Michel Foucault

“What characterizes the act of justice is not resort to a court and to judges; it is not the intervention of magistrates (even if they had to be simple mediators or arbitrators). What characterizes the juridical act, the process or the procedure in the broad sense, is the regulated development of a dispute. And the intervention of judges, their opinion or decision, is only ever an episode in this development. What defines the juridical order is the way in which one confronts one another, the way in which one struggles. The rule and the struggle, the rule in the struggle, this is the juridical.” - Michel Foucault Penal Theories and Institutions is the title Michel Foucault gave to the lectures he delivered at the Collège de France from November 1971 to March 1972. In these lectures Michel Foucault presents for the first time his approach to the question of power that will be the focus of his research up to the writing of Discipline and Punish (1975) and beyond. His analysis starts with a detailed account of Richelieu’s repression of the Nu-pieds revolt (1639-1640) and then goes on to show how the apparatus of power developed by the monarchy on this occasion breaks with the system of juridical and judicial institutions of the Middle Ages and opens out onto a “judicial State apparatus”, a “repressive system”, whose function is focused on the confinement of those who challenge its order. Michel Foucault systemizes the approach of a history of truth on the basis of the study of “juridico-political matrices” that he had begun in the previous year’s lectures (Lectures on the Will to Know) and which is at the heart of the notion of “knowledge-power”. In these lectures Foucault develops his theory of justice and penal law. The appearance of this volume marks the end of the publication of the series Foucault’s courses at the Collège de France (the first volume of which was published in 1997).

“What characterizes the act of justice is not resort to a court and to judges; it is not the intervention of magistrates. What characterizes the juridical act, the process or the procedure in the broad sense, is the regulated development of a dispute. And the intervention of judges, their opinion or decision, is only ever an episode in this development. What defines the juridical order is the way in which one confronts one another, the way in which one struggles. The rule and the struggle, the rule in the struggle, this is the juridical.” - Michel Foucault Penal Theories and Institutions is the title Michel Foucault gave to the lectures he delivered at the Collège de France from November 1971 to March 1972. In these lectures Michel Foucault presents for the first time his approach to the question of power that will be the focus of his research up to the writing of Discipline and Punish and beyond. His analysis starts with a detailed account of Richelieu’s repression of the Nu-pieds revolt and then goes on to show how the apparatus of power developed by the monarchy on this occasion breaks with the system of juridical and judicial institutions of the Middle Ages and opens out onto a “judicial State apparatus”, a “repressive system”, whose function is focused on the confinement of those who challenge its order. Michel Foucault systemizes the approach of a history of truth on the basis of the study of “juridico-political matrices” that he had begun in the previous year’s lectures and which is at the heart of the notion of “knowledge-power”. In these lectures Foucault develops his theory of justice and penal law. The appearance of this volume marks the end of the publication of the series Foucault’s courses at the Collège de France.

Hoje eu gostaria de começar analisando as primeiras ocorrências da palavra parrhesia na literatura grega, como a palavra aparece nas seguintes seis tragédias de Eurípides: Fenícias; Hipólito; As Bacantes; Electra; Íon; Orestes. Nas primeiras quatro peças, a parrhesia não constitui um tópico importante ou tema; mas a própria palavra geralmente ocorre num contexto preciso que nos ajuda no entendimento de seu significado. Nas últimas duas peças – Íon e Orestes – a parrhesia assume um papel muito importante. De fato, eu penso que Íon é inteiramente consagrado ao problema da parrhesia, uma vez que investiga a questão: Quem tem o direito, o dever e a coragem de falar a verdade? Esse problema parrhesiástico em Íon é levantado na estrutura das relações entre os deuses e os seres humanos. Em Orestes – que foi escrito dez anos mais tarde e, por essa razão, é uma das últimas peças de Eurípides – o papel da parrhesia não é nem de longe tão significativo. E ainda assim a peça contém uma cena parrhesiástica que garante a atenção na medida em que é diretamente relacionada a questões políticas que os atenienses estavam então levantando. Aqui, nessa cena parrhesiástica, há uma transição concernente à questão da parrhesia tal como ela ocorre no contexto das instituições humanas. Especificamente, a parrhesia é vista como uma questão tanto política quanto filosófica.

E agora algumas palavras sobre esse seminário. O ponto de partida. Minha intenção não era lidar com o problema da verdade, mas com o problema de dizer a verdade ou do que diz a verdade como uma atividade. Com isso quero dizer que, para mim, não era uma questão de analisar os critérios internos ou externos que possam permitir a gregos e romanos, ou a qualquer outro povo, reconhecer se uma declaração ou proposição é verdadeira ou não. A questão para mim foi, outrossim, a tentativa de considerar dizer a verdade como uma atividade específica ou como um papel. Mas, mesmo no âmbito dessa questão geral do papel do narrador da verdade.

It has been over two centuries since resemblance ceased to play in our culture a stable, adequate and autonomous role at the wellspring of knowledge. The classical age broke away from it. First Bacon, then Descartes established within our time a system of knowledge in which similitude no longer occupied more than a precarious and temporary place, on the border of illusion: “when we discover some resemblances between two things we ordinarily attribute what we have recognized as true of one only to the other as well, even aspects in which in reality they differ.” Since the 17th century the similar has offered no more to knowledge than an unstable countenance, ready to give way to knowledge, and it is the province of knowledge to determine immediately the identical and the different so that they appear one beside the other and are scrupulously distinguished.

Three years before his death, Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain that until recently remained almost unknown. These lectures—which focus on the role of avowal, or confession, in the determination of truth and justice—provide the missing link between Foucault’s early work on madness, delinquency, and sexuality and his later explorations of subjectivity in Greek and Roman antiquity. Ranging broadly from Homer to the twentieth century, Foucault traces the early use of truth-telling in ancient Greece and follows it through to practices of self-examination in monastic times. By the nineteenth century, the avowal of wrongdoing was no longer sufficient to satisfy the call for justice; there remained the question of who the \u201ccriminal\u201d was and what formative factors contributed to his wrong-doing. The call for psychiatric expertise marked the birth of the discipline of psychiatry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as its widespread recognition as the foundation of criminology and modern criminal justice.   Published here for the first time, the 1981 lectures have been superbly translated by Stephen W. Sawyer and expertly edited and extensively annotated by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. They are accompanied by two contemporaneous interviews with Foucault in which he elaborates on a number of the key themes. An essential companion to Discipline and Punish, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling will take its place as one of the most significant works of Foucault to appear in decades, and will be necessary reading for all those interested in his thought. &nbsp