Daniele Lorenzini

ABSTRACT I argue that Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality can be productively read as perfectionist in Emerson’s sense. After reconstructing the debate on Nietzsche’s perfectionism, I problematize the literature’s almost exclusive focus on Schopenhauer as Educator at the expense of the Genealogy, which has caused scholars to construe Nietzsche’s perfectionism in merely individualistic terms. By contrast, I show that the Genealogy can be interpreted as a perfectionist endeavor, at the heart of which lies the first-person plural: the “we.” I thereby emphasize the relevance of “we-making” for a novel reading of Nietzsche’s perfectionism—what I call his genealogical perfectionism. I conclude that the analysis of the genealogical dimension of Nietzsche’s perfectionism provides us with much-needed resources to construe it in nonindividualistic terms.

Cet ouvrage, à travers une pluralité cohérente d'approches, a pour but de réfléchir sur le rapport que la philosophie entretient avec la littérature, et sur les usages qu'elle en fait. Ce rapport et ces usages, toutefois, ne sont pas envisagés comme de l'ordre de la subordination, ou de la réduction de la littérature à la philosophie, par la philosophie. La littérature apparaît au contraire ici comme un objet qui ne se laisse pas assimiler par la philosophie, mais la travaille, autant qu'elle le travaille : la philosophie traite moins de la littérature qu'elle n'y trouve un lieu à l'intérieur duquel elle s'exerce. Loin de postuler une extériorité entre le matériau littéraire et la production philosophique, il s'agit donc de s'interroger sur la richesse de l'expérience que le texte littéraire offre à la réflexion philosophique.

L'Histoire de la folie l'âge classique de Michel Foucault a produit, au montent de sa publication, une onde de choc. Cet ouvrage, foisonnant, baroque, labyrinthique, est apparu aussitôt comme insituable. S'agissait-il d'histoire, de philosophie, de littérature, de sociologie? Les partages disciplinaires traditionnels furent emportés par le courant impétueux de ce livre impossible. Mais il n'y eut pas que les cercles universitaires pour se trouver inquiétés par ces thèses tumultueuses (l'exclusion de la folie par l'âge classique, l'hypocrisie atroce de la libération des fous par les médecins modernes, etc). Le récit épique de l'enfermement des fous dans les prisons de l'ordre moral, des nouveaux partages imposés par les révolutionnaires, altérait la bonne conscience d'une psychiatrie qui se pensait, fondamentalement, et par la vertu d'une fondation originaire jamais interrogée, humaniste. histoire de la folie préparait ainsi les révoltes de l'anti-psychiatrie. Cinquante ans après la parution de ce qui, au départ, était une simple thèse de doctorat, l'éclat de la rupture est intact. Ce livre continue à troubler, fasciner, irriter. Notre culture ne l'a toujours pas digéré. On découvre sans cesse de nouvelles apories, de nouveaux problèmes, de nouvelles perspectives pour interroger l'avenir. Ces rencontres, provoquées à l'occasion de cet anniversaire ne sont pas des commémorations. Il ne s'agit pas d'établir scientifiquement ici ce que Foucault a vraiment voulu dire, mais d'entendre jusqu'à quel point, encore aujourd'hui, ce texte réinvente notre rapport à la folie.

Paru en 1975, Surveiller et punir de Michel Foucault a profondément marqué l'ensemble des sciences humaines et sociales. Plus de quarante ans après, la société de surveillance annoncée par Foucault se manifeste à travers des préoccupations sécuritaires croissantes et la quête fantasmatique d'un risque zéro. Les réformes successives de notre droit pénal traduisent une volonté forte de prévenir, voire de prédire, la réalisation des infractions. La surveillance se déploie non seulement dans l'enceinte carcérale mais au-delà des murs. Il s'avère ainsi crucial de relire l'ouvrage de Foucault à la lumière d'une actualité juridique et politique dense, marquée par une progressive prise de conscience de la nécessité d'appréhender les questions pénales et pénitentiaires d'une manière globale et concertée, mais aussi par le caractère limité des avancées concrètes en ce domaine. Ainsi, en mobilisant une pluralité d'approches disciplinaires (du droit à la philosophie, de la science politique à la sociologie et à la psychiatrie), cet ouvrage se propose de mettre les analyses foucaldiennes de la société punitive, du pouvoir disciplinaire, de l'archipel carcéral, de la surveillance généralisée et de la production de la délinquance à l'épreuve de notre présent, à la fois pour en mesurer la portée réelle et pour élaborer un diagnostic original de notre actualité sociale, juridique et politique.

