Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth and The Ethics of an Intellectual 3031043553, 9783031043550

Table of contents :
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
About the Book
Contents
About the Author
Chapter 1: Introduction: The Courage of Truth and the Specific Intellectual
References
Chapter 2: New Politics of Truth: From the Will to Knowledge to the Courage of Truth
Theoretical Shifts: Between Governmentality and the Government of Self and Others
The Government of Others
The Government of Self and Others
Telling the Truth About Self and Others
The Deconstruction of Christian Obedience and Scientific Rationality: For the Affirmation of Greco-Roman Autonomy
Greek Autonomy of Self
The Ethics of Truth-Telling
The Courage of Truth and the Aesthetics of Existence: From Socrates to the Cynics
Socrates: Ethics and the Courage of Truth
The Cynics and the Aesthetics of Existence
References
Chapter 3: Philosophical Life and Revolutionary Militancy: Cynicism, the Specific Intellectual and Criticism of the Revolutionary Party
Parrhēsia Outside the Institutional Field: Socrates and Cynicism in Revolutionary Militancy
Socrates and Political Practice Outside the Institution
The Resonance Cynicism has for Western Culture
Cynicism and the Specific Intellectual: True Life for the Transformation of This World
Cynicism and True Life
Heterotopias and Utopias: Between “Autre Monde” and “Monde Autre”
Cynics, Radical Other Life and the Transformation of this World
Christian Asceticism and the Other World
References
Chapter 4: For a New Political Militancy: The Experience of GIP and the Arts of Living
The Intellectual and the Parrhesiastic Attitude
Parrhēsia, Risk and Courage
Parrhēsia, Philosophy and Politics
The Parrhesiastic Attitude
Prison Militancy and the GIP
The Emergence and Specificity of the GIP’s Militancy: Approximations and Differences with Regard to Left-Wing Groups
The Prison System Is Intolerable
GIP and Liberation Movements: Socio-Ethical Proposals
The Construction of Ethical Ways of Existence
Radically Transform Subjectivities
Freedom Practices and New Ways of Life
References
Chapter 5: Conclusion: The Ethics of an Intellectual—Detaching Oneself and Dissipating Admitted Familiarities
References
Index

Citation preview

Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth and The Ethics of an Intellectual

Priscila Piazentini Vieira

Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth and The Ethics of an Intellectual

Priscila Piazentini Vieira

Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth and The Ethics of an Intellectual

Priscila Piazentini Vieira Department of History Federal University of Paraná Curitiba, Brazil

ISBN 978-3-031-04355-0    ISBN 978-3-031-04356-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04356-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 0th edition: © Priscila Piazentini Vieira 2015 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 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. Cover illustrations: Marina Lohrbach_shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Hear not the frantic cries of the leaders who in that they seek to lead desert us. Virginia Woolf. Between the Acts, 1941 Il faut (…) penser que ce qui existe est loin de remplir tous les espaces possibles. Michel Foucault. “De l’amitié comme mode de vie”, 1981

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I would like to dedicate this book to my parents Zezé and Toninho, and Meg (in memoriam)

Foreword

Since 1997, Michel Foucault’s lectures at Collège de France (1970–1984) have been gradually published, bringing an extraordinary amount of writings, unsettling readers with new challenges to familiar subject matter and surprising them with unusual challenges. It seems Foucault, year after year, even posthumously, never ceases to lavish us with unread works. This very book comes from that place, drawing specifically from the three last lectures: The Hermeneutics of the Subject (1981–1982); The Government of Self and Others (1982–1983); and The Courage of Truth (1983–1984). Once the main reference works are established, this book addresses them as a “construction site” (an expression to Foucault’s taste) to construct its own architecture. But mainly, it addresses them from a remarkable and thorough knowledge of Foucauldian production preceding the above-mentioned lectures, and armed with a solid knowledge of works by main commentators, as well as thinkers Foucault himself either approached or confronted. The extended bibliography does not, however, make this book a heavy load of information. Rather, it digests the content in autonomous meditations by way of pleasant writing. It is about writing, or rather the form of its construction—more than about content—that we shall reflect on through some considerations. Supported by Michel Foucault’s journey, Priscila Vieira addresses both the key concepts of his thoughts, and the diversity and enunciation of his points of view. Such concepts and points merge with the two subject matters indicated in the title: “courage of truth” and “ethics of an intellectual”. However, these explicit subject matters are stated and developed ix

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through a sort of “axis,” interlocking key notions and the multiple viewpoints addressed. We shall name the axis of transformation, change or displacement. Let us discuss some examples. It is by reconstructing the flow of changes from the 1970s and early 1980s to established Foucauldian thought that the author leads us toward an understanding of the almost unknown subject, “courage of truth.” And within such changes another displacement takes place, now a chronological one toward Ancient Greek Culture and parrhesiastic figure of Socrates and Cynic philosophers. Ultimately, it is this very step into the past that allows for transformation of the viewpoint concerning the “ethics of an intellectual” at present. Throughout this dynamic, Foucault’s testimony is depicted as one whose motion follows the same displacement axis: Foucault’s behavior, merging altogether “thought” and “life”, unfold as critique, for instance, on very specific topics such as political parties, revolution, the failure of traditional left-wing politics, among others. And it is precisely the dynamics of behavior, embraced in the Foucauldian journey, that resonates today in an openness to transformation and new possibilities. Secondly, while this book is constructed as a gear in displacement, change, and transformation axis, one might also identify the so-called links in such a gear. These links are the recurrent use of counterpoints, parallels, and polarities, which allow one to link subject matters, create shortcuts, build bridges and passages. The following are some examples. It is in the form of opposition that the first chapter confronts Christianity and modern science on the one hand, with the autonomy of Greco-Roman culture on the other. By demonstrating “differences and approximations” the second chapter discusses various subject matters, such as anarchism, modern state, revolutionary party of the vanguard, left-wing universal intellectual, and so on and so forth. There are parallels that the third chapter draws between traditional activism of leftist groups and other social movements called counterculture (feminism, gay movement, etc.). Nevertheless, beyond these specific confrontations, there is a more conceptual, fundamental counterpoint on which the entire book grounds itself, so to speak: The “bifurcations” or polarities inaugurated by Plato and passed down throughout the history of Western thought—philosophy as “metaphysics of the soul” and philosophy as a “mode of life”. Including Cynicism in second pole, it is in the form of the polarity between Cynicism and Platonism that two frameworks or “two insertion points” of the relationship between politics and philosophy in the West will be identified.

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There is a third consideration complementary to the two above. While this book finds itself in the transformation axis, structured in counterpoint links, it is an understanding that the ideas discussed are often demonstrated as pair of concepts or double concepts. The pair “thought and experience,” for instance, to which we have already referred, is composed of distinct but constantly approximated concepts: “experience” understood not as “original or founding experience”, but rather as “mode of life,” which refers “to relationship with oneself, with others, and with truth” and thus with “thinking,” giving rise to the concept of theory as “co-­ experience.” Another example is the double meaning conveyed by the notion of “subject”: “subject in relationship of power and subject in a manifestation of truth,” or “subject of enunciation and subject of conduct”. The above considerations—as mentioned are mostly structure and writing related and less content related—obviously suggest a viewpoint, a reading perspective. However, as Foucault himself would want it, no more than a way of looking at things, this foreword is only a suggestion. Better yet, it is an invitation to the book itself. São Paulo, Brazil May 2015

Salma Tannus Muchail

Preface

This book was originally written in Portuguese, from 2008 to 2013, titled A Coragem da verdade e a ética do intelectual em Michel Foucault [Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth and The Ethics of an Intellectual]. It is the outcome of a doctoral dissertation defense approved by the History department at the Philosophy and Human Science Institute (IFCH) of the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP)—São Paulo, Brazil—and advised by Dr. Margareth Rago. It also includes results from research made at Université Est-Créteil, France, from 2010 to 2011, under Dr. Frédéric Gros’s guidance. The reflections you are about to read in these pages are from a context where Foucault’s last courses—The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982–1983 and The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–1984—had been published neither in English nor in Portuguese yet. Other courses were still unpublished at all, such as On the Government of the Living and Subjectivity and Truth. I accessed their full content through the audio archives at Collège de France. The dialogues established in this work come from the International Colloquium Michel Foucault, which have been held in Brazil since 1999. It was there that I was able to contact a vast diversity of studies, more specifically, the ones by: Vera Portocarrero, Alfredo Veiga-Neto, Luiz Orlandi, Oswaldo Giacoia, Edson Passetti, Salete de Oliveira, Silvio Gallo,

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Salma Tannus Muchail, Márcio Alves da Fonseca, Peter Pál Pelbart, Tânia Swain, Carmen Soares, Norma Telles, Denise Sant’Anna, Maria Rita de Assis César, André Duarte, Ernani Chaves, Durval Muniz de Albuquerque, Pedro de Souza, Heliana Conde, Philippe Artières, Frédéric Gros, Luca Paltrinieri, Diogo Sardinha, Thomas Abraham, Dora Barrancos, Margaret McLaren, Marcelo Hoffman, Rodrigo Castro Orellana and, more recently, Philippe Sabot, Marcelo Raffin, Senda Sferco, Arianna Sforzini, Orazio Irrera and Daniele Lorenzini. Last but not least, I would like to highlight some important information. A great part of Chap. 3 has already been published in English, in Carceral Notebooks: Foucault and the Politics of Resistance in Brazil, number XII (2017) as “Freeing Ourselves: The Experience of the Prisons Information Group (in Light of Foucault’s 1973 Rio Lectures)”. Thank you, Marcelo Hoffman, for translating all the work comprised in the volume and for editing the book. And thank you, Bernard Harcourt, for, as an editor at Carceral Notebooks, opening the doors and showing interest in the work on Michel Foucault developed in Brazil. Concerning the translation of Foucault’s work, it is necessary to mention that while writing the Portuguese version of this book my reference was the original work in French. Otherwise, either Portuguese or Spanish translations, which often came out before English translations as a result of Foucault’s trips to Latin America, his impact on Latin American countries, and the numerous studies on his thoughts and political practices published every year in the continent. It did so happen that certain lectures at Berkeley were translated to Spanish even before they were available in French. Questions raised by Brazilian intellectuals during the conference A verdade e as formas jurídicas, held in Rio de Janeiro, in 1973, as well as Foucault’s answers were first publicized in Portuguese, in Brazil, and are still unpublished in English. The content published in English comprising the work Power/Knowledge (1980) had been published in Portuguese two years before as Microfísica do Poder. Those pieces of information are meaningful so that English readers acknowledge the fact that Foucault’s texts, lectures, and courses are both timeless and do not follow the expected route, i.e., Europe—USA—Latin America. On many occasions, it went from Europe to Latin America and then to the USA or from the USA to Latin America and then to Europe,

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and so forth. However, most of the time, bringing Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth and The Ethics of an Intellectual forth to an anglophone audience, an effort was made to privilege Foucault’s books, interviews, courses, and articles translated into English. I hope there is even more dialogue between these spaces of knowledge, embracing the various languages that have revealed enthusiasm, passion, and delight for Foucault in every corner, showing he shall increasingly and forever resonate in us. Curitiba, Brazil

Priscila Piazentini Vieira

Acknowledgments

This book was written while many people kept me company, either while I was a Ph.D. student or now as a Contemporary History Professor at the University of Paraná (UFPR). National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), and Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES) sponsored both the research and this publication. I would like to thank these institutions for supporting my academic activities within the country, allowing me to travel and attend conferences and meetings, and having the privilege of dedicating myself exclusively to research. I also thank CAPES for the great opportunity given through a one-year Sandwich Ph.D. Program (PDEE) scholarship in Paris, providing me with fundamental means to enrich not only research but also my own life experience. Without them, it would have been very difficult to carry out this work. I would like to thank FAPESP for the financial aid toward my research in the State of São Paulo, especially that for scientific publications. It allowed me to make my Doctoral Thesis into the original work in Portuguese. In addition, I thank Joaquim Antonio Pereira who embraced the idea of publishing through Editora Intermeios (São Paulo/Brazil), without him it would be unlikely that this book were real. I also thank Editora Intermeios for consenting to the publication in English. I would like to thank Margareth Rago for the support and encouragement in these many years of sharing and friendship. I have always listened to her questions, suggestions, and provocations with great pleasure, since xvii

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2001, when I started my years as an undergraduate History student at Unicamp. She led me to rethink certain paths and certain choices, as well as to build questions different from those I had first thought of. After all, what would be the important role of an advisor if not the persistence in producing in his/her advisee shifts and questions when they think they are sure to be in a quiet space? Moreover, her studies on women and children from the Brazilian working class show a perspective that informed not only my view on Foucault but mainly on Brazilian historiography, Feminist Studies, and Foucauldian Studies in general: Do cabaré ao Lar: a utopia da sociedade disciplinar e a resistência anarquista. Brasil 1890–1930 (1985), Os prazeres da noite: prostituição e códigos da sexualidade feminina em São Paulo (1890–1930) (1991)—about prostitution in Brazil—Entre a história e a liberdade: Luce Fabbri e o anarquismo contemporâneo (2001)—about Italian anarchist Luce Fabbri, living in Uruguay—A aventura de contar-se: feminismos, escrita de si e invenções da subjetividade (2013)—about Brazilian feminists during the military dictatorship and “redemocratization”—and her most recent book As marcas da pantera: percursos de uma historiadora (2021). Thanks to the entire group of advisees led by Professor Margareth Rago at Unicamp in recent years, “Gênero, Experiência e Subjetividades”, more specifically: Maria Clara Pivato Biajoli, Júlia Glaciela da Silva Oliveira, Susel Oliveira da Rosa, Ana Carolina Murgel, Tony Hara, Aldo Ambrózio, Marilda Ionta, Maria Célia Orlato Selem, Jaqueline Gonçalves Araújo, Luana Saturnino Tvardovskas, Rosamaria Giatti Carneiro, Mauricio Pelegrini, Gabriela Barzaghi De Laurentiis, Varlei Rodrigo Couto, Mariléa de Almeida, Carolina Ramkrapes, and Gabriela Trevisan. I am grateful to professors Salma Tannus Muchail, Márcio Alves da Fonseca, Edson Passetti, and Silvio Gallo, for their care, precious suggestions, and attention when reading my work, while being the committee at my doctoral defense. I am grateful to Salma Tannus Muchail, who translated into Portuguese The Order of Things, in 1981, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, with Márcio Alves da Fonseca, in 2004, and Utopian Body, in 2013, and who wrote many books about Michel Foucault, for her sensitivity and beautiful reading while writing the preface. I thank professor Frédéric Gros, for making it possible for me to undergo PDEE (Doctorate Program in the Country and Internship Abroad) in France—it allowed me various possibilities of finding Foucault.

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I thank the employees of Collège de France—especially Claire Guttinger—who were very efficient and helpful in organizing the audios of two of Foucault courses that had not yet been published in France, Brazil, or the United States (Du gouvernement des vivants and Subjectivité et vérité), making work more enjoyable. And the employees of Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF), for their assistance in consulting material of extreme importance to the research during my internship in Paris. I also thank the employees, students, and professors at IFCH Unicamp, for their attention, efficiency, and dedication throughout my years of ethical and intellectual development, and the employees, students, advisees, and colleague professors at UFPR, since 2015. I thank the research groups in which I take part at UFPR: Laboratório de Investigação em Corpo, Gênero e Subjetividade na Educação, Núcleo de Estudos de Gênero, Grupo de Estudos Discursivos em arte e design, e Intersubjetividade e Pluralidade: reflexão e sentimento na História. I thank Bhuvi Libanio, who dedicated herself to translating this book into English and encouraged me when I was reaching out to publishers engaged in the Foucauldian thought. Raahi Ellis’s revision was also significant; he took the challenge with much courage. I thank the History Graduate Program at UFPR for the financial support to translate this book. I would like to mention the coordinators of the program: Marcella Lopes Guimarães, Renan Friguetto, Renata Senna Garraffoni, Roseli Boschilia, Ana Paula Vosne Martins e Luiz Geraldo Santos da Silva. I thank my parents, Maria José Piazentini Vieira and Antonio de Lacorte Vieira, and my brother, Heleno Piazentini Vieira, for the affection and support they gave me throughout the process. It would also be impossible to reach this point without being inspired by Meg, with all her joy and insistence on life. All these years she has been teaching me to be a warrior and to always fight, even during the most difficult moments and during the so-considered impossible and improbable recoveries. I thank Luiz Filipe da Silva Correia for the nonstop twists. I thank Jhoyce Póvoa Timóteo—still my Unicamp colleague—and Cibele Cristina Trinca—especially for the time I was in Paris—for their friendship and unconditional affection. Three friends, colleagues, and great researchers and professors had a significant role in my life when I arrived at UFPR, and they still have Maria Rita de Assis César, André de Macedo Duarte and Renata Senna Garraffoni.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Palgrave Macmillan for welcoming this book, with care and dedication throughout the process, especially Amy Ivernizzi who immediately embraced it, and Chandralekha Mahamel Raja for the support while getting the final version ready. And it would be impossible to talk about how Foucault is studied and his word spread in Brazil without mentioning Roberto Machado. We should all be grateful for his generosity in perpetuating Foucault’s work in Portuguese, since the first publication of Microfísica do Poder, in 1978. Machado passed away in 2021, but not without sharing his beautiful writing, smile, and passion. University of Paraná (UFPR) Department of History Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil

Priscila Piazentini Vieira

About the Book

The book is organized as follows. In Chap. 1 “Introduction: The Courage of Truth and The Specific Intellectual,” I highlight Michel Foucault’s interest in parrhe ̄sia in the ancient culture to articulate it with his reflections on the ethical practice of construction of the individual. Such problematization is part of the philosopher’s later studies, from 1982 to 1984, dedicated to working on ethics, aesthetics of existence, and self-care in the Greco-Roman world. It is also part of his reflections on a “historical ontology of ourselves,” from a historical critique aimed at liberation and overcome of contemporary existing conditions. Within this problematic, returning to antiquity through the study of parrhe ̄sia, allows Foucault to question the figure of the “universal intellectual” from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and propose, through the figure of the “specific intellectual,” a new relationship between truth, politics, and the production of knowledge. In Chap. 2, “New Politics of Truth: From the Will to Knowledge to the Courage of Truth,” I highlight the change Foucault’s thought undergoes in the 1980s, especially regarding the problematic of truth. He tries to escape the prevailing modes of understanding it in modernity, which are linked to Christianity and modern science. Ancient culture, therefore, functions as a counterpoint to Christian and scientific truth regimes. It is neither an example to follow nor a political program framework, but rather a historical difference, which strongly assists him in denaturalizing evidence proposed by his present ontology.

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Seeking for the courage of truth is a way of highlighting a notion of truth not yet tied to Christian subjectivity, and which does not function merely as a utilitarian relationship of knowledge, as in modern science. While he proposes to construct a “genealogy of critical attitude in Western philosophy,” the practice of parrhe ̄sia problematizes the link established with the tradition of truth in Western thought. Foucault states that Kant establishes two possibilities for thinking philosophy: analytics of truth and transcendental tradition; and critical tradition, in which reflection on the present is made through a diagnosis of who we are. It is in the latter tradition where Foucault recognizes himself; thus, his appreciation of parrhe ̄sia while opposing it to rhetoric, for example, produces a new look at the past, showing how history allows for very different paths. Chapter 3, “Philosophical Life and Revolutionary Militancy: Cynicism, the Specific Intellectual, and Critique of the Revolutionary Party,” highlights the importance of Foucault’s study of Socratic and Cynic parrhe ̄sia. Moreover, it indicates how ancient cynicism resonates in modernity, especially in the revolutionary movements throughout the nineteenth century, such as anarchism. While Cynics count on true life to transform this world, Christian asceticism relied on obedience to the other to reach the other world. Therefore, I intend to demonstrate how Foucault emphasizes the relevance of Cynicism, defending a political militancy that is grounded on the transformation of the world through its own mode of life. Cynics criticize social conventions through existence as living scandal in the public square. They start from political engagement concerned with caring for self, for others and for the entire human race, proposing daily intervention in people’s lives. Foucault, therefore, sees in the Cynics a form of political militancy built on autonomous values. Furthermore, we must keep in mind that not only Foucault but also the whole European intellectual community since the late-1940s criticized Marxism and refused Marxian concepts such as dominant ideology, hegemony, alienation, revolution sparked by awareness, revolutionary party, organic intellectuals. I likewise emphasize that such problematization emerged from within Marxism itself, mainly in the Socialism or Barbarism group, created in France, in 1948, and whose members were Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Guy Debord, among others. Disputes continued outside Marxism and grew intense from the 1950s to the 1970s. Movements such as feminist, Black Power, gay rights, US civil rights, and

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the events in May 1968 were likewise central, not only in France but also worldwide (cf. Pereira 1983; Roszak 1995; Reis Filho and Moraes 1998; Kurlanski 2005; Artières 2008). To address the importance of these discussions in the early 1980s, especially about the changes which all these events produced in intellectual militancy, I researched interviews and articles by intellectuals such as Julia Kristeva and Pierre Bourdieu in French newspapers and magazines to which Foucault wrote, more specifically Le Monde (Fauvet and Laurens 1944), Libération (1973), Le Débat (Nora 1980), Le Gai Pied (Bitoux 1979), Le Nouvel Observateur (1964), between 1980 and 1984. The research took place at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF), documentary collection, in Paris. Additionally, I would like to emphasize that the revolutionary intellectual had to go through constant self-criticism which implied self-policing, vigilance, purification through rejection of petty-bourgeois desires (Ferrer 2004). While discussing ethics and the aesthetics of existence, Foucault also proposes the construction of a “new man”; however, under other political premises. Therefore, it is not a matter of disregarding the importance of left-wing political commitment born in the nineteenth century and its ethical commitment to transformation, but rather of showing how new problems, such as Nazism, Fascism, and Stalinism, profoundly marked the twentieth century, leading many people to rethink Marxist revolutionary premises, such as the centrality of the Party and the hierarchical relationship established between intellectuals and the so-called “masses” or the working class. It did not occur as a turning back to bourgeois values to build alliance with the right-wing thought; but it was an attempt to further advance the critique of the left in transforming and contesting all prevailing social, economic, cultural, sexual, and racial orders. For a new leftist culture which fights for the “forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions,” as well (Marx & Engels 2002). Chapter 4, “For a New Political Militancy: The GIP Experience and the Arts of Living”, is grounded on the opposition Foucault established between parrhesiastes and rhetoricians, flatterers, wise people, technicians, and prophets, keeping in mind, above all, how these questions relate directly to Foucault’s mode of thinking on the relationship between philosophy, politics, and militant practice. In addition, I focus on the following question: How did the topics courage of truth and individual autonomy allow Foucault to rethink political militancy and the ethics of an intellectual? To understand such issues, I highlight a specific political militancy experience of Foucault’s during which, together with Jean-Marie

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Domenach and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, he established GIP—Prison Information Group—between 1971 and 1972. Distributing clandestine questionnaires within Parisian prisons and, therefore, from anonymous reports by prisoners themselves and their families the group intended to gather information about penitentiary system conditions, and to criticize knowledge as built by dominant and authoritative knowledge. GIP operations revealed Foucault’s acquaintance with many leftist organizations, such as Maoists. It also unveiled differences established by GIP, which participated in the great transformation undergone by post-May 68 militancy. Along with the above-mentioned questions, Chap. 4 deals with Foucault’s diagnosis of his own actuality focused on rejecting the type of individuality produced by modern state and promoting new modes of subjectivity. The theme of creating new modes of life which he finds in ancient culture is linked to the purpose of the new liberation movements in the 1970s and the 1980s, which suggest the existence of new relationships which are no longer tied to codes and institutions. The topic of friendship emerges as key in decolonizing affective relationships. Imagining modes of managing life other than desire for modern domination: Behold Foucault’s problem. Chapter 5, “Conclusion: The Ethics of an intellectual—Detaching Oneself and Dissipating Admitted Familiarities”, highlights that the book developed on the transformation that occurred in Foucault’s own thought, mainly in relation to his way of understanding the truth: the path he takes from the will to know, present, for example, in the production of modern scientific knowledge and in Christian confession, to the courage of ancient truth demonstrates important shifts. The will to know was the main reference prevailing in modern Western thought, and it also ended up inspiring the way in which the traditional revolutionary left, the one linked to the Party and unions, built the figure of the engaged intellectual and the relationship he should establish with the so-called masses. Ancient philosophical texts, on the other hand, allowed Foucault to perceive a very different way of relating to the truth. Instead of concepts such as neutrality, objectivity, the discovery of inner truth and self-denial, which followed the Western will to know, Foucault found notions such as courage, freedom, risk, aesthetics of existence, care of self and others and ethics. This was possible only by his openness to new ways of thinking. Therefore, Foucault understands the transformation of the self, which is intrinsic to the work of the intellectual.

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References Artières, Philippe (2008). 1968, années politiques. Paris: Éditions Thierry Magnier. Bitoux, Jean le (1979). Le Gai Pied hebdo: hebdomadaire homosexuel d’information. Paris. [Texte imprimé]. Accessed October 2011. Fauvet, Jacques & Laurens, André (1944). Le Monde. Paris. [Texte imprimé]. Accessed June 2010. Ferrer, Cristian. (2004). Átomos soltos: a construção da personalidade entre os anarquistas no começo do século XIX. Verve. Revista do NU-­ SOL da PUC-SP (5). Kurlanski, Mark (2005). 1968: The Year That Rocked the World. New  York: Random House Trade Paperbacks. Le Nouvel Observateur (1964). Paris. [Texte imprimé]. Accessed September 2010. Libération (1973). Paris. [Texte imprimé]. Accessed August 2011. Marx, Karl & Engels, Friedrich (2002). The Communist Manifesto. London: Penguin Classics. Nora, Pierre (1980). Le Débat. Paris. [Texte imprimé]. Accessed July 2011. Perdriel, Claude (1977). Le Matin de Paris. Paris. [Texte imprimé]. Accessed July 2011. Pereira, Carlos Alberto Messeder. O que é contracultura. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1983. Reis Filho, Daniel Aarão; Moraes, Pedro (1998). 68: a paixão de uma utopia. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fundação Getúlio Vargas. Roszak, Theodore (1995). The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Contents

1 Introduction:  The Courage of Truth and the Specific Intellectual  1 References  13 2 New  Politics of Truth: From the Will to Knowledge to the Courage of Truth 17 Theoretical Shifts: Between Governmentality and the Government of Self and Others  18 The Government of Others  20 The Government of Self and Others  23 Telling the Truth About Self and Others  27 The Deconstruction of Christian Obedience and Scientific Rationality: For the Affirmation of Greco-Roman Autonomy  30 Greek Autonomy of Self  31 The Ethics of Truth-Telling  37 The Courage of Truth and the Aesthetics of Existence: From Socrates to the Cynics  43 Socrates: Ethics and the Courage of Truth  44 The Cynics and the Aesthetics of Existence  49 References  51

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3 Philosophical  Life and Revolutionary Militancy: Cynicism, the Specific Intellectual and Criticism of the Revolutionary Party 55 Parrhēsia Outside the Institutional Field: Socrates and Cynicism in Revolutionary Militancy  63 Socrates and Political Practice Outside the Institution  63 The Resonance Cynicism has for Western Culture  66 Cynicism and the Specific Intellectual: True Life for the Transformation of This World  81 Cynicism and True Life  83 Heterotopias and Utopias: Between “Autre Monde” and “Monde Autre”  86 Cynics, Radical Other Life and the Transformation of this World  91 Christian Asceticism and the Other World  99 References 107 4 For  a New Political Militancy: The Experience of GIP and the Arts of Living111 The Intellectual and the Parrhesiastic Attitude 112 Parrhēsia, Risk and Courage 113 Parrhēsia, Philosophy and Politics 115 The Parrhesiastic Attitude 120 Prison Militancy and the GIP 126 The Emergence and Specificity of the GIP’s Militancy: Approximations and Differences with Regard to Left-Wing Groups 127 The Prison System Is Intolerable 131 GIP and Liberation Movements: Socio-Ethical Proposals 135 The Construction of Ethical Ways of Existence 137 Radically Transform Subjectivities 140 Freedom Practices and New Ways of Life 142 References 149

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5 Conclusion:  The Ethics of an Intellectual—Detaching Oneself and Dissipating Admitted Familiarities153 References 159 Index161

About the Author

Priscila Piazentini Vieira  is a postdoctoral scholar at Federal University of Paraná (UFPR). History professor, Dr. Vieira researches Theory and Philosophy of History and Contemporary History, being her main topics of research Michel Foucault’s genealogical analysis of history, his concepts of courage of the truth, specific intellectual, and the subject of right, as well as Donna Haraway’s feminism. As an undergraduate and graduate professor at UFPR, Dr. Vieira has taught courses on Foucault, Donna Haraway and Brazilian historiography in the twentieth-­century, mainly what concerns the construction of a national identity, focusing on class, race, and gender issues. Also as a professor, she has advised students through their processes of writing undergraduate monograph projects and master’s thesis. She is editor-in-chief of the UFPR History graduate program magazine History: Questions & Debates.

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Courage of Truth and the Specific Intellectual

We should start by reinventing the future focused on a more creative present. —Michel Foucault (1994a). Conversation sans complexes avec le philosophe qui analyse les ‘structures de pouvoir’. In: Dits et Écrits III (1976–1979). Paris: Gallimard, 678

There are some moments in Foucault’s intellectual journey when he reflects on parrhēsia: in two lectures at Collège de France: The Hermeneutics of the Subject (1982) and The Government of Self and Others (1983); during the seminar held in the University of Berkeley, 1983; and in 1984, when he heads back to Paris to hold his last lecture entitled The Courage of Truth. The word parrhēsia was first used in Greek literature by Euripides, circa fourth century BC. It was generally translated as “frankness.” Therefore, the parrhesiastes is one who speaks through parrhēsia, i.e., one who speaks the truth, who speaks everything, better yet, it is one who has the courage and freedom to tell the truth to the Prince, a friend, a disciple. Such an attitude of risk and free choice is one of the main criteria to prove the spoken discourse true. Foucault proposes a meaning for parrhēsia as follows:

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. P. Vieira, Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth and The Ethics of an Intellectual, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04356-7_1

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What is basically at stake in parrhēsia is (…) the frankness, freedom, and openness that leads one to say what one has to say, as one wishes to say it, when one wishes to say it, and in the form one thinks is necessary for saying it. The term parrhēsia is so bound up with the choice, decision, and attitude of the person speaking that the Latins translated it by, precisely, libertas. The telling all of parrhēsia was rendered by libertas: the freedom of the person speaking. (Foucault 2005: 372)

In addition, commitment to truth is a moral quality, since the speaker expresses no personal interest in persuading or convincing. Because a parrhesiastes ultimately wants to construct a relational mode of knowledge “capable of producing a change in the subject’s mode of being.” This practice, as Gabilondo and Megías claim, has a specific characteristic: it intends for the other to constitute sovereignty over him/herself through ethical elaboration. It therefore presupposes a relationship with the other. From that perspective, the main distinguishing trait of knowledge in Antiquity is: (…) in the way in which what one knows (connait) about the gods, men, and the world can have an effect on the nature, I mean on the way of doing things, on his ethos (…) the individual’s way of being, his mode of existence. (Foucault 2005: 237)

Also in The Hermeneutics of the Subject, parrhēsia is integral to the practice of conversion in Antiquity, as opposed to the art of speaking in Christian pastoral and spirituality. For in Christianity, attention falls fundamentally on the person being guided, who must tell the truth about him/ herself to an authority. This is imperative for salvation and points out a particular relation between the subject and truth, an important moment in the history of subjectivity in the Western World. This relationship did not exist in Antiquity, because one who is guided toward truth through the master’s discourse is not obliged to tell the truth about oneself. There is no need to talk. In fact, silence is recommended. The problem, therefore, does not lie on the person being guided, for there is no specific role for this person’s speech, but rather, the role of silence. The master’s speech is the one to follow the rules of the principle of parrhēsia, referring to two aspects: on one hand, quality and moral attitude, éthos; on the other, technical procedures, tékhne. Both are imperative for the transmission of true discourse and so the discourse serves the purpose—guaranteeing the other’s autonomy:

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The objective of parrhēsia is to act so that at a given moment the person to whom one is speaking finds himself in a situation in which he no longer needs the other’s discourse. How and why does he no longer need the other’s discourse? Precisely because the other’s discourse was true. It is insofar as the other has given, has conveyed a true discourse to the person to whom he speaks, that this person, internalizing and subjectivizing this true discourse, can then leave the relationship with the other person. (Foucault 2005: 379)

Thus it was drawing from the subject matter conversion that Foucault introduced parrhēsia into his studies. Beyond the importance of returning to the self in Christianity, in morals and in philosophy, he also expresses its relevance in nineteenth-century political life. Although briefly, at that point he suggests the formulation of “the history of what could be called revolutionary subjectivity” (Foucault 2005: 208). A story that starts from the experience of the French Revolution, when “schemas of individual and subjective experience of ‘conversion to the revolution’ begin to be defined” (Foucault 2005: 208). Therefore, in order to understand what practice and revolutionary individuals meant during the nineteenth century, it is key to learn how they were linked to such historically traditional technique. However, Foucault carries on formulating the axis to a history of revolutionary subjectivity and indicates two fundamental issues: We would also have to see how this notion of conversion was gradually validated, then absorbed, soaked up, and finally nullified by the existence of a revolutionary party, and how we passed from belonging to the revolution through the schema of conversion, to belonging to the revolution by adherence to a party And you know that these days, now, in our daily experience (…) we only convert to renunciation of revolution. The great converts today are those who no longer believe in the revolution. Okay. In short, there is a whole history to be written. (Foucault 2005: 209)

In the above excerpt there are two extremely relevant issues: the revolutionary political party and the contemporary experience of “renunciation of revolution”. These are axes pervading this entire book, after all, it is one of my main intentions to highlight how Foucault’s interest in parrhēsia is directly linked to the question on contemporary intellectuals, especially concerning their relation to politics and truth. The following discussions make this relationship explicit.

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In his seminar held in Berkeley (Foucault 2003, 2016, 2019b), Foucault demonstrates the evolution of the parrhesiastic game in ancient culture, highlighting three main moments: parrhēsia versus rhetoric; its relationship to politics; and its association to philosophy and the care of self. At first, I will refer to Plato’s Phaedrus, whose main discussion concerns the difference between knowledge that tells the truth and knowledge not capable of such. This opposition between philosophy and rhetoric is clearly defined in the fourth century BC through Plato’s writings and shall remain in philosophy through centuries. Rhetoric is an art of persuasion not concerned about truth—in fact, it is even capable of lying—and whose regular procedures have the objectives of taking action, leading, and guiding others, in assemblies or in the army for example. On the contrary, parrhēsia has the purpose of acting on others “so they come to build up a relationship of sovereignty to themselves” (Foucault 2005: 385). Concerning its link to politics, parrhēsia was a key trait of Athenian democracy as both a good citizen’s ethical and personal attitude, and a requirement to speak in public. The latter was considered a right linked to social status; those not having the right to speak freely are not capable of exercising power of any kind, thus being in a similar position to slaves. Parrhēsia, therefore, is not an equal right for every Athenian citizen, but rather it is a right for those of prestige. During the Hellenistic period, and with the rise of monarchies, such political meaning changes, being then about the relationship between the sovereign, the Prince, and his counselors or courtiers. A counselor was expected to help the king, through parrhēsia, in making decisions, as well as in preventing abuse of power, for which purpose he could criticize the governor’s authority. In such a “parrhesiastic contract,” a sovereign addresses one who holds the truth but not the power. If the king has no self-control and does not hear the truth, that means he is a bad governor for the city (Foucault 2008). Then, in a third moment parrhēsia is depicted as related to the field of philosophy, considered as the art of living (tékne toû biou) (Foucault 2019b: 193). In the context of Athenian crisis of democracy, Socrates performs a parrhesiastic role. In his dialogue with Alcibiades, parrhēsia is linked to care of self (epimeleia heautou) (Foucault 2019b: 60) when he claims the Persian King must first take care of himself before he could be the Athenian sovereign. Felisa Santos asserts the care of self is no longer thought of for the purpose of leading a polis, but rather it is itself an objective (Santos 2003: 47–48). Accordingly, Socrates wonders how philosophy can form a personal life style, i.e., he searches for a harmonious relationship between

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rational discourse, logos, and mode of living—between words and actions. The search for such harmony distinguishes Socrates from Sophists. The concept of harmony is discussed in many Greek schools of philosophy, such as Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Cynicism. Epicurus’s followers—for instance, Philodemus—where dedicated to communitarianism within groups apart from society, aspiring to the safety of all members. Around the fourth and third centuries BC, Athens was under constant threat of invasion, mainly from Macedonia; there was a constant feeling of danger (Romeyer-Dherbey 2008: 59). Hence Epicurus’ response was to seek refuge within high garden walls and renounce every political action outside that community. Public life in the city is, therefore, replaced by friendship among Epicureans. Philia was then understood as political bond strengthening relationships between individuals and stimulating life in community. Philosophers who dedicated themselves to thinking mainly about private relationships supported each other in a kind of Stoicism that spread in ancient culture, along with other schools. Such was the case with Plutarch, Seneca, and Galen, for instance. Here it is necessary to remember Foucault highlights Epithet, although he was Stoic, as one who provided students with an intense community life (Foucault 2019b: 158). Concerning the late Stoicism I have already mentioned here, it suffered strong impact as a result of Emperor Alexandre’s domain, which historically degraded the public components that laid the foundation for the polis (Daraki 2008: 50–51). Within this context, after the golden age of the Greek cities, even though Alexander’s empire raised the idea of a unity of the empire, the Stoics strongly criticized such notion (Daraki 2008: 52). While the crisis of the polis took place, they identified the separation between man and society and relied on exercises about themselves, such as Seneca’s examination of conscience, which in no way resembles individualistic, narcissistic practices nor ascetic exercises of Christian tradition. Ultimately, Cynics such as Diogenes, Crates, and Hipparchia were more willing to leave examples of life by resorting to public demonstrations than by producing texts or doctrine. For them independence, freedom, and autonomy from any political institution or law is a condition for happiness. As Maria Daraki claims, they reprobated, among other things, the last and most noble “technical invention” that defined the most advanced stage of civilization: writing. They also fought against the human propensity to “discover and invent a thousand devices,” therefore praising the exemplary life of animals, connected to simplicity and truth (Daraki

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2008: 13). Despite the hostility Cynics suffered from noble philosophers of the Greek elite, Foucault greatly emphasizes their scandalous way of life (Daraki 2008: 13). In such aggressive rejection of social norms, cynics transgressed the values ​​ established through a principle of dispossession, transforming, according to Frédéric Gros (2012), a philosopher’s existence into an infamous life, alluding to Foucault’s “The Life of Infamous Men,” (2019a). By that time, Foucault had searched prison and police archives in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to find flashes of brief “singular lives.” Such lives reached us only because they were captured by a court case that linked them to the very power relations they were struggling with; however, this encounter with power also played as beams of light, while revealing and recording lives in historical documents. Gros, therefore, compares these characters’ anonymity and infamy with the Cynics’ bad reputation in both ancient and modern culture. Following his argument, he emphasizes how Stoic self-care, which plots life and truth in an ideal harmony, is distinguished from Cynic parrhēsia, which makes existence the intolerable point of truth. The following are examples of two different senses of truth in ancient culture: Two aesthetics of existence, two absolutely different styles of courage of Truth: courage to slowly transform oneself, to maintain style in a moving existence, to last and to persist; a more prompt and more intense courage of provocation, to bring out by action, truths which everyone knows but no one says, or which everyone repeats but no one bothers to live, courage of disruption, refusal, termination. In both cases, it is not about forging a new morality which seeks good and moves away from evil, but rather, it is the demand for an ethic pursuing the truth and arraigning the lie. It is not about the moral of a philosopher; it is about an engaged intellectual’s ethics. (Gros 2012)

Once again, here one reads the link between Foucault’s study of a mode of speaking and relating to truth in antiquity, and the ethics of intellectuals in the present, demonstrating how works on parrhēsia in ancient culture inspired Foucault to rethink contemporary political activism. I also think that his own mode of political activism, while linked to the margins, allowed for his particular view toward rendering visible philosophical practices condemned in antiquity and/or forgotten by a given tradition of philosophical and political thought. In such case, Gros discusses the position that Foucault himself takes while engaging politically. The Stoics and

