The Politics of Truth (Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents)

192 Pages·2007·12.94 MB·English

by  Michel Foucault

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THE POLITICS
O F T R U T H
Michel Foucault
Edited by Sylvere Lotringer
Introduction by John Rajchman
Translated by Lysa Hochroth & Catherine Porter
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Contents
Introduction: Enlightenment Today by John Rajchman 9
Was ist Aufklarung? by Immanuel Kant 29
PART 1. CRITIQUE AND ENLIGHTENMENT 39
1. What is Critique? 41
2. What is Revolution? 83
3. What is Enlightenment? 97
4. For an Ethics of Discomfort 121
5. What Our Present Is 129
PART 2. HERMENEUTICS OF THE SELF 145
1. Subjectivity and Truth 147
2. Christianity and Confession 169
Acknowledgements 193

John Rajchman
Enlightenment Today
Introduction to The Politics of Truth
"WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT?" Kant asked himself in a short essay
in a Berlin newspaper in 1784, a few years before the Revolution
in France would sweep Europe, inspiring his Republican enthusi
asm. Reprinted, it starts this volume. Two centuries later, from
1978 to his death in 1984, in a series of lectures, interviews, and
prefaces that accompanied him in his many travels, Michel Fou
cault would constantly refer back to this apparently minor text in
the Kantian corpus, finding in it a new question that would be
taken up in different ways in German, French, and English lan
guage traditions, leading to his own style of "historico
philosophical critique". In the process, the very idea of enlightenment
would appear in a new light, confronted with the great questions
of the 20th century about political rationality, colonialism, and the
fate of Revolution in Russia, and hence with the problem of a new
and "despotic" kind of lumiere. A selection from these writings
makes up the rest of this book.
An immediate impetus for Foucault's focus on the enlighten
ment question was a grand intra-continental philosophical debate,
pitting Foucault against Jurgen Habermas, dreamt up at UC
Berkeley, but eventually assuming a larger scope. Habermas would
publish his own views in a polemical series of lectures called "The
9
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity," in which he declared that
there is in fact nothing new in post-war French philosophy or what
he calls "neo-structuralism". For, in effect, the post-war French
philosophers simply had become bad irrational Germans (follow
ing Nietzsche and Heidegger), while in the meantime the Germans
had become good Americans (social-democratic, consensual), thus
shifting roles in a larger "discourse of modernity" that descends
from the division of Kant's three Critiques.l Playing with Haber
mas, Foucault offered another picture. He wanted to show how the
line in modern French philosophy that descends from Cavailles,
Bachelard, and Canguilhem could be seen to have taken up the
question of enlightenment in a new way, leading after the War to
the invention of a different idea of the critical attitude from Haber
mas' own picture of a public rational argumentation transpiring in
the lofty "quasi-transcendental" air of "ideal speech" and leading to
consensus. In post-war French thought, he tried to isolate and
define a more agonistic style of critical thinking, less sure of prior
or unchanging norms or deductive argumentation, more closely
tied to material conditions-uncertain and questioning, "dis
sensual" or "problematising," associated as well with fiction and
aesthetics rather than with sociological expertise or academic posi
tions-which would yet retain the honorable political background
symbolized by Jean Cavailles in the French Resistance.2 It was as if
the whole idea of "Continental" philosophy that had grown up in
academia after the War around the fate of phenomenology in
France (itself rooted in a "subject-centered" version of Kantian
critique) was becoming unraveled, dismantled, and new lines were
being drawn up, in which the French "neo-structuralist" sequence
had become the zone of debate and transformation. Foucault's
lectures on enlightenment may be read as his attempt, in this
10 I Hit) Puiilic;; of Truth
"post-Continental" situation, to redraw the map of post-Kamian
thought and to sketch a new kind of critique.
Joined by many other voices and players on both sides of the
Rhine and the Atlantic, the larger bicentennial debate about
enlightenment to which this sometimes acrimonious exchange
would give rise, emerged at a particular juncture not simply in
Continental philosophy, but also in politics. It goes back to a
moment after the events of 1968 but before the fall of the Berlin
Wall in 1989 that would help hasten the unraveling of the great
cold-war ideological divide, which, particularly on political ques
tions, had tended to over-determine the Continental and
"Anglo-Saxon" philosophical divisions at issue. No doubt Fou
cault's trips to Poland during this period, and, more generally, his
