Clare and friends
wonderful to be able to use our distributed archive to fill some publication
and memory gaps.
I located my notes on this lecture (9 January 1980). I transcribed this
passage which ovelaps with Clare's quote.
'Cette notion de gouvernement des hommes par la vérite, j'en avais parlé un
petit peu les années precedentes. Ce que veut dire élaborer cette notion? Il
s'agit par là de déplacer un peu les choses par rapport au theme maintenant
usagé et rabattu du savoir-pouvoir�. se débarrasser de la notion de savoir-pouvoir
comme on s'est débarrassé de la notion d'idéologie dominante.
[I spoke a bit about this notion of the government of men by truth in the
previous years. What does it mean? It's about shifting things around a little in
relation to the now rather tired and worn out theme of knowledge-powerâ?¦.
Discarding the notion of knowledge-power just as one previously discarded the
notion of a dominant ideology.]
Foucault says here and in the following lecture that he is interested in a
necessary relationship between 'exercise of sovereignty' and 'manifestation of
truth' (he calls the latter 'aletourgia'). He says that aletourgia exceeds or
is supplementary to knowledge which functions in a purely utilitarian role in
relation to the exercise of power. However he says that he feels unable to
give a general account of this relationship and the main part of this course
addresses manifestation of truth not in relation to political sovereignty but in
the early Christian doctrine of penitence (at the time, I was one of those
who found this rather frustrating...) . As far as I know he does not return
subsequently to discuss 'aletourgia', nor how he sees its relation to parrhesia.
Nor, as far as I know, does he elsewhere give quite the same explanation of the
benefits of the governmentality perpective or make the same explicit comment
on its merits as an advance on savoir-pouvoir. I am myself sure he did not
mean to tell other people who find the latter approach useful for their own
purposes that they should give it up.
The following is a short summary of the lecture in a part my Introduction to
'Power' which was omitted from the published text.
<< In the first of his College de France lectures for 1980 [1], Foucault
recalled how the Roman Emperor Severus had a hall built in which he dispensed
justice under a ceiling painted to show the stars in the sky at the moment of his
birth, their disposition indicating astrologically the necessity and
inevitability of his own sovereignty (which had, in the event, been acquired by
force). Foucault compares Severus with his recent predecessor, Marcus Aurelius,
Stoic philosopher and proponent of the Stoic view of government in which the order
of the Empire would be consonant with the order of the world.
Through these examples, Foucault identifies an issue which he sees as
going beyond the mere availability to government of a useful knowledge: it
concerns, more generally, 'a relation between the exercise of power and the
manifestation of truth'. This truth, who manifestation needs to accompany the exercise
of power, goes considerably beyond the simple content of knowledges useful to
government: it contains the notion that a valid governmental hegemony
(exercise of power) calls for the performance of some form of ritual manifestation of
a truth. For this notion, adapting a word used by the ancient writer
Heraklides, Foucault proposes the term aletourgia. He cites an example of such a ritual
from the early modern period in France, in the episode of an expulsion of a
soothsayer from the royal court.[2] Foucault links this notion to the idea of a
'government of men through truth' which he had touched in his 1978 and 1979
lecture on governmental rationality, reason of state, liberalism and
neoliberalism. It contains, he suggests, a respect in which the notions of government
and governmental rational, the 'conduct of men's conduct', now seem to him a
more effective and satisfactory means of analysis than his earlier notions of
power and power/knowledge - which he indeed speaks of here, in 1980, as needing
to be discarded, just as one had previously discarded the (Marxist) notion of a
dominant ideology.
Foucault went on to cite five widely differing examples of ways
'manifestation of truth' and 'government of men' have been thought of as conjoined in
modern times. The 16th-17th century doctrines of raison d'état propose a
knowledge of the truth of the state, as the object of governmental action; Quesnay
and the French économistes of the 18th century argue that more truth means less
government; as government recognises better the truths of economy, it will no
longer be men who governed, but the nature of things themselves; Saint-Simon,
in the early nineteenth century, puts forward the influential Polytechnician's
idea of government as a kind of social engineering, capable of achieving its
results through a specialised, technical expertise ; Rosa Luxembourg calls for
a universal consciousness-raising [prise de conscience] as the immediate
instrument for overturning governments, regimes and systems - capitalism would not
last another 24 hours, if the truth were known; Alexander Soljenitsyn holds,
conversely, that everyone does know the nature of (socialist) power, and the
latter survives none the less: the power of terror is the power of a naked
government, showing itself for what it is - not a lie, but the truth.