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the Cynics are two models of existence questioning the role of activists: actions, principles, and adequacy toward their lives. Foucault’s view of the ancients, therefore, enables a specific way of writing history: from a critique of the present. *** Felisa Santos claims that the problematization of parrhēsia derives from a larger theme: an ontology of actuality. In The government of Self and Others such relationship becomes even clearer. The first two lessons deal with Kant’s answer to the question “Was ist Aufklärung?”, highlighting it as a typically modern text, mainly because it deals with the present in a specific way (Foucault 2008). Later, such discussions are also present in Foucault’s article “What is Enlightenment?”. Written in 1984, it was originally published by Paul Rabinow in The Foucault Reader (Foucault 1984). Later, in 1994, the article composed the fourth volume of Dits et écrits (Foucault 1994b). In “What is Enlightenment?” Foucault argues that Kant does not seek to understand the present from totality or future realization, but rather following a difference: “what difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday?” (Foucault 1984: 34). In addition to this question, Kant understands Enlightenment as a process that releases us from the state of “immaturity,” which 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” (Foucault 1984: 34) Man himself is responsible for his immature status and cannot escape but by bringing about change in himself. Foucault adds: “Thus Enlightenment must be considered both as a process in which men participate collectively and as an act of courage to be accomplished personally” (Foucault 1984: 35). I realize how courage is key for man’s escape from immaturity, i.e., for the transformation the individual operates in himself. The “art of oneself”, to be discussed throughout the book while showing specificities and importance of such concept in Foucault’s thoughts, must be understood from a critical attitude towards the present, as well as imagining the present differently and transforming it “with the practice of a freedom that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it” (Foucault 1984: 41). This particular notion of attitude needs to be clarified, as it helps to signal the link between the study of antiquity and the ontology of the present:

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[B]y ‘attitude,’ I mean a 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. (Foucault 1984: 39)

Therefore, Foucault understands this attitude as a permanent critique of our historical being, pointing to contemporary limits, while highlighting what is no longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects. The historical ontology of ourselves questions what is given as universal, necessary, obligatory, showing from singularities what is contingent and the product of arbitrary impositions: “The point, in brief, is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression” (Foucault 1984: 45). This work on the critical attitude in the West had already been Foucault’s object of study in a 1978 communication: “What is Critique?” (Foucault 1990). Comparing the different periods of this discussion, Gros states that in “What is Critique?,” reposing the question of Enlightenment is to ask oneself “How not to be governed in that way?” (Gros 2008: 378) The problem was, therefore, linked to a specific objective: “the ‘desubjectification’ in the framework of a ‘politics of truth’” (Gros 2008: 378). At that time, modernity was seen as a privileged historical period to study the apparatus of power-knowledge for subjecting/subjectifying. In The Government of Self and Others, the question pertaining to Enlightenment is thought of as “a courageous speaking of the truth that appeared in the Greeks, and as giving rise to a different question: What government of self should be posited as both the foundation and limit of the government of others?” (Gros 2008: 379). Thus “modernity” also has a change of meaning, becoming “a meta-historical attitude of thought itself” (Gros 2008: 379). More than faithfulness to the elements of a doctrine of Enlightenment, therefore, it is precisely in this critical attitude that Foucault stresses the thread that can connect us to Kant’s work and all his tradition. Again, I notice a very particular relationship that Foucault establishes with the past and the present, while seeing in the problematization brought by Enlightenment a mode of rethinking our own present and designing new paths. This procedure shows the libertarian character of Foucault’s thought, remembering that our relationship with the past serves to

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denaturalize our present and transform it: “I do not know whether it must be said today that the critical task still entails faith in Enlightenment; I continue to think that this task requires work on our limits, that is, a patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty” (Foucault 1984: 50). I understand the link Foucault establishes with parrhēsia in the sense of denaturalizing our present and thinking of different forms to produce our freedom, which allows him to glimpse ways out of impasses he finds in his own present. While treating Kant’s work as a proposal to reorganize the government of self and others, Foucault also points out that the aim of his course will be to see this problem from other historical documents and periods, i.e., according to ancient society rules of parrhesiastic practice. His purpose is “to try to see how truth-telling (dire-vrai), 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” (Foucault 2008: 42). Nancy Luxon sees in Foucault’s later studies of parrhēsia a response to normalization in late modernity (Luxon 2008: 395). Parrhēsia, understood as “practices in liberty,” integrates a system of morality distinct from the modern one, for it is not part of a universal ethical code and does not become an orthopaedy of behaviors, as it occurs with the emergence of disciplinary society (Luxon 2008: 387). Within this ancient mode of being, “individuals might develop themselves differently as ethical subjects” (Luxon 2008: 385). Such practices do not produce a “knowing subject,” as modern scientific knowledge does, but rather an “expressive subject” (Luxon 2008: 385). In that same direction, Mariapaola Fimiani notes that this ethics forges “another subject whose status is extremely variable, fluid, undetermined and in no case institutionalized” (Fimiani 2012: 87–127). The study of parrhēsia, therefore, opens up many possibilities for problematizing the conditions of existence in the present, mainly while indicating an ethics of the government of self that escapes a modern morality framework. And, certainly, one of the most relevant ways out Foucault offers concerns discussing the attitude of the intellectual toward politics and a new concept of truth in contemporaneity. ***

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Again, Nancy Luxon is the one who highlights Foucault’s concern with the relationship between ethics and politics—especially regarding the intellectual—in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She claims “his later work returns to the dilemma of political action with more insistence.” (Luxon 2008: 394; cf. Luxon 2013). Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983), Thomas Abraham (1988), Frédéric Gros (1996), Margareth Rago (2004, 2006; Rago and Vieira 2009), Edson Passetti (1996, 2007a, 2007b), Salma Tannus Muchail (2004, 2009), Alfredo Veiga-Neto (2005), Cesar Candiotto (2010), Torben Dyrberg (2014), Judith Revel (2015), Daniele Lorenzini (2017) among others, also highlighted the link between the studies of ancient ethics and present-day political action. An interview he gave in 1977, “Truth and Power,” (Foucault 1980: 32) and his communication in Japan, in 1978, “Analytic Philosophy of Politics,” (Mascaretti and Foucault 2018: 192) clearly show Foucault’s concern about possible modes of political struggle of the intellectual in the present. In the interview, he states that one of the great issues posed by intellectuals in the early to mid-1950s was that of the political status of science and the ideological functions it could convey. While the interweaving of power and psychiatry as a form of knowledge, for example, failed to interest (Foucault 1980: 110), Marxism sought to be recognized by university institution and accepted as great renewal of liberal tradition. Moreover, Stalinism did not allow for addressing ways not yet traveled. Add to these aspects the great silence of the French intellectual Left, which, despite the very strong criticism showed since 1950 from within Marxism itself with C. Castoriadis and his group Socialism or Barbarism, for example, went through a wider political opening only in 1968. Also in that context of left renewal, Foucault notices a transformation in the definition of intellectuals. For a long time, the “left” intellectual was recognized as the bearer of truth and justice, somewhat as the proletariat was considered the bearer of the universal, but still little conscious of himself: “The intellectual is thus taken as the clear, individual figure of a universality whose obscure, collective form is embodied in the proletariat.” (Foucault 1980: 126). However, according to Foucault, since the mid-­ twentieth century, the role of the intellectual has undergone transformation and a new link between theory and practice has been established. Intellectuals have become used to acting no longer in the modality of “universal,” “exemplary,” but rather within specific and precise sectors where they are situated by working or conditions of life, such as housing,

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asylum, university, family and sexual relations, etc. That is what Foucault calls “specific” intellectual as opposed to the “universal” intellectual. Although he dates this change back to the 1950s, it should be remembered that the image of intellectuals as universal, organic, and partisan in the revolution has long predominated in the imaginary and political practice of both Brazilian and European intellectuality. And it was not until 1970, with the failure of experience and disappointment with the leftist revolutionary models, that transformations were perceived at greater scales and intensities. Foucault’s work, although written in 1977, was controversial among scholars who, in a way, were grounded in the concept of the pure, immaculate intellectual, the bearer of universal truth. Following Foucault’s steps, indicating the emergence and provenance of those two notions of the intellectual, he shows that the figure of the “specific” intellectual develops from World War II and his “chief representative” is the atomic scientist. From that moment on, political power persecutes intellectuals no longer for their general discourse, but rather for their specific knowledge and political danger. Nevertheless, “universal” intellectuals present in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries derive from the man of justice and law, because of great political struggles for the law, the Constitution, i.e., for whatsoever is fair by reason and by nature, or yet what should count as universal. These two models, therefore, produced two very different figures: the “jurist or notable” and that of the “savant or expert” (Foucault 1980: 128). When Foucault argues for a new relationship between philosophy and power, he also expresses the mode of acting of the “specific intellectual”: Perhaps one could see that there is still a certain possibility for philosophy to play a role in relation to power, which would be a role neither of foundation nor of renewal of power. Perhaps philosophy can still play a role on the side of counter-power, on the condition that this role does not consist in exercising, in the face of power, the very law of philosophy, on the condition that philosophy stops thinking of itself as prophesy, (…) as pedagogy, or as legislation, and that it gives itself the task to analyze, clarify, and make visible, and thus intensify the struggles that develop around power, the strategies of the antagonists within relations of power, the tactics employed, the foyers of resistance. (Mascaretti and Foucault 2018: 192)

The role of philosophy would thus have a meaning other than that of science, which is to make known that what we do not see. Philosophy

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must not discover what is hidden; it rather makes visible what is visible, it makes appear what is nearby, what is immediate, what is intimately connected to ourselves in such a way that we do not perceive it. It’s what he called “analytico-political philosophy.” (Mascaretti and Foucault 2018: 192). In that sense, Foucault perceives social movements from the 1960s onwards—the women’s movement, for instance. They do not pursue political power or aim at economic systems, because their objectives are not the same as those of traditional political or revolutionary movements. They are attentive to instances of power close to them, to that which exerts itself directly upon individuals. They are “immediate struggles,” “anarchist struggles.” (Mascaretti and Foucault 2018: 192). For such groups it is not a matter of following the Leninist model, to which the working class was the great avant-garde combatant, because their claims are different from those strongly valued in the West during revolution (Lenin 2012). The role of analytico-political philosophy is precisely to estimate the importance of such phenomena to which, up to now, only marginal value has been given. Foucault argues that while aimed at an endless destabilization of the mechanisms of power, these immediate struggles deserve at least the same merit that we grant traditional revolutionary struggles. The following excerpt returns to the problematization of political party and revolution, discussed in The Hermeneutics of the Subject: “What we call, from the twentieth century, the Revolution, what the parties and movements we call revolutionary aim at, is essentially what constitutes the economic power…” (Mascaretti and Foucault 2018: 200). Foucault, therefore, escapes venerated signs of the revolution and favors actions linked to particular conjunctures very similar to his mode of understanding the function of the intellectual. It is a matter of occupying a specific position linked “to the general functioning of an apparatus of truth.” (Foucault 1980: 132) The major problem, therefore, is not to criticize the ideological content of science, but rather “ascertaining the possibility of constituting a new politics of truth (…) The political question, to sum up, is not error, illusion, alienated consciousness or ideology; it is truth itself.” (Foucault 1980: 133). I understand the historical problematization of ancient parrhēsia as a means through which Foucault suggests other possibilities for constructing a new politics of truth, one which escapes modern and Christian frameworks—I will detail that further in Chap. 1. While highlighting the

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discussion on parrhēsia, I thus emphasize a critical history which liberates us from the present and points us to possible overtaking and ways out, especially when Foucault establishes such an innovating and transformative relationship between intellectuals, politics, and truth. The latter is no longer revealed through the objectivity of a correct method which could neutrally describe the thing or the object itself, rather it is thought following precepts of ancient parrhēsia, ruled by courage, sincerity, and free speech while running risks. Truth, therefore, emerges when there is harmony between what a person says and the life of the person speaking. Whether at the assembly, before an emperor, to a disciple, a friend, in the public square, production of truth takes place in a slow process of elaborating subjectivity in relation to itself and to the other. It is also understood from the following end: transformation and autonomy of an individual through creation of specific ethical modes of existence. Throughout the book we shall see some of them. There is striking resonance between Socrates’ stylistics of existence, the Cynic scandal of the truth, and Foucault’s courage to think and live differently. In what ways? In multiple and delicate ways, certainly. I will suggest some, while highlighting the axis of politics this notion of parrhēsia brings us. Thus, my interest in the courage of truth is to speak of its resonances in Foucault’s political activism. Readers might notice many others, while yet others remain to be discovered or silenced. Would that be unfortunate inaccuracy haunting Foucault? No. They are rather endless new possibilities to be created from his thought which insistently continue to surprise us.

References Abraham, Tomás (Ed.). (1988). Foucault y la ética. Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos. Candiotto, Cesar (2010). Foucault e a crítica da verdade. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica; Curitiba: Champagnat. Daraki, Maria (2008). Los cínicos; Los stoicos. In: Daraki, Maria, and Romeyer-­ Dherbey, Gilbert (Eds.). El Mundo helenístico: cínicos, estoicos y epicúreos. 50–51. Madrid: Ediciones Akal. Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Rabinow, Paul (1983). Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: The University Chicago Press. Dyrberg, Torben (2014). Foucault on the Politics of Parrhesia. Palgrave Pivot. Fimiani, Mariapaola (2012). Le véritable amour et le souci commun du monde. In: Gros, Frédéric. Foucault. Le courage de la vérité. 87–127. Paris: PUF.

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Foucault, Michel (1980). Truth and Power. In: Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel (1984). “What Is Enlightenment?” (“Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?”). In: Rabinow, Paul. The Foucault Reader. 32–50. New  York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel (1990). Qu’est-ce que la critique? Critique et Aufklärung. Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie, 82 (2), 35–63. Foucault, Michel (1994a). Conversation sans complexes avec le philosophe qui analyse les ‘structures de pouvoir’. In: Dits et Écrits III (1976–1979). Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, Michel (1994b). “What Is Enlightenment?” (“Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?”). In: Dits et écrits IV (1980–1988). 562–578. Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, Michel (2003). Coraje y verdad. In: Abraham, Tomás (Org.). El último Foucault. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana. Foucault, Michel (2005). The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France, 1981–82. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel (2008). The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France (1982–1983). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel (2016). Discours et vérité. précédé de La parrêsia. Édition et apparat critique par Henri-Paul Fruchaud et Daniele Lorenzini. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. VRIN. Foucault, Michel (2019a). Lives of Infamous Men (1977). In: Luxon, Nancy. Archives of Infamy: Foucault on State Power in the Lives of Ordinary Citizens. 67–84. Mineápolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, Michel (2019b). Discourse & Truth and parrhēsia. Edited by HenriPaul Fruchaud and Daniele Lorenzini. Introduction by Frédéric Gros. English edition established by Nancy Luxon. Chicago and London. The University of Chicago Press. Gros, Frédéric (1996). Que Sais-je? Michel Foucault. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Gros, Frédéric (2008). Course Context. In: Foucault, Michel. The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France (1982–1983). New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gros, Frédéric (Ed.). (2012). Foucault. Le courage de la vérité. Paris: PUF. Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (2012). What Is to Be Done? In: Essential Works of Lenin: “What Is to Be Done?” and Other Writings. Mineola: Dover Publications. Lorenzini, Daniele (2017). La force du vrai: De Foucault à Austin. Lormont: Le Bord de l’eau. Luxon, Nancy (2008). Ethics and Subjectivity: Practices of Self-Governance in the Late Lectures of Michel Foucault. Political Theory, 36 (3), Sage Publications. Luxon, Nancy (2013). Crisis of Authority: Politics, Trust, and Truth-Telling in Freud and Foucault. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Mascaretti, Giovanni, and Foucault, Michel (2018). The Analytic Philosophy of Politics. Foucault Studies, 24. Muchail, Salma Tannus (2004). Leitura dos antigos, reflexões do presente. In: Rago, Margareth, and Veiga-Neto, Alfredo (Eds.). Para uma vida não fascista. 349–361. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica. Muchail, Salma Tannus (2009). Foucault, simplesmente: textos reunidos. São Paulo: Loyola. Passetti, Edson (1996). Foucault libertário. Revista Margem, 5. São Paulo, 135–147. Passetti, Edson (2007a). Foucault e o libertarismo. Revista Aulas, 3. Passetti, Edson (2007b). Anarquismo urgente. Rio de Janeiro: Achiamé. Rago, Margareth (2004). Foucault, história & anarquismo. Rio de Janeiro: Achiamé. Rago, Margareth (2006). Narcisismo, sujeição e estéticas da existência. Verve, Revista do NU-SOL—Núcleo de Sociabilidade Libertária do Programa de Estudos de Pós-Graduação em Ciências Sociais da PUC-SP, 9, São Paulo. Rago, Margareth, and Vieira, Priscila Piazentini (2009). Foucault, criações libertárias e práticas parresiásticas. In: Caminhos da História. Revista do Departamento de História, Centro de Ciências Humanas—UNIMONTES, 14 (2). Montes Claros: Editora Unimontes, 23–58. Revel, Judith (2015). Foucault Avec Merleau-Ponty: Ontologie Politique, Présentisme Et Histoire. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin. Romeyer-Dherbey, Gilbert (2008). Epicúreos. In: Daraki, Maria, and Romeyer-­ Dherbey, Gilbert (Eds.). El Mundo helenístico: cínicos, estoicos y epicúreos. Madrid: Ediciones Akal. Santos, Felisa (2003). El Riesco de pensar. In: Abraham, Tomás (Org.). El último Foucault. 47–48. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana. Veiga-Neto, Alfredo (2005). Foucault & a educação. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica.

CHAPTER 2

New Politics of Truth: From the Will to Knowledge to the Courage of Truth

It seems to me that what must now be taken into account in the intellectual is not the “bearer of universal values.” Rather, it’s the person occupying a specific position—but whose specificity is linked (…) to the general functioning of an apparatus of truth. In other words, (…) the specificity of the politics of truth in our societies. —Michel Foucault (1980a). Truth and Power. In: Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. 132. New York: Pantheon Books

Lectures on the Will to Know was one of Foucault’s last lectures to be published in France (Foucault 2011b), U.S. (Foucault 2014a) and in Brazil (Foucault 2014b). The publication comprises his first lectures at Collège de France between 1970 and 1971. One of his main purposes is “seeing what real struggles and relations of domination are involved in the will to truth.” (Foucault 2014a: 2) Thirteen years later, in The Government of Self and Others he indicates the following direction for the study: “I would like to try to see how truth-telling (dire-vrai), 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.” (Foucault 2014a: 42).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. P. Vieira, Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth and The Ethics of an Intellectual, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04356-7_2

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In the following year, Foucault addresses a specific problem: “What is the ethical relationship between courage and truth? Or, to what extent do the ethics of truth imply courage?” (Foucault 2011a: 124). In the above quoted excerpts, I am interested in the different terms associated with truth. From the first one I highlight “real struggles,” “relations of domination,” and “will to truth”; from the second quote, “procedures of government” and “the individual is constituted as a subject in the relationship to self and to others”; finally, from the third quote I highlight, “ethics” and “courage.” What are the issues involved in these shifts in the mode of thinking about truth?

Theoretical Shifts: Between Governmentality and the Government of Self and Others In the first hour of his lecture on January 5, 1983, Foucault summarized his thought and thus uncovered details concerning his general project going under the title “the history of thought.” (Foucault 2008: 2). Differentiating himself from two other methods widely used in the period, the history of mentalities and the history of representations, Foucault proposes a study that is different from the activities of most historians of ideas. On the one hand, the history of mentalities favors the analysis of actual behaviors, as well as expressions which may precede, follow, translate, prescribe, and justify such behaviors. Foucault also highlights such difference in “Introduction,” in The use of pleasures, using sexuality to point out specificities of a history of thought: (…) how, why, and in what forms was sexuality constituted as a moral domain? Why this ethical concern that was so persistent despite its varying forms and intensity? Why this “problematization”? But, after all, this was the proper task of a history of thought, as against a history of behaviors or representations: to define the conditions in which human beings “problematize” what they are, what they do, and the world in which they live. (Foucault 1990)

On the other hand, the history of representations or representational systems has two main objectives. One is the analysis of “representational functions” or the role representations might play in relation either to the represented object or to the subject who represents it (a history of ideologies). The other concerns the study of representations in terms of a

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knowledge considered criterion of truth, as a truth-reference point. And it is in relation to such criterion that the representational value of a given system of thought might be determined. Between these two possibilities Foucault proposes a history of thought. He understands “thought” through the joint articulation of three axis: forms of a possible knowledge (knowing); normative frameworks of behavior for individuals (power); and potential modes of existence for possible subjects (ethics). Following that perspective, he analyzed madness, not considered an invariant object throughout history and on which a certain number of representations would act (Foucault 1988a). Nor did he understand the history of madness as the study of an attitude we have had over the centuries or at a given moment concerning madness. Rather he studied it as an experience within our culture, taking it, at first, as a starting point to forge heterogeneous knowledge, i.e., madness as matrix of knowledge. Furthermore, he understood it as a form of knowledge, a combination of norms establishing it as a phenomenon of deviation within society. Ultimately, he thought of madness as a defining experience which constitutes a mode of being for normal individuals as opposed to abnormal individuals. Therefore, the articulation between these three axis defines the study of “experience.” (Foucault 1994a: 578–584) Thus, his proposal of thought was built from three theoretical shifts. First, when studying the formation of knowledge, he shifts the axis of the history of knowledge towards the analysis of knowledge, and perceives discursive practices as forms of verification. In a second moment, while analyzing normative models of behavior, he does not describe Power (with a capital P), institutions of power, or general or institutional forms of domination, but rather studies techniques and procedures by which we lead the conduct of others. The question on norms of behavior arises in terms of the power we exercise, which in turn is analyzed as a field of government procedures. Accordingly, he goes from the analysis of the exercise of power to procedures of governmentality, following the example of criminality and disciplines (Foucault 1991). The third axis analyzes the constitution of the subject’s mode of being. At this point the objective was to escape a theory of the subject and analyze the different ways in which the individual is formed as subject. From the example of sexual behavior and history of sexual morality, Foucault seeks an understanding of how and by which forms of relationship of self with self, the individual is called to constitute himself as a moral subject of his sexual conduct. It is, therefore, about operating the following shifts:

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getting rid of the question of the subject and analyzing the modes of subjectivation and, in addition, studying them from the technologies of the relationship with self, or from the standpoint of their pragmatics. For Foucault, these three axes constitute a history of “experiences.” His study was grounded on experiences of madness, criminality, and sexuality as fundamental in the constitution of Western culture. This theoretical statement clearly indicates Foucault’s intentions in his work, as well as the struggles he established while facing traditionally accepted studies and subject matters in dominant philosophy or historiography. However, there are shifts, as well, occurring in his own thought, as he explains in “Introduction,” in The use of pleasures (Foucault 1990). Although his method of theoretical shifting is very well outlined in the work mentioned, I would like to address a change whose beginning was in Security, territory, population (Foucault, 2009), in 1977, and went on until the early 1980s between the notions of power and government. In Foucault’s theoretical statement in the work The government of self and others, these questions are already answered and, therefore, are posed in a more finished and synthesized way. To understand the clashes, shifts, deadlocks, and questions involving these transformations, it is important to return to Foucault’s works preceding The Hermeneutics of the Subject, a course in which parrhēsia appears for the first time. More specifically, I refer myself to On the Government of the Living (Foucault 2014c), lectured between 1979 and 1980, and Subjectivity and Truth (Foucault 2017), lectured in 1981. The Government of Others The problem of governmentality was key for him to shift from the study of “relations of domination” that were involved in the question of truth, to the “practice of government” which later enabled the analysis of the “constitution of the subject in relation to self and others,” returning to the terms that I initially underlined. Foucault himself addresses that in a lecture given in the United States, in 1980: When I was studying asylums, prisons and so on, I perhaps insisted too much on the techniques of domination. What we call discipline is something really important in this kind of institution. But it is only one aspect of the art of governing people in our societies. Having studied the field of power relations taking techniques of domination as a point of departure, I would like,

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in the years to come, to study power relations starting from the techniques of the self. 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 or for the transformation of the self. (Foucault 2021)

Looking back at that period, therefore, I notice movement going from the study of techniques of domination to techniques of self. I focus on how, at first, it was a question of understanding the techniques of domination, and then Foucault’s intention was to integrate techniques of coercion and techniques of self. Ultimately, the last ones stand out. The general problem of art of government, therefore, again reveals itself as important in understanding these changes. César Candiotto, in Foucault and the critique of truth (Candiotto 2010), is aware of the following two movements: first, the difference Foucault establishes in relation to the dominant philosophical practice, such as the subject’s philosophy, the theory of objective knowledge, or logical positivism and structuralism (Candiotto 2010: 17); later, in the shifts in Foucault’s thought, following five moments: “Knowledge, the discourse and the man;” “Truth, subject and genealogy;” “Truth and subjection in subjectivity;” “Government and critical attitude” and “Truth and ethics of the subject”. Although I am specifically interested in the last moment, Candiotto’s work is important in showing the complexities of the three axes Foucault pointed out, i.e., knowledge, power, and ethics. Their development highlights exactly the change which is crucial to understanding how it was possible for Foucault to switch from the will to know to the government: The history of truth ceases to emphasize the rules between knowledge of an era and to emphasize struggles over power in disciplinary and biopolitical practices in order to address the truth that link government of self and government of others. (Candiotto 2010: 128)

Nildo Avelino also points out the importance of reflections on the government to the issue of ethics. Highlighting Foucault’s proposal for an “anarcheology” in On the Government of the Living, he says: Following the development of Michel Foucault’s analysis of power makes the importance of anarcheology in his elaboration of the aesthetics of

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e­ xistence understandable. How might one apprehend this analytical path which through the analysis of government or governmentality led from subject matter Power-Knowledge to aesthetics of existence? (Avelino 2011: 26)

It stems from the fact that, Avelino argues, Foucault realized that the exercise of power was not independent of subjectivity (Avelino 2011: 29), hence his concern with establishing connections between techniques of domination and techniques of self. On the Government of the Living is, therefore, an important course to understand Foucault’s shift regarding the problem of truth. He begins by introducing the notion of “regimes of truth” and then moves on to the study of the procedures for the examination of souls and confession in early Christianity. Here, the act of truth is defined as the confession of sinners. This conception of truth serves Foucault’s purpose well, which he intends, as he states in the summary of On the Government of the Living, to understand: “How was a type of government of men formed that does not just require one to obey, but to manifest what one is by stating it?” (Foucault 2014c: 321). This problem produced the following shift: from the notion of power-­ knowledge to that of government by the truth. While doing so, Foucault rendered positive content to the two-first terms, and began expressing how the concept of government was much more operational for carrying out his research than that of power. He explains this new concept in the 1980 course: (…) “government” being understood, of course, not in the narrow and current sense of the supreme instance of executive and administrative decisions in State systems, but in the broad sense, and old sense moreover, of mechanisms and procedures intended to conduct men, to direct their conduct, to conduct their conduct. (Foucault 2014c: 12)

Let us remember, that is not the first time such a concept of government is claimed. For instance, in his communication “What is critique?” and in the course Security, Territory, Population for example, it has great relevance. Nevertheless, in On the Government of the Living, Foucault expands this discussion from a specific link between manifestation of truth and exercise of power, arguing that exercise of power needs manifestation of truth in the form of subjectivity: “Once again, the question I would like to raise is this: how is it that, in our type of society, power cannot be exercised without truth having to manifest itself, and manifest itself in the form of subjectivity (…)?” (Foucault 2014c: 75).

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That is the context in which the word subject has double sense: subject in a power relationship and subject in manifestation of truth. In an act of truth such as confession, for example, the subject may become an active agent, “thanks to which the truth comes to light;” (Foucault 2014c: 81) however, it is very different from the temperamental individual who pronounces the truth in an act of courage, as masters do before a disciple, or citizens do before the Greek democratic assembly in ancient culture, as indicated in the course proposal: 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? Why in this great system of relations of power has a regime of truth developed indexed to subjectivity? Why does power require (and for thousands of years in our societies, has required) individuals to say not only, “here I am, me who obeys,” but in addition, “this is what I am, me who obeys, this is who I am, this is what I have seen, this is what I have done?” (Foucault 2014c: 82)

Even if the problem of subjectivity appears—that is where the great contribution of this course to the shifts it later proposes—the study of Christianity through “regimes of truth” is made from the point of view of embarrassment and obligation of individuals toward the truth: “By regime of truth I mean that which constrains individuals to a certain number of truth acts, (…) that which determines the obligations of individuals with regard to procedures of manifestation of truth.” (Foucault 2014c: 93). The Government of Self and Others While parrhēsia will discuss the question of truth in other terms, contributing to the thought of an invention of new policies of truth, in the course Subjectivity and Truth—subsequent to On the Government of the Living— questions on government and truth shift to the problem of ethics, which in On the Government of the Living is only discussed when ancient culture serves as counterpoint to Christian confession. In On the Government of Living, the question concerning ethics is posed when Foucault speaks about Greek’s direction of souls; however, the main topic is truth in

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obedience and obligation. I shall deal with that matter in the following section. The following excerpt by Foucault reveals that, in this 1980 course, despite the fundamental shift in the notion of government already including the problem of subjectivity, the main question concerns Western will to know, which I mentioned in the beginning of this section when I mentioned the problems he would like to address in his first course at the Collège de France: Basically, what I would like to do and know that I will not be able to do is write a history of the force of truth, a history of the power of the truth, a history, therefore, to take the same idea from a different angle, of the will to know. Force of truth, will to know, power of the truth, in short, a history of this in the West (…) How has he [Western man] bound himself, as it were, at two levels and in two ways, on the one hand, to the obligation of truth, and second, to the status of object within this manifestation of truth? (Foucault 2014c: 43)

Subjectivity and Truth grounds discussions in the last two volumes of History of Sexuality, and Foucault himself mentions in the course summary that it will be subject of a forthcoming publication (Foucault 2017: 299). Techniques of self and Antiquity no longer appear only as an aspect of difference when comparing them to Christianity or modernity. Now they are the main topic in Foucault’s work. The “question of the experience we may have of ourselves” is posed (Foucault 2017: 26). In addition, it is the first study in which “techniques of self” becomes central. “Techniques of self,” “techniques of life,” “techniques of existence,” “mastery of oneself,” “self-knowledge,” “care of the self” are terms used; they will be further detailed in The subject’s hermeneutics, The Government of Self and Others, The Courage of Truth, and the publication of the last two volumes of History of sexuality. Subjectivity and Truth is a series of studies from which we may form a history of the “care of oneself,” understood as experience and technique, elaborating and transforming that experience. “Such a project is at the intersection of two themes treated previously: a history of subjectivity and an analysis of forms of ‘governmentality.’” (Foucault 2017: 294). To explain that intersection he takes stock of his studies, underlining the novelty brought by the 1981 course. As for the history of subjectivity, Foucault cites his work on divisions operated in society in the name of

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madness (Foucault 1988a):, of disease (Foucault 1994b), of delinquency (Foucault 1991), and its effects on the constitution of a rational and normal subject, as well as on attempts to highlight the subject’s modes of objectifying knowledge, such as those concerning language, work, and life (Foucault 1994c). Regarding the study of “governmentality,” he responded to a double objective: to criticize the legal conception of power, which was thought of as a unitary system organized around a center, analyzing it, on the contrary, as a domain of strategic relationships between individuals or groups, whose main objective is to direct the conduct of others. These issues are dealt with in his work on discipline, reason of state, “art of government” and in the book written with historian Arlete Farge on lettres de cachet, which was published in 1982 (Foucault and Farge 1982). Hence the specificity of the study that began in 1981: the history of the care and techniques of self would be a way of making the history of subjectivity no longer based on divisions between mad and non-mad, delinquents and non-delinquents, and not focusing on fields of scientific objectivity as central. He therefore takes “governmentality” in another aspect: “the government of self by self in its connection with relations with others (as one finds in pedagogy, advice on conduct, spiritual direction, the prescription of models of life, and so on).” (Foucault 2017: 295). The study delimited the themes following two criteria: first, studying what in Hellenistic and Roman culture was called “technique of life,” “technique of existence” by philosophers, moralists, and doctors, from first century BC to the second century AD. Then understanding that these techniques of life were applied to the field of aphrodisia, which has been very inadequately translated in the word “sexuality.” The problem of Subjectivity and truth is: how did philosophical and medical techniques of life define the practice of sexual acts? Such study is not organized around the repressive hypothesis, rather it is about acts and pleasures, not desire: “It is a matter of the formation of self through techniques of life, not of repression by prohibition and the law.” (Cf. Deleuze 1994). The course discusses the relationship between subject and truth from the question: How is the relationship an individual has with himself transformed by the existence of this true discourse and by the effects that it induces, by the obligations that it imposes? Subjectivity, for him, is not conceived from a previous and universal theory of the subject, nor is it related to an original or founding experience, but it is what is constituted and transformed in the relationship with the truth. In that sense, there is

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no theory of the subject that is independent of the relationship with the truth. Accordingly, I understand why Candiotto’s hypothesis in his work Foucault e a crítica da verdade is as follows: “The working hypothesis is that the guiding thread running through Foucault’s thought is identified with the problematization of truth and its relationship with the subject” (Candiotto 2010: 16). The theme of sexuality creates a difference. While in the cases of madness, disease, and crime, the discourse fell on the subject from outside and from the other, in sexuality the subject’s true discourse on himself is an obligation. Therefore, Foucault asks: What is the type of subjectivity that is linked to saying: “yes, it is true, I desire”? He intends to study how, in our society, the subject was called upon to manifest himself and to recognize himself in his own discourse as being the subject of desire and, yet, how sexuality could appear as the field of a subjective experience, given that there is knowledge about sex, practice, and sexual activity that is intended to be true. The material analyzed is the literature on the arts of living and conduct in the first century of our era. The art of conduct in our society has completely lost its autonomy, and since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there is no more specific literature, which aimed to learn to modify, qualify or shape the mode of being. Therefore, through gestures, through things we do, we can transform what we are. But these arts of living, from late Middle Ages to seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, increasingly tend to say what should be done, defining themselves around professional learning. And that led to the disappearing of the art of living as an autonomous genre of reflection and analysis. It is a genre of experience guided by three relationships: relationship with the self, with others, and with the truth. When submitting to the other and the other’s teaching, such knowledge becomes permanent reference for existence. The bios, qualified life, is the main subject of these techniques of self. According to Foucault, the arts of living are a rich documentation to understand the general problematic subjectivity and truth. That paved the way to demonstrate in The Hermeneutics of the Subject, in the following year, how these ancient practices prioritize the subject’s relationship with truth in a very specific way. In the summary of the course he claims: (…) it is not a matter of discovering a truth in the subject or of making the soul the place where truth dwells (…); nor is it a matter of making the soul

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the object of a true discourse. We are still very far from what would be a hermeneutics of the subject. On the contrary, it is a question of arming the subject with a truth that he did not know and that did not dwell within him. (Foucault 2005: 501)

Telling the Truth About Self and Others Theoretical shifts made the study of truth-telling possible. Studying parrhēsia, Foucault points out two possible directions. First, “an epistemological analysis,” i.e., the analysis of specific structures of different discourses taken as true discourses (Foucault 2011a: 2). On the other hand, to understand the type of act by which the subject, telling the truth, manifests himself by representing himself that way as well as being recognized by others as someone speaking the truth. Foucault chooses the latter option, because for him it is not a matter of studying the forms of discourse by which it is recognized as true, through “epistemological analysis,” but rather it would involve analyzing the form in which, in his act of telling the truth, the individual constitutes himself and is constituted by others as a subject of a discourse of truth, the form in which he presents himself to himself and to others as someone who tells the truth, the form of the subject telling the truth. (Foucault 2011a: 3)

He names this field “study of ‘alethurgic’ forms” (Foucault 2011a: 3) as opposed to research on epistemological structures. Etymologically, alethurgy means production of truth, the act by which truth manifests itself. And in that framework he studied parrhēsia. Foucault explains that he arrived at that matter from a very traditional and central issue for Western philosophy: the relationship between subject and truth. As he articulates, at first, the following questions were posed: On the basis of what practices and through what types of discourse have we tried to tell the truth about the subject? Thus: on the basis of what practices, through what types of discourse have we tried to tell the truth about the mad subject or the delinquent subject? On the basis of what discursive practices was the speaking, laboring, and living subject constituted as a possible object of knowledge (savoir)? This was the field of study that I tried to cover for a period. (Foucault 2011a: 3)

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Subsequently, he considered the relationship between subject and truth in another form: not that of a discourse that tells the truth about the subject, but rather that which prioritizes the truth that the subject says about himself, for instance, in confession or in examination of conscience, through “analysis of the subject’s true discourse about himself, and it was easy to see the importance of this discourse for penal practices or in the domain of the experience of sexuality.” (Foucault 2011a: 3). The problem in previous courses, was to analyze historically the practices of telling the truth about oneself. Thus, the principle “one should tell the truth about oneself” was greatly important for ancient morality (Foucault 2011a: 4). To illustrate such relevance, Foucault cites practices of examination of conscience prescribed by Pythagoreans or Stoics, such as Seneca (I AD) and Marcus Aurelius (second century AD), exchange of letters, and personal journals. Foucault does not claim to have discovered these practices, but demonstrates a tendency to analyze these forms of telling the truth about oneself by relating them to a central axis: the Socratic principle “know yourself.” He situates such practices back in a more general context of self care, which he detailed in The Hermeneutics of the Subject. These practices of self had an indispensable partner: the presence of the other who listens, even prior to Christianity and the practice of confession: “In ancient culture, and therefore well before Christianity, telling the truth about oneself was an activity involving several people, an activity with other people, and even more precisely an activity with one other person, a practice for two.” (Foucault 2011a: 5). But the presence of the other poses a number of problems. In Christianity, for example, it takes the institutional form of the confessor or spiritual director, while in modern culture, it takes the form of doctor, psychiatrist, psychologist, or psychoanalyst. Contrarily, in ancient culture, this relationship takes place in very diverse and variable forms, such as in pedagogy, political advice, or medical practice manifested in taking care of the soul, and by a regimen of life which does not only go through dietary regimen but rather all aspects of the mode of life. Anyway, in this relationship with the other, ancient culture has a particular qualification, strikingly different if compared to Christianity and modernity: And this qualification, unlike the confessor’s or spiritual director’s in Christian culture, is not given by an institution and does not refer to the possession and exercise of specific spiritual powers. Nor is it, as in modern

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culture, an institutional qualification guaranteeing a psychological, psychiatric, or psychoanalytic knowledge. The qualification required by this uncertain, rather vague, and variable character is a practice, a certain way of speaking which is called, precisely, parrhēsia (free-spokenness). (Foucault 2011a: 6)

Thus, the topic parrhēsia appears as constitutive of this other, who is indispensable for us to be able to tell the truth about ourselves. This notion later became very difficult to understand, but left many traces in the Greek and Roman texts, such as those of Seneca, Philodemus, Plutarch, and Galen, for example. Foucault focused on this notion as the element that qualifies the other, a necessary piece in the game and obligation to tell the truth about oneself. And, for him, this study works as a type of “prehistory” of those practices which are later organized and developed around famous couples: the penitent and the confessor, the one being guided and the spiritual director, the sick person and the psychiatrist, the patient and the psychoanalyst. However, in spite of the importance of the notion of parrhēsia in the domain of examination of conscience, of spiritual guidance, or soul counseling, Foucault does not assume it emerges from the practice of spiritual guidance, especially in Hellenistic and Roman literature. For it is primarily a political notion. And, as I have already emphasized, it is this political axis which interests me. Accordingly, he articulates how this conception of parrhēsia deviated him a little from what was his immediate project: the ancient history of the practices of telling the truth about oneself. But, on the other hand, it brought him back to a theme that had been very present in his previous studies: power relations and their role in the game between subject and truth. While examining the political aspect of parrhēsia, Foucault realized the subject’s relationship with the truth through the “government of self and others,” claiming: “Connecting together modes of veridiction, techniques of governmentality, and practices of the self is basically what I have always been trying to do.” (Foucault 2011a: 8). Foucault then refuted critiques of his work which characterized it as an analysis of structures in which the subject has no place. While reading this passage and after explaining all the previous shifts, I see how his axes of study reappear, as in The Government of Self and Others, well intertwined and synthesized. The purpose of all the previous discussion was, therefore, to unfold, if not all the shifts, at least those serving more directly to the understanding of how reflections on the courage of truth were possible:

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And to the extent that this involves the analysis of relation between modes of veridiction, techniques of governmentality, and forms of practice of self, you can see that to depict this kind of research as an attempt to reduce knowledge (savoir) to power, to make it the mask of power in structures, where there is no place for a subject, is purely and simply a caricature. What is involved, rather, is the analysis of complex relations between three distinct elements none of which can be reduced to or absorbed by the others, but whose relations are constitutive of each other. These three elements are: forms of knowledge (savoirs), studied in terms of their specific modes of veridiction; relations of power, not studied as an emanation of a substantial and invasive power, but in the procedures by which people’s conduct is governed; and finally the modes of formation of the subject through practices of self. (Foucault 2011a: 8–9)

The Deconstruction of Christian Obedience and Scientific Rationality: For the Affirmation of Greco-Roman Autonomy I would like to get back to an issue I have already mentioned: the way ancient culture is present in Foucault’s last works and modifies his thoughts on the problem of truth. Calling upon antiquity, however, is not unprecedented in his work in the 1980s. In his first course at the Collège de France in 1970, for example, antiques are greatly present in the discussion on the relationship that was established in Western philosophy between knowledge and truth. Therefore, Sophists, Plato, Aristotle, and many others are cited, while Nietzsche is the modern reference point, echoing the Sophists in the nineteenth century. According to Foucault, philosophy, since Descartes, has always been linked to the problem of knowledge, having as main question: “What is truth?” (Foucault 1980b: 66). Since Nietzsche that question undergoes transformation. He no longer asks himself: “What is the surest path to Truth?,” but rather, “What is the hazardous career that Truth has followed?” (Foucault 1980b: 66). Moreover, as José Ternes recalls (Ternes 2011: 132), Greek truth had already been quoted in La Pensée du dehors (Foucault 1988b). However, I am not interested in the thorough analysis of all these references, as I focus on the role ancient culture comes to play especially in the late 1970s and early 1980s. At that moment, it functions as counterpoint to two traditional and dominant modes of relating to the truth in the West: Christianity and modern science.

