Daniele Lorenzini

In 1980, Michel Foucault began a vast project of research on the relationship between subjectivity and truth, an examination of conscience, confession, and truth-telling that would become a crucial feature of his life-long work on the relationship between knowledge, power, and the self. The lectures published here offer one of the clearest pathways into this project, contrasting Greco-Roman techniques of the self with those of early Christian monastic culture in order to uncover, in the latter, the historical origin of many of the features that still characterize the modern subject. They are accompanied by a public discussion and debate as well as by an interview with Michael Bess, all of which took place at the University of California, Berkeley, where Foucault delivered an earlier and slightly different version of these lectures. Foucault analyzes the practices of self-examination and confession in Greco-Roman antiquity and in the first centuries of Christianity in order to highlight a radical transformation from the ancient Delphic principle of “know thyself” to the monastic precept of “confess all of your thoughts to your spiritual guide.” His aim in doing so is to retrace the genealogy of the modern subject, which is inextricably tied to the emergence of the “hermeneutics of the self”—the necessity to explore one’s own thoughts and feelings and to confess them to a spiritual director—in early Christianity. According to Foucault, since some features of this Christian hermeneutics of the subject still determine our contemporary “gnoseologic” self, then the genealogy of the modern subject is both an ethical and a political enterprise, aiming to show that the “self” is nothing but the historical correlate of a series of technologies built into our history. Thus, from Foucault’s perspective, our main problem today is not to discover what “the self” is, but to try to analyze and change these technologies in order to change its form.

On the Government of the Living plays a pivotal role in the evolution of Foucault’s thought because it constitutes a “laboratory” in which he forges the methodological and conceptual tools—such as the notions of anarcheology and alethurgy (or, better, what I call here the “alethurgic subject”)—necessary to carry on his study of governmentality independently from his History of Sexuality project. In this paper, I argue that Foucault’s projects of an anarcheology of the government of human beings through the manifestation of truth in the form of subjectivity and of a genealogy of the subject of desire, albeit essentially linked to one another, are conceptually autonomous. These projects are both part of a genealogy of the modern subject but should be treated independently insofar as it is the former, elaborated in On the Government of the Living, that provides us with the key to understanding Foucault’s interest in the care of the self and parrhesia as an integral part of his analyses of governmentality and the critical attitude from the late 1970s.

Under what conditions does the killing of a nonhuman animal qualify as euthanasia? In this paper, I elaborate an original nonprescriptive definition of nonhuman animal euthanasia which avoids the conceptual confusions surrounding the use of this expression. Such a definition imposes strict limitations on the notion of nonhuman animal euthanasia. On the one hand, the nonhuman animal whose life is ended through an act that legitimately qualifies as euthanasia is normally a sentient domestic animal. On the other, the painless and merciful nature of the termination of a nonhuman animal’s life is a necessary but not sufficient condition for it to count as a genuine instance of nonhuman animal euthanasia.

In a recent blog post, Joshua Clover rightly notices the swift emergence of a new panoply of “genres of the quarantine.”1 It should not come as a surprise that one of them centers on Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, asking whether or not it is still appropriate to describe the situation that we are currently experiencing. Neither should it come as a surprise that, in virtually all of the contributions that make use of the concept of biopolitics to address the current coronavirus pandemic, the same bunch of rather vague ideas are mentioned over and over again, while other—no doubt more interesting—Foucauldian insights tend to be ignored. In what follows, I discuss two of these insights, and I conclude with some methodological remarks on the issue of what it may mean to “respond” to the current “crisis.”