Michel Foucault est un philosophe qui, loin de plancher sur d'autres philosophes, avance avec et contre eux - et contre pas moins qu'avec, au vu du caractere distinctement agonistique de sa pensee. Dans ce volume, il dialogue successivement avec douze philosophes et ecrivains de tous les temps - des auteurs dont les oeuvres soutiennent et traversent la sienne, dans une perpetuelle tension. Chacune de ces encontres est mise en scene par un specialiste de Foucault. Tout se joue autour du et: de Foucault et Platon a Foucault et Althusser ou Genet en passant par Machiavel, Hegel, Said et bien d'autres. Le et, ici, rapproche et eloigne a la fois. Selon cette approche, l'oeuvre perd son caractere de forteresse pour devenir un noeud, dans un reseau: celui de la philosophie vivante qui se construit et se poursuit dans d'infinies circulations et interactions. Une toile d'araignee dont le centre provisoire serait ici une pensee nommee Michel Foucault.

Dans cet article, en commençant par une analyse inédite de l’ Œdipe Roi de Sophocle, nous abordons le problème du statut du témoin oculaire et de sa prise de parole, ou mieux, de son « dire-vrai » en tant qu’acte de langage spécifique, notamment au sein de la littérature de témoignage. Nous soutenons que la question cruciale à poser à ce propos est celle de l’engagement du locuteur dans son discours, et que l’acte de témoigner va donc bien au-delà de la simple transmission d’une série de contenus ou d’informations. Cet acte se situe en effet sur deux plans : celui du lien éthique entre le locuteur et ce qu’il dit et celui du lien social entre le locuteur et ses interlocuteurs ou auditeurs. En nous inspirant des analyses de Michel Foucault sur la parrêsia et de J. L. Austin sur la dimension perlocutoire du langage, nous concluons alors que les récits de témoignage relèvent d’une « dramatique du discours » qui joue le plus souvent le rôle d’un véritable acte de résistance.

A groundbreaking examination of Michel Foucault's history of truth. Many blame Michel Foucault for our post-truth and conspiracy-laden society. In this provocative work, Daniele Lorenzini argues that such criticism fundamentally misunderstands the philosopher’s project. Foucault did not question truth itself but what Lorenzini calls “the force of truth,” or how some truth claims are given the power to govern our conduct while others are not. This interest, Lorenzini shows, drove Foucault to articulate a new ethics and politics of truth-telling precisely in order to evade the threat of relativism. The Force of Truth explores this neglected dimension of Foucault’s project by putting his writings on regimes of truth and parrhesia in conversation with early analytic philosophy and by drawing out the “possibilizing” elements of Foucault’s genealogies that remain vital for practicing critique today.

This paper addresses the multiple readings that Foucault offers of Descartes’ Meditations during the whole span of his intellectual career. It thus rejects the (almost) exclusive focus of the literature on the few pages of the History of Madness dedicated to the Meditations and on the so-called Foucault/Derrida debate. First, it reconstructs Foucault’s interpretation of Descartes’ philosophy in a series of unpublished manuscripts written between 1966 and 1968, when Foucault was teaching at the University of Tunis. It then addresses the important shifts that took place in Foucault’s thought at the beginning of the 1970s, which led him to elaborate a new approach to the Meditations in terms of ‘discursive events’. Finally, it argues that those shifts opened up to Foucault the possibility of developing an original reading of Descartes’ philosophy, surprisingly close to his own interest in ancient askēsis and the techniques of the self.

This paper presents a new interpretation of Michel Foucault’s critical project. It is well known that Foucault’s genealogical critique does not focus on issues of justification, but instead tackles “aspectival captivity,” that is, apparently inevitable limits of thought that constrain the agent’s freedom but that, in fact, can be transformed. However, it has not been recognized that, according to Foucault, critique can proceed along two distinct paths. In a key passage of “What Is Critique?,” Foucault states that critique is tasked with questioning truth about its effects of power and with questioning power about its discourses of truth. We show that this “double movement” organizes Foucault’s critical project as a whole, giving it a significantly wider scope and a more complex structure than has been previously acknowledged. At the heart of the above-mentioned bifurcation lies an apparent tension between two contrastive roles Foucault assigns to truth-telling in the context of critique: on the one hand, truth-telling (as avowal) is a target of critique; on the other, truth-telling (as parrhesia) is one of critique’s methods. We argue that combining these two dimensions in a unified account is crucial for understanding and re-evaluating Foucault’s critical project as a whole. By showing that truth-telling remains an essential element of Foucauldian critique, this paper also rectifies some influential misinterpretations according to which Foucault’s critical project seeks to eliminate truth from the picture.