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Greek Autonomy of Self I begin with a statement of Foucault’s in the 1978 course Security, Territory, Population: “over millennia Western man has learned to see himself as a sheep in a flock, something that assuredly no Greek would have been prepared to accept.” (Foucault 2009: 174) Here, obedience appears as a general category non existent among the Greeks, showing how it is typical of Christian pastorate to establish a relationship of integral dependence between the sheep and the one who directs it. In the second chapter I discuss the concept of pastoral power, while addressing militancy in the political party in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For now, I return to On the Government of the Living, “Course Summary,” where Foucault cites the study of practices of confession in Christian monastic life through Cassian’s work, analyzing three aspects: “the mode of dependence on the elder or teacher, the way of conducting the examination of one’s own conscience, and the duty to tell all regarding the impulses of thought in a formulation that was meant to be exhaustive: the exagoreusis.” (Foucault 2014c: 323). Regarding the practice of examination of conscience in ancient philosophy, Foucault finds important differences: in the monastic institution, the relationship to the master takes the form of an unconditional and continuous obedience concerning all aspects of life, leaving the novice no margin of initiative. Moreover, obedience must constitute, in the form of humility, a continuous relationship to oneself and to others. He further articulates: But it needs to be stressed that the aim of this manifestation was not to establish one’s sovereign mastery over oneself; rather, what was expected from it was humility and mortification, detachment with regard to oneself and the constitution of a relation to self that strives for the destruction of the form of the self. (Foucault 2014c: 325)

It is important to keep in mind that parrhēsia is a technique, serving as counterpoint to Christian examination of conscious, and The Hermeneutics of the Subject clearly introduces this difference. In such context, he states the essence of parrhēsia is to express a thought with minimum ornament, because teachings conveyed are the thoughts of the one who conveys them: Much more even than the need to adjust oneself tactically to the other, it seems to me what characterizes parrhēsia, libertas, is this perfect fit between

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the subject who speaks, or the subject of enunciation, and the subject of conduct. This perfect fit is what gives one the right and possibility to speak outside required and traditional forms, to speak independently of the resources of rhetoric, which one may use, if need be, in order to facilitate the reception of what one is saying. (Foucault 2005: 406)

Parrhēsia represents, on the side of the person who utters it, a pact between the subject of enunciation and the subject of conduct, for that person commits himself to do what he says and to be the subject of a conduct that obeys the truth that he formulates. And this is the core of parrhēsia, the subject of the conduct must be identical to the subject of the enunciation. And in this context, Foucault finds it different from Christianity, especially when comparing its ways of conveying the truth. Thus, in a relationship called “pedagogical,” the transmission of truth has the function of endowing a subject with capacities and knowledge that he previously did not have. In a different way, in a “psychagogical” relationship, the transmission of truth does not have the function of endowing a subject with aptitudes, but modifying his way of being. In such a processes of transmitting the truth, a great mutation occurred between Greco-Roman philosophy and Christianity (Cf. Taylor 2009). In Antiquity, the weight of truth, the mutation of the subject’s way of being affects the master, the guide, the friend, i.e., the one who gives advice, and the psychagogical relationship is very close to the pedagogical one. As opposed to what happens in Christianity: although the provider of spiritual direction obeys some rules, the essential cost of the truth will weigh on the one whose soul must be guided. Therefore, Christian psychagogy is deeply opposed to psychagogy of the Greek-Roman philosophical type, as Foucault explains in the following excerpt, articulating a fundamental change: Let’s say (…) in Christian spirituality it is the guided subject who must be present within the true discourse as the object of his own true discourse. In the discourse of the one who is guided, the subject of enunciation must be the referent of the utterance: this is the definition of confession. In Greco-­ Roman philosophy, rather, the person who must be present within the true discourse is the person who guides. And he does not have to be present in the form of the utterance’s reference (he does not have to speak about himself), and he is not present as the person who says: “This is what I am.” He is present in a coincidence between the subject of enunciation and the

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s­ ubject of his own actions. “This truth I tell you, you see it in me.” (Foucault 2005: 409)

In The Hermeneutics of the Subject, ancient culture, despite being the main topic of the course, is still depicted at first in comparison with Christianity, mainly with regard to the study of parrhēsia. But even in this discussion, the truth-telling has its “direct and positive analysis,” as Salma Tannus Muchail points out in “The Truth-Telling: positive description” (Muchail 2011: 159). Foucault, therefore, had to detach himself from the Christian regimen of truth, depicting in On the Government of the Living how Christianity introduced, in relation to the ancient Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman world, a regimen of singular and paradoxical truth, which highlights the obligation of permanent knowledge the individual establishes with himself. With conversion and Christianity of the third century, there is a relationship with the truth of selves, and a disruption in the relationship of subjectivity with truth, a movement that really rocks ancient culture. Hence Foucault’s message: it is not in every culture that the relationship between subjectivity and truth occurs through the form of conversion as a revealing discontinuity of the individual. The very notion of relapse is foreign to Greek culture, and the sharing was more about the actions, and not about the subject himself. The issue of the subject’s rupture in the relationship he has with the truth is, therefore, fundamental. Thus, in primitive penance, the manifestation of self does not pass through language and does not take the form of right, law, and discourse. Along with Christianity, the need for the subject to express the truth emerges, making himself an object of knowledge, which is very different from what happens in a parrhesiastic relationship. Therefore, in Greek and Roman morals there is a pagan history of rites of truth, and Foucault demonstrates the coupling of verbalization and exploration of oneself differs completely among different pagan philosophies and Christianity. The problems of subjectivation and the direction of ancient consciousness is also present in On the Government of the Living. In this specific relationship with the other, it is about reaching perfection, tranquility of the soul, absence of passions. How does Foucault explain Greco-Roman culture differences when compared to Christian confession? In a description addressing the old direction in the 1980 course, he states:

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(…) the person directed does not seek an external end in direction, but an internal end understood as a modality of the relationship of self to self. (…) if we call subjectivation the formation of a definite relationship of self to self, then we can say that direction is a technique that consists in binding two wills in such a way that they are always free in relation to each other, in binding them in such a way that one wills what the other wills, for the purpose of subjectivation, that is to say access to a certain relationship of self to self. The other and the other’s will are freely accepted by me so that I may establish a certain relationship of myself to myself. This seems to me to be the general meaning we can give to this notion of direction. (Foucault 2014c: 231–232)

Therefore, the examination of conscious in the Greek and Roman direction and in the Christian direction is profoundly different. Both have diverse effects of knowledge and subjectivation. The old direction falls on actions, not intentions. Christianity brings on stage the character of the accuser, while for Seneca, for example, it is less a judge condemning the infractions than an administrator who has to watch over management errors. Furthermore, errors are defined according to the objective that we set ourselves, and not according to a moral law. The examination does not judge the acts with reference to an allowed moral code, but seeks to organize a new scheme of conduct. The stoic examination, for example, had autonomy as its main end, based on the autonomous use of reason. At the heart of Christian leadership, two obligations: to obey and to hide nothing. Foucault explains: Telling all about oneself, hiding nothing, willing nothing by oneself, obeying in everything; the junction between these two principles is, I think, at the very heart of not only the Christian monastic institution, but of a whole series of practices, of apparatuses (dispositifs) that will inform what constitutes Christian and, as a result, Western subjectivity. (Foucault 2014c: 266)

Thus, a specific relationship is created between the subject, the other, the will, and the enunciation. Furthermore, obedience is not the same relationship built between a teacher and a student in ancient culture, for the latter is limited, provisional and instrumental, and it is based on the difference in nature between the director and the person guided. In Christianity, the director is not a model of perfection and is always subject to fall. Obedience, therefore, is not a period in life, but rather a state in which we must find ourselves until the end of our lives and in relation to

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anything. It is not about the quality of the order, or the quality of the one giving the order, but the obligation to obey any order, because “one obeys in order to become obedient, in order to produce a state of obedience (…) Obedience is and must be a way of being (…).” (Foucault 2014c: 270–271) Foucault further articulates: “There is no need to say how far this is from the effects peculiar to ancient direction.” (Foucault 2014c: 271). Unlike Greeks, Christians cannot and should not take for themselves their own measure and, moreover, they ignore what they are. While the Greeks could and knew how to differentiate a deceiver through their logos, their reason: The ancient sage was precisely someone who renounced wanting to master the order of the world and rule over it, but who had at least a little empire over which he could cast his gaze and exercise his power, and this was himself. He could not be dispossessed of this empire and thus was happy to give up advising sovereigns when he was certain of exercising his sovereignty over himself. This was the ancient sage. Here, on the other hand, we see the holy man who is capable of advising the princes of the world. It is easier to tell those who command the whole world what they must do than to tell myself what I must do. What I must do eludes me if I do not refer to someone else. (Foucault 2014c: 295)

In ancient examination, it is a question of whether, having acted as one did, one did not fall victim to a current opinion or whether the truth did not escape him. For them, the question was about the truth of what is thought, i.e., the objective set of my opinions. In Christian examination, focus is on the material reality of ideas, on the uncertainty of what goes on deep within myself: “It is not the question of the truth of my idea, it is the question of the truth of myself that is an idea. It is the question, not of the truth of what I think, but the question of the truth of the thinking me.” (Foucault 2014c: 303). Hence the need for intervention of confession: since I must always distrust myself and trust the other with what I feel, it will have to be perpetual and constant. In Greek examination of conscious, the nature both of the act committed and the sinner, the detail of their circumstances did not matter. Christian leadership, on the other hand, points to discourse on oneself. The old direction was intended to allow the subject to permanently exercise jurisdiction over his acts, making the law of himself. In Christian technique, an unknown truth must be produced. It is the construction of a

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relationship Foucault calls “veridiction,” the obligation to tell the truth of self: establishing a relationship of obedience to the other’s will and at the same time establishing, in correlation with, as condition of this obedience, what I would call not a jurisdiction, but a veridiction: the obligation constantly to tell the truth about oneself, with regard to oneself, and in the form of confession. The aim of ancient direction is a jurisdiction of actions with a view to the subject’s autonomisation; the formula for [Christian] direction is, I think, obedience to the other with veridiction of oneself for its instrument. (Foucault 2014c: 308)

This Christian way of relating subjectivity and truth produces the renunciation of oneself, substituting one’s will with another’s will. Thus, ancient perfection is seen as presumption, and the obligation to tell the truth of myself links the obligation of truth to subjectivity, producing a model of subjectivation typical of our Western culture: And this linkage between production of truth and renunciation of self seems to me to be what could be called the schema of Christian subjectivity, let’s say more exactly the schema of Christian subjectivation, a procedure of subjectivation historically formed and developed in Christianity and characterized paradoxically by the obligatory link between self-mortification and production of the truth of oneself. (Foucault 2014c: 309)

In Christian direction and in Western societies, therefore, there is an obligation to speak, to produce a truth-discourse about oneself: In this obligation to speak about oneself you can see the eminent place taken by discourse. Putting oneself in discourse is in actual fact one of the major driving forces in the organization of subjectivity and truth relationships in the Christian West. Subjectivity and truth will no longer connect so much, primordially, or anyway not only in the subject’s access to the truth. There will always have to be this inflection of the subject towards its own truth through the intermediary of perpetually putting oneself into discourse. (Foucault 2014c: 313)

Producing discourse from your own truth is one of the basic forms of obedience, and the course Subjectivity and Truth depicts how sexuality in Western culture reveals our truth. Again, the difference when comparing

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to ancient culture is striking, since the Greeks did not know subjectivity as we do. Bios is the term that would come closest, but we have a hard time understanding this expression, for our reference is Christian. In the Christian framework the relationship with the other world, conversion, and the existence of a profound truth to be discovered are fundamental problems. We therefore prioritize the relationship of authenticity with our notion of subjectivity. And all of this characterizes the matrix of Western and Christian subjectivity. The Greek bios, on the other hand, is not thought of in terms of another world, but in relation to the objective that each one poses for oneself. It is also not defined by conversion, but rather by continuous work of self on self. Furthermore, it is not understood from the relationship with a hidden authenticity that we would have to discover deep within ourselves, but through the creation of modes of existence. I conclude with these differentiations. Later, I will highlight the last lessons of the course The Courage of Truth, which directly compare ancient parrhēsia and Christian parrhēsia. While I discussion pastoral power in the next part, Foucault’s notes on Christian parrhēsia will be extremely important to understand the difference between political militancy which invests in the transformation of this world through true life (inspired by the cynics) and another mode, one which emphasizes redemption and reward in “another world,” by obedience to the other, in this world (debtor to Christians). The Ethics of Truth-Telling During an interview, in 1978 “The Stage of Philosophy,” (Foucault 1994d: 571–595) Foucault expresses his admiration for theater. For him, since Plato and Descartes the most important philosophical questions were whether we were in the real world or in the world of lies, separating real from illusion, truth from lie. The theater, on the other hand, ignores these distinctions and, therefore, it fascinates him: (…) I would like to try and describe the way men in the West saw things without ever asking whether it was true or not, try to describe the way they themselves put together, through the game of their eyes, the show which is the world. (Foucault 1994d: 571)

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Foucault carries on with the discussion, showing how he “does not have the competence to separate true from false,” (Foucault 1994d: 571) and intends to describe the theater of truth: As the West built a theater of truth, a scene of truth, a scene for that rationality that has now become a mark of the imperialism of men in the West, since (…) Western economy (…) came to the end of its heyday (…). But something has remained, which the West undoubtedly left for the rest of the world: a form of rationality. It is a certain form of perception of truth and error, it is a certain theater of the true and the false. (Foucault 1994d: 571)

Foucault found this same rationality in the Marxism of his time. In his work “Questions on Geography,” 1976, he articulates not being the kind of philosopher to conduct a discourse of truth on some science, for it was, above all, a positivist project. This scientific claim is similar to Marxism, which as arbitrator, judge, universal witness, stated that “Marxism, as the science of sciences, can provide the theory of science and draw the boundary between science and ideology” (Foucault 1980b: 65). This role is strongly rejected by Foucault. He was interested in some conflicts involving medicine, psychiatry, and the penal system, but he never wanted to make a general history of human science, nor a critique of the possibility of science in general. I understand Foucault’s studies on madness, medicine, prison, sexuality, neoliberalism as severe criticisms of modern science’s way of dealing with truth, such as logical positivism, Marxism, humanism, structuralism. Foucault does not, in any of these cases, approach a scientific method seen as neutral, or the procedures of Marxist historical materialism, which, however, also strongly criticize liberal and bourgeois society. It is important to remember that philosophers such as G.  Bachelard and G. Canguilhem, between the 1950s and 1960s, also problematized this relationship between truth and production of knowledge. Foucault was very inspired by his archaeological reflections when he wrote his first books: The Order of Things, Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, The Archeology of Knowledge. I would, however, like to understand how his criticisms, in the 1980s—which are linked to the concepts of government of self and others, and the courage of truth—enabled a new relationship between the production of knowledge and the truth within Foucault’s own thought.

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Foucault begins the course On the Government of the Living with Dion Cassius’s—second century AD historian—description of the exercise of power in the government of Roman emperor Septimius Severus. He begins with this example to show how manifestation of truth and exercise of power are related not only for utilitarian or economic needs. He articulates it as “non-economic manifestation of the truth,” (Foucault 2014c: 5) demonstrating how both scientific, positivist, and rational mode, and Marxist mode of relating to the truth, understanding the exercise of power as linked to economic relations, do not pay attention to the importance effects of the truth as produced by power relations. Severo’s manifestation of power, therefore, was not intended to prove, demonstrate, refute, organize knowledge, because, as Foucault argues, the exercise of power does not assume only useful and usable knowledge, but rather manifestation of truth. In Subjectivity and Truth Foucault argues that truth is not a concept of knowledge that we can consider as universally valid and authorized. It is a system of obligation, not a formal content or structure of knowledge. He claims science, objective knowledge is only a possible case among all these ways in which truth can manifest itself (Foucault 2014c: 7). Such notion of government by men for truth, as I have already pointed out, was designed so that Foucault could move away from the notion of knowledge-power. However, we must bear in mind that he is also opposed to the concept of dominant ideology, as he articulated during the interview “Truth and power,” in 1977. Foucault said: The notion of ideology appears to me to be difficult to make use of, for three reasons. The first is that, like it or not, it always stands in virtual opposition to something else which is supposed to count as truth. Now I believe that the problem does not consist in drawing the line between that in a discourse which falls under the category of scientificity or truth, and that which comes under some other category, but in seeing historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false. The second drawback is that the concept of ideology refers, I think necessarily, to something of the order of a subject. Thirdly, ideology stands in a secondary position relative to something which functions as its infrastructure, as its material, economic determinant, etc. For these three reasons, I think that this is a notion that cannot be used without circumspection. (Foucault 1980a: 118)

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In On the Government of the Living he builds a critique of ideological analysis from the following three objections: First, because it postulates an imperfectly constructed theory of representation; second, for being attached to an opposition of true and false, of reality and illusion, of scientific and unscientific, of rational and irrational; and third, because it uses knowledge that asks “how and why some dominate others in a society.” (Foucault 2014c: 11). To escape these problems and denaturalize the way in which the relationship between power and truth was thought of in the modern period, he points out several ways of linking the exercise of power to truth in modern thought, from the seventeenth century onwards. First, the truth that must be manifested is that of the State as an object of governmental action, i.e., the problem of the reason peculiar to the state dealt with in Security, Territory, Population; second, there would be a utopian point in history where the empire of truth would make its order reign without authoritarian decisions intervening, and the government would be a reflective surface of the truth. Such is the ​​physiocrats’ idea, which he demonstrated in The Birth of Biopolitics. The third moment reflects on the nineteenth century, when the art of government is linked to the discovery of truth and its objective knowledge, providing the constitution of specialized knowledge. As an example of this principle, Foucault mentions the socialist Saint-Simon, who was associated with the idea of the Enlightenment progress. According to W. Hofmann (1984: 48–55), Saint-Simon understood the history of mankind as governed by the great law of self-improvement, as it happened in the history of nature. In modernity, however, it depended on positive philosophy based on experience to recognize the laws of the period, realizing which elements represented objective progress compared to the previous period. His criticism of the current order and his proposal for a transformation therefore went through the following motto: It is no longer a question of intellectually idealizing a society of the future; alternately, concrete trends must be recognized and promoted. Thus, in place of natural law in Saint-Simon, positive science arises. It is part of the law of higher development that major social issues are always historically positioned, i.e., increasingly widespread. (Hofmann 1984: 49)

Furthermore, in a fourth moment, many people believed that if it were possible to make individuals know the truth, the government would lose

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its legitimacy. Revolution would happen through awareness of the mechanisms of exploitation and domination. Therefore, the principle of universal awareness is a means of disturbing governments, regimes and systems, as defended by Rosa Luxemburg—important Marxist theorist and activist of the Social Democratic Party of Germany in early twentieth century, and one of the great dissonant voices of the left-wing in that time, making severe criticisms of Leninism. Edson Passetti talks about the importance of Rosa Luxemburg’s positions: Among the revolutionaries, Rosa Luxemburg, in her 1919 essay Russian Revolution drew attention to the importance of democracy as a form of political education for the urban proletariat and peasantry during the revolution. She alerted the Bolsheviks to the danger of totalitarianism of proletariat dictatorship becoming a dictatorship over the proletariat, but Lenin continued considering her a mere anarchist. Her ideas and criticisms were put away until the second half of the twentieth century, after Stalin’s death and the notorious massacre of the Hungarian communes, in 1954. (Passetti 2002: 149–150)

Despite this dissonant position, she was sure—as Marxists and socialists were too—that the revolution did not happen because the “masses,” the workers, were devoid of consciousness of exploitation. In this case, therefore, it was up to intellectuals or the Party to deliver to the dominated classes, the objective reality of the existing social and economic conditions so that, finally, when everyone was equipped with such knowledge, they would fight against bourgeois domination and oppression. Finally, the last idea emphasizes that the triumph of socialist regimes took place precisely because everyone knew the truth, as Solzhenitsyn claimed. He was arrested and sentenced to forced labor by Stalinism. In the 1970s, he became very much known for denouncing the practice of Soviet political repression. That is, in terror, it was the truth, not the lie, that immobilized people (Cf. Christofferson 2009: 177–146). For Foucault, these modern ways of reflecting the relationship between the government and the truth are defined according to a reality that would be the State or society. Society is the object of knowledge and spontaneous processes. In addition, these analyzes presuppose knowledge that would be of the order of objective knowledge of the phenomena. The link between the exercise of power and the manifestation of truth, however, is much older, and it goes beyond the purpose of governing effectively.

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It is interesting, therefore, to see how Foucault problematizes the way in which the modern era thought this relationship between the exercise of power and the manifestation of truth, indicating the limitations of these analyses. Governing has not always meant having a relationship with the real, understood as the State or society, and has implied elaborating a rationality of state. Differences come to show historical particularity, as well as the fragility of its existence. Therefore, the question that guides the course: “how have the relations between the government of men, the manifestation of the truth in the form of subjectivity, and the salvation of each and all been established in our civilization?” (Foucault 2014c: 75), is a refusal of explanation made by ideological analysis. The latter argues that the more men are concerned for salvation in the hereafter, the easier it is to govern them down on earth (Foucault 2014c: 75). He comments on the meaning of this refusal: It is not the critique of representations in terms of truth or error, truth or falsity, ideology or science, rationality or irrationality that should serve as indicator for defining the legitimacy or denouncing the illegitimacy of power. It is the movement of freeing oneself from power that should serve as revealer in the transformations of the subject and the relation the subject maintains with the truth. (Foucault 2014c: 77)

By claiming that no power is evident or inevitable and, therefore, it should not be accepted, Foucault questions further: (…) what of the subject and relations of knowledge do we dispense with when we consider no power to be founded either by right or necessity, that all power only ever rests on the contingency and fragility of a history, that the social contract is a bluff and civil society a children’s story, [and] that there is no universal, immediate, and obvious right that can everywhere and always support any kind of relation of power. (Foucault 2014c: 77–78)

That is when Foucault, while discussing how close and far from anarchism he is, proposes “anarcheology” as the method. I will get back to that issue further on. What interests me now is how the issue of anarchism draws from his criticism of the concept of ideology. Anarcheology of knowledge implies excluding the division between scientific and ideological, furthermore, showing how “the specificity of science is not defined by opposition to all the rest or to all ideology, but simply as one among many other possible and existing regimes of truth.” (Foucault 2014c: 100) This

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criticism also extends to the discussion of evidence as a concept in relation to truth (Foucault 2014c: 100), as well as the question of logic. Again, it indicates his concern for other possible regimes of truth: I think it must be understood that science is only one of the possible regimes of truth and that there are many others. There are many other ways of binding the individual to the manifestation of truth, and of binding him to the manifestation of truth by other acts, with other forms of bond, according to other obligations and with other effects than those defined in science, for example, by the self-indexation of truth. (Foucault 2014c: 99)

The reflection on parrhēsia will clearly deal with this problem, indicating other possible regimes of truth. It will be from these reflections on the truth-telling that the following question can be answered: what do we have besides the subject of knowledge and its connection with the truth? Therefore, it is criticism not only of scientific thinking or Marxism but also of a whole mode of thinking about change or revolution. Following these theoretical positions, I understand more carefully Foucault’s position regarding political activism and the ethics of the intellectual, themes that will be dealt with in the next section. Meanwhile, I quote the following excerpt from Foucault, in which he explains his studies of madness: (…) to the series: universal category—humanist position—ideological analysis and reform program, is opposed a series: refusal of universals (I do not say nominalism for a host of reasons, the main one being that nominalism is a very specific and technical conception, practice, and philosophical method) so, refusal of universals—anti-humanist position—technological analysis of mechanisms of power and, instead of reform program: further extend points of non-acceptance. (Foucault 2014c: 80)

The Courage of Truth and the Aesthetics of Existence: From Socrates to the Cynics In his “8 February 1984” lecture Foucault resumes reflections carried on in 1983, demonstrating the following development: from the importance of parrhēsia for the government of a democratic city, such as in Euripides, to its crisis, and the dangerous and ambiguous image it begins showing from the fourth century BC, following Plato’s and Isocrates’s writings. In this context of radical criticism of the Athenian institutions, democratic

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parrhēsia loses ground and the freedom of speech allowed to everyone now runs the risk of mixing the true and the false (Cf. Fonseca 2011: 17:30). Thus the crisis of democratic parrhēsia leads to the problem of ethos and ethical differentiation. Therefore, another relationship between the discourse of truth and the government is established: that of the Prince with his adviser. The soul care of the former is a key factor, since the negative appreciation of personal, monarchical, tyrannical power is a constant in ancient thought. Accordingly, the Prince’s soul, unlike the people in democracy, is individual and might allow for the construction of an ethical differentiation, because his is a soul that might be persuaded and educated by truth-­ discourse. Democracy structure would not allow for the recognition of this ethical differentiation. It is the absence of a place for êthos in democracy that caused the truth to lose its place and no longer be understood. On the contrary, it is because the êthos of the Prince is the principle and matrix of his government that parrhēsia is possible, precious and useful in the case of autocratic government. Parrhēsia, therefore, should not be seen only as the freedom of all to tell the truth in the city. It is no longer a right held by the subject, but rather, it is practice, for we have moved from the polis to the soul of the Prince, as the correlative of the essential action of truth-telling. Its main objective is an individual’s ethos, and no longer the city’s health. Parrhēsia is now a practice which, following a set of operations, produces in the soul the effects of transformation of the individual. This change was important in Greek philosophy and, consequently, in Western philosophy. Socrates: Ethics and the Courage of Truth In The Government of Self and Others, Foucault (2008: 378) highlights an important topic for ancient philosophy: Philosophical attitude, mainly considered from Plato’s work, Apology of Socrates, which refers to Socrates’ particular situation: his death. That was a time when practicing parrhēsia is depicted as an extreme necessity and yet it was the most dangerous period to exercise parrhēsia. In addition, a new type of parrhēsia emerges; it is one in eternal conflict with life and death, and with institutional political, judicial eloquence. Now, to be an agent of truth, to be a philosopher, and as such to claim the monopoly of parrhēsia for oneself does not simply mean that one should enunciate the truth in teaching, in councils, in speeches, but rather effectively be an agent of truth in life. Foucault states:

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And you see that there is another important element here. The first was the fact that philosophical parrhēsia as it appears in Socrates is not a directly, immediately political parrhēsia. It is a parrhēsia which stands back in relation to politics. Second, it is a parrhēsia in which what is at stake is the acting subject’s, not the city’s safety. Finally, the third point is that this philosophical parrhēsia does not necessarily or exclusively go through logos, through the great ritual of language in which one addresses the group or even an individual. After all, parrhēsia may appear in the things themselves, it may appear in ways of doing things, it may appear in ways of being. (Foucault 2008: 320)

Socratic parrhēsia, therefore, does not consist, in the first place, in telling the truth in the institutional political field, because, as I have highlighted, it represents rupture in relation to political activity itself. In Apology of Socrates, the philosopher’s parrhesiastic role is not to intervene before the Assembly, and neither is it the simple refusal to become an unjust subject. And Socrates responds to those who want to listen to him and to those who ask him questions, that we must not exalt men who care about honor, wealth, or glory, but rather those who care for themselves. To philosophize, then, is to take care of the self and yet to encourage others to take care of themselves. Philosophical parrhēsia is that “which is identified not just with a mode or technique of justice but with life itself.” (Foucault 2008: 326). In The Courage of Truth, Foucault points out that in Plato’s Laches the theme of courage and the example of the exercise of Socratic parrhēsia stands out. The dialogue is also run through by the theme of courage, hence the importance of this work for the problem of the courage of truth, and the intertwining of the themes of courage and of truth, a central reflection of the 1984 course. The fundamental issue in this dialogue is the ethics of truth, i.e., the moral conditions that allow a subject to have access to the truth and to utter it. What mostly occupied Western reflection was the question of ethics of truth in the form of the subject’s purity and purification. It is the idea that to have access to the truth, it is necessary that the subject be constituted in a certain break with the sensory world of lack, interest, and pleasure, with everything that constitutes, in relation to the eternity of truth and its purity, the universe of the impure. The passage from the pure to the impure, from the obscure to the transparent, from the transitory and fleeting to the eternal is what identifies the moral trajectory by which the subject can constitute himself as a subject capable of seeing and telling

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the truth. Foucault notices such thought from Pythagoreans to modern philosophy. But this dimension is only one aspect of the ethics of truth, showing how its other dimension brings a sense of “will to truth” very different from that which appears in Foucault’s first course at Collège de France, with which I began my observations: There is another aspect which is that of the courage of truth: what type of resolution, what type of will, what type of not only sacrifice but battle is one able to face in order to arrive at the truth? This struggle for the truth is different from the purification by which one can arrive at the truth. It is no longer the analysis of purification for the truth, but the analysis of the will to truth in its different forms, which may be those of curiosity, battle, courage, resolution, and endurance. (Foucault 2011a: 125)

In Laches, Foucault finds one of the elements to analyze that aspect of the ethics of truth, which also functions as a starting point for one of the lines of development of Western philosophy. As in Alcibiades (Cf. Muchail 2008: 239–252), Laches is about a young man’s training, such that his parents and guardians were not able to provide him with. The link between education and neglect is based on the principle of care: it is necessary to care for the education of young people. In Alcibiades, it was necessary to take care of the soul, and take the principle of its existence, to contemplate it as an object of care. In Laches, the object in the dialogue is not the soul, but rather the principle that young people must learn to take care of themselves. The object of care is not the soul as an immortal reality, but life (bios), the way of living. Both dialogues, therefore, open two broad lines of evolution of reflection and philosophical practice. Alcibiades urges men to take care of themselves, leading them to this metaphysical reality which is that of the soul; Laches, on the other hand, shows philosophy as a proof of life, a proof of existence and elaboration of a modality of life. In Plato, there is no incompatibility between these two themes, and they are both deeply linked; however, Foucault argues they represent two profiles of philosophical practice in the West: On the one hand, a philosophy whose dominant theme is knowledge of the soul and which from this knowledge produces an ontology of the self. And then, on the other hand, a philosophy as a test of life, of bios, which is the ethical material and object of an art of oneself. These two major profiles of Platonic philosophy, of Greek philosophy, of Western philosophy, are fairly

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easily decipherable when we compare the dialogues of the Laches and the Alcibiades with each other. (Foucault 2011a: 127)

Precisely from the theme of care of self, of bios as object of care, Foucault would like to analyze the text. The themes of frankness, of examination and care of self, therefore, are fundamental, no longer demonstrating the parrhesiastic game of the political model, but practices that inaugurate and mark the emergence of the Socratic game and ethical parrhēsia. Hence, it is not a question of interrogating someone about who he was in the chain of knowledge transmission, or about the works he did thanks to his competence. But getting him to take care of himself. It is nothing like a Master’s techniques or work. The great question is how we live, how we live now and how we lived in our past lives. This domain of existence will constitute the field in which Socrates’ discourse and parrhēsia will be exercised. Therefore, an individual, in the reality of his life, puts his words and his actions in agreement, i.e., harmony between one’s speech and who one is, and in this sense a speech may be accepted as true. It is the harmonious relation between the way of living and the way of speaking which provides guarantee. Socratic parrhēsia as freedom to say what one wants is marked by the sound of Socrates’ own life, building the following trajectory of truth-telling: from the harmony between Socrates’ life and discourse to the practice of a true, free, and frank discourse. Free-spokenness hangs on the style of life. It is not courage in battle that authenticates the possibility of talking about courage. (Foucault 2011a: 148)

Therefore, Socratic parrhēsia speaks of a mode of existence, which will appear as the fundamental correlative of the practice of truth-telling. To tell the truth for the care of men is to question their mode of life, and to define what can be ratified and recognized as good, and what must, on the contrary, be rejected and condemned. Thus, Foucault highlights the organization of a fundamental channel: of care, parrhēsia (free-spokenness) and the ethical separation between good and evil in the domain of bios (of existence). Foucault found in Plato’s works on Socrates, traces of a history of the “aesthetics of existence,” (Foucault 2011a: 160) that is to say, the different forms that the arts of existence may take. It shows how, due to the emergence and foundation of Socratic parrhēsia, existence became an

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object of Greek thought and aesthetic perception: bios as beautiful work, opening up a rich historical field. If the history of the metaphysics of the soul is to be made, there is also a history of the stylistics of existence, of life as possible beauty to be written. This whole aspect of the history of subjectivity has long been covered by a history of metaphysics, the history of the way in which we founded and established the ontology of the soul. However, this possible study of the beautiful existence was also discovered by the analyses that prioritize these aesthetic configurations, which were devised to give form to things, substances, colors, space, light, sounds, and words, but also to man as its main object: But even so, we should recall that man’s way of being and conducting himself, the aspect his existence reveals to others and to himself, the trace also that this existence may leave and will leave in the memories of others after his death, this way of being, this appearance, this trace have been the object of his aesthetic concern. (…) This aesthetics of existence is an historical object which should not be neglected in favor of a metaphysics of the soul or an aesthetics of things and words. (Foucault 2011a: 163)

With that, Foucault does not intend to say that the care of beautiful existence is a Socratic invention or of the Greek philosophy of the fifth and fourth centuries BC.  But that is when a certain relationship established between this archaic, ancient, traditional care of a brilliant, memorable existence, and truth-telling. More precisely, he intends to understand how parrhēsia, in such an ethical modality which appears with Socrates at the beginning of Western philosophy, linked the principle of existence as work to be modified in all its possible perfection with the care of the self, as if the purpose of a beautiful existence and the task of taking care of the self were combined in the game of truth-telling. Foucault explains his intention with the course The Courage of Truth, showing the conception of truth linked to the notion of the art of existence: What I wanted to try to recover was something of the relation between the art of existence and true discourse, between the beautiful existence and the true life, life in the truth, life for the truth. The emergence of the true life in the principle and form of truth-telling (telling the truth to others and to oneself, about oneself and about others), of the true life and the game of truth-telling, is the theme, the problem that I would have liked to study. (Foucault 2011a: 163)

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Socrates represents the moment when the emergence of truth-telling and the principle of beautiful existence are linked to care of self. From this relationship, two possible developments were designed: the metaphysics of the soul and the aesthetics of life. There is no incompatibility or contradiction between such themes, as they have been continuously associated. But it is also necessary to emphasize that this relationship between the metaphysics of the soul and the aesthetics of life is not necessary and unique; it is a flexible and variable relationship. For example, in relation to Christianity, there is a relatively constant metaphysics of the soul and, however, a very variable stylistic of existence. The lay person’s life, the ascetic’s, and the cleric’s represent a series of different modulations in the stylistics of existence. In addition, there is the opposite situation: very diverse soul metaphysics supporting relatively stable styles of existence, as in the case of the Stoics. The Cynics and the Aesthetics of Existence In The Government of Self and Others, Foucault points out that toward the end of his golden age, in the first centuries AD, Stoic philosopher Epictetus describes the most typical form of ancient philosophy. While drawing the profile of a Cynic Epictetus demonstrates what constitutes a type of limit in relation to what was the great history of old philosophy as parrhēsia. The courage of truth in cynicism proposes to face people’s rage by giving them an image of what they admit and value in thought, while rejecting and despising in their own lives. That is the Cynic scandal, which does not risk life by simply telling the truth, but rather by way of living. Therefore, the question cynicism insistently posed to philosophy in Antiquity, in Christianity, and in the modern world is that of philosophical life, stating: “One exposes one’s life, not through one’s discourses, but through one’s life itself.” (Foucault 2011a: 234). And by raising the question: “what can the form of life be, such that it practices truth-telling?” (Foucault 2011a: 234). In The Courage of Truth, it is precisely in the theme of true life and of stylistics of existence that Foucault finds the example of Cynicism. In Cynic practice, the demand for an extremely typified mode of life (with very characteristic and defined rules, conditions or modes) is strongly connected with the principle of truth-telling, unlimited and courageous until its intolerable insolence. This connection of truth-telling and mode of life is not mediated by a doctrine or, in any case, participates in a very

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rudimentary theoretical framework which is less important, less developed in Cynic practice than it could be in Platonism, Stoicism, or Epicureanism. Therefore, Foucault’s interest is to demarcate the traits that radically distinguish Cynicism from Socratic practice and the philosophical movements in which the mode of life was, however, very important. Furthermore, and this is an important trait he perceives in Cynics and in parrhēsia, truth is directly linked to the mode of life in a very particular way. The relationship is different from that which is shown in Plato’s Laches, for instance. The mode of life (staff, beggar’s pouch, poverty, roaming, begging) is characterized by precise and coded forms of behavior easily recognizable in relation to truth-telling. Life is, therefore, a condition of possibility for the exercise of this parrhēsia. This way of life also plays another role in relation to parrhēsia, that is, it is not only a condition of possibility; it also has a reductive function: to reduce all useless obligations, those that are regularly received and accepted by everyone and are not found in nature or reason. Such an attitude works as a kind of general contestation of existence and opinions, to make the truth appear, often due to public scandal. This is the case of Diogenes, who masturbated in a public square, and justified himself for considering masturbation (Cf. Onfray 1990: 43–52) to be a satisfaction of the same kind as food, after all we need both. He thought: If we eat in public, why not meet other needs in the same way? The way of life has this reductive function in relation to conventions and beliefs. The aesthetics of cynic existence, has yet a role of proof in relation to the truth, for in its independence, in its fundamental freedom, it makes appear everything that life should be. Socratic parrhēsia present in Alcibíades consisted of, from the care of self, defining in its radical separation what is the being of the soul itself. Cynics carry out a reverse operation, reducing life itself to the truth. Cynicism makes life what Foucault called an alethurgy, a manifestation of truth, making it visible in one’s gestures, in one’s body, in one’s way of dressing, conducting oneself and living the truth itself: What is manifested in Cynicism is life as the immediate, striking, and unrestrained presence of the truth. Or again: truth as discipline, ascesis, and bareness of life. The true life as life of truth. From its emergence in the fourth century in the Hellenistic period until at least the end of the Roman Empire. (Foucault 2011a: 173)

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It is an alethurgy dramatically different from that which works in Christian confession, although there is a certain link between Cynicism and Christianity, as I will detail below. Foucault’s interest in Cynicism, however, is not limited to Antiquity, but rather to its resonance for Western culture, as he articulates: I will make a detour and try to show you why and how Cynicism is not, as is often thought, just a somewhat particular, odd, and ultimately forgotten figure in ancient philosophy, but an historical category which, in various forms and with diverse objectives, runs through the whole of Western history. There is a Cynicism which is an integral part of the history of Western thought, existence, and subjectivity. In the next hour I would like to evoke something of this trans-historical Cynicism. (Foucault 2011a: 174)

In his history of truth that is the moment when scandal enters the picture to destabilize the way truth was conceived by Christianity, science, and political party in modern times. He attacks, in particular, the way in which intellectual, truth, and political activism have been associated. In a 1975 interview, “I am a pyrotechnician,” (Foucault 2004; Foucault 2006: 68–100) Foucault articulated how his speech is instrumental, like a gunpowder bag or a molotov cocktail. Margareth Rago and Alfredo Veiga-­ Neto (2006) have also recalled this characteristic of Foucault’s thought. His desire for destruction, while breaking down walls certainly produced changes and opened immense creative possibilities: I am a pyrotechnician. I manufacture something that finally serves a siege, a war, a destruction. I am not in favor of destruction, but I am in favor of coming through, moving forward, tearing down walls. (Foucault 2006: 69)

References Avelino, Nildo (2011). Apresentação: Foucault e a anarqueologia dos saberes. In: Foucault, Michel. Do governo dos vivos. Curso no Collège de France, 1979–1980 (excertos). São Paulo: Centro de Cultura Social. Rio de Janeiro: Achiamé. Candiotto, Cesar (2010). Foucault e a crítica da verdade. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica; Curitiba: Champagnat. Christofferson, Michael (2009). II. La Métaphore du Goulag. Les usages intellectuels et politiques de L’Archipel du Goulag d’Alexandre Soljenitsyne. In: Les Intellectuels contre la gauche. L’idéologie antitotalitarisme en France (1968–1981). 117–146. Marseille: Agone.

