This may be helpful, as a summative and selective assessment of the main themes of Foucault's courses on L'Herméneutique du Sujet, Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres, and Courage de la vérité.
This would wrap up the Foucauldian arguments about political life and would clarifiy what his research on aesthetics of existence leads to: How practices, discourses, and forms of subjectivization are intertwined and how they shape dominant dispositifs and/or regimes (of truth, of spirituality, etc.), and how self-transformative practices of self-subjectivization are always already political--and not merely "aesthetic" as understood separately from a bios politikos.
Best,
Fouad Kalouche
p.s. I would welcome any suggestions/comments at fkalouche@xxxxxxxxxxx as I work on revising these parts/selections of a paper I am working on.
1. Foucault: from Psyche to Bios
Whether he analyzed power, the subject, and/or transformation, Foucault studied processes within specific historical settings. He focuses on “how” power functions, how the subject is constructed, or how transformation takes place, and in order to do so, he needs tools of analyses, not as foundational principles but as a set of relations involving intersections and inter-connections (or “agencement”) of practices, knowledge/discourses, institutions, etc.[i] Of these tools of analyses, the “subject” and “subjectivity” designate a specific site that is always already historically constructed through processes of subjectivization. In “The Subject and Power,” Foucault describes the process of production of subjectivity through three modes of objectification that transform human beings into subjects: modes of inquiry/signification associated with scientific discourses, disciplines, or regimes; dividing practices associated with regulatory mechanisms developed by normalizing institutions and classificatory systems; and techniques of subjectivization that aim at governing conduct and relations with others as well as techniques of self-subjectivization that aim at governing oneself and one’s relation to oneself.[ii] Thus did Foucault link his archaeological analyses of practices of knowledge, his genealogical analyses of practices of power, domination and strategies, and his work on the techniques of the self. It is to this late Foucault who focused on the techniques of the self that I would like to turn to in order to further understand his focus on “bios” (“manière de vivre”) as a unit of analysis in his study of subjectivization and self-subjectivization.
[…] The project of Foucault in Le Pouvoir Psychiatrique is directly linked to his project in Subjectivité et Verité, L’Herméneutique du Sujet, Le Gouvernement de Soi et des Autres, and Le Courage de la Verité. In the age of disciplinarity and control, psychiatric power is not only an institution or discourse involved in normalization; it is in fact also, and most importantly, a form of subjectivization involving various dispositifs, mechanisms, techniques, etc., that determine ways of governing others and of governing oneself. Self-government involves processes of self-subjectivization that allow not only for normalization but also for resistance to normalization: Foucault will focus in his next project on how “truth” (regimes, dispositifs, techniques, etc.) intersects with ways of “self-subjectivization” that allow for self-transformation as well as social transformation in terms of creating alterity and difference. Foucault will trace how discourses and practices associated with “truth” and “truth-telling” combine into sets of “techniques of self” that transpose “freedom” from political settings (of the polis and of sovereignty) to ethical settings with political consequences (subjectivity, self-transformation, and opposition to nomos). Self-subjectivization techniques function at the level of social and political ontology as they apply not to “psyche” as a soul to be known and understood (as elaborated in Plato’s Alcibiades) but to “bios” as the way of living through an askesis involving various practices and discourses.
Foucault sets up the problematic in L’Herméneutique du Sujet in terms of the relationality (enchevêtrement) between epimeleia heautou (care of the self) and gnôthi seauton (knowledge of oneself).[iii] Taking Socrates’ Apology as his starting point, Foucault describes how it is the “care of the self” that defines Socrates’ philosophical project and from which emerges the need to “know oneself.”[iv] Such a need is nonetheless still imbued in a pre-modern understanding of truth, where “spirituality” postulates that the subject needs to transform him/herself in order to access truth; only with the “Cartesian moment,” Foucault claims, does “knowledge” become the direct access to truth. Eros and Askesis both involve such a spiritual self transformation entailing work on oneself, elaboration of oneself, and self-transformation.[v] Foucault would choose to focus on the askesis related to “care of the self” and “knowledge of the self.” It is in Plato’s Alcibiades that Foucault finds the first way of approaching the “care of the self” as a care for the soul; he will later find in Plato’s Laches a second way of approaching the “care of the self” as a techne bios associated with parrhesia and he will trace how that parrhesia evolved from a concern with political freedom to a concern with an ethics of freedom.
