Must We Do What We Say?

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

Biopolitics in the time of coronavirus

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.

To be done with truth-demonstration. Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault and the history of truth-regimes

El objetivo de este artículo es investigar el significado y el alcance de la «historia de la verdad» de Michel Foucault, es decir, su historia de la relación entre verdad, poder y subjetividad en las sociedades occidentales. Mi argumento básico es que la historia de la verdad de Foucault ha de entenderse como una tarea ética y política, más que como una epistemológica, ya que se presenta claramente como un estudio de la verdad de diferentes regímenes que representan las condiciones de posibilidad para la gobierno de los seres humanos y, al mismo tiempo, las condiciones de inteligibilidad de los procesos de subjetivación en los que participan los seres humanos. La distinción entre la verdad considerada como un «evento» y la verdad entendida como «demostración», junto con la oposición entre las concepciones antiguas y modernas de la verdad, será el marco esencial para evaluar la epistemología de Gaston Bachelard y Georges Canguilhem, quienes defendieron que no existe ninguna «verdad filosófica». En los párrafos finales se trata de demostrar que el anatomo y bio poder moderno todavía dependen en gran medida en el concepto epistemológico de la verdad, y para sugerir una manera positiva de afrontar ese giro epistemológico-aparato político.The aim of this article is to investigate the meaning and the scope of Michel Foucault’s «history of truth», i.e. his history of the relationship between truth, power and subjectivity in western societies. My basic argument is that Foucault’s history of truth has to be understood as an ethical and political task, far more than as an epistemological one, since it is clearly presented as a study of the different truth-regimes which represent the conditions of possibility for the government of human beings and, at the same time, the conditions of intelligibility for the processes of subjectivation in which these human beings are involved. The distinction between truth considered as an «event» and truth as «demonstration», together with the opposition between ancient and modern conceptions of truth, will be the essential framework to evaluate Gaston Bachelard’s epistemology and Georges Canguilhem’s claim that there does not exist any «philosophical truth». The concluding paragraphs try to show that modern anatomo- and bio-political relations of power still rely heavily on the epistemological concept of truth, and to suggest one positive way to resist this epistemological-political apparatus

Philosophical discourse and ascetic practice : on Foucault’s Readings of Descartes’ Meditations

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

From Counter-Conduct to Critical Attitude: Michel Foucault and the Art of Not Being Governed Quite So Much

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.

On possibilising genealogy

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