STPe), Foucault gives a lecture entitled “What is Critique?” (WIC) that seems to change this general attitude toward Kant. It indeed proposes a reading of Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?,” establishing a filiation between the counter-conducts correlative of governmentality put forward in STPe a few months earlier,2 the Kantian critical attitude, and his own work as “critique.”3 I will try to show in this chapter and the next that the meaning of “critique” gains greater importance for Foucault after the studies on subjectivity. Starting in 1978, references to Kant (and this specific text)  See Chap. 2.  See Chap. 4. 3  Since The Order of Things, Foucault uses this term to refer to his work, in a mildly Kantian sense: where Kant meant to disclose the a priori conditions of possibility of legitimate knowledge, Foucault is looking for its historically a priori conditions. 1 2

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recur, reaching a climax when Foucault chooses to analyze Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” as an introductory lesson to the 1983 lectures.4 This reading in 1983 is interesting on a few grounds; first, why did Foucault find it important to analyze Kant’s text in the middle of a corpus focused on Greco-Roman texts? Indeed, it is the notion of parrhesia, linked to the Greco-Roman direction of conscience in 1982, that is at the heart of his following lectures, The Government of Selves and Others in 1983 (GSO) and The Courage of Truth in 1984 (CT). This strategic position derives, I believe, from the fact that the relevance of Kant’s definition of autonomy as the exit from tutelage,5 already apparent in 1978 with the conceptualization of governmentality (WIC 48), becomes crucial with the notion of parrhesia. As shown in the previous chapters, the parrhesia is a very specific form of discourse that can bring the Greek disciple to self-­ sovereignty: but it implies a bind to a freely chosen rule, that establishes a troubling similarity between the Stoics’ self-mastery and the Kantian definition of autonomy as self-rule, within limits that I hope to make clearer below. Would this mean that a modern autonomy is possible after all? If so, under which conditions? In order to answer these questions, it is necessary to first follow Foucault’s reappraisal of Kant, starting in 1978, as will be done in the first part below. This path opens the way to my second part, a reading of parrhesia as foregrounded in the 1983 and 1984 lectures through the lens of Kantian autonomy, a reading that Foucault himself suggested in his introductory lecture (GSO 7). This reading gives shape to this very specific form of autonomy that Foucault strives to establish, sometimes terming it “ethical differentiation,” in contradistinction to Kantian autonomy.

Autonomy Reconsidered My claim that Foucault is questioning the notion of autonomy, either modern or Greek, is problematic—first and foremost in relation to Foucault’s own diagnosis of modernity. After all, one of the main arguments of The Order of Things is that the autonomous, transcendental 4  Foucault also studies in the first hour, more rapidly, The Conflict of the Faculties. My remarks concerning this second text are dealt with in the next chapter. 5  The German word in Kant’s text is alternatively translated into tutelage, immaturity, or nonage; as much as possible, I used the term “immaturity” which remains close to the French word used by Foucault—“minorité.” Yet in some instances like the one above, “tutelage” better describes the relation to a master which is at stake here.

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modern subject is an illusion, the fruit of this mode of thinking that characterizes modernity itself. This claim was further strengthened with Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality I, where Foucault argued that the modern subject is produced by mechanisms of power, as always already subjugated. Yet a displacement from this general claim has appeared in the course of my discussion, when Foucault redefined power in terms of government. He was thus led to ask, in 1978, slightly before the first lecture on Kant’s text, whether a subject without subjection was rendered possible by modern forms of government (STPe 231, unread; BB 260–261, unread; WIC 47).6 In this strand of thought, Bevir contends that in his early descriptions of modern disciplinary power Foucault rejected, with the concept of the modern subject, both autonomy and agency; the shift to governmentality allowed the recognition of the subject as agent, “but not an autonomous agent” (Bevir 1999, 74). I would like here to argue that the study of governmentality also led Foucault to reconsider the issue of autonomy. But contrary to some commentators, such as Habermas who claims that Foucault contradicts himself with this concept (Habermas 1994, 152–154; McCarthy 1994, 268), or Pradeau who sees in the last texts references to “an essential freedom” (Pradeau 2002, 154 n. 2), I think that the form of autonomy that Foucault defends is neither transcendental, nor essential, and thus reconciles with his previous inquiries. The analyses of the different modes of the constitution of the self in the previous chapters have indeed answered negatively to the hypothetic existence of a “free, natural subject.” From this viewpoint, Koopman rightly notices that Foucault continues to reject the “liberatory freedom complicit in the deadlock of the disciplinary power” (Koopman 2013, 179–180) that Foucault tackled in Discipline and Punish. Yet for Koopman, the term “autonomy” remains too close to the modern concepts that Foucault wanted to depart from, hence he proposes to call “transformative freedom” the kind of freedom that Foucault argued for in his last years (Koopman 2013, 174). My point is that this transformation of the self, constitutive of freedom that Koopman describes, implies in practice a voluntary bind to a rule freely chosen. Such a proposition cannot not be connected to Kant, and does make of this freedom a form of autonomy.7  See Chap. 4.  See also, in relation to the counter-conducts, in 1978: “at this time we see the appearance, or rather reappearance, of the function that philosophy (…) as the answer to the fun6 7

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Hence my claim is that all along the studies of the Stoics and earlier Greek texts, Foucault is actually in dialogue with Kant, in order to isolate a certain form of autonomy, understood under the Kantian terms of “self-­ rule,” while crucially trying to eschew universal law: conditioned on the transformation of the self, this autonomy is not transcendental. Allen (2008, 64–65) makes a similar point, but her reading of Foucault’s autonomy is solely in relation to critique—the capacity for self-reflection and for deliberate self-transformation (Allen 2008, 2–3, 46–47)—and does not allow her to isolate the rational bind that Foucault maintains between the self-constituted subject and a truth freely chosen. For instance, when she states that for Foucault “autonomy consists not in freely binding oneself to a necessity in the form of the moral law” (Allen 2008, 65; Allen 2011, 50), she is only partially right: Foucault is looking for a bind, neither to a necessity nor to the moral law, but it is a bind all the same. Hence Foucault remains in my view much closer to Kant than even Allen is ready to acknowledge. This part follows Foucault’s changing approach to Kant and autonomy, from his early diagnosis of modernity, to the studies of governmentality where the Greeks start to take precedence in his enterprise. Against the Kantian Universal Law The question that Foucault intends to answer in the Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology (IAe) in 1960 is how to reconcile Kant’s critical philosophy with his later Anthropology. The tension between, on the one side, the critical attitude—the attempt to circumscribe the limit of legitimate knowledge—and on the other side the Anthropology—focused on man as an object of knowledge—is at the heart of Foucault’s diagnosis of modernity in The Order of Things (OT). Foucault finds in Kant’s thought the paradox of a system offering both the modern reflection on man’s finitude (the fact that human knowledge, or representation, is limited) and, in this very movement of thought, the “figure of man” as a “quasi-­transcendental” (as an object of knowledge that can be known).8 This distinction remains valid until the end: in 1984, Foucault inscribes his own work within the critical attitude founded by Kant and in opposition to humanism as a recurring attempt to give a positive definition to the figure of man (TFR damental question of how to conduct oneself. What rules must one give oneself in order to conduct oneself properly?” (STPe 230, emphasis added). 8  See Chap. 2.

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43–45).9 Another way to look at this is to note, after Koopman, that the Kantian critique is transcendental, that is aimed at disclosing the “universal conditions under which alone things can be in general objects of our cognition” (Kant quoted by Koopman 2013, 111, emphasis added). This transcendence is both crucial for Kant’s autonomy (Guyer 2003, 73) and at the heart of Foucault’s criticism of modernity. In studies of the power-knowledge entanglement that follow OT, Foucault indeed tackles Kant mainly as the initiator of the universal, transcendental modern subject of knowledge-connaissance. If truth existed as something “to be found, discovered” (LWK 214), as implied by the model of knowledge as connaissance, then indeed it would be “objective,” universally valid for all knowing subjects, hence calling for the universal (transcendental) subject of knowledge. Yet truth for Foucault in these analyses is solely an effect of power. Universality is one of the means through which the illusion of objectivity and knowledge-connaissance is created. His intent is instead to show that “the supposedly universal subject of knowledge is really only an individual historically qualified according to certain modalities” (PPe 238).10 The general thesis in the power-knowledge analyses is that knowledge is always the perspective of some, and the arbitrary imposition of a will. In the 1976 lectures, truth is spoken not by the universal, measured, moderate subject that both Kant and Greek philosophy sought, but by the decentered, struggling subject (SMBD 53). This links the subject of knowledge to the subject of rights—a direct consequence of the power-­ knowledge entanglement—and opens the way to Foucault’s criticism of law: law is never universally valid but always specifies the one-sided rights of the victors (SMBD 53). This in turn questions the model of the social 9  See for instance TFR 44: “It is a fact that, at least since the seventeenth century, what is called humanism has always been obliged to lean on certain conceptions of man borrowed from religion, science, or politics. Humanism serves to color and to justify the conceptions of man to which it is, after all, obliged to take recourse.” Foucault’s specific understanding of the Kantian critical attitude is dealt with in Chap. 8. 10  In 1974, Foucault points to the qualification of the scientist: “anyone can have access to , since it is there, everywhere and all the time. However, the necessary circumstances are still required, and we must acquire the forms of thought and techniques that will give us access to this truth that is everywhere” (PPe 247, emphasis added). This echoes interestingly with his 1982 claims that scientific truth in modernity does not demand a transformation of the subject (see Chap. 6); in PPe, he insists on the necessary qualifications (rather than transformation), that create power relations between those who have or do not have them. It is precisely this distinction that disappears in 1983; but let’s not anticipate.

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contract, where equal (universal) subjects of rights are supposed to transfer some of these rights to the sovereign, thus legitimating it.11 In his 1976 conceptualization of the “deployment of sexuality” (dispositif de sexualité) Foucault further challenges the “repressive hypothesis,” according to which power is codified in a negative manner, “as law and prohibition.”12 Interestingly, in a lecture that same year, Foucault wonders why power is conceived in such an inadequate way. One “unsatisfactory answer,” from his viewpoint, is to attribute this model to Kant’s influence (and later to Durkheim’s, relying on Kant), and to the idea that “the moral law, the ‘you must not’, the opposition ‘you must’/’you must not’ is at bottom the matrix of all regulation of human conduct” (F2007, 154). This remark introduces a first displacement in his reading of Kant. In the 1982 lectures, The Hermeneutics of the Subject (HSe), Foucault comes back to this unquestioned correlation, for modern individuals, between the moral constitution of the subject on the one hand, and the obedience and subjection to “the order of the law” on the other (HSe 318–319).13 He now offers another, more satisfactory, genealogy for this modern bias and attributes it to “the slow juridification” that occurred starting with the Middle Ages in Christian institutions, that led to the codification of moral conducts into universal laws: We should not be led astray by later historical processes of the progressive juridification of Western culture, which took place in the Middle Ages. This juridification has led us to take law, and the form of law, as the general principle of every rule in the realm of human practice. (…) Basically, law is only one of the possible aspects of the technology of the subject concerning himself. (HSe 112; see also WDTT 170–187, 202)

From this viewpoint, the association between moral conduct and law is wrongly attributed to Kant and is rather the result of Christian practices over centuries, Kant himself being only one of its modern manifestations.  See Chap. 2.  See Chap. 5. 13  The reference to Kant is actually implicit here. Foucault starts this development as follows: “when we pose the question of the subject in the realm of practice (not just ‘what to do?’ but ‘what to make of myself?’), quite spontaneously (…) I should say rather ‘quite historically,’ (…) we think it obvious that this question (…), ‘what should make of himself ?’ [must be posed] in terms of the law” (HSe 318, emphasis added). “What must I do?” is Kant’s second question, treated in the Critique of Practical Reason, the answer to which is summarized in the categorical imperative as a universal law. 11 12

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Kant Between a Subject of Rights and a Subject of Ethics Kant’s reappraisal occurs in 1978. The first lecture on Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” starts with an evocation of the counter-conducts studied in STPe, understood this time as a critical attitude traced back to Kant and “the refusal to be governed” (WIC 43–45). When asked by the audience to refine whether what he means is “not to be governed at all” (WIC 75), Foucault corrects himself by insisting that he meant “the will not to be governed thusly, like that;” hence critique would be the replacement of one government by another, in line with earlier remarks in the STPe lectures (STPe 230–231). Kant’s critical attitude thus appears, already in 1978, as a form of a government of the self founding a subject of ethics rather than a subject of rights. Foucault also adds that, in order to really answer this question, the most important thing would be to study the question of the will, an issue that “Western philosophy has always treated with infinite precautions and difficulties” (WIC 76; see also DE II #235, 603–615). Foucault actually tackles this “question of the will” in the following years at the Collège de France. It appears almost tacitly in two analyses of the social contract; the first takes place in 1979 in the characterization of the homo oeconomicus, the second, in surprisingly similar terms, deals with the Greek directions of conscience as treated in 1980. One finds a stunning analogy between the subject of rights and the Christian disciple on the one side, and the subject of interest and the Greek disciple on the other side. Both are linked to Kant, in a manner that I would like to show below. In 1979, Foucault contends that liberal governmentality refers to concepts and assumptions “absolutely heterogeneous” to those of the social contract model and the subject of rights it aims to found (BB 275–277, 282–283, emphasis added): The dialectic or mechanism of the subject of right is characterized by the division of the subject, the existence of a transcendence of the second subject in relation to the first, and a relationship of negativity, renunciation, and limitation between them, and it is in this movement that law and the prohibition emerge. (BB 275, emphasis added)

In the social contract, the subject of rights transfers part of his rights. This transfer is described in 1979 as a renunciation: “the subject of rights is by definition a subject who accepts negativity, who agrees to a

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self-­renunciation, and splits himself” (BB 275, emphasis added). By contrast, the “self-limitation” principle specific to liberal governmentality, means that “the limit will not be drawn in the subjects. That is to say, one will not try to determine a division within subjects between one part that is subject to governmental action, and another that is definitively, once and for all, reserved for freedom” (BB 11, emphasis added). Hence the liberal subject of interest, the homo oeconomicus, at the opposite of the subject of rights, remains whole and sovereign in the entire process: “it is not because we have contracted that we respect the contract , but because it is in our interest that there is a contract (…) And if, moreover, the contract no longer offers an interest, nothing can oblige me to continue to comply with it” (BB 274, emphasis added). Moreover, the interest of the homo oeconomicus appears for the first time “as a form of both immediate and absolutely subjective will” (BB 273, emphasis added). The “heterogeneity” introduced in the modern subject by his being homo oeconomicus deserves here special attention. For Foucault, the modern self is constituted both by homo oeconomicus and the subject of rights who transfers some of them in the contract. It is precisely to explain the possibility of coexistence of those disparate elements that Foucault contends in 1979 that heterogeneity should be understood in terms of connection and coexistence (BB 42). But it is in my view all the more interesting since Foucault uses the same term to characterize the Greek subjectivity when compared to the Christian one, as mentioned in Chap. 6. Furthermore, while homo oeconomicus is in tension with the subject of rights, it appears as very similar to the Greek self! Indeed, in the Greek direction, Foucault insists that one should not interpret the submission “as a transfer of sovereignty” (GL 230). He describes instead the interaction between two individuals where there is no renunciation of the will, and concludes: There is no social contract in direction because there is no transfer of a part of will to another. There is someone who guides my will, who wants my will to want this or that. And I do not cede my own will, I continue to will, I continue to will to the end, but to will in every detail and at every moment what the other wants me to will. The two wills remain continuously present. (GL 230, emphasis added)

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The Greek subjectivation hence constitutes a self where “the force of the truth is one with the form of the will” (BHS 210, emphasis added). It leads to a subject whose will remains “whole and entire” as with the liberal subject of interests described the prior year: “the work on the self does not aim at the split of the subject but the bind to his self, but solely his self” (unpublished, quoted by Gros 2001, 514, personal translation). In a further analogy with the liberal contract, Foucault even mentions that, unlike any political or juridical structure that would force him to follow his master, the disciple remains entirely free to stop the direction (GL 230); there is in fact a co-existence of the wills of the disciple and his master (GL 230). In the same strand of thought, the Christian renunciation of the will studied in the previous chapter, leading to subditio—the complete subjection of the disciple (GL 271; WDTT 138)—should be paralleled with the transfer of rights of the social contract. And indeed, Foucault insists in 1979 that the modern subject of rights renounces a part of himself, concluding as follows: So, with the subject of interest (…) there is a mechanism which is completely different from the dialectic of the subject of right, since it is an egoistic mechanism (…) a mechanism without any transcendence in which the will of each harmonizes spontaneously and as it were involuntarily with the will and interest of others. We could not be more distant from the dialectic of renunciation, transcendence, and the voluntary bond of the juridical theory of the contract. (BB 275–276, emphasis added)

The best way to summarize this point might be to compare the philosopher and the pastor in their guidance; both Greek and Christian directions necessitate the presence of a guide. In the Christian direction, the government by the shepherd imposed on the individuals the injunction of “being other through the manifestation of truth (…) Government by the manifestation of the Completely Other (du Tout Autre) in each” (GL 161—unread). Moreover, the submission needed for direction is never lifted since it is also its end; the concern for the self is actually transferred to the shepherd, who takes care of his entire flock (F1997c, 278).14 The Greek direction by contrast aims at self-sovereignty. Yet this end cannot be obtained without

14  In BHIST, Foucault also remarks that the confession is a way to let somebody else take care of one’s self.

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an initial dependence (HSe 127–128; GSO 44);15 the submission however remains temporary, for the sake of learning a mode of being (HSe 379; WDTT 138–139), and this is the main point of departure from the Christian direction. Without being explicitly quoted, Kant is omnipresent in these considerations, and appears paradoxically on both sides of this heterogeneity: as a transcendental subject of rights, the Kantian subject is submitted to the split and the cession; but as an autonomous subject, he has not renounced his will. Foucault mentioned this tension during a 1983 interview (revised in 1984),16 where he compares different moral practices of the self, among them Kantian ethics. At that point, Kant is described as trying to articulate the relation between the subject of knowledge-connaissance and the moral subject.17 Foucault concludes that the Kantian universal subject allows on the one hand knowledge-connaissance, but also demands, on the other hand, an ethical attitude, a transformation of the self, “this relation to self that Kant describes in the second Critique” (F1997c, 279–280, emphasis added). Foucault seems to introduce here a distinction between the first and second Kantian Critiques, which might be interesting to follow. A tension, inherent to the first Critique, leads to the paradox developed in The Order of Things. In 1982, Foucault further tackles the consequences of finitude: , what we cannot know is precisely the structure itself of the knowing subject, which means that we cannot know the subject. Consequently, the idea of a certain spiritual transformation of the subject, which finally gives him access to something to which precisely he does not have access at the moment is chimerical and paradoxical. (HSe 190)

The ethos of the second Critique by contrast lies in its offering the “universal subject of rights” as the telos of the ethical work for the modern subject. The tension is no longer in a finite human being trying to escape his finitude, but rather in the “universal subject” taken as given in the first 15  Foucault comments on “the metaphor of the eye” taken from Plato’s Alcibiades; the eye cannot properly see itself as an eye by looking in the mirror; it can see itself only by looking in another eye looking at him (HSe 69–70; F1997c, 275). 16  F1997c and DE II #344 respectively. See Elden (2016, 170–171) on the two versions of this article. 17  Moral individuals are defined by Foucault as subjects who have an ethos, “a manner of doing things, being, and conducting themselves” (CT 33).

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Critique, that has become the aim of the work on the self in the second.18 This work on the self is obtained for Kant with a certain use of reason, as described below. A Certain Use of Reason In the Regent lecture at Berkeley in 1983, where Foucault also discusses “What is Enlightenment?,” he mentions that Kant saw in Aufklärung “an achievement in the history of reason, but more specifically in the use of reason” (REG). Yet Foucault does not specify there how the use of reason is involved. I believe the explanation can be found in the analysis at the Collège de France in 1983. The immaturity is indeed further characterized in Foucault’s reading as the lack of distinction between a private and a public use of reason on the one side, and the confusion between obedience and absence of reasoning on the other. The private use of reason is the use of our faculties in our professional life, as long as we are involved in collective responsibilities, where the common good is at stake: as a citizen, an officer in the army or a pastor at church, one has to fulfill his duty as expected by the authority; one has to obey.19 The public use of reason, by contrast, is this use we can make as members of a collectivity of “universal subjects,” as members of “the public;” it is the activity of “the writer addressing the reader” (GSO 36). Both uses belong to what we would call today the public domain. The distinction between these two uses makes it possible for Kant to maintain that obedience—in the private use of reason—is compatible with reasoning in its public use, equated here with autonomous reasoning (GSO 36–37). Immaturity occurs when, for the sake of obedience, one stops reasoning altogether. 18  This point seems to obviously contradict Foucault’s earlier contention that the Kantian critique definitively sealed the possibility for the modern subject to actively transform himself (developed in Chap. 6). The contradiction however seems not to be Foucault’s but Kant’s; Guyer indeed remarks that Kant’s published texts describe a moral intuition that is “immediate and automatic” (Guyer 2003, 91), therefore implying that no transformation is needed for the subject to constitute himself as a transcendental subject. Yet if such a moral consciousness is the fruit of certain exercises to practice on one’s thought, as results from Guyer’s study of the unpublished texts, then indeed a transformation is possible, even necessary, for the sake of morality. 19  O’Neill (1986, 530) considers that the “private” use of reason corresponds to an audience limited in number by an external authority that controls its content, as opposed to the public use where the addressees are universal and free of any external authority.

