{"id":1298,"date":"2016-02-21T17:27:10","date_gmt":"2016-02-21T22:27:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/?p=1298"},"modified":"2018-08-11T16:21:55","modified_gmt":"2018-08-11T20:21:55","slug":"introducing-subjectivite-et-verite","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/2016\/02\/21\/introducing-subjectivite-et-verite\/","title":{"rendered":"Bernard E. Harcourt | Introducing Subjectivit\u00e9 et V\u00e9rit\u00e9"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Bernard E. Harcourt\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1981, Foucault delivered, back-to-back, two lecture series. First, he gave twelve lessons on Subjectivit\u00e9 et v\u00e9rit\u00e9 <\/em>[Subjectivity and Truth<\/em>, not yet translated into English] at the Coll\u00e8ge de France from January 7th<\/sup> to April 1st<\/sup>, 1981. The very next day, Foucault began a second lecture series, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice<\/em>, which he delivered at the Catholic University of Louvain from April 2nd<\/sup> to May 20th<\/sup>, 1981.<\/p>\n

Subjectivit\u00e9 et v\u00e9rit\u00e9<\/em> explicitly pursues the line of research begun the previous year<\/a> regarding the third dimension of Foucault\u2019s research project\u2014namely, beyond knowledge and\u00a0power, the question of the subject and subjectivity\u2014focused specifically on the domain of ancient Greek and Roman sexuality or rather aphrodisia<\/em> (since, as he explains, the term “sexuality” is a more modern invention and thus anachronistic). As Foucault underscores on January 7, 1981: “I would now like to apply the same method [concerning subjectivity] to another domain, the domain of what we call, since relatively recently (less than two centuries), sexuality.”(S&V<\/em>, p. 16).<\/p>\n

In this light, the central question of the 1981 lectures becomes: \u201cHow to \u2018govern oneself\u2019 through actions\u2014actions of which one is oneself the objective, the domain on which they apply, the instrument that they use, and the subject that acts?\u201d (S&V<\/em>, p. 299). To address this question, Foucault returns to texts from Greek and Roman antiquity, with an emphasis on the late Stoics\u2014but ranging from Plato\u2019s Alcibiades <\/em>and Aristotle\u2019s Nicomachean Ethics<\/em>, to Hippocrates and Xenophon, to Cicero\u2019s De finibus<\/em>, Plutarch, Pliny the Elder, and Hierocles, to Artemidorus\u2019 The Interpretation of Dreams <\/em>and the Physiologus <\/em>(both circa 200 CE)\u2014in order to study the ancient modes of life through detailed analyses of marriage, marital life, and marital sex, the questions of sexual penetration, monogamy, pederasty, and incest, and the ways in which the ancients shared their normative views.<\/p>\n

From the Arts of Government to the Arts of Living<\/h1>\n

What becomes increasingly evident as Foucault’s\u00a0research unfolds is that, despite the continuity in the line of inquiry from\u00a0the year before, we are beginning to witness an important displacement in Foucault’s\u00a0thought from an earlier focus, beginning in 1977 and extending to 1980, on the \u201carts of governing\u201d to a more concerted focus now on the \u201carts of living.\u201d In other words, there is an increasing interiority<\/em> to the object of these arts, these techne<\/em>. While much of the earlier work on madness, the clinic, and the prison\u2014and even, to a certain extent, the first volume on sexuality\u2014examined the conduct of conduct by others, Foucault\u2019s attention to subjectivity is beginning to produce a shift toward the conduct of conduct by oneself. One can feel this reading the 1981 lectures: they are increasingly about arts of living, about modes of existence, about ways of being. They are about what Foucault calls \u201cla fa\u00e7on de se conduire, les modes de vie, les mani\u00e8res d\u2019\u00eatre<\/em>,\u201d \u201cles arts de vivre, l\u2019art de se conduire,<\/em>\u201d \u201cles mod\u00e8les de conduite<\/em>,\u201d or \u201cces consignes d\u2019existence<\/em>.\u201d (S&V<\/em>, p. 29). We have shifted ground to modes of life<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In the case of madness, the clinic, or the prison, Foucault maintained, \u201cthe core of truthful discourse regarding the self was held from the outside, by an other\u201d\u2014by the psychiatrist, the doctor, social worker, actuarian, or warden. By contrast, in the domain of aphrodesia<\/em>, the truthful discourse on the self is institutionalized in an entirely different way: by the subject reflecting on him or herself. \u201cThat is to say,\u201d Foucault explains, \u201cit is not organized on the basis of an observation or examination, or of objective rules, but rather around the practice of avowal,\u201d on the basis of a more internal or internalized reflection, on the basis of something that we, ourselves, tell ourselves about ourselves. (S&V<\/em>, p. 16-17) It is not like the doctor who tells us we are mad, nor the psychiatrist who tells us we are dangerous; rather, it is we, ourselves, who talk about our own desires, about what we<\/em> desire.<\/p>\n

This produces a subtle shift. To be sure, Foucault\u2019s lengthy treatment for instance of Artemidorus\u2019 The Interpretation of Dreams<\/em>\u00a0(with which Foucault will open Volume 3 of the\u00a0History of<\/em>\u00a0Sexuality) shows how the text signals to others<\/em> how they should interiorize sex acts that augur well versus those that are foreboding\u2014and surely, this is governing of the other as well. But the focus is less on particular behaviors (what Foucault refers to as \u201cles arts du comportement<\/em>,\u201d which he associates with the modern period), than on modes of being, on \u201cthe being that we are,\u201d or \u201ca certain quality of being, a certain modality of experiencing.\u201d (S&V<\/em>, p. 33) This is not to suggest that other persons do not play an important role; the director of conscience, the spiritual guide is a central figure. But nevertheless, as Foucault explains:<\/p>\n

