{"id":1342,"date":"2016-03-01T09:17:10","date_gmt":"2016-03-01T14:17:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/?p=1342"},"modified":"2016-03-01T11:01:39","modified_gmt":"2016-03-01T16:01:39","slug":"stathis-gourgouris-on-subjectivite-et-verite-a-redetermination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/2016\/03\/01\/stathis-gourgouris-on-subjectivite-et-verite-a-redetermination\/","title":{"rendered":"Stathis Gourgouris on Subjectivit\u00e9 et v\u00e9rit\u00e9: A Redetermination"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Stathis Gourgouris<\/strong><\/p>\n

Please allow me a philological indulgence as a point of entry.<\/p>\n

For a while now, in reading through these seminars, I have become intrigued by the homologous sonority between penance and penalty, enough to do a little digging. Etymological opinions differ on the matter of their linguistic association. No doubt, the whole panoply of words linked to the punitive domain is drawn from the Latin derivation of the Greek poin\u0113<\/em>, which is the fine, penalty, or punishment exchanged for a transgression. The word still enjoys contemporary usage with fully established juridical value. This much is easy.<\/p>\n

Penance (and its surrogate, penitence) is thought to derive as well from the Late Latin poenit\u0113re<\/em>, the verb deriving from poena<\/em>, which does mean penalty (and in English will also come to lend significance to the word \u201cpain\u201d) and is, of course, just as much a carryover from the same Greek poin\u0113<\/em>.[1]<\/a> But contrary to the Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins<\/em>, the Oxford English Dictionary<\/em> claims that the Latin verb poenit\u0113re<\/em> is a late Latin spelling of paenit\u0113re<\/em>, which is generally thought to be related to paene<\/em> \u2013 \u201calmost\u201d \u2013 in the sense of signifying something that is regrettable for not being quite enough, for almost being what is meant to be, regretfully nearly achieved but not quite. Indeed, the full ascetic gamut of penitence in Western Christianity is characterized by the desire to repair the whole that has been torn either by specific acts in worldly life or by the fallen condition of human-being as such. Penitence and repentance \u2013 the \u201cre\u201d already figures as the sign of the repetition necessary in every ascetic discipline \u2013 are meant precisely to repair this tearing, to reverse the regret.<\/p>\n

[Incidentally, notice the similar connection\/disjunction in French regarding the word peine<\/em>, which in legal discourse is primarily used to indicate \u201cpain\u201d but in common language is also used to mean \u201ceffort\u201d (\u00e7a ne vaut pas la peine<\/em>) \u2013 in both cases, a disciplinary meaning \u2013 and, in a totally different sense, the phrase \u00e0 peine<\/em>, which means barely, hardly, not quite, almost (\u00e0 peine l\u00e9gal<\/em>).]<\/p>\n

Now, we all know that the history of penance and penitence is inseparable from the history of punishment (indeed, self-punishment, and I will return to this) as well as the history of pain. Whatever may be the simply juridical dimensions of the punitive domain, according to the main exigencies of poenit\u0113re<\/em>, the moral or psychical dimensions of the penitent domain cannot be summarily exempted from juridical attributes. Foucault does not make these connections explicit, but the music of language alone does not allow me to overlook them. Besides, the connection works well to Foucault\u2019s advantage, even if not quite intended.<\/p>\n

For, in the most general terms, his grand-scale inquiry into punitive realms of society from the outset of his thinking has been consistently implicated, whatever the specific focus, in regimes of disciplinarity<\/em> \u2013 which I take here in all senses of the word, from the ordering of things and modes of knowledge to the practices of self, including the governmentality of the self and the other, the very basics of subjectivation and subjection. I say this as a kind of preamble orientation of myself in the face of navigating through Foucault\u2019s journey into Christian waters, which for me has never been quite easy to come to terms with, especially insofar as it serves as a source of material concerning self-governance.<\/p>\n

The seminar oddly titled Subjectivit\u00e9 et verit\u00e9<\/em> \u2013 \u201cpretentiously titled\u201d avows Foucault (27) \u2013 follows very much the previous year\u2019s under the title On the Government of the Living<\/em> but, as has been pointed out, also restages some of the earliest interests of Foucault going back to the original lectures on The Will to Know<\/em>. Which was, of course, the title of the 1st<\/sup> volume of The History of Sexuality<\/em>, and it is perfectly apt, since at this juncture Foucault is going back to resume the project of this history, after having interrupted it to develop the thinking on what we now understand as biopolitics and governmentality. I confess I had always thought of this interruption as a divergence \u2013 and I don\u2019t mind either interruption or divergence; besides, Foucault taught me very much to appreciate discontinuity in history \u2013 but, in retrospect, I realize that, discontinuity being what it is, there is a fantastic consistency of inquiry and research, that is to say, a consistent trajectory of purpose, and in fact \u2013 because we\u2019re talking about Foucault here \u2013 an extraordinarily disciplined drive toward the exhaustion of a certain subject (topic) of inquiry.<\/p>\n

