Synopses & Reviews
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 “criminal” 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.
Review
Praise for
Lectures at the College de France, 1978-1979:
"[Foucault] has an alert and sensitive mind that can ignore the familiar surfaces of established intellectual codes and ask new questions...[He] gives dramatic quality to the movement of culture."--The New York Review of Books "Foucault is quite central to our sense of where we are..."--The Nation "These lectures offer important insights into the evolution of the primary focus of Foucault's later work - the relationship between power and knowledge."--Library Journal
"Ideas spark off nearly every page...The words may have been spoken in [the 1970s] but they seem as alive and relevant as if they had been written yesterday."--Bookforum
Review
“Graham Burchell has once again done an excellent job retaining its stylistic simplicity.”--Theory & EventPraise for Lectures at the College de France, 1978-1979:
"[Foucault] has an alert and sensitive mind that can ignore the familiar surfaces of established intellectual codes and ask new questions...[He] gives dramatic quality to the movement of culture."--The New York Review of Books "Foucault is quite central to our sense of where we are..."--The Nation "These lectures offer important insights into the evolution of the primary focus of Foucault's later work - the relationship between power and knowledge."--Library Journal
"Ideas spark off nearly every page...The words may have been spoken in [the 1970s] but they seem as alive and relevant as if they had been written yesterday."--Bookforum
Review
“A stunning set of lectures given by Foucault that focus on the history of 'avowing' ones acts and the truth of who one is. Foucault seeks to understand at what point it became important not only to confess to a crime, but to avow ones act in public. For Foucault, avowal of ones criminality before an established authority becomes a way of reestablishing that authority, and resisting avowal becomes tantamount to civil disobedience. The political implications of his analysis become especially clear in the interviews included here. This is wonderful and arresting read.”
Review
“The publication of Foucaults Louvain lectures, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling, beautifully and rigorously established and commented upon by Fabienne Brion and Bernard Harcourt, is an important event in the contemporary blossoming of Foucault studies. In no way is it redundant with the lectures at the Collège de France, whose series is now practically complete. With this amazingly rich inquiry, focusing on the mythical, religious, and judiciary dimensions of 'avowal,' we are offered a unique possibility to understand how Foucaults genealogy articulated the order of discourse and the power of institutions.”
Review
“Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling is one of Foucaults most stirring inquiries into what he has named ‘the hermeneutics of oneself. These lectures stage the concept of avowal in performances as varied as Greek tragedy, criminal justice, and confessional practices; and they provide us with some of Foucaults most illuminating observations on the intimate and agonistic relations between sites of enunciation, orders of truth, and investments of power. The subject of avowal is never free of the ethical exigency and the discursive contingency of 'chang[ing] itself, transform[ing] itself, displac[ing] itself, and becom[ing] to some extent other than itself, and Foucaults genius lies in providing us with critical and genealogical reflections on the worldly practices of avowal. Bernard Harcourt and Fabienne Brions essential afterword provides both a frame and a ballast to the book. This is a considerable addition to the English archive of the work of Michel Foucault.”
Review
"The publications of Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France have given us an incredible view of the development of his thinking. This new volume, The Government of Self and Others, shows us how Foucault was conceiving the relation between the self and the others who make up the political, how fearless speech (parrēsia) is at the center of both, and how parrēsia defines, for Foucault, philosophical action itself. Thanks to these lectures, we see Foucault as the great thinker he is."
- Leonard Lawlor, Sparks Professor of Philosophy, Penn State University, USA.
"The publication of Foucault's lectures is momentous not only because they deepen our understanding of his books and essays, but because they dramatically change the way we read him. This study of the ancient practice of parresia – philosophical truth-telling – forces us to abandon the view that his late thought was a turn away from politics.
The key question in these lectures is the relationship between philosophy and politics: their necessary dependence, but impossible coincidence. The political significance of philosophy was an acute problem for Foucault throughout his life. It remains a definitive question today for anyone concerned with the future of Western political thought and practice."
- Johanna Oksala, University of Dundee, UK.
"The Government of Self and Others is a fascinating analysis of a notion which is at the center of the philosophical and political enterprise and is highly recommended for specialist and non-specialist scholars alike."
- Christopher Forlini, Free University Berlin, Germany.
Review
”Reconstructed through the patient labours of Fabienne Brion and Bernard Harcourt, . . . [the lectures] are now available in a scrupulous English translation.”
Review
"Fabienne Brion and Bernard Harcourt are to be congratulated for their invaluable work."