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The characterization of “autonomous reasoning” is interesting in relation to the type of guidance necessary for the self-sovereignty mentioned above. Considering the authority involved, Kant actually rejects the possibility that a guide could lead others out of immaturity, precisely because guidance starts by imposing a new authority on those one wants to free (GSO 36–37); in Foucault’s terms, it simply replaces one shepherd by another. Moreover, insists Foucault, men are in a state of “self-incurred immaturity,” not because they are incapable of this maturity nor because of a juridical situation depriving them of their rights (GSO 29), but because of a “form of will” (GSO 29, emphasis added). In his reading of Kant in 1978, Foucault insisted that humanity was maintained in a state of immaturity by the exercise of authority (WIC 48). In 1983, he notices that the “authorities” mentioned by Kant are in fact very specific and very weak: the use of a book instead of one’s understanding, a pastor instead of one’s moral conscience, and a physician to decide on one’s diet. These are not per se illegitimate sources of authority and it is only “laziness and cowardice,” not the violence of authority, that creates immaturity (GSO 30, 33), further suggesting that the exit depends solely on a proper relation to self (GSO 32–33).20 Another difference between the 1978 and 1983 readings is that, in Foucault’s view in 1978, the refusal to be governed should be primary to any knowledge; in the perspective of the power-knowledge entanglement, the acceptance of any knowledge as legitimate is already subjection to a certain power (WIC 62–67). Hence critique appears as insufficient to exit from immaturity. In 1983 by contrast, Foucault sees the process of Aufklärung (as the exit from immaturity) and the Kantian critical enterprise as complementary elements (GSO 31–32; TFR 38; see also Gros 2006 on this point): “it is because we go beyond the legitimate limits of reason that we are led to appeal to an authority which places us precisely in a condition of tutelage” (GSO 31).21 The pastor will abusively become “the first principle of will” if, in the moral domain, I try to found 20  Both readings are possible; Kant first states that the immaturity is due to laziness and cowardice, he then insists that “the public was brought under this yoke by their guardians.” 21  See also TFR 34: “by ‘immaturity,’ means a certain state of our will that makes us accept someone else’s authority to lead us in areas where the use of reason is called for” (emphasis added).

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my conduct on my future destiny, which is defined in the second Critique as illegitimate (GSO 32). The difference with 1978 is striking. Foucault seems to admit the relevance of what Gros coins “the transcendental lucidity” (Gros 2006, 164) for the sake of the care of the self. Interestingly, the knowledge acquired by the Stoics in self-examination aimed precisely at filtering one’s thoughts, at recognizing what should be discarded as illegitimate due to dealing with things not under one’s control. Among them, thought about the future (HSe 463; FS 160) echoes one’s “future destiny” in 1983. Finally, in 1984, Foucault explicitly links Kant’s critical attitude and parrhesia: “philosophical discourse as analysis, as reflection on human finitude and criticism of everything which may exceed the limits of human finitude, whether in the realm of knowledge or the realm of morality, plays the role of parrhesia to some extent” (CT 30, emphasis added). In any case the critical attitude derived from Kant’s first Critique is understood in 1983 as part of the process of the care of the self, as work on the self. While the private use of reason is obedient, the public use of reason starts by the questioning of the legitimacy of knowledge, in relation to self (GSO 35–36). As the refusal of any authority, it further leads to the government of the self. Foucault concludes that for Kant Aufklärung is “the new distribution of government of self and government of others” (GSO 37), thus describing the government of the self as a certain use of reason, as developed in Chap. 5 on Greek practices. Crucially, this leads to the question of what would be the historical form of the government of the self that could correspond to our own present? If the transcendental subject, relying on universal law, is no longer an option, what form could such autonomy take today? Instead of our present, Foucault chose to study the Greeks’ techniques of the self, precisely because the bind to truth involved doesn’t take the shape of universal law, a point that makes these studies relevant to our own time. Indeed, as I have tried to show in Chaps. 3 and 4, the “regression of the juridical” means that law, as the imposition of a will, is not adequate to describe contemporary forms of power. Besides, as shown above, neoliberal governmentality does not rely on a universal, normalizing, disciplinary rule. As a result, law (together with religion and science) cannot be taken to guide our actions any longer: “religion, law and science those three great references of our ethics, are now worn out. And we know very well that – first, we need an ethics and that – second, we cannot ask either religion nor law, nor science to give us this ethics” (BHIST; see also F1997c, 254–255, 261). The

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Greeks’ care of the self leads to a form of self-sovereignty that cannot be understood in Kantian terms; but I would like to suggest, it bears relevance to our own predicament for that very reason. When asked in 1978 if he could have chosen Socrates instead of Kant as a point of reference for his lecture on the critical attitude, he answers: “the trial of Socrates can, I think, be investigated in a valid manner, without any anachronism, but starting with a problem which is and which was, in any case, perceived by Kant as the problem of Aufklärung” (WIC 74, emphasis added). I propose to examine in the following part how these considerations on self-government in Kant enlighten the parrhesia lectures.

Greek Subjectivation as Autonomy? I said earlier that my claim that Foucault is questioning the notion of autonomy is problematic on at least two grounds. The first was Foucault’s own diagnosis of modernity, tackled in the previous part. The second is that even if the term “autonomy” has a Greek origin, it was used to describe the polis where citizens made their own laws; it did not refer to individuals before the Middle Ages (Dworkin 1988, 12–13) or the Renaissance (Pitkin 1999, 10–11). In a 1984 interview though, Foucault contends that “individual freedom was very important for the Greeks  – contrary to the commonplace derived more or less from Hegel that sees it as being of no importance when placed against the imposing totality of the city” (F1997e, 285).22 Foucault then defines in a few words the Greek conception of freedom as non-slavery, to others and to oneself: “it is quite a different definition from our own (…), which means that with respect to oneself one establishes a certain relationship of domination, of mastery” (F1997e, 286–287); however, different from ours, this is actually Kant’s exact definition of freedom,23 and it leads to a second problem.

22  In The Care of the Self (CS 42–43) Foucault has a more nuanced approach, showing that the Greek care of the self is actually a cultural phenomenon, not a form of individualism. See also Gros 2005, 701: “what interests Foucault in the care of the self, is the manner by which it is integrated in the social fabric and constitutes a motor for political action.” 23  See Guyer (2003), p. 72: “Kant suggests a bipartite account of freedom (…) On the one hand, freedom consists in a person’s ability to determine his ends independently of domination by his own inclinations and desires; on the other hand, freedom consists in a person’s ability to select and pursue his own ends independently of domination by other persons” (emphasis added).

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While Foucault’s interest in Greek subjectivation seems to lie, at least partly, in the fact that “the care of the self in ancient Greek and Roman culture was never really seen, laid down, or affirmed as a universal law valid for every individual” (HSe 113), it is difficult to believe that he might find there a truth that will not be metaphysical, thus universally valid. Yet this is precisely what he is trying to isolate, as I will show below, leading Han-­ Pile to contend that he “remains haunted by a pseudo-transcendental understanding of the subject” (Han-Pile 2002, 187). How Foucault actually deals with that difficulty is the object of this part. Greek Autonomy? The term “autonomy” appears explicitly as the aim of the Stoic direction in Foucault’s 1980 lectures (GL 246). Later on, in 1982, he seems to hesitate when using the term, always requalifying it in its more common-sense meaning, as independence from others: In parrhesia there is indeed someone who speaks to the other but (…) he speaks to the other in such a way that this other will be able to form an autonomous, independent, full and satisfying relation to himself (…) The truth passing from one to the other in parrhesia seals, ensures, and guarantees the other’s autonomy, the autonomy of the person who received the speech from the one who uttered it. (HSe 379, emphasis added)24

In the series of lectures at Berkeley in 1983 entitled Fearless Speech (FS) as well as in The Care of the Self (CS 37–68), Foucault gives further details on this form of independence: it is first the independence from the master who has spoken with parrhesia. But it is also independence from one’s own passions, “internal excitation or agitation” (FS 150; CS 66–67). The “satisfaction” from self obtained by self-mastery is the pleasure of self-­ possession, where this pleasure is opposed to voluptas, itself a pleasure It is Guyer’s contention that this definition of freedom is accessible, within the Kantian system, only by the achievement of autonomy (Guyer 2003, 73). Yet the demonstration relies crucially on the Categorical Imperative being a universal law, hence escaping the phenomenal world of stimuli and senses. This is the type of constraint that Foucault rejects, without renouncing some form of autonomy, as will be shown below. 24  It is interesting to note that in the first version of this interview given in 1983 (F1997c, 279), Foucault makes reference to the Stoic exercise thanks to which “a subject ensures his autonomy and independence;” that reference is erased from the 1984 revised, and untranslated, version (DE II #344).

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dependent on external objects (CS 66; CT 271).25 The teleology of the Stoic askesis is thus to be looked for in an independence from both sensations and others’ will. Finally, the self-examination also builds an independence from external events, the accidents of life that one cannot control, or one’s future destiny, as mentioned before (HSe 321–326; CS 66–67; FS 150). The aim is to reach a stability, “the absence of any form of disturbance in the soul or the mind” (CS 66; FS 162).26 This “stability” cannot be obtained without focusing one’s will on truth, therefore the link between Greek freedom and autonomy as self-rule.27 The active constitution of the subject as a moral subject cannot be obtained without a bind to truth, a point to which I come back in the next section. Interestingly enough, in CS—the final text that Foucault published on the care of the self28—the word autonomy does not appear, and the concept “sui juris” appears instead: This relation to self that constitutes the end of the conversion and the final goal of all the practices of the self still belongs to an ethics of mastery. (…) This relation is often conceived in terms of the juridical model of possession: one “belongs to himself,” one is “his own master” (…); one is answerable only to oneself, one is sui juris; one exercises over oneself an authority that nothing limits or threatens; one holds potestas sui. (CS 65)

Of course “sui juris” is a close Latin translation of the Greek autonomia, self-rule; it is also, even more interestingly, the term referring to legally mature individuals. The aim of the care of the self is undoubtedly a

25  Hadot tackles here Foucault’s use of “pleasure” for what the Stoics coined “joy,” because “they precisely refused to introduce the principle of pleasure in moral life (…) long before Kant” (Hadot 2002, 324–325, emphasis added, personal translation). I rather read Foucault’s text along Gros’ lines: “the care of the self never meant a satisfied and pleasurable self-contemplation (…) but a mindful introspection” (Gros 2001, 514–515). 26  This stability, “tranquillitas” (FS 150) should be opposed to the agitation of the soul, the stultitia evoked in Chap. 6 as characterizing the individual prior to the focus of the will produced by the direction. 27   For an interpretation of Foucault’s ethics as a “disposition to steadiness,” see Luxon (2008). 28  As mentioned by Gros (2001, 489), prior to the lectures at the Collège de France, the care of the self was found in Foucault’s work solely in a single short chapter of the third volume of The History of Sexuality (CS).

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form of “absence of tutelage,” as Kant defines it in his text, what we would tend to call autonomy. Autonomy as Ethical Differentiation Thus far, the form of autonomy established by Foucault appears rather as self-mastery and independence from others’ authority. The point though is that Foucault crucially insists that such a self-sovereignty cannot be built without a relation between self and truth; this is why, in my view, Foucault keeps referring to Kant in his analyses of the Greeks’ practices of the self. But exactly as Kantian autonomy was found paradoxical, implying a work on the self for the constitution of the moral subject yet relying on universal law as a given, the study of the Stoics carries the same tension. For instance, in a 1983 interview introducing the last volume of the History of Sexuality, Foucault distinguishes between classical Greece and the late Stoics, since the latter replaced the freely chosen obligation to follow a code of conduct by a general injunction to follow a universal law: “it is not a problem of choice; you have to do it because you are a rational being. The mode d’assujettissement is changing” (F1997c, 266). Hence both the late Stoics and Kant’s care of the self imply a bind to a rule which is universally valid.29 In The Care of the Self, Foucault’s thesis is that the late Stoics can be taken as a step toward the later emergence of the Christian techniques of the self where the subject is led to renounce his self; but, he adds, “one is still far from an experience of sexual pleasure where (…) behavior will have to submit to the universal form of law” (CS 68). These contradictory quotations show, in my view, that the kind of self-­sovereignty that Foucault wants to isolate is also difficult to find in the ancient texts he studies. There is indeed a tension in this care of the self, and the reading of Kant in 1983 seems to fully illuminate this point: while in Foucault’s reading, Kant rejects the idea that the exit from immaturity could be obtained thanks to a guide (GSO 33–34), Foucault insists that the Greek disciple needs a master to conduct him. One cannot reach self-government without being first governed by a master. The specificity of the parrhesiastic 29  The analogy between Foucault’s’ interpretation of Kant and the late Stoics is sometime striking. For instance, in the Regent Lecture at Berkeley (REG), Foucault comments on a text by Epictetus with the following: “Epimeleia heauthou is ontologically linked to human finitude; it is the practical form of freedom.” This could have been a comment about Kant!

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discourse as described in 1982 is precisely to allow that transition from government by someone else, to self-government. But the Stoic parrhesia is not devoid of paradoxes; on the one hand, the master’s true discourse is at the liminal point between the two wills: it becomes a principle of conduct freely chosen by the subject. Yet on the other hand, since the true discourse comes from the side of the powerful, the access to truth means, on the side of the disciple, that he has incorporated the true principles of his master. The truth he reached in that direction is the same truth as his master’s, ultimately the reason of the universe. In 1982, Foucault symptomatically strives to distinguish the Stoic form of “assimilation into divine reason” from its Platonic version (HSe 420–421).30 In the same strand of thought, during the last lesson of 1983, Foucault makes an “addition,” “to fill a gap” (GSO 357). He then examines two passages of Plato’s Gorgias, one of them dealing with the “test of the soul” (basanos, the touchstone – GSO 367) in the philosophical direction: when does the disciple know that he is ready, that his soul has reached the truth? “One will have a criterion of truth when there is homologia (…), when what is said by one can be said by the other (…) the identity of the discourse between two persons ” (GSO 371, emphasis added). But this analysis of homologia comes rather as a nota bene, a gap to be fulfilled, as Foucault notices in his introductory remarks to the lesson; he could not have concluded the lectures on Plato’s philosophical practice without mentioning that in the Platonic perspective, the unity of truth and its universality guarantees that the direction leads to the independence of the disciple. Foucault is in fact striving to show that the care of the self in its Greek form is not obtained under general, universal laws. Hence just after evoking the modern association of moral conduct with universal law, Foucault insists in 1982: The care of the self in ancient Greek and Roman culture was never really seen, laid down, or affirmed as a universal law valid for every individual regardless of his mode of life. The care of the self always entails a choice of one’s mode of life, that is to say a division between those who have chosen this mode of life and the rest. (HSe 113) 30  On Foucault’s difficulty in giving a strong modern version of parrhesia, see Han-Pile (2006, 203–204).

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For Foucault, the Greek care of the self could not be universal because of practical reasons; it was a privilege of the free citizen (HSe 112–113), that had to be practiced within a chosen community or philosophical school: “you cannot take care of the self in the realm and form of the universal. The care of the self cannot be practiced simply by virtue of being human as such (…). It can only be practiced within the group and within the group in its distinctive character” (HSe 117, emphasis added). More fundamentally, the aim of the care of the self is the transformation of the subject into someone different from the majority (HSe 75); it is to extract oneself from “current opinion” (HSe 242) precisely because, since it is accepted by all, current opinion cannot produce any change in the being of the subject (HSe 242). This point is crucial in the political parrhesia, studied in 1983, and might explain Foucault’s final focus on this form of discourse. In 1983, Foucault indeed turns to parrhesia, this time not as the discourse of the philosopher-guide but as the political parrhesia of the citizen in the agora. This parrhesia dislocates the power-knowledge entanglement and the dictate, by power, of what is true. Parrhesia is now indeed characterized by the risk that one takes. More precisely, the risk appears because the truth stated by the parrhesiast goes against the truth recognized as true by power. Therefore the bind of the subject with his own discourse is also a risk that he accepts to take. Accepting the risk creates the specific mode of subjectivation of parrhesia, in the actualization of freedom, and in ethical differentiation: by choosing to bind himself to a truth which goes against that of the powerful, and against the majority, the parrhesiast marks his freedom and constitutes himself as a subject at the same time (in contradistinction to the Christian avowal for instance, where the statement is the one expected by the powerful, and the bind to this statement a submission to power).31 Interestingly, this is very similar to Kant’s injunction to courage in “What is Enlightenment?;” Kant’s understanding is that the comfort of tutelage on the one hand and the fear of falling by thinking without guidance on the other, generally prevent human beings from autonomously using their own reason. The comfort is to remain under tutelage; the exit from immaturity seeks to question this comfort, to work on the self; it demands courage. Foucault adds that this injunction “is something by which one identifies oneself and enables one to distinguish oneself from  See Chap. 5.

31

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others. The use of a maxim as a precept is therefore at once an order and a distinctive mark” (GSO 28, emphasis added). It is also interesting to analyze the courage involved by parrhesia in terms of uncertainty. The parrhesiast states what he believes is true, yet his statement cannot be verified in terms of “true or false” (in which case there would be no parrhesia). The statement expresses the trust of the speaker in what he says, and binds him to this truth, this bind being the risk he takes (GSO 313). Yet the “risk,” mentioned repeatedly by Foucault, is both a danger and an open possibility: truth-telling “creates a fracture and opens up the risk: a possibility, a field of dangers, or at any rate, an undefined eventuality” (GSO 63, emphasis added). This again echoes with Aufklärung, read by Foucault as “a movement by which one extricates oneself from something, without saying anything about what one is moving towards” (GSO 27, emphasis added). It is interestingly also very close to Kant’s definition of transcendental freedom as “a special kind of causality… namely a faculty of absolutely beginning a state” (quoted in Guyer 2003, 71, emphasis added). Through parrhesia the speaker constitutes himself as an autonomous subject, since his discourse now stands devoid of tutelage.32 Autonomy was first linked to the will of the subject, yet here another important element of parrhesia is the subjectivity of the statement, at the heart of the risk taken: it is radically relative to the speaker, as a “breach” or a “detachment.” But it is also a bind to this truth freely chosen, which implies the type of exercises described in the previous chapter. In other instances, Foucault speaks of the “difference,” the singularity introduced by the parrhesiast (GSO 183, 229, 325; CT 25); in other words, it is an ethical differentiation, as both an ethical work and a differentiation of the self from others. * * * The “care of the self” described by Foucault takes many different forms: the Christian one leads to the total submission of the individual.33 The  See Chap. 5.  Foucault does not always consider that the Christian confession is a “care of the self,” precisely because it ultimately leads to renunciation of the self. Yet in the conclusion of the last volume of the History of Sexuality (CS), he describes how the Greek constitution of a moral self takes a new shape with Christianity (CS 239–240). This is confirmed in a 1984 interview, where he mentions “the paradoxical Christian care of the self” (F1997e, 285). 32 33

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Greek one leads to self-mastery, where the disciple never renounces his will. In both the Greek and Kantian care of the self, the teleology is self-­ mastery, the “exit from immaturity,” to speak in Kantian terms. Yet if the Kantian moral subject is also a subject who wills, his will is shaped by universal law; so is the Stoic subject’s. Foucault seems to be looking for something else. He strives to establish a form of the care of the self where the bind to truth is an ethical differentiation that cannot occur under the bind to a universal law. The Aesthetics of Existence Differentiation appears therefore as a condition for the active self-­ constitution of the subject that Foucault intends to establish. While in 1982 he strives to isolate such an ethical differentiation in the Stoic care of the self in contradistinction to the Platonic one, he will actually (and paradoxically) achieve his goal in his reading of Laches and Phaedo in the following years, as will be shown below. Indeed, after concluding the 1983 lectures with the study of Gorgias and the “touchstone” of truth—found in homologia, the identity of discourses—Foucault comes back to this “touchstone” in the fall of 1983, in a series of lectures at Berkeley on parrhesia (FS). This time the text examined is Plato’s Laches, and the touchstone is not homologia, but “the relation between the logos and the bios” (FS 97, 100–101). The ultimate courage in relation to self is the risk taken, up to the risk of death, to make one’s own life the proof of the truth. In 1984, Foucault interprets after Dumezil the last words of Socrates— ”Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius”—as follows; Asclepius is the god that one thanks for recovery from a disease. But what is the disease that Socrates escaped from? Not the disease of life, as some like Nietzsche would have it, but the disease of following common opinion. Crito indeed wanted Socrates to evade his prison because this was the best decision, according to common judgment. Socrates refused, following instead his own judgment, sticking to his truth. And just before dying, he then asks Crito to thank Asclepius for having given him the courage to escape common opinion (CT 98–105). Hence the courage to make one’s life a proof of the truth isolated in Laches means fighting against the false judgment of common opinion and living according to one’s true principles. Foucault concludes that Laches marks the split in the philosophical tradition of the West, between philosophy as metaphysics and philosophy as a way of life (CT 127). Philosophy

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as metaphysics is for Foucault an ontology of the self, placed under the necessity of knowledge-connaissance of the soul, which leads to the “assimilation to the divine” mentioned in the previous section (CT 158–160). Foucault’s interest is in the other tradition, philosophy as a way of life, an expression he borrows from Hadot: “philosophy consists neither in an abstract theory nor an exegesis of texts but in an art of being, a concrete attitude, a style of life which engages the entire existence” (Hadot 2002, 22–23). While in the case of Socrates, the adequatio is between the logos and the bios, the cynical parrhesia studied by Foucault in 1984 is a limit point where the logos, the rational discourse, becomes almost superfluous (CT 127–128, 207–209; FS 118). As such, the cynical parrhesia is almost a silent exhibition of truth (CT 207). In both Socrates’ and Diogenes’ cases, the object of the care of the self is not in the soul and its harmony with the universe but in the preoccupation with one’s mode of being and one’s acts (CT 160), what Lorenzini describes as the “ordinary dimension of our words and deeds” (Lorenzini 2010, 21). This preoccupation with the bios is not devoid of knowledge, to the contrary. In the 1981 lectures, Foucault indeed distinguishes between two Greek words for living: “zên” is the property of living that humans share with animals and plants. “Bios” by contrast is “life one may make oneself, decide oneself. Bios is what happens to us, of course, but from the angle of what we do with what happens to us” (ST 34). It is the course of existence in that it can be led and governed. Foucault concludes: “bios that part of life that falls under a possible technique, a considered and rational transformation” (ST 34, emphasis added; see also HSe 177–178). Later in the lectures he insists on the difficulty for us moderns to grasp the exact meaning of the term bios, a difficulty which is linked in my view to the loss of spirituality described in the previous chapter: bios is life “that must be the object of a techne,” where techne is itself defined as “considered ways of doing things that are intended to carry out a certain number of transformations on a determinate object” (ST 251). The bios is difficult for us to understand because it is that part of life actively transformed by the individual, an activity coined a spirituality in 1982, lost with our understanding of truth in its scientific form.34

34  See Chap. 6. It is also difficult for us to grasp, says Foucault, because “the sharp Christian division (fundamental scansion) between life [in] this world and life [in] the hereafter no doubt brings about for us the loss of the unity and immanent sense of the Greek bios” (ST

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The distinction between the care of the self (epimeleia heauthou) and the knowledge of the self (gnothi seauton) mentioned in Chap. 6 is reinterpreted in relation to these arts of existence: one is asked to “give an account of oneself” (didonai logon in Laches, CT 159), leading to a knowledge of the self both similar and different to the gnothi seauton: This gnothi seauton, this self-knowledge, (…), which is valid both for the discovery of the soul and for bringing the problem of the bios to light, obviously has a very different form when “giving an account of oneself” is indexed to the problem of the bios (life) rather than to the discovery of the soul as an ontologically distinct reality. This self-knowledge, which in the Laches is evoked more than it is employed, does not take the form of the soul’s contemplation of itself in the mirror of its divinity. This mode of self- knowledge takes [the form]—the words are in the Laches; we noted them—of the test, of examination, and also of exercise concerning the way in which one conducts oneself. (CT 160, emphasis added)

Foucault then distinguishes between two forms of techne: the first is the technical/theoretical knowledge as a body of principles transmitted by a master to his disciples (CT 144, CT 146). The other is the ethical parrhesia that establishes a harmony between words and deeds (CT 148). It is therefore another kind of true discourse that aims at giving a shape to one’s life: “so as to give a certain form, thanks to a certain kind of true discourse” (CT 161). Foucault also termed truth-telling as giving shape to one’s life as the “aesthetics of existence” (CT 161). I think that the expression should be understood along two main axes. First, the “aesthetics” is also described as an “art,” art being the translation of the Greek “techne” to be learnt, the techne tou biou, the art of living (HSe 446–447, F1997c, 260): “the human being is such (…) that he cannot live his life without referring to a certain rational and prescriptive articulation, which is that of techne” (HSe 447, emphasis added; see also UPe 10). In this respect, to make of one’s life a “work of art” (F1997c, 261; CT 162; UPe 11; FS 166), should be understood as a work, complying with Veyne’s contention: “for the Greeks, an artist was first of all an artisan and a work of art was first of all a work” (Veyne 1993, 7). The Greek bios is the result “of a continuous work of self on self” (ST 254). As Gros (2005, 707) puts it, by contrast to 251, emphasis added). A bit later in the same lecture, Foucault adds that bios is Greek subjectivity (ST 253).