Foucault finds in the Alcibiades the political origin of the emergence of the notion of “care of the self.”[vi] In the Alcibiades, the question of the care for the self (epimeleisthai heautou) turns into a question of knowing what that self that needs to be cared for is (heautou): the response to that question is that one needs to know oneself (gnôthi seauton) through a process of taking care of one’s soul (psukhês epimelêteon). That is what Socrates states in his Apology and what is mentioned in The Cratylus. The coupling of heauton with psyche becomes evident: the self is the soul.[vii] Thus the soul is declared the “subject” that controls language, instruments, and the body because it “uses” or “makes use” of language, instruments, and the body. It is this “use” or “usage” (Khrêsthai from Khrêsis) that is subject of “care” according to Plato. Thus Foucault implies that Plato in the Alcibiades was not actually working with the soul as “substance” but with the soul as “subject”—and one needs to take care of oneself as a subject that uses, a subject that has this attitude, these types of relations, etc.[viii] And Foucault concludes that this type of epimeleia heautou (care for the self) inevitably requires a form of otherness associated with mastery/master, with a way of governing, with justice.[ix] The master that will guide this form of “care” leads the subject towards justice and that form of care is exemplified in Epicurean, Stoic, and Christian practices and techniques of the self (that will be connected with pastoral power at a much later stage). This is the first way of approaching the “art of living” or the “aesthetics of existence” (tekhnê tou biou): through the question of the Other (la question de l’Autre) where the master has to intervene in order for the individual to constitute himself or herself as subject. The subject cannot independently transform himself/herself.[x]
Still in L’Herméneutique du Sujet, Foucault introduces another way of “caring for oneself,” through a relational way of knowing (associated with the Cynics and some Stoics) that he calls “ethopoetic knowledge.” It is a way of knowing words (logoi) and things (pragmata) differently and, in the process, to construct or produce the ethos of the subject.[xi] He studies how philosophical askesis, for Greeks and Romans, is about the constitution of an independent relation to oneself in order to construct a preparation or an equipment (paraskeuê) that can permanently transform true discourses into principles of good comportment. By involving relations of “véridiction” between words and actions, that askesis links the individual to truth by making truth-telling a mode of being of the subject.[xii] Parrhesia is also introduced in L’Herméneutique du Sujet as both an ethical attitude and a technical procedure associated with truth-telling that initially develops in the polis in relation to a good sovereign or ruler, but then is integrated into practices of living and of self-subjectivization, as it also links the subject of enunciation with the subject of conduct.[xiii] Finally, the significance of these analyses (important for Foucault’s later theses) is expounded in the last parts of L’Herméneutique as related to the emergence of forms of self-subjectivization associated with an art of living or techniques of existence (techne tou bios) that include the care of the self—thus, social and political ontology started to include a relation to oneself, which has transformational potential. Bios itself changes into a self-referential field of experiences, of practices, of exercises, of knowledge, that is both formative and transformative.[xiv] [read note] The subject starts auto-constituting her/himself with the help of techniques of the self and is not just constituted by techniques of domination, power, and discourses.[xv]
2. Foucault: Parrhesia, (Self-)Transformation, Alterity/Difference
In Le Gouvernement de Soi et Des Autres, Foucault continues exploring Parrhesia and traces the usage of political parrhesia associated with truth-telling to and/or by the sovereign to effectuate political change as well as the emergence of ethical parrhesia associated with risk, thus courage, in a performative (enunciative) practice. Foucault starts by describing the complex changes associated with political parrhesia, relying on various Greek classical texts (mainly Euripides and Sophocles), and he tells the story of how truth and truth-telling become more and more associated with passions and with various forms of veridiction (véridiction aveu, véridiction imprécation)—instead of with investigation and political right (related to isegoria, the equal right to speak), respectively. Parrhesia becomes increasingly the courageous activity of some who speak, who try to convince, who direct others, with all the risks associated with that.[xvi] Democratic parrhesia required both a condition of truth, the necessity of a rational logos, and a moral condition, the courage of a struggle in an agonistic society, and started to be founded on philosophy. It is not just associated with Rhetoric, but with Philosophy as a way of living that bridges the difference between logoi and erga, words and actions.[xvii] In the course of February 16, 1983, mainly using Plato’s Seventh Letter, Foucault sets out a new understanding of Philosophy as a way of living whose reality or pragmata is activity, practice, exercise. The “real” of philosophy lies in the relation to oneself, as an articulation of the problem of governing oneself and governing others. Political parrhesia relying on philosophy states the truth as its reality, and its reality is its relation to truth, to truth of oneself.[xviii] However, a “new historical conjunction” emerges with the Cynics and the parrhesia of Diogenes, since that kind of parrhesia is not only a mode of living, but it is also a way of confronting political power. Plato’s philosophy says the truth in relation to political action, in relation to the exercise of politics, but directly addresses the soul of the Prince in order to shape it, form it, guide it, etc. The Cynics, on the other hand, say that truth in the public space, in the agora, in order to confront the dominant political or cultural norms, to oppose them, to deride them, and to reject them.[xix] This will be the focus of the 1984 lectures of Le Courage de la Vérité; in the 1983 lectures, Foucault established that “it is the ontological engagement of the subject in the act of enunciation that distinguish it from language acts, since parrhesia becomes a public and risky expression of a personal conviction.”[xx]