ABSTRACT In this paper, I argue that the vindicatory/unmasking distinction has so far prevented scholars from grasping a third dimension of genealogical inquiry, one I call possibilising. This dimension has passed unnoticed even though it constitutes a crucial aspect of Foucault’s genealogical project starting from 1978 on. By focusing attention on it, I hope to provide a definitive rebuttal of one of the main criticisms that has been raised against (unmasking) genealogy in general, and Foucauldian genealogy in particular, namely the idea that Foucault’s genealogical project lacks normative grounding and is therefore ultimately incapable of telling us why we should resist and fight against the mechanisms of power it nevertheless reveals in an empirically insightful way. This conclusion, I argue, is mistaken because it conceives of Foucauldian genealogy exclusively as an unmasking or problematising method, whereas I claim that Foucault’s genealogical project possesses a possibilising dimension that provides his work with sui generis normative force.

This essay argues that desire, conceived of as a central and permanent dimension of the human subject, is the condition of possibility of the emergence of both the modern experience of sexuality and the mechanisms of power that produced, organized, and exploited it. This condition of possibility, as Michel Foucault points out, was historically constituted. Thus, the objective of this essay is both to critically reconstruct the way in which Foucault accounts for the progressive emergence of desire as a principle of subjectivation/objectivation of sexual acts in the Greco-Roman and Christian worlds, and to emphasize the socio-political relevance of these early “chapters” of his history of sexuality—an often downplayed relevance that is connected to a “political history of the will.”

Cet ouvrage propose une lecture originale du projet foucaldien d'une histoire de la vérité qui vise à en mettre clairement en lumière les enjeux éthiques et politiques, grâce à l'établissement d'une confrontation entre les analyses de Foucault sur la parrêsia antique, les travaux de J.L. Austin sur l'énoncé performatif et l'étude de l'énoncé passionné par Stanley Cavell. Le problème qui est ainsi posé, en lien mais également en décalage avec les réflexions traditionnelles sur le pouvoir des mots, est celui de la force du vrai : est-il possible ou légitime d'affirmer que la vérité est une force qui s'inscrit, de manière toujours " stratégique ", à l'intérieur d'un champ de bataille? En répondant par l'affirmative, cet ouvrage entreprend d'interroger sous un angle inédit les rapports entre vérité, critique et vie au sein d'une éthique et d'une politique du dire-vrai.

Quel rapport est-il possible de tracer entre l'ethique et la politique? Michel Foucault, Pierre Hadot et Stanley Cavell, a partir de trois positions philosophiques tres differentes, ont elabore des strategies de reponse a cette question que le present ouvrage se propose de rendre explicites et d'explorer. Ainsi, l'esthetique de l'existence, les exercices spirituels et le perfectionnisme moral y sont combines afin de construire un arriere-plan conceptuel et pratique permettant de saisir a la fois les enjeux politiques d'une ethique de soi et l'incontournable dimension ethique d'une politique de nous-memes. Cet ouvrage entend contribuer a l'elaboration d'une philosophie analytique de la politique dont le but est de rendre visibles l'existence et le fonctionnement concret du pouvoir dans ses ramifications quotidiennes; une telle entreprise se noue de facon etroite avec une analyse des techniques de l'ordinaire, c'est-a-dire de ces pratiques que les individus utilisent pour donner une forme a leur vie et pour transformer leur rapport a eux-memes, aux autres et au monde.

In this paper, I argue that the appropriate answer to the question of the form contemporary neoliberalism gives our lives rests on Michel Foucault’s definition of neoliberalism as a particular art of governing human beings. I claim that Foucault’s definition consists in three components: neoliberalism as a set of technologies structuring the ‘milieu’ of individuals in order to obtain specific effects from their behavior; neoliberalism as a governmental rationality transforming individual freedom into the very instrument through which individuals are directed; and neoliberalism as a set of political strategies that constitute a specific, and eminently governable, form of subjectivity. I conclude by emphasising the importance that Foucault’s work on neoliberalism as well as the ancient ‘ethics of the care of the self’ still holds for us today.