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the Christian “who are you?,” the aesthetics of existence aim at answering the question “what are you making of your life?” It implies a constant scrutiny and a relation to self, and considering one’s life as an “unfinished work,” the aim of this work being the transformation of the self (UPe 10). Indeed, Foucault sometimes equates “aestheticism” with “transformation” (F1997d, 131–132). Hence criticisms such as Hadot’s—who considers that Foucault puts too much emphasis on “aesthetics” at the expense of the exercises on the self (Hadot 2002, 331; see also Flynn 2005, 615)— do not seem to hold. Second, Foucault uses the term “aesthetics” to signal the individual choice as opposed to universal obligation: “Greek ethics is centered on a problem of personal choice, of the aesthetics of existence” (F1997c, 260, emphasis added). From this perspective, “the function of free-speech doesn’t have to take legal form (…) the task of speaking the truth is an infinite labor” (F1996f, 464), because universal validity would prevent personal choice and the active shaping of one’s life. Contrastingly, Foucault asks for “a mode of truth-telling whose role and end is to give some kind of form to this bios (this life, this existence)” (CT 160, emphasis added). The relation to truth that accompanies the building of the self is now a relation to beauty; the shape that one gives to one’s life is also termed the “style” of one’s life (CT 144), which replaces the rule of conduct, once it has become so individually defined that it has lost any kind of generality: The arts of existence (…) are intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, (…) and to make their lives into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria. (UPe 10–11, emphasis added)

The aesthetics of existence as a work on the self and as a choice of a rule of conduct or a style of living can, in my view, be considered as another kind of rationality. Foucault indeed defines the Greek techne as “a practical rationality governed by a conscious goal” (F2001g, 364, emphasis added). The association of the aesthetical and the rational might seem surprising here, but doesn’t it result from our understanding of the “rational” solely in its scientific dimension? Foucault is actually showing that the government of the self, this rational activity, should escape the modern injunction to scientific approach. It remains a work in thought, for the sake of transformation.

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Besides, Foucault’s aesthetics of existence is often compared to Nietzsche’s transfigurations (Huijer 1999; Sluga 2006, 225; Milchman and Rosenberg 2007). While Foucault never denies his Nietzschean filiation (F1997c, 262), it is Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” that he keeps reading and interpreting in the last years, calling it a “fetish” text (GSO 7). As Gros rightly notices, Foucault is not radically criticizing reason in the name of irrationality (Gros 2012, 77; see also BB 36). In contradistinction to Nietzsche, whose criticism of reason is radical (Habermas 1987, 93–94, 96), Foucault is not looking for a transformation of the self that would not be rational, to the contrary; I have tried to show in this section that the techne in question in the “arts of living” is a rational relation to self for the sake of its transformation. This point is usually downplayed in the literature, or remains ambiguous. Osborne for instance defines this aesthetics as “a kind of doctrineless, self-imposed doctrine of how to live” (Osborne 1999, 47); it is doctrineless in the sense that Foucault refuses universally valid rules of conduct. But it remains a self-imposed doctrine, which itself relies on a knowledge of the self. From this perspective, the 1978 expression “reason – the despotic enlightenment” (F1991a, 12) used in relation to power as discipline, is corrected in the 1984 version of the same text into “reason, both a despot and an enlightenment” (DE II #361, 1587, emphasis added, personal translation).

Conclusion In the concluding remarks to the lectures on the care of the self in 1982, Foucault wrote the following: “if the task left by Aufklärung (…) is to question the grounds of our system of knowledge, it is also to question the grounds of the modality of the experience of self” (HSe 487—unread). Kant, the obvious yet unnamed reference here, is unsurprisingly, then, at the heart of the first lesson the next year. The object of this chapter was to describe the ongoing relation of Foucault to Kant, with a specific focus on that first lesson of 1983, in order to define after Foucault the kind of autonomy that he sees relevant for modern times. The first diagnosis of modernity that Foucault proposes with The Order of Things already renders Kant central to his enterprise: the tension found in Kant between the critical attitude and human finitude on the one hand and, on the other, the definition of a transcendental and universal subject, can by itself summarize Foucault’s own diagnosis of modernity. In the analyses of power as discipline, this universal subject, who is also a subject

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of rights, is at the heart of his criticism. Foucault’s attempts to offer an alternative to the juridical-philosophical model are also attempts to consider the modern subject in opposition to the autonomous and transcendental subject of rights. The inflection given by the concept of governmentality to Foucault’s reflections on power also implies a revision of Foucault’s position toward Kant. Indeed, processes of subjectivation are at the heart of governmentality as the conduct of conducts. Foucault concluded that any subjectivation means the bind to a rule that one gives to oneself, showing the proximity of this self-government to Kantian autonomy. But on what condition does this rational rule indeed mean self-sovereignty? In “What is Enlightenment?,” Kant discards the possibility that the exit from immaturity could be achieved with the help of a guide. Foucault is more concerned with the reference to a universal law for the conduct of the self, since he associates it with normalization (F1997c, 254), a point that will become clearer in the next chapter. Hence Foucault’s analysis of Kant’s transcendental ethics as askesis should be read as another historical possibility, yet irrelevant to Foucault’s predicament, or our own. The study of parrhesia in 1983 provides a further inquiry into the relation between government of self and others started in 1982: if the Other is necessary to build a relation to self, as Foucault recognizes, yet universal law is not an option, can the contemporary individual ultimately attain autonomy? The elements presented in this chapter insist on the askesis, the work on the self, as a process of self-transformation necessary to free oneself from dependence on others. It is also the risk taken, the courage to detach oneself from ordinary opinion for the sake of ethical differentiation. Yet this differentiation should not be mistaken for radical freedom: in 1978, speaking of counter-conducts, he interestingly mentions that he was not “referring to something that would be a fundamental anarchism (…), an originary freedom, absolutely and wholeheartedly resistant to any governmentalization” (WIC 75). As shown here and in the previous chapters, the differentiation remains a bind to some truth, a “rational and prescriptive articulation, which is that of techne (…) For a Greek, human freedom has to be invested not so much, or not only in the city-state, the law, the religion as in this techne (the art of oneself) which is practiced by oneself” (HSe 447). Once the rule followed takes the most subjective form, it becomes a “style” and the ethical differentiation is also an aesthetic exercise.

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This answer is better grasped, I believe, in relation to the turn in modern philosophy signaled by “What is Enlightenment?” toward a critical attitude. This aspect will be studied in the next chapter.

References Foucault’s Work BB 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics – Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. CS 1986. The Care of the Self. New York: Pantheon Books. CT 2011. The Courage of Truth – Lectures at the Collège de France 1983–1984. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DP 1995. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage Books. FS 2001. Fearless Speech. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). GL 2014. On the Government of the Living – Lectures at the Collège de France 1979–1970. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. GSO 2008. The Government of Self and Others – Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–1983. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. HSe 2005. The Hermeneutics of the Subject  – Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. IAe 2008. Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). LWK 2013. Lectures on the Will to Know  – Lectures at the Collège de France 1970–1971. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. OT 1994. The Order of Things – An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books. PPe 2006. Psychiatric Power  – Lectures at the Collège de France 1973–1974. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. SMBD 2003. Society Must be Defended  – Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976. New York: Picador. ST 2017. Subjectivity and Truth – Lectures at the Collège de France 1980–1981. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. STPe 2009. Security, Territory, Population  – Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. TFR 1984. The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow. Chicago: Pantheon Books, New York. UPe 1990. The Use of Pleasures. New York: Vintage Books. WDTT 2014. Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling – The Function of Avowal in Justice, ed. Fabienne Brion and Bernard E.  Harcourt. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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WIC  2007 [1978]. What is Critique? In The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth, 41–81. Harvard: Semiotext(e), MIT Press.

Articles F1991a. 1991[1978]. Introduction. In The Normal and the Pathological, ed. G. Canguilhem, 7–24. New York: Zone Books. F1996f. 1996 [1984]. The Concern for Truth. In Foucault Live (Collected Interviews, 1961–1984), ed. Sylvère Lotringer, 455–464. New  York: Semiotext(e). F1997c. 1997 [1983]. On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress. In The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.1, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, 253–280. New York: The New Press. F1997d. 1997 [1983]. An Interview by Stephen Riggins. In The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.1, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, 121–134. New York: The New Press. F1997e. 1997 [1984]. The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom. In The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.1, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, 281–302. New York: The New Press. F1998b. 1998 [1965]. Philosophy and Psychology. In The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Vol.2, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D.  Faubion and Paul Rabinow (general editor), 249–260. New  York: The New Press. F2001g. 2001 [1982]. Space Knowledge and Power. In The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.3, Power, ed. James D. Faubion and Paul Rabinow (general editor), 349–364. New York: The New Press. F2007. 2007 [1981]. The Meshes of Power. In Space, Knowledge, and Power, ed. J.W. Crampton and S. Elden, 153–162. Ashgate: Aldershot.

Works

in

French

DE II  2001 [1994]. Dits et Ecrits, II 1976–1988. Paris: Quarto-Gallimard.

Audio Recordings BHIST  Talk with the History Department at Berkeley, 19/04/1983. Available online at: http://ubu.com/sound/foucault.html REG  Regent’s Lecture at Berkeley, 12/04/1983. Available online at: http:// ubu.com/sound/foucault.html

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Other Authors Allen, Amy. 2008. The Politics of Ourselves  – Power, Autonomy and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory. Columbia University Press: New York. ———. 2011. Foucault and the Politics of Our Selves. History of the Human Sciences 24 (4): 43–59. Bevir, Mark. 1999. Foucault and Critique: Deploying Agency against Autonomy. Political Theory 27 (1): 65–84. Dworkin, Gerald. 1988. The Theory and Practice of Autonomy. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. Elden, Stuart. 2016. Foucault’s Last Decade. Polity: Cambridge. Flynn, Thomas. 2005. Philosophy as a way of life: Foucault and Hadot. Philosophy and Social Criticism 31 (5–6): 609–622. Gros, Frederic. 2001. Situation du Cours. In L’herméneutique du Sujet – Cours au Collège de France 1981–1982, 489–526. Paris: Seuil-Gallimard. ———. 2005. Le souci de soi chez Michel Foucault: A review of The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2005–31, pp. 697–708. ———. 2006. Foucault et la Leçon Kantienne des Lumières. Lumières (8): 159–167. ———. 2012. Foucault, penseur de la Violence? Cités 2012/2 (50): 75–86. Guyer, Paul. 2003. Kant on the Theory and Practice of Autonomy. Social Philosophy and Policy 20 (2): 70–98. Habermas, Jurgen. 1987. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge: MIT Press [1985]). ———. 1994. Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present: on Foucault’s Lecture on Kant’s ‘What is Enlightenment? In Critique and Power – Recasting the Foucault/ Habermas Debate, ed. M. Kelly, 149–156. Cambridge: MIT Press. Hadot, Pierre. 2002. Exercices Spirituels et Philosophie Antique. Albin Michel: Paris. Han-Pile, Béatrice. 2002. Foucault’s Critical Project – Between the Transcendental and the Historical. Stanford, Stanford UP. ———. 2006. The Analytic of Finitude and the History of Subjectivity. In The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. G.  Gutting, 176–209. Cambridge University Press. Huijer, Marli. 1999. The aesthetics of existence in the work of Michel Foucault. Philosophy and Social Criticism 25: 61–85. Koopman, Colin. 2013. Genealogy as Critique  – Foucault and the Problems of Modernity. Indiana University Press: Bloomington. Lorenzini, Daniele. 2010. Must We Do What We Say? Truth, Responsibility and the Ordinary in Ancient and Modern Perfectionism. European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy II (2): 16–34.

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Luxon, Nancy. 2008. Ethics and Subjectivity: Practices of Self-Governance in the Late Lectures of Michel Foucault. Political Theory (36): 377–402. McCarthy, Thomas. 1994. The Critique of Impure Reason: Foucault and the Frankfurt School. In Power and Critique, ed. M. Kelly, 243–282. Cambridge: MIT Press. Milchman, Alan, and Alan Rosenberg. 2007. The Aesthetic and Ascetic Dimension of an Ethics of Self-Fashioning: Nietzsche and Foucault. Parrhesia (2): 44–65. O’Neill, Onora. 1986. The Public Use of Reason. Political Theory 14 (4): 523–551. Osborne, Terry. 1999. Critical Spirituality – On Ethics and Politics in the Later Foucault. In Foucault contra Habermas, ed. S. Ashenden and D. Owen, 45–59. London: Sage Publications. Pitkin, Hanna F. 1999. Autonomy  – Personal and Political. In Fortune is a Woman  – Gender and Politics in the Thought of Machiavelli, 3–22. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Pradeau, Jean-François. 2002. Le Sujet Ancien d’une Ethique Moderne. In Foucault – Le courage de la Vérité, ed. F. Gros, 131–154. Paris: PUF. Sluga, Hans. 2006. Foucault’s Encounter with Heidegger and Nietzsche. In The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. G.  Gutting, 210–239. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Veyne, Paul. 1993. The Final Foucault and His Ethics. Critical Inquiry 20 (1, Autumn): 1–9.

CHAPTER 8

Foucault, Kant, and Critique

As set out in the previous chapter, Foucault reads “What is Enlightenment?” in the first 1983 lecture as a modern injunction to take care of oneself, linking the text to his own inquiries into the Greek parrhesia. His reading highlights the contradictory role played by the guide in the Kantian text, as both necessary for the exit from tutelage and the main obstacle to this exit.1 In his last remarks, Foucault insists that the end of the text contradicts the very definition given by Kant to the Aufklärung; after having established the subtle equilibrium between free thought (reasoning) and obedience, as a “new distribution of the government of self and others” (GSO 37), Kant’s reference to Frederick II as the agent who will render the Aufklärung possible constitutes a contradiction in the text. From Foucault’s viewpoint, this is the reason why in The Conflict of the Faculties, Kant replaced Frederick II by the French revolution in his demonstration (GSO 39). The analysis of The Conflict of the Faculties was actually performed in the first hour of the 1983 introductory lecture on Kant, leading to conclusions on Foucault’s work as a modern critical philosopher. The object of this chapter will be to isolate the kind of critical philosophy as a “certain tradition” of modernity, that Foucault recognizes as his own in his reading of Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties. More surprisingly perhaps, I would like to argue that Foucault’s foregrounding the concept of “the public” in relation to the Enlightenment, in the 1983 lecture,

1

 See Chap. 7.

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shows that his critical philosophy is rendered possible, yet not self-evident, by the existence of a “public,” through a definition specified below. These reflections on his philosophical work appear more often in interviews than in the lectures, although it is possible to interpret the last year at the Collège de France from this perspective. In the first part I follow Foucault’s appraisal of the public, first as the opinions of the population, then as a place of confrontation with those opinions. The second part builds on this understanding of the public in order to describe Foucault’s enterprise as a critical philosopher.

Kant and the Public Foucault finds three contradictions in the end of “What is Enlightenment?” First, Kant speaks of external obstacles being lifted, whereas he had just explained that what prevents the exit from tutelage are inner obstacles, our “laziness and cowardice.” Second, after having demonstrated that the exit from immaturity cannot be led by a guide, Kant praises the role of Frederick II in the process. Last but not least, the government of the self, attached to the public use of reason, seems to be jeopardized by Kant’s final contention that free thought will actually strengthen obedience (GSO 37–39). These three contradictions could easily be lifted. For instance, laziness and cowardice being the main obstacles to the exit from immaturity could result from other obstacles being removed; Frederick II’s promotion of a public sphere could be interpreted as rendering cowardice and laziness the only remaining ones. More crucially, the reference to Frederick II as the agent of the Aufklärung, in obvious contradiction to Kant’s prior contention that there can be no guide in the process, might be interpreted along the lines of Strauss’s Persecution and the Art of Writing: Kant had to be careful with his articles if he wanted to be published, showing that not all the obstacles to free speech had already been removed.2 2  According to Strauss (1941, 499), pre-modern writers “witnessed or suffered, during at least part of their lifetimes a kind of persecution which was more tangible than social ostracism.” Concerning Kant, he has this hint: “Kant’s case is a class in itself” (Strauss 1941, 499, n. 13). Actually Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” can be read as an interpretation of Frederik II’s sentence “reason as much as you want, but obey!,” with the intention of securing freedom of speech in the public sphere (Guyer 2004). Kant also had problems with the successor of Frederik II’s censor, who prohibited the publication of Religion in the Limits of Reason Alone (Deligiorgi 2005, 77, 96).

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But this is not Foucault’s line of interpretation; after these remarks on the inner contradictions of the text, he sends back his audience to the beginning of the class: The agent of Aufklärung, the very process of Aufklärung will be transferred, (…), in , to the Revolution. Or, more exactly, it will not be transferred entirely to the Revolution, but to that general phenomenon of revolutionary enthusiasm produced around the Revolution. (GSO 39)

So, from Foucault’s viewpoint, the reference to the prince in “What is Enlightenment?” should be replaced by the “general phenomenon,” the “enthusiasm around the French Revolution” in order to lift the contradiction in the text. The prince cannot be a guide, probably nobody can be a guide, but the French Revolution can. Foucault insists that Kant does not refer to the Revolution as a historical fact which actually emancipated people, to the contrary; the Revolution was a disaster since, besides the massacres, people simply fell under the authority of those who wanted to free them, as Kant announced in his 1784 premonitory text (GSO 17–18, 34). The Revolution rather serves as an agent of Aufklärung, in “the way in which it exists as a spectacle, the way in which it is greeted everywhere by spectators who are not participants but observers, witnesses, and who, for better or worse let themselves be caught up in it” (GSO 17, emphasis added). Foucault points to the development, at the end of the eighteenth century, of the “public,” of “institutions like learned societies, academies, and journals, and what circulates within this framework” (GSO 8), a recurring theme in the two hours of the class (GSO 7–8, 17, 35–36).3 Foucault’s insistence on the public in the 1983 lecture is surprising when put in relation with earlier definitions of “the public.” The public indeed already appeared as an important concept for liberal governmentality, as something governed rather than a place for the constitution of an autonomous subject. Foucault obviously presents in 1983 the public from Kant’s viewpoint and not his own; yet “these journals, societies and academies constitute the authority—so important historically, in the eighteenth century, and to which Kant attaches such importance in his text—which 3  Interestingly enough, Leo Strauss also situates the emergence of “a complete freedom of public discussion” in certain countries at the beginning of the nineteenth century (Strauss 1941, 488).