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Deleuze, Gilles (1994). Désir et plaisir. Magazine littéraire, 325, 59–65. Fonseca, Márcio Alves da (2011). “Os paradoxos entre a democracia e o dizer-­ verdadeiro”. Revista de Filosofia. Aurora, Curitiba, 23(32). Foucault, Michel (1980a). Truth and Power. In: Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel (1980b). Questions on Geography. In: Power/Knowledge. In: Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel, and Farge, Arlette (1982). Le Désordre des familles: Lettres de cachet des Archives de la Bastille. Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, Michel (1988a). Madness and Civilization. A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, Michel (1988b). Maurice Blanchot—The Thought from Outside. Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him: Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside and Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him. Cambridge: MIT Press. Foucault, Michel (1990). The History of Sexuality 2: The Use of Pleasure. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, Michel (1991). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison. New York: Vintage Book. Foucault, Michel (1994a). Préface à l’Histoire de la sexualité. In: Dits et écrits IV (1980–1988). 578–584. Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, Michel (1994b). The Birth of the Clinic. An Archaeology of Medical Perception. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, Michel (1994c). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, Michel (1994d). La Scène de la philosophie. In: Dits et écrits III (1976–1979). Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, Michel (2004). Je suis un artificier. In Roger-Pol Droit (éd.). Michel Foucault, entretiens. Paris: Odile Jacob. Foucault, Michel (2005). The Hermeneutics of the Subject. Lectures at the College de France, 1981–1982. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel (2006). Eu sou um pirotécnico [I am a pyrotechnician]. In: Pol-­ Droit, Roger. Michel Foucault. Entrevistas. Trans. Vera Portocarrero. 68–100. São Paulo: Graal. Foucault, Michel (2008). The Government of Self and Others. Lectures at the Collège de France (1982–1983). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel (2009). Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the College de France 1977–1978. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel (2011a). The Courage of Truth. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel (2011b). Leçons sur la volonté de savoir. Cours au Collège de France (1970–1971) suivi de Le savoir d’Œdip. Paris: Gallimard.

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Foucault, Michel (2014a). Lectures on the Will to Know. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1970–1971 and Oedipal Knowledge. New York: Picador. Foucault, Michel (2014b). Aulas sobre A vontade de saber. Curso dado no Collège de France (1970–1971). Trans. Rosemary Costethek Abílio. São Paulo: Martins Fontes. Foucault, Michel (2014c). On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979–1980. Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel (2017). Subjectivity and Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1980–1981. Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel (2021). Subjectivity and Truth (17 November 1980). About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self. Lectures at Dartmouth College, 1980. Trans. Graham Burchell. Edited by: Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Daniele Lorenzini. 19–52. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hofmann, Werner (1984). A história do pensamento do movimento social dos séculos 19 e 20 [History of the ideas behind social movements of the 19th and 20th centuries]. Trans. Adolpho José da Silva. 48–55. Rio de Janeiro: Tempo Brasileiro, 1984. Muchail, Salma Tannus (2008). Da promessa à embriaguez: A propósito da leitura foucaultiana do Alcibíades de Platão. In: Rago, Margareth, and Veiga-Neto, Alfredo (Orgs.). Figuras de Foucault. 239–252. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica. Muchail, Salma Tannus (2011). O dizer-verdadeiro: descrição positiva. Revista de Filosofia. Aurora, Curitiba, 23(32). Onfray, Michel (1990). La Vertu du poisson masturbateur. Cynismes. Portrait du philosophe en chien. 43–52. Paris: Grasset. Passetti, Edson (2002). Heterotopias anarquistas. Verve. Revista Semestral do Nu-Sol—Núcleo de Sociabilidade Libertária. Programa de Estudos Pós-­ Graduados em Ciências Sociais, PUC-SP, São Paulo, 2, 149–150. Rago, Margareth, and Veiga-Neto, Alfredo (2006). Apresentação. Aquela história de pirotécnico. Figuras de Foucault. 9–11. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica. Taylor, Chloë (2009). The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault. A Genealoqy of the ‘Confessing Animal’. New York, London: Routledge. Ternes, José (2011). Foucault, do retorno da linguagem ao dizer-verdadeiro. Revista de Filosofia, Aurora, Curitiba, 23(32).

CHAPTER 3

Philosophical Life and Revolutionary Militancy: Cynicism, the Specific Intellectual and Criticism of the Revolutionary Party

Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force. —Michel Foucault (1983: xiii–xiv)

From all of Foucault’s differences and similarities with anarchism, I am interested in his criticism regarding the concept of representation, especially with regard to the importance that the State, the revolutionary party, and the left intellectual as having a universal conscience in the social transformation political project led by the communists. Daniel Aarão Reis Filho lists what he called the “cohesion myths” of the communists, that is, what keeps them united in action during the struggle: “the inevitable revolution, the universal mission of the proletariat, the essential role of the vanguard party” (Reis Filho 1989: 19). Therefore, the fundamental relation of representation which Foucault problematized, goes through the way they were associated to reach the Revolution—proletariat, on the one hand, and State, Party and intellectual, on the other. If in Foucault’s On the Government of the Living his anarcheological method is inspired by Anarchism, for its movement toward a separation from power and the questioning of all the ways in

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. P. Vieira, Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth and The Ethics of an Intellectual, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04356-7_3

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which power is effectively accepted (Foucault 2014: 78), among other things, to what extent State, Party and universal intellectual, which I have highlighted, are criticized? I notice Foucault’s anarchist look in Security, Territory, Population, as well, when he describes the state on the basis of the general tactics of governmentality. According to Michel Senellart (2009: 380), he applies the same “point of view” he had already adopted in his studies on disciplinary mechanisms, separating relations of power from institutionalist or functionalist approaches. That meant with research on governmentality the state entered into the field of analysis of micro-powers. Foucault states: Then we would have to say that the state is not that kind of cold monster in history that has continually grown and developed as a sort of threatening organism above civil society. What we would have to show would be how, from the sixteenth century, a civil society, or rather, quite simply a governmentalized society organized something both fragile and obsessive that is called the state. But the state is only an episode in government, and it is not government that is an instrument of the state. Or at any rate, the state is an episode in governmentality. (Foucault 2009: 248)

By placing the emergence of the state in the history of governmentality, Foucault decentralizes the importance normally attributed to it. For him, the constitution of the state was based on multiple processes which formed these government practices. To understand this shift, I turn back to Senellart. He argues that with the theme of government, Foucault first responds to frequent criticisms directed at him concerning the absence of the state in his analyzes on power. Foucault’s answer makes it clear that not even as a central theme of one of his courses does the state apparatus appear as a great enemy to be fought, or as the place from which all our problems emanate. The state, as he had already demonstrated with prisons in relation to disciplines, was invaded and colonized by techniques of governmentality to the point of relegating its existence to the following movement: But the state, doubtless no more today than in the past, does not have this unity, individuality, and rigorous functionality, nor, I would go so far as to say, this importance. After all, maybe the state is only a composite reality and a mythicized abstraction whose importance is much less than we think. Maybe. What is important for our modernity, that is to say, for our present,

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is not then the state’s takeover (étatisation) of society, so much as what I would call the “governmentalization” of the state. (Foucault 2009: 109)

Therefore, this passage is key to understand that, as Senellart argues, “in Foucault, taking the question of the state into account is inseparable from criticism of its current representations: the state as timeless abstraction, as a pole of transcendence, an instrument of class domination, or a cold monster.” (Foucault 2009: 381) Foucault points to the overvaluation of the problem of the state in the analysis of relations of domination. He also problematizes the reduction of the state to the function of reproduction of the relations of production. Moreover, such a view of the state makes it a target of attack and a place to be occupied. In The Communist Manifesto (1848), pamphlet that became the great reference for the revolutionary action of left movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Marx and Engels argued that “the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class.” (Marx and Engels 2002). Even though in the course of the development of the revolutionary process the ultimate objective was to abolish political power ensured by the working class when it had become the ruling class, transformation of the current order passed through the crucial role of occupying the state to guarantee the Revolution. These criticisms of the role of the state in the revolutionary process lead us further to the problems of the Revolutionary Party and the organic intellectual (Cf. Gramsci 1989). On the first discussion, Foucault cites both Leninism and Maoism, whose assumptions are “a popular organization and army against a bourgeois organization and army, dictatorship and the proletarian state.” (Foucault 1996a: 233). These are the known instruments for the seizure of power, which would disappear after a transitory stage. It is for this reason that Foucault proposes to overcome Marxism, precisely thinking of it as a philosophy of state and which also functioned as the expression of a political party. And, for him, political parties have a tendency to ignore social movements and even weaken their forces (Foucault 1994a: 603). Foucault further reminds us that, for a long time, workers fought for the right to freedom of association. They succeeded, but soon union bureaucracy was established, and it functioned by assuming workers did not think; therefore, it should decide, think. Consequently, it confiscated the right to reflect, calculate, decide (Foucault 1994b: 422). To Foucault it was about recovering what was monopolized by Marxism and by the

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Marxist parties (Foucault 1994a: 603). Therefore, Foucault considers the existence of an organization such as the Communist Party, which owns a complex organization and follows a monastic order, a determining fact for the history of Western Marxism (Foucault 1994a: 613). Furthermore, the working class was often seen as “indifferent,” “passive,” “confused,” and that would be the reason it should be organized by the Party. In his work A revolução faltou ao encontro [Revolution missed the meeting] Reis Filho argues that all parties imagined themselves as depositaries of a historical mission: to lead the working class or the ‘popular masses’ (Reis Filho 1989: 52). On the relationship between the vanguards and the workers, he concludes: While compared to communists the “masses,” and even the working class, are depicted with the following weaknesses: unaware of their interests, asleep through dominant ideologies, suspicious about their own possibilities, lacking a spirit of solidarity and internal impulse. Consequently, the avant-garde should have a dynamic role: to instill revolutionary consciousness by “constantly feeding” the proletariat, preparing them, increasing their forces, directing them, raising their levels of consciousness and organization, developing their combativeness, training them; in short, take care of its preparation in all terrains. (Reis Filho 1989: 66)

Accordingly, the revolutionary party is seen as an organization thanks to which the proletariat reaches class consciousness. This specific relationship between the working class and the parties is defended by what is conventionally called “Marxism-Leninism.” Despite the importance of Marx and Lenin to that matter, their postulates do not refer strictly to such inspirations and are appropriated in regard to various issues. Reis Filho conceptualizes it as follows: How should one define Marxism-Leninism? So many people invoke it. Where might one find its roots? In Marx? In Lenin’s update of it? In Stalin’s translation? In Mao? Confusion does not prevent anyone from saying that it is based on a certain conception of historical becoming (historical determinism, inevitability of the revolution), of a vision of the historical role of the working class (workers’ messianism), and a conception of communists as revolutionary avant-garde, among other references. (Reis Filho 1989: 107)

That notion built fundamental dependence between the Party and the proletariat, as Foucault points out: “While the Party is, consequently, the

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consciousness of the proletariat, it is (…) its condition for existence.” (Foucault 1994a: 614). Marx and Engels argued for communists’ avant-­ garde position, showing both their advance in relation to the other parties of the working classes and their leadership in relation to the proletariat: The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement. (Marx and Engels 2002)

Furthermore, Foucault reminds us that the Party is an organization with hierarchy stratification, and it concentrates individual wishes of militants in a type of monolithic will, i.e., the leaders’ bureaucratic will. In this context, the Party invoked Marx’s theory as the only truth. Marx thus represented high authority. For Foucault, knowing how individual wills in the revolution and the struggle were articulated with other levels of will is fundamental, since “today, those multiple wills start to spring in the gap of hegemony held by the traditional left” (Foucault 1994a: 615). The objectives of the struggles were always hidden by prophecies. As only the Party was considered the authentic holder of the struggle and the only one capable of making a rational decision, the obscure areas of human activities never came up (Foucault 1994a: 615). Foucault emphasizes how insufficient any and all the theories are, but mainly whichsoever does not hear dissonant voices coming from multiple experiences: It would be necessary to destroy the idea that philosophy is the only normative thought. It is necessary that voices of an incalculable number of subjects who speak resonate and it is necessary to make countless experience speak (…). It is necessary to make all kinds of experiences speak (…). I believe the task of a philosophy practitioner who lives in the West is to listen to all these voices. (Foucault 1994a: 615–616)

As for the critique of representation regarding the relationship between the intellectual and the masses, concerning the workers, Foucault constantly stated that they never needed intellectuals: “Their role (…) is not to forge workers’ conscience, given that it already exists, but rather allow for such conscience, for workers’ knowledge to enter the information

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system, disseminate and consequently help other workers, or people.” (Foucault 1994b: 421). It was thought that the only knowledge that mattered was that of intellectuals or scientists; however, Foucault argues the knowledge of intellectuals is partial: Intellectuals constantly depict the working class as bearing the same humanist values as the bourgeoisie. Now, that is not true. If you look closely at the working class, you notice it is ultimately illegal. It is against the law, since the law is always made against it. (Foucault 1994b: 422)

It was not only Foucault who criticized this role of intermediary expected of intellectuals. Julia Kristeva is a remarkable European feminist and Bulgarian dissident from Soviet regime exiled in France since 1966. She also strongly questions Gramsci’s conception of “organic intellectual,” as it depends on opposition between the masses and the individual, the society and the intellectual (Kristeva 1984: 147). Discussing this issue, Reis Filho writes: For Gramsci, the proletariat would not “spontaneously” set aside corporate interests, nor could it become a social class without direction from an avant-­ garde party. The Party would be the “conscious leadership,” the “collective will,” the “modern Prince.” Its mission: to educate, to purify, to guide “spontaneous feelings”. Even after the victory their tasks would not cease (…). The thesis on social classes creating their “organic intellectuals,” capable of providing them with “homogeneity and awareness” in all fields of activity, would also reinforce, with a new elaboration, the crucial role of the avant-garde. (Reis Filho 1989: 115)

Kristeva calls attention to “questioning this morality of engagement, this ‘willingness to serve’.” (Kristeva 1984: 147). For her, “if an intellectual is to have a raison d’être, it is to the extent that he affirms and conveys the difference.” (Kristeva 1984: 147). And in the search for new forms and languages, which might often be seen as obscurity or esotericism, the intellectual consents to pay a price for now speaking “in his name,” and no longer “in the name of.” Moreover, Kristeva questions the role of the state in all forms of political militancy, especially a Marxist one. She argues for the need to transform Marxism, as well as to reinvent the function of the intellectual (Kristeva 1984: 152).

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Foucault reinvents the role of the intellectual when he participates, for example, in 1981, in the fight against the repression of the Soviet regime against a Polish group of trade unionists and dissident intellectuals, Solidarité (Cf. Christofferson 2009: 205–242). Along with other intellectuals such as P. Bourdieu, C. Castoriadis, M. de Certeau, C. Lefort, J. le Goff, R.  Chartier, F.  Furet, P.  Nora, M.  Perrot, JP Vernant, P.  Veyne, P. Vidal-Naquet, among others, and French workers and members of the CFDT (Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail), Foucault joined a movement against totalitarianism in Poland and denounced the neglect of François Mitterrand’s socialist government regarding such a problem. The uniqueness of that group is less the link between intellectuals and unionists, and more a result of how their connection took place. Didier Eribon (1981: 8–9) wrote in French newspaper Libération, on December 23, 1981, about how French intellectuals and trade unionists supported Polish resistance. He also highlights the press conference which brought together union members, intellectuals, university students, and artists. Intellectuals spoke about the importance of cooperation between the French trade union movement and intellectuals. Among the lectures Foucault’s was the longest. He spoke about proposed actions, being the first to ensure Solidarité’s voice as a group was not muffled. The intellectual gesture was to disseminate this information to as many people as possible. Eribon concludes his story with the following sentence: “We saw this exceptional fact yesterday: it has been a long time since such a meeting of intellectuals was gathered to establish a common practice with a union organization.” (Eribon 1981: 8–9). In that same newspaper, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1981: 8–9) speaks about that political action. In an interview, he expresses the movement’s criticism of the French socialist government, which, despite having always defended freedom during Eastern Europe totalitarian regimes, was not showing any reaction. Aligned with Foucault, Bourdieu argues that power of transformation should not be delegated to the men of state apparatus, highlighting the symbolic value of a relationship between intellectuals and unionists. Obviously, imagination would not be in power, but rather in specific actions, for example. Their great obstacle, as Foucault and Kristeva argued, was the tendency of certain left-wing organizations to stick to the state model. While proposing “war machine against the French communist party,” (Bourdieu 1981: 8–9) he articulates the need to eliminate the Leninist dream of the intellectual who organizes the workers.

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Foucault has always depicted the intellectual less as a prophet—a role he played until the 1950s, 1960s—who said what “should be done” and more as a person building practice in which there is no program to be proposed. He claims that “as soon as one ‘proposes’—one proposes a vocabulary, an ideology, which can only have effects of domination. What we have to present are instruments and tools that people might find useful (Foucault 1984). Only thus, the possibilities of instruments for struggles can be open and never closed by following, for instance, a Marxist program already very outworn. Foucault cites Stalinism and Maoism (Foucault 1994c: 377) as aspects reinforcing the need for criticism of great theoretical and political systems. It is not a matter of replacing Marxism with another theory considered more coherent and objective; it is rather about paying attention to specificities in each political struggle and, moreover, learning from them. Therefore, Foucault points out, as many intellectuals of that period did, the need to reinvent political militancy, since revolutionary thought has lost the support it found in other parts of the world, such as USSR, Cuba, Vietnam, or China. He says: “It is the first time that there is no longer a single spot on earth from which the light of hope could arise” (Foucault 1994d: 397). There is no longer a revolutionary movement that serves as an example to be followed. For him, we were sent back to 1830, a period when revolutions began in Europe, or even earlier, for the French Revolution and the entire European tradition of Enlightenment: (…) it is necessary to start all over again from the beginning and ask what can be criticized in our society (…) the important tradition of socialism is fundamentally called into question, because everything socialist tradition produced in history is out there to be condemned. (Foucault 1994d: 398)

However, Foucault argues that such an attitude of indicating the difficulty of our conditions does not demonstrate a generalized pessimism. It is precisely because he sees difficulties and says “let us start over,” that he believes to be demonstrating great optimism: (…) restart the analysis, the criticism—not purely and simply the analysis of the so-called “capitalist” society, but the analysis of the social, state system, which we find in socialist and capitalist countries. Such is the criticism that is to be made. It is a huge task. We must start now and with a lot of optimism. (Foucault 1994d: 398)

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Parrhēsia Outside the Institutional Field: Socrates and Cynicism in Revolutionary Militancy According to Foucault, the intellectual’s task consists of “forging the instruments of analysis, political action and political intervention on the reality that it is contemporary with us and about ourselves.” (Foucault 1994e: 414). Offering courses which highlight an old way of life concerned with changing oneself and others and looking for transformation outside institutional practice, provides us with fundamental and direct instruments for the task. In other words, I argue that while emphasizing Socrates and the importance of not only speaking the truth in the Assembly but also in one’s own way of life, and remembering the Cynics’ active engagement in the transformation of the world, Foucault seeks examples of political practices which avoid the traditional leftist framework. The latter was built from partisan organization, considering that taking over power would be the only way to achieve Revolution. Furthermore, I suggest that all of Foucault’s daily political action, as I mentioned previously, was based on the specific intellectual and on criticism of the revolutionary Party—which in turn was based on a hierarchical relationship between workers and avant-garde intellectuals—contributed to his developing of a concerned view toward historical experiences differing from the Revolution framework, forgotten or labeled as “pre-­political,” without organization, or class consciousness. These movements so marginalized by the history of thought are Foucault’s interest, linking them to his own leftist militancy actions in France. And I am not talking solely of Socrates and the Cynics, but also about Anarchists and Socialists—from the modern period, late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, and whom Marx and Engels pejoratively called “utopians,” for they were “of a purely Utopian character.” (Marx and Engels 2002). The following discussions deal with these struggles and Foucault’s choices. Socrates and Political Practice Outside the Institution In the first hour of his lecture on February 15, 1984, Foucault begins his study on Socrates related to the theme of ethical parrhēsia. He recalls that Socrates—who prefers to face death rather than renounce parrhēsia—does not practice truth-telling in court or before an Assembly. Socrates demonstrates the courage of truth through a game of ironic interrogation, and Foucault takes Plato’s Apology of Socrates as his main source. It is a famous

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work in which Socrates explains why he does not want to play a political-­ institutional role in the city. Apology… is composed of a judicial discourse and, therefore, begins with a defense: Socrates demonstrates that he is telling the truth because, unlike his opponents, he talks about things in a simple, direct way and without skill or ornaments, which is proof of truth. Furthermore, his opponents spoke so much about him through rhetorical details and devices, they practically made him forget himself. In this sense, the ability of opponents to speak produces forgetfulness of self; conversely, simplicity, words without ornament spoken directly, the true word, i.e., parrhēsia, will lead to the truth of ourselves. This risk of forgetting oneself is a central issue in these dialogues. In that same work, Socrates answers the crucial question: Why does he not participate directly in politics? He says that if he did not care for Athens and Athenians in the Assembly nor in the courts, that is because his care is similar to that of a father or older brother. And why did he not participate in the city’s decisions publicly? Here the political role of one who stands up before the Assembly, speaks to the people and participates in the city’s deliberations within the scene of democratic institutions, in which parrhēsia has its place, clearly appears. He is the figure of the political parrhesiast who, despite the threats, accepts to speak and stand before everyone, as it is in the interest of the city. And risking death, he tells the truth. It is precisely this role that Socrates does not want to play. And how does he justify his position? The most obvious and clear answer is that in telling the truth he would die. However, Foucault analyzes the situation more closely and realizes that Socrates’ concern is not only about the risk of death, as he accepts this danger when uttering truth-telling. He was not hindered by the threats his activities could carry, for the risk of death was at the heart of his endeavor. Which, therefore, means his is a certain form of parrhēsia different from political parrhēsia. He defines it as a mission; however, one very different from that of the sage, who intervenes from time to time and, in his wisdom, remains silent for the rest of his life. The sage acts when urgency demands it. Other than that, he remains in the silence of his own wisdom. But Socrates does not compare his mission to the sage’s; he rather compares it to the soldier’s, who among citizens has to fight and defend himself and others at every moment. The purpose of this mission is to watch over others, to urge them to take care of themselves, their reason, their truth, and their souls. In other words, a mission very different from political parrhēsia, making each individual take care of

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himself as a rational being, having in fact a founding relationship about the being of his own soul: And in this we now have a parrhēsia on the axis of ethics. What is at stake in this new form of parrhēsia is the foundation of ēthos as the principle on the basis of which conduct can be defined as rational conduct in accordance with the very being of the soul. (Foucault 2011: 86)

An ensemble defines Socratic parrhēsia: “Zêtêsis, exetasis, epimeleia. Zêtêsis is the first moment of Socratic veridiction—the search. Exetasis is examination of the soul, comparison of the soul, and test of souls. Epimeleia is taking care of oneself.” (Foucault 2011: 86). In this ensemble defining Socratic parrhēsia, Socrates’ courageous veridiction is opposed to political veridiction, which is not practiced as investigation, but manifests itself as assertion of one who is capable of telling the truth; which does not prioritize examination and confrontation of souls, but courageously addresses, in solitude, an Assembly or a tyrant who does not want to listen; which is not aimed at urging people to take care of themselves, but tells them what to do and, once said, lets people do as they can with themselves and the truth. Thus, Socrates drew a line of division and determined the separation in Greek and, therefore, Western thought between practice of political truth-­ telling and another practice of truth-telling, one which obeys other formulae and other objectives. Another parrhēsia therefore emerges: it does not defend the need to expose itself to the danger of politics, and will be incompatible with the platform and the rhetorical forms of typically political discourses. Furthermore, this true saying would run the risk of being reduced to silence when it tried to manifest itself in a democracy or in an oligarchy. But Socrates is never done repeating: parrhēsia which is kept from the risks of politics is not less useful to the city. While encouraging others to take care of themselves, you are being useful to the whole city. Protection of life is precisely in the interest of the city. Foucault argues: Finally, philosophy—as courageous veridiction, as non-political parrhesia, yet maintaining an essential relation with the city’s utility—will be deployed throughout what could be called the great chain of cares and concerns. (Foucault 2011: 90)

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In Apology of Socrates, thereby, a coincidence might be noticed between the origination of a discourse of truth different from prophecy, wisdom, teaching, and the definition of philosophical parrhēsia distinct from political parrhēsia. The care of the self appears as a fundamental theme of this courageous and philosophical discourse, as the main objective of this parrhēsia articulated in the relationship with gods, with the truth, and with others. Socrates’ dedication to provoke others to take care of themselves, just as he took care of himself, is his last will: may people pay attention to the precept take care of oneself. It is this mission that concerns the self-care that led Socrates to death, establishing in Greek thought and Western history philosophy as a form of veridiction that is not that of prophecy, wisdom, or of technique, but a veridiction proper to philosophical discourse. For the latter, courage must be exercised until death, as a proof of the soul that no longer has its place in political gallery. The connection of these studies of parrhēsia in Antiquity with modern culture comes to light when Foucault articulates interest in the dramatics of discourse of truth in Greco-Roman politics, which is the discourse of the counselor. In addition to that research, he has the following projects, although he does not know whether he will be able to carry them out: to study the dramatics of the minister in political order which appears around the sixteenth century, when the art of governing begins to acquire stature and to define its own technique according to what the state is; in addition, to understand the appearance of a third figure in the theme of truth-­ telling: that of the “critique,” and to try to understand what critical discourse is forged in political order in the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; lastly, Foucault finds a fourth figure: the revolutionary, who stands up in the midst of society and says: “I am telling the truth, and I am telling the truth in the name of the revolution that I am going to make and that we will make together?.” (Foucault 2008: 70). While I see how Cynics are the main object of The Courage of Truth, I understand it was mainly this fourth figure which occupied him. And it is precisely this connection between Cynic parrhēsia and its resonances in modern political militancy that I will deal with next. The Resonance Cynicism has for Western Culture In the second hour of his lecture on February 29, 1984, Foucault analyzes Cynicism as a moral category in Western culture. I will highlight the connections he establishes between the Cynics and the resonances they have

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for the practice of revolutionary political activism. This theme is extremely relevant for scholars who are interested in the trajectories of militants who had to face the risk of death, anonymity, or social exclusion when pronouncing and practicing what they took and experienced as the scandalous truth against power. In her poignant article, Margareth Rago establishes this relationship between Brazilian militant women and their constant struggles in the twentieth century (Rago 2011: 251–268). Post-­ structuralist feminisms, in general, have created bridges with Foucault’s problematizations about ethics, aesthetics of existence, the art of living, and the courage of truth. Following Rago, Susel Oliveira da Rosa links the theme of courage to Brazilian feminist Danda Prado as well as to leftist militants who fought against the dictatorship in Brazil (Cf. Rosa 2009, 2011). Other connections between feminisms and Foucault’s studies on ethics are highlighted in Norma Telles (2009: 291–303) and Margaret Mclaren’s (2002) works, and in Feminism and the Final Foucault (Taylor and Vintges 2004). Foucault asserts that there are few works that deal with this long history of Cynicism. While discussing the bibliography on the subject, he mentions some texts from German philosophy such as Tillich, Heinrich, and Gehlen, for example, who problematize Cynicism in its ancient and modern forms. In general, these authors counterpose Cynicism of positive value (of Antiquity) to cynicism of negative value (of modern world). Cynicism, even in antiquity, was always perceived with strong ambiguity. But, he argues, if we are to emphasize its dimensions as a mode of existence in Christian and modern Europe, we cannot simply put upon it a uniformly negative judgment. In addition, we must problematize the hypothesis of a strong and well-marked discontinuity between ancient and modern Cynicism, as if they were styles of existence modulated according to different formulae. Still, in these interpretations, cynicism is presented as a type of individualism, of self-assertion, an exasperation of specific existence, in its extreme singularity, both in Antiquity and in Modernity. Thus, the individual and individualism would be at the core of Cynicism. According to Foucault, if we read Cynicism from the history of individualism we run the risk of missing one of its fundamental dimensions: the relationship between modes of existence and the manifestation of the truth. Furthermore, the long history of Cynicism must be grounded in the theme of life as scandal of the truth, or as way of life as a place of the emergence of the truth.

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Foucault intends to shed light on the cultural legacy, the permanent existence of Cynicism across European culture, calling attention to a philosophical and political reflection which is not usually present in the canons of Western philosophy. Moreover, Cynics have never been thought of by a traditional left as being linked to a militancy whose main objective was the transformation of the world. But Foucault will draw attention to the importance of Cynicism beyond Antiquity, showing how the insistence on scandalously living precepts formulated had resonance, for instance, in nineteenth century movements of political contestation. He points out three elements that passed along the Cynic mode of existence throughout Europe history: Christian asceticism, nineteenth century revolutionary movements, and modern art. The first support for relaying and penetrating the Cynic mode of existence was the Christian culture itself, by practice and institution of asceticism. Foucault finds great closeness between the practice of Cynic destitution and Christian asceticism. Through Christian asceticism the Cynic mode of life was transmitted for a long time, and much of the attitudes and modes of behavior, as well as many themes we can find in Cynic thought are found in the numerous Middle-Age spiritual movements, such as Franciscans, Dominicans and heretical movements. The theme of nakedness was extremely important in all Christian spirituality and it also refers, in any case implicitly, to the famous Cynic nudity and its double value of being a way of life of complete destitution while manifesting in full nakedness what the truth of the world and of life is. Christian, anti-­ institutional, and anti-ecclesiastical Cynicism was also felt within the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. The second support for passing on the Cynic mode of being—which Foucault mostly studied and which is my main interest—is Cynicism understood as a way of life in the scandal of the truth. It has resonance for political practices, especially for the nineteenth century revolutionary movements. According to Foucault, revolution in the modern European world was not just a political project; it was a way of life, as well. The way in which life was defined, characterized, organized as revolutionary activity, or revolutionary activity as life consecrated, either totally or partially to the Revolution, was dubbed “militantism.” In Europe, this practice took three forms; Foucault was interested in the third one. The first is revolutionary life understood in the form of secret society; secret in the formation of an invisible sociality ordered to a millenarian principle or objective. This characteristic of revolutionary life was very

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important in the beginning of the nineteenth century, and I believe Foucault did not pay much attention to this experience for the peculiar restricted character secret implied, that is, a different mode of life was elaborated only within the secret society. As for life outside the secret society, individuals behaved according to social customs and standards so they were not discovered as part of a sect, following precepts contrary to norms or intending to transgress moral values. The organization of a secret society, in most cases, does not publicize their battles, very different from the Cynics, who made the scandal of true life in public square their main way of acting. In his work Primitive Rebels (1959), Eric Hobsbawm states that among the secret and millenarian societies we could mention Freemasonry, which constitutes a link between two groups: First, in organizations which because they were or had to be secret, or because their revolutionary aims were extremely ambitious, imposed an exceptional degree of cohesion on their members; second, in organizations which, because they derived from older bodies and traditions, retained exceptionally lively links with the primitive past. In other words, on the one hand in secret revolutionary societies and orders, on the other in trade unions and friendly societies, especially those descended from skilled independent artisans. (Hobsbawm 1959: 153)

Furthermore, Hobsbawm argues Freemasonry appeared with great force at the end of the eighteenth century, and did not have a fixed doctrine or program. The members shared the same faith in Enlightenment values, and many of revolutionaries and conspirators between 1789 and 1830 were from Masonic background. Regarding secret brotherhoods, Hobsbawm states: The classical secret brotherhood was a hierarchical élite group, with a tremendous paraphernalia of initiation and other rituals, symbolism, ritual nomenclature, signs, passwords, oaths and the rest. The candidate was carefully selected and, after admission, progressively advanced through a succession of degrees, each bringing higher responsibility and a more esoteric knowledge until, with luck, he joined (or rather, was co-opted into) the innermost of whatever inner directing circles there were. Marx, who had no fondness for this sort of thing, described it as “superstitious authoritarianism” and the phrase may stand. (Hobsbawm 1959: 165)

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As the previous excerpt suggests, Hobsbawm judges these groups’ action for their lack of aptitude. I particularly highlight the last sentence, when he quotes Marx’s negative opinion about Freemasons and reaffirms this position. The very title of the book cited also alludes to the primitivism of these movements. Many scholars described such groups from early nineteenth century as “primitive,” “archaic,” “pre-political,” “without a program,” “disorganized.” Such judgmental terms are not in Foucault’s lexicon, especially when he deals with political actions preceding the organization of workers in political parties or unions. In fact, he always takes notice of marginal groups such as anarchists—groups he mentions as ones serving the purpose of transferring Cynic precepts of existence. I would say Foucault’s distinction lies precisely in this aspect, for he respects and underlines actions of political movements considered by many to be “naive,” strongly criticizing views which frame such experiences and ends up dismissing them as less important to the history of political militancy. Foucault himself practices militancy which escapes traditional patterns and, therefore, invests in threads connecting him to devalued political engagement practices. Let us further remember that Hobsbawm had the praiseworthy initiative of studying groups often not even considered by the history of social movements, such as millennialists, social banditry, the Italian Mafia, worker sects, Freemasons and Sicilian anarchism, for instance. However, he did end up producing hierarchies, mainly while comparing groups which are the objects of his work, seen as archaic and pre-political, with the modern movements organized by a program or a political theory. Hobsbawm states: “Though their movements are thus in many respects blind and groping, by the standards of modern ones, they are neither unimportant nor marginal.” (Hobsbawm 1959: 2). Looking back at the other modes of militancy Foucault remembered in addition to secret organizations, secondly, at the other extreme, militantism appears in the form of a visible, recognized, instituted organization that seeks to assert its objectives and dynamics in the social and political fields, mainly recognizing itself in union organizations or in revolutionary political parties. Even if Foucault strongly criticizes these two forms of organization (the union and the political party), it would be important to think that while he problematizes such organizations, in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the revolutionary parties were extremely bureaucratic, almost state-owned, and had already failed to provide a sociality that Maffesoli (1993) called

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“basic.” Until at least the 1920s, left-wing political organizations still valued social practices and relations other than those advocated by the state or the dominant elite. Accordingly, many libertarian education projects, cultural meetings organized by the workers themselves, books readings, among other events, populated the practices of leftist organizations. We can bring such practices close to the forms of solidarity that Maffesoli found in the Mafia and described as “primitive” (but this time in a positive sense), because within it, a code is condoned; however, according to him: The essential point of the “code” is the distance of the relationship to the center, which is to say, the relationship to the state and its diverse instruments of control. “Never call in the authorities of the state to get justice.” One such distance in principle, whose consequences we are all familiar with, allows for assurance of an efficient resistance to centralization in all its forms. (Maffesoli 1993: 61)

This “basic sociality” is far from the forms of sociability present in modern societies, in which the “individual is anonymous and atomized, who is completely dependent on an unknown total central pole, the ‘Big Brother’ of ‘1984’” (Maffesoli 1993: 62). In basic solidarity: “each member of the ‘family’ (…) has the sole obligation to respect the dynamic (…) balance of the group. It sums up this other rule, ‘the organization comes before the individual.’” (Maffesoli 1993: 62). In the early nineteenth century, leftist organizations were more similar to those relations and less close to deterioration of twentieth century Marxist-Leninist party organizations, which had, for example, already experienced Stalinism and its authoritarian and bureaucratic precepts. The unions between left-wing workers of early nineteenth century were like the basic sociality as described by Maffesoli: “these little things that a macroscopic view cannot take into account, but which constitute the vital force, the power of social structuring” (Maffesoli 1993: 64). But organization became fundamental in late nineteenth century as political parties and unions were institutionalized, which in turn caused relationships between workers and those two to grow hard, weakening “basic sociality” while parties and unions would gradually confiscate workers’ freedom and autonomy. Finally, the third way of being militant Foucault highlights is militancy as a witness for life in the form of style of existence, which disrupts society’s conventions, habits and values. Through constant practice and immediate existence it must manifest directly in visible form the concrete

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possibility and the evident value of an other life, which is the true life. Therefore, it is at the center of the experience of revolutionary militantism that he discovers “the theme, so fundamental and at the same time so enigmatic and interesting, of the true life, of that problem of the true life which was already raised by Socrates and which I do not think has ceased to run through all Western [thought].” (Foucault 2011: 184). On that ground, what Foucault highlights is that specific form of militancy very similar to the Cynics’, precisely because the way of life against conventions is his main support. This aspect of “bearing witness by one’s life, of the scandal of revolutionary life as a scandal of the truth,” was dominant in movements from mid-nineteenth century. In this sense, Foucault articulates the need to study Dostoyevski and Russian nihilism; then European and American anarchism; and the problem of terrorism and the way in which anarchism and terrorism, as practice of life which might accept death for the truth (the bomb that kills the bomber), appear as a type of crossing limits, dramatic or delusional, of this courage for the truth that had been presented by Greeks: “Going after the truth, manifesting the truth, making the truth burst out to the point of losing one’s life or causing the blood of others to flow is in fact something whose long filiation is found again across European thought.” (Foucault 2011: 185). Hobsbawm also recognizes the specificity of the militancy of those he calls “utopians” or anarchists. They are identified as groups which believed in total modification of customs in their own reality. One of their main objectives was the development of exemplary moral standards. Hobsbawm comments on the so-called “utopian” militancy: It is this consciousness of utter change, not as an aspiration but as a fact (…) Revolutionaries not only set themselves a standard of morality higher than that of any except saints, but at such moments actually carry it into practice. (Hobsbawm 1959: 61).