This article puts Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon into dialogue in order to explore the relationships between the constitution of subjects and the production of truth in modern Western societies as well as in colonial spaces. Firstly, it takes into account Foucault’s analysis of confessional practices and the effects of subjection, objectivation, and subjectivation generated by the injunction for the subject to tell the truth about him or herself. Secondly, it focuses on the question of interpellation that emerges in the colonial context and on the colonized who, as Fanon illustrates, is always seen as a deceitful subject. Finally, it shows that, despite the difference in the relationships between the constitution of subjectivity and the production of true discourses described by Foucault and Fanon, the transformative dimension enacted by the processes of subjectivation and by the practices of resistance constitutes a shared conceptual and political ground between the two authors.

In this article I reconstruct the philosophical conditions for the emergence of the notion of counter-conduct within the framework of Michel Foucault’s study of governmentality, and I explore the reasons for its disappearance after 1978. In particular, I argue that the concept of conduct becomes crucial for Foucault in order to redefine governmental power relations as specific ways to conduct the conduct of individuals: it is initially within this context that, in Security, Territory, Population, he rethinks the problem of resistance in terms of counter-conduct. However, a few months later, in What is Critique?, Foucault (implicitly) replaces the notion of counter-conduct with that of critical attitude, defined as the particular form that counter-conduct takes in modern times. This notion allows him to highlight the role played by the will (to be or not to be governed like that) in resistance to governmental strategies. But since the notion of counter-conduct is conceptually wider than that of critical attitude, I suggest in conclusion that it could be worth reactivating it as a “historical category which, in various forms and with diverse objectives, runs through the whole of Western history.”

In this essay, I draw inspiration from Stanley Cavell’s analysis of passionate utterance, as an enlargement of J. L. Austin’s theory of performatives, in order to discuss Michel Foucault’s study of truth telling (parresia) from an ethico-political perspective. I suggest that we should consider parresia, like passionate utterance, as a form structured around perlocutionary effect, and I show that this standpoint allows us to clarify Foucault’s analyses by identifying seven necessary conditions for parrhesiastic utterance: absence of codified effect, freedom of the individual speaking, criticism, dangerousness, courageousness, transparency, and alethurgy. This list, which does not claim to be exhaustive, turns out to be essential to distinguish parresia from other utterances that we commonly label under the rubric of truth telling.

The central argument of this paper is that moral perfectionism cannot be understood in its radical philosophical, ethical and political dimensions unless we trace its tradition back to the ancient Greek conception of philosophy as a way of life. Indeed, in ancient Greece, to be a philosopher meant to give importance to everyday life and to pay attention to the details of common language and behaviour, in order to actively transform oneself and one’s relationship to others and to the world. Truth itself was conceived as an event emerging from the agreement among the logoi of different people, or from the harmony established by an individual between his words and his deeds (e.g. Socrates, the Cynics). But this way of conceiving truth and practicing philosophy has been somehow put aside in modern times, and it has been renewed only during the last two centuries, primarily thanks to the transcendental American philosophy of Emerson and Thoreau. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to show how modern perfectionism re-invented ancient perfectionism, through the re-activation of the imperative to pay attention to our ordinary words and everyday life (and to their harmonic relation), linked to a truth always meant as a practice. My conclusion will be that moral perfectionism can be conceived and still practiced, today, as an ethics and politics of responsibility, i.e. of attention to and care for the ordinary.

This book traces a crucial yet generally “overlooked” phase in Jacques Maritain’s thought on human rights, evident in his collaboration with a group of American Catholic intellectuals in founding the Committee of Catholics for Human Rights in 1939. Maritain’s years in New York reveal a previously unknown side of the philosopher: his firm determination to promote a set of fundamental rights that every human being possesses regardless of their knowledge of religious “truth.” This illustrates the evolution of Maritain’s political thought, which shifted from a perspective of traditional defense of the rights of the person—as a spiritual and transcendent being (and thus subordinate to the recognition of the rights of God and the Catholic Church)—to a clear historical-theoretical legitimization of human rights, which are universal and inalienable, and which have become established in the course of the modern age.