philosophical sympathies with East European dissidence (with its
own complicated relations with Enlightened Germany or France)
together with his on-going discussions with the "autonomous"
movements in Italy (and the issue of "red terrorism"), anticipate
this event he did live to see and its role in the larger post-Marxist
character of the debate over enlightenment. In France at the time,
the historian Fran<;:ois Furet had been arguing that the Revolution
in Europe-about which Kant had been so enthusiastic, later taken
up and transformed in 1917-had finally come to a close, undoing,
in the process, the old divide between left and right; at the same
time, for his part, Jean-Fran<;:ois Lyotard was writing his own com
mentaries on the aesthetics of Kant's "enthusiasm," tied up with
what he called "the event," and so to his idea of post-modernism ..~
In his enlightenment lectures, Foucault took up this question of
politics after the Revolution: how, he would ask in 1978, might we
continue critical thought and reinvent the political, after the hopes
of a Revolution that had "gone astray in a despotic rationaliry"?4
Introduction: Enllqhtenrnnllt Today / 11
Today, twenty-odd years on, however, this larger geo-philo
sophical or geo-political setting of Foucault's lectures no longer
seems quite the same, as if the strata in the Continent of Europe
(and hence of its Enlightenment, its Revolution) had shifted in
turn. The great internal rift of the day between French and German
sorts of critical theory seems a good deal less burning; and even
Habermas came to admit the limitations, if not the outright mis
readings, in his book. New forces at once inside and outside the
borders of Europe have emerged to recast the question of critical
enlightenment, at once philosophical and political, with which he
and Foucault were concerned. Indeed, if one were to ask "what is
enlightenment?" (and so, at the same time, what was enlighten
ment and what might it yet be) today in Europe, one would rather
quickly be confronted with two larger global schemes and related
problems. One would be faced with the question of the so-called
"clash of civilizations" or of religious collectivities, in and out of
Europe, and hence of the role of religion and politics so central in
Kant's idea of enlightenment at the end of the 18th century, and
hence, with the apparent failure of European Republican ideals and
institutions, especially schools themselves (or the social-scientific
knowledge they at once produce and suppose), to deal with this
"clash" in Europe or to institutionalize this key Republican
lumiere. The whole "theologico-political" dimension of the ques
tion of enlightenment has thus been cast in a new light. At the
same time, one would no doubt be confronted with the role of
America in this question of religion, and with it, a second division,
pitting a more civilized but less militarized Europe against an
American "imperial" (or hegemonic) military force and crass "post
industrial" commercial civilization, spreading out in the global
cities of the world, and opposed by "anti-globalization" meetings in
12 I Trx; Politics of TrlJnl
other cities. The cosmopolitan implications of Kant's vIew of
enlightenment acquire new sense and urgency in this situation;
indeed there is the whole question of the fate of European or Con
tinental critical-philosophical traditions as "minor languages"
within, and with respect to, an increasingly global English. Today
in short, much more than in 1978-1984, the great post-Kantian
critical philosophies in France as in Germany seem to be confront
ed with a complex situation, at once within and without their
borders, in which they are called upon to intervene without being
able any longer to completely control from their center, yet in
which they constitute a key zone.
Re-assembled in this small congenial format precisely in Eng
lish, Foucault's lectures on enlightenment seem peculiarly suited to
this new situation. What role might the French historico-philo
sophical attitude he was trying to sketch yet play in it and in
analyzing it? How might his picture of an agonistic collectivity in
critical thought, irreducible to any already constituted public,
emerging in different places through the new sorts of questions it
starts to pose to politics (and to political policy) and so to the forms
of knowledge on which it rests, be adapted and used in the larger
transnational or global arena that has taken shape in the years after
his death? What new forms of sensibility, what aesthetics do these
questions suppose or encourage, themselves elaborated in an
increasingly global practice in contemporary art and art institu
tions? On what sorts of new lineages or genealogies in critical
European philosophy might they draw? What (and where), in
other words, is enlightenment, or the enlightened public's "use of
reason," today?
Two general features of the view of enlightenment Foucault
works out in these lectures stand out in this regard; at the same