However, I notice Foucault’s interest in such movements is different from that of other historians, such as Hobsbawm. Foucault had already insisted on the importance of the specificity of those groups, such as “Fourierissts,” toward the end of his work Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1991: 288–292; 307–308). Let us remember Charles Fourier’s project of change through social experiences in “Phalanstery” was systematically criticized in the history of workers’ movements, as well as all those considered “utopians”: Gracchus Babeuf, Etienne Cabet, Saint-Simon,

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Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. The Communist Manifesto, by Marx and Engels, helped disseminate the infamy reserved for socialist groups from early to mid-nineteenth century, when they said that utopian socialists: (…) they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social Gospel. (Marx and Engels 2002)

Foucault strongly rejects judgments which consider such groups minor experiments without relevance. The very proposal to modify the ways of living through the manifestation of those precepts in one’s life characterizes, is, as Foucault argues, a revolutionary political action. Therefore, utopians and anarchists are like cynics in Antiquity, always seen in an ambiguous way and, most of the time, a negative image about their actions was created, as the following passage by Hobsbawm about anarchists depicts: Classical anarchism is thus a form of peasant movement almost incapable of effective adaptation to modern conditions, though it is their outcome. Had a different ideology penetrated the Andalusian countryside in the 1870s, it might have transformed the spontaneous and unstable rebelliousness of the peasants into something far more formidable, because more disciplined, as communism has sometimes succeeded in doing. This did not happen. And thus the history of anarchism, almost alone among modern social movements, is one of unrelieved failure; and unless some unforeseen historical changes occurs, it is likely to go down in the books with the Anabaptists and the rest of the prophets who, though not unarmed, did not know what to do with their arms, and were defeated for ever. (Hobsbawm 1959: 92)

In reading this passage, I notice the great difference in Foucault’s view. Unlike Hobsbawm, who leans on discipline and communism for support and defense, Foucault criticizes this view, which impoverishes and frames the experience of revolutionary groups, such as anarchists. Analysis which have always pointed to failure and historical unimportance for the workers’ movement must be understood as counterpoint to Foucault’s view, which, contrary to such positions, highlights how anarchists are, in Edson Passetti’s words, estilistas da existência libertária [stylists of libertarian existence]. For the other hand, Foucault also says in Society must be defended: “Socialism was a racism from the outset, even in the nineteenth

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century. No matter whether it is Fourier at the beginning of the century or the anarchists at the end of it, you will always find a racist component in socialism” (Foucault 2017: 261). While he praises Anarchists in The Courage of Truth Foucault not only demonstrates that he cares that Cynic teaching is not lost; furthermore, Anarchists themselves are a reference in Foucault’s militancy in mid-­ twentieth century. Cynics and anarchists charm Foucault not only because from them the history of traditional philosophical and political thought, which pushed fundamental revolutionary actions to the margins, can be problematized. Foucault is interested in linking himself to this cultural heritage of revolutionary left-wing activism concerned with change for the transformation of ways of life, which was not yet linked to the organizations of the Party and of revolutionary unions. Edson Passetti also highlights that difference between anarchists and the so-called scientific socialism: Guided by the search for the enhancement of freedoms, anarchists have distinguished themselves within socialist discourse for standing in the adversary field of authoritarian and reformist socialism, regulated from Marx and Engels’s propositions. Before the State as means of occupation by the dictatorship of the proletariat, anarchists mobilize for the end of the State and its abolition. (Passetti 2002: 142)

Nonetheless, when Foucault points out that life as testimony prevailed in the nineteenth century, especially in movements from Nihilism to Anarchism or Terrorism, he does not mean this aspect has disappeared and now it is just a historical figure within European revolutionary practice. This is because he sees the problem of life as scandal of the truth resurfacing, while the problem of style of revolutionary life reappears as leftism. This resurgence is not based on some organization, but rather on the dimension of militantism of secret sociality which through scandalous forms of life manifests itself and becomes visible. In this context, Foucault depicts the importance of a precise analysis of the way of life developed by revolutionary parties in France, socialists and communists. The following excerpt addresses this issue while demonstrating how fundamental the theme is, to discuss the production of the figure of the revolutionary individual in the twentieth century, mainly by strongly criticizing the styles of life that political parties adopted in that period, completely reversing the revolutionary sense of Cynicism. Instead of

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criticizing traditional ways of life and the proposal to create new styles of existence, with which Foucault became deeply involved in his last years of life, the twentieth-century revolutionary parties supported the resumption of more conventional schemes which liberal and bourgeois morality had produced: In the present situation, all forms and styles of life which might have the value of a scandalous manifestation of an unacceptable truth have been banished, but the theme of the style of life nevertheless remains absolutely important in the militantism of the French Communist Party, in the form of the, as it were, inverted injunction to adopt and assert persistently and visibly in one’s style of life all the accepted values, all the most customary forms of behavior, and all the most traditional schemas of conduct. So that the scandal of the revolutionary life—as form of life which, breaking with all accepted life, reveals the truth and bears witness to it—is now inverted in these institutional structures of the French Communist Party, [with] the implementation of accepted values, customary behavior, and traditional schemas of conduct, as opposed to bourgeois decadence or leftist madness. (Foucault 2011: 186)

In note 24 of the 1 March 1978 lecture in Security, Territory, Population, Michel Senellart points out that Foucault’s criticism of the Communist Party must be linked to the project articulated in The Birth of Biopolitics lecture, of studying the “party governmentality (…) in the historical origin of something like totalitarian regimes.” (Foucault 2009: 220). Still according to Senellart, in 1983, in Berkeley, Foucault gathered a work group on new political rationalities in interwar period, and studied militantism in left-wing political parties, mainly communists, in terms of “styles of life.” After the religious movements of the middle ages and after nineteenth-­ century revolutionary political practice, Foucault warns about a third major vehicle in the European culture of Cynicism or the theme of the mode of life as scandal of the truth. He finds it in the field of art. Before dealing with the relationship between art and Cynicism, I recall that, in a 1970 text, Giorgio Agamben offers us fundamental contributions on the concept of art. He emphasizes the importance of understanding art as Greeks understood poiesis. In the following excerpt, Agamben differentiates poiesis from praxis, demonstrating how the former is connected to production of the truth:

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The Greeks, to whom we owe all the categories through which we judge ourselves and the reality around us, made a clear distinction between poiesis (poiein, “to pro-duce” in the sense of bringing into being) and praxis (prattein, “to do” in the sense of acting). As we shall see, central to praxis was the idea of the will that finds its immediate expression in an act, while, by contrast, central to poiesis was the experience of pro-duction into presence, the fact that something passed from nonbeing to being, from concealment into the full light of the work. The essential character of poiesis was not its aspect as a practical and voluntary process but its being a mode of truth understood as unveiling, ἀ-λήθεια. (Agamben 1999: 68)

This concept concerning art as poiesis, therefore, implies thinking about the dimension of creation and transformation of existence allowed by artistic production. Agamben complements this discussion, indicating again the relationship between art and the production of truth: And yet what the Greeks meant with the distinction between poiesis and praxis was precisely that the essence of poiesis has nothing to do with the expression of a will (with respect to which art is in no way necessary): this essence is found instead in the production of truth and in the subsequent opening of a world for man’s existence and action. (Agamben 1999: 72)

It is from the reflections on art and Cynicism, highlighted by Foucault in the 1984 course, that José Luís Câmara Leme also connects art and the problem of the truth, especially when he phrases the possibility of “extending the notion of parrhēsia to the artistic domain.” (Leme 2009: 188). It is mainly in modern art that the issue of Cynicism becomes important. According to Foucault, modern art was “the vehicle of the Cynic mode of being, of this principle of connecting style of life and manifestation of the truth, came about in two ways.” (Foucault 2011: 187). At first, in the late-­ eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century, with the appearance of artistic life. The idea that the artist should have a singular life, which in turn should not be reduced to common dimensions and norms, was already a value acquired in the period. However, since the late-­ eighteenth century and early-nineteenth century, the artist’s life must be a certain testimony of what art is in its truth. Not only must the artist’s life be unique enough for him to create his work, his life must be a manifestation of art itself in its truth. One of the principles of the theme of artistic life is that art is capable of giving existence a form which disrupts all others; a form of true life.

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Furthermore, art itself in the modern world, whether it is literature, painting, or music, must establish a relationship with reality that is no longer in the order of adornment, imitation, but rather, violent reduction of existence to its basics—an idea very present in mid-nineteenth century. Regarding the specific meaning that the term elementary holds for Foucault, Leme states: That is, instead of imitation and adornment, art unveils, unmasks. But this reduction to its basics, or exposure of the truth, is also the possibility of whatever is repressed in a given culture finding means of expression. Foucault defines the expression of the repressed through “violent reduction of existence to its basics” as Anti-Platonism of modern art. (Leme 2009: 188)

Thus, the art of Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, Édouard Manet, Francis Bacon, Samuel Beckett, or William Burroughs are sites of irruption of what has no possibility of expression. Thus the “Anti-Platonism of modern art,” (Leme 2009: 188) where art appears as the site of irruption of the basic, unveiling existence. There is a kind of permanent Cynicism in every form of modern art in relation to all acquired art. This modern art was anti-cultural, because it opposed the cultural consensus by the courage of art in its barbaric truth, providing, as Leme points out, the “destruction of the aesthetic canon.” (Leme 2009: 189). Modern art is Cynicism of culture turned against itself. Accordingly, Foucault suggests: To that extent, I think we could undertake a history of the Cynic mode, of Cynic practice, of Cynicism as mode of life linked to a manifestation of the truth. We could do this with regard to modern art as with regard to revolutionary movements, and as we have been able to do with regard to Christian spirituality. (Foucault 2011: 189)

But what about Ancient Cynicism? In the first hour of the lecture of 7 March 1984, Foucault addresses this theme. Obviously, there is this widespread stereotype: a man with a messy beard, dirty feet, holding a staff, standing on the corner of the street, in public squares, or at the doors of temples, about to approach people with the truth. As Michel Onfray states, one of the most famous Cynics is Diogenes, who liked to constantly ask himself: “What good can a philosopher be if he spent his entire life in such activity without ever disturbing anyone?” (Onfray 2007, 2008: 130). For Cynics, a good philosopher was capable of

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understanding the necessary indexation of his behavior by nature, of refusing culture, of taking animals as a model and discarding the objurgations of law, morality, good and evil, vice and virtue as promulgated by social order and resumed in chorus by the majority. (Onfray 2008: 133)

Apart from this familiar character, there are other forms of life at that time presented, perceived, characterized, valued and devalued as Cynic ways of life. However, criticism of customs accepted by the majority, is a strong Cynic trait with resonance for daily practices. Onfray describes them as follows: Evil pleasures, those of common man, come from having: getting married, making children, starting a family, seeking money, coveting honors, striving for wealth, aiming at reputations, expecting fame, be with the powerful or celebrities, traveling, doing politics, which are vices, perversions and objectives that rot existence. The search for these false values certainly leads to disenchantment, disillusionment, heartbreak. Fiction, dust in the eyes, jokes, nonsense, and company. (Onfray 2008: 137–138)

However, these sayings have almost always been neglected by philosophical canons. The study of Ancient Cynicism is, therefore, difficult and unique, especially because there are few theoretical works on Cynic tradition. Foucault argues that this rudimentary characteristic must be associated with the popular form of philosophy, which had great social implementation and a narrow and elementary school of thought. Its popular character can be confirmed through the individuals to whom it was addressed—generally uncultivated, and recruitment was also done outside the elites. Some people were forced from childhood to work hard and earn their own living, shoemakers and carpenters, for instance. About this popular recruitment of Cynics, Dio Chrysostom, in the second century AD, distinguishes three categories of philosophers—which Foucault, intending to bring closer to modern lexicon, calls intellectuals, making clear use of Ancient Cynicism to think about the problematization of the figure of the intellectual in Modernity. Accordingly, there are intellectuals who remain silent because they think the crowd is not likely to be convinced and would never be able to understand the arguments; consequently, they withdraw from society. The second-category philosophers are those who deliver their teachings in classrooms and conferences only for a chosen audience, refusing to face the general public and to address the city.

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The third category comprises the Cynics, those who, by laughing at philosophy itself, enchant Foucault himself. Cynics act in their particular places: streets, doors of the temples. Cynic doctrine itself justifies this theoretical poverty and this banality of doctrinal teaching by the relationship they established between teaching and philosophical life. For Cynics, philosophical teaching does not serve the purpose of conveying knowledge; but rather first and foremost it offers intellectual and moral training to the individuals one forms. Foucault argues that this concept of teaching is about arming individuals for life, as opposed to allowing them the possibility of having a set of knowledge: “It was a matter of arming them for life so that they were thus able to confront events.” (Foucault 2011: 204). Foucault also describes the figure of the philosophical hero, quite different from the sage, the saint, or the ascetic of Christianity. The philosophical hero represents an important mode of life at the time in which he was formed, insofar as this figure modeled a certain number of existences, he represented a type of practical philosophical-attitude matrix. Cynicism as the essence of philosophical heroism ran through Antiquity and made it, despite its theoretical poverty, an important event in history, not only of forms of life, but of thought. Philosophical heroism—philosophical life as heroic life—was inscribed and transmitted by this Cynic tradition. It constituted what Foucault dubbed “philosophical legend,” which forged philosophical life itself, as we know and practice it in the West. Foucault further articulates: On the basis of this we can conceive of the idea of a history of philosophy which would be somewhat different from the history traditionally taught today, a history of philosophy which would not be a history of philosophical doctrines, but a history of forms, modes, and styles of life, a history of the philosophical life as a philosophical problem, but also as a mode of being and as a form both of ethics and heroism. (Foucault 2011: 210)

This history of philosophy as ethics and heroism ends when philosophy becomes a teaching profession, in the early nineteenth century, when life, ethics, heroism, and philosophical legend lost raison d’être. But it is when philosophy can only be perceived as a historical set of doctrines that the legend of philosophical life receives its highest and last literary formulation. Such occurs with Goethe’s Faust, which, according to Marshall Berman (1982: 39), was conceived and created between 1770 and 1831, one of the most turbulent and revolutionary periods in world history. It

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was, according to Foucault, the last image and the greatest formulation of the philosophical legend as it consisted of and was consolidated for centuries in the West. Fausto is a character who represents the modern man’s desire for “radically transforming the whole physical and social and moral world he lives in.” (Berman 1982: 40). Berman draws attention to how a specific speech by the modern hero in the work deals with this impetus for transformation. Irritated by the lack of ambition for change experienced in the period, Berman shows how he uses a political language from post-1789 in a context never faced by anyone as a politician. Fausto asks himself: “Why should men let things go on being the way they have always been? Isn’t it about time for mankind to assert itself against nature’s tyrannical arrogance, to confront natural forces in the name of “the free spirit that protects all rights’?” (Berman 1982: 61). When philosophy became a teaching profession, philosophical life disappeared. And, then, Foucault saw this philosophical life restarted in another, in a displaced form, when the figure of the revolutionary appeared: Philosophical heroism, philosophical ethics will no longer find a place in the practice of philosophy as a teaching profession, but in that other, displaced and transformed form of philosophical life in the political field: the revolutionary life. Exit Faust, and enter the revolutionary. (Foucault 2011: 211)

Marshall Berman also develops this relationship between the philosophical hero and revolutionary life Foucault perceived in Faust. According to Berman, Goethe’s work inserts itself in late 1820s, a period in which Germans were enchanted by Saint-Simon’s socialism. Proposals which mostly interested Goethe were ones “for long-range development projects on an enormous scale,” (Berman 1982: 72) very similar to those with which Faust was involved in the story. And it will be such a “Faustian model” of development that it will make room, according to Berman, for conditions of modes of existence of the modern intellectual linked to values of leadership and criticism of customs: It will open up an exciting and ambiguous world-historical role for the modern intellectual—Saint-Simon called this figure “the organizer”; I have favored “the developer”—who can bring material, technical and spiritual resources together, and transform them into new structures of social life. Finally, the Faustian model will present a new mode of authority, authority

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that derives from the leader’s capacity to satisfy modern people’s persistent need for adventurous, open-ended, ever-renewed development. (Berman 1982: 74)

Cynicism and the Specific Intellectual: True Life for the Transformation of This World Foucault was able to identify the Cynic particularity precisely because of his critical view of traditional revolutionary militancy. For him, philosophical life became revolutionary in its blunt, strong and strange positions to universal militant framework, as he discusses in one of his interviews—previously commented (Foucault 1980). In his work Security, Territory, Population, Foucault (2009: 17) speaks about a philosophical practice concerned with politics of truth. His analyzes of power relations were extremely important to diagnose the struggles, clashes and shocks of the circle of philosophy that understands the struggle for the truth. However, conventional politics does not excite him. Disappointed in extreme-leftist movements following May 1968, and having had enough of countless discussions around Marxism, he expresses his desire to “never do politics.” His activism, therefore, occurred on other fronts: “I tried to do things that involved a personal commitment that was physical and real, and which would pose problems in concrete, precise, and definite terms in a given situation.” (Foucault 2009: 18). The analyses presented in this lecture on pastoral power are opposed to old conceptions of ideology, when he highlights strategies and tactics: Rather than say that each class, group, or social force has its ideology that allows it to translate its aspirations into theory, aspirations and ideology from which corresponding institutional reorganizations are deduced, we should say: every transformation that modifies the relations of force between communities or groups, every conflict that confronts them or brings them into competition 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. (Foucault 2009: 283)

In his work “The Subject and Power” Foucault (1982: 780–781), details forms of resistance to power developed since the 1960s, arguing for their importance and particularities: they are “transversal” struggles, as

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they are not limited to any country or specific type of government, despite particular forms of action presented; their objective would be the struggle against power itself and the detailed control it exercises over the lives of individuals; they are “immediate” struggles, given that they criticize nearby authorities, without aiming for a future solution to their problems, like a revolution, which makes them “anarchistic struggles” (Foucault 1982: 780). Foucault allies himself with political mobilizations that are diverse and multiple, without unity or global project, says Didier Eribon (2001: 17). Eribon argues that one might read Foucault’s thought as “radical criticism and demand for a thought that must never stop to question the evidence from the world around us, and the powers or institutions persisting in perpetuating it.” (Eribon 2001: 18). Paul Veyne also reminds us that Foucault argues for an intellectual whose main role is to ruin the evidence and dispel admitted familiarities (Veyne 2001: 55). Furthermore, he reports Foucault’s physical courage in always refusing the role of one who says what must be done, a prophet who tells people what they should do (Veyne 2001: 56). According to Foucault, it has always made more sense to think of points of resistance where possible overtakings are found (Veyne 2001: 56). It is Philippe Artières who exemplifies Foucault’s political action, when speaking of his Prison Information Group (GIP), established in 1971. Artières depicts how it represented “a break in the history of post-war struggles and even those of 1968.” (Artières 2001: 101). What differences did Foucault point out in the 1970s and 1980s concerning notions of intellectual and political militancy? How does the study of Cynicism and the courage to live truly represent the defense of a militancy which escapes the party and bureaucratic frameworks of revolutionary action? In this second chapter, I detail the Cynic militantism. In the third chapter I look back at details of Foucault’s activism in the GIP. While looking back at the Cynics and paying attention to how they had resonance for modern militancy, Foucault connects himself to a mode of militantism concerned with possible changes in this world. He leans on small moments of “heterotopias of deviation.” (Foucault 1986: 25). In the following section, I intend to deal with such discussions, mainly by expressing the differences between forms of Cynic and Christian militantism. To start problematizing the theme, I again quote Passetti, who while writing about diversity of proposals between anarchists and scientific socialists, refers to Foucault’s concept of heterotopia:

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While they are utopian but non believers in the establishment of a new society after taking over the State, as scientific socialists, anarchists, pacifists, or revolutionaries, they build heterotopias, spaces of counter-position within deviations which are unbearable to our society. They are radically different from statist scientific socialists (…). Anarchisms, everyone knows, only remain alive when they do not become doctrine. (Passetti 2002: 142)

Cynicism and True Life In an interview he gave to François Ewald in 1984, Foucault talks about truth-telling: Nothing is more inconsistent than a political regime that is indifferent to the truth; but nothing is more dangerous than a political system that claims to prescribe the truth. The function of “free speech” doesn’t have to take legal form, just as it would be vain to believe that it resides by right in spontaneous exchanges of communication. The task of speaking the truth is an infinite labor: to respect it in its complexity is an obligation that no power can afford to shortchange, unless it would impose the silence of slavery. (Foucault 1996b: 464)

A Cynic is one who takes truth-telling to the extreme. He finds his point of emergence in the very life of the one who must speak the truth, under the manifestation of existence. Thus, Foucault’s intention is to find the elements which allow an understanding of how and why the Cynic’s truth-telling takes the form of life as testimony of truth. The theme of true life has been very important for political ethics since the nineteenth century, as I mentioned earlier. Foucault addresses that in the 1984 course, while prioritizing the cynical way of life: What is the true life? Given that our mental framework, our way of thinking leads us, not without problems, to think of how a statement can be true or false, how a statement can have a truth value, then what meaning can we give to this expression “true life”? When talking about life—and the same could be said with regard to a form of behavior, a feeling, or an attitude— how can we qualify it as true? What is a true feeling? What is true love? What is the true life? This problem of the true life has been absolutely crucial in the history of our philosophical or spiritual thought. I would like to refer to this theme of the true life in a general way, but taking Cynicism as the point of application. (Foucault 2011: 218)

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However, what did Greek philosophy mean by true life? Before that, it is necessary to know the meaning of the very notion of truth. Foucault distinguishes four ways in which something can be said to be true, mainly from Plato’s texts. First, whatever is not hidden, not concealed, and is completely visible is true. But also whatever has nothing added or supplemented to it, nor is mixed with anything other than itself. It is that whose being is not changed by a foreign element, which would thus conceal what it is in reality. Furthermore, whatever is straight is true, no twists nor turns, which conceals the rectitude, deriving from the fact that the truth is not hidden and that it is without multiplicity; it is unalloyed. The fourth meaning is that which exists and remains in identity, immutability, and incorruptibility. This discussion of the notion of truth is also applicable to ways of being, doing, conducting, and acting. Moreover, it applies to logos, understood not as a proposition or statement, but as a way of speaking, in which case, true logos is that of a way of speaking not at all concealed, where neither the false, the opinion nor the appearance mix with the true; it is direct speech, according to the rules and the law; additionally, it is a discourse that remains the same, does not change, does not corrupt, does not distort, nor can it ever be overcome, reversed or refuted. And now it is important to know how Cynicism dealt with this notion of true life. Diogenes’ life, told by Diogenes Laërtius, has a series of important episodes or allusions. One of them is the reflection on the principle of “changing the value of the currency” (Foucault 2011: 239). Among the many meanings, I highlight the one Foucault considered the subtlest. First, it is interesting to notice how close the words currency, custom, rule, law are. Nomisma is currency, nomos is law. Changing the value of the currency is also taking a certain attitude towards what the convention is, the rule, the law. Cynics will take this precept to its limit, living an existence that is contrary to what was traditionally recognized as true life: Cynicism as the grimace of the true life. The Cynics tried to make the traditional philosophical theme of the true life grimace. Instead of seeing Cynicism as a philosophy which broke with the themes of the true life because it was popular, or because it was never the courage of truth accepted by the educated philosophical consensus and community, it should rather be seen as taking these themes to their extreme consequence, as an extrapolation of the themes of the true life rather than as external to them. With

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regard to the question of the true life, what is involved is much more a sort of carnivalesque continuity of the theme, than of a break with the received values of classical philosophy. (Foucault 2011: 227–228)

With cynicism, Foucault perceives a third form of the courage of truth, distinct from political bravery and Socratic irony. The Cynic courage of truth consists in condemning, rejecting, despising, insulting what people admit or intend to admit as principles. It is about facing their wrath by giving them an image of what they admit and value in thought, and reject and despise in their own life. That is the Cynic scandal which Gros asserts must unmask and explode contradictions and lies of social comedies (Gros 2011: 63). The unacceptable, for them, is “the indefinite perpetuation of hypocrisies” (Gros 2011: 64). In the first two cases—political bravery and Socratic irony—the courage of truth consists of risking life for truth-­ telling. In the case of Cynic Scandal, we risk our lives not simply by telling the truth, but by the very way we live. He says: “One exposes one’s life, not through one’s discourses, but through one’s life itself.” (Foucault 2011: 234). Furthermore, the difficult and embarrassing question Cynicism poses to philosophy in Antiquity, Christianity, and Modernity is that of philosophical life. Cynicism is the form of philosophy that raises the question: “What can the form of life be such that it practices truth- telling?” (Foucault 2011: 234). Foucault argues that the West has always admitted that philosophy is not dissociable from a philosophical existence, that the practice of philosophy should always be a type of life exercise. It is in this sense that philosophy is distinguished from science: But while loudly proclaiming that philosophy is fundamentally not just a form of discourse, but also a mode of life, Western philosophy—and such was its history and perhaps its destiny—progressively eliminated, or at least neglected and marginalized the problem of this philosophical life, which to start with, however, it posited as inseparable from philosophical practice. It has increasingly neglected and marginalized the problem of life in its essential connection with the practice of truth-telling. (Foucault 2011: 235)

This forgetfulness and the elimination of the problem of true life in relation to philosophical discourse manifest a number of phenomena. Firstly, the absorption, confiscation of the theme, and the practice of true life by religion was one of the reasons for this disappearance. On the other

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hand, the institutionalization of the practices of true saying in the form of a standardized, regulated, instituted science, which gains space in institutions, was the other major reason why the theme of true life disappeared as a philosophical issue, as a problem of access to the truth: So, there has been confiscation of the problem of the true life in the religious institution, and invalidation of the problem of the true life in the scientific institution. You understand why the question of the true life has continually become worn out, faded, eliminated, and threadbare in Western thought. (Foucault 2011: 235)

Therefore, the question of true life was gradually removed from reflection and philosophical practice, except in some remarkable moments. It appeared with a certain intensity and strength from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century—with Montaigne and the issue of Aufklärung, and with Spinoza, for instance. Thus, if the question of Being was what Western philosophy forgot, and through this forgetfulness made metaphysics possible, the question of philosophical life has not ceased to be neglected either. Neglect of philosophical life enabled the validation of a relation to truth manifested only in the form of scientific knowledge. That is the point where Foucault distinguishes between science and philosophy, while considering the Cynic way of dealing with real life. In such a perspective, Cynicism, as a particular figure in Ancient philosophy, and as a recurring attitude throughout Western history, poses the question of philosophical life in the form of scandal: The fact that Cynicism is always both inside and outside philosophy (the familiarity and strangeness of Cynicism in relation to the philosophy which serves as its context, milieu, vis-à-vis, opponent, and enemy), the Cynic constitution of the philosophical life as scandal, is the historical stamp, the first manifestation, the point of departure for what has been, I think, the great exteriorization of the problem of the philosophical life in relation to philosophy, to philosophical practice, to the practice of philosophical discourse. (Foucault 2011: 237)

Heterotopias and Utopias: Between “Autre Monde” and “Monde Autre” The Cynics’ main objective was to change, disrupt customs, to break rules, habits, conventions, and laws. This precept can also be understood from

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how they characterized theirs as the “life of the Cynic dogs.” (Foucault 2011: 243). Cynics lead a dog’s life for they have no modesty, honor or human respect. It is a life lived in public and in the eyes of all, which only dogs and animals dare to do while ordinary men hide. It is also a life indifferent to everything that might happen and, therefore, not attached to anything, content with what he has. It is a life with no needs other than those which can be satisfied immediately. Moreover, it is a life of discernment, as it is able to distinguish good from bad, master from enemies, and it knows how to assess, test, and distinguish. Finally, it is a dog’s life, because it is always on guard, dedicated to saving and protecting the lives of others. While Cynic life is a continuation and extension of true life, it is the taking to the limits and transformation of true life: “What is the shameless life if not the continuation, the pursuit, but also the scandalous reversal of the unconcealed life?” (Foucault 2011: 243). Bearing the idea of true life as an other life, Foucault reaches a point he considers important in the histories of Cynicism, Philosophy, and Western ethics. To that extent, Cynicism was not just the insolent, crude, and rudimentary way of formulating the question of philosophical life. It rather posed another fundamental problem; as Foucault put it offered philosophical life the vanguard, while raising the question of an other life. He articulated: (…) for life truly to be the life of truth, must it not be an other life, a life which is radically and paradoxically other? It is radically other because it breaks totally and on every point with the traditional forms of existence, with the philosophical existence that philosophers were accustomed to accepting, with their habits and conventions. (…) it could be said that with Platonism, and through Platonism, Greek philosophy since Socrates basically posed the question of the other world (l’autre monde). But, starting with Socrates, or from the Socratic model to which Cynicism referred, it also posed another question. Not the question of the other world, but that of an other life (vie autre). It seems to me that the other world and other life have basically been the two great themes, the two great forms, the great limits within which Western philosophy has constantly developed. (Foucault 2011: 245)

Therefore, Cynics make a difference in this discussion because they pose the problem of an other life, of living differently, and do not aspire to another life, located in the hereafter. They place more emphasis on changes in the way of life in this world and are less concerned with the transition

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to the other world. Hence Foucault’s preference for Cynic militancy and his insistence on creating new modes of existence today, a theme that I will deal with in the next chapter. With Socratic care of the self, Foucault sees two broad lines of development being drawn, along which philosophy will unfold. On the one hand, and as a starting point, there is Alcibiades and self-care, which leads to the question of what is, in truth, in one’s own being, to be taken care of. This dialogue discovers that we should be concerned with the soul, it was a matter of contemplating it. And in the mirror of the contemplated soul, the pure world of truth is discovered, that other world which is of truth and which one must aspire to. Accordingly, Alcibíades founds, based on self-care and contemplation of the soul by itself, the principle of the other world, establishing the origin of Western metaphysics. On the other hand, taking Laches as a starting point, care of the self leads to the question not of knowing what is, in its reality and in its truth, this being I must care for, but of knowing what that care of the self should be and a life that intends to take care of itself. And Foucault notices here not a movement about the other world, but the question of what it must be, in relation to all other forms of life, one which takes care of itself and of what it can actually be. This other line of development provides the philosophical foundation to the question of art and of way of living, as he articulates in the following excerpt: We do not encounter Platonism and the metaphysics of the other world (l’autre monde) on this line. We encounter Cynicism and the theme of an other life (vie autre). These two lines of development—one leading to the other world, and the other to an other life, both starting from the care of self—are clearly divergent, since one give rises to Platonic and Neo-Platonic speculation and Western metaphysics, while the other gives rise to nothing more, in a sense, than Cynic crudeness. But it will revive, as a question which is both central and marginal in relation to philosophical practice, the question of the philosophical and true life as an other life. May not, must not the philosophical life, the true life necessarily be a life which is radically other? (Foucault 2011: 246–247)

Frédéric Gros highlights the distinction between Platonism and Cynicism, which represent two opposite figures of the Other: there is “the other world” of the Platonic metaphysicians, the world of essences and eternal truths, and the “other world,” “in the sense of immanence that can

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be transformed by political energies, the appeal to this transformation is constituted by the scandalous life of the Cynic, who questions, pushes, bothers.” (Gros 2011: 64–65). Foucault’s last question at the end of the excerpt above clearly reveals his preference for the question posed by Cynics on a radically different life. Between political, Socratic, and Cynic parrhēsia, Foucault sympathizes with the latter. While dealing with Cynic militancy, Gros speaks of “resistance as a general form of truth (…) profoundly different” (Gros 2011: 60). Does Foucault then deal with a politics of Cynic truth from the creation of new ways of existence in the present? I shall answer to that question in this chapter and in the third chapter through the themes of “new militancy” and “new arts of living.” Why is Foucault so interested in the Cynics? I argue this admiration is primarily due to the fact that Cynicism is a way of understanding political action that escapes all traps into which revolutionary militancy has already fallen: organizations, hierarchies, lack of commitment to the cause, individualistic interests, the bureaucracies of a party. Commenting on French anarchist Proudhon’s criticism of Marxists in the nineteenth century, Edson Passetti indicates some of these traps: For French anarchist [Proudhon] as democracy is the will of people before the king’s will—as posed by the French Revolution—would a centralist socialist revolution be the other side of progress expressing the transition from the will of the people to the will of the proletariat? With French Revolution, in the name of the people, bourgeois rule took place; with the party-led socialist revolution, in the name of the proletariat, the bureaucratic rule took place. We are facing an idea of linear progress supplanted by historical fact. Socialist revolution would be—and it was—a setback. (Passetti 2002: 149)

However, in proposing the transformation of this world as one of their main missions, the Cynics escape the setbacks that haunted revolution projects. And, as Foucault had already pointed out, one might link them to the anarchist who, as Passetti points out, “while inventing a new society in the present, educates himself, his partners, and children in an anti-­ authoritarian way, suppressing Western material and cultural heritage of centralized authority and its powers based on fear and punishment.” (Passetti 2002: 151). In his lecture “Of Other spaces” (1967), Foucault described utopias as unreal spaces:

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Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case, these utopias essentially are fundamentally unreal spaces. (Foucault 1986: 24)

But there are also, in every culture and in every civilization, real places, functioning as effectively achievable utopias, which Foucault calls “heterotopias” (Foucault 1986: 24). He describes them as: “these different spaces, these other places. As a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live.” (Foucault 1986: 24). It is worth remembering that while comparing utopias as unreal spaces and heterotopias as spaces that are actually achievable, Foucault drastically differentiates himself from Marx and Engels’ criticism of utopian socialisms (Marx and Engels 2002). Such socialisms—for instance, those of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen and others—were referred as utopian projects, for they dealt with the still underdeveloped state of the proletariat at the time. Furthermore, the economic situation they encountered did not “yet offer to them the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.” (Marx and Engels 2002). Because they wanted to put an end to class antagonisms and to stop the progressive historical development of the proletariat by peaceful means and by experiments of social communities, utopians were seen as ones who rejected all political action by creating “fantastic pictures of future society” (Marx and Engels 2002). The following excerpt depicts such criticism: They, therefore, endeavor, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realization of their social Utopias, of founding isolated “phalansteres,” of establishing “Home Colonies,” or setting up a “Little Icaria” (…) and to realize all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois. By degrees, they sink into the category of the reactionary [or] conservative Socialists depicted above, differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science. (Marx and Engels 2002)

While focusing more on heterotopias than on utopias, Foucault is certainly not following such criticism. On the contrary, in the twentieth century he is not asserting his thoughts are more scientific than that of utopians and Marxists. It is not about a competition on true forms of

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militancy; but rather, it is about proposing changes in the way we look at and conceive of changes and revolutions. Accordingly, Passetti articulates such a difference between utopia and heterotopia as formulated by Foucault: “utopia is comfort, a smooth surface. Heterotopia is the stopping of words, the elaboration of lyricism in sentences, it is what makes you tremble” (Passetti 2002: 166). Foucault’s thought leads us to the following questions: What if, like the so-called utopians Marx and Engels, we did not experience daily revolution in every instance of our own life? What if we did not have to wait until the state is abolished? What if the revolution were less about seizing power and more about inventing new modes of life? The third chapter of this book will prioritize such questions. Passetti (2002: 167) understands Anarchism as heterotopia in the sense that it provokes an expansion of life, producing the invention of places, existences and, every day criticizing, as does the specific intellectual, the nearby social instances in the very place where it acts. The management of a new society, therefore, would start from that specific opening of other spaces. In his work on heterotopia, Foucault describes their diverse forms, such as heterotopia of crisis and heterotopia of deviance, for instance. However, Passetti goes further, and articulates that another type of heterotopia should be added to this thought, “that of the aesthetics of existence resulting from the latest research on care of the self, life without being separated from society and the State, and people associate themselves based on the reason of the other” (Passetti 2002: 167). It seems to me that in The Courage of Truth Foucault finds something like a Cynic heterotopia, ready to demonstrate the precise space of social intervention and, through scandal, to denounce the “hypocrisy of conventions, the vanity of riches, the artificiality of social codes, and the mockery of independence” (Gros 2011: 62). I further approach this attitude of revolt while facing social conventions with Foucault’s main gesture of “historical ontology of ourselves,” based on a historical criticism which aims to free and overcome the existing conditions of today. Cynics, Radical Other Life and the Transformation of this World According to Foucault, the Cynics took the theme of true life to its limit, transforming it into a proposal of an other life. The Cynic way of life implies dedication to others marked by three traits. The task of sacrificing one’s own life to take care of others is a given mission because of nature’s

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demand for the care of others. It is a tough mission; however, in self-­ sacrifice the philosopher finds happiness and fulfillment of his own existence. Furthermore, this is not a legislator’s mission much less a government’s mission; it is rather a relationship of care, of a doctor’s. Diogenes is described as someone who goes from house to house, knocking on doors and delivering advice to all those in need so that they can heal themselves. Epictetus said the following words about the cynic and his social life: But marriage, said he, and the begetting of children,—are these to be received by the Cynic among his chief purposes? Give me, said Epictetus, a city of wise men, and perhaps no one will easily come to the Cynic way: for whose sake should he embrace it? However, if we do suppose such a thing, there is nothing to hinder his marrying and begetting children (…) But things being as they now are, as it were in order of battle, must not the Cynic be given wholly and undistracted to the service of God (…) Warden of men, and with so many cares on whom it lies to oversee all men, the married, and parents, and who useth his wife well, and who ill, and who wrangles, and what household is well-ordered, and what not; going about as a physician, and feeling pulses. (Epictetus 2012)

There is physical and social interventionism of the Cynics, which is quite different from Seneca, who through his advice and work was a model to others. Moreover, the Cynic mission takes the form of combat. It is controversial and bellicose, because the Cynics propose harsh medications. They are benefactors, but a benefactor who is fundamental and constantly aggressive. The Cynic is useful to society, not only because of his examples of life or advice given, but also because he bites and attacks. A Cynical combat is not simply the combat through which one ensures to dominate oneself and, therefore, be beneficial to others. A Cynical combat is explicit, voluntary, and constant aggression, targeting humanity in general—humanity in their real life. While their horizon, or objective, is to transform its moral attitude (its ēthos), they also, and because of that, seek to change its habits, conventions, and ways of living. The Cynic is a combatant struggling for others and against enemies through resistance, destitution, and perpetual test of self on self. The Cynic’s struggle is in relation to the whole of humanity, fighting for himself and for others. Cynics also change the theme of militant life, the life of combat and struggle. Foucault warns us that when using the terms “militant life” and

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militancy, clearly there is anachronism. But we have a number of themes, images, notions used by Cynics and that will cover what later becomes, in Western ethics, the theme of militant life. The Cynic practice is unique and is distinguished from all others, for militancy in the philosophical sects of Antiquity was done in closed circuit, always trying to gather as many individuals as possible. But it was in the form of a sect, a small privileged number, that philosophical militancy was exercised. According to Cynics, militancy must be directed to the entire world, as it does not require an education and uses certain violent and drastic means, however, that is not with the purpose of training and converting people. It is a militancy that aims not only to attack this or that addiction, defect, or opinion this or that individual might have; it also intends to attack conventions, laws, institutions which rest on addiction, defects, and opinions human beings share. As Foucault articulates it: It is therefore a militancy which aspires to change the world, (…) we should also recognize a particular form in this militancy: an overt, universal, aggressive militancy; militancy in the world and against the world. This, I think, is the singularity of Cynic sovereignty. (Foucault 2011: 285)

Accordingly, Foucault argues that the history of philosophy, morals, and thought based on modes of life, art of existence, ways of conducting and behaving one self, and modes of being would give great importance to the Cynic movement. He further argues in Cynicism there might be issues important for our culture, among them nineteenth century revolutionary militancy. Not only did the Cynics turn the theme of true life into scandalous and an other life, but they dealt with the theme of an other life not merely as a different and sovereign life, “but as the practice of a combativeness on the horizon of which is an other world (un monde autre).” (Foucault 2011: 287). Foucault states that while we are a long way from most of the themes of true life in Ancient culture, we have what is central for an ethic form characteristic of Christian and modern world: And inasmuch as it was through this movement that the theme of the true life became the principle of an other life and aspiration for another world (un autre monde), Cynicism is the matrix, the embryo anyway of a fundamental ethical experience in the West. (Foucault 2011: 287)