The Cynic practice of truth-telling is unique, as it introduces practices of “transformation” that are ethically situated but that have effects on social and political ontology. Foucault will not only talk of the “ethics of freedom” associated with the Cynics, but will also elaborate on their militancy as formative of self-transformative practices. The Cynics practiced parrhesia and applied truth to practices of self-transformation in order to create “Another life”:
La vraie vie comme une vie autre, comme une vie de combat, pour un monde changé… elle prétend s’attaquer aux conventions, lois, institutions… une militance qui prétend changer le monde.[xxi]
Le Courage de la Vérité starts by reviewing the various elements of Foucault’s latest project on parrhesia. He introduces 4 modes/modalities of truth-telling that he believed can be found in different societies and can combine different cultures, different discourses, different regimes of truth, etc.: Prophecy/Destiny (Enigmatic, mystery that escape human beings); Wisdom/Being (Apodictic, concerns being, physis, and the nature of things); Teaching and Technique/Techne (Demonstrative, knowledge, know-how); and parrhesia/ethos (Polemical, concerns indivudals and situations).[xxii] It is the last modality of veridiction that Foucault is concerned with here. Recaping how political parrhesia was aimed at the Sovereign/Ruler in its attempt to affect the individual soul (l’âme individuelle), Foucault highlights that the belief was that psyche was considered susceptible to ethical differenciation through various effects (it can be inculcated an ethos that can hear and follow truth). The objective of parrhesia was thus initially psyche where sets of operations of veridiction produce effects of “transformation.”[xxiii] The transposition of parrhesia from the political scene to the game of individual relations marks its transformation from the institutional horizon of democracy to the individual practice of the formation of an ethos reflecting three poles of reality/realities: a- aletheia and truth telling; b- politea and government; and c- etho-poesis and formation of ethos/subject. These three interconnected poles of reality were thus the foundation of forms of subjectivization and self-subjectivization, within which any ethos can affirm its singularity and difference.[xxiv]
Next, Foucault develops an analysis of this “ethics of truth” using The Apology, Laches, and contrasting Laches with Alcibiades. He describes Socrates’ “ethical axis” in the Apology as based on Zetesis (search), Exetasis (examination of the soul), and Epimeleia (care of the self). In the Laches, he finds parrhesia dominant throughout the dialogue representing “courage” and a will to truth associated with decision, will, and combat. Of course there is, within the ethics of truth purveyed in the Laches, Exetasis (as the Socratic form of veridiction, entailing procedures of verification, experimentation, inquiry and examination) and Epimeleia (“care” through education, formation, and training of youth in qualities necessary to politics).[xxv] But the Laches, for Foucault, offers a new way of understanding the “care for the self,” a different way from that presented in the Alcibiades: “Here, the designated object through the thread of the dialogue as what one should take care of is not the soul, it is life (bios), which means the manner/way of living. It is this modality, this practice of existence that constitutes the fundamental object of the epimeleia.” While in the Alcibiades it was psyche that needed to be taken care of, here, the self is not correlated with psyche. Thus, it is no longer the knowledge of the soul (connaissance de l’âme) but the experience of life (épreuve de la vie) that is the starting point for the question of the care of the self (souci de soi). [xxvi]
Socratic parrhesia is described as a “mode of existence, mode of living... and it is this mode of living that appears as essential and fundamental correlative to the practice of truth-telling.” This is “ethical parrhesia” whose object is life and the way of living; it is a “stylistic of existence” or an “aesthetics of existence” and not the “metaphysics of the soul” described in the Alcibiades. Bios becomes a beautiful product/work (oeuvre) that one is involved in shaping, forming, and transforming.[xxvii]
For the rest of the lectures, Foucault focuses on the Greek Cynics, their way of living, and their parrhesia and how they inaugurate self-transformative ways of subjectivizing that are “transformative” of the dominant social and political ontology—entailing subjectivizing forces as well as discourses and practices. The Cynic parrhesia best represents an “ethics of freedom” engaged in resistance to dominant forms of governmentality. For the Cynics, “one needs to reassess customs and norms to know oneself”; their care of the self is also about “changing customs, breaking with customs, breaking the rules, the habits, the conventions, norms, and laws.” That is what Foucault calls a “transvaluation”: the bios alěthěs of the Cynic movement aimed at transforming ontological structures of society and politics through parrhesia, anaidea, and adoxia and through praxis/askesis of a public self/activity. The anti-nomos life of the Cynics was an open militancy (militantisme ouvert) and “their life of veridiction has for objective the transformation of human beings and of the world.” They were interested in “Another Life”—not another “world”—and it is this otherness, this alterity, this difference, that truth and truth-telling aimed at.[xxviii] Change and transformation, through combat, implies here self-transformation and anarchic and destructive forms of self-subjectivization that set “an ethics of freedom” at the foundation of self-subjectivization. The last words, of the last page, of the last manuscript, of the last course of Foucault are about “alterity” and how truth necessitates this alterity, and is itself always different and never the same—reflecting multiple and changing realities, indeterminate historical situations, and processes among processes of transformation including self-transformation.