Review
“The Louvain lectures show us an aspect of Foucault’s work that is often neglected in an attempt to focus on his commitment to historicizing: that for histories, even genealogical histories, to be constructed, one must not only trace the changes themselves but also that which is changed and therefore remains, in its changes, continuous.”
Synopsis
This lecture, given by Michel Foucault at the Collège de France, launches an inquiry into the notion of parresia and continues his rereading of ancient philosophy. Through the study of this notion of truth-telling, of speaking out freely, Foucault re-examines Greek citizenship, showing how the courage of the truth forms the forgotten ethical basis of Athenian democracy. The figure of the philosopher king, the condemnation of writing, and Socrates rejection of political involvement are some of the many topics of ancient philosophy revisited here.
Synopsis
Three years before his death Michel Foucault gave a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain that have remained relatively unknown until only recently. Entitled Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling, these lectures provides the missing link between Foucaults early work on sexuality and punishment and his later work on Greek and Roman antiquity. Ranging broadly from Homer to the 20th century, Foucault traces how the early ethical acts of truth-telling in ancient Greece gradually metamorphosed into acts of self-incrimination in monastic times and ultimately into the birth and rise of psychiatry as the foundation of modern penology, criminology, and criminal justice. For Foucault, self-incrimination no longer did the work necessary to quell justice because, by the 19th century, we wanted to know more than just the fact of wrongdoing, we wanted to know who the criminal was: not just whether the accused committed the crime, but what it was about him that made him commit the crime. An avowal of wrong-doing was no longer sufficient—psychiatric expertise was now necessary—and that development marks the birth of discipline and modern criminal justice made so famous by Foucault
About the Author
Michel Foucault (1926–84) was one of the most significant social theorists of the twentieth century, his influence extending across many areas of the humanities and social sciences.
Fabienne Brion is professor in the School of Law and Criminology at the Catholic University of Louvain.
Bernard E. Harcourt is Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and the director of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought.
Stephen W. Sawyer is chair of the History Department and cofounder of the History, Law, and Society Program at the American University of Paris. He is the translator of Michel Foucault’s Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Table of Contents
Foreword: François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana
Translators Note
One: 5 January 1983: First Hour
Remarks on method. — Study of Kants text: What is Enlightenment? — Conditions of publication: journals. — The encounter between Christian Aufklärung and Jewish Haskala: freedom of conscience. — Philosophy and present reality. — The question of the Revolution. — Two critical filiations.
Two: 5 January 1983: Second Hour
The idea of tutelage ( minorité ): neither natural powerlessness nor authoritarian deprivation of rights. — Way out from the condition of tutelage and critical activity. — The shadow of three Critiques. — The difficulty of emancipation: laziness and cowardice; the predicted failure of liberators. — Motivations of the condition of tutelage: superimposition of obedience and absence of reasoning; confusion between the private and public use of reason. — The problematic turn at the end of Kants text.
Three: 12 January 1983: First Hour
Reminds of method. — Definition of the subject to be studied this year. — Parresia: difficulty in defining the notion; bibliographical reference points. — An enduring, plural, and ambiguous notion. — Plato faced with the tyrant of Syracuse: an exemplary scene of parresia. — The echo of Oedipus. — Parresia versus demonstration, teaching, and discussion. — The element of risk.
Four: 12 January 1983: Second Hour
Irreducibility of the parrhesiastic to the performative utterance: opening up of an unspecified risk/public expression of a personal conviction/bringing a free courage into play. — Pragmatics and dramatics of discourse. — Classical use of the notion of parresia: democracy ( Polybius ) and citizenship ( Euripides ).
Five: 19 January 1983: First Hour
Ion in the mythology and history of Athens. — Political context of Euripides tragedy: the Nicias peace. — History of Ions birth. — Alethurgic schema of the tragedy. — The implication of the three truth-tellings: oracle, confession ( laveu ), and political discourse. — Structural comparison of Ion and Oedipus the King. — The adventures of truth-telling in Ion: the double half-life.
Six: 19 January 1983: Second Hour
Ion: A nobody, son of nobody. —Three categories of citizen. — Consequences of political intrusion by Ion: private hatreds and public tyranny. — In search of a mother. — Parresia irreducible to the actual exercise of power and to the citizens status. — The agnostic game of truth-telling: free and risky. — Historical context: the Cleon/Nicias debate. — Creusas anger.