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Epictetus also deals with the hard mission Cynics must fulfill. He describes Cynic sovereignty as a mission. His is a complex work, and Foucault does not take it as a Cynic’s direct expression of life forms, after all, Epictetus offers us a representation by a Stoic, depicting Cynic life from what could most easily be acceptable, recognizable, essential and pure for a Stoic. He also avoids in his representation of Cynical life, the loudest, noisiest, and most scandalous features. And he eliminates a number of things from cynic life while adding properly Stoic elements, coming up with a kind of mixture. It is a Stoic description of Cynicism presented as a militant practice of philosophical life, or even, philosophical life as militancy. He defines this Cynical militancy not as a choice of life, but rather as given mission. Taking Stoicism as a reference, each man living in a city would receive status, wealth and, eventually, tasks and obligations. And the Stoics considered it morally condemnable to get rid of these different tasks, such as getting married, raising children, etc. Contrary to such tasks, philosophy was the choice of a form of existence that enabled the individual to exercise these functions in his own way. Philosophy was a choice in relation to a type of social mission received: Cynic life, [as] Epictetus depicts it, transforms this idea of philosophy as pure choice as opposed to missions and responsibilities one has received. Epictetus does not describe the kunizein (the fact of being a Cynic, of leading the Cynic life) as a choice one might make on one’s own, quite the contrary. Speaking of those people who start to lead the Cynic life (wearing a rough cloak, sleeping on the ground), he says that all these choices of existence, these voluntary, self-imposed practices cannot constitute the true kunizein (the true Cynic practice). (Foucault 2011: 292–293)

Therefore, adopting a Cynic life should not be a choice one makes for oneself based on a decision. It is not to be done independently of the gods and thus no one should be a self-appointed Cynic. Within this general domain of philosophy which rests on choice, there is someone’s philosophical mission. So they are different things: choosing philosophical life over non-philosophical life is a work of choice and freedom. But when one stands as a Cynic and undertakes this task which consists of addressing the human race to fight with and for it, eventually against it for the very change of the world, is a mission only God can assign. One must wait for it. Following that thought, although everyone might be able to choose a philosophical life, only a few are missionaries of philosophy and make it a

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profession, in two senses: philosophy as a profession to which one will dedicate oneself entirely; and also an attitude seen as a manifestation of philosophy in which one believes and which is identified with the philosophical role one is given. It is, therefore, a question of “the Cynic profession.” (Foucault 2011: 295). But there is no precondition for recognizing oneself as being in charge of a philosophical mission, as in Christianity when the signs of grace or divine vocation are received. The only condition is to affect oneself, and that is the important role played by knowledge of oneself, because whoever wants to become a Cynic should not look for external signs. It is not a matter of self-assignment, but rather of testing oneself about oneself, of recognizing what one is and what one is able to do in an attempt to live a Cynic life. It is not the intellectual who is at the forefront and, therefore, he is the only one who can and must guide the workers towards revolution. There is also no external truth of the Party, always saying what must be done. And the revolutionary is not always working on himself because he is constantly in error, because the fear of constantly falling into petty-bourgeois practices that must be denied by the purification of the Party’s correct and scientific truth haunts him daily. I will further discuss self-criticism in the next chapter. In a very different way, this Cynic life concerns the ideal of an undisguised life, so that the individual is always tested, having a particular matter to work on: his own soul. In addition, Cynics must lead a life of poverty and wandering, not tied to anything and not attached to a homeland. It is an independent life with few resources—because it is the life of a Cynic that makes the difference. A Cynic is able to show men that they are entirely at fault, and to search for the nature of good or evil wherever it is not; that is, a Cynic is an enlightener who indicates to men what is favorable and what is hostile to them. Cynics are responsible for humanity. This humble, rude, hard task which requires many renunciations, is both the most beneficial and the highest. It is a double concern, as the Cynic must take care of men, this is his task as a philosopher. He will not stand at the podium to speak about public interests, or about war and peace in the city. But rather, he will address the whole world, being the one who carries out real public activity, while dealing with well-being and misfortunes, freedom and slavery of the entire humankind. Consequently, the Cynic is associated with the “government of the universe,” which is not that of States and cities, but that of the whole world:

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It is a militancy that claims to change the world. (…) a form of open, aggressive militantism; a militantism in the world and against the world. What gives this Cynic activity its historical importance is also the series in which it is inserted: the activism of Christianity, which is at the same time spiritual battle, but battle for the world; other movements which have accompanied Christianity: the mendicant orders, preaching, movements which preceded and followed the Reformation. In all these movements we find the principle of an open militantism. Revolutionary militantism of the nineteenth [century]. The true life as an other life (une vie autre), as a life of combat, for a changed world. (Foucault 2011: 303)

Regarding the change in conduct, the Cynic must show others, by his speech, by criticisms he directs, by his scandals, that people are entirely mistaken concerning the theme of good and evil. Therefore, Cynics are to show men how they are wrong, how they look elsewhere for truth, peace, and happiness. Foucault realizes the importance of this game around the meaning of the “other place.” The principle of Cynicism is to say that true life is an other life, and its function is to show that others are in error. Moreover, the task of Cynic veridication is to remind individuals who do not lead Cynic lives of the form of true existence. It does not refer to another existence, which deceives itself on the way, but rather to that which is faithful to the truth. And this is not about a way of life which would simply be a reform of individuals, but rather of the entire world. The other world that must emerge and be on the horizon is the objective of this cynical practice: This other world should not be understood in the Platonic sense, as a world promised to souls after their deliverance from the body. It is a matter of another state of the world, another “catastasis” of the world, a city of sages in which there would no longer be any need for Cynic militancy. Now the condition for arriving at this true life is that every individual form a vigilant relationship to self. (…) So that the objective of this life of veridiction is the transformation of humankind and of the world. (Foucault 2011: 315)

These are the two fundamental nuclei in the genesis of European philosophical experience: a metaphysical experience of the world, and a historical-­critical experience of life. Foucault notices emerging from cynicism, the matrix of what had been a form of present life throughout the whole Christian and modern tradition, the matrix of life destined to the truth, dedicated at the same time to the actual manifestation of the truth

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(ergō), veridiction, truth-telling, and manifestation of truth in discourse (logō). This practice of truth, which characterizes the Cynics, has the ultimate objective of demonstrating that the world cannot rediscover its truth, transfigure itself and become an other, so that it might rediscover what it is, in its truth, except for a change, a complete alteration in the relationship with the self. And in this return of oneself to oneself, in this care of the self, one finds the principle of moving to that other world Cynicism has promised. Foucault certainly does not see Cynics as a model of militancy to be followed. It is not a question of using them as an example of a program for political action. While talking about the GIP, Artières comments that “inventiveness of GIP profoundly influenced social movements by proposing new militant practices, but also a new relationship between theory and practice.” (Artières 2001: 110). It is not my intention to show how much the study of Cynicism was directly transposed to think of Foucault’s practices in his militancy. The relationship is more in the order of subtlety, inspiration and difference. Cynics are chosen from Stoics, Epicureans, and other Ancient philosophical schools because they have a political commitment aimed at the transformation of the world. It is a group that, as we have seen, Foucault indicates as the one which has strong resonance for the leftist revolutionary movements of the nineteenth century, such as that of Anarchists, for example. Cynicism is also linked to the political militancy beginning in post-World War II and appearing with great impact in “May 68.” Movements of the so-called counterculture are, therefore, an echo of cynicism in the twentieth century—the hippie, gay, and black power movements, as well as the political struggles of the feminists. Such militants, each in their own way, criticized the bureaucratic way of politics in Communist Parties around the world. I argue that Foucault’s own thought and militant practice appear as him reclaiming Cynic teachings. His proposal to transform social relations by creating new modes of existence today might be understood as his appropriation of a Cynic tool, one that sees in the scandal of true life the change in oneself and in others. Foucault’s own specific militancy might have allowed him to modify his gaze, and later focus his lectures on scandalous features of Cynic life as a way of deconstructing traditional militancy in his present, demonstrating how Ancient Cynicism might inspire to create, for our own life, specific changes, such as the movements of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s elaborated.

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Therefore, Cynics are what Foucault considered most interesting in the ancient world regarding political militancy. That is because while making their actions a public scandal, turning the arbitrariness of customs against the very society that created them, he also sees a gesture that refuses to comply with any acquired or accepted morals. And Foucault has something in common with this combativeness. I quote Stéphane Legrand’s work “What is it to be done?” (Legrand 2007: 242–254), whose title refers to Lenin’s great political program (1902) adopted by a large part of the left. Obviously, at that moment, it was not Legrand’s objective to propose a political project grounded on Foucault’s teachings, but rather question how we could use it today. Legrand recalls that, according to Foucault, theoretical work is not supposed to prescribe what should be done; it is supposed to indicate differing factors, effects of acceleration and transformation in history, movements that are about to happen, so work can be done in common toward configurations that are yet needed (Legrand 2007: 252). Furthermore, he points out a difference between Foucault and Marx while focusing on the following statement in The German ideology: Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence. (Legrand 2007: 252)

Legrand argues that Foucault and Marx would agree on the first two points: change as something real and concrete and the abolition of all current social conditions. The difference would be precisely in the last aspect: conditions for these movements to occur, according to Marx, resulted from the existing premises, that is, from the formation of the proletariat as the revolutionary class that would make the revolution, from the revolutionary party’s avant-garde role to make workers aware of the struggle to seize state power. This whole path would be ensured by a supposedly scientific theory that would herald the future. However, Foucault argues that this future is not given by any theoretical assumption. About this revolutionary movement determined a priori, Reis Filho wrote: The revolution was a destination which an ever-optimistic expectation followed. It was natural law. Men’s action and will were secondary, not because

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they were expendable, but because they were determined, as human action for the revolution was inscribed in the very logic of the revolution, as a by-­ product. (Reis Filho 1989: 108)

Legrand articulates that Foucault went in another direction: “The future is built and invented; it is created (…) within groups that strive to live and think differently (…). A theorist does not advocate, he ‘coexperiments’.” (Legrand 2007: 252–253). Therefore the groups themselves are to create revolutionary modes of action. Furthermore, the theorist does not dictate the path that needs to be followed, but assists with tools at the same level as militants in inventing the future. Legrand concludes on the use we can make of Foucault’s work today: “If we read Michel Foucault today, use his methods, and feel inspired by his work, it is with a perspective of redefinition for contemporary struggles—a new communism.” (Legrand 2007: 253). Thus, he refers Foucault’s thought to left-wing political performance, while, as Senellart (2009: 480), points out how he enables the renewal of this left culture. Foucault takes distance mainly from the traps built by party strategies and leadership of the avant-garde intellectual. Therefore, Foucault made a scandalous resumption of Cynicism, without any doctrinal commitments, because the Cynics, as already mentioned, do not advocate theoretical systems, but outrageous ways of life. In the following section, however, I will deal with another appropriation Cynics made possible, one that saw dedication to the entire humankind as a model of renunciation and a way of ascending to the other world: Christian asceticism. Christian Asceticism and the Other World In Cynicism as portrayed by Epictetus, Foucault finds emerging elements which we shall find developed later, particularly in the Christian experience. It depicts the transition from a pagan asceticism to Christian asceticism: from militant, aggressive, harsh Cynicism towards the self and others, to the Christian ascetic. Christian asceticism developed intensely in the third and fourth centuries A.D. It would later be limited, regulated, integrated and almost socialized within cenobitism, which follows a strict religious order. But before taking such form, Foucault found the themes of scandal, indifference to the opinion of others, power structures and their representatives in

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asceticism, such as in Cynicism. The brutality of material existence must be asserted against all humanity’s values. He also perceives some components like bestiality and animality. Thus, practices of ascetic life have elements in continuity with Cynic asceticism, in conformity at times, and in displacement as well. However, regarding Cynic tradition, Christian asceticism brought many different elements. Firstly, Christian asceticism is related to the “other world,” not to a “world which is other.” Such a life does not aim to simply transform this world, but mainly to give individuals access to an other world. The philosophical importance of Christianity makes the following connection: (…) one of the master strokes of Christianity, its philosophical significance, consists in it having linked together the theme of an other life (une vie autre) as true life and the idea of access to the other world (l’autre monde) as access to the truth. [On the one hand], a true life, which is an other life in this world, [on the other] access to the other world as access to the truth and to that which, consequently, founds the truth of that true life which one leads in this world here: it seems to me that this structure is the combination, the meeting point, the junction between an originally Cynic asceticism and an originally Platonic metaphysics. This is very schematic, but it seems to me that there is in this one of the first major differences between Christian and Cynic asceticism. Through historical processes which would obviously need to be examined more closely, Christian asceticism managed to join Platonic metaphysics to that vision, that historical-critical experience of the world. (Foucault 2011: 319)

The second major difference is of a different order. It is the importance given in Christianity to a specific precept, which Foucault finds only in Christianity—it is not present in Cynicism or Platonism. It is the principle of obedience to the other in this world, in order to have access to true life. There will only be true life through obedience to the other and access to the other world. That is the link between Platonic element and a Judeo-­ Christian one that will bring the two great inflections to Cynic asceticism and provoke the change into Christian form. Foucault does not characterize the difference between paganism and Christianity as a difference between a Christian ascetic morality and a non-ascetic one, that of antiquity. He argues asceticism was a pagan invention of ancient Greco-Roman culture:

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The difference between Christian asceticism and other forms of asceticism which may have prepared the way for and preceded it should be situated in this double relation: the relation to the other world to which one will have access thanks to this asceticism, and the principle of obedience to the other (obedience to the other in this world, obedience to the other which is at the same time obedience to God and to those who represent him). Thus we see the emergence of a new style of relation to self, a new type of power relations, and a different regime of truth. (Foucault 2011: 320–321)

Foucault, therefore, understands Christianity as a way of acting which produces subjection of an individual and the distrust of himself, which produces knowledge about himself. It was, therefore, a type of subjectivity, self-awareness always concerned with one’s own mistakes, one’s own temptations (Foucault 1994f: 566). Therefore, demonstrating a new style of relationship with the self, a new type of power relation and another regime of truth. Foucault strongly criticizes the principles of relationship with the other world and obedience to the other, mainly because they served as a basis for the militant political practice of the European left. This return to cynicism by Foucault has a double intention: to show how militancy was already based on autonomous principles and, at the same time, how it was inspired by another appropriation of Cynics: that of Christian asceticism. As for autonomous militancy, Foucault often refers anarchists as exemple. Very different from Christian asceticism, which strongly leans on obedience to the superior, anarchists, according to Passetti, do not consider a superior command and are always ready to create customs not based on hierarchies: While Anarchists convulse through social movements, they build their free relationships in associations within the very unequal society (…). They agree that it is not a revolution that will institutes a new society, and workers are not seen in need of a superior command to guide their consciousness. Anarchists create anti-hierarchical customs based on the abolition of punishment and fear. (Passetti 2002: 141–142)

Returning to the appropriation of the courage of truth by Christianity, Gregory of Nissa (4th century AD) 174 reconstructs the themes of cynicism, mainly in relation to the primitive life which is, at the same time, a true life to which one must return, and a life of stripping and nudity. parrhēsia now appears as the relationship that man establishes with God. The term comes up with the positive value of the relationship with others,

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insofar as we are able to manifest the courage of truth in a relationship of confidence of man in relation to God, who would remember this first encounter between man and his creator. That is the positive nucleus of parrhēsia. It is only to the extent that in the life of Christianity, in Christian practice and institutions, will the principle of obedience in relation to oneself and the truth be marked that the negative value of parrhēsia appears. Man’s relationship of trust in relation to God will be obscured, and the theme of parrhēsia linked to trust will be replaced by the principle of obedience, according to which the Christian must believe in God, must recognize the need to submit to His will and to the will of those who represent him: We will see the development of the theme of mistrust of oneself, as well as the rule of silence. As a result of this, parrhe-sia, [as] that openness of heart, that relationship of confidence which brought man and God face-to-face, closest to each other, is increasingly in danger of appearing as a sort of arrogance and presumption. (Foucault 2011: 333)

From the fourth century AD, and more clearly in the fifth and sixth centuries, authority structures by which individual asceticism function are developed, inserting themselves within the institutional structures in which priests, pastors and bishops are entrusted with the conduct of souls. Accordingly, there is pastoral power, which Foucault studied in Security, Territory, Population. The shepherd-flock relationship is essentially religious and the shepherd’s power is exercised over the flock in displacement; he is also beneficial, since his main objective is the flock’s salvation. Furthermore, Pastoral power values care, and is initially manifested in zeal, dedication, infinite application. The pastor is one who takes care, meaning he monitors every nefarious thing that might happen. All his concern is focused on others, never on himself. In other words, daily life must be effectively assumed and observed, so that the shepherd must build, based on the daily life of the sheep he watches, a perpetual knowledge of people’s behavior and conduct. Pastoral power implies a mode of individualization not involving affirmation of the self, but rather its destruction (Foucault 2009: 236). Hence the difference when compared to ancient culture, since there has never been such a concept among the Greeks of gods leading men, as a shepherd leads his flock. The Greek god founds the city and gives advice about it, but he never leads men of the city as a shepherd would lead his sheep.

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Concomitantly, the theme of the relationship with God only mediated by obedience is developed, defending the idea that the individual is no longer able to find this relationship with God for himself. And he is no longer able to obtain it by himself, by the very movement of his soul, by the opening of his heart towards God. A mediator is needed to compose these structures of authority, since he himself must be suspicious: He must not believe, imagine, or be so arrogant as to think that he can secure his own salvation and find the way of opening to God by himself. He must be the object of his mistrust. He must be the object of an attentive, scrupulous, and suspicious vigilance. By himself and in himself he can find nothing but evil, and only by renunciation of self and putting this general principle of obedience into practice will man be able to secure his salvation. (Foucault 2011: 334)

Foucault frequently highlights traditional authority structures as negative. The appearance of such instances allows the institutionalization of domination, revealing all its pitfalls. Obviously, in his total refusal of institutions lies Foucault’s acidic and radical anarchism. While an intermediary communicates with God, the conduct of souls no longer concerns the individual himself, but rather obedience to the other. At this point I see the great danger an intellectual might become while attached to this role as mediator, whether an individual’s or collectivity’s mediator. Therefore, Foucault demonstrates how an intellectual might condone with obedience, and not freedom. Now, the case of political parties is directly related to these issues, as I mentioned earlier. Therefore, the problem of parrhēsia concerns the trust of oneself that ignores respect due to others in its essential manifestation in obedience: “Where there is obedience there cannot be parrhēsia. (…) the problem of obedience is at the heart of this reversal of the values of parrhēsia.” (Foucault 2011: 336). With the development of ascetic Christianity, the truth of oneself or the problem of the relationship between knowledge of the truth and the truth of oneself will no longer be able to establish the form, in full and whole, of an other existence all together existence of truth and existence capable of knowing the truth of the self. From that moment on, the knowledge of oneself (knowledge in relation to oneself, knowledge about oneself) will be one of the fundamental conditions, and even a precondition, for the purification of the soul and, consequently, for the moment when we can finally expect a trusting relationship with God. We will only expect true

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life with the precondition of having practiced deciphering the truth of the self, drastically moving away from the Cynic conception of true life: Only by deciphering the truth of self in this world, deciphering oneself with mistrust of oneself and the world, and in fear and trembling before God, will enable us to have access to the true life. It was by this reversal, which put the truth of life before the true life that Christian asceticism fundamentally modified an ancient asceticism which always aspired to lead both the true life and the life of truth at the same time, and which, in Cynicism at least, affirmed the possibility of leading this true life of truth. (Foucault 2011: 338)

As Foucault explains, the truth of life is determined before the real life. And it was in this inversion that Christian asceticism fundamentally changed ancient asceticism which aspired to lead at the same time true life and the life of truth. Let us keep in mind this transformation also allowed for a specific way of thinking about militancy, more concerned about the other world, and less about the ways of living that transfigure conventions of this world in which we live. This is the direction Foucault intends to follow in his militancy, in a Cynic manner, which affirmed the possibility of leading the true life to the truth. Foucault believed that social and local actions could achieve greater effects than global projects, which ended up falling into the same norms inspired by nineteenth century bourgeois society (Foucault 1996a). This was the case with the Soviet Union, which did not even abandon a traditional family morality. Scientific socialism, in the nineteenth century, detached itself from utopias and dreams (Foucault 1996a). Real socialism, in the twentieth century, also fabricated its absences, mainly from deviant experiences, those which proposed a different relationship with drugs, sex, community life, and had the purpose to create another type of individuality, such as the feminist, gay, and hippie movements in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Foucault invests in a struggle which questions problems regarding gestures, practices and well defined situations, focusing on everyday life itself. He said: “I would like that, as painting, music, and theater, theories and historical knowledge went beyond traditional forms and deeply impregnated everyday life” (Foucault 1994g: 84). Foucault argues that all these bureaucracies and nationalizations of the Revolutions experienced in the twentieth century—Stalinism being its great representative—drove the masses to no longer desire revolution, as happened in the nineteenth century. Hence intellectual’s function would

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be “to restore to the revolution all its nineteenth-century charm. And for that purpose, it would be necessary to invent new ways of knowing, new ways of pleasure and sexual life.” (Foucault 1994g: 86). This gesture is fundamental for Foucault, especially after the 1960s, when intellectuals discovered that many things which were treated as minors and marginals became central in the political domain, since “political power does not consist only of the great state institutional forms we call State apparatus” (Foucault 1994h: 473). According to Foucault, power operates in multiple places: family, sex life, how we treat the mad, exclusion of homosexuals, relations between men and women as political relations. The transformation of society, therefore, involves changing all of these small relationships. Once again, the USSR as an example haunts him, for there relations of production changed with the revolution, but all other relations remained the same as those in Western countries. These struggles against power in daily life refuse to seize power, and that is their difference when compared to revolutionaries movements, especially those already bureaucratized by party and institutional experiences. Before the 1950s and 1960s, intellectuals played the role of the universal conscience. From that period on, intellectuals became useful in their specialization, disseminating information which so far remained confidential as expert knowledge (Foucault 1994i: 531). That is when the “specific intellectual” appears, because “it is no longer necessary to be a universal philosopher (…). Whether a lawyer or a psychiatrist, everyone can resist the use of power directly linked to specific knowledge and help prevent it from being exercised.” (Foucault 1994i: 531). I now arrive at an extremely relevant discussion which Foucault addressed in an interview given in Japan, in 1978, entitled: “Methodology for the knowledge of the world: How to get rid of Marxism” (Foucault 1994a: 595–618). Foucault is concerned with a “new political imagination,” since he believes the characteristic of his generation is “the lack of political imagination” (Foucault 1994a: 599). The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries dreamed of the future of human society, and utopians produced abundant products for sociopolitical imagination. But Foucault considers its contemporaneity to be quite uncreative. And it is exactly when he asks himself about the poverty of imagination at political level that Marxism plays an important role. Therefore, the theme so recurrent in Foucault’s time, “how to get rid of Marxism,” serves as a guiding thread; and he states: “Marxism has contributed and always contributes to

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the impoverishment of political imagination” (Foucault 1994a: 599). Because, as Bachelard defended: “fixed and achieved image cut the wings of the imagination.” (Bachelard 1988). Marxism crystallized the image of the revolution. We should then pay attention to Bachelard’s advice: More generally, it is necessary to list every desire to abandon what is seen and what is said in favor of what is imagined. Thus, we will have the opportunity to restore the role of seduction to the imagination. Through imagination we abandon the ordinary course of things. Perceiving and imagining are as antithetical as presence and absence. To imagine is to be absent, to throw yourself into a new life. (Bachelard 1988)

The habit of thinking about transformation through the leadership of the intellectual and the party, and also by taking power, ended up preventing creative imagination from considering other forms of political activism. Foucault’s generation did not believe that the revolution should be expected as a transcendental idea that would transport us to a new world, clinging to distant, unreal and almost never achievable experiences. Cultivating beautiful future dreams is important, but working daily for a different reality implies dealing with the ambivalent idea of reality being dream power and dream being reality. To struggle and experience “slight hopes,” as Bachelard names it, so that imagination is “the very experience of openness, the very experience of novelty.” (Bachelard 1988). Foucault, however, distinguishes Marxism from Marx. His problem is with the former, which has become mode of power in modern society. It emerged within a rational thought, naming itself science of sciences and therefore ended up connecting itself with a whole series of coercive propositions. And it is precisely the character of prophecy that made it possible to exercise these forces. Furthermore, Marxism has always worked through a political party and has never been able to free itself from dependence on the state apparatus. Foucault argues that it forms a set of power relations, while describing itself as scientific discourse, prophecy, and State philosophy or class ideology. Therefore, Foucault articulates that it is necessary to end this dynamics of power relations linked to Marxism and its functions. Obviously, he recognizes the great importance of Marx; however, the use Marxism made of his thought ended up electing him decisive keeper of the truth. Foucault, therefore, criticizes the link between the effects of truth and the state philosophy on which Marxism is based. For him, one should not look for Marx’s authenticity, but rather use him in what he

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serves us, desecrate him, divert him, until one can move on and invent new ways of dreaming politically. Accordingly, it is essential to notice Foucault’s statement: “We must think that what exists is far from filling all possible spaces” (Foucault 1997: 140). What resonates in this phrase is his insistence on the invention of new forms of political militancy and arts of living.

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CHAPTER 4

For a New Political Militancy: The Experience of GIP and the Arts of Living

Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action. —Michel Foucault (1983). Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life. In: Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix (Eds.). Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: UMP, xi–xiv

I start from the importance of thinking about the practice of the intellectual today. Among a politician in the general Assembly, a lawyer, or a lawyer in the courtroom, a leader at the head of a political party or an organization, a militant, a teacher in a classroom, a writer, or a philosopher, writing a book, how to tell the flatterer from the rhetoric of the parrhesiast committed to truth, ethics, and the transformation of their own ways of life, and of individuals whom they talk to? How can we react to an intellectual model that is concerned with saving everyone, but at the same time is bound up in such old and archaic ways of existence? How can you no longer resort to your role as a representative of a group? What is the difference that Foucault produces in the militant practice of the intellectual? Foucault’s militancy in prisons with the GIP (Prison Information Group) can help us understand how Foucault himself dealt with the

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changes in intellectual practice, especially between the post-May 68 and the early 1980s. It was a way of acting at a time when he witnessed the failure of the leftist movements and the totalizing political models. In this sense, how did Foucault stress the relationship between thought and experience, escaping from the way the traditional left party supporter thought of the link between theory and practice? How does his reflection on the aesthetics of the existence of Antiquity dialogues with the liberation and counterculture movements of the 1970s and 1980s, such as the gay movement, feminism and many others? Foucault bets on the strength of the following attitude: to transform the present. To do this, we must reject the kind of individuality imposed on individuals by modern power relations and create new ways of living. In order to begin to understand these questions, I would like to highlight the differences that Foucault himself drew up between, on the one hand, the parrhesiast and, on the other, the rhetorician, the adulator, the wise, the technician and the Prophet. It will also be essential to look at the way Foucault establishes the link between philosophy, politics and the courage of truth.

The Intellectual and the Parrhesiastic Attitude Foucault deals with the specificity of parrhesiastic discourse in many moments of his last two courses at the Collège de France, for example in his reading of Parallel Lives, by Plutarch. This is a text that lies between the classical era and the Christian spirituality of the fourth and fifth centuries AD. Foucault is interested in the part in which Plutarch speaks of the life of Dion, a disciple of Plato who will represent his effective relationship with political life and the tyranny of Denis. In the text, Plutarch recalls that Dion has beautiful qualities: the greatness of the soul, the courage, the ability to learn. But in the course of Denis’ tyranny, Dion was young and gradually became accustomed to fear, servitude and pleasures. In this way, his soul was filled with false opinions, until he learned about Plato’s school and listened to his teachings, when his good and true nature reappears. He also wants Denis to follow Plato’s lessons, and in a dialogue between the three, the main theme is virtue, but above all courage and its different elements. Denis is not happy with Plato’s remarks and then asks: Dionysius asked Plato: ‘What have you come to Sicily for?’ And Plato replied: ‘I am looking for a good man.’ The tyrant replied: ‘By the gods, it is clear that you have not yet found one!’ (Foucault 2008: 49).

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It is at this moment, in the face of Denis’ fury when he comes to the conclusion that he is not a good man—because he punishes Plato with exile, and even intends to sell him as a slave—that Dion tells Denis about his tyranny, expressing an exemplary scene of parrhēsia: when a man stands before the tyrant, telling him the truth. Plato also uses parrhēsia: in giving his classical lesson about virtue, about what courage, justice, and the relationship between justice and happiness is, he tells the truth—not only in his class, but also in the reply to Denis. The word parrhēsia, however, is not used in relation to Plato, even if he participates in a matrix scene of its notion. It is only when Dion, Plato’s disciple, appears that the word parrhēsia is effectively used. For Dion is not in the position of the teacher who teaches, but of the one who is close to the tyrant and tells him the truth and even, eventually, replicates it when the tyrant says false things. Thus, Dion is the parrhesiast. Parrhēsia, Risk and Courage It is from this episode that Foucault perceives how parrhēsia is not defined by the content of truth, but by the manner of saying it. How to analyze the different possible ways of telling the truth? They can take many forms, and can participate in a strategy of demonstration, persuasion, teaching or discussion. Foucault asks: “Does parrhēsia belong to one of these strategies? Is it a way of demonstrating, persuading, teaching, or debating?” (Foucault 2008: 52). Parrhēsia is not a way of demonstrating. Dion himself makes no demonstration, and is content only to give warnings, to utter aphorisms, without any demonstrative development. Parrhēsia may use elements of demonstration, but it is not the demonstration nor the rational structure of speech that will define it. About the art of persuading, on the one hand, parrhēsia as a technique, procedure and way of saying things must use the resources of rhetoric. On the other hand, in certain rhetorical treaties, it will have a very paradoxical place. For Quintilian, it is step zero of rhetoric. Among them, therefore, there is a whole set of interferences, proximities, imbrications. But parrhēsia should not be defined as the relevant element of rhetoric. This is because, first of all, it is defined by the truth-telling; while rhetoric is an art or technique of having the elements of speech available to persuade people. Moreover, it should resort to rhetoric, its procedures, but it is not its greater goal or its main purpose. Plato, when he replies that he came to

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Sicily to seek a good man, expresses something on the order of challenge, insult, criticism, and not persuasion towards the tyrant. Parrhēsia is therefore an opinion, not an enterprise to persuade. It is also not a way of teaching or a pedagogy. Parrhēsia always addresses itself to someone, but not to teach them. The parrhesiast hurls truth in the face of the one whom they talk to, without finding their own way of teaching; it ranges from the known to the unknown, from the simple to the complex, from the single element to the set. There is something in parrhēsia that is contrary, at least in certain procedures, to pedagogy. It is also not Socratic irony or Socratic-platonic irony. It consists of a game in which the master pretends not to know and leads the student to formulate what he did not know. In parrhēsia, as if it functioned as a true anti-irony, he who speaks the truth rubs it in the face of his interlocutor, a truth so violent, abrupt, that the other can only shut up, or even move on to another record. Far from being the one to whom we address who discovers by themselves, by irony, the truth that they did not know, parrhēsia is a truth that they cannot accept, that they cannot reject, and that leads them to injustice, to a lack of measure, to madness, to blindness. Then, wouldn’t it be a way to face an opponent? An agonistic structure in which the two characters fight around the truth? Although we are very close to the value of parrhēsia when we speak of its agonistic structure, it is not an art of discussion, as the latter makes triumphant what we believe to be true. It is not a victory of knowledge, of speech, because it always runs the risk of banishment, exile or even a death sentence. We are reminded that after Plato’s attitude towards Denis, he will not only exile him, but also sell him as a slave. For Foucault, we must analyze parrhēsia on the speaker’s side or, even, on the side of the risk that telling the truth opens for him. This fact has costly consequences, especially from the effect it produces on the interlocutor. To speak in the presence of Denis, the tyrant, is to open a space of risk, of danger, where the existence of the announcer will be put at risk. Parrhēsia is situated in what connects the speaker to the fact of what he says, to the truth, and to the consequences that follow, because there is a certain price to pay for the word. The history of Plutarch, in this way, is exemplary for parrhēsia: the point where the subjects voluntarily undertake truth-telling, and they explicitly accept what it could cause for their own existence: the parrhesiasts are those who, at the end of the day, agree to die because they spoke the truth. Or more precisely, the parrhesiasts are those who undertake truth telling at an indeterminate price, which may go as far as their own death (Foucault 2008: 56).

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The second characterization of parrhēsia that I select is when Foucault speaks of the image of bad parrhēsia, which arises from the death of Pericles in 429 BC. At that moment, the differences from the discourse of adulterers and demagogues become fundamental. Athens now appears as a city in which the game of democracy and parrhēsia is no longer convenient for the survival of the Democratic political system. This picture of the poor adjustment between democracy and truth telling can be found in many texts. Foucault highlights Isocrates’ Speech (355 BC). If democracy and parrhēsia no longer function as a pair, it is not simply because truth telling has been refused, but because its imitation has appeared, its false side. This is the speech of the adulterer and the demagogue. This bad parrhesiast no longer speaks what his opinion represents, either because he thinks it is true, or because he has a certain intelligence so that his opinion effectively corresponds to the truth and what is best for the city. Now, what the parrhesiast says represents the current opinion, that of the majority. That is, rather than the true discourse being characterized by its difference, their speech is in conformity with anyone who speaks or thinks. The third feature shows how this false parrhēsia does not have as its main characteristic the singular courage of the one who is able to turn against the people and give them the answers. In the place of courage, we find individuals who are concerned to ensure their own safety and their own success through the pleasure they produce in the auditors, flattering their feelings and opinions. Parrhēsia, Philosophy and Politics The third definition of parrhēsia, which I stress, begins to appear in the first hour of the “Class of February 16, 1983”. Foucault discusses the relationship between philosophy and parrhēsia, wondering what the task of philosophy would be in his relationship with politics. Plato’s text quoted on this occasion is Alcibiades. Within it, the philosopher’s intervention on the political scene appears as one of the main themes. Despite the different contexts, Foucault sees similarities between the scene of Socrates in Alcibiades and that of Plato himself before Denis, the tyrannical. Socrates does not have to be an advisor to a tyrant, a despot or a monarch, but to a young man who wants to be part of the first tier of citizens. Plato, on the other hand, must be an advisor to someone who is the first, by statute and by inheritance, and by the political structure itself. But in both cases, it is a matter of addressing someone, of speaking and trying

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to persuade them of the truth, and of governing their souls, that of those who have to rule others. Therefore, there is an analogy in the situation, despite the difference in the political context. But there are also a number of differences between the role of Socrates in Alcibiades and that of Plato in relation to Denis, drawing a cleavage in platonic philosophy. Anyway, Foucault perceives one of the themes that permeates the two occasions. The philosopher, in Plato’s case, poses a problem about what the reality of philosophy is. This problem does not consist in asking what is real to philosophy; it also does not mean asking what is the reality with which philosophy relates, and with which it must confront itself; and yet it does not intend to measure it in order to know whether or not it is the truth. Foucault asks: “What is the reality that enables one to say whether what philosophy says is true or untrue? It is: What is the reality of this philosophical truth-telling, what makes it more than just a futile discourse that tells the truth or says something untrue?” (Foucault 2008: 228). The answer is interesting: the reality of philosophy, the proof that philosophical veridiction manifests itself as reality is that it has the courage to address those who have the power. It is not to tell the truth about politics, nor to show how the Constitution or government of cities should be that makes philosophical discourse confront reality. Philosophy, for Plato, manifests its reality from the moment it enters the political field in different ways, such as giving advice to the Prince, persuading a crowd, etc. And that is exactly what will distinguish it from rhetoric. The latter is solely the instrument by which the one who wants to exercise power repeats what the crowd wants to hear, or what the Chiefs or Prince desire. Rhetoric is a means of persuading people of what they already believe. Philosophy, on the other hand, has other guidelines: “The test of philosophy, on the contrary, the test of philosophy’s reality, is not its political effectiveness; it is the fact that it enters the political field in its specific difference and has its own particular game in relation to politics.” (Foucault 2008: 229). Foucault sees this relationship between philosophy and politics as fundamental to the history of philosophical discourse. For a long time, people thought that the reality of philosophy meant being able to tell the truth, especially about science. For a long time, we have believed that in essence, the reality of philosophy is the power to tell the truth, the truth of the truth. But in Plato’s text, there is another way of defining what the reality of philosophy can be, for “philosophy is the activity which consists in speaking the truth, in practicing veridiction in relation to power.” (Foucault 2008: 230). In the face of this, Foucault highlights two major questions: the first question under what conditions philosophical discourse can be sure that it

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will not be only logos, but also ergon in the field of politics. The second series of discussions asks what philosophy has to say about its function. On the first, the condition for philosophy to find its reality lies in the specificity of those to whom it is addressed. In order for it not to be simply a speech, but also a reality, it should not be addressed to everyone and to anyone, but only to those who want to listen: Being listened to and meeting with the listener’s willingness to follow the advice given is the first condition of the exercise of philosophical discourse as task, work, ergon, reality. (Foucault 2008: 231)

Yet Philosophy can never concern itself only with its own self, cannot propose itself as violence, appear as a table of laws or write and circulate as something that would fall into all or any hands. The reality of philosophy is that it addresses the philosophical will. And that is where it differs from rhetoric, for it finds its effectiveness regardless of the will of those who listen. Philosophy is therefore exactly the opposite of rhetoric. But following this question “(…) how can you recognize those who will listen to you? How is it that the philosopher will be able to accept the test of reality on the basis of the certainty that he will be listened to?” (Foucault 2008: 236). Plato does not use the solution given by Socrates to answer this question. He resorts to a perception, an intuition that makes him guess through the beauty of a boy what the quality of his soul was. In Plato, it is a clear method that should be absolutely decisive and give undoubted results. And one of the most striking things is the need to show tyrants or those who believe they know what philosophizing is. The reality of philosophy is a set of practices represented as a road to be travelled, and the one who wants to test it and put it to the test should recognize it, as well as know the way and show it as the only one possible. This philosophical choice is one of the first conditions. From there, the candidate, the one who is tested, must demonstrate his strength and devote himself promptly to a guide that shows him the way, who takes him by the hand and makes him walk the road. The candidate must not abandon the leadership of the one who guides him, so that he can subsequently lead himself without his instructor. Foucault considers this text important because it indicates that the choice of philosophy must be made once and for all and maintained until the end. On the other hand, this philosophical choice is not incompatible

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with common actions, because it consists in what, even in everyday life and in our everyday actions, we use philosophy. We are philosophers precisely in these common actions. Beyond the circle of listening, then, there is that of the self, for the reality of philosophy is found and effected in the very practice of philosophy. The reality of philosophy is not its practice as knowledge, as speech, as dialogue, but the act of philosophizing in its practices, in the plural, in its exercises. And who are these exercises about? The subject himself: “Philosophy finds its reality in the practice of philosophy understood as the set of practices through which the subject has a relationship to itself, elaborates itself, and works on itself.” (Foucault 2008: 242). The relation of philosophy to politics, then, does not consist in giving the laws to men and telling them what the ideal city they should live in, for the reality of philosophy will be in the practices we exercise of ourselves over ourselves. It is then that philosophy escapes the danger of being just logos, since it is how “setting out the problem of the government of self and the government of others that philosophy, here, in this text, formulates its ergon, at once its task and its reality.” (Foucault 2008: 255). Thus, Parrhēsia is the activity that Plato recognizes and claims to be fundamental in his activity as advisor. He is the one who uses parrhēsia to persuade people by revealing the truth from his own speech, from his own opinion. It is from political reality that philosophical discourse takes away the assurance that it is not simply logos, but that it is also action. Foucault concludes: “We have here a set of elements which match up with what I tried to tell you concerning the parrhesiast’s function.” (Foucault 2008: 279). These pieces of advice are important because they show the point at which philosophy and Politics meet, that is, the point at which politics can serve as proof of reality for philosophy. The first feature of this relationship, discussed by Plato, is that philosophy should not be understood for its casual ability to tell the truth about the best ways to exercise the power, as it is politics itself which serves this function: “It is not for philosophy to tell power what to do, but it has to exist as truth-telling in a certain relation to political action” (Foucault 2008: 286). This relation between the true philosophical saying and political practice can take different forms. In Plato’s own time, and even among Socrates’ successors, Foucault finds other ways of defining the relationship of politics to philosophical discourse. This is the case on the most opposite side of Platonism that he can imagine: the cynics. Among them, this relationship is completely