This discussion of aletourgia advances an important thesis: that the
acceptability and tenability of government in Western culture depends on a
criterion more general and polymorphic, and therefore only partially or contingently
convergent with, the particular desiderata of either legitimacy or
instrumental savoir.
[1]Tapes of these lectures are held in the archives of the Centre Michel
Foucault in Paris. To my knowledge, Foucault's discussion of aletourgia has never
appeared in a published text. His lectures of January 1980 are a reworking the
commentary on Sophocles' Oedipus Rex contained in the 1974 Brazilian lectures
reproduced here, and which he recalled giving at the Collège de France in
around 1971. In 1974, the tragedy is interpreted, as we have seen*, as the fall
of the tyrant who denies the necessary separation of knowledge and power; in
1980, while the detail of the analysis is largely the same, Foucault finds a
slightly different conclusion being reached: the necessity to the valid exercise
of sovereignty of the manifestation of truth.
Foucault gave altogether thirteen annual lecture courses at the Collège de
France. Tapes and transcripts exist for all but one of the courses. The 1976
lectures were published in Italian in 1990 and French in early 1997. It was then
announced that the other courses would appear in further edited volumes at a
rate of about one per year.
[2]Foucault cites on this topic D. Grozynski's paper in Vernant ed.,
Divination et rationnalité.
* In his 1974 lectures in Brazil, 'Truth and Juridical Forms', Foucault gives
an introduction to his work of that period on power and knowledge through a
commentary on a passage in Nietzsche, and on Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. Foucault
draws on the work of his mentor Georges Dumézil on the social structure of
early Indo-European societies, to interpret the drama of Oedipus as enacting the
fall of a certain model of political power - the rule of the early Greek
'tyrant', which Foucault considers a Western offshoot of the Assyrian model of
kingship in which knowledge (wisdom, expertise) and the function of political rule
are conceived as an indivisible unity. Sophocles' drama, like the philosophy
of Plato, is a rebuttal of the claim of the ruler to an intrinsic and
proprietary form of knowledge. Greek philosophy will assert the autonomy of truth from
power, and affirm the permanent possibility of an external, critical
challenge to power in the name of truth.
In this discussion Foucault locates himself within the heritage of
Nietzsche, as the thinker who breaks with this tradition in Western philosophy by
rejecting its founding disjunction of power and knowledge as a myth. Foucault
does not mean by this, as some of his critics have chosen to suppose, that power
cannot be criticised and that there are no intrinsic criteria for establishing
claims to know. He is saying, rather, that the actual forms of Western
politics and Western rationality have both, from the time of the Greeks to out own
present, incorporated features not dreamt of (or at any rate only
intermittently perceived and investigated) in the pre-Nietzschean canon of Western
philosophy.
>>
Colin
In a message dated 19/03/04 03:52:12 GMT Standard Time,
panoptique@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
> Subj: Re: (More questions on) power-knowledge
> Date: 19/03/04 03:52:12 GMT Standard Time
> From: panoptique@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Reply-to: foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> To: foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Sent from the Internet
>
>
>
> A few days ago Colin Gordon was referring to some comments by
> Foucault about his use of power-knowledge and governmentality.
>
> I have located the passages in question. It is in his lecture of 9
> January 198o. This lecture has not been published as yet. I found it
> in the Foucault archives in Paris. It's actually a rather amusing
> passage in places. He says:
>
> 'This notion of the government of men by truth ... Elaborating this
> notion means displacing things a little in relation to the now
> overused and worn out theme of power-knowledge. For the history of
> thought, I had an analysis which was more or less organized, or which
> revolved around, the notion of dominant ideology. In general, if you
> like, there are two successive displacements: then, from the notion
> of dominant ideology to that of power-knowledge and now, a second
> displacement from the notion of knowledge-power to the notion of
> government by the truth... Discarding the notion of knowledge-power
> the same way as I discarded the notion of dominant ideology. Well,
> when I say that, I am perfectly devastated (detruite) because it is
> obvious that you don't discard something you thought yourself in the
> same way as you discard what others have thought. As a consequence I
> will certainly be more indulgent with the notion of knowledge-power
> than with that of dominant ideology, but it is up to you to criticize
> me for that.'
> --
> Clare
> ************************************************
> Clare O'Farrell
> email: panoptique@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> website: http://www.foucault.qut.edu.au
> ************************************************
>
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