Every art of living implicates that not only does one learn, but, as we would say with our vocabulary, we interiorize. En tout cas il faut que l\u2019on pense soi-m\u00eame, que l\u2019on r\u00e9fl\u00e9chisse dessus, que l\u2019on m\u00e9dite.<\/em>\u201d (S&V<\/em>, p. 34).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This subtle movement from the \u201carts of governing\u201d to the \u201carts of living\u201d serves to reframe Foucault\u2019s research project in relation to the bios<\/em> of biopolitics. Foucault returns to the question of bios <\/em>on March 25, 1981, where he suggests that the term is the closest Greek concept to our modern notion of subjectivity. (S&V<\/em>, p. 255) Bios<\/em> is at the heart of these 1981 lectures.<\/p>\n

From biopolitics to \u201cbiopoetics\u201d to \u201cbiotechniques\u201d<\/em><\/h1>\n

As you will recall<\/a>, the turn to subjectivity the previous year, in 1980, was the result of Foucault’s investigation of biopolitics<\/em>: in 1979<\/a> Foucault had explored neoliberalism in order to set the foundation for a study of populations and biopolitics; he had intended to then return to the question of biopower by studying \u201cthe government of the living\u201d in 1980<\/a>, but instead returned to the ancients to reboot, at an earlier time, his genealogy of the arts of governing\u2014his genealogy of governmentality\u2014thus going back to Sophocles and then the Stoics and early Christian writers. But the return to the ancients in 1980, with a more focused attention on sexuality in 1981, displaces or shifts his attention from biopolitics to \u201cbiopoetics,\u201d and ultimately to \u201cbiotechniques.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bios<\/em>\u00a0remains the central concept\u00a0\u2014corresponding to the Greek term for these arts of living, of how to conduct oneself\u2014but it has taken on a different valence from the earlier attention to \u201cpopulations.\u201d The focus now is on techniques of the self. The hand-written manuscript of the 1981 lectures proposes a fascinating trajectory from biopolitics<\/em>\u00a0related to the normalization of sexual behaviors, to biopoetics<\/em>\u00a0related to a \u201cpersonal fabrication of one\u2019s own life\u201d and \u201caesthetical-moral conduct of individual existence,\u201d and ultimately to biotechniques<\/em>, a term which Foucault uses in the public lectures. (S&V<\/em>, p. 37 n.a).<\/p>\n

From biopolitics<\/em>, then, to biopoetics, <\/em>to biotechniques<\/em> or techniques of the self, or technologies of the self: this is the path that Foucault takes in these 1981 lectures to explore what, he tells us, the Greeks and the Romans practiced under the rubric \u201ctekhnai peri bion<\/em> (techniques of living).\u201d (S&V<\/em>, p. 37)<\/p>\n

Aphrodesia, Flesh, Sexuality<\/em><\/h1>\n

Foucault declares that he wants to focus the 1981 lectures on \u201cconcupiscence,\u201d what we might call lust or sexual desire. As Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Gros notes, Foucault had originally\u00a0planned to dedicate the second of the six volumes of The History of Sexuality<\/em> to a genealogy of concupiscence under the title La Chair et le Corps<\/em> [The Flesh and the Body<\/em>] (S&V<\/em>, p. 25-26 n.42; see <\/em>back cover of the original edition of HS <\/em>in 1976). This second volume was intended to be, as Daniel Defert writes in his Chronology, \u201ca genealogy of concupiscence by means of the practice of the confession in Western Christianity and of the direction of conscience, such as it developed after the Council of Trent.\u201d (Defert, Chronologie in Pl\u00e9iade <\/em>edition of the complete works of Michel Foucault, Volume 2, p. xxvii).<\/p>\n

These 1981 lectures, by contrast, will not focus on Christian writings, but rather (mostly) on the late Stoics. Foucault will explore their writings on marriage and conjugal relations (spending a\u00a0lot\u00a0of time on marital relations), monogamy, bodily pleasures, and the love and erotics of boys. This research will contribute to Foucault\u2019s ongoing genealogy of the desiring subject, which would culminate in the\u00a01984 publication of volumes 2 and 3 of\u00a0The History of Sexuality<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Most of the material in Volume 3: The Care of the Self<\/em> is, in fact, a development of the material that Foucault began to explore in these 1981 lectures, Subjectivity and Truth<\/em>, beginning with the opening chapter (\u00ab\u00a0R\u00eaver de ses plaisirs\u00a0\u00bb<\/em>) on Artemidorus, then turning in Chapter 3 to matrimonial relations, in Chapter 4 to the body and regimes of pleasures, in Chapter 5 to the wife, conjugal relations and the pleasures of marriage, and finally in Chapter 6 to the love and erotics of boys, through analyses of texts of the first two centuries CE.<\/p>\n

What Foucault began to\u00a0unearth here in 1981 already\u2014and would build on in his later lectures\u2014is that four-part\u00a0history\u00a0of the desiring subject reflected, first, in the ancient Greek experience of aphrodesia<\/em>, second in the Stoic and Epicurean culture of the self in the first two centuries CE, third in the Christian experience of the flesh, and fourth\u00a0in the modern experience of sexuality. (S&V<\/em>, p. 78)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Bernard E. Harcourt\u00a0 In 1981, Foucault delivered, back-to-back, two lecture series. First, he gave twelve lessons on Subjectivit\u00e9 et v\u00e9rit\u00e9 [Subjectivity and Truth, not yet translated into English] at the Coll\u00e8ge de France from January 7th to April 1st,… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1641,"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":[38975],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts-10-13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1298","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\/1641"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1298\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}