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different, because it is about the world of exteriority, of confrontation, of scorn, of mockery, where it takes place. The parrhēsia of cynics consists in showing itself in its natural nudity, outside all the conventions and all the artificial laws imposed by the city. It is in its way of life, and it is also manifested in its discourse of insult and denunciation towards power. On the contrary, with Plato, the relationship of true philosophical expression to political action takes the form of intersection, pedagogy and identification of the subject who philosophises and the subject who exercises power. This passage is fundamental in order to remember Foucault’s specificity in political practice. His philosophy never says what the real political practice to be implemented is, let alone pronounce the real political form to be defended, but acts as a voice reflecting on politics and its forms of action: (…) philosophical discourse in its truth, in the game it necessarily plays with politics in order to find its truth, does not have to plan what political action should be. It does not tell the truth of political action, it does not tell the truth for political action, it tells the truth in relation to political action, in relation to the practice of politics, in relation to the political personage. And this is what I call a recurrent, permanent, and fundamental feature of the relationship of philosophy to politics. (Foucault 2008: 288)

Foucault says the same about the Great forms of true philosophical expression in relation to politics in modern or contemporary times. The philosophical theory of sovereignty, the philosophy of fundamental rights, the philosophy considered as social criticism do not say how to govern, what decisions to take, or what laws to adopt. It is therefore also indispensable for a philosophy to prove its reality, to show that it is able to tell the truth in relation to political action. True expression, then, does not coincide with what can and must be political rationality. But this highly necessary and fundamental relationship, which is undoubtedly a constituent of philosophy and politics in the West, is an absolutely unique phenomenon to our culture. This correlation should never be conceived as an acquired coincidence. In this way, certain misconceptions concerning this relationship should be avoided, because if philosophy and politics must relate, they must never coincide. And, for Plato, philosophy should never tell politicians what to do, but exist, before politics, as a philosophical discourse or veridiction. The cynics shifted the relationship between true philosophical expression and the exercise of political power to the public square. They are the

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men of the street, of opinion as well. For Plato, the place of this relationship between philosophy and politics is not in the public square, but in the soul of the Prince. For Foucault, these two models are fundamental in the history of political thought and the relations between politics and philosophy in the West: It seems to me that the Cynicism-Platonism polarity very quickly became an important, perceptible, explicit, and also durable feature of these relations (…) It indicates the two poles in terms of which, and very quickly, from the fourth century, the problem of the meeting point between philosophical truth-telling and political practice found two points of insertion: the public arena or the Prince’s soul. And we will find these two polarities throughout the history of Western thought. (Foucault 2008: 292)

The general function of philosophy, for all ancient philosophy, is the possibility of courageously and freely expressing its truth. And the philosophical life, the existence we choose, the choices we make, the things we renounce, the things we accept, the way we dress, talk, all of this must be the manifestation of that truth. Let us remember that, in Antiquity, philosophy was a free questioning of men’s conduct by a truth-saying that accepted to take the risk of their own danger. The intellectual Foucault is certainly linked to the cynical tradition, which relates philosophy and political practice to the scandal in the public square. Couldn’t his own enchantment with the cynics be regarded as a scandalous resumption of cynicism in the history of philosophy? His specific act of practicing philosophy clearly shows his defense of a form of political militancy that, rather than giving advice to a Prince, attacks the Kings canonized by revolutionary discourse and acts, for example, at the prison door distributing questionnaires, as he did in his direct political action with the GIP. The Parrhesiastic Attitude The fourth elaboration of the concept of parrhēsia is made in The Courage of Truth, when Foucault (2011: 15–22) differentiates it from three other ways of truth-telling in antiquity. The first is the true expression of the prophecy. Parrhēsia is opposed to the true prophetic expression: the parrhesiast, unlike the prophet who pronounces the word of God and is always in a position of mediation, speaks in his own name, since it is essential that his opinion, his thought and his conviction be formulated by

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frankness. On the other hand, the Prophet should not be frank, not always does he tell the truth. Moreover, the parrhesiast never talks about the future, nor does he help men to transpose what separates them from it, because of an ontological structure of human beings and time. He assists men in their blindness, but on what they are, on themselves, because of distraction or moral dissipation, lack of attention, complacency or cowardice. The role of unveiling very different from the Prophet, which is placed at the point where the human finitude and the structure of time are articulated. And the parrhesiast does not speak in riddles but communicates in the clearest and most direct way possible, without any rhetorical ornamentation, so that his speech can immediately receive a prescriptive value, leaving nothing to interpretation. I should remind you that Foucault’s main criticisms of traditional political militancy are their position as mass mediator and their prophetic component. Foucault, the intellectual parrhesiast, does not occupy the role of a prophet, nor does he serve as an intermediary for the characters engaged in the social struggle. I will return to that discussion later with the GIP. Secondly, he opposes true parrhesiastic expression to that of the wise man. The parrhesiast is not only a spokesperson; he can also be a prophet and speaks of the moment in his own name. He is also present in his true expression, for he formulates his own wisdom, not that of any other person or spiritual entity. In this sense, the wise man is closer to the parrhesiast than the prophet, but he gains his wisdom from a recess or retreat and is never constrained to pronounce his wisdom or distribute it. This explains the fact that he is silent, and that his answers are very similar to those of the prophet, since they can be enigmatic and leave those whom he addresses in ignorance and uncertainty. The Wise man also speaks about the being of the world and of things. And if his truth-saying can have a prescriptive value, it is not in the form of advice linked to an economic situation, but in that of a general principle of conduct. To understand these differences, Foucault highlights two characters. On the first, he cites the profile of Heraclitus (sixth and fifth centuries BC) by Diogenes Laërtius (third century AD). Heraclitus lives in recess, and remains silent, retreating into the mountains, and practicing contempt for men. And it is in this context that he writes his texts, so that only the capable people can read it. To this characterization of the wise man, Foucault opposes the character of the parrhesiast. This is not someone who stays fundamentally in secrecy. On the contrary, his duty, his

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obligation, his task is to speak. Socrates, in Apologia, received from the god this function of asking questions of men. And he will not abandon this task, even threatened by death. Instead of silence, the parrhesiast is the permanent interpellator. While the wise man talks about the being of the world and things, the parrhesiast intervenes and says what things are, but in the uniqueness of individuals, situations and conjunctures. Foucault highlights a differentiation that serves well his militancy practices and parrhesiast writing, very different from those of the wise man: we will constantly find this opposition between useless knowledge which speaks of the being of things and the world, on the one hand, and on the other the parrhesiast’s truth-telling which is always applied, questions, and is directed to individuals and situations in order to say what they are in reality, to tell individuals the truth of themselves hidden from their own eyes, to reveal to them their present situation, their character, failings, the value of their conduct, and the possible consequences of their decisions. (Foucault 2011: 19)

The third veridiction against which parrhēsia is opposed is that of the one who teaches, that of the technician, that is, the doctor, the musician, the shoemaker, the carpenter, the master of arms, etc., much evoked by Plato in his Socratic dialogues. It is a knowledge conceived as a technique, which encompasses the knowledge that takes shape in a practice and implies, for its learning, not only a theoretical knowledge, but an elaborate exercise. The technician is able to teach and transmit this knowledge to others and has a duty to speak the truth he knows. He would not know anything if he had not had a master. To continue this process and for this knowledge not to die, he has a duty to teach it to someone. Foucault does not find this obligation to speak in the wise man, but in the parrhesiast. But with one main difference: this transmission of knowledge by a teacher does not run any risk. Foucault exemplifies: “Everyone knows, and I know first of all, that you do not need courage to teach.” (Foucault 2011: 24). But I ask: Did Foucault’s courage to study subjects most did not care about, not cause him to take a certain risk or pay too high a price for the constant contempt or anger toward his objects of study and political militancy? I will touch upon these issues, especially when I look at the relationship between the creation of new ways of existence and the work of the intellectual.

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Either way, with the technician, a filiation is established in the order of learning, while the parrhesiast, when telling the truth, far from establishing this positive connection of a common knowledge, of heritage, of affiliation, of recognition, of friendliness, it may, on the contrary, to provoke anger, provoke the hostility of the city, to be the object of revenge, of punishment of a tyrant. Thus, he can even risk his life, paying with his existence for the truth he spoke. The cynic Diogenes and Socrates are examples of this parrhesiast veridiction. Foucault then seeks to understand how these four modalities combine in different cultures, societies or civilizations, in their discursive modes or in their “truth regimes”. In Greek society, they are clearly divided into four great ways of veridiction: that of the prophet and destiny; that of the wise man and of the being; that of teaching and technique; and that of parrhēsia and of the ethos. But one of the traces of the history of philosophy and ancient culture is the tendency of the modes of true expression of the wise man and that of parrhēsia to connect with each other, in a kind of philosophical modality of true expression, very different from prophetic, teaching and technique of rhetoric. It is there that Foucault sees the formation of a true philosophical expression, in which he is clearly inspired, intending: (…) to speak of being or the nature of things only to the extent that this truth-telling concerns, is relevant for, is able to articulate and found a truth-­ telling about ethos in the form of parrhēsia. And to that extent, we can say that, only up to a certain point, of course, wisdom and parrhēsia merge. (Foucault 2011: 28)

Yet medieval christianity, and I should remind that in a very similar fashion to the discourses of the revolutionary left that Foucault criticizes, has developed other approaches which bring together the prophetic modality to the parrhesiastic, when wanting to tell the truth about the future and about what they were, as was the case with the franciscans and the dominicans, who were telling the men what they were, and to say to them is, quite frankly, with all the parrhēsia, what the faults and crimes of these were, and where and how they should change their way of life. This same medieval society also brought together two other forms of veridiction: the modality of wisdom that says the being of things and their nature and the modality of teaching, with the creation of the medieval university. The latter thus defined a regime of true expression very different from the

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one found in the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman world, in which parrhēsia and wisdom combined. It is in modern times, as I have already indicated, that Foucault sees the Association of prophetic saying with revolutionary discourses. He finds the true expression about the being of things in a certain philosophical discourse, while technical modality is organized around science, and all relate in some way to parrhesiastic modality. As he explains below, these modalities play the role of parrhēsia when they destabilize the order of their speeches and consequently reveal their way of relating to revolutionary discourse, philosophy and science, always in a movement of strong criticism of their clichés: Revolutionary discourse plays the role of parrhesiastic discourse when it takes the form of a critique of existing society. 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 parrhēsia to some extent. And when scientific discourse is deployed as criticism of prejudices, of existing forms of knowledge, of dominant institutions, of current ways of doing things—and it cannot avoid doing this, in its very development—it plays this parrhesiastic role. (Foucault 2011: 30)

In this sense Foucault indicates the characteristics that differentiate philosophical discourse from scientific, political or institutional discourse, or even moral discourse. Scientific discourse defines its rules and its objective according to the questions: “what is truth-telling, what are its forms, what are its rules, what are its conditions and structures?” (Foucault 2011: 66). Political discourse raises the question of politeia, that is, the forms and structures of government. Moral discourse is one which prescribes principles and norms of conduct. Philosophical discourse differs from these three modalities, for it never raises the question of truth without questioning, at the same time, the conditions of that truth-telling, either on the side of the ethical differentiation that opens up access to that truth for the individual, or on the side of the political structures within which that truth-telling has the right, the freedom and the duty to speak. The existence of philosophical discourse, for Foucault, from Greece to the present day, is a possibility, and the necessity of interplay between these three different types of speech, making, in a way, the axes of his study of

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government, which I have dealt with in the first chapter of the book, the relations of power, ethics, and the problem of truth: What makes a discourse a philosophical discourse and not just a political discourse is that when it poses the question of the politeia (of the political institution, of the distribution and organization of relations of power), at the same time it poses the question of truth and true discourse on the basis of which these relations of power and their organization will be able to be defined, and it also poses the question of the ethos, that is to say, of the ethical differentiation to which these political structures can and must give space. And finally, if philosophical discourse is not just a moral discourse, it is because it does not confine itself to wanting to form an ethos, to being the pedagogy of a morality, the vehicle of a code. It never poses the question of ethos without at the same time inquiring about the truth and the form of access to the truth which will be able to form this ethos, and [about] the political structures within which this ethos will be able to assert its singularity and difference (Foucault 2011: 67). In the face of these speeches, Foucault recalls the four modalities he had previously mentioned: the prophetic truth-telling, that of wisdom, that of technique and that of parrhēsia. Following these modalities, he perceives the development of four fundamental philosophical attitudes that, each in its own way, connect the question of truth, power and ethics. Therefore, there are four ways of linking these three issues. The prophetic attitude is that which, in philosophy, promises and guesses, beyond the limit of the present, the moment and form in which the production of truth (aletheia), the exercise of power (politeia), and the moral formation (ethos) coincide. It makes the speech of the promised reconciliation among these three issues. The attitude of wisdom is that which means, in a fundamental and unique discourse, what truth, power and morality are. It is the discourse that tries to think and say the founding unity of truth, of politeia and of the ethos. The attitude of teaching is one that does not seek a promise in the future, does not search for a fundamental unity and the point of coincidence between Aletheia, politeia and ethos, but, on the contrary, it defines the formal conditions of truth-telling (logic), the best forms of exercise of power (political analysis) and moral principles (morality). It is the discourse of heterogeneity and separation between the three issues. And the fourth attitude is parrhesiastic, that is, the one that Foucault adopts in his thinking and in his experience, which always tries to bring in the problem of truth, the matters of policy, and the differentiation of

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ethics; It is also related to the question of power, truth, and knowledge, on one side, and the ethic differentiation, on the other; and, finally, he places the issue of truth-telling in which the moral subject constitutes itself and the power relations in which he is formed: (…) the parrhesiastic discourse and standpoint in philosophy: it is the discourse of the irreducibility of truth, power, and ethos, and at the same time the discourse of their necessary relationship, of the impossibility of thinking truth (aletheia), power (politeia), and ethos without their essential, fundamental relationship to each other. (Foucault 2011: 68)

Prison Militancy and the GIP The GIP, the Prison Information Group, was formed by Michel Foucault, Jean-Marie Domenach and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and operated between 1971 and 1972. Daniel Defert was also took a large part in the actions of the group, besides encouraging Foucault to participate in its creation (Foucault 1994b: 174). I am interested in the GIP for the following questions, highlighted by the organization of the collection Dits et-écrits (Foucault 1994b: 174): The context of the struggle around the prisons, from which the group emerged, alongside other significant affiliations with the left, such as the maoists, for example; the specificity of the action of the GIP, which would insist on collecting all of the information on the prison system within the prison and from the questionnaires distributed secretly among the inmates themselves and their families; lastly, the role of the support given to the group by several specific intellectuals such as judges, doctors, and social workers. Gilles Deleuze frequently participated in the group (Cf. Deleuze 2003). These questions will help in understanding the particularity of Foucault’s political militancy. The GIP has produced many effects, among which I would like to highlight two: the entry of prisons as a relevant topic for discussion in the daily press and French radio, and the problematization of a traditional left-­ wing political discourse that establishes the division between the proletariat and the “lumpemproletariat”. The GIP thus helped modify post-May 68 militantism.

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The Emergence and Specificity of the GIP’s Militancy: Approximations and Differences with Regard to Left-Wing Groups According to Philippe Artières et al. (2003), the organisers of the book Le Groupe d’informations sur les Prisons. Archives d’une Lutte, 1970–1972, the history of GIP goes beyond Foucault’s biography and also relates to three issues of extreme importance: the intellectual conjuncture of Post-May 68; the political and social situation of the early 1970s; and the penitentiary policies practiced in France since the end of World War II in 1945 (Cf. Artières et al. 2003: 16–19). Following the remarks of the aforementioned book, the political and socio-cultural demonstrations of May 68 brought together a wide variety of social groups, such as students, peasants and workers in France. The response of the authorities, however, was immediate, as the disputes were judged to be the origin of the increase in violence in French society. The events between May and June 68 aimed, according to a study by the French Ministry of the Interior, for “the evolution of Customs and mentalities, the general contestation, the development of revolutionary groups and the decline of authority and the hierarchical principle” (Artières et al. 2003: 12). On behalf of the Republic and the defense of Institutions, Minister of the Interior Raymon Marcellin established a policy of order as a reaction to May 68. This policy of order created a bill which made the organizations of demonstrations criminally responsible and set up special courts, which sentenced many students and young workers to imprisonment. On the side of the left there were many demonstrations, mainly in 1970, when they occurred most frequently. In this intense context of social struggle, the action of the Maoist and non-Leninist organization La Gauche Prolétarienne (GP), was composed originally of two currents: one of libertarian tendency and the other, Marxist (Artières et  al. 2003: 14). In 1970, the organization was dissolved, and its militants went underground. Consequently, the police begin to treat all acts related to the organization as illegal and relate them directly to delinquency. It is then that they receive the support of many intellectuals, among these Jean-Paul Sartre. He actively supports the movement of the militants of the GP and is one of the intellectuals who defend the constitution of a “popular” justice as a means of struggle before the justice of the State, which was denounced by everyone for its clear partiality (Artières et al. 2003: 15). The court would be able to judge the

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guilt of the police for the violence committed in the demonstrations organised by the left. This discussion was central at the time, and the debate lasted between 1970 and 1975 (Artières et al. 2003: 15). Sartre’s position was not unanimous, since: “Michel Foucault rejects the very form of the ‘bureaucratic Court of Justice’, which is alien, according to him, to the practice of popular justice” (Artières et al. 2003: 15). Foucault’s opposition to the people’s court can be clearly understood in his dialogue with the Maoists in 1972. On that occasion, he makes the genealogy of the people’s court, and concludes that “the revolution can only take place via the radical elimination of the judicial apparatus” (Foucault 1980: 16). In September 1970, many GP militants who were arrested began a hunger strike to obtain political prisoner status, which was not provided for by French law (Artières et al. 2003: 27). This form of political manifestation was quite common and had already been used in the prisoners’ collective actions during the Algerian war between 1958 and 1961. After 25 days of hunger strike, there was a relative indifference of French public opinion, even if articles were published in important newspapers such as Le Monde. In January 1971, another hunger strike took place, this time with greater emphasis in the press and with greater support from students, teachers and university students who, in solidarity, also end up participating in the hunger strike. A press conference was held on 8 February 1971 (Artières et al. 2003: 28) to discuss all these events and to report the end of the prisoners’ hunger strike. It is during this event that Michel Foucault, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Jean-Marie Domenach announce the Constitution of the GIP. The GIP, according to Philippe Artières (2011: 320), was born in accordance with the discussion of the “popular” courts of the leftists and with the struggle of the imprisoned Maoists who, as I have already commented, claimed political prisoner status. On the other hand, as Artières proceeds, it also meant a break, because the prison became a place of struggle for the first time, and the ordinary prisoners, and not only the politicians, were the actors of these struggles. Artières explains the rupture produced by GIP: Up to that time, ordinary prisoners were considered an unpoliticized and sometimes reactionary sub-proletariat. On the other hand, the GIP radically distances itself from the demarche des etablis (movement of young intellectuals going to work in the factories); it was not a question of putting themselves in the place of the prisoners—none of its members tried to be

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incarcerated. The aim was to collect arrest information by means of a series of investigations carried out using questionnaires circulating in French prisons, in order to obtain information from the source. (Artières 2011: 320)

The passage by Artières discusses the important differences between the GIP and the other Left movements of the period: first, the interest in the common prisoners, usually seen as lumpemproletariat, that is, those who would not participate in the revolution. Moreover, it had no purpose to speak for the prisoners or to place itself in the place of exploitation. On the demarche des etablis, Artières says that it was a “movement that preached the need to put itself in the place of the proletariat for proper political action” (Artières 2011: 320). These are questions which clearly refer us to Foucault’s criticism of the traditional left-wing militancy and the mode of action of the specific intellectual, who did not concern himself with speaking on behalf of the “masses”, nor sought to identify himself and blend in with the means of labor of the dominated, such as factories and mines. Next, I will deal with these two differences highlighted by Artières about the GIP. Daniel Defert (2003: 315) also draws attention to the appearance of the GIP as initially associated with the defense strategies of Gauche Prolétarienne, but later created autonomy from Maoist militants. According to Defert, the leaders of the GP used a traditional strategy in the history of the communist movements, that is, an alliance with leading figures of the French intellectual world and with the organizations engaged in the defense of civil rights, described as “democrats” (Defert 2003: 315). Hence Sartre’s support is fundamental. Foucault (1994c: 301), on the other hand, always preferred effective work rather than “college babbling”. Defert talks about the method of manipulation that Foucault hated the most: the spectacular operations of personalities who appeared at prison doors on behalf of citizens, later restrained and assaulted by the police before the photographers (Defert 2003: 317). The proximity and difference in the acronym of the GP and GIP groups had also been elaborated on by Foucault in the choice of the acronym that represented his group: GIP showed the reference and the approach to GP, but also had its specificity in the I, which meant the difference that specific intellectuals should bring into the formation of the GIP (Defert 2003: 320). Thus, the GIP stood out for their political action, which differed from the other left-wing groups of the period. Anarchists have also taken part in the events that surrounded the uprisings in French prisons in the early

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1970s, but they expected violent actions from the GIP outside the prison; additionally, they did not sympathize with the group’s proximity to the Maoists. On the other hand, the Maoists hoped that violence would come from inside the prison, because it would be a sign of the politicisation of the inmates. There was also pressure from the philanthropic and Christian tradition which acted directly in prisons. It expected the GIP to propose reforms and improvements to the prison system. The GIP, however, did not share these expectations and, as Defert says: “Our aim was, first of all, to render prison inoperative as an instrument of political repression.” (Defert 2003: 321). It was an unprecedented political mobilization that is worth remembering because it meant “an instant in which the penitentiary wavered, in which it was imagined that it might disappear” (Artières et al. 2003: 11). For Defert, May 68 had also left the prisons aside, which were treated as if they did not symbolize forms of power. Moreover, the old Marxist distrust of the lumpemproletariat, which still structured certain political discourses, as Artières had already pointed out, was always hanging over the inmates. So I return to the double rupture produced by GIP, because the group: (…) rejects the Marxist point of view that makes ordinary prisoners a naturally deviant and reactionary lumpemproletariat (…). It is not a question of affirming that all prisoners of common law are political prisoners, but of considering that prison is a daily place of the politician, and, this time, informing about what prison is consists on a political action. (Artières et al. 2003: 28)

In a text written between 1971 and 1972, Foucault called politics “every struggle against the established power” (Foucault 2003a: 155). The GIP takes advantage of the mobilization around the imprisoned leftist militants, because the problem of prisons could be raised thanks to the hunger strike carried out by them. However, at the same time, it does not follow the same logic of action of the Maoists; it seeks to radicalize the displacement caused by them. The problem of Prisons is not only that of political detention. This division between political prisoners and common law, as between the proletarians and the lumpemproletariat, had not always existed. The division, according to Foucault (1994d: 425–432), dates back to the nineteenth century, and established the rupture between the politically

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and union organized proletariat and the lumpemproletariat. From that moment on, the solidarity among revolutionary movements and movements in prisons, which was very important in all political revolutions of the nineteenth century (1830, 1848 and 1870), was broken (Foucault 1994d: 426). This connection, however, reappeared in France when, during the Algerian War, there were many Algerian inmates in French prisons who claimed the status of political prisoners, as did as the political prisoners of post-May 68, mainly the Maoists. The GIP also had great importance in the problematization of this sharing, as with the formation of the group “the inmates knew that there was a movement abroad that was interested in their problems, a movement that was not simply a movement of Christian or secular philanthropy, but a movement of political contestation of the prison” (Foucault 1994d: 426). The Prison System Is Intolerable Despite the differences between the GIP and Maoists and Marxists, Foucault was inspired by fundamental experiences of the political left when distributing questionnaires inside and outside prisons. Soon after May 1968, there was the movement of intellectuals, the établis, who went to work in the factories to learn about the working condition. Even if the method of placing oneself in the place of the worker and speaking for him is the opposite of that adopted by the GIP, as I have already reminded you with Artières, a parallel can be drawn between the two groups (Artières et al. 2003: 29), as both of them had the distribution of the questionnaires to the workers or to the prisoners as their primary mode of action on existing conditions, both in factories and in the prisons. Moreover, in 1961, in an attempt to renew Marxism, Raniero Panzieri, in the midst of the Italian working class, had carried out a very similar project, gathering direct information from the workers. The three groups also take up an older tradition: that of workers’ research carried out in the nineteenth century (Artières et al. 2003: 47), in particular by Karl Marx, and published in the Revue Socialiste in 1880. GIP’s purpose was to search inside the prisons for information. To this end, a questionnaire was drawn up for inmates and their families. This way, the words of the prisoners could come out of silence, short-circuiting the production of all authorised speeches (Artières et al. 2003: 47). The questionnaires were answered anonymously and contained questions about all aspects of prison life, and were distributed clandestinely within prisons,

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because the prison administration did not allow inmates to have access to any kind of correspondence that alluded to incarceration. Therefore, it was not the way of the établis, “to put themselves in the place of the prisoners, but to make known their conditions, respecting their voices” (Artières et al. 2003: 48). According to a list made by Daniel Defert, the GIP produced the following publications, based on questionnaires distributed in and outside prisons: Enquête dans 20 prisons, Le GIP enquête dans une prison-modèle: Fleury-Mérogis, L’ assassinat de George Jackson, Cahiers de resalrications sortis des prisons lors des récentes révoltes and Suicides de prison (Defert 2003: 324–325). For the GIP, the prison regime was intolerable (Foucault 1994e: 177), and the group did not claim to make the prisoners aware of their situation, since “they had been aware of this for a long time, they just did not have the means to express it” (Foucault 1994e: 177–178). In this sense, consciousness, reactions, indignations, reflections on the penitentiary situation existed in individuals, but did not appear. It was necessary for the information to circulate, precisely through the dissemination of the contents of the questionnaires: “the method may surprise, but it is still the best. It is necessary that information appear; individual experience must be transformed into collective knowledge. In other words, political knowledge” (Foucault 1994e: 178). As Defert argues, information is a struggle, because it brought into the public space a knowledge about the daily experience of the inmates (Defert 2003: 324). Prison conditions gain greater visibility in the French press with the political action of the GIP, making it impossible for the prison administration to deny any of the information disclosed in the questionnaires (Artières et  al. 2003: 49). In all the uprisings that took place in French prisons between 1970 and 1972, there was a general objective: “we must put an end to the mystery that the administration maintains about what is happening in prisons.” (Artières et al. 2003: 216). The GIP, according to Artières (2011: 320), allowed the emergence of a discourse of the inmates’ own, and its action “marks the history of prisons considerably and, more broadly, the social movements of the 1970s by the originality of their procedures” (Artières 2011: 321). The GIP, still according to Artières, is a political legacy left by Foucault, since it brought the prison into the field of current affairs, giving visibility to the problems surrounding it. He also clearly revealed the lack of dignity of speaking for others, by giving the floor to the inmates themselves and their families, recalling Foucault’s position as a specific intellectual, when he argued that

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the masses did not need the intellectuals to know their conditions or even to reach consciousness. This refusal to speak in the place of the other and the focus on the particular and the unique brought out by the testimonies of the prisoners, clash with other positions, like that of Jean-Paul Sartre, who, according to Defert, facing the same indignations of the prisoners, insisted on “stating the detainees fought on behalf of them all, as if it was not worthy to fight for oneself, as if it were necessary to resist the division in the course of these struggles.” (Defert 2003: 326). The GIP has not only influenced social movements by proposing new practices of militancy, but also established a new relationship between theory and practice (Artières 2011: 331). Reis Filho talks about the meaning that theory had for Marxism and its relation to social struggles: Theory (…) plays (…) a key role. Uncovers the conditions of struggle, reveals its evolution, illuminates the path. This is about a true knowledge, because it is scientific and therefore unique. But theory does not develop within the social struggles of the proletariat, although these are its empirical foundation. It is drawn up by a particular sector—the revolutionary intellectuals (…). That is, the working class, although appointed as the historical vanguard of the revolution, receives—“from the outside”—from the communists—“to the inside”—the Marxist-Leninist scientific doctrine. (Reis Filho 1989: 135)

This relationship between the intellectuals and the workers is greatly affected by the GIP’s practice. Instead of intellectuals having the task of bringing knowledge to inmates, it is the latter’s testimonies in the questionnaires that constitute knowledge about the condition in prisons. Therefore, hierarchy is violently broken. For Marxism, as Reis Filho (1989: 135) points out, this split between revolutionary theory and popular force should be overcome by the existence of a party, from which the fusion between theory and the social movement takes place. Thus there is an overvaluation of theoretical power to the detriment of practical knowledge, for “socialist consciousness would not arise from social movements, but from a deep scientific knowledge” (Reis Filho 1989: 143). The GIP, on the contrary, had as its sole motto to give the prisoners the floor (Foucault 1994c: 304). The group did not have a hierarchical organization, nor did it have a head. It was an anonymous movement that relied on three personalities: Foucault, Domenach and Vidal-Naquet. But they were just a support, since everyone who had something to say could

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participate, not because they were personalities or because they were renowned by the majority or by the press, but because they had something to say about the prisons. In a GIP announcement written by Foucault (2003b: 193) in 1972, he says that the GIP was neither an intellectual court nor a subversive group that would inspire inmates outside the prison, because the group never wanted to speak on behalf of the prisoners, but to allow them and their families to speak for themselves. For Foucault (1994c: 306), the problem was not to propose a model prison or the abolition of prison, since the mechanisms of marginalization present in prisons were immersed in all social relations. The goal was: “to offer a critique of the system that explains the process by which today’s society pushes a part of the population to the margins” (1994c: 306). During the time the GIP was active, Foucault was also involved with the issue of prisons in his studies. In 1972, he taught at the Collège de France the Théories and institutions pénales course. The following year, he continued to talk about the subject of criminal systems in La Société Punitive (Foucault 2013, 2015, 2016). Foucault’s involvement with the GIP, however, was not only intellectual or about the production of scientific knowledge about prisons. He was not doing sociological research with the prisoners on their living conditions. In addition to delaying by two years the writing of the book on prisons, which was to be released in 1975 under the title of Discipline and Punish, so that inmates could not assume that he possessed only a speculative interest in his militant action, he drastically modified his mode of militancy and thinking after his participation in the group. The experience of militancy, therefore, was not led by a totalizing theory, which would be applied in the analysis of the uprisings in French prisons. Foucault concludes the first chapter of Discipline and Punish remembering this movement, when he proposes a history of the present: That punishment in general and the prison in particular belong to a political technology of the body is a lesson that I have learnt not so much from history as from the present. In recent years, prison revolts have occurred throughout the world. (…) they were revolts, at the level of the body, against the very body of the prison. (Foucault 1991: 30)

In 1984, Foucault (1994f: 747–752) recalled how Marxism was a dominant thought in the University when he was a student, and the

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problem of the relationship between theory and practice was at the heart of all theoretical discussions. For him, this relationship must be seen in a simple, practical way, since it relates his studies to his own life. In this sense, he says that his books are “fragments of autobiography. My books have always been my personal problems with madness, prison, sexuality.” (Foucault 1994f: 747–748). Furthermore, he has always made interferences and interconnections between practical activities and theoretical or historical work, hence his “immediate and contemporary relationship with practice. It was because I spent time in psychiatric hospitals that I wrote The birth of the clinic. In the prisons, I started to do a number of things and then I wrote Discipline and Punish.” (Foucault 1994f: 748). Foucault has always paid attention to the fact that his theoretical work would not function as a law in relation to a current practice, and argues: “let us now try to work together [psychiatrists and specialists of the penitentiary system] on new ways of criticism (…), to try something else. Here is, then, my relationship with theory and practice.” (Foucault 1994f: 749). GIP and Liberation Movements: Socio-Ethical Proposals Daniel Defert (2003: 323), when speaking about the GIP, recalls that the situation in women’s prisons was radically different from the one in men’s prisons. A political action group, named after Claude Rouaut (Defert 2003: 323), focused on this problem when examining the Parisian women’s prison La Roquette. This group inscribed its action in the problems of feminist struggles. The same happened to imprisoned cross-dressers, who called for the help of the GIP and raised questions quite different from those previously dealt with by the militancy in prisons. Defert comments on the specificity brought by these new characters: So, quickly, the prison struggles that we had tried to integrate into the proletarian struggles, communicated more and more with the new feminist movements, homosexuals, or around immigrants, in which the social control of the body, the mutilations of identities became the structuring issue. (Defert 2003: 323)

In addition to the group around women, the Front Homosexuel d’action Révolutionnaire was also created by Guy Hocquenghem, who, from 1979, would participate in the newspaper Le Gai Pied, linked to the French gay

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movement, wherein Foucault writes frequently between 1979 and 1984. Defert (2003: 323) also reports that, for “certain leaders of the Gauche Proletarienne, the new movements were representative of the typically petty-bourgeois society”. Reis Filho points out how, for Marxists, the petty bourgeoisie was responsible for the errors and deviations of the party. He also comments on Lenin’s interpretation of this discussion: Lenin (…) would make sweeping attacks on the “nefarious” influence of the petty bourgeoisie on the revolution in general and on the proletariat party in particular. Throughout his political life, at various opportunities, he would point to general execution the harmful characteristics of petty-­ bourgeois intellectuals: aversion to discipline, organization, instability, lack of determination and energy, inconsistency, sentimental and weeping tendencies, elitist prejudices, submission to fashions, taste for phrase, opportunism, timidity and vacillation, cowardice, structural tendencies to anarchism, excessive following, servility. (Reis Filho 1989: 145)

The errors, failures and defeats of the movement were the responsibility of this negative influence from the petty bourgeoisie. Naming these new groups that participated in the uprisings in prisons in this way implied disapproval, demotion, ridicule and diminution of the claims that arose with these new groups. The GIP, however, had been attentive to these new issues. That is why Daniel Defert (2003: 326), when comparing the left-wing social movements of Post-May 68, cites the Marxist, Marxist-­ Leninist, Maoist, Trotskyist organizations, which could be more or less authoritarian, but which used very traditional methods of analysis and intervention. According to him, the Trotskyist movements favored the construction of well-structured means, while the Maoists, such as the Gauche Prolétarienne bet on immersion in the masses. GIP connected to other concerns: The GIP probably makes a connection between this second period of post-­ May 68 and the emergence of the new so-called liberation movements (of women and homosexuals in particular) that were deeply escaping, in their recruitment, in their analysis and in their objectives, from the political movements that wanted to prolong 68 by force (…). I would describe these new movements as desirous, not only of policies, but also of socio-ethical ones, in that it is a question of subverting the relationships of power, hierarchies and values. (Defert 2003: 326)

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This link between the GIP, the new liberation movements and their socio-economic desires is fundamental, especially if it is related to Foucault’s interest in the late 1970s and early 1980s, by the theme of the aesthetics of existence, ethics and the practices of freedom that he finds in Greek, Hellenistic and Roman societies. The GIP study was important because it made it possible for us to understand the difference between Foucault’s militancy in relation to other organisations of the French left such as the maoists and leninists, indicating the specificity of his practice; additionally, it showed Foucault’s interest for marginalized groups which were undervalued by the supporters of traditional left-wing, as in the case of the prisoners; The prison group has also allowed us to see how much Foucault’s thought and his political experience intersect in a way that is complex, subverting the traditional way of the left, which related theory and practice hierarchically. Looking at the margins, moreover, may have inspired Foucault to be enchanted by the cynics, figures little celebrated by philosophy, even within the ancient culture itself. But there is still another aspect to be taken into account to understand Foucault’s fascination with ancient modes of existence, such as the cynics: his admiration for the counterculture movements of the 1970s and 1980s, such as the hippies, the gay movement, feminism, black power culture and others. They proposed, according to Foucault’s attentive eye in his diagnosis of today, new ways of living.

The Construction of Ethical Ways of Existence In the 1982 text ”The Subject and Power”, Foucault (1982: 780) talks about the specificity of these new social movements, remembering how they dealt with “a series of oppositions that had developed in recent years: opposition to the power of men over women, of parents over children, of the psychiatrist over the mental patient, of medicine over the population, of administration over the ways people live” (Foucault 1982: 780). Among the most original aspects of these struggles, I consider two of extreme relevance. The first refers to the fact that these struggles question the status of the individual himself, and in the following ways: On the one hand, they assert the right to be different and underline everything that makes individuals truly individual. On the other hand, they attack everything that separates the individual, breaks his links with others, splits

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up community life, forces the individual back on himself, and ties him to his own identity in a constraining way. (Foucault 1982: 781)

Foucault names these practices of political disputes as battles against the “government of individualization” (Foucault 1982: 781). Then, the main objective of these struggles would not be in so much as to attack a certain institution of power, elite or class, but to invest against a technique of power that constrains the individual in his daily life, categorizing him in such a way that he becomes bound to his own identity. These relationships of power produce unsubjected individuals. Hence the meaning that the word “subject” acquires in Foucault’s vocabulary: “subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge.” (Foucault 1982: 781). Foucault believes that there were three kinds of social struggles in the course of our history: those against forms of domination (ethnic, social, and religious); those that turned against forms of exploitation which separate individuals from what they produce; or those which rebelled against that which binds an individual to himself and submits him in that way, to the others—the struggles against subjection, and the forms of subjectivity and submission. Although these do not appear in isolation, he considers that conflicts have prevailed in feudal societies against forms of domination. The nineteenth century was characterized by the struggle against exploitation, while in Foucault’s present (the 1970s and 1980s) struggles against the forms of subjection or submission of subjectivity have become increasingly important, even if those of domination and exploitation have not disappeared. Many scholars would treat these types of subjection as phenomena derived from other economic and social processes, such as “forces of production, class struggle, and ideological structures that determine the form of subjectivity.” (Foucault 1982: 782). If, for Foucault, the mechanisms of subjection cannot be studied outside of their relationship to the mechanisms of domination and exploitation, this does not mean that he considers them only as a reflection of these instances. And to understand its complexities and specificities, Foucault highlights the emergence of a new form of power that has developed since the sixteenth century: The State. However, on many occasions it has been seen as a kind of power that ignores individuals and cares only for the interests of a totality, such as class, for example.

