The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

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emphasized the process through which the human became an object of scientiic discourses of truth. Yet, Foucault wants to show that truth had a different history and a different set of rules prior to the modern scientiic understanding of truth as objective and demonstrative. Truth has not always presented itself as an ahistorical and unconditioned object (see also Detienne 1999). These studies in antiquity aim to restore the modality of the event to the advent of truth. In a late interview, Foucault clariied this emphasis on truth:

After all, why truth? How did it come about that all of Western culture began to revolve around this obligation of truth which has taken a lot of different forms? Things being as they are, nothing so far has shown that it is possible to deine a strategy outside of this concern. It is within the ield of the obligation to truth that it is possible to move about in one way or another, sometimes against the effects of domination which may be linked to structures of truth or institutions entrusted with truth.... Thus, one escaped from a domination of truth not by playing a game that was totally different from the game of truth but by playing the same game differently, or playing another game, another, with other trump cards. (EEW1, 295)

There is no pure outside to the truth game but only a different set of rules and a different set of possible cards. Foucault’s studies of the ancient world do not then seek to escape games of truth but to examine a different set of rules and cards by which these games were played. In order to do this, they analyze games of truth that are speciically tied to the character of the event: in terms of rituals, practices, forms of speech, and askesis.

In this movement to examine a whole different set of truth games free from the demonstrative reign of self-evidence, Foucault will show the different forms in which truth was not primarily predicated on an epistemological but rather an ethical (or political) relation in antiquity. For example, in The Hermeneutics of the Subject, he shows that modern philosophy has entirely overlooked the fundamental link between the care of the self (epimeleia heautou) and truth in antiquity. The maxim at Delphi, know thyself (gnothi seauton), has almost completely overshadowed this other history. Foucault shows the Hellenistic practices through which self-care was always required of the subject in order to have access to truth, and where self-knowledge only had meaning with respect to a preliminary care of the self. A reexamination of the igure of Socrates in The Apology illuminates the centrality of this theme of self-care. Here, Socrates is fundamentally a character who urges others to take care of themselves, and it is only through such care that they might eventually attain the path to wisdom. This theme is clearly present in all of Stoic philosophy as well, and Foucault shows that it was, in fact, a fundamental concern of all of antiquity.

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In The Courage of Truth, Foucault extends his studies of parresia (frank speech or fearless truth-telling) from the previous year’s course, “The Government of Self and Others,” and shows the way in which the true discourse of a subject is bound not to a condition of knowledge but an ethical and political condition. For example, in Plato’s Laches, Socrates’ ability to speak the truth is predicated not on a correspondence with his knowledge but on an ethical relation of mastery he has achieved in his deeds. Thus, it is through the harmony between words and deeds that Socrates has access to the true and frank discourse of parresia. The Cynics radicalize this harmony and ask the question: what is the form of life such that we can make the brilliance of the truth appear in the very form of our existence? The Cynics arrive at a point where parresia becomes a confrontational form of life over and above a confrontational form of speech. Thus, we see that the alethurgical appearance of truth is already produced in the mode of existence itself, in the bios, which does not necessarily await the articulation of the logos to become visible: “In short, Cynicism makes life, existence, bios, what could be called an alethurgy, a manifestation of truth”

(ECF-COT, 172). Arriving at the end of Foucault’s philosophical career, we are quite far from the reign of self-evidence. Instead truth is manifested in the scandalous practice of Cynic critique, one that brilliantly appears through bios rather than logos with the force of an event.

In concluding, it is worth considering two critiques often posed to Foucault’s philosophy of truth. The irst is the claim that Foucault is nothing more than a radical relativist and so must not be able to tell us very much about truth. This claim fails to grasp the nature of a regime of truth that is precisely not just any set of rules or rituals but ones that have been historically instantiated to have determinate effects on the very being of the subject. The radical relativist would have no interest in games of truth, because the radical relativist thinks that there are no rules of constraint and that any and all acts may pass as true depending on the beliefs or opinions of the individual. This position could not be further from Foucault’s view that we must understand the speciic constraints that lead us to formulate and carry out truths on ourselves, whether it be in scientiic studies that objectify the subject, practices of power that conduct the subject, or in the ethical relations that the subject holds to itself. Truth is always embedded within a network of constraints and possible actions.

The second critique leveled against Foucault asks about the truth content of his own utterances that he produces in his books, essays, and interviews. In response to this question, Foucault claims that his books should be read as experiences and not as factual claims to be veriied as true or false (EEW3, 239–246). Foucault’s aim in writing philosophy is not to expose us to some deeper truth, for this would return his work to the very ideology theory that his work aims to displace. Instead, these experience books aim at the immanent critique of the intolerable effects of power and subjection that certain discourses of truth hold for the subject. The aim is not

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See Also

Historical a Priori

Knowledge

Parresia

Power

Self

Spirituality

Martin Heidegger

Suggested Reading

Detienne, Marcel. 1999. The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece. Cambridge, MA: Zone Books. Flynn, Thomas R. 1985. “Truth and Subjectivation in the Later Foucault,” Journal of Philosophy

82, no. 10:531–540.