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[corresponds to] this notion of public” (GSO 8) describe a historical reality very different from the governed public evoked in the 1978 lectures. I would like to highlight here the displacement from one meaning to the other, and the tension involved. The Public as “the Population on the Side of Its Opinions” The public domain was indeed already identified in the 1978 lectures (STPe) as a corollary of the emergence of the notion of the population with the liberal form of governmentality: “the public, which is a crucial notion in the eighteenth century, is the population seen under the aspect of its opinions, ways of doing things, forms of behavior, customs, fears, prejudices, and requirements” (STPe 75, emphasis added). Such a definition does not leave much hope for a process of active transformation of the self, be it in its Kantian sense. The public appears rather as “what one gets a hold on through education, campaigns, and convictions” (STPe 75); it is something governed by the manipulation of opinions (STPe 275, unread), contributing to the uniformization of modern society. The “public” in 1978 is therefore the corollary of the regime of truth that accompanies the liberal government of the population, as the system of true/false propositions which frames the understanding of conducts (BB 18). More precisely, it is a “subject-object of a knowledge (savoir): subject of a knowledge that is ‘opinion’ and object of a knowledge that is of a different type, since it has opinion as its object and the question for this knowledge of the state is to modify opinion, or to make use of it, to instrumentalize it” (STPe 275, unread). The public domain would then be the series of discourses accepted as true in a certain time and place and which dictates appropriate behaviors. As I have tried to expose in Foucault’s genealogy of the modern self,4 he actually turned to the Greco-Romans in order to isolate techniques for the active constitution of the self, independently from Christian and modern mechanisms of power and subjection. Indeed “the ‘arts of existence’ (...) were assimilated into the exercise of a pastoral power in early Christianity, and later, into educative, medical, and psychological types of practices” (UPe 11, translation modified). In modern times, the regime of truth and its true discourses seems therefore to be produced by the educative, medical, or psychological 4

 See Chap. 6.

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systems. This claim is strengthened by the reference in the 1981 lectures to the consensus as “what is recognized as true:” even psychoanalysis and criminology are “true,” as long as they function with a bind to truth that creates a subjectivity. And Foucault concludes that models of proper conduct have been absorbed; the arts of living have been integrated into pedagogy, social stereotypes and the human sciences (ST 27). The modern public domain, from this perspective, appears as the system of norms and normative behaviors that frames the ordinary conducts of the population. Hence Foucault’s reticence toward an ethics founded on universal law. Such a law, just like the social stereotypes evoked in 1981, implies the same demand from everyone, leading in practice to normalization: “I don’t think one can find any normalization in, for instance, the Stoic ethics. The reason is, I think, that the principal aim, the principal target of this kind of ethics, was an aesthetic one (…) It was only a problem of personal choice” (F1997c, 254).5 Yet in the 1978 definition of the public as “the population on the side of its opinions,” Foucault interestingly inserted “its habits,” among the opinions, the fears, and the prejudices, creating an interesting link with earlier analyses. The habits of the population were first studied in the 1973 lectures (PS), while Foucault was still conceptualizing the instruments of the disciplinary regime. They were then associated with the coercion imposed on bodies, leading to the “docile bodies” of discipline (DP 135). More strikingly, in the 1973 lectures, the “habits” are used as a synonym of “discipline:” A society of disciplinary power, (…) whose instrument is the acquisition of disciplines or habits. It seems to me that since the eighteenth century there has been a constant multiplication, refinement, and specification of apparatuses for manufacturing disciplines, for imposing coercions, and for instilling habits. (PS 237, emphasis added)

Foucault strongly insists in the power-knowledge analyses on the physical dimension of disciplinary power, downplaying its mental one; since the subject is produced in these mechanisms of power, whatever happens in the mind of such a subject is for Foucault either part of the discipline or simply irrelevant. The revision introduced by governmentality to Foucault’s conception of power lies precisely at this point; if power is the conduct of 5

 This is later contrasted, in the same interview, with the late Stoics (see Chap. 7).

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conducts, rather than the physical imposition of a force, then some reflexive agency should be taken into account: A power relationship can only be articulated on the basis of two elements which are indispensable if it is really to be a power relationship: that “the other” (the one over whom power is exercised) be thoroughly recognized and maintained to the very end as a person who acts. (SaP 220, emphasis added)

Reflecting upon practices in 1978, Foucault can then contend that “‘practices’ don’t exist without a certain regime of rationality (...) My problem is to see how men govern (themselves and others) through the production of truth” (F1991b, 79, emphasis added). From this viewpoint, the habits of a population should not be studied separately from its opinions; they are part of them, both shaped by and shaping the opinions. In the 1983 Regent lecture, Foucault further defines his enterprise as follows: I don’t want to analyze what people think as opposed to what they do but what they think when they do what they are doing. What I want to analyze is the meaning they give to their own behavior, the way they integrate their behavior in general strategies, the type of rationality they recognize in their different practices, institutions, models and behaviors. (REG, emphasis added)

Hence, instead of discarding opinions as what masks the actual practices of power, Foucault is now interested in the manner in which rationality shapes subjectivity, as I have tried to show in Chap. 5. Foucault’s focus on the rational dimension of practices and habits, I would like to argue, is what allows him to redefine critical philosophy in his own terms as will be developed in the next part. But first I would like here to link this claim to Foucault’s reading of Kant in the 1983 lecture. Public and Belonging What is at stake, in the 1983 reading of Kant, is an approach to the “public” radically different from a place governed by opinion and prejudices, thus framing the standardization of the population. Foucault’s approach to Kant’s public is rather focused on the possibility to introduce a breach in this mode of thinking. This twist is less surprising if one recalls the main

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characteristics of the form of autonomy Foucault is looking for; the ethical differentiation implies a necessary uprooting from the current opinion (HSe 242). Yet precisely for this reason, it implies some form of confrontation with the public as opinion and prejudices (HSe 242). When speaking of Greek parrhesia, Foucault indeed insists that the statement must go against the hegemonic opinion, either that of the majority or that of the tyrant; it is part of the risk taken by the parrhesiast, an intrinsic element of parrhesia itself, without which there is no free subject (GSO 56).6 This remains true, I suggest, whatever the period at stake, including Foucault’s. It implies a second level of publicity that I would like to sketch here. In the 1983 introductory lecture, Foucault contends that with “What is Enlightenment?” Kant assigns philosophy as a discursive practice the task of questioning its belonging to a certain actuality, and giving meaning to the present: We should look for in events which are almost imperceptible. That is to say, we cannot analyze our own present in its significant values without engaging in a hermeneutics or decipherment which will enable us to endow what is apparently of no significance and value with the significance and value we are looking for. (GSO 17, emphasis added)

Interestingly enough, “hermeneutics and decipherment” are the words associated in Foucault’s lexicon with the mode of subjection of the Christian subject and the psychoanalytic one, words he uses generally with a negative connotation to show the endless activity in which this subject is entrapped: both subjects are formed under the exhaustive saying of their thoughts to the other and the hermeneutics of their self.7 When speaking of the interrogation of one’s present, Foucault seems to re-orient the activity of decipherment and hermeneutics from the inner self toward one’s own present, by questioning one’s actuality, imbuing this activity with a positive content. It is therefore by the abandonment of introspection in favor of the observation and the questioning of what is external,

 See Chap. 7.  See for instance HoS pp. 66–67: “Truth is constituted in two stages: present but incomplete, blind to itself, in the one who spoke, it could only reach completion in the one who assimilated it and recorded it. (…) the revelation of confession had to be coupled with the decipherment of what it said. The one who listened was not simply the forgiving master (…) he was the master of truth. His was a hermeneutic function.” 6 7

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public, and contemporary that a new understanding of the public is achieved. Foucault indeed defines the task of the philosopher as asking, for the first time with Kant, the question of “the present as a philosophical event to which the philosopher who speaks of it belongs” (GSO 12).8 The following lectures on parrhesia can also be put in the perspective of “the dramatics of true discourse,” of which the critic is another figure: “what is the critical discourse in the political domain that we see forming, developing, or anyway assuming a certain status in the eighteenth century and on through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?” (GSO 70, emphasis added). It is through this specific critical attitude that questions the present that Foucault can recognize himself in the modern tradition (GSO 21). But the form of this questioning is also historically changing. Foucault finds indeed a definition of a “we” in his reading of Kant, in opposition to Descartes or Leibniz (GSO 11–13). He remarks that “Kant asks ‘what are we?,’ as part of the Enlightenment. Compare this with the Cartesian question: who am I? I, as a unique, but universal and unhistorical subject; I, for Descartes, is everyone, anywhere, at any moment” (SaP 216; WDTT 236).9 Hence the work of constituting oneself as a universal subject—Kant’s version of an ethics of the self—actually means to grasp one’s own actuality. Here Foucault redefines Kant’s universality in order to make it historically grounded (see also Allen 2008, 36–37): The question will no longer be one of his adherence to a doctrine or a tradition, or of his membership of a human community in general, but a question about him being part of a present, about his membership of a particular “we” if you like, which is linked, to a greater or lesser extent, to a cultural ensemble characteristic of his contemporary reality. (GSO 13, emphasis added)

8  Prior to 1983, Foucault interprets “What is Enlightenment?” mainly along these lines (F1991a; F2001c; WDTT 236; SaP; TFR 32–50; DE II #361; TS 145–162). 9  In WDTT Foucault presents the question as follows: “if there is a certain coherence in what I do, it is perhaps tied more to a situation that we all share, one and other, of which we are all a part (…) It seems to me that modern philosophy, perhaps since Kant asked the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’—that is to say, ‘What is our current situation? What is happening around us? What is our present?’—it seems to me that at that moment, philosophy acquired a new dimension, or it opened itself up to a certain task that it had ignored or that had not previously existed, which is to state who we are, to explain our present, what it is, today. This is very clearly a question that would have been meaningless to Descartes” (WDTT 236, emphasis added).

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As developed in the previous chapter, by contrast with Kant who seeks publicity to reach the universally valid and correct judgment,10 Foucault strives to establish an ethical distinction. This appears in his description of the questioning that takes place: This “we” has to become, or is in the process of becoming, the object of the philosopher’s own reflection. By the same token, it becomes impossible for the philosopher to dispense with an interrogation of his singular membership of this “we.” (GSO 13, emphasis added)

Although Foucault refers here to Kant, this distance taken by the philosopher toward the actuality, in the form of his “singular membership,” seems in fact to characterize his own enterprise; indeed he further insists in the text that the modern questioning of one’s actuality is “a vertical relationship of the discourse to its own present.” It consists of questioning the present in its own right, with no attempt to put it in “a longitudinal relationship to the Ancients” (GSO 14). Interestingly enough, “to find oneself at the vertical of oneself” (on se trouve à la verticale de soi-même) is the metaphor that Foucault uses in The Use of Pleasures to describe his own critical activity (UPe 11, personal translation).11 Foucault also mentions in an interview that he has been criticized for not making use of “any ‘we’, (…) those ‘we’s’ whose consensus, whose values, whose traditions constitute the framework for a thought and define its validity conditions” (TFR 385, translation modified). His answer is that his critical questioning does not start from a “we;” it is rather, “necessary 10  Habermas also interprets Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?,” and insists that the public use of reason leads to “an agreement of all empirical consciousnesses, brought about in the public sphere, corresponding to the intelligible unity of transcendental consciousness” (Habermas 1991, 108). Other scholars do not always adopt this interpretation in term of transcendental consciousness; for O’Neill and Deligiorgi, the absence of a transcendental viewpoint is actually what necessitates the public use of reason: it is in the course of communication with others that the correct judgment is obtained, in agreement with others, thus becoming universal (O’Neill 1986, 539; Deligiorgi 2002). Deligiorgi further interestingly mentions that Kant makes recurring references to the “supreme touchstone of truth,” measured by the universalizability of a judgment (Deligiorgi 2005, 85). 11  This is my own, literal translation. The English text reads: “one finds that one is looking down on oneself from above” (UPe 11). The vertical metaphor also resonates with the plunging gaze of the Stoics (HSe 282–283), and, differently, with the Christian censorship on thought: “The examination of oneself (…) the form of a permanent control, the form of a sort of vertical relationship of self to self” (WDTT 164, emphasis added).

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to make the future formation of a ‘we’ possible, by elaborating the question. Because it seems to me that the ‘we’ must not precede the question; it can only be the result – and the necessarily temporary result – of the question” (TFR 385, emphasis added, translation modified). Hence the inquiry of the philosopher starts by a detachment, an uprooting from the consensus, in order to create an understanding of one’s situated condition which constitutes his new belonging. Macherey further notices that Foucault’s reading of Kant in 1983 makes central the notion of “belonging.” In Macherey’s reading, the philosopher should reflect on and enunciate the norms that build him as a subject (Macherey 2009, 79, personal translation): “to be a subject is to belong” to a given system of norms, where the specificity of the philosopher resides in his enunciation of this condition (Macherey 2009, 79–80). This “belonging” of the subject should in my view be understood as dual: the modern subject’s, whose reflexivity is built in relation to unexamined true discourses so as to be a member of the consensus on the one hand— the public as the existing regime of truth described in my first section above—and the philosopher’s questioning of his own present and this regime on the other, thus elaborating a new understanding of the public as defined here. Moreover, the transformation of the individual might take place in relation to the public, understood as a place of encounter and struggle between the ordinary opinion—into which one is brought up—and those “imperceptible events” that trigger thought. This struggle is the difficult negotiation between a general mode of thinking that shapes the subjugated subject to start with, and a critical thought which extracts this subject from this mode of thinking. While this encounter happened for Kant in “the journals, societies, and academies,” Foucault seems to imply that in his time such an encounter takes place in books (GSO 8). In a 1978 interview, he indeed distinguishes between experience-books of the kind he is writing, from “truth-books or demonstration books” (F2001b, 246), where the reader only finds information but is not invited to transform himself. Because Foucault struggles in his books with admitted true discourses on a given topic, they can become triggers for similar experiences in his readers. And he concludes that the book plays a part in the reader’s transformation: “the book worked toward that transformation. To a small degree, it was even an agent in it” (F2001b, 246). Hence Kant’s public as the agent of the Aufklärung is for Foucault replaced by the experience-book in the work on the self. The “experience-book” is the

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liminal point of encounter between the writer and the reader, evoked by Foucault in the 1983 lecture (GSO 7), the “public domain” so to speak, where his philosophical activity can take place, both for himself and his readers. * * * The dual belonging points to a tension that reflects the two definitions of the public. The modern individual is built or builds himself within a given regime of truth, in relation to the consensus of “what is recognized as true,” a truth he does not question. While a reflexive activity does take place in the relation between self and truth, a second level of reflexivity, which consists in questioning the consensus itself, is missing. The belonging of the philosopher by contrast, consists in questioning admitted true discourses. His inquiries are as many possibilities for the calling into question of consensual opinions: “the essential political problem for the intellectual (…) is a matter of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time” (PK 133, emphasis added). The task of the philosopher seems therefore to propel alternative true discourses which counter the hegemonic ones and trigger thought; these are not discourses to be learnt but experiences to make, in thought. Yet the danger always remains for the philosopher’s free speech to turn into just another form of tutelage. How such a danger can be avoided has to do with Foucault’s definition of his work as critique, and is addressed in the next part.

The Role of the Critical Thinker I tried to show in the previous chapter that, for Foucault, neither the Greek form of subjectivation nor the Kantian constitution of a universal moral subject are directly applicable in contemporary times. While he is explicitly looking for ways to constitute an “autonomous subject” (TFR 42, 43), his answer cannot be found either in the Stoics or in Kant, for the main reason that both philosophies had recourse to some form of universal law. Foucault insists instead on the necessity to work on the self: “leaving the condition of tutelage and exercising critical activity are (…) two related operations” (GSO 32, emphasis added). The critical approach to one’s actuality is an attitude, that first appeared with modernity (WIC 42). This reflexive consciousness, which finds expression in the public sphere,

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is the form of philosophy that Foucault is striving for. It has four main characteristics that should be put in relation to those of the public described in the previous part. Ideas Versus Thought In a 1984 interview, Foucault explains that he has for a long time tried to distinguish between thought, ideas, and mentalities (TFR 388). While he is not always consistent in his use of these terms, it is still important to recognize that distinction. When Foucault denies his being a philosopher, he generally presents philosophy as the history of ideas (e.g. F2001b, 246; TFR 388), an institutional body of knowledge (F1991a, 7), or as preoccupied with an ontology of truth independent of considerations on power phenomena (F2018, 192). From this viewpoint, their institutional dimension means that ideas are recognized as legitimate, they have been “integrated into pedagogy, social stereotypes and the human sciences” (FCL.63, C63.2.1, emphasis added). Ideas and mentalities are giving sense to existing conducts, thus reinforcing habits and the power relations in which they took shape. Thought, by contrast “is not what inhabits a certain conduct and gives it its meaning; rather, it is what allows one to step back from this way of acting or reacting, to present it to oneself as an object of thought and question it as to its meaning, its conditions, and its goals (…) and reflects on it as a problem” (TFR 388, emphasis added). Foucault distinguishes here, I would like to argue, between two types of rationalities, in line with the two publics described in the previous part: ideas and mentalities on the one hand, that accompany “habits” and practices inasmuch as those are subjugating practices; thought on the other, as a manner of taking one’s distance, which could be defined as the rationality of critique as a practice. Similarly, in the introduction to UPe, Foucault distinguishes between a curiosity “that seeks to assimilate what is appropriate for one to know,” and the curiosity “which enables one to get free of oneself (se déprendre de soi-même)” (UPe 8, emphasis added; see also PMVI; F1997a, 325). Within Kantian critical philosophy, Foucault also isolates, thanks to “What is Enlightenment?,” two philosophical traditions that can roughly be attached to the distinction between ideas and thought presented above. The first is an analytics of truth, that shows the condition of possibility of legitimate knowledge (the Kantian Critique in its traditional meaning). Foucault discarded that critical attitude in his 1978 lecture on Kant (WIC),

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since the modern exercise of power has made extensive use of scientific (legitimate) knowledge, leading to endless power abuses which critical philosophy intends to uncover (WIC; see also F2001d, 298–299). He comes back to this theme in 1984: We have been able to see what forms of power relations were conveyed by various technologies (whether we are speaking of productions with economic aims, or institutions whose goal is social regulation, or of techniques of communication): disciplines, both collective and individual procedures of normalization exercised in the name of the power of the state. (TFR 48)

Because it assumes the existence of legitimate (scientific) knowledge, this strand of philosophy does not give itself the means to question the subjectivity involved in these techniques. Foucault’s critical attitude, deriving from this diagnosis of the flaw in the analytics of truth, consists of “an ontology of the present, (…) an ontology of ourselves” (GSO 21). Foucault had already defined the lines of an alternative critical philosophy in his lectures at Berkeley in 1980 (HOW). Instead of seeking the conditions of possibility of the knowledge of objects, he seeks “the conditions and infinite possibility of transforming the subject” (BHS 224 n. 4; see also HSe 253; WDTT 20). On the one hand, this last sentence points to his inquiries into the Greeks’ subjectivity and the techniques of the self. Yet on the other, it is open to an interpretation for the modern self, that is an “ontology of ourselves” where “ourselves” is Foucault’s own present. In the same lecture, he concludes that the “diagnosis of what we are,” the result of this critical philosophy, opens up the possibility “to refuse and to change in the world, in ourselves and our circumstances” and therefore has a political dimension (BHS 224 n.4, see also SaP, 216). Critique as Modern Askesis Unlike modern scientific knowledge that takes the subject as a given, throughout his last years at the Collège de France Foucault was exploring the manner in which the subject is formed and transformed by rational exercises. If the modern self is formed by techniques of subjectivation that have been incorporated into pedagogy, social stereotypes, and the human sciences (ST 27), then it is possible, by proper work on the self, to transform this subject. Such a transformation of the self is how Foucault

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interprets his own work as a philosopher: “philosophy (…) an askesis, an exercise on the self in the activity of thought” (UPe 9, emphasis added). According to Rose, “in stressing the role of thought in making up our present, in making it governable, such studies also suggest that thought has a role in contesting the ways in which it is governed” (Rose 1999, 59, emphasis added). One finds again here the two aspects of the public evoked in the previous part: either formed in the consensus or transformed by its confrontation in the public sphere, the subject always relates to a form of rationality. Therefore the work “on the self in thought,” that Foucault advocated for is also a “work of thought” (Rose 1999, 59), as defined in the previous section. The questioning of Kant’s limits of legitimate knowledge thus becomes the task of the philosopher: We have to be at the frontiers. Criticism indeed consists in analyzing and reflecting upon limits. But if the Kantian question was that of knowing what limits knowledge has to renounce crossing,12 it seems to me that the critical question today has to be turned back into a positive one: in what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints? (TFR 45)

To “renounce crossing the limits” is to remain within the boundaries of the history of ideas; it consists of learning certain forms of knowledge and approaching philosophy as the analytics of truth, that does not question the subject’s mode of being. Demonstrating the contingency of what is taken as necessary does the opposite, and has long been defined by Foucault as his own critical enterprise (OT xx).13 But it assumes a new 12  The English text has “transgressing,” but it is not the French word used by Foucault— ”franchir.” Foucault actually does not use transgression positively after HoS, where he admits that it is built on the unquestioned split between allowed and forbidden. Such a split is inherent to law, and becomes irrelevant with the modern disciplinary power of the norm: “one could plot a line going straight from the seventeenth century pastoral to what became its projection in literature, ‘scandalous literature’ at that. (...) Sade takes up the injunction in words that seem to have been retranscribed from the treatises of spiritual direction” (HoS 21; see also HoS 150). 13  More precisely, in the introduction to The Order of Things, Foucault states the following: “It is here that a culture, imperceptibly deviating from the empirical orders prescribed for it by its primary codes, instituting an initial separation from them, causes them to lose their original transparency, relinquishes its immediate and invisible powers, frees itself sufficiently to discover that these orders are perhaps not the only possible ones or the best ones” (OT xx).