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As I pointed out in the second chapter, Foucault has a characteristic look at the State, showing how the power relations it exerts are both individualizing and totalizing. This was due to the formation of the modern state, which integrated an ancient technology of power found in Christian institutions: pastoral power. This form of power, also worked on in the second chapter of the text, takes care of the community as a whole, but also of each individual in particular. In order to ensure salvation in the other world, pastoral power implies knowledge about the consciousness of the individual and ends up producing its own truth. In this sense, Foucault says: I don’t think that we should consider the “modern state” as an entity that was developed above individuals, ignoring what they are and even their very existence, but, on the contrary, as a very sophisticated structure in which individuals can be integrated, under one condition: that this individuality would be shaped in a new form, and submitted to a set of very specific patterns. (Foucault 1982: 783)

Pastoral power, which was previously associated only with the religious institution, expanded in modern times throughout the social body and relied on multiple institutions such as family, school, hospitals, factories, etc. In the face of this diagnosis, produced by himself, of the forms of power and production of subjectivity against which the social movements of the 1970s and 1980s fought, Foucault recalls the importance of a philosophy that cares about the existing conditions of today. He resorts, as I dealt with in the introduction of the book, to Kant’s initial gesture, who asks himself: “What are we?” (Foucault 1982: 785). Foucault indicates the unfolding of this question, carried out in 1784, when Kant writes: “What’s going on just now? What’s happening to us? ‘What is this world, this period, this precise moment in which we are living?” (Foucault 1982: 785). The problem brought by Kant, thus inspires Foucault to also produce a diagnosis of his present time. But Foucault’s goal is no longer the same as Kant’s in the eighteenth century, that of “finding out who we are”. In Foucault’s present, the “refusal of who we are” becomes urgent. The fundamental aim is to get rid of the individualization and aggregation linked to the structures of modern power. He adds:

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The conclusion would be that the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the state, and from the state’s institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality that has been imposed on us for several centuries. (Foucault 1982: 785)

Radically Transform Subjectivities In this refusal of the models of individuality developed by the modern state, the creation of new forms of subjectivity becomes urgent. This theme appears in two of Foucault’s texts prior to “The Subject and the Power”, which depict the question of Iran: “The spirit of a spiritless world” (Foucault 1994g: 743–755; Afrasiabi 2016) and “Useless to revolt?” (Foucault 2001: 449–453), both from 1979. I do not intend to detail the discussions about Foucault’s texts about Iran and all the discomfort created at the time around this issue (Cf. Pelegrini 2013). I only wish to point out how the subject of the production of new subjectivities appears with great importance in these texts, as does the figure of the one who revolts before the power, even knowing of his risk of death. It is a courage to rise up, therefore, which also appears in these texts. The title of the first text, “The Spirit of a spiritless world”, refers to the somewhat forgotten phrase of Marx (1977), written in 1843, in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. The phrase appears near the famous passage, much more quoted, known and remembered by all: “Religion is the opium of the people.” Foucault uses Marx’s unknown phrase to show the specifics of the 1978 Iranian Revolution, which had obtained a very negative reaction from most intellectuals of the period. Upon reflecting on the Iranian Revolution, Foucault produces two fundamental shifts: first, he problematizes the traditional notion of revolution. Then, precisely because it concerns a new perception of revolution, the theme of radically changing the production of subjectivity, as I have already mentioned, emerges in a relevant way. With regard to the subject of revolution, Foucault points out that we have learned to recognize it from two dynamics: one is by the contradictions existing in society, such as that involving the class struggle or the great social confrontations; the other, by the presence of a vanguard, class or political party that would guide a whole nation. The revolution in Iran helps Foucault to recognize that a revolution can not always be

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characterized exclusively by the presence of these two aspects. But, on the other hand, the Iranians clearly knew who and what elements they were fighting against: In rising up, the Iranians said—and perhaps that is the soul of the revolt: we must certainly change the regime and get rid of this man, we must change these corrupt people, we must change everything in the country, the political organization, the economic system, the foreign policy. But above all, we must change ourselves. It is necessary that our ways, our relationship with others, with things, with eternity, with God, be completely modified, and there will be no real revolution without this radical change taking place in our experience. (Foucault 1994g: 749)

Hence the importance that Islam possessed within the Iranian revolution, according to Foucault, mainly because religion was, for its followers, the promise and guarantee of something to radically transform their subjectivities. The intensity of the Iranian movement would come precisely from this “will for a radical change in existence.” (Foucault 1994g: 754). The importance of subjectivity also appears in “Useless to Revolt?” especially when Foucault treats revolts as something that at the same time belongs to and interrupts the movement of history itself (Foucault 2001: 449). It is the moment when a man prefers the risk of death to the certainty of having to obey. The discussion on the subject of the revolution appears again. For Foucault, it has constituted a gigantic effort to acclimate the revolt within a rational and dominant history, which defined the laws of the development of a revolution, its legitimacy, its good and bad forms, and also fixed the pre-existing conditions and the ways of implementing it. He further adds: ”Even a status of the professional revolutionary was defined” (Foucault 2001: 450). For Foucault, however, no one has the right to tell anyone to revolt in his name, nor to promise the final liberation to all men, for: “One does not dictate to those who risk their lives facing a power.” (Foucault 2001: 452). Courage and the risk of revolting are crucial. Foucault continues: Is one right to revolt, or not? Let us leave the question open. People do revolt; that is a fact. And that is how subjectivity (not that of great men, but that of anyone) is brought into history, breathing life into it. A convict risks his life to protest unjust punishments; a madman can no longer bear being confined and annihilated; a people refuse the regime that oppresses them. That doesn’t make the first innocent, doesn’t cure the second, and doesn’t

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ensure for the third the tomorrow it was promised. Moreover, no one is obliged to support them. No one is obliged to find that these confused voices sing better than the others and speak the truth itself. It is enough that they exist and that they have against them everything that is dead set on shutting them up for there to be a sense in listening to them and in seeing what they mean to say. (Foucault 2001: 452)

In a 1979 text, “Foucault studies State reason”, Foucault (1994h: 801–805) is no longer concerned only with Iran, but with his present time and Western societies. For these, the problem of subjectivity is also important, because since the 1960s, themes such as sexuality, identity and individuality appear with great prominence. According to Foucault, they “constitute a major political problem” (Foucault 1994h: 801), and the greatest danger would be to consider identity and subjectivity as deep and natural components, which are not determined by political and social factors. Freeing ourselves from the psychological subjectivity built by psychoanalysts is indicated by him as one of the main tasks of his present. Foucault says, “We are prisoners of certain conceptions of us and of our conduct. We must liberate our subjectivity, our relationship with ourselves.” (Foucault 1994h: 801–802). Freedom Practices and New Ways of Life This problem of the urgency of the production of new subjectivities is directly connected with the question of freedom, in particular by the sense it acquires and the space it occupies in Foucault’s last lectures. The relationship between truth, freedom and the production of new subjectivities is fundamental to his thinking, especially in the early 1980s. To begin this discussion, I stress the importance that freedom has for the problem of the courage of truth. This link is indicated on at least two occasions by The Government of Self and Others. In a brief passage, Foucault states that his problem in studying parrhēsia is not to know to what extent truth limits the exercise of freedom, but the opposite: (…) how and to what extent is the obligation of truth—the “binding oneself to the truth,” “binding oneself by the truth and by truth-telling”—at the same time the exercise of freedom, and the dangerous exercise of freedom? How is [the fact of] binding oneself to the truth (binding oneself to tell the truth, binding oneself by the truth, by the content of what one says and by

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the fact that one says it) actually the exercise, the highest exercise, of freedom? (Foucault 2008: 67)

Later, he reveals his project of an “ontological history of discourses of truth” (Foucault 2008: 310). For Foucault, a discourse that purports to tell the truth should not be analyzed by a history of knowledge that would make it possible to determine whether it speaks the true or the false. These real discourses should also not be analyzed by a history of ideologies, which would ask why they speak the false to the detriment of the truth. In explaining this position, he reserves a central role for the production of freedom, a theme which permeates all of Foucault’s thinking and which, here, acquires a characteristic sense. Therefore, freedom would not be granted by a liberal right that the contract society secures to an already formatted modern subject, but a possibility of constant invention: (…) the history of thought must always be the history of singular inventions. Or again: if we want to distinguish the history of thought from a history of knowledge undertaken in terms of an index of truth, and if we want to distinguish it from a history of ideologies undertaken by reference to a criterion of reality, then this history of thought—this anyway is what I would like to do—should be conceived of as a history of ontologies which would refer to a principle of freedom in which freedom is not defined as a right to be free, but as a capacity for free action. (Foucault 2008: 310)

By perceiving freedom as an ”ability to do“ and not ”a right to be”, Foucault understands freedom as something that must be permanently created and elaborated. Not to think of it as a right to be acquired shows his effort, also revealed in 1982 (Foucault 1997b: 157–162), to think of freedom no longer on the basis of moral codes and institutions, but by creating new ways of life: But if what we want to do is to create a new way of life [mode de vie], then the question of individual rights is not pertinent. In effect, we live in a legal, social, and institutional world where the only relations possible are extremely few, extremely simplified, and extremely poor. There is, of course, the relation of marriage, and the relations of family, but how many other relations should exist, should be able to find their codes not in institutions but in possible supports, which is not at all the case! (Foucault 1997b: 158)

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For Foucault, then, we live in a relational world in which institutions became impoverished and ended up limiting the possibility of new relationships happening. We must fight against this impoverishment of the relational fabric, so that the relations of provisional co-existence are recognized, and so that we do not only encourage close relationships, such as those of marriage. He complements: Rather than arguing that rights are fundamental and natural to the individual, we should try to imagine and create a new relational right that permits all possible types of relations to exist and not be prevented, blocked, or annulled by impoverished relational institutions. (Foucault 1997b: 158)

In this discussion, two issues are important, which refer to two of Foucault’s deep sympathies highlighted in this interview: the Hellenistic and Roman world before Christianity and gay culture. He says, “Right now I’m fascinated by the Hellenistic and Roman world before Christianity” (Foucault 1997b: 158) and “I think that there is an interesting part to play, one that fascinates me: the question of gay culture” (Foucault 1997b: 159). Alston (2017: 20) comments: It seems possible that somewhere in that self-invention and perhaps in the gay scene of the West Coast, Foucault found an experience of freedom and an innovative life practice that inflected his works. (Alston 2017: 20)

As for his first sympathy, I would remind you that the ancient world and the discussions on the aesthetics of existence refer to a historical period in which the modern notion of a liberal subject of rights did not exist (Cf. Fonseca, 1995). Diogo Sardinha (2011: 182–186) works on this issue from the differentiation between the “ethical subject” and the “political subject of rights”. In ancient culture, priority is given to the formation of the citizen through autonomous relations. The Socratic care of oneself and the other, still, argued that there should be harmony between speech and action, that is, between what is said and the way of life itself. With the cynics, it was about showing the truth by the scandal of life itself. A society, therefore, that does not organize the lives of citizens for the achievement of institutional rights. It is a problematization that drastically escapes the modes of production of modern subjectivities both by not being guided by the production of the subjected and disciplined citizen, as well as by not resorting to the institutionalized arsenal linked to the rights

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guaranteed by the state, so characteristic of the notions that involve the concept of modern citizenship. Foucault explained this danger of fighting for more rights in the preface he made in 1977 to the Anti-Oedipus, by Deleuze and Guattari: - Do not demand of politics that it restore the “rights” of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to “de-individualize” by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. (Foucault 1983)

Regarding his second sympathy, gay culture, Foucault highlights the possibility that it opens to think of relationships outside of institutional marriage. It is a culture that, for him, “invents ways of relating, types of existence, types of values, types of exchanges between individuals which are really new and are neither the same as, nor superimposed on, existing cultural forms.” (Foucault 1997b: 159–160). Yet, such a culture would not only be a choice of homosexuals for homosexuals, but would also be fitting for heterosexuals: “By proposing a new relational right, we will see that nonhomosexual people can enrich their lives by changing their own schema of relations.” (Foucault 1997b: 160). The urgency of the present situation, that of refusing the identities imposed by the state and of creating new forms of subjectivity, appears here materialized in the creation of “other spaces” by gay culture, which escape Institutional law. Such a culture is very close to the problems dealt with by Foucault in his later lectures. In “The social triumph of sexual pleasure: a conversation with Michel Foucault, “Foucault associates the theme” invent other ways of life” (Foucault 1997b: 162) with the practices of gay culture of the early 1980s. Foucault comments: And it is possible that changes in established routines will occur on a much broader scale as gays learn to express their feelings for one another in more various ways and develop new lifestyles not resembling those which have been institutionalized. (Foucault 1997b: 154)

When talking about his relationship with the gay movement, Foucault reveals constant dialogue. But, as we have seen with the prisoners, he never puts himself in the place of the intellectual who would have a program to offer to be followed, nor does he impose his discussions on the gay movement. He thus takes care to encourage the invention of the groups themselves:

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I am, of course, regularly involved in exchanges with other members of the gay community. We talk, we try to find ways of opening ourselves to one another. But I am wary of imposing my own. views, or of setting down a plan, or program. I don’t want to discourage invention, don’t want gay people to stop feeling that it is up to them to adjust their own relationships by discovering what is appropriate in their situations. (Foucault 1997b: 154)

Another theme worked by Foucault, still within the possibility of creating new relationships outside the institutional field by gay culture, is that of friendship (Cf Muchail 1999; Ortega 1999; Ortega 2000; Passetti 2003; Passetti 2002). The relationship between boys, for Foucault, does not take part in institutionalized ties such as marriage, nor does it take the form of the couple, and should therefore be treated “as a matter of existence” (Foucault 1997a: 136) hence his question: “what relationships can be established, invented, multiplied, modulated through homosexuality?” (Foucault 1997a: 135). This discussion by Foucault does not seek to discover the truth contained in sex, a subject often dear to most movements of sexual liberation, but stresses the importance of practices, such as friendship, that allow the creation of new ways of life beyond the relations institutionalized and recognized by the State. He says: The institutional codes cannot validate these relations with their multiple intensities, with their variable colors, their imperceptible movements, with their transformed forms. These relations produce a short circuit and introduce love where there should be the law, the rule or the habit. (Foucault 1997a: 137)

When asked about the use that can be made of Foucault’s work, methods and inherited objects, Stéphane Legrand (2007, 249) points to “an immediate political significance” of Foucault’s interview, especially when he indicates the need for invention of homosexual friendship relations. That is because, by proposing a kind of homosexual asceticism, Foucault indicates the following Movement: ”a homosexual asceticism that would make us work on ourselves and invent, I don’t say discover, a way to still be unlikely.” (Foucault 1997a: 137). This notion of a way of life is very important for Foucault, because it allows us to go beyond social classes, occupational differences and cultural levels. He complements: A way of life can be shared between individuals of different age, status, and social activity. It can give way to intense relationships that do not resemble

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any of those that are institutionalized and, it seems to me, that a way of life can give way to a culture and ethics. To be gay is, I believe, not to identify with the psychological traits and visible masks of the homosexual, but to seek to define and develop a way of life. (Foucault 1997a: 138)

For Foucault (1994i: 636–646), in an interview in 1984, the problem of sexuality should not be understood only by the gesture of sexual liberation. This is one of the reasons why he does not attach himself to any movement of sexual liberation, since he refuses the idea that identifies the truth of the individual with his sexuality. He relates sexuality to another question: ”for me, sexuality is a problem of way of life, it refers to the technique of self.” (Foucault 1994i: 663). In this context, as well as in his activism in the prisons, Foucault clashes with the traditional left, who also worked with the division between the proletariat and the subproletariat, rather than the struggles, such as those of the prisoners, and homosexuals to the struggles of less importance, or, at worst, to the interests of petty-­ bourgeois. The movements of the 1970s and 1980s fought for problems and issues that “the European political tradition of the nineteenth century had banished as unworthy of political action” (Foucault 1994d: 428), as Foucault advocated in 1973: But is not this precisely what characterizes the current political movements: the discovery that the most everyday things—the way to eat, to feed, the relations between a worker and his employer, the way to love, the way in which sexuality is repressed, family obligations, the prohibition of abortion—are political? (Foucault 1994d: 428)

A whole field of social problems, therefore neglected by the traditional left, opens up to be discussed. Foucault pays attention to these new social actors: “If we take into account women, prostitutes, homosexuals, drug addicts, there is a force to challenge society that we do not have the right, I think, to neglect in the political struggle” (Foucault 1994d: 535). As Senellart says about Foucault’s analysis of forms of resistance in Security, Territory and Population: “everything is politicized, everything can become political” (Senellart 2009: 505). As Foucault (1994a: 537) points out in 1974, “the problem of the integration of sexuality into the political struggle” appears again. The whole of the politics of the body as workforce which reigned from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and which Foucault studied in Discipline and Punish, is called into question by various movements whose themes are sex and the body: “In the political

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movement which tends towards the recovery of the body, we find the movement for the liberation of women, as well as for the homosexuality, male or female (Foucault 1994a: 537). Thus, for these movements it is not about following the split between the proletariat and the subproletariat, that is, those who are working and those that are outside of the social relations of production, because in addition to being a hierarchical position that chooses the social relations of production as an element that explains all the other problems of domination, the boundary between the proletariat and those who are excluded from work fades away with the growth of unemployment (Foucault 1994i: 664). Marginal themes such as those concerning sexuality thus become problems of general scope. The creation of new forms of subjectivity that escape modern power relations is clearly linked to the construction of new ways of life and Foucault’s work on the notion of freedom. In this context, the theme of sexuality mobilizes all these questions: This is precisely the problem I encountered with regard to sexuality: does it make any sense to say, “Let’s liberate our sexuality”? Isn’t the problem rather that of defining the practices of freedom by which one could define what is sexual pleasure and erotic, amorous and passionate relationships with others? This ethical problem of the definition of practices of freedom, it seems to me, is much more important than the rather repetitive affirmation that sexuality or desire must be liberated. (Foucault 1997c: 283)

The definition of ethics as a practice of freedom serves Foucault’s purpose of creating new ways of life well. His diagnosis of the current situation signaled the need to refuse the identities imposed by the state. Both his interest in ancient culture and the prominence given to gay culture in the early 1980s point to his main struggle—to create an ethos that problematizes the fascination that modern society has for the domination of the production of subjectivity of individuals: I do not think that a society can exist without power relations, if by that one means the strategies by which individuals try to direct and control the conduct of others. The problem, then, 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. (Foucault 1997c: 298)

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CHAPTER 5

Conclusion: The Ethics of an Intellectual— Detaching Oneself and Dissipating Admitted Familiarities

In its critical aspect-and I mean critical in a broad sense-philosophy is that which calls into question domination at every level and in every form in which it exists, whether political, economic, sexual, institutional, or what have you. To a certain extent, this critical function of philosophy derives from the Socratic injunction “Take care of yourself,” in other words, “Make freedom your foundation, through the mastery of yourself.” —Michel Foucault (1997a: 300–301)

In his work The Concern for Truth (1984) Foucault discusses the ethics of an intellectual: “What can the ethics of an intellectual be (…) if not that: to render oneself permanently capable of self-detachment (which is the opposite of the attitude of conversion)?” (Foucault 1996: 461). This question resumes Foucault’s discussion in his work The Hermeneutics of the Subject—and already presented in this book, in “Introduction”—about the importance of problematizing the notion of “conversion to the revolution,” which was first defined in the nineteenth century and directs the modes of production of revolutionary subjectivity. Foucault’s intention in undertaking his latest studies on Ancient culture was precisely to highlight modes of production of subjectivity that are not linked to Christian techniques of directing conscience, to the coercive

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. P. Vieira, Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth and The Ethics of an Intellectual, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04356-7_5

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power relations typical of modernity, and to the left revolutionary political party. Criticism of these three forms of production of subjectivity inspires him to elaborate a fundamental question for his present day, a period of profound social changes which also includes the failure of traditional leftist militancy: How could new arts of living be created? To come to this question, Foucault followed a double movement, which constitutes the raison d’être of intellectuals: To be at the same time an academic and an intellectual is to try to engage a type of knowledge and analysis that is taught and received in the university in a way so as to modify not only the thought of others but one’s own as well. This work of modifying one’s own thought and that of others seems to me to be the intellectual’s reason for being. (Foucault 1996: 461)

Therefore, the book developed on the transformation that occurred in Foucault’s own thought, mainly in relation to his way of understanding the truth: the path he takes from the will to know, present, for example, in the production of modern scientific knowledge and in Christian confession, to the courage of ancient truth demonstrates important shifts. The will to know was the main reference prevailing in modern Western thought, and it also ended up inspiring the way in which the traditional revolutionary left, the one linked to the Party and unions, built the figure of the engaged intellectual and the relationship he should establish with the so-­ called masses. Ancient philosophical texts, on the other hand, allowed Foucault to perceive a very different way of relating to the truth: Instead of concepts such as neutrality, objectivity, the discovery of inner truth and self-denial, which followed the Western will to know, Foucault found notions such as courage, freedom, risk, aesthetics of existence, care of self and others and ethics. This was possible only by his openness to new ways of thinking. Foucault understands transformation of the self, which is intrinsic to the work of the intellectual, as follows: “an elaboration of the self by the self, a studious transformation, a slow and arduous transformation through a constant care for the truth.” (Foucault 1996: 461) This attitude of constant care for the truth also allowed Foucault to problematize the traditional left party frameworks, which designated intellectuals to tell others what should be done and to formulate prophecies, promises, and political programs. The main objective was to “mold the political will of others.” (Foucault 1996: 462). With the changes, noticed

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by Foucault since 1945, intellectuals no longer act as a universal representative. Accordingly, the figure of the specific intellectual emerges, producing transformations in his own domain of particular activity. His intents are to “to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities.” (Foucault 1996: 462). While speaking about prisons, in a 1973 dialogue, Foucault shows this critical strength of the specific intellectual. As he escapes from false metaphysical problems (a utopian society without prisons), he also addresses the importance of group autonomy in managing their own lives: When asked if he can imagine a society without prisons. Foucault: The answer is easy. There were, in fact, societies without prisons not so very long ago. As a mode of punishment, prison is an invention dating from the beginning of the nineteenth century. (…) You want me to describe a utopian society where there would be no prison. The problem is to find out whether a society could be imagined in which the application of rules would be applied by groups themselves. It is the whole question of political power, the problem of hierarchy, authority, State, and State apparatus. (Foucault 1994: 432)

One of the admitted familiarities Foucault helped dispel with his studies on the transformation in production of subjectivity and creation of new modes of existence was certainly the relationship established by the traditional left between the militant and the revolutionary party. According to Reis Filho, when joining the Party, a militant experienced a sense of superiority: There is plenty of reasons for that: he is now part of a general staff that will transform the world, holding the keys to its understanding. Therefore, he differs from ordinary, general people; he has special knowledge—Marxism-­ Leninism—and power—resulting from the former—over people and events. (Reis Filho 1989: 119)

But, on the other hand, the militant knows that his superiority derives exclusively from the Party, and his knowledge and power are only possible because of his chosen life as a partisan. Then, there is also a sense of inferiority that accompanies the militant in relation to the Party, through “debt complex. Debt will always be structuring the social practice of communists: having incurred errors, the party will have failed, he will have to clear debts, and be self-critical. Facing victories, he will only have fulfilled

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his revolutionary duty and followed the Party line.” (Reis Filho 1989: 119). Upon joining the Party, the militant becomes aware of his needs, which only life as a partisan will be able to supply. He must also overcome the petty-bourgeois deviations from the society he brings with him. The Party’s role is to transform members into “new men” (Reis Filho 1989: 120), following, as Reis Filho (1989: 121–122) lists, values defended by Engels, MaoTsé-Tung, Gramsci, Lukács, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara: “ascetic austerity,” “spartan equality,” “spirit of sacrifice,” “determination,” “discipline,” “heroism,” “modesty,” “simplicity,” “spirit of camaraderie,” “originality,” “personality,” “altruism” and many others in that sense. On the other hand, characteristics attacked by self-criticism sessions were: “subjectivism,” “adventurism,” “passivity,” “liberalism.” (Reis Filho 1989: 125). Furthermore, self-satisfaction was condemnable, “because communists are never satisfied with what they have already accomplished and seek to achieve the maximum in each moment.” (Reis Filho 1989: 129). Vices created by the petty-bourgeoisie should be severely contained by the Party, hence a very characteristic process that involved the entry of militants into the Party: The theme of class “suicide” would be resumed by several revolutionary authors and leaders. It was necessary for the petty-bourgeois to “commit suicide” as a class in order to “resurrect” themselves as revolutionaries. Thus, intellectuals’ aspiration to be revolutionaries had to do—necessarily— with the denial of their origins. (Reis Filho 1989: 146)

Such practices demonstrate how the traditional leftist revolutionary party reproduces many of the Christian and modern techniques of producing subjectivity, mainly due to the themes of self-criticism, eternal lack and self-denial. Therefore, a fundamental dialogue exists between the possibilities of creating new modes of existence explained by Foucault and the practice of the specific intellectual. As Ewald, Farge, and Perrot argued, the ethics of the intellectual must: “bring about the modification of these regimes of truth that subject us to our own identity.” (Ewald et  al. 1985: 56). In 1984, Foucault states that one of the most important observations made by intellectuals and social movements after the Second World War was the crisis of all social and political programs. Political programs almost always led to abuses and the political domination of a group, whether technicians or bureaucrats. The big difference between the 1960s and the

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1970s, and Foucault (1997b: 172) saw it as a beneficial achievement, was that certain “institutional models have been experimented with without a program”: For instance, in France there has been a lot of criticism recently about the fact that there are no programs in the various political movements about sex, about prisons, about ecology, and so on. But in my opinion, being without a program can be very useful and very original and creative, if it does not mean without proper reflection about what is going on, or without very careful attention to what’s possible. (Foucault 1997b: 172)

Foucault insists that, since the nineteenth century, large institutions and political parties have confiscated the process of political creation. The changes produced between 1960 and 1970 by social movements, according to him, should be preserved, mainly because their actions take place outside the major political parties and a traditional program: It’s a fact that people’s everyday lives have changed from the early sixties to now, and certainly within my own life. And surely that is not due to political parties but is the result of many movements. These social movements have really changed our whole lives, our mentality, our attitudes, and the attitudes and mentality of other people—people who do not belong to these movements. And that is something very important and positive. I repeat, it is not the normal and old traditional political organizations that have led to this examination. (Foucault 1997b: 172–173)

In an anonymous interview he gave to French newspaper Le Monde, “The Masked Philosopher,” Foucault dreamed of “a new age of curiosity” (Foucault 1997c: 325), multiplying ways and possibilities to come and go. He argues philosophy is a way of reflecting not so much on what is true and what is false, but on our own relationship with truth: to separate ourselves from what is admitted as truth and all the work done to think differently, to do different things, to become different from what you are. Curiosity, however, was stigmatized by Christianity, philosophy, and a certain conception of science. It was also associated with futility. But Foucault relates it to another word—care—: Curiosity is seen as futility. However, I like the word; it suggests something quite different to me. It evokes “care”; it evokes the care one takes of what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never

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immobilized before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is disappearing; a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and fundamental. (Foucault 1997c: 325)

Accordingly, Salma Muchail argues that the Ancients’ emphasis on self-­ care inspires Foucault not to directly move these precepts into our present, but to rehabilitate a view that had been obscured from philosophical tradition. Leaning on Gros and Foucault himself, Muchail indicates the possibility appointed in Foucault’s studies on Ancient culture: (…) today, to “exacerbate,” the Socratic injunction of self-care. This also means (…) reformulating the question once suitable to Hellenistic philosophers and make it suitable for us: “how can the subject act as it suits him, be as he may, insofar as he not only knows the truth, but insofar as he says it, practices it, and exercises it? (Muchail 2009: 360)

And Foucault himself did not fail to appropriate that question formulated by Hellenistic philosophers. He practiced philosophy which not only dealt with how we know the truth, but mainly, it showed how fundamental it is to have the courage to practice and exercise the truth in one’s own way of living. In the interview previously mentioned, “The Masked Philosopher” (1980), Foucault also puts the last thirty years of philosophical activity in a nutshell. He argues it was very intense, mainly because there was “interaction between analysis, research, “learned” or “theoretical” criticism, and changes in behavior, in people’s real conduct, their way of being, their relation to themselves and to others has been constant and considerable.” (Foucault 1997c: 327). I end this work with an excerpt explaining the relationship this book intended to address—Foucault’s gesture of reflecting at once on our connection with the truth and the change in the way we conduct ourselves: I was saying just now that philosophy was a way of reflecting on our relationship to truth. It should also be added that it is a way of interrogating ourselves: If this is the relationship that we have with truth, how must we behave? I believe that a considerable and varied amount of work has been done and is still being done that alters both our relation to truth and our way of behaving. And this has taken place in a complex situation, between a whole series of investigations and a whole set of social movements. It’s the very life of philosophy. (Foucault 1997c: 327)

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References Ewald, François; Farge, Arlette; Perrot, Michelle (1985). Une Pratique de la vérité. Michel Foucault. Une Histoire de la vérité. Paris: Syros. Foucault, Michel (1994). Prisons et révoltes dans les prisons. Dits et écrits II (1970–1975). Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, Michel (1996). The Concern for Truth. In: Foucault Live: Collected Interviews 1961–1984. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e). Foucault, Michel (1997a). The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom. In: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press. Foucault, Michel (1997b). Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity. In: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press. Foucault, Michel (1997c). The Masked Philosopher. In: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press. Muchail, Salma Tannus (2009). “Leitura dos antigos, reflexões do presente”. In: Rago, Margareth; Veiga-Neto, Alfredo. Para uma vida não-fascista. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica. Reis Filho, Daniel Aarão (1989). A Revolução faltou ao encontro. Os comunistas no Brasil. São Paulo: Brasiliense.

Index

A Aesthetics, xxi, xxiii, xxiv, 6, 21, 22, 43–51, 67, 77, 91, 112, 137, 144, 154 Anarcheology, 21, 42 Anarchism, x, xxii, 42, 55, 70, 72–74, 83, 91, 103, 136 Anarchist, 41, 56, 63, 70, 72–74, 82, 83, 89, 97, 101, 129 Ancient culture, xxi, xxiv, 4–6, 23, 28, 30, 33, 34, 37, 93, 102, 123, 137, 144, 148, 153, 158 Antiquity, xxi, 2, 6, 7, 24, 30, 32, 49, 51, 66–68, 73, 79, 85, 93, 100, 112, 120 Art, 2, 4, 20, 21, 26, 40, 46–48, 66–68, 75–77, 88, 89, 93, 107, 111–148, 154 Asceticism, xxii, 68, 99–107, 146 Attitude, xxii, 1, 2, 4, 7–9, 19, 21, 44, 50, 62, 68, 83, 84, 86, 91, 92, 95, 112–126, 153, 154, 157 Autonomy, ix, x, xxii, xxiii, 2, 5, 8, 13, 26, 30–43, 71, 101, 129, 144, 155

B Bourgeois, xxiii, 38, 41, 57, 75, 89, 90, 104 Bourgeoisie, 60, 136 C Care of the self, 24, 45, 48, 66, 88, 91, 97 Christianity, x, xxi, 2, 3, 22–24, 28, 30, 32–34, 36, 49, 51, 79, 85, 95, 96, 100–103, 123, 144, 157 Courage, xxii–xxiv, 1–13, 17–51, 63, 66, 67, 72, 77, 82, 84, 85, 101, 102, 112–116, 122, 140–142, 154, 158 Creation, 13, 37, 76, 89, 122, 123, 126, 140, 145, 146, 148, 155, 157 Critique, x, xxi, xxiii, 7, 8, 22, 29, 38, 40, 42, 59, 66, 134 Cynicism, x, xxii, 5, 49–51, 55–107, 120 Cynics, x, xxii, 5–7, 13, 37, 43–51, 63, 66, 68–70, 72–74, 76–79, 81–89, 91–101, 104, 118–120, 123, 137, 144

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. P. Vieira, Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth and The Ethics of an Intellectual, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04356-7

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INDEX

D Democracy, 4, 41, 44, 65, 89, 115 Desire, xxiii, xxiv, 25, 26, 51, 80, 81, 104, 106, 116, 137, 148 Discourse, 1–3, 5, 11, 21, 25–28, 32, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 44, 47–49, 64–66, 74, 84–86, 97, 106, 112, 115–120, 123–126, 130, 132, 143 E Enlightenment, 7–9, 40, 62, 69 Ethics, ix, x, xxi, xxiii, xxiv, 6, 9, 10, 18, 19, 21, 23, 37–49, 65, 67, 79, 80, 83, 87, 93, 111, 125, 126, 137, 147, 148, 153–158 Existence, xxi–xxiv, 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 13, 19, 22, 25, 26, 37, 42–51, 56, 58, 59, 67, 68, 70, 71, 73, 75–80, 83–85, 87–89, 91–94, 96–98, 100, 103, 111, 112, 114, 120, 122–124, 133, 137–148, 154–156 F Family, xxiv, 11, 71, 78, 104, 105, 126, 131, 132, 134, 139, 143, 147 Feminism, x, 67, 112, 137 Freedom, xxiv, 1, 2, 5, 7, 9, 44, 47, 50, 57, 61, 71, 74, 94, 95, 103, 124, 137, 142–148, 154 Friendship, xxiv, 5, 146 G Gay, x, xxii, 97, 104, 112, 135, 137, 144–148 Genealogy, xxii, 21, 128 Government, 8, 9, 17–30, 38–44, 56, 61, 82, 92, 95, 116, 118, 124, 125

H Heterotopia, 82, 83, 86–91 History, x, xiii, xxii, 2, 3, 7, 13, 18–21, 24, 25, 29, 33, 38, 40, 42, 47–49, 51, 56, 58, 62, 63, 66–68, 70, 72–74, 77, 79, 82, 83, 85–87, 93, 98, 114, 116, 120, 123, 127, 129, 132, 134, 138, 141, 143 Homosexual, 105, 135, 136, 145–147 I Identity, 84, 135, 138, 142, 145, 148, 156 Ideology, xxii, 12, 18, 38, 39, 42, 58, 62, 73, 81, 106, 143 Institution, xxiv, 5, 10, 19, 20, 28, 31, 34, 43, 63–66, 68, 82, 86, 93, 102, 103, 124, 125, 127, 138–140, 143, 144, 157 Institutional, 19, 28, 29, 44, 45, 63, 75, 81, 102, 105, 124, 143–146, 157 Intellectual, ix, x, xiv, xxii–xxiv, 1–13, 41, 43, 51, 55–107, 111–129, 131–134, 136, 140, 145, 153–158 Invention, 23, 48, 91, 100, 107, 143, 145, 146, 155 J Justice, 10, 11, 45, 71, 113, 127, 128 K Knowledge, ix, xv, xxi, xxii, xxiv, 2, 4, 9–11, 17–51, 59, 60, 69, 79, 86, 95, 101–105, 114, 118, 122–124, 126, 132–134, 138, 139, 143, 154, 155

 INDEX 

L Law, 5, 11, 25, 33–35, 40, 60, 78, 84, 86, 93, 98, 117–119, 128, 130, 135, 141, 145, 146, 148 Leftist, x, xxiii, xxiv, 11, 63, 67, 71, 75, 97, 112, 128, 130, 154, 156 Leninist, 12, 61, 137 Life, x, xxii, xxiv, 3–6, 10, 13, 25, 26, 28, 31, 34, 37, 44–50, 55–107, 111, 112, 118–120, 123, 131, 135, 136, 138, 141–148, 155–158 Love, 83, 146, 147 M Maoist, xxiv, 126–131, 136, 137 Marriage, 92, 143–146 Marxism, xxii, 10, 38, 43, 57, 60, 62, 81, 105, 106, 131, 133, 134, 155 Militancy, xxii–xxiv, 31, 37, 55–107, 111–148, 154 Modernity, xxi, xxii, 8, 9, 24, 28, 40, 56, 67, 78, 85, 154 Moral, 2, 3, 6, 18, 19, 33, 34, 45, 66, 69, 72, 79, 80, 92, 93, 98, 121, 124–126, 143 N Norms, 6, 19, 69, 76, 104, 124 O Obedience, xxii, 23, 24, 30–43, 100–103 Objectivity, xxiv, 13, 25, 154 Other life, 72, 87, 88, 91–100 Other word, 63, 64, 69, 102, 132

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P Parrhēsia, xxi, xxii, 1–4, 6, 7, 9, 12, 13, 20, 23, 27, 29, 31–33, 37, 43–45, 47–50, 63, 89, 101–103, 113–120, 122–125, 142 Party, x, xxii–xxiv, 3, 12, 31, 41, 51, 55–107, 111, 112, 133, 136, 140, 154–157 Philosophy, x, xxii, xxiii, 3–5, 11, 12, 20, 21, 27, 30–33, 40, 44, 46, 48, 49, 51, 57, 59, 65–68, 78–81, 84–88, 93–95, 106, 112, 115–120, 123–126, 137, 139, 145, 157, 158 Pleasure, 25, 45, 78, 105, 112, 115, 145, 148 Politics, x, xxi, xxiii, 3, 4, 8–10, 12, 13, 17–51, 64–66, 78, 81, 89, 97, 112, 130, 145, 147 Power, xi, 4, 6, 10–12, 19–25, 28–31, 35, 37, 39–44, 55–57, 61, 63, 67, 71, 81–83, 89, 91, 97–99, 101, 102, 105, 106, 112, 116, 118, 119, 125, 126, 130, 133, 136–141, 145, 148, 154, 155 Practices of truth, 97 Present, x, xxi, xxii, xxiv, 6–11, 13, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 50, 56, 62, 68, 71, 75, 77, 80, 89, 90, 96–98, 100, 112, 121, 122, 124, 125, 134, 138, 139, 142, 145, 154, 158 Prisons, xxiv, 6, 20, 38, 56, 111, 120, 126–137, 147, 155, 157 Problematization, xxi, xxii, 7, 8, 12, 18, 26, 67, 78, 126, 131, 144 R Rationality, 30–43, 75, 81, 119 Regime of truth, 23, 101

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Relationship, x, xi, xxi–xxiv, 2–5, 7–11, 13, 17–20, 23, 25–34, 36–38, 40–42, 44, 48–50, 58, 59, 61, 63, 65–67, 71, 75–77, 79, 80, 92, 96, 97, 101–105, 112, 113, 115, 116, 118–120, 122, 126, 133, 135, 136, 138, 141, 142, 144–146, 148, 154, 155, 157, 158 Revolt, 91, 134, 140, 141 Revolution, x, xxii, 3, 11, 12, 41, 43, 55, 57–59, 62, 63, 66, 68, 82, 89, 91, 95, 98, 99, 101, 104–106, 128, 129, 131, 133, 136, 140, 141, 153 Rhetoric, xxii, 4, 32, 113, 116, 117, 123 Risk, xxiv, 1, 13, 44, 49, 64, 65, 67, 85, 113–115, 120, 122, 123, 140, 141, 154 S Science, x, xxi, xxii, 10–12, 30, 38–40, 42, 43, 51, 85, 86, 106, 116, 124, 157 Self and others, xxiv, 9, 18–30, 38, 99, 154 Sex, 26, 104, 105, 146, 147, 157 Sexuality, 18, 20, 25, 26, 28, 36, 38, 135, 142, 147, 148 Silence, 2, 10, 64, 65, 83, 102, 122, 131 Speak, x, 1, 3, 4, 13, 23, 32, 36, 47, 59, 61, 64, 81, 83, 89, 95, 112, 114, 115, 120–124, 129, 133, 134, 142, 143

Speech, 2, 13, 44, 47, 51, 80, 83, 84, 96, 113–115, 117, 118, 121, 124, 125, 131, 144 State, x, xxii, xxiv, 7, 8, 10, 22, 25, 31, 33–35, 40–42, 44, 55–57, 60–62, 66, 69–71, 74, 77, 83, 90, 91, 93, 95, 96, 98, 105, 106, 127, 138–140, 142, 145, 146, 148, 155, 156 Struggles, 10–12, 17, 20, 21, 46, 55, 59, 62, 63, 67, 81, 82, 90, 92, 97–99, 104–106, 121, 126–128, 130, 132, 133, 135, 137, 138, 140, 147, 148 Subject, ix–xi, 2, 3, 8, 9, 17–30, 32–36, 39, 42–45, 59, 67, 114, 118, 119, 122, 126, 134, 138, 140, 141, 143, 144, 146, 156, 158 Subjectivity, xxii, xxiv, 2, 3, 13, 22–26, 33, 34, 36, 37, 42, 48, 51, 101, 138–142, 144, 145, 148, 153–156 T Technique, 3, 19–22, 24–26, 29–31, 34, 35, 45, 47, 56, 66, 113, 122, 123, 125, 138, 147, 148, 153, 156 Thought, ix–xi, xiv, xxi–xxiv, 4, 6–8, 13, 18–21, 23, 25, 26, 30, 31, 35, 37, 38, 40, 42, 44, 46, 48–51, 59, 60, 62, 63, 65, 66, 68, 72, 74, 78, 79, 82, 83, 85, 86, 90, 91, 93, 94, 97, 99, 106, 112, 116, 120, 134, 137, 143, 154, 158

 INDEX 

Transformation, x, xi, xxii–xxiv, 7, 10, 11, 13, 20, 21, 30, 37, 40, 42, 44, 55, 57, 61, 63, 68, 74, 76, 80–83, 87, 89, 91–99, 104–106, 111, 154, 155 Truth, xi, xxi–xxiv, 1–13, 17–51, 59, 63–68, 72, 74–77, 81, 83–89, 95–97, 100–104, 106, 111–116, 118–126, 139, 142–144, 146, 147, 154, 156–158 U Universal, x, xxi, 8–11, 25, 38, 41–43, 55, 56, 81, 93, 105, 155 Utopia, 86–91, 104, 148

165

V Values, xxii, xxiii, 6, 12, 19, 49, 60, 61, 67–69, 71, 72, 75, 76, 78, 80, 83–85, 100–103, 114, 121, 122, 136, 145, 156 W Western, x, xxii, xxiv, 2, 20, 24, 27, 30, 31, 34, 36–38, 44–46, 48, 51, 65–81, 85–89, 93, 105, 120, 142, 154 Women, 12, 67, 105, 135–137, 147, 148