Gros, Frédéric. 2004. “Michel Foucault, Une Philosophie de la Vérité,” in Michel Foucault: Philosophie Anthologie, ed. Arnold I. Davidson and Frédéric Gros. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, pp. 11–25.

Lorenzini, Daniele. 2008. “‘El Cinismo Hace de la Vida Una Aleturgie.’ Apuntes Para Una Relectura del Recorrido Filosóico del Último Michel Foucault,” Revista Laguna 23:63–90.

2010. “Para Acabar con la Verdad-Demostración. Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault y La Historia de los ‘Regímenes de Verdad,’” Revista Laguna 26:9–34.

Prado, C. G. 2006. Foucault and Searle on Truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, chap. 3.

Revel, Judith. 2009. “Vérité/Jeux de Vérité,” in Le Vocabulaire de Foucault. Paris: Éditions Ellipses, pp. 64–65.

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This neat separation of power from violence restores the possibility of a critique of violence, as some of Foucault’s commentators have aptly pointed out. Thomas Flynn (Flynn 2005, 244–245, 250), for example, notes that for Foucault all violence attaches to relations of power, but not all relations of power necessarily entail violence. It is rather the species of power that Foucault calls “domination” and Flynn labels “negative” power with which violence is necessarily associated. It refers to power relations that are nonconsensual and have become institutionalized in a way that the individuals embedded in them are unable to overturn or alter (EEW1, 299).

In light of Foucault’s earlier writings on power, the categorical distinction he makes between power and violence in this late text is, however, in many ways perplexing. It seems as if there had been almost a complete reversal in his views. In his original and extensive work on modern forms of power such as disciplinary power, for example, Foucault seemed to have argued for exactly the opposite: any clear distinction between power and violence is untenable. Foucault had also used the model of war for analyzing the functioning of power relations, and had argued for the superiority of this model in comparison to all contractual models of power.

Foucault’s characterization of disciplinary power in Discipline and Punish is in many ways strikingly similar to his late deinition of violence: disciplinary power is power that acts directly on bodies. It oversteps the rules of law and right and is addressed to bodies, to “man-as-body.” It is exercised through constant surveillance, observation, and examination but also through more manifestly violent means of manipulating bodies through a closely meshed grid of material coercions. The violence of disciplinary power is markedly different from the violence characterizing earlier forms of punishment, however. It does not subject the body to violence that is spectacular and disproportional but, on the contrary, disciplinary violence is carefully hidden, meticulous, and economical. It focuses on the details of the body, on single movements, on their timing and rapidity. It organizes bodies in space and schedules their every action for maximum effect. Unlike older forms of bodily coercion such as public tortures, slavery, and hangings, disciplinary power does not operate by mutilating the body, but this does not mean that it should be understood as nonviolent.

Foucault sets disciplinary power in opposition to juridical power. Whereas juridical power operates with the binary framework of legal and illegal, disciplinary power is capable of making more nuanced distinctions through the functioning of norms. The contrast to juridical power is illuminating in terms of understanding the fusion of disciplinary power with new forms of violence. Although juridical power is arguably founded on violence, and the threat of violence forms its necessary condition of possibility, the relationship between power and violence at least appears instrumental. The exercise of police violence, for example, is intended to be restrictive and punitive and is reserved for those who break or contest the law. The sharp distinction that Arendt, for example, makes between power as an end in itself and

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violence as merely the means for securing it seems to hold in the case of juridical power. What characterizes disciplinary power, on the other hand, is that the dividing line between power and violence becomes permeable, at times totally indistinguishable. Disciplinary power/violence is not only punitive but also corrective, rehabilitating and restoring. In short, it produces subjectivity.

Another important instance in Foucault’s oeuvre that seems to question the possibility of a categorical distinction between power and violence occurs in his Collège de France lecture course “Society Must Be Defended” (Il faut défendre la société) held in 1976. He introduces the course by noting that he would like to begin a series of investigations into whether war can provide a principle for the analysis of power relations. Rather than war being seen as a disruptive principle, he wants to treat it as a principle of intelligibility for understanding history, power, and society. With the model of war, Foucault attempts to offer an alternative to what he calls “the economic models of power”: power should not be regarded as a right, which can be possessed in the way that one possesses a commodity. It is not something that the individual can hold, and that he or she can surrender, either as a whole or in part so as to constitute a political sovereignty (ECF-SMD, 13). Rather than understanding political power in terms of contracts, laws, and the establishment of sovereignty, we should understand it in terms of an unending and shifting struggle, a movement that makes some dominant over others. In the irst lecture, Foucault famously inverts Clausewitz’s (1984, 87) dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means and chooses as his working hypothesis the claim that politics is the continuation of war. He distinguishes this model from the juridical contract schema represented by Hobbes and his contractarian followers by claiming that the essential opposition is not between the legitimate and the illegitimate but between struggle and submission (ECF-SMD, 17). This war is thus not the abstract, Hobbesian war of every man against every man but a concrete historical struggle in which groups ight groups. Foucault claims that Western political thought has been dominated by social contract theories focusing on the constitution of sovereignty and positing the contract as the matrix of political power. This discourse has covered up the memory of real war that lies at the genesis of sovereignty. As Foucault polemically formulates his aim, it is to show how the birth of states, their organization, and juridical structures are not the result of a contract but arise from and are maintained in the blood and mud of battles. Violence must be understood as fundamentally constitutive of our social and political reality in this sense.

