Untruth as the new democratic ethos (2)

Qualitative Research Review, 2021

Considering the issue of power in Foucault will always lead to comments on the issue of knowledge and vice versa. What I suggest in this paper, however, is to look into both topics presented in the work by Foucault separately, at least to a certain extent. I believe that the evolution of these two threads in his works allows us to evaluate their suitability differently as far as their relevance to contemporary culture is concerned. Foucault's approach to the issue of power and its evolution towards so-called governmentality is evidence of how accurately he sensed the direction of changes to the Zeitgeist of Western civilizations, a fact which cannot be said about the evolution of Foucault's approach to the issue of knowledge, leaning towards the question of truth and truth-telling. The aim of this paper is to substantiate the outlined and differentiated evaluation of Foucault's oeuvre while, at the same time, highlighting the predominant features of contemporary culture. Special attention will be paid to the role of sociology in governmentality.

Qualitative sociology review, 2021

Considering the issue of power in Foucault will always lead to comments on the issue of knowledge and vice versa. What I suggest in this paper, however, is to look into both topics presented in the work by Foucault separately, at least to a certain extent. I believe that the evolution of these two threads in his works allows us to evaluate their suitability differently as far as their relevance to contemporary culture is concerned. Foucault’s approach to the issue of power and its evolution towards so-called governmentality is evidence of how accurately he sensed the direction of changes to the Zeitgeist of Western civilizations, a fact which cannot be said about the evolution of Foucault’s approach to the issue of knowledge, leaning towards the question of truth and truth-telling. The aim of this paper is to substantiate the outlined and differentiated evaluation of Foucault’s oeuvre while, at the same time, highlighting the predominant features of contemporary culture. Special att...

in Laura Cremonesi et al., "Foucault and the Making of Subjects" (London: Rowman & Littlefield), 2016

In this chapter, I explore the rich and complex articulation between two of the main projects that characterise Michel Foucault’s work in the 1970s and the 1980s: on the one side, the project of a history of truth and, on the other, the project of a genealogy of the modern (Western) subject. From this perspective, the year 1980 is to be considered a crucial turning point, since it is in his lectures at the Collège de France, On the Government of the Living, as well as in those at the University of California, Berkeley and Dartmouth College, About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self, that Foucault explicitly connects and articulates in an original way these two projects. After addressing the meaning and ethico-political value of Foucault’s history of truth, focusing above all on the shape it takes in 1980—namely, a genealogy of a series of ‘regimes of truth’ in Western societies—I offer an analysis of the related project of a genealogy of the modern (Western) subject and more precisely of Foucault’s account of the processes of subjection (assujettissement) and subjectivation (subjectivation) within the Christian and the modern Western regimes of truth. I eventually argue that the essential political and moral issue that Foucault raises is not whether the subject is autonomous or not, but rather whether he or she is willing to become a subject of critique by opposing the governmental mechanisms of power which try to govern him or her within our contemporary regime of truth and striving to invent new ways of living and being.

Contemporary Political Theory, 2018

This essay challenges dominant interpretations of Foucault’s lectures on parrhesia as affirming an ethical, non-political conception of truth-telling. I read the lectures instead as depicting truth-telling as an always political predicament: of havingto appear distant from power (to achieve credibility), while also having to partake insome sense of political power (to render one’s truth significant). Read in this way, Foucault’s lectures help us to understand and address the disputed politicality of truth-telling – over who counts as a truth-teller, and what counts as the truth – that his ethical interpreters tend to neglect. Yet the essay also shows that Foucault’s depiction of thepredicament of truth-tellers is problematically gendered: focused on the masculine problem of moving in and out of the public sphere, rather than on the experience of the dispossessed, who are excluded from political power altogether. The essay mobilizes an alternative reading of one of Foucault’s key texts – Euripides’ Ion – to draw out an alternative, more democratic model of the predicament of truth-telling: of having to constitute power that can lend significant to truth-telling, while speaking from a position of powerlessness.

Philosophy of Education

Staying and working at home during the Coronavirus outbreak gave me a great deal of time to read and reread some critical discourses on truth, power, and democracy. Specifically, during the Spring and Summer of 2020, I examined some writings on truth and democratic pluralism by Michel Foucault and Chantal Mouffe as well as a number of important critiques of these thinkers. Reviewing the writings of Foucault and Mouffe emerged for me because of two parallel discussions that were taking place while we were quarantined at home. On the one hand, was the barrage of misinformation that came out of the daily briefings of the Trump White House, not to mention the conspiracy theories that were perpetuated on various websites and in many social media outlets. On the other hand, was the emergence of a debate among medical experts, national and local leaders, and reporters in the United States about a regime of testing, contact tracing, surveillance of people that were infected, and mandated quarantine. The convergence of these two discourses reinforced my hunch that if I immersed myself in the writings of some critical theorists who have addressed the issues of truth, power and democratic pluralism, I might gain some valuable insights about the crisis of truth in which we are currently living. 1 My intention in this essay is to analyze both the promises and limitations of some critical discourses on power and democratic pluralism in a post-truth era marked by fake news, alternative facts, and misinformation. In what follows, I first explore the significance of Foucault's and Mouffe's discourses on power and democratic pluralism while explaining how each advances our understanding of truth in politics. Next, I focus on how the current phenomenon of post-truth serves to illuminate a major weakness of Foucault's and Mouffe's discourses-their failure to anticipate or adequately