This introduction to the special issue ‘Foucault Before the Collège de France’ surveys Foucault’s work in the first part of his career. While there is a familiar chronology to the books he published in the 1960s – from History of Madness to The Archaeology of Knowledge – the story can be developed in relation to his articles, his translations, his early publications and manuscripts, and his teaching. Looking at the programme of posthumous publication of many of his courses and unfinished manuscripts, this introduction discusses key themes, and introduces the papers of the special issue which analyse these texts in detail. It concludes with some general thoughts about what these hitherto neglected or hidden sources tell us about the work of Foucault. Although it adds some cautions about their use, we believe the texts and lectures analysed in this issue and others from the period before the Collège de France add valuable insights into our understanding of Foucault’s intellectual development, his interests and plans, and his enduring influence on a variety of fields in the humanities and social sciences.

English summary: This ambitious volume examines the Foucaults later writings from the 1980s. Foucaults contemporaries were baffled by his new perspective from this period in which he explored the modalities of a relationship with the self and the truth, seeming to blur the image of a Foucault concerned with describing and denouncing the forms of contemporary power. This study brings to light the theoretical and practical aspects of this period, in order to a reinvention of our own actuality. French description: Les recherches menees par Foucault au cours des annees quatre-vingt demeurent, a beaucoup d'egards, indecidables. Doit-on parler, a leur propos, d'un retour aux questions classiques du sujet, de la morale, de la liberte? D'un abandon de la mise en perspective politique? D'un dandysme esthetisant? Les contemporains furent profondement deconcertes par des analyses qui, en se concentrant sur les modalites du rapport a soi et a la verite dans l'Antiquite ou le christianisme primitif, paraissaient brouiller l'image d'un Foucault attache a decrire et denoncer les formes du pouvoir moderne. Le present ouvrage se propose de relever le defi pose par ce dernier moment, aussi fecond que provocateur, de la pensee foucaldienne, d'en degager les enjeux theoriques et pratiques, et de se donner les moyens, a partir d'eux, de reinventer notre actualite.

Foucault (1926-1984) et Wittgenstein (1889-1951) appartiennent, selon une présentation courante, à deux traditions de pensée différentes, pour ne pas dire rivales, dont chacun serait en quelque sorte une figure tutélaire. Au-delà des oppositions des philosophies continentale et analytique, tous deux partagent pourtant un fond commun : une critique radicale de la notion classique de subjectivité, une façon spécifique de concevoir et de pratiquer la philosophie comme manière d'être et de vivre. Tous deux, en philosophant, engagent un discours critique et un exercice de transformation de soi-même, des autres et du monde. Cet ouvrage ne cherche nullement à réconcilier deux traditions adverses. Nul oecuménisme ici, mais plutôt la volonté de faire ressurgir des problèmes dont la force et l'insistance se jouent des clivages institués : le rapport à soi, la conscience et ses illusions, le rapport entre le " je " et le " nous ". Une telle confrontation possède la vertu d'arracher ces deux auteurs au statut de doctrines instituées et figées et de susciter de nouvelles interrogations à propos d'oeuvres prétendument connues et reconnues. Un questionnement contemporain.

In this paper, I take issue with the idea that Michel Foucault might be considered a theorist of epistemic injustice, and argue that his philosophical premises are incompatible with Miranda Fricker’s. Their main disagreement rests upon their divergent ways of conceiving the relationship between reason and power, giving rise to the contrasting forms of normativity that characterize their critical projects. This disagreement can be helpfully clarified by addressing the different use they make of the genealogical method. While Fricker’s genealogy of Testimonial Justice aims to ground her claim that reason and power can be neatly pulled apart, thus avoiding the reductionist and relativist conclusions entailed by Foucault’s genealogies, I argue that Foucault’s mature, overlooked definition of genealogy is based on a sophisticated distinction between games and regimes of truth, and is thus not vulnerable to these criticisms. Consequently, Foucault’s genealogical inquiries prove helpful for understanding issues that normally fall under the umbrella of epistemic injustice in a new light, while also allowing us to avoid some of the main objections that threaten Fricker’s project.