Seven: 26 January 1983: First Hour
Continuation and end of the comparison between Ion and Oedipus: the truth does not arise from an investigation but from the clash of passions. — The rule of illusions and passions. — The cry of confession and accusation. — G. Dumézils analyses of Apollo. — Dumézils categories applied to Ion. — Tragic modulation of the theme of the voice. — Tragic modulation of the theme of gold.
Eight: 26 January 1983: Second Hour
Tragic modulation of the theme of fertility. — Parresia as imprecation: public denunciation by the weak of the injustice of the powerful. — Creusas second confession ( aveu ): the voice of confession ( confession ). Final episodes: from murder plan to Athenas appearance.
Nine: 2 February 1983: First Hour
Reminder of the Polybius text. — Return to Ion: divine and human veridictions. — The three forms of parresia: statutory-political; judicial; moral. — Political parresia: its connections with democracy; its basis in an agnostic structure. — Return to the Polybius text isegoria/parresia relationship. Politeia and dunasteia: thinking of politics as experience. — Parresia in Euripides: The Phoenician Women; Hippolytus; The Baccahe; Orestes. — The Trial of Orestes.
Ten: 2 February 1983: Second Hour
The rectangle of parresia: formal condition, de facto condition, truth condition, and moral condition. — Example of the correct functioning of democratic parresia in Thucydides: three discourse of Pericles. — Bad parresia in Isocrates.
Eleven: 9 February 1983: First Hour
Parresia: everyday usage; political usage. — Reminder of three exemplary scenes: Thucydides; Isocrates; Plutarch. — Lines of evolution of parresia. — The four great problems of ancient political philosophy: the ideal city; the respective merits of democracy and autocracy; addressing the Princes soul; the philosophy/rhetoric relationship. — Study of three texts by Plato.
Twelve: 9 February 1983: Second Hour
Platos Letters: the context. — Study of Letter V: the phone of constitutions; reasons for non-involvement. — Study of Letter VII. — Dions history. — Platos political autobiography. — The journey to Sicily. — Why Plato accepts: kairos; philia; ergon.
Thirteen: 16 February 1983: First Hour
Philosophical ergon. Comparison with the Alcibiades. — The reality of philosophy: the courageous address to power. — First condition of reality: listening, the first circle. — The philosophical oeuvre: a choice; a way; an application. — The reality of philosophy as work of self on self ( second circle ).
Fourteen: 16 February 1983: Second Hour
The failure of Dionysius. — The platonic rejection of writing. — Mathemata versus sunousia. — Philosophy as practice of the soul. — The philosophical digression of Letter VII: the five elements of knowledge. — The third circle: the circle of knowledge. — The philosopher and the legislator. — Final remarks on contemporary interpretations of Plato.
Fifteen: 23 February 1983: First Hour
The enigmatic blandness of Platos political advice. — The advice of Dionysius. — The diagnosis, practice of persuasion, proposal of a regime. — Advice to Dions friends. — Study of Letter VIII. — Parresia underpins political advice.
Sixteen: 23 February 1983: Second Hour
Philosophy and politics: necessary relationship but impossible coincidence. — Cynical and Platonic game with regard to politics. — The new historical conjuncture: thinking a new political unit beyond the city-state. — From the public square to the Princes soul. — The Platonic theme of the philosopher-king.
Seventeen: 2 March 1983: First Hour
Reminders about political parresia. — Points in the evolution of political parresia. — The major questions of ancient philosophy. — Study of a text by Lucian. — Ontology of discourse of veridiction. — Socratic speech in Apology. — The paradox of the political non-involvement of Socrates.
Eighteen: 2 March 1983: Second Hour
End of study of Socrates Apology: parresia/rhetoric opposition. — Study of the Phaedrus: general plan of the dialogue. — The conditions of good logos. — Truth as permanent function of discourse. — Dialectic and psychagogy. — Philosophical parresia.
Nineteen: 9 March 1983: First Hour
The historical turnaround of parresia: from the political game to the philosophical game. — Philosophy as practice of parresia: the example of Aristippus. — The philosophical life as manifestation of the truth. — The permanent address to power. — The interpellation of each. — Portrait of the Cynic in Epictetus. — Pericles and Socrates. — Modern philosophy and courage of the truth.
Twenty: 9 March 1983: Second Hour
Study of the Gorgias. — The obligation of confession ( aveu ) in Plato: the context of liquidation of rhetoric. — The three qualities of Callicles: episteme; parresia; eunoia. — Agnostic game against egalitarian system. — Socratic speech: basanos and homologia.
Course Context
Index of Names
Index of Concepts and Notions