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meaning in the perspective of the technologies of the self; indeed, if these techniques have been incorporated into pedagogical and social institutions, the only way to constitute oneself as a moral subject means first to “get free of oneself” (se déprendre), of the frames in which we are built (UPe 8; F1996f, 461), in line with the two modes of belonging outlined in the previous part. From this viewpoint, Foucault finds himself within the modern tradition: Aufklärung is indeed, fundamentally, “a reflective relation to the present” (TFR 44). But since such an enterprise is a work on the self, Foucault also finds his own filiation to the Stoics: mode of relating to contemporary reality a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task; a bit, no doubt, like what the Greeks called an ethos. (TFR 39, emphasis added)

Hence these reflections on his work as a critical philosopher are in convergence with his inquiries into the constitution of the Greco-Roman ethical self; his philosophy is his manner of constituting himself as a moral subject. In the first introduction to UPe, he could conclude: “a working of thought upon itself; (…) the principle of the history of thought as critical activity. All of this bears upon the work and teaching I have labeled the history of systems of thought” (TFR 335–336), which is actually the title of his chair at the Collège de France. The “ontology of ourselves” is then defined as a philosophical ethos, “the historico-practical test of the limits that we may go beyond, and thus as work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings” (TFR 47). Like any other askesis, critique will transform the subject practicing it. The exercise in thought performed by the philosopher on his own self is also accessible to the public of his readers. At least this can be deduced from the interviews, where Foucault seems to invite his readers to confront themselves through his writings. Asked for instance whether he considers that there is a “lack of thought in our period,” he answers that: People are always complaining that the mass media stuff people’s heads. There is a certain misanthropy in this idea. On the contrary, I believe that people react; the more one convinces them, the more they question things. The mind is not made of soft wax. It’s a reactive substance. (F1997a, 325)

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At the same time, in giving this very interview, Foucault demanded to remain anonymous; once involved in the public sphere, his own public figure prevents the philosopher’s audience from hearing what he has to say: “out of nostalgia for a time when, being quite unknown, what I said had some chance of being heard” (F1997a, 321). By becoming well-­ known, Foucault has been absorbed into a consensual approach to his work, preventing the reading of his texts. Yet the “condition of possibility” of his work as critical philosopher is the existence of a public that might read, think, and transform themselves: We need to free ourselves of the sacralization of the social as the only instance of the real and stop regarding that essential element in human life and human relations—I mean thought—as so much wind. Thought does exist, both beyond and before systems and edifices of discourse (…) as soon as people begin to have trouble thinking things the way they have been thought, transformation becomes at the same time very urgent, very difficult, and entirely possible. (F2001e, 456–457, emphasis added)

Understanding that a transformation of the modern subject in askesis is both very difficult yet possible, characterizes Foucault’s critical attitude. It relies on one basic assumption, defined in his first introduction to The History of Sexuality II as “the principle of irreducibility of thought: “Singular forms of experience (…) may well not be independent from the concrete determinations of social existence (…) But there is no experience which is not a way of thinking” (TFR 335). Any such experience, as shown in Chap. 5, can involve either a form of subjection (the “concrete determinations of social existence”) or of subjectivation, the activity of thought in the transformation of the self. The multiplicity of thought and rationality allows for these various experiences. In any case, a rationality is always involved: it is either the “prison of the body,” as Foucault put it in Discipline and Punish (DP 30) or the tool thanks to which one can break free from his own determinations.14 As such, the transformation is accessible to all, since “we are all thinking beings” (DE II #362, 1600, personal translation;15 see also DE II #344, 1431).

14  In the definition of “the principle of the irreducibility of thought,” Foucault downplays the distinction mentioned in the previous section between ideas and thought; to remain in line with this distinction, it is not “thought” which is always involved, but a rationality. 15  The English translation is “thinking subjects” (TS 14).

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The Universal Viewpoint One of the main criticisms against The Order of Things was that the thesis of the book could not be reconciled with its very writing; if modes of thinking were dictated by the episteme, as Foucault maintained in the book, how could he, as a writer, stand out of all epistemes to describe them (Habermas 1987, 252; Taylor 1984)? This question takes a new shape with critique as askesis: what is the point of perspective obtained by detachment of the self from its prior modes of thinking, into which he was shaped? Foucault addressed a few times the question of the perspective obtained by critical thinking. Here probably, the difference of his attitude from both the Stoics and Kant appears most clearly. Foucault distinguishes in 1982 between the Platonic conversion and the Stoic one, in order to isolate the Stoic viewpoint from Plato’s world of Ideas: while Plato’s detachment from this world transforms the individual by showing him the truth outside the cave, the Stoic exercise allows reaching a point of perspective turned on this world and not outside of it (HSe 276). Foucault successively studies two exercises, two kinds of gaze on the self, Seneca’s and Marcus Aurelius’s. Yet even if the askesis is turned toward this world, both Stoic exercises lead to a displacement of the subject; Foucault also speaks of an uprooting, an “unlearning,” “a stripping away of previous education and established habits” (HSe 95). Spiritual knowledge consists in acquiring a certain perspective on the self that in return affects the subject’s mode of being (HSe 308). Moreover, the goal obtained is the “incorporation” of the rationality of the cosmos and the fusion of the individual self-government with divine government (HSe 457), which, even if not turned toward the world of Ideas, remains the achievement of a universal viewpoint. But Foucault’s own intent in his critical activity is not to reach such a point of perspective: his critique “is not transcendental, its goal is not that of making a metaphysics possible: (…) in the sense that it will not seek to identify the universal structures of all knowledge or of all possible moral action” (TFR 46). Here he tackles both Kant and the Stoics; he is not seeking the universally valid principles of reason (like Seneca or Marcus Aurelius), nor the conditions of possibility of legitimate knowledge (like Kant): “It is true that we have to give up hope of ever acceding to a point of view that could give us access to any complete and definitive knowledge of what may constitute our historical limits” (TFR 47).

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Renouncing the universal viewpoint has a few meanings here. First, it implies abandoning the point of view à la Descartes, a point where the “I” is “everyone, anywhere, at any moment” (SaP 216). I mentioned in the previous part that Foucault associates this form of universality with Descartes, not Kant, defending instead a form of “local” universality for the Kantian “we.”16 The Kantian universality consists instead of a community of a people living in a certain time and place (GSO 13), with which Foucault associates his own enterprise in his reading of “What is Aufklärung?.” But he also seems here to go one step further than Kant, by specifying a viewpoint that will not isolate legitimate knowledge—the form of the consensus—but brings into view its historicity and contingency: his criticism will “seek to treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events” (TFR 46, emphasis added).17 As a result, as Lemke rightly noticed, Foucault does not oppose rationality as a form of thinking unique to irrationality, but recognizes the plurality of rationalities: “in contrast to the universalist and rationalist tradition, a ‘history of truth’ sets out to analyze the historical conditions and limits of singular rationalities” (Lemke 2011, 30). In his attempts to think differently than he previously did, Foucault concludes that: Perhaps at most made it possible to go back through what I was already thinking, to think it differently, and to see what I had done from a new vantage point and in a clearer light. Sure of having traveled far, one finds that one is looking down on oneself from above. (UPe 11, emphasis added)

16  In her analysis of man’s finitude in The Order of Things, Han-Pile (2010) draws an interesting distinction between two forms of finitude and, crucially here, two forms of transcendence. Prior to modernity, transcendence is an “infinite understanding” (OT 314), God’s eye on the world. The understanding of human limits with modernity creates a “transcendental finitude” (Han-Pile 2010, 126), a transcendence/finitude which remains aware of human limits: “the transcendental finitude entails a limitation can be analytically deduced from the very concept of the transcendental as a standpoint (which implies a specific perspective and thus limiting conditions, by opposition to a God’s eye view which would not be limited in such a way)” (Han-Pile 2010, 126). These two forms of transcendence can, I believe, be associated with Foucault’s interpretation of Descartes’ (God’s infinite eye on the world) and Kant’s (transcendence as a specific standpoint). 17  Davidson (2005, xxi–xxii) notices that taking “thought as an event” rather than as an ahistorical and universally valid activity has long been Foucault’s stance toward philosophy.

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So that on the one hand, Foucault is very close to the plunging gaze of the Stoics evoked previously (HSe 282); on the other, instead of reaching the universality of cosmic reason or that of the transcendental subject, he remains close to his own self, yet transformed. Second, it is also the abandonment of “all these projects which pretend to be global and radical;” Foucault has in mind what he coined in The Order of Things discourses of “pre-critical naiveté” (OT 320), such as Marxism, that give the programmatic sketch of “another society,” or “a new man” (TFR 46–47; see also F2018, 191). In an unpublished interview, he introduces in this respect a distinction between political “totalizations,” which would tend to give such total and definitive answers, and the “generality” of his inquiries.18 This generality is defined by the “historical recurrence in Western societies” of the issues involved, in contradistinction to a meta-historical approach, or even an analysis of the variations over time of a single phenomenon: “ critical analysis in which one tries to see how the different solutions to a problem have been constructed; but also how these different solutions result from a specific form of problematization” (TFR 389, emphasis added). Different solutions to a problem do coexist within a given problematization, just as for instance, the human sciences were all the fruits of the modern episteme. What actually interests Foucault are the conditions for the possibility of different answers, that is disclosure of how a practice is understood as a problem that characterizes a mode of thinking, as will be developed in the next section. Critique as Problematization Foucault hence displaces the work of the philosopher from the studies of “answers to problems,” to the understanding of modes of problematization. For him, the activity of thought consists in problematization, not in providing answers: “what blocks thought is to explicitly or implicitly accept one form of problematization and seek an alternative solution” (DE II 344, 1431). Therefore his activity as “history of systems of thought” is a history of problematizations: “I would like to do a genealogy of problems” (F1997c, 256). Problematization is defined in another 18  The interview is actually published as in TFR (373–380). But in the audio tape at IMEC, Foucault adds side remarks to the published text, saying for instance that “this distinction between political totalization and generalization is important to me” (see FCL.26, C.26 1.1).

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interview as “the set of discursive or non-discursive practices that makes something enter into the play of the true and false, and constitutes it as an object for thought” (F1996f, 456–457). This formulation actually relates to the shift marked by governmentality when Foucault abandoned the “level of discourse,” to look at the effects in reality of true discourses. Yet it is not these effects that Foucault now seeks to isolate but the fact that the objects rendered visible by the practices are also “objects for thought.” Problematization should in fact be understood at two levels: the ordinary and the critical one.19 The ordinary problematization is, I would like to argue, the system of true discourses that always accompany a given subjectivation; the sexual codes of conducts in Antiquity, the precepts of the philosopher, or the system of norms of the modern subject exposed in the previous part: “the way people act or react is linked to a way of thinking, and of course thinking is related to tradition” (TS 14). It is, to paraphrase the Regent lectures, “what people think when they do what they are doing.” It is best understood in relation to the Greco-Roman subjectivation; the care of the self, in French “le souci de soi,” is a concern, a “preoccupation (…) a moral problematization,” says Foucault in UPe (9–10).20 In this respect, the difficulty of determining in Foucault’s texts whether this “ordinary problematization” is conscious or not, as proposed by Han-­ Pile (2002, 189–194), is correlative in my view to the paradoxical manner in which the modern subject is constituted/constitutes himself. As shown in Chap. 6, the constitution of a subject always implies a reflexive relation to truth, itself historically determined. But since the modern subject is subjectivated in relation to “discourses which are recognized institutionally or by consensus as true” (ST 11), the question arises as to whether these discourses themselves are instances of thought or of ideas, as defined earlier. Foucault’s point, in my view, is that a “prescriptive and rational

19  Han-Pile (2002, 189–194) considers the possibility of three levels of problematization, one of them being non-reflexive. Koopman (2013, 98–99) offers a typology of four problematizations, along two dimensions and two directions. I found this typology less relevant to what interests me here, that is thought as a rationality. 20  See also Burchell (1996, 31): “new truth games, new ways of objectifying and speaking the truth about ourselves, and new ways in which we are able to be and required to be subjects in relation to new practices of government.”

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articulation” is always present in the practices (HSe 447).21 But the ordinary problematization could be either a system or thought or a system of ideas, depending on the distance taken by the individual from the code of conduct he follows. In this strand of thought, Butler notices that: “certain kind of practices which are designed to handle certain kind of problems produce, over time, a settled domain of ontologies as their consequence and this ontological domain, in turn, constrains our understanding of what is possible” (Butler 2002, 216). The “ordinary problematization” appears therefore as the equivalent of the episteme (the historical conditions of possibility of knowledge) in the domain of the principles that guide the practices of the self. Therefore: The subject who is formed by the principles furnished by the discourse of truth is not yet the subject who endeavours to form itself. Engaged in “the arts of existence,” this subject is both crafted and crafting, and the line between how it is formed and how it becomes a kind of forming, is not easily, if ever, drawn. (Butler 2002, 225)

By contrast, criticism is a form of problematization that always coincides with thought. It consists first for Foucault in the examination of these existing, ordinary problematizations: “a critique (…) consists in seeing on what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established, unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based on” (F2001e, 456, emphasis added). From this viewpoint, the work of the philosopher consists in the restitution of these unexamined ways of thinking, in an examined way: “If the work of thinking has a meaning  – (…) it is to rethink the manner in which men problematize their behaviors” (DE II #344, 1431, emphasis added, personal translation). Second, by so doing, the philosopher is actually problematizing his own thinking, which I call a critical problematization. Following Koopman, one can say that Foucault “took already existing problematizations as his objects of inquiry while at the same time positioning his inquiries in such a way as to intensify these already-existing objects thus further problematizing them” (Koopman 2013, 99, emphasis added). In the same 21  This would be the only way to explain a position such as: “man is a thinking being up to his most mute practices” (DE II #344, 1431, emphasis added, personal translation). This passage does not appear in the first version of the interview, published in English as F1997c.

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strand of thought, Rabinow (2011, 11) contends that, for Foucault, thinking arises in the context of problems, in problematic situations. But Foucault’s inquiries also aim at pointing to new possible problems for our times, thanks to past and forgotten problematizations. It then consists in making visible new objects, that is turning into a problem a situation that was not seen as such: “it is a work of problematization and repeated re-­ problematization” (DE II #344, 1431, personal translation). As Deleuze puts it: “thought thinks its own history (past), in order to free itself from what it thinks (present) and be able finally ‘to think otherwise’” (Deleuze 1986, 127, personal translation). “Knowing if one can think differently than one thinks” is the goal that Foucault sets himself (UPe 8, emphasis added). It is his form of critique, the aim of which is first his own transformation. Second, by offering these critical problematizations to his public, Foucault intends to disrupt accepted modes of thinking and, with his own transformation, propel that of his readers: Understood in those terms, criticism (and radical criticism) is utterly indispensable for any transformation. For a transformation that would remain within the same mode of thought, a transformation that would only be a certain way of better adjusting the same thought to the reality of things, would only be a superficial transformation. (F2001e, 456–457)

“Better adjusting the same thought to the reality of things,” I believe, is to offer just another solution to a problem without questioning its terms; it is not thinking but playing with ideas in an unquestioned episteme, so to speak. Criticism in the sense looked for by Foucault is “the virtue of critique,” as he mentioned in his 1978 lecture on Kant (WIC). For Butler: If that self-forming subject is done in disobedience to the principles by which one is formed, then virtue becomes the practice by which the self forms itself in desubjugation, which is to say that it risks its deformation as subject, occupying that ontologically insecure position which poses the question anew: who will be a subject here, and what will count as a life. (Butler 2002, 226)

I find this definition compelling because it allows a fresh understanding of why Foucault so strongly insisted on the risk taken by the parrhesiast,

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as developed in the previous chapter. On the one side, this risk is the ultimate “exercise of freedom” (GSO 67). On the other, the parrhesiast, by breaking free from recognized forms of subjectivation, takes the risk of not being recognized as a subject.22 This is where Foucault differs most from his contemporary critical thinkers who often tackled him on this specific point: Habermas (1987, 276, 294) and Fraser (1994) for instance accused him of “crypto-­ normativism,” of not making clear the moral standpoint that guides him in his inquiries (Habermas 1987, 336–337; Taylor 1984). As I have tried to show in the previous section, Foucault is struggling against the crystallization of a viewpoint that would pretend to give definitive answers. To the contrary, Foucault insisted time and again on the fact that he didn’t see his task as offering solutions to problems: “there is always something ludicrous in philosophical discourse when it tries, from the outside, to dictate to others, to tell them where their truth is and how to find it” (UPe 9). Foucault’s resistance to giving answers should also be understood in relation to autonomy as a practice of the self; if it can be obtained by an exercise in thought, one should not expect the philosopher to be the shepherd denounced by Kant as “just another tutelage.” In this respect, Foucault repeatedly dissociated critique from “prophecy:” philosophy has a role to play “on the condition that philosophy stops thinking of itself as prophecy, (…) as pedagogy, or as legislation, and that it gives itself the task to analyse, clarify, and make visible, and thus intensify the struggles that develop around power” (F2018, 192; see also CT 15–16). Moreover, Foucault’s task is also an infinite questioning of his own thinking: “the theoretical and practical experience that we have of our limits and of the possibility of moving beyond them is always limited and determined; thus we are always in the position of beginning again” (TFR 47). I would like to argue that the critical activity, as defined by Foucault in his late articles, presented a final rationality, the activity of thought. Such an activity makes it possible to question one’s own present and get rid of the too easily accepted ordinary problematization: “the role of philosophy is not to discover what is concealed, but rather to make visible what 22  Both Foucault and Butler seem to refer indirectly to their experience of homosexuality. For an interpretation of the “stylization of existence” in relation to Foucault’s “attitude to homosexuality,” see Davidson (2006). For Butler’s interpretation of Foucault on these lines, see Butler (2006).

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precisely is visible, which is to say to make appear what is so close, so immediate, so intimately connected with ourselves that we cannot perceive it” (F2018, 192). It is on condition that one performs such an activity that autonomy as ethical differentiation is possible for the modern subject; it starts by the exit from the tutelage of consensus and continues with the stylization of one’s life, as evoked in the previous chapter. This definition offers to our predicament a form of social criticism that can be compared to other thinkers from this tradition, to whom Foucault finally recognized his own filiation. This point is approached in the next chapter.

Conclusion As I have tried to show in Chap. 7, Foucault’s reading of Kant in the first 1983 lecture was aimed at placing his inquiries into the Greek parrhesia in relation to contemporary times. I have argued there that he was actually trying to isolate the possibility of a modern form of autonomy. The current chapter proposed a continuation of this argument. Indeed, if autonomy is enabled by proper work on the self, it cannot be obtained without a confrontation with “consensus and stereotypes” as they appeared, in modern times, in “the public.” Hence, alongside considerations on the nature of the relations of the disciple to the guide, in the 1983 lecture Foucault gives the public an important role to play, in this dual sense of expressing the consensus and confronting it. Yet this necessity of a public for the constitution of an autonomous subject reveals a tension; on the one hand, the ordinary problematizations have to be tackled as what forms us into subjects, always already subjugated in a given regime of truth. On the other hand, Foucault’s own work as critique, and arguably any transformation of the self, would not be possible without a confrontation with the public. In the case of Foucault himself, it is interesting to notice that it is the activity of writing which constitutes the work on the self, in thought. It appears at first sight as a solitary experience. Yet because his books struggle with “a collective practice and a way of thinking” on a given topic, they can become triggers for similar experiences in his readers, hence taking a larger dimension: “the book should allow a transformation, a metamorphosis that is not only mine but can have a certain value, a certain form, accessible to others.” Foucault hence distinguishes between an experience-book of the kind he is writing, from a “truth-book or a demonstration book” (F2001b, 246), which again would deliver knowledge solely in the form of ideas.

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Foucault’s own work of ethical differentiation is also done from one book to the other, in differentiation with his own self. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, he already claimed: “I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: this is the morality of the civil status. At least spare us when we write” (AK 29). He comes back to this point in the introduction to UPe, stating that his motivation is “to get free of himself” (UPe 8). In any case, this critical attitude as an activity of thought, for the transformation in thought, is the last rationality that Foucault seems to study— a critical rationality. While he hopes to encourage his readers to perform similar work on themselves, he refuses to dictate the law of their actions: “So I have a political activity which very much derives from internal analyses, but that is not to transform my analyses into a law for others” (Mort and Peters 1979, 19). By distinguishing ideas and thoughts, Foucault tries to promote thinking as an activity rather than the learning of others’ ideas, where again one remains in the realm of existing problematization. Foucault insists instead on “the ethical differentiation,” in the striving for one’s own path out of the consensus. This is probably the reason why he often offers his own life as a philosopher as an example, rather than his ideas: At every moment, step by step, one must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, with what one is (...) The key to the personal political attitude of a philosopher is not to be sought in his ideas, as if it could be deduced from them, but rather in his philosophy-as-life, in his philosophical life, his ethos. (TFR 374)

The concept of philosophy as life, as an ethos, was the object of the final year of lectures at the Collège de France. Finally, as noted by Gros (2009, 328), Foucault’s last words on the last page of his last course’s manuscript were: “there is no establishment of the truth without an essential position of otherness; the truth is never the same; there can be truth only in the form of the other world and the other life (l’autre monde et la vie autre)” (CT 340, unread). After hesitating between two tests of truth, either the commonality of logos (as homologia),23 or the ethical life as differentiation, Foucault chose the ethos.

 See Chap. 7.

23

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References Foucault’s Work AK 2002. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge Classics. BB 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics – Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. BHS  1993. About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth. Political Theory, 21 (2): 198–227. CT 2011. The Courage of Truth – Lectures at the Collège de France 1983–1984. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DP 1995. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage Books. GSO 2008. The Government of Self and Others – Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–1983. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. HoS 1978. The History of Sexuality I. New York: Random House. HSe 2005. The Hermeneutics of the Subject  – Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. OT 1994. The Order of Things – An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books. PK 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon Books. PMVI 1980. Power, Moral Values and the Intellectual  – An interview with Michael Bess. Online: https://my.vanderbilt.edu/michaelbess/ foucault-interview/ PS 2015. The Punitive Society  – Lectures at the Collège de France 1972–1973. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. SaP  1982. The Subject and Power. In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. H.L.  Dreyfus and P.  Rabinow, 208–226. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ST 2017. Subjectivity and Truth – Lectures at the Collège de France 1980–1981. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. STPe 2009. Security, Territory, Population  – Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. TFR 1984. The Foucault Reader, ed. P.  Rabinow. Chicago: Pantheon Books, New York. TS  L.H. Martin and H. Gutman (eds.). 1988. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. London: Tavistock. UPe 1990. The Use of Pleasures. New York: Vintage Books. WDTT 2014. Wrong-Doing Truth-Telling – The Function of Avowal in Justice, ed. Fabienne Brion and Bernard E.  Harcourt. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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WIC  2007 [1978]. What is Critique?. In The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth, 41–81. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Semiotext(e).

