{"id":1080,"date":"2016-02-07T11:48:05","date_gmt":"2016-02-07T16:48:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/?p=1080"},"modified":"2018-08-11T16:45:33","modified_gmt":"2018-08-11T20:45:33","slug":"forging-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/2016\/02\/07\/forging-words\/","title":{"rendered":"Jesus Velasco | Forging Words"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Jes\u00fas R. Velasco<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is at the beginning of his lectures On the Government of the Living<\/em> that Michel Foucault explains to his students\u2014to those heterogeneous, even heteroclite set of students he had at the Coll\u00e8ge de France\u2014that he intends to reformulate the relationship between truth and forms of government: he is not interested in studying\u00a0the bodies of knowledge that are \u201cuseful for those who govern\u201d, but rather in analyzing \u201cthat manifestation of truth correlative to the exercise of power.\u201d His first concern is to find the proper word to name this, and, as it is well known, he proposes\u00a0one that is \u201cnot well-established or recognized, since it has hardly been used but once, and then in a different form, by a Greek grammarian of the third or fourth centuries\u2026 a grammarian called Heraclitus who employs the adjective alethourges<\/em> [\u1f00<\/em>\u03bb\u03b7\u03b8\u03bf\u03c5\u03c1\u03b3\u03ae\u03c2<\/em>] for someone who speaks the truth.\u201d According to the data contained in the\u00a0LSJ<\/a>,\u00a0the word is, in effect, a hapax legomenon<\/em>, that is a word that only happened once in one particular context. The study tool included in Perseus<\/em> at Tufts, likewise, offers the possibility for its users to determine whether the meaning offered by the different dictionaries and glossaries is the right one. Foucault\u2019s meaning\u2014probably obtained from his reading of Pseudo-Heraclitus\u2019 Allegories d\u2019Hom\u00e8re<\/a>, <\/em>published in 1962 by Les Belles Lettres, collection Bud\u00e9 d\u2019Auteures Classiques<\/a>\u2014is the only one registered in the dictionaries, and the only one voted by Perseus\u2019<\/em> users. This hapax<\/em> adjective is the result of composing the noun meaning \u201ctruth\u201d (al\u00e9theia<\/em>, \u1f00\u03bb\u03ae\u03b8\u03b5\u03b9\u03b1) with the noun meaning \u201caction\u201d or \u201cdeed\u201d (\u00e9rgon, \u1f14\u03c1\u03b3\u03bf\u03bd).<\/p>\n

The \u201cfictive word\u201d forged by Foucault, alethurgy<\/em>, is decidedly defined to signify \u201cthe set of possible verbal and non-verbal procedures by which one brings to light what is laid down as true as opposed to false, hidden, inexpressible, unforeseeable, or forgotten,\u201d in order to conclude that \u201cthere is no power without something like alethurgy\u201d (7).<\/p>\n

The form used by Foucault, alethurgy, or, in French \u201cal\u00e8thurgie\u201d cannot hide a second genealogy, at least working at the level of the signifier, and at the phonological level. Indeed, the word does not only sound like the combination of al\u00e9theia<\/em> and \u00e9rgon<\/em>, but also like the combination of al\u00e9theia<\/em> and liturgy. Liturgy<\/a>, in turn, is a civil duty that one performs at his or her own expenses (and risks). As civil duty, it has a certain ritual, a series of forms and spaces where it can be performed. In fact, throughout Foucault\u2019s text, alethurgy goes from \u201cmanifestation of truth\u201d to mean the forms and rituals in which truth is manifested as part of the technique of government.<\/p>\n

Liturgy, however, is a concept also linked to religious duties and rituals that engage in government techniques (insofar as govern<\/em> is also hold the helm [lat. gubernaculum<\/a>] and pilot the ship [gr. kybernao<\/em>, \u03ba\u03c5\u03b2\u03b5\u03c1\u03bd\u03ac\u03c9<\/a>, also, incidentally, the etymon of \u201ccybernetics\u201d] one of the metaphors of the ecclesia christiana<\/em>), and in the adscription of specific rituals and actions to a certain calendar that keeps repeating itself year after year. Liturgy is, in Christian terms, the interconnection of a calendar with the actions, feelings, and duties that constitute the truth of the doctrine.<\/p>\n