Sur quoi je voudrais insister pour finir, c’est ceci: il n’y a pas d’instauration de vérité sans une position essentielle de l’altérité. La vérité, ce n’est jamais le même. Il ne peut y avoir de vérité que dans la forme de l’autre monde et de la vie autre.[xxix]
[i] Refer to Judith Revel, Le Vocabulaire de Foucault (Paris: Ellipses, 2002): « […] une généalogie du pouvoir est indissociable d’une histoire de la subjectivité ; si le pouvoir n’existe qu’en acte, alors c’est à la question du « comment » qu’il revient d’analyser ses modalités d’exercice, c'est-à-dire aussi bien l’émergence historique de ses modes d’application que les instruments qu’il se donne, les champs où il intervient, le réseau qu’il dessine et les effets qu’il implique à une époque donnée. » (p. 47)
[ii] “The Subject and Power,” op. cit., p. 126.
[iii] Michel Foucault, L’Herméneutique du Sujet (Paris : Gallimard/Seuil, 2001), p. 67.
[iv] L’Herméneutique du Sujet, op. cit., p.10.
[v] L’Herméneutique du Sujet, op. cit., pp. 17-19.
[vi] L’Herméneutique du Sujet, op. cit., pp. 37-38.
[vii] L’Herméneutique du Sujet, op. cit., pp. 51-53.
[viii] L’Herméneutique du Sujet, op. cit., pp. 55-57.
[ix] L’Herméneutique du Sujet, op. cit., pp.70-71.
[x] L’Herméneutique du Sujet, op. cit., pp.123-126.
[xi] L’Herméneutique du Sujet, op. cit., pp. 225-228.
[xii] L’Herméneutique du Sujet, op. cit., pp.303-312.
[xiii] L’Herméneutique du Sujet, op. cit., pp.356-393, esp. 388.
[xiv] L’Herméneutique du Sujet, op. cit., pp.429-430 and 465-467, esp : « Que le bios, que la vie — je veux dire : que la manière dont le monde se présente immédiatement à nous au cours de notre existence — soit une épreuve, ça doit être entendu en deux sens. Epreuve au sens d’expérience, c’est-à-dire que le monde est reconnu comme étant ce à travers quoi nous faisons l’expérience de nous-mêmes, ce à travers quoi nous nous connaissons, ce à travers quoi nous nous découvrons, ce à travers quoi nous nous révélons à nous-mêmes. Et puis, épreuve en ce sens que ce monde, ce bios, est aussi un exercice, c’est-à-dire qu’il est ce à partir de quoi, ce à travers de quoi, ce en dépit de quoi ou grâce à quoi nous allons nous former, nous transformer, cheminer vers un but ou vers un salut, aller à notre propre perfection. » (p. 466)
[xv] Frédéric Gros, « Situation du Cours », L’Herméneutique du Sujet, op. cit., p.494.
[xvi] Michel Foucault, Le Gouvernement de Soi et des Autres (Paris : Gallimard/Seuil, 2008), pp. 41-155, esp. P. 144-146.
[xvii] Le Gouvernement de Soi et des Autres, op. cit., pp. 171-201.
[xviii] Le Gouvernement de Soi et des Autres, op. cit., pp. 219-224 and 230-236.
[xix] Le Gouvernement de Soi et des Autres, op. cit., pp. 263-274.
[xx] Frédéric Gros, « Situation du Cours », Le Gouvernement de Soi et des Autres, op. cit., p. 351.
[xxi] Michel Foucault, Le Courage de la Vérité (Paris : Gallimard/Seuil, 2009), p. 279ff.
[xxii] Le Courage de la Vérité, op. cit., pp. 27-28.
[xxiii] Le Courage de la Vérité, op. cit., pp. 57-61.
[xxiv] Le Courage de la Vérité, op. cit., pp. 62-63.
[xxv] Le Courage de la Vérité, op. cit., pp. 80, 113-114, and 116-117.
[xxvi] Le Courage de la Vérité, op. cit., pp. 118-119.
[xxvii] Le Courage de la Vérité, op. cit., pp. 138-150.
[xxviii] Le Courage de la Vérité, op. cit., pp. 222-223, 224-225, 232-240, 278-279, 278ff, 279ff, and 288ff.
[xxix] Frédéric Gros, « Situation du Cours », Le Courage de la Vérité, op. cit., p. 328.
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