Articles F1991a. 1991 [1978]. Introduction. In The Normal and the Pathological, ed. G. Canguilhem, 7–24. New York: Zone Books. F1991b. 1991 [1978]. Questions of Method. In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 73–86. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. F1996f. 1996 [1984]. The Concern for Truth. In Foucault Live (Collected Interviews, 1961–1984), ed. S. Lotringer, 455–464. New York: Semiotext(e). F1997a. 1997 [1980]. The Masked Philosopher. In The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.1, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. P. Rabinow, 321–328. New York: The New Press. F1997c. 1997 [1983]. On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress. In The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.1, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. P. Rabinow, 253–280. New York: The New Press. F2001b. 2001 [1978]. Interview with Michel Foucault. In The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.3, Power, ed. J.D.  Faubion and P.  Rabinow (general editor), 239–297. New York: The New Press. F2001c. 2001 [1979]. For an Ethics of Discomfort. In The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.3, Power, ed. J.D.  Faubion and P.  Rabinow (general editor), 443–448. New York: The New Press. F2001d. 2001 [1981]. Omnes et Singulatim. In The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.3, Power, ed. J.D.  Faubion and P.  Rabinow (general editor), 298–325. New York: The New Press. F2001e. 2001 [1981]. So Is It Important to Think? In The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.3, Power, ed. J.D.  Faubion and P.  Rabinow (general editor), 454–458. New York: The New Press. F2018. 2018 [1978]. The Analytic Philosophy of Politics. Foucault Studies 24: 188–200.

Works in French DE II  2001 [1994]. Dits et Ecrits, II 1976–1988. Paris: Quarto-Gallimard.

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Audio Recordings REG  Regent’s Lecture at Berkeley, 12/04/1983. Available online at: http:// ubu.com/sound/foucault.html

Materials at IMEC (Following Their Reference at IMEC): FCL.26  1983. Corrections of Politics Interview. Interview at Berkeley (C.26.1.1). FCL.63  1981. Subjectivité et Vérité. Audio Version of the Cours au Collège de France (C.63.1 to C.63.7).

Other Authors Allen, Amy. 2008. The Politics of Ourselves – Power, Autonomy and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory. New York, Columbia University Press. Burchell, Graham. 1996. Liberal Government and Techniques of the Self. In Foucault and Political Reason – Liberalism, Neoliberalism and Rationalities of Government, ed. A. Barry, Osborne Terry, and Rose Nikolas, 19–36. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Butler, Judith. 2002. What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue. In The Political, ed. D. Ingram, 212–226. London: Basil Blackwell. ———. 2006. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge [1990]). Davidson, Arnold. 2005. Introduction. HSe, pp. xix–xxx. ———. 2006. Ethics as Ascetics: Foucault, the History of Ethics, and Ancient Thought. In The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. G. Gutting, 123–148. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deleuze, Gille. 1986. Foucault. Les Editions de Minuit: Paris. Deligiorgi, Katerina. 2002. Universalizability, Publicity and Communication: Kant’s Conception of Reason. European Journal of Philosophy 10 (2): 143–159. ———. 2005. Kant and the Culture of Enlightenment. New York: SUNY Press. Fraser, Nancy. 1994. Michel Foucault: A “Young Conservative”? In Critique and Power, ed. Kelly Mark, 185–210. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gros, Frederic. 2009. Situation du Cours. In Le Courage de la Vérité – Cours au Collège de France 1983–1984, 314–328. Paris: Seuil-Gallimard. Guyer, Paul. 2004. Kant, Immanuel. In Edward Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London, Routledge. Available online at: http:// www.rep.routledge.com/article/DB047SECT14 Habermas, Jurgen. 1987. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge: MIT Press [1985]).

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———. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Harvard: MIT Press [1962]). Han-Pile, Béatrice. 2002. Foucault’s Critical Project – Between the Transcendental and the Historical. Stanford UP: Stanford. ———. 2010. “The Death of Man:” Foucault and Anti-Humanism. In Foucault and Philosophy, ed. O’Leary and Falzon, 118–142. Oxford: Blackwell. Koopman, Colin. 2013. Genealogy as Critique  – Foucault and the Problems of Modernity. Indiana University Press: Bloomington. Lemke, Thomas. 2011. Critique and Experience in Foucault. Theory, Culture & Society 28 (4): 26–48. Macherey, Pierre. 2009. De Canguilhem à Foucault  – la Force des Normes. La Fabrique Editions: Paris. Mort, Frank, and Roy Peters. 1979. Foucault Recalled: Interview with Michel Foucault. Online: http://www.uib.no/sites/w3.uib.no/files/attachments/ mortpetersfoucaultrecalledaninterview.pdf O’Neill, Onora. 1986. The Public Use of Reason. Political Theory 14 (4): 523–551. Rabinow, Paul. 2011. Dewey and Foucault: What’s the Problem? Foucault Studies (11): 11–19. Rose, Nikolas. 1999. Governing. In Powers of Freedom  – Reframing Political Thought, 15–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strauss, Leo. 1941. Persecution and the Art of Writing. Social Research 8 (1/4): 488–504. Taylor, Charles. 1984. Foucault on Freedom and Truth. Political Theory 12 (2): 152–183.

CHAPTER 9

Concluding Remarks: Foucault and Contemporary Social Criticism

My investigations were spurred by a puzzle: the critique of modern Enlightenment for the sake of a multicultural ethics, in the late twentieth century, seems to have left us with no standpoint from which to formulate social criticism. In its traditional form, social criticism was understood as meta-critique, based on the capacity to take a distance from ordinary opinions; the prophet addressed a community of faith and spoke the words of God. In its modern form, the moral standpoint of the critic was derived either from the neutrality of science, a theory of domination, or belief in the historical process of emancipation. All these references are now lost, partly as a result of the strength of the multicultural predicament. Indeed, as Honneth puts it: “the consciousness of a plurality of cultures and the experience of a variety of different social emancipation movements have significantly lowered expectations of what criticism ought to be” (Honneth 2009, 20). Social criticism seems therefore to be trapped in a paradox. On the one hand, it needs to be a rational activity; on the other, rationality has sustained so much criticism that no universally valid criterion is left for making acceptable normative judgments. Is social criticism possible today? What form can it take? In this enterprise, Foucault appeared as central because he both offered a striking diagnosis of modernity and managed to redefine criticism in terms of “an ontology of the present,” terms that are appropriate, I would like to argue, for our postmodern predicament.

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Foucault associates his work in this ontology with that of Hegel, Nietzsche, Weber, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School.1 While an appraisal of his connection to each of these authors is far beyond the scope of this work, Foucault’s relation to the Frankfurt School is particularly relevant to my subject. Indeed, if one follows Honneth, “the various authors of the Frankfurt School are united in the idea that the living conditions of modern capitalist societies produce social practices (…) that result in a pathological deformation of our capacities for reason” (Honneth 2009, vii). The general problematic of the movement, and the diagnosis of modern societies in terms of the rationalities involved, create an obvious link with Foucault’s work. But, at the same time, the reference to “pathologies of reason” also indicates the source of the main divergence. Moreover, it is Honneth’s contention that Habermas succeeded in offering a rational social criticism relevant to our multicultural time (Honneth 2009, 41), which can fruitfully be compared to Foucault’s. It is to this confrontation between Foucault and his main interlocutors on reason and rationality that I would now like to turn, in order to summarize in this final chapter the findings of my inquiry and show Foucault’s specific contribution to the possibility of engaging in meaningful social criticism, even in our times. When he mentions them, Foucault rarely specifies the authors involved in “the Frankfurt School,” but he points essentially to Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Habermas.2 Interestingly, a comparison of Foucault’s work to each of these authors can highlight the different steps of his own project.

Diagnoses of Modernity: Foucault Versus Horkheimer and Marcuse In the introduction to the last volumes of the History of Sexuality in 1984 (UPe & CS), Foucault describes in retrospect his inquiries as three theoretical shifts, necessary for the analysis of “the advancement of learning,” 1  In the lecture in 1983, he mentions a “certain tradition of modern philosophy,” alongside “Hegel and the Frankfurt School, Nietzsche and Max Weber” (GSO 21; see also WDTT 236; TFR 32). In a 1982 lecture at Vermont University, he adds to the list—Fichte, Husserl, and Heidegger (TS 4). In “What is Enlightenment?” (TFR 32), the reference to the Frankfurt School in general is replaced by “Horkheimer or Habermas.” 2  Whether Habermas should be considered as part of the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory is a matter of debate (see Held 1980, 249–253). In any case, for Foucault he was (see for instance F1998d, 440).

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the “manifestations of power,” and “what is termed the subject” (UPe 6). These theoretical shifts are Foucault’s re-problematizations, his manner of formulating anew the problems of knowledge, power, and the subject. Although these domains appear as separate axes, they are not independent from one another. The problematization of power incorporates the axis of knowledge, and the analyses of the subject further build on this power-­ knowledge entanglement. Because the analyses of modern power, from discipline to governmentality, include the dimension of knowledge and therefore link “the advancement of learning” and “the manifestations of power,” they can interestingly be compared to the works of Horkheimer and Marcuse, a comparison suggested by Foucault himself in interviews. This part presents both an overview of Foucault’s first two periods (my Chaps. 2, 3, and 4) and the way he distances himself from those authors. Modern Entrapments The “archaeologies” that Foucault pursued until 1970 are best defined, in my view, as critical inquiries into the nature of knowledge and the way it determines our mode of thinking. Foucault intends to expose the historical conditions of possibility, or “the unconscious” of knowledge (F1996a, 52). In respect to modernity, Foucault discloses in The Order of Things (OT) the central status of the subject, of man as an empirico-­transcendental doublet. Because representation cannot exhaust either the reality of things or the complexity of thinking, the modern condition seems to be doomed to an endless work of commentary and interpretation, that takes for granted the “founding subject” as the origin of meaning. The “figure of man,” the transcendental subject who takes himself as an object of knowledge, is for Foucault the main assumption of the modern episteme, its condition of possibility, and its trap. Foucault’s intention in his criticism of modernity is to show the contingency of this form of thinking and to point to a potential future break in the episteme that would allow us to escape the cyclical nature of the human sciences. But this description of modernity as built on the fiction of the subject seems to swallow human agency in “the unconscious of knowledge” which dictates certain modes of thinking. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault re-works the concepts of the “end of the man” and of “meaning” in an approach to discourse aimed at remaining “at the level of the statement,” with no attempt to reach the referent behind the

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discourse or the author’s intention (AK 32–33). But this approach does not lift the problem of agency raised by his approach: the author of a text or an act is nothing other than an anonymous individual who came to fulfill a certain function in a field regulated by rules he is unaware of. Starting in the 1970’s, Foucault becomes more interested in political issues, at both a personal and academic level. The period starts with his involvement in political action in the domain of the prisons in France. Discipline and Punish, published in 1975, bears the marks of that involvement: it describes the disciplinary regime that supports the development of industrial society. In Foucault’s view, this model reflects the functioning of modern power better than the contract model, that takes the subject of rights as a given and consolidates the legitimacy of power in the metaphor of the transfer of those rights. The disciplinary regime both reinforces and is reinforced by the human sciences. It functions through constant control and sanction, imposing a normalized behavior on the bodies. The main thesis of the book is that modern power does not function solely negatively through repression but also—and mainly—produces subjects as always already subjugated, “psychologized and individualized” under its mechanisms. It thus doesn’t leave any margin of action to the individual, reinforcing the picture of the modern entrapment first sketched in The Order of Things. The description of modern rationality has nonetheless been significantly modified by the analysis of discipline: rationality appears first as the structure of the system of surveillance through which the utility of the bodies is maximized. Second, while The Order of Things pointed to the unconscious modes in which our thoughts are oriented, the analysis of power has added an important dimension. The disciplinary regime intertwined with the human sciences indeed needs the practical rationality of subjects: they are supposed to have reasons for their acts. Rationality therefore, is not only what passes through individuals in the structure of the episteme or the apparatus of power. It is also the reasoning of individuals who can provide reasonable justifications for their acts. All these rationalities—the structure of the episteme, the political rationality of the disciplinary apparatus, and the practical reasoning of individuals—have the common effect of regulation and normalization (Ae 255–256), denying the possibility of autonomy even more strongly than The Order of Things did.

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According to his interviews, Foucault discovered the work of the Frankfurt School while working on Discipline and Punish.3 Alluding to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, he summarizes in a 1978 interview their approach to modernity in terms similar to his: The West wouldn’t have been able to reach the economic and cultural results that characterize it without the exercise of particular form of rationality. And in fact how can that rationality be separated from the mechanisms, procedures, techniques and effects of power that accompany it? (…) Couldn’t it be concluded that the Enlightenment’s promise of attaining freedom through the exercise of reason has been turned upside down, resulting in a domination by reason itself? (F2001b, 273)

In their work, that describes the final “collapse of reason,” Foucault identifies a thesis similar to his own in those years: the entanglement of power with knowledge negates the Enlightenment faith in the capacity of knowledge to promote emancipation and freedom. Foucault insists in Discipline and Punish that “the ‘Enlightenment,’ which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines” (DP 222). The liberal creed in human freedom and autonomy is thus reduced to “an ideology of the parliamentary democracy” (SMBD 33). Cook also rightly remarks that while Foucault mentions Horkheimer a few times, in this interview and others, he never makes references to Adorno, except for this specific text written with Horkheimer (Cook 2018, 1). However, it is her contention that Adorno and Foucault have much in common; they indeed share, as Foucault recognizes above, a common diagnosis of modernity and the criticism of modern sciences in the way they have been entangled with power. She proceeds to show that their critical attitude is also very close, mentioning for instance that in Adorno’s reading of Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?,” “maturity is achieved when individuals are able ‘to resist established opinions’” (Cook 3  Kirchheimer and Rusche’s Punishment and Social Structure is quoted in DP (24, 54) and again in the first preface to the History of Sexuality II, published in TFR (171). This last reference is significant, in my viewpoint, since it is one of the texts in which, in 1984, Foucault summarizes his entire work; he explains that in his own attempt to conceptualize punitive practices, he had to abandon both the model of the law (Durkheim) and the model of the development of industrial modes of production (Kirchheimer and Rusche). So it is in contradistinction to their work that Foucault tried to specify the terms of the problem (his “problématique”).

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2018, 123). Yet I think that although Foucault’s reading of Kant indeed sounds very close, it cannot be properly understood without due reference to his studies on modes of subjectivation. Hence when Cook suggests that “Adorno deciphered Kant’s ahistorical and disembodied transcendental subject as a figure for a society that is ‘unaware of itself’” (Cook 2018, 3), he couldn’t be farther from Foucault’s reading, as developed in Chap. 7. Foucault also summarizes in the same 1978 article his main points of opposition to Horkheimer and Adorno: their assumption is that the distorted instrumental reason of their time should be opposed to an undistorted, natural form; for Cook, “Foucault does not share Adorno’s aim of returning to things themselves” (Cook 2018, x). In Honneth’s terms, instrumental reason constitutes “a pathology of reason,” as opposed to a right or true reason. This opposition between true and false discourse, so to speak, was already discarded by Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge: “There is not (…) a sort of ideal discourse that is both ultimate and timeless and which choices, extrinsic in origin, have perverted, disturbed, suppressed” (AK 70). But this is also where, for Honneth, the kind of social criticism proposed by Foucault cannot be of help in “overcoming the social suffering caused by deficient rationality” (Honneth 2009, 21), a point to which I’ll come back in the next part. Furthermore, from Foucault’s viewpoint, the Frankfurt School’s assumption that an unalienated individual should be the aim of critical theory, remains entrapped in a “Marxist humanism,” where the subject is taken as a given. For him, the major effect of the power-knowledge entanglement is instead the production of the subject within its threads (F2001b, 274–275).4 Foucault tackles here “the repressive hypothesis:” if the modern subject is produced by power, it should not be approached as if alienated or repressed; one should not try to “free” the subject, or to retrieve a lost identity (F2001b, 275). This point is in turn one of the main theses of the first volume of the History of Sexuality, and seems to be addressed, among others, to Marcuse5: “I think that Marcuse is trying to use the ancient themes inherited from the nineteenth century to salvage the 4  This is also indeed a major revision of the Marxist’s conception of the subject, already tackled in the 1973 lectures. According to Harcourt, Foucault aims at showing that Work is not the essence of man, but is “fabricated” into an essence by disciplinary power; as a result, disalienation is a myth (Harcourt 2013, 299). 5  Reich is the one actually mentioned in HoS rather than Marcuse. See Boyer on Foucault and Freudo—Marxism (2012).

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subject, understood in its traditional sense” (F1996b, 102, translation modified).6 Foucault does recognize that Marcuse, by focusing on how power works at the level of the human psyche, tries to isolate the effects of power on the subject, just as Foucault did. But, says Foucault, “these analyses always thought the function and the role of power was to say no, to prohibit, to prevent, to trace a limit” (RC 128; see also PK 59): such a model of power—the negative power that forbids—admits the juridical model of the contract and the predominance of law in its functioning. For Foucault, this model is an inaccurate description of modern disciplinary power that functions through norms rather than law. * * * Foucault’s conceptualization of power as disciplinary was in fact paradoxical: on the one hand it aimed at showing the irrelevance of the contract model for modern societies, proposing instead a “web-like” spread of power (HoS 96). On the other, the subject that he described could not be the node of such a web and seemed rather subjected to an anonymous, omnipotent king. As a form of confirmation, in the lectures of 1978 and 1979 Foucault pursued his analyses of power but with a major shift, thus lifting the paradox: power is no longer described as discipline but as government. The Conduct of Conducts The understanding that power functions both at the disciplinary level of the individual body and the global, statistical one of the population, opens the way, around 1976, for a renewed analysis of power, this time in terms of governmentality as the conduct of conducts, quickly replacing the original focus on bio-power. Foucault insists on the advantage of the notion “conduct,” since it has the dual meaning of conducting others and conducting oneself; government functions both at the macro levels of the population, the society, and the state, and the micro level of the family or even the self (STPe 192–193). The notion of “government” also allows jointly conceptualizing very different forms of the exercise of power: it covers both the pastoral power 6

 The French has “subject;” the translation has “ego.”

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of the Church and modern liberal governmentality, which has itself two versions. The first is classical liberalism, characteristic of the exercise of power up to the 1960’s; it functions with statistical tools alongside disciplinary techniques. The second is neoliberal governmentality, whose principles were first applied in the 1960’s. In this latest form of government, Foucault was strikingly led to consider the possibility that individuals could be governed without any subjection. Some speak of Foucault’s fascination at this stage with neoliberalism or, at least of “a sense of (albeit value-neutral) intellectual attraction and esteem” (Gordon 1991, 6; Behrent 2009; Gamez 2018; Zamora and Behrent 2015; see also Lorenzini 2018 for a critical review of this issue). It is better understood, I believe, as an attempt to adjust his critical activity to the actuality of power (BB 191–192). This is how one can relate to the renewed references or allusions to Marcuse in the 1978 and 1979 lectures (STPe 338; BB 117; 127 n. 46). If, starting in the 1960’s, the disciplinary techniques of power were recognized as “cumbersome” (PK 58), then Marcuse’s criticism of capitalist societies in terms of the uni-­dimensionality of the individual is insufficient for Foucault (BB 113–114). It indeed misses the development of new specific techniques of power that do not aim at uniformization: “I think something completely different emerges in the seventeenth century that is much more than this entry of human existence into the abstract world of the commodity” (STPe 338). This point is interesting in relation to Foucault’s definition of the public in modern societies, evoked in Chap. 8. Indeed, he tackles via Marcuse the criticism of modern societies which claims that “capitalist society has forced individuals into a type of mass consumption with the functions of standardization and normalization” (BB 113). While Foucault would obviously not oppose the idea of the modern exercise of power’s uniformizing effects, he refuses to limit the analysis to such a claim; with the emergence of neoliberal governmentality, he discerns a new aim in the current exercise of power: it is no longer the uniformization of societies but “the multiplicity and the differentiation of enterprises” (BB 149). He thus shifts his understanding of “the public” accordingly, and recognizes in it a more complex arena than the simple exhibition of a governed opinion. The turn to the studies of governmentality indeed also meant a renewed approach to the relations between truth and power. By recognizing the importance of veridiction in the mechanisms of the liberal exercise of power, Foucault displaces the description of his work to “the history of

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the regime of veridictions,” in contradistinction to a history of error or a history of ideology. He adds: This means abandoning once again that well-known critique of European rationality and its excesses, which has been constantly taken up in various forms since the beginning of the nineteenth century. From romanticism to the Frankfurt School, what has always been called into question and challenged has been rationality with the weight of power supposedly peculiar to it. (BB 35–36)

By so doing, Foucault finally escapes McCarthy’s and Habermas’s charge of radical criticism of reason (McCarthy 1994, 248; Habermas 1987, 283). * * * Foucault’s proximity to the various authors of the Frankfurt School evoked above is also a point of departure for his own developments; starting from a common diagnosis of modernity, Foucault mentions these authors all the more easily in 1978 as his own curriculum led him away from them. The “problematization” of power, not as a repressing force imposed on a natural subject but as producing it instead, is the main difference with the Frankfurt School. It led Foucault first to refine his definition of power as the conduct of conducts and, as a consequence, to his later interest in modes of subjectivation. By so doing, Foucault both stepped back from the Frankfurt School’s thesis of a modern reason doomed to domination and self-destruction and turned to forms of rationality and knowledge that escaped the power-knowledge entanglement. From this viewpoint, his approach is similar to Habermas’s, although the type of rationality and the kind of critical attitude they offer for our time are strikingly different, as will be shown below. Such a comparison is therefore interesting for understanding Foucault’s potential contribution to the contemporary debate on rationality.