Environment and Planning D: Society & Space, 2019

Responding to ongoing concerns that Michel Foucault's influential governmentality analytics fail to enable the study of " resistance " , this paper analyses his last two lecture courses on " parrhesia " (risky and courageous speech). While Foucault resisted resistance as an analytical category, he increasingly pointed us towards militant, alternative, and insolent forms of counter-conduct. The paper comparatively analyses Foucault's reading of Plato, Socrates and the Cynics, exploring parrhesia's episteme (its truth-knowledge relations), techne (its practice and geographies), identities (its souls and its bodies) and its possible relations to the present. It concludes that Foucault viewed resistance as power, which problematized governmentalities but could also be analysed as a governmentality itself.. In pursuing parrhesia Foucault reaffirmed his commitment to studying discourse as always emplaced and enacted, whilst sketching out the geographies (from the royal court and the democratic Assembly to the public square and the street) that staged the risk of truth-talking. This suggests new subjects and spaces to open up political possibilities when exploring the geographies of governmentalities.

In recent years, the work of Michel Foucault has been subject to a critical reappraisal. In light of widespread dissatisfaction with the neoliberal economic order and a renewed interest in social democracy among millennial voters, Foucault’s late writings on liberalism and the free market have come under great scrutiny. How could one of the great critics of modern regimes of power and the ideology of progress countenance ideas that would come to underlie a form of life beset by widespread poverty and unemployment and under constant threat of environmental collapse and nuclear war? While it is crucial to question Foucault’s neoliberal vision of freedom, it is even more important to ask whether Foucault’s basic picture of power, institutionality, and normativity can, even in principle, live up to its own aim of providing a critical theory of modernity. This essay accomplishes three things: First, I show that Foucault’s deep misapprehension of transcendental idealism results in an incoherent conception of human discourse and practice. Second, I show that Foucault's genealogical method is unable to adequately specify the modern conception of power and to ground a critique of modern institutional practices. And third, turning to Kant’s greatest inheritor and Foucault’s bête noir, G.W.F. Hegel, I attempt to recover the Hegel that remained inaccessible to Foucault and to establish the conceptual conditions necessary for providing a consistent articulation of the idea of the historicity of reason.

Derrida Today, 2010

In The Experience of Freedom, Jean-Luc Nancy argues that freedom is not a state of human being, but an experience of the finitude of existence exposed in the openness of absolute possibility. Freedom is not something that someone has, but an experience that makes possible free being, the being free of something. In this essay I want to test this proposition in terms of democracy as a potential site of freedom. My argument, drawn from Jacques Derrida’s essays on democracy as well as Jean-Luc Nancy’s writing on the experience of freedom, is in response to an emerging problem in cultural critique where it is becoming increasingly difficult to think of a mode of democracy other than the one advanced through global capital. In this mode, freedom is produced in terms of its immanence to all social relations, so that democratic freedom becomes a self-evident virtue associated with the freedom of the citizen as an autonomous self. At the same time, human being (as defined in the occidental tradition) is becoming ever increasingly configured into calculations of economic efficiency (technē) and the necessities of behaviour accompanying subjectification. We are free so long as we subject ourselves to the commands and calculations that make us free. Thus human being is caught in an aporia between freedom and necessity configured at the very heart of democracy and especially in the current process of global democratisation. This paradoxical process colonises the practice of democracy grounded in a common way of life, restricting it to a set of predictable behaviours (e.g. opinion polls, statistics). The paper develops key ideas of sense, virtue, and freedom, working towards the idea of an open, pluralised democracy in affirmative resistance to the 'generic' democracy of neo-liberalism.

In this paper I explore what Michel Foucault described as the problem of contemporary Western society in regards to our relations with ourselves. In the 1980 Dartmouth Lectures he dubbed this issue as “the politics of ourselves” (Foucault, 2007b, 190). My hypothesis states that we should interpret Foucault's use of politics, in this instance, as defined by Plutarch as “'a life' and a 'practice' (bios kai praxis)” (Foucault, 1986, 87). Through this interpretation, in order for modern human beings to actively constitute themselves as ethical subjects they must attempt to solve two additional aspects of the puzzle: their lives and their practices. However, I will also maintain that this definition does not necessarily negate the simultaneous interpretation of politics as it is commonly conceived. In fact, I believe the utilization of both definitions is required.