On propose de faire dialoguer l’interprétation que Martha Nussbaum donne de la conception aristotélicienne de la vie bonne avec les lectures « perfectionnistes » de Michel Foucault, Pierre Hadot et Stanley Cavell. Ces lectures permettent d’apporter de précieux éléments de réponse à la difficulté soulevée dans l’appendice à la troisième partie de La Fragilité du bien : rendre compte de la tension, chez Aristote, entre un modèle de la vie bonne entièrement « humain », tel qu’il est développé dans la plupart de ses écrits, et les affirmations du livre X de l’ Éthique à Nicomaque à propos de l’excellence et de la perfection (le caractère « divin ») de la vie théorétique. Plusieurs pistes de réponse sont explorées avant une hypothèse de travail permettant de concevoir de manière originale le rapport entre l’« humain » et le « divin » au sein de l’éthique aristotélicienne.

J.L. Austin’s insight that language should be treated as a domain of human action, rather than merely as a tool for the transmission of information, has been enormously influential. His analysis of speech acts continues to be widely utilised in a vast number of fields, from the philosophy of language to social and political philosophy, the philosophy of law, gender and literary studies, as well as a variety of social sciences. Yet scholars have so far focused on performative utterances and illocutionary acts, while the perlocutionary dimension of speech has generally been dismissed as unessential. This special issue, drawing inspiration from Stanley Cavell’s seminal work on passionate utterance, aims to shed new light on the philosophical, moral and political relevance of the perlocutionary.

This volume collects a series of lectures given by the renowned French thinker Michel Foucault late in his career. The book is composed of two parts: a talk, Parrēsia, delivered at the University of Grenoble in 1982, and a series of lectures entitled “Discourse and Truth,” given at the University of California, Berkeley in 1983, which appears here for the first time in its full and correct form. Together, they provide an unprecedented account of Foucault’s reading of the Greek concept of parrēsia, often translated as “truth-telling” or “frank speech.” The lectures trace the transformation of this concept across Greek, Roman, and early Christian thought, from its origins in pre-Socratic Greece to its role as a central element of the relationship between teacher and student. In mapping the concept’s history, Foucault’s concern is not to advocate for free speech; rather, his aim is to explore the moral and political position one must occupy in order to take the risk to speak truthfully. These lectures—carefully edited and including notes and introductory material to fully illuminate Foucault’s insights—are a major addition to Foucault’s English language corpus.

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.

This paper addresses the multiple readings that Foucault offers of Descartes’ Meditations during the whole span of his intellectual career. It thus rejects the (almost) exclusive focus of the literature on the few pages of the History of Madness dedicated to the Meditations and on the so-called Foucault/Derrida debate. First, it reconstructs Foucault’s interpretation of Descartes’ philosophy in a series of unpublished manuscripts written between 1966 and 1968, when Foucault was teaching at the University of Tunis. It then addresses the important shifts that took place in Foucault’s thought at the beginning of the 1970s, which led him to elaborate a new approach to the Meditations in terms of ‘discursive events’. Finally, it argues that those shifts opened up to Foucault the possibility of developing an original reading of Descartes’ philosophy, surprisingly close to his own interest in ancient askē sis and the techniques of the self.

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.

In this paper, I argue that a serious philosophical investigation of the domain of the perlocutionary is both possible and desirable, and I show that it possesses a distinctively moral dimension that has so far been overlooked. I start, in Section II, by offering an original characterisation of the distinction between the illocutionary and the perlocutionary derived from the degree of predictability and stability that differentiates their respective effects. In Section III, I argue that, in order to grasp the specificity of the perlocutionary, we must focus on the total speech situation, which I define as conversation. Then, in Section IV, I show that an investigation of the domain of the perlocutionary requires us to draw a conceptual distinction between recognition and acknowledgment. This distinction proves to be crucial, because the success of perlocutions normally depends on something more than what Austin calls the ‘securing of uptake’: the reciprocity condition for illocutions needs to be supplemented, in the case of perlocutions, with an analysis of what I call the ‘grammar of acknowledgment.’ Lastly, in Section V, I elaborate the notion of ‘perlocutionary responsibility,’ a specific form of moral responsibility for the consequences of utterances that are not (entirely) predictable.