Critical Attitudes: Foucault and Habermas Foucault’s untimely death in 1984 prevented the holding at Berkeley of the “Foucault-Habermas debate,” which is famous even though it did not take place. The debate was supposed to focus on the diagnoses of

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modernity that both philosophers proposed (F1998d, 448). Habermas published in 1985 The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, where almost three chapters deal with Foucault, which can be taken as his contribution to the debate. In his Adorno Prize speech in 1980, entitled “Modernity: an Unfinished Project,” he termed Foucault an anti-modernist. I assume that Foucault refers to this intervention when he addresses Habermas in his interviews.7 Based on the published books only, Habermas’s criticism does not give a full picture of Foucault’s enterprise.8 Yet a reading of Foucault’s project—including the studies of the care of the self that Habermas ignores—in relation to the “communicative rationality” that Habermas offers to “the unfinished project of modernity,” better specifies Foucault’s critical project. It is interesting first to notice that Habermas’s understanding of the modern predicament is very close to Foucault’s; like Foucault, he intends to depart from the philosophy of the subject, also called the philosophy of consciousness; Habermas admits that Foucault has “acutely diagnosed” the endless loop that traps the empirico-transcendental modern subject (Habermas 1987, 317). In this respect, both authors seem to refuse the immediateness of a subject taken as a given by modern authors, including the members of the Frankfurt School studied in the previous part (see also Allen 2008, 41). Moreover, both authors agree, says Kelly, that claims to 7  Cf. F1998d, p. 447: the journalist asks Foucault to situate himself in relation to Habermas’ criticism of postmodernity, as expressed in his 1980 lecture. In his text, however, Habermas distinguishes between the postmodernity of neo-conservatives and the anti-modernity of the Young Conservatives, putting Foucault within this second category (Habermas 1981, 13). In any case, Foucault’s answer is: “what are we calling postmodernity? I’m not up to date.” See also Schmidt and Wartenberg (1994, p. 300) on this point. 8  Habermas’s focus on Foucault’s earlier works, from History of Madness to Discipline and Punish; he simply misses the turn implied by the studies in governmentality and subjectivation. Habermas actually mentions Foucault’s Howison lectures at Berkeley in 1980, where Foucault gives an account of the technologies of the self. But he understands this inquiry solely as a furthering of the modes of subjectivation as subjection that Foucault first studied in Discipline and Punish: indeed, the technologies of the self are depicted by Habermas as: “These technologies that encourage individuals to test themselves conscientiously and discover the truth about themselves Foucault traces back to the practice of confession (…) Structurally similar practices, which penetrate all realms of education in the eighteenth century, install an armory of instruments for self-observation and self-questioning” (Habermas 1987, 273). Habermas thus downplays the evocation of active Greek subjectivation mentioned by Foucault in the lectures (see BHS and HOW), which is paramount for grasping the overall importance of the techniques of the self for Foucault’s project, as I have tried to show here. See also Kelly (1994) on this point.

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truth and justice “can no longer rely on religion, metaphysics or any other traditional bases of these claims” (Kelly, 1994, 366). Starting from a common diagnosis, they offer a completely different critical attitude, as I would like to sketch below. Modes of Subjectivation: Foucault Versus Habermas Foucault’s detachment in 1979 from a certain form of criticism as “missing” the most recent development in Western societies, shown above as turned against Marcuse, can also be seen as a self-criticism. Indeed, the study of neoliberal governmentality led him to the understanding that “veridiction,” acts of truth-telling, were becoming predominant over jurisdiction. While Ewald (1990) amply describes “the regression of the juridical” and its impact on government, my suggestion is that it does not have a lesser impact on Foucault’s conception of the modern subject. In fact he revised his first description of power as discipline in order to take into account the fact that the “conduct of conducts” implied subjects acting on their own, not under the yoke of the norm—still too close to law in this respect—but under the guidance of veridictions as acts of truth. I have argued in Chap. 4 that Foucault turned to the relations between subject and truth in order to understand the nature of the social constraint imposed by neoliberal governmentality, that seemed to function mainly with veridiction (acts of truth). If government passes by individuals’ veridiction, then it is always “indexed to subjectivity” (GL 82). Foucault’s focus in the years 1980–1984 turns therefore to subjectivation, the process of becoming a subject. Foucault wants to analyze “the experience the subject can have of himself once he has the possibility or the obligation to recognize about himself something which is taken to be true” (ST 12, my translation). Crucially, subjectivation appears as a rational process by which an individual either constitutes himself or is constituted into a subject, in relation to a true discourse. Foucault has indeed demonstrated with the techniques of the self a third dimension to rationality; alongside epistemological knowledge and techniques of power, it points to the rationality in relation to self, the effect on the self of the way we think. Knowledge-savoir in its modern sense is not the focus any longer but the power these acts of truth contain, in any regime of truth, be it the more archaic one or the scientific modern one. The displacement consists in studying veridiction as truth-telling instead of knowledge, and its effect on

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the one who speaks; the regime of truth would then be the power effect of truth (and not the truth effects of power—SMBD 24) on the subject. Moreover, since the nature of the truth involved is changing historically and culturally, regimes of truth, and subjectivity, are changing accordingly. The modern subject of neoliberal government is then bound to his own, albeit sometimes transparent, specific regime of truth. In an ironic manner, Foucault’s turn to acts of veridiction starting in the 1980’s seems to bring him closer to Habermas, who had put aside instrumental rationality for the sake of focusing on a communicative rationality, relying on our being “fundamentally language-using animals” (McCarthy 1994, 251). For Habermas, it is this potential for another rationality that might permit the fulfillment of the project of modernity and the emancipation of individuals (Habermas 1981, 12).9 Yet Habermas’s communicative action, as will be shown below, is very close to Plato’s homologia which, as I have tried to show in Chap. 7, is precisely the kind of identity in discourse that Foucault intends to tackle. Foucault similarly finds in the Greco-Roman care of the self, I would like to argue, an alternative rationality. He insisted enough on the fact that one should not seek solutions to contemporary problems in the solutions of past problems, nor did he start to believe in the possibility of emancipation as if a free subject existed beneath the subjugated one. Yet my argument has been that the study of the Greco-Roman techniques of the self was motivated by the existence of parrhesia and the type of subject it rendered possible. Indeed, in contradistinction to the Christian subject whose subjectivation is a renunciation of the self and an absolute subjection, the Greco-Roman care of the self aims at the slow building of a subject as self-sovereign. Yet subjectivation always implies a subjection, and vice-versa: the bind to truth is independent from the type of subject constituted. To “get started again on Greek thought” (F1996g, 470) would then mean looking for the possibility of a modern form of autonomy, understood as the bind to a freely chosen rule of conduct, a style of existence. Lorenzini interestingly considers that Foucault’s critical attitude consists of “possibilising.” By giving, in his genealogy of power, examples of counter-conducts, Foucault actually demonstrates that:

9  The potential both developed and was distorted by capitalist modernization (Habermas 1987, 315).

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individuals in history have always been immersed in, and subjugated by, complex power-knowledge formations, but never entirely trapped, since they were always able to elaborate a multiplicity of specific, contingent, but real forms of counter-conduct. If it was possible for them, Foucault’s argument goes, this suggests that it is possible for us as well. (Lorenzini 2020, 12, emphasis added)

Such a possibility has nothing evident: in Foucault’s genealogy of the modern subject, one rather finds the genealogy of our obedience, inherited from the Christian tradition of the renunciation to self. With the Greeks by contrast, Foucault traced “the genealogy of the critical attitude” (FS 170–171), constructed as a practice of the self. Yet he insists that our modernity has lost the understanding of the care of the self as work on the self for its transformation. Once truth is understood under scientific categories, the idea of “a price to pay” in order to gain access to truth becomes incomprehensible. This does not mean that the techniques of the self have ceased functioning; to the contrary, the human sciences actually incorporated these techniques in order to mold the modern subject. The positivism of the human sciences led to the production of a modern self, a subject unaware of the possibility to actively transform himself. This is where, I believe, Foucault and Habermas take the most different stances toward the present. Habermas indeed derives his theory of communicative action from the inter-subjective socialization of individuals as opposed to the subject-centered reason, rightly denounced in his view by Foucault and others. He offers to replace the paradigm of the knowing subject by “the paradigm of mutual understanding between subjects capable of speech and action” (Habermas 1987, 295). Habermas’s fundamental assumption is that the possibility of ideal speech and understanding is inscribed in the modern forms of socialization. More precisely, following Allen’s reading of Habermas, the model of subjectivation he offers is one where the child is first raised under the authority of his parents and slowly internalizes the social norms that they reflect to him, thus reaching autonomy (Allen 2009, 17; Allen 2011, 53). This model crucially assumes, as Allen puts it, that “the social controls that have to be internalized are rational and the authority of the parents who enforce them is legitimate, thus, they are unobjectionable from a normative viewpoint” (Allen 2009, 18, emphasis added). Allen rightly assumes here that the rationality of the social controls implies for Habermas their

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legitimacy and their normativity: Habermas—in this sense a true heir of the Frankfurt School—does claim the existence of an undistorted, true, form of rationality for our time: communicative rationality. Hence Habermas’s autonomy as the internalization of the social norm seems to result almost naturally from the process of socialization itself. Moreover, the morality of the social norm is derived from its consensuality: “communicative rationality (…) brings along with it connotations of non-­ coercively unifying, consensus building force of a discourse in which the participants overcome their first subjectively biased views in favor of a rationally motivated agreement” (Habermas 1987, 315). Such a consensus seems easily obtained by the integration of the social norms: “the lifeworld forms a horizon and at the same time offers a store of things taken for granted in the given culture from which communicative participants draw consensual interpretative patterns in their efforts at interpretation” (Habermas 1987, 298, emphasis added). This constitutes a major point of contention with Foucault’s account of subjectivation. More precisely, Foucault would accept Habermas’s description of the modern subject’s formation in the family nucleus, yet with a major twist. In the 1974 lectures he recalls, for instance, the role that the family plays in the disciplinary process: “the family is the instance of constraint that will permanently fix individuals to their disciplinary apparatuses” (PPe 81). Hence for Foucault the social norm propelled by the family is “imposed on bodies” and cannot be taken as non-coercive. It is by the imposition of these social norms that modern individuals are subjected into “docile bodies” (DP 135). The studies of subjectivity do not fundamentally change this position, since the techniques used by the disciplinary regime and the apparatus of sexuality are presented as having integrated the ancient techniques of the self, for the sake of producing the modern subjugated subject. Yet the injunction at the beginning of the 1982 lectures to “a politics of ourselves,” as a revival of the care of the self, might be understood as an injunction to “exit from immaturity,” for the sake of autonomy. Foucault’s autonomy, as I defined it in the previous chapters, consists of the extraction from one’s upbringing and the free choice of a rule of conduct, a style of existence. In sharp contrast with Habermas, this transformation of the self implies an extraction from the consensus. It is indeed my contention that Foucault’s autonomy is best defined as an ethical differentiation. It is the risk taken, the courage to detach oneself from the system of thought into which one was raised to be a subject. But the

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ethical differentiation should not be understood as “a fundamental anarchism that would be like an originary freedom” (WIC 75), nor as a purely narcissist quest for a lost and authentic self (Gros 2001, 515). My claim is that the differentiation remains a bind to some truth, a “rational and prescriptive articulation, which is the techne,” the art of living (HSe 447). This rule, in its most subjective form, becomes a “style” of life. Hence the ethical differentiation is also an aesthetic exercise, where the transformation of the self implies making of one’s life a work of art. * * * Both Foucault—in his last years—and Habermas are thus trying to define a form of autonomy adequate for our time. But, derived from a different understanding of modern subjectivity, the form of autonomy they offer is radically at odds. Habermas sees in the inter-subjective formation of the subject and his internalization of the social norm the promise of “communicative action;” Foucault by contrast sees in this socialization the very frame from which one should break free in order to constitute oneself as a moral subject. Where Habermas sees in the universality of the norm the proof of its normativity and its legitimacy, Foucault sees only normalization (F1997c, 254).10 This in turn leads to two distinct critical attitudes. Two Critical Attitudes It is now possible to compare Foucault’s and Habermas’s critical attitudes. Foucault’s autonomy is obtained, as mentioned in the previous section, by a confrontation with the consensus as it appeared, in modern times, in “the public.” The critical attitude consists in disclosing ordinary “problematizations” as what renders certain practices possible at the expense of others. It is based on Foucault’s principle of the “irreducibility of thought” (TFR 335): any practice is always understood and problematized within a given rational framework. Rethinking that problematization allows its contingency to be disclosed, and renders possible a re-problematization, or a critical problematization. Interestingly, Foucault’s ordinary problematization can be compared to Habermas’s consensus; both consist of what is taken for granted in the 10  See Taylor (2009). Taylor further maintains that the ideal of normativity has itself become normalizing.

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lifeworld. But where Foucault’s entire project resides in the re-­ problematization of such immediate and transparent understandings, Habermas builds on their consensuality to ground their legitimacy: the normativity immanent to communicative action is seen in the “genuine” consensus that appears out of argumentation in the ideal speech situation (Habermas 1987, 323). Moreover, the consensus obtained delivers for Habermas a transcendental point, intended to remain contextualized, and hence fits the post-­ metaphysical predicament: “the validity claimed for propositions and norms transcends spaces and times (…); but the claim is always raised here and now, in specific contexts, and is either accepted or rejected with factual consequences for action” (Habermas 1987, 323). Koopman interestingly notices that Foucault’s disclosure of problematizations is also a way to highlight such universals. Actually, Foucault can be seen as questioning “processes of universalization-in-action,” the “near universal appeal” of certain modes of thinking in a given time and place (Koopman 2013, 234). But where Habermas understands those universals as an achievement, Foucault’s approach remains critical. It is Habermas’s contention, against Foucault, that social criticism cannot be performed without first specifying both the normative standpoint of the critic and the criterion for the validity of claims. Habermas’s ideal speech situation, from which the genuine consensus is supposed to emerge, “provides a standard for evaluating systematically distorted forms of communication” (Habermas 1992, 50). Communicative action therefore permits, in his view, a renewal of critical theory on the basis of this validity criterion: “the theory of communication makes it possible to return to the undertaking that was interrupted with the critique of instrumental reason; and this will permit us to take once again the since-neglected tasks of a critical theory of society” Habermas (1984 – I, 386). Foucault’s critical attitude is radically different. It consists in “getting rid” of the social automatisms one was brought up into, as subjugating. Autonomy cannot be taken as a natural process occurring in the course of socialization itself; it is rather a rational transformation, a work in thought. I tried to present in the previous chapter the resulting complex relation Foucault maintains with his own public: since his aim is to render possible the transformation of his readers, he has no intention of defining normative values; critique is not prophecy, he insists (F2018, 197; see also CT 15–16). Refusing to be a new tutor, he describes his books as being “experience-­ books,” where the reader is invited to perform his own

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transformation rather than absorb a body of knowledge in the form of ready-made ideas. Moreover, there is a large amount of ideal in the ideal speech situation; indeed, Habermas defends the possibility of an “intact inter-subjectivity,” defined as “a mutual and constraints free understanding among individuals (…) It is a glimmer of symmetrical relations marked by free, reciprocal recognition” (Habermas 1992, 145). Foucault rejects as utopian this non-­ coercive ideal speech situation where common understanding is supposed to take place: This is a failure to see that power relations are not something that is bad in itself, that we have to break free of (…) The problem is not to try to dissolve them in the utopia of completely transparent communication but to acquire the rules of law, the management techniques, and also the morality, the ethos, the practice of the self that will allow us to play these games of power with as little domination as possible. (F1997e, 298, emphasis added)

If one compares this claim to Foucault’s definition of two critiques in the previous chapter, Habermas’s position appears highly Kantian, as if he had defined anew the “limits of legitimate claims”—instead of knowledge. Foucault’s answer was rather to try and cross these limits to show the contingency of those claims. * * * Starting from a common diagnosis of modernity and the understanding that criticism should avoid taking the subject as a given, Foucault and Habermas end up with opposed definitions of the critical attitude. While for Habermas the normative standpoint derives from the possibility of attaining consensus, Foucault struggles to escape its determination. As a result, autonomy seems to be part of the natural process of individuation in Habermas’s account of modern subjectivation, whereas autonomy is for Foucault the end result of a difficult transformation of the self. Hence where Habermas seems to cede to utopia, Foucault maintains the same austere vigilance he found in the Stoics. Even toward Habermas’s communicative action, Foucault would apply his “rational critique of rationality” (F1998d, 441, emphasis added). Foucault then has answered my speculation whether a form of social criticism is still possible today: critique as a form of rational inquiry, as a work in thought, for the

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re-problematization of practices and the transformation of the self, while avoiding universal standpoints seems more than ever a necessary practice. This “politics of ourselves” consists in “the infinite labour” (F1996f, 464) of questioning our identity and those values we take for granted (BHS). Interestingly, as Allen noticed, this position is itself highly normative. Allen derives Foucault’s normativity from his claim to disclose “what is dangerous in the ordinary” (DE II # 344, 1431, personal translation) and the practices he chose to put under such a light. She thus asks “how else are we to understand Foucault’s choices about which aspects of our modernity to problematize if not as having some normative political point?” (Allen 2014, 240). I’d rather insist on the fact that he presents problematization and the activity of thought as a “task” of the critical philosopher. In a 1980 interview, where he describes himself as a moralist, he advances three “elements in his morals:” (1) the refusal to accept as self-evident the things that are proposed to us; (2) the need to analyze and to know, since we can accomplish nothing without reflection and understanding—thus, the principle of curiosity; and (3) the principle of innovation: to seek out in our reflection those things that have never been thought or imagined. Thus: refusal, curiosity, innovation. (PMVI, emphasis added)

These elements are in my view normative principles for the elaboration of a specific form of thinking, that critical rationality which I aimed to define in Chap. 8.

Concluding Remarks I have argued to start with that our multicultural predicament has led to a criticism of rationality and neutrality in the public sphere that seems to have left us with no possibility for productive social criticism. To this puzzling situation, Foucault’s contribution is multiple. With his early diagnosis of modernity as a mode of thinking where human beings are entrapped in “the figure of man” as both a transcendental subject and an object of knowledge, he appears first among the most critical thinkers of the modern faith in reason and rationality. His analyses of power as intertwining power and knowledge further pursue this criticism of modern rationalities to show how emancipation cannot be expected to emerge naturally from science and knowledge. From this standpoint,

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the “rationality” of a phenomenon is never a warrant of its neutrality or its justice. Modern rationalities, either as an unconscious running through our knowledge and practices, or as our conscious reasoning, seem rather to shape us into subjects always already subjugated into relations of power. But by redefining power as the conduct of conducts, Foucault recognized that subjectivity was something more complex than a simple production of power. His study of different processes of subjectivation, and specifically the Greco-Roman constitution of a self-mastering subject, showed the possibility of rationally transforming oneself into an autonomous subject, aiming to govern oneself according to freely chosen principles. By insisting that such principles cannot be universally valid, Foucault fundamentally transforms the Kantian autonomy into an ethos for our time. Some wonder at this point how can one be sure to have escaped, with such a self-constitution, the social molds that entrap us; after all, the main argument of The History of Sexuality I was precisely that the so-called “sexual liberation” of the Seventies was in fact just another form of social control (Gutting 2006, 98). Others insist that an aesthetic transformation cannot have value without taking guidance from “more normatively robust” sources of judgment (Koopman 2013, 210) and that one cannot accept the value of change for its own sake (Fraser 1995, 68). I think that these objections should be dealt with at two different levels. At the individual one, my contention is that the critical problematization that Foucault defends comes precisely to answer the issue of falling into other forms of social norms. The permanent questioning of what is taken as self-evident (the first element of his morals defined above) should prevent the blind adoption of illusory injunctions to freedom. Moreover, the transformation that Foucault is arguing for is not “a change for its own sake” but rather a thorough questioning of one’s frames of thought, “to analyze and to know,” his second element above. The aim of these analyses is the refusal of essential identities. Yet this questioning can lead to the reappropriation of certain modes of thinking; this is at least how one can read, in the introduction to The Use of Pleasures, his contention that, with some inquiries, “sure of having traveled far, one finds that one is looking down on oneself from above” (UPe 11). “Traveling far” would have meant a change; what happened instead was that these inquiries made it possible “to go back through what was already thinking, to think it differently” (UPe 11). The activity of thinking appears as its own compass,

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with no additional sources of judgment than thought itself, as critical problematization. At the collective level though, these objections become more difficult to overcome. Problems of justice cannot be solved in the aesthetic realm, as McCarthy rightly contends after Habermas (McCarthy 1994, 269–270). I do not mean that Foucault’s critical attitude is not political; in my view, the refusal of essential identities is eminently political, as he himself insisted (HOW; BHS 223). Yet since the work on the self for the sake of its transformation is an aesthetic enterprise, Foucault gives us no clues for how to take decisions in the (common) public domain. But maybe this should not be the aim of a critical attitude. In an interesting passage of the conclusion to the 1983 lectures, Foucault establishes a direct connection between parrhesia, ancient philosophy, and the modern one. He then concludes that modern philosophy as a critical activity, just like parrhesia, is a practice exterior to the political (GSO 354). Moreover, Foucault in his critical problematizations acutely indicates forms of injustice that would otherwise remain unnoticed. Instead of taking for granted the normative value of the consensus, he maintains his critical gaze. In so doing, he crucially and surprisingly rescues for us a form of rationality, an activity of thinking, that eschews the scientific paradigm. It rejects both the true/false dichotomy and the conflation of legitimacy with universal acceptance. Knowledge, after all, albeit in a very specific meaning, does propel for Foucault the critical reappraisal of all knowledges and consensual values which alone can lead, in modern times, to autonomy: What would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of himself? There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all. (UPe 8, emphasis added)

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References Foucault’s Work Ae 2003. Abnormal – Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975, ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni. General Editors: Francois Ewald and Alessandro Fontana. English Series Editor: Arnold I. Davidson. London: Verso. AK 2002. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London, Routledge Classics. BB 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics – Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. BHS  1993. About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth. Political Theory 21 (2, May): 198–227. CS 1986. The Care of the Self. New York: Pantheon Books. CT 2011. The Courage of Truth – Lectures at the Collège de France 1983–1984. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DP 1995. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage Books. FS 2001. Fearless Speech. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). GL 2014. On the Government of the Living – Lectures at the Collège de France 1979–1970. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. GSO 2008. The Government of Self and Others – Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–1983. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. HM 2006. History of Madness. New York: Routledge. HoS 1978. The History of Sexuality I. New York: Random House. HSe 2005.The Hermeneutics of the Subject  – Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. OT 1994. The Order of Things – An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books. PK 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon Books. PMVI 1980. Power, Moral Values and the Intellectual  – An Interview with Michael Bess, 1980. On line: https://my.vanderbilt.edu/michaelbess/ foucault-interview/ PPe 2006. Psychiatric Power– Lectures at the Collège de France 1973–1974. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. RC 1999. Michel Foucault, Religion and Culture, ed. J.  Carette. New  York: Routledge. SMBD 2003. Society Must be Defended  - Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976. New York: Picador. ST 2017. Subjectivity and Truth – Lectures at the Collège de France 1980–1981. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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STPe 2009. Security, Territory, Population  – Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. TFR 1984. The Foucault Reader, ed. P.  Rabinow. Chicago/New York: Pantheon Books. TS  Martin, L.H. and Gutman, H. (eds.). 1988. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. London: Tavistock. UPe 1990. The Use of Pleasures. New York: Vintage Books. WDTT 2014. Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling – The Function of Avowal in Justice, ed. Fabienne Brion and Bernard E.  Harcourt. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. WIC  2007 [1978]. What Is Critique? In The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth, 41–81. Harvard: Semiotext(e), MIT Press.

