Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

FOUCAULT, BIOPOLITICS, AND GOVERNMENTALITY
not the “structural analysis of truth,” in a line that leads from Kant’s first
Critique to the first phases of analytical philosophy as well as to the
epistemological claims of early phenomenology, but the question of truth as
situated, historical, and finite, as a series of shifting horizons that must
include the present of the questioner. It is here that Foucault once more
encounters the later work of Heidegger (and to a lesser extent Hegel), and
the question of what it means for truth to have a history, without being
simply reducible to empirical conditions, i.e. truth as a series of problems
imposed on thought. 11
4) Finally, there is the theme of parrhesia and truth-telling (which is
dealt with in Maurizio Lazzarato’s contribution below). Foucault once more
returns to the Greeks, this time not in order to investigate various forms of
self-relation and self-constitution, but instead to consider the role of the
intellectual in public life and Greek democracy (significantly, the 1981–82
lectures begin with an extended meditation on Kant’s analysis of Öffentlichkeit
before going back to the Greek material). 12 But although the work on
parrhesia forms the core of the last lectures delivered before his death in
1984, they cannot be taken as a last will and testament; they remain just as
open and inconclusive as the preceding ones. The end itself seems to arrive
in medias res; the final words from the lecture, dated March 28, 1984, read:
The truth of life before the true life, it is in this reversal that Christian
asceticism fundamentally modified an ancient asceticism that always
aspired to lead, at the same time, the true life and life of truth, and that,
11 The ultimate question that Foucault proposes in his analysis of the history of sexuality
(most explicitly in the introduction to the second volume, The Use of Pleasure) bears on
how man has constituted himself as at once a subject and an object, explicated his
relation to himself, and opened up a space of self-reflection in a “truth game.” Such a
“hermeneutics of the self” does not concern knowledge in the sense of propositional
truth, but the constitution of a particular type of experience of the self as a problem. This
history of truth intersects Heidegger’s conception of the history of metaphysics as a
series of finite horizons within which beings can be given in experience, and for
Heidegger too, truth does not refer to mental representations or propositions as
correlated to states of affairs, but to a pre-objective and pre-subjective “openness” for all
types of subject and object positions, aletheia as the clearing in which beings can be
encountered. But unlike Heidegger’s meditations on metaphysics, which claim to locate
those moments in the history of metaphysics where beings as such are given in new
ways, the perspective opened up by Foucault’s rereading of the dispositifs of sexuality
and the analyses of processes of “subjectification” and “technologies of the self” wants to
allow an open multiplicity of mundane practices to play a constitutive role, although
without giving in to a simple historicism.
12 Le gouvernement de soi et des autres: Cours au collège de France, 1982–1983, ed. Frédéric
Gros (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2008).
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