Foucault\u2019s interest in \u201cforging\u201d words, and in his specific love for Greek words, cannot be underestimated, but also requires a lot of attention and specific individual study. The hapax legomenon<\/em> is a privileged epistemological structure, precisely because it exists formally only in a tentative way, and because its meaning has not been fully established. Foucault plays with both the signifier and the meaning, in order to create a concept that has institutional character. By creating \u201calethurgy\u201d he is not only creating an abstract concept, but also the spaces, times, agents, forms, and manifestations for\u00a0the performance of this concept. One good example is, indeed, the relationship between alethurgy, government, and confession \u2013and, in particular, Christian confession. In the list of rare Greek words that become part of his conceptual and institutional analysis, there are other well-known composites like exomologesis<\/em> or exagoreusis<\/em>, pieces of semantic\u00a0craftsmanship that allow Foucault to be extremely precise with his ideas on confession and truth \u2013from a perspective, however, that reminds us of Jesuitic introspection and confession.<\/p>\n

Even if he is not working with the hapax<\/em> or with similar unknown words, he prefers to look at his lexicon from an etymological perspective, by understanding the formation of the word and the foldings of the concept. A\u00a0good example for this is his reference to hegemony<\/em>, that he strips from its\u00a0most common understanding, in order to re-instate its etymological sense of \u201cbeing in the position of leading others\u201d (cf., hegemon\u00eda<\/em>, \u1f21\u03b3\u03b5\u03bc\u03bf\u03bd\u03af\u03b1<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Foucault loved Greek words \u2013one could say\u2014not only because they represented a trip in time and culture in search for ideas, notions, concepts, that would allow him to re-define the questions he wanted to ask and respond, to posit the issues. Those words are not just an open door to different genealogies. They are, also, like empty signifiers, words that cannot be in the memory of false friends, because they have been carefully selected from hidden sources and from a language that most students and scholars studied as a dead language. These forged words are invested with the power of defamiliarization (\u043e\u0441\u0442\u0440\u0430\u043d\u0435\u043d\u0438\u0435, ostrananie<\/em>) Viktor Sklovskij talked about in 1927: words that de-authomatize perceptions and call the attention on themselves. This defamiliarizing language is, one could argue, a set of pieces for meditation, for thinking. It is because of that that they can be the origin of a new process of theorization, of a question never asked before in that particular form.<\/p>\n

One could also argue that Foucault\u00a0was interested in forging institutions out of words, and not only concepts. Institutions, of course, not in the sense of State-institutions, confinement centers, or the like. Institutions in the sense in which some of his colleagues, predecessors, and masters in the Coll\u00e8ge de France understood the term, that is, in a profoundly philological and political way, in a profoundly legal and juridical way. Like \u00c9mile Benveniste identifying the Indo-european civil and religious institutions during his tenure at the Coll\u00e8ge de France, basing his analysis in the organization of the vocabulary. Like his master, Georges Dum\u00e9zil, working in the tri-functional societies and the relationship between forms of instituting practices and the use and distribution of its vocabularies in epics and history. Like, indeed, the work of other intellectuals including Merleau-Ponty, Roland Barthes, Jacqueline de Romilly, Georges Duby, or Pierre Hadot, working on the formation of political, social, and moral vocabularies and institutions in literary and non literary languages, from the Antiquity to the Early Modern period.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Jes\u00fas R. Velasco It is at the beginning of his lectures On the Government of the Living that Michel Foucault explains to his students\u2014to those heterogeneous, even heteroclite set of students he had at the Coll\u00e8ge de France\u2014that he… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1644,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38974],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts-9-13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1644"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1080\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}