Articles F1996a. 1996 [1968]. Foucault responds to Sartre. In Foucault Live (Collected Interviews, 1961–1984), ed. Sylvère Lotringer, 51–56. New York: Semiotext(e). F1996b. 1996 [1972]. An Historian of Culture. In Foucault Live (Collected Interviews, 1961–1984), ed. Sylvère Lotringer, 95–104. New York: Semiotext(e). F1996f. 1996 [1984]. The Concern for Truth. In Foucault Live (Collected Interviews, 1961–1984), ed. Sylvère Lotringer, 455–464. New  York: Semiotext(e). F1996g. 1996 [1984]. The Return of Morality. In Foucault Live (Collected Interviews, 1961–1984), ed. Sylvère Lotringer, 465–474. New  York: Semiotext(e). F1997c. 1997 [1983]. On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress. In The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.1, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, 253–280. New York: The New Press. F1997e. 1997 [1984]. The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom. In The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.1, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, 281–302. New York: The New Press. F1998d. 1998 [1983]. Structuralism and Post-structuralism. In The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Vol.2, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D.  Faubion and Paul Rabinow (General editor), 433–458. New  York: The New Press. F2001b. 2001 [1978]. Interview with Michel Foucault. In The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.3, Power, ed. James D. Faubion and Paul Rabinow (General editor), 239–297. New York: The New Press.s F2018. 2018 [1978]. The analytic Philosophy of Politics. Foucault Studies 24 (June): 188–200.

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DE II  2001 [1994]. Dits et Ecrits, II 1976–1988. Paris: Quarto-Gallimard. HS 2001. L’Herméneutique du Sujet – Cours au Collège de France 1981–1982. Paris: Seuil-Gallimard. SoP 2013. La Société Punitive – Cours au Collège de France 1972–1973. Paris: Seuil-Gallimard.

Audio Recordings HOW 1 & 2.  Truth and Subjectivity. Howison Lectures I and II, held at Berkeley, 20–21 October, 1980. Audio version. Available online at: http://ubu.com/ sound/foucault.html

Other Authors Allen, Amy. 2008. The Politics of Ourselves  – Power, Autonomy and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory. Columbia University Press: New York. ———. 2009. Discourse, Power and Subjectivation: The Foucault/Habermas Debate Reconsidered. The Philosophical Forum 40 (1): 1–28. ———. 2011. Foucault and the Politics of Our Selves. History of the Human Sciences 24 (4): 43–59. ———. 2014. The Normative and the Transcendental: Comments on Colin Koopman’s Genealogy as Critique. Foucault Studies 18 (October): 238–244. Behrent, Michael C. 2009. Liberalism without Humanism: Michel Foucault and the Free-Market Creed, 1976–1979. Modern Intellectual History 6 (3): 539–568. Boyer, Charles. 2012. Du ‘freudo-marxisme’ au ‘freudo-libéralisme’ ? Le Philosophoire 2 (38): 229–249. Cook, Deborah. 2018. Adorno, Foucault, and the Critique of the West. Verso: London. Ewald, François. 1990. Norms, Discipline and the Law. Representation 30 (Spring): 138–161. Fraser, Nancy. 1995. False Antitheses. In Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, ed. Butler Benhabib et al., 59–74. New York: Routledge. Gamez, Patrick. 2018. Did Foucault Do Ethics? The ‘Ethical Turn,’ Neoliberalism, and the Problem of Truth. Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy  – Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française XXVI (1): 107–133. Gordon, Colin. 1991. Governmental Rationality: an Introduction. In The Foucault Effects – Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 1–52. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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Gros, Frederic. 2001. Situation du Cours. In L’Herméneutique du Sujet – Cours au Collège de France 1981–1982, 489–526. Paris: Seuil-Gallimard. Gutting G. (Ed.). 2006. The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Revised ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, Jurgen. 1981. Modernity vs Postmodernity. New German Critique 22 (Winter): 1–14. ———. 1984. I, Theory of Communicative Action, Vol I: The Rationalization of Society. Beacon Press: Boston. ———. 1987 [1985]. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge: MIT Press. ———. 1992. Postmetaphysical Thinking. MIT Press: Cambridge. Harcourt, Bernard e. 2013. Situation du Cours. In Michel Foucault, La Société Punitive – Cours au Collège de France 1972–1973. Paris: Seuil-Gallimard: 273–314. Held, David. 1980. Introduction to Critical Theory  – Horkheimer to Habermas. London: Hutchinson & Co. Honneth, Axel. 2009. Pathologies of Reason. Columbia UP: New York. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 1974 [1944]. La Dialectique de la Raison. Paris: Tel Gallimard. Kelly, Michael. 1994. Foucault, Habermas and the Self-Referentiality of Critique. In Critique and Power – Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelly, 365–400. Cambridge: MIT Press. Koopman, Colin. 2013. Genealogy as Critique  – Foucault and the Problems of Modernity. Indiana University Press: Bloomington. Lorenzini, Daniele. 2018. Governmentality, subjectivity, and the Neoliberal Form of Life. Journal for Cultural Research 22 (2): 154–166. ———. 2020. On Possibilising Genealogy. Inquiry. Available online at: https:// doi.org.10.1080/0020174X.2020.1712227 McCarthy, Thomas. 1994. Kantian Constructivism and Reconstructivism: Rawls and Habermas in Dialogue. Ethics 105 (Oct): 44–63. Schmidt, James, and Thomas E.  Wartenberg. 1994. Foucault’s Enlightenment: Critique, Revolution, and the Fashioning of the Self. In Critique and Power – Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelly, 283–314. Cambridge: MIT Press. Taylor, Dianna. 2009. Normativity and Normalization. Foucault Studies 7 (September): 45–63. Zamora, Daniel, and Michael Behrent, eds. 2015. Foucault and Neoliberalism. 1st ed. Cambridge/Malden: Polity.

Index1

A Adorno, Theodor W., 209, 210, 214 Aesthetics of existence, 165–169 Aesthetics of life, 219 Alethurgie, 88, 89, 95, 100, 102, 134 Anthropological sleep, 26–27, 35, 145 Anthropology, 25, 25n7 Archaeology, 24, 24n5, 27, 29, 29n12, 39, 51–53, 53n4, 57, 58, 62–68, 64n20 Arts of existence, 167, 168, 178, 195 Arts of living, 169 Askesis, 124, 125, 128, 129, 187–191 Austin, John L., 107n13 Autonomy, 5, 9, 10, 12, 13, 145–171, 197, 198, 208, 209, 216, 218–221, 223, 224 as independence, 161 as self-rule, 146, 160 Avowal, 84–86, 88, 88n19, 126, 126n4, 132, 136–139

B Belonging, 180–185, 189 Bentham, Jeremy, 32, 41 Bio-power, biopolitics, 64, 67, 211 Bios, 165–168 Body, bodies, 32, 33, 34n20, 35, 35n21, 36, 41–45, 42n34, 44n36, 95, 113, 121, 124, 179, 186, 190, 208, 211, 218, 221 Body, social, 30, 32, 33 C Care of the self, 5, 7–9, 12, 121–135, 125n3, 137, 140, 157–167, 158n22, 160n25, 160n28, 164n33, 169, 214, 216–218 Classical age, 21, 21–22n2, 22, 24, 25n6, 26, 26n8, 32, 40n31, 51, 54–56, 56n9, 59, 60, 62, 66, 68, 133n13 Classical age vs. Renaissance, 24, 51, 54

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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INDEX

Conduct of conducts, 10, 12, 74, 80, 80n9, 81, 86, 90, 95, 170, 179–180, 211–213, 215, 223 Confession, 44, 83n13, 84, 86, 96, 101, 102, 104, 105, 112, 114 Consensus, 3, 3n3, 5, 6, 12, 13, 89, 179, 183–185, 188, 192, 194, 198, 199, 218–221, 224 Contract theory, 30, 32, 34, 39 Counter-conducts, 79n6, 81, 81n11, 82n12, 145, 147n7, 151, 170, 216 Critical activity, 191, 197 Critical attitude, 5–9, 12, 13, 123, 145, 148, 149n9, 151, 157, 158, 169, 171, 182, 185–187, 190, 199, 209, 213–222, 224 Foucault vs. Habermas, 219–222 Critical philosophy, 175, 176, 180, 186, 187 Critique, 175–199 D Democracy, 46, 79, 209 Descartes, René, 132–134, 133n13, 140, 182, 182n9, 192, 192n16 Desire, 60, 121, 125, 140 Direction of conscience, 96, 123, 146 Discipline, disciplinary regime, 21–46, 52, 58, 60, 62, 69, 95, 111, 113, 179, 187, 207–209, 211, 215, 218 Dispositif, 29–30n14, 45, 150 E Enlightenment/Aufklärung, 1, 155–158, 164, 169, 175–177, 182, 184, 189, 209 Enlightenment, criticism of, 2n1, 7

Epictetus, 129 Epimeleia heauthou, 133, 135, 161n29, 167 Episteme, 21n2, 22–29, 26n8, 34, 39, 45, 51–60, 55n8, 62, 63, 66n25, 67, 68, 119, 191, 193, 195, 196 Ethical differentiation, 13, 146, 161–165, 170, 181, 198, 199, 218 Ethical substance, 124, 126, 129, 138 Ethics, 151–155, 157, 160, 160n27, 168, 170, 179, 182 F Frankfurt School, 206, 206n1, 206n2, 209, 210, 213, 214, 218 Freedom, 80, 147, 152, 158, 158–159n23, 160, 161n29, 163, 164, 170, 209, 219, 223 Freud, Sigmund, 41, 139 G Genealogy, 52, 58, 62, 63, 64n20, 66, 68 Gnothi seauton, 108, 108n16, 133–136, 167 Government, 95–97, 100, 101, 103, 116 Governmentality, 7, 9–12, 51–69, 73–75, 77, 78, 80, 82, 83n14, 86, 90, 95, 97, 114, 119, 122, 124, 136, 141, 145–148, 170, 179, 194, 207, 211, 212, 214n8, 215 liberal, 77, 83n14, 86, 122, 124, 151, 152, 177, 178, 212 neoliberal, 97, 112, 157, 212, 215

 INDEX 

H Habermas, Jurgen, 1–5, 3n2, 3n3, 3n4, 4n6, 8n11, 13, 42, 46, 88, 89, 147, 169, 183n10, 191, 197, 206, 206n1, 206n2, 213–222, 214n7, 214n8, 216n9, 224 Hobbes, Thomas, 30, 31 Homologia, 162, 165, 216 Homo oeconomicus, 80, 84, 151, 152 Horkheimer, Max, 206–213, 206n1 Human sciences, 21–46, 51, 57, 58, 67, 83, 85, 111, 119, 135–137, 140, 179, 186, 187, 193, 207, 208, 217 I Instinct, 76, 83n14, 84, 84n15 Interest, 51, 53, 57, 60 J Juridical (the), 78, 79, 79n6, 82, 83n13, 89, 90 Juridical codification, 110 Juridical, regression of the, 78, 90, 112, 157, 215 Jurisdiction, 74, 75, 77–86, 88, 89, 112, 215 K Kant, Immanuel, 1, 12, 13, 23–27, 23n3, 61, 145–171, 175–199, 176n2, 182n9, 183n10, 192n16, 209, 210 Knowledge, 75–77, 75n3, 77n5, 79, 82, 83, 87, 88 subjugated, 81 Knowledge-connaissance, 76, 149, 154, 166 Knowledge-savoir, 77, 82, 112, 116, 215

231

vs. connaissance, 75n3, 76, 134, 134n15 vs. science, 37, 57 L Law, 61, 74, 77–80, 83, 85, 88, 97, 110, 112, 116, 123, 128n9, 157 moral, 148, 150 rule of, 79, 80 rule of the game, 79 sovereign, 78, 79, 86, 90 statistical, 61 universal, 148–150, 150n13, 157, 159, 161, 162, 165, 170, 179, 185 Leuret, François, 36, 105 Liberalism, liberal government, 64 Logismos, 126 Logos, 105, 106, 108n16, 109, 165, 166 M Malthus, Thomas Robert, 55n6, 63, 64 Man (figure of), 25n6, 58, 148, 207, 222 Marcuse, Herbert, 206–213, 210n5, 215 Marx, Karl, 55, 55n7, 63, 64 Mathematics, 57, 58, 58n12 Mercantilists, mercantilism, 53–55, 59, 60, 62, 63 Modernity, 5–7, 10, 12, 13, 21–46, 52, 54, 55n8, 57n11, 58–68, 59n15, 61n16, 120, 128n8, 132–135, 133n13, 140, 145–149, 149n10, 158, 169, 175, 185, 192n16, 205–214, 216, 217, 221, 222 Multicultural, multiculturalism, 1–3, 2n1, 3n2, 6, 7, 9, 205, 206, 222

232 

INDEX

N Neoliberal, neoliberalism, 73–75, 78, 80, 82, 85, 90, 97, 100, 104, 112 Nietzsche, Nietzschean, 75, 76, 77n5, 84n15, 87, 165, 169, 206, 206n1 Norm, 78, 90, 122, 124, 137, 138, 179, 184, 188n12, 194, 218, 219 disciplinary, 78, 86 statistical, 78, 122 Normalization, 61, 111, 113, 208, 212 vs. normation, 61 Normativity, 218–220, 219n10, 222 O Obedience, 96, 104, 114, 116, 217 Ontology of the present, 205 Opinion, 176, 178–181, 184, 185 P Panopticon, 32–34 Paradox (Foucault’s), 39–45, 69, 81 Parrhesia, 5, 96, 101–107, 101n9, 107n12, 107n14, 107n15, 109, 110n22, 114, 121, 123, 124, 129, 130, 132, 133, 141, 146, 157–159, 162–167, 162n30, 170, 175, 181, 182, 198, 216, 224 as courage, 164, 218 as risk, 163, 164, 181, 196, 218 Pastoral power, 59, 102, 103, 110, 114, 122–124, 211 Physiocrats, physiocracy, 53–55, 54n5, 60–63, 61n16 Plato, 96n2, 108n16, 109, 127, 154n15, 162, 165, 191 Population, 52, 52n1, 57, 60–69, 63n17, 64n20, 65n23, 176, 178–180, 211

Post-metaphysical, 2 Postmodern, postmodernism, 1, 2, 2n1, 4, 4n6, 6n8 Power, 22, 24, 28n10, 29–46, 29–30n14, 34n19, 34n20, 35n21, 37n24, 37–38n25, 39n28, 40n30, 40n31, 42n34, 44n36, 51, 52, 58–65, 67–69, 68n26, 74, 77, 89 Power-knowledge, 37, 37n25, 38, 46, 62, 74, 75, 87, 98, 100, 103, 149, 156, 163, 179, 207, 210, 213, 217 Power relations, 30n14, 37, 97, 98, 100 Probability, 52–59, 55n8, 56n9, 62–69, 66n25 Problematization, 193–199, 194n19, 207, 213, 219, 220, 222–224 critical, 195 Psychoanalysis, 22, 36, 38n27, 42n34, 44, 101, 102, 104, 134, 136, 138, 139, 179 Public (publikum), 176–186, 176n2, 183n10, 188–190, 198, 212, 220 R Raison d’État, 59–61, 68, 78 Rationality, 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 15, 23, 28, 29, 45, 46, 59, 65, 66, 69, 81–83, 89, 90, 96, 103, 104, 110, 113–116, 128, 138, 168, 180, 186, 188, 190–192, 190n14, 194n19, 197, 199, 205, 206, 208, 209, 213–216, 218, 221–224 critical, 199 Reason, 1–10, 3n2, 3n4, 5n7, 15, 21, 22, 27, 28n10, 41, 46, 56, 60, 83, 86, 105, 109, 121, 126–128, 131, 140, 155–158, 155n19,

 INDEX 

156n21, 162, 163, 169, 175, 176, 179, 183n10, 191, 193, 206, 209, 210, 213, 217, 220, 222 communicative, 4 radical criticism of, 2, 4, 4n6, 5 Reasons for action, 83 Reason, use of (khresis, logo khresthai), 109, 155–158, 155n19, 156n21 Regime of truth, 99, 178, 184, 185, 198, 215, 216 Renunciation of self, 114, 140, 164n33, 216, 217 Ricardo, David, 54, 55, 55n6, 55n7, 63 Right, 76, 77, 79 natural, 34 S Sciences, human, 21–46 Scientific discourse, 21, 27n9 Security mechanisms, 62, 65, 68, 69 Self-mastery, self-sovereignty, 96, 114, 122, 123, 128, 131, 140, 146, 153, 156, 158, 159, 161, 165, 170, 216, 223 Seneca, 127, 129, 131, 191 Smith, Adam, 54, 61n16 Social contract, 30–32, 149–153 juridico-philosophical model of the contract, 32, 211 social contract vs. liberal contract, 151 Social criticism, 1, 2, 7, 13, 198, 213–222 Socrates, 158, 165, 166 Somatic singularities, 35, 42, 43, 44n36, 103 Soul, 36, 41, 42, 44, 44n36, 95, 101n9, 104, 108n16, 109, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126n5, 130,

233

130n10, 160, 160n26, 162, 166, 167 direction of, 121, 124, 126n5 Sovereign, 78, 79, 86, 90 Sovereign power, sovereignty, 30–32, 34, 35, 35n21, 60, 62, 79, 82 Speech acts, 104–107 Spirituality, 108, 108n16, 116, 132–134, 166 Statistical vs. disciplinary, 61 Statistics, 52, 55–69 Style of existence, 168, 170, 216, 218, 219 Subject, 6, 22, 23, 25, 28, 28n11, 30, 34–37, 34–35n20, 39–46, 43n35, 74, 85, 86, 119, 211, 213 autonomous, 4, 5, 8, 146, 154, 164, 170, 177, 185, 198 modern, 25, 37, 40, 44, 45, 119–141, 145, 147, 149, 152–154, 155n18, 170, 210, 214–218 moral, 154, 160, 161, 165, 219 natural, 80, 147 as object, 25, 30, 35, 36 subjugated, 22, 39, 45, 113 transcendental, 22, 146–147, 149, 154, 155n18, 157, 169, 170, 207, 210, 222 Subjection, 28n11, 34n20, 43, 44, 95–116, 214n8, 216 Subjectivation, 9–12, 74, 83n13, 85, 86, 89, 90, 96, 101, 103, 104, 114, 185, 187, 190, 194, 197, 210, 213, 214n8, 215–219, 221, 223 as rational process, 108–111 Subjectivation processes, 96, 170, 215, 221, 223 Subjectivity, 9, 11, 12, 73–90, 95, 97, 104, 114, 119–121, 123, 132, 138, 139

234 

INDEX

Subject of ethics, 151–155 Subject of interest, 151–153 Subject of rights, 39, 149, 151–155, 169–170, 208 T Techne, 108, 166–170, 219 Technologies, techniques of the self, 95–97, 109n18, 111, 113–115, 120, 124, 127, 131, 132, 135, 136, 140, 150, 157, 161, 187, 189 Telos, teleology, 113, 154, 160, 165 Transcendental(s), 26, 27, 35, 148, 149, 154, 155n18, 164, 169, 170 True discourse, 100, 102, 106, 109–112, 178, 182, 184, 185, 194, 215 Truth, 1, 23, 36, 74–76, 85, 87–90, 97–99, 114, 125, 127, 129, 133, 138, 148, 149, 149n10, 153, 157, 159–166, 168, 170, 179, 180, 181n7, 183n10, 185–188, 191, 192, 194, 194n20, 195, 197, 199, 212, 219 obligation of, 98–100 regime of, 99 relation to, 97, 124, 126, 129, 132, 168, 194

scientific, 134 two kinds of, 76 Truth acts, acts of truth, 84–86, 88, 90, 95, 101, 103, 104, 112, 119, 121–132, 135, 136 Truth acts as speech acts, 104–107 Truth-books, 184 Truth-telling, 36, 74, 74n2, 83, 83n13, 84, 86, 88, 97, 99n8, 101, 104, 107, 107n12, 111, 164, 167, 168, 215 U Universal(s), 220, 222, 224 V Veridiction, 74, 74n2, 75, 77–86, 88–90, 88n19, 97, 99n8, 100–107, 111, 112, 129, 132–140, 212, 215 W Web-like organization of power, 40, 42, 211 Will, 149, 151–154, 156, 156n21, 159, 160, 160n26, 162, 164, 165, 170