Although it is thus important to take seriously Foucault’s late distinction between power and violence and its signiicance for critiques of violence, this distinction is not the most original contribution that Foucault makes for our understanding of violence. If Foucault’s understanding of violence is reduced to a categorical distinction between consensual power and coercive violence, we lose sight of what is most original and important in his approach to it. All deinitions of violence, including the

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ones that Foucault himself provides, must be understood in the light of his understanding of power and knowledge as political acts, and their extension and validity must be open to constant contestation.

When we analyze power on the level of individual acts, it is possible to make fairly clear distinctions between acts of power and acts of violence. When we move to the level of governmentality and attempt to analyze the technologies of power, the distinction becomes more problematic. The practices and institutions of government, in the broad sense of the term, are always enabled, regulated, and justiied by a speciic form of reasoning or rationality that deines the ends and the appropriate means of achieving them. The analytics of power technologies must concentrate not only on the actual mechanisms of power but also on the rationality that is part of the practices of governing. If we think of a power network as a game, as Foucault has also suggested (e.g., FDE3, 542), then the analysis of the techniques of government would mean an analysis of both the implicit and the explicit rules that this game conforms to. On this level, it is dificult to start with a clear distinction between violence and power because the rules, to a large extent, determine what is understood as acts of power or as acts of violence in the speciic game. Moreover, different rules or rationalities are compatible with different forms of violence.

We could take the example of “domestic violence” and argue that it is only in a certain cultural and historical context that it even exists. Forms of behavior that we now conceptualize as domestic violence have only very recently been understood as forms of violence at all. Another example could be “terrorism.” Because our descriptions of the world are inevitably the expression of hegemonic power relations, there cannot be any objective or purely descriptive deinitions of terrorism and terror. Many of the recent critical analyses of terrorism acknowledge Foucault’s claim that we should rather attempt to study the political effects of using such a label. Judith Butler (Butler 2004, 87–88), for example, has emphasized that various forms of violence are called “terror” not because there are valences of violence that can be distinguished from one another on objective grounds but because the label functions as a way of characterizing the violence waged by political entities deemed illegitimate by established states. The use of the terms “terror” and “terrorism” works to delegitimize certain forms of violence committed by political entities that are not state centered, and at the same time they sanction a violent response by established states. In other words, terror does not describe a distinct type of violence but a form of violence that is illegitimate. It is not a descriptive notion but a prescriptive notion, the intelligibility of which depends on the normative claim that it makes.

The always partial, power-laden, and arbitrary nature of all interpretative acts is itself often referred to as violence. Foucault oversteps his narrow deinition of violence as bodily harm when he describes the “violence” of the interpretative act itself. Following Nietzsche, he claims that any interpretation of reality is always a form of violence in the sense that knowledge “can only be a violation of the things to be

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known,” not a simple recognition or identiication of them (EEW3, 9). The task of his genealogical approach is not to expose and record the hidden and essential meaning of our history. Instead, we have to acknowledge that every interpretation is “the violent or surreptitious appropriation of a system of rules” (EEW2, 378). History as interpretation is itself a series of violent acts, and Foucault’s genealogies must be understood as weapons in this silent war.

On the basis of Foucault’s analytics of power, it is thus ultimately impossible to secure any categorical, context-free deinition of violence. On the contrary, the implication is that we must be wary of all such deinitions because of their ignoble histories and inescapable political effects. We must be mindful of Nietszche’s assertion that “only that which is without history can be deined” (Nietzsche 1996, 60). Foucault’s genealogies should be read as attempts to uncover the underpinning rationality of historically speciic practices of power and to study the extent to which this rationality implies and is compatible with speciic forms of violence. His most important legacy is not in providing us with a philosophically accurate deinition of power and violence but rather in demonstrating how all deinitions and social objectivities, including the meaning of violence, are constituted in power/knowledge networks and are therefore matters of political contestation and struggle.

Joanna Oksala

See Also

Contestation

Discipline

Knowledge

Power

War

Friedrich Nietzsche

Carl von Clausewitz

Suggested Reading

Arendt, Hannah. 1970. On Violence. San Diego: Harcourt Brace.

Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Clausewitz, Carl von. 1984. On War, ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret. Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press.

Flynn, Thomas R. 2005. Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, volume 2: A Post-Structuralist Mapping of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Hanssen, Beatrice. 2000. Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory. London: Routledge.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1996. On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Oksala, Johanna. 2010. “Violence and the Biopolitics of Modernity,” Foucault Studies 10:23–43. 2011a. “Lines of Fragility: A Foucauldian Critique of Violence,” in Philosophy and the Return of Violence: Studies from this Widening Gyre, ed. Christopher Yates and Nathan Eckstrand.

New York: Continuum, pp. 154–170.

2011b. “Violence and Neoliberal Governmentality,” Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 18:474–486.