So, these renewed investigations on \u201cthe will to know\u201d \u2013 or, as he says in 1980s terminology, \u201cthe instituted modes of knowing the self\u201d (299) which means the techniques of knowing and self-knowing \u2013 come to encounter the already laid out investigations on modes of governing and being governed. Again, as Foucault himself says, the encounter creates \u201can intersection between the history of subjectivity\u201d (which would go all the way back to Histoire de la folie<\/em>) and \u201cthe analysis of modes of governmentality\u201d which I would place \u2013 and we can discuss it \u2013 all the way back to Les Mots et les choses<\/em>, in the sense that his questioning of epistemological order and its relation to modes of fashioning and sustaining (but also altering<\/em>) knowledge\/power in that book already prefigures the later investigations of disciplinarity and the arts of government\/governance\/governmentality.<\/p>\n

Paraphrasing again: the techniques of the care of the self are a way of conducting the history of subjectivity (faire l\u2019histoire de la subjectivit\u00e9<\/em>) not in terms of the contrary pairs of normal\/abnormal (the mad, the sick, the delinquent, etc.) as was being done so far, where \u201cscientific objectivity\u201d sets the terms, but rather by way of examining modes of knowing oneself (or more generally being in relation to oneself, which quite literally means accounting for the otherness in oneself), as these come to be formed and transformed in society. This latter sense, Foucault tells us, points to a whole other mode of investigating how governmentality is at play \u2013 specifically, \u201cthe governmentality of the self by the self\u201d (300), with all the pedagogical elements that come with it. In other words, the investigation of the techniques of \u201cthe care of the self\u201d are granted a thoroughly political<\/em> significance, and these are the terms (the political) in which the discussion is staged, as far as I see it.<\/p>\n

[In this context, I want to mention a brilliant book that does this as well, and in fact in some ways more extensively, especially in that it clarifies the differences between the Greek care of the self in the polis and the Roman\/Hellenistic care of the self in the imperial apparatus. I am speaking of John Hamilton\u2019s Security: Politics, Humanity, and the Philology of Care<\/em> (Princeton, 2013), which is especially pertinent because it links the philology of care to the politics of security, very much a Foucauldian concern.]<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s Foucault\u2019s singular contribution \u2013 in the wake of feminism in this era, as practice perhaps more than theory (for all the great theory that is already out there) \u2013 that this domain of not merely self-knowledge but self-governance is investigated and contemplated in terms and from the standpoint of sexuality.<\/p>\n

Sexuality, of course, is a term of modernity and thus, Foucault says, inadequate to account for the practices of self-knowledge\/self-governance he turns to in attempting to form a genealogy of the making of subjectivity. Unlike the modern notion of sexuality, the Greek notion of aphrodisia<\/em> is judged on the basis of acts of pleasure not desire; or, on the basis of self-formation according to \u201ctechniques of life\u201d not techniques of repression (refoulement<\/em>) in the face of the law, of what is forbidden. These latter aspects \u2013 the discursive fashioning of desire as a consequence of interdiction \u2013 Foucault traces back to the early years of Christianity, in the Eastern Empire (and I will come back to this), and not in the years of industrialized capitalist modernity (say, Victorian morality).<\/p>\n

We know this well; it is the principle of the first instance of the History of Sexuality<\/em> project. But what is innovative, in relation to that early instance to which Foucault returns in order to re-evaluate it and enhance it, is that he pushes back this specific disciplinarity to the last of the pre-Christian years in the Greco-Roman world in this region \u2013 Stoic thought and practice \u2013 to which in fact he gives a sort of primary agency in shaping Christian institutional thinking.<\/p>\n

I can say a lot about this specific conjuncture between Stoic thinking and what soon after developed as Early Christian thought \u2013 which interests me a great deal and I have written about in different discursive context (e.g. political theology) \u2013 but it would take up a lot of my allotted time. Historically speaking, Foucault is correct \u2013 and despite the various critiques, prominent Classicists of this period accept his account. So, no dispute there. It\u2019s only when Foucault easily slides from the account of the Stoic to the account of the Greek per se, as if it is seamless, that some important questions are raised that we need to address. And he does this in many instances, even if not altogether consistently.<\/p>\n

Incidentally, he does this also in his later discussion of parrh\u0113sia<\/em>, which isn\u2019t our direct concern in this seminar but in fact, given the centrality of truth-telling, very much in play in our discussion. It\u2019s quite interesting to me that Foucault\u2019s evident investment in parrh\u0113sia<\/em> is less in the terms in which the notion first arose in the democratic city \u2013 as the mode of bringing everything<\/em> into the explicit language of the public sphere, of not excluding a priori anything<\/em> from being uttered, heard, considered, questioned, debated, or dismissed[2]<\/a> \u2013 and more in the terms in which it came to be privatized, in the Stoic period, as the philosopher\u2019s (and consequently, the individual subject\u2019s) disclosure of self: parrh\u0113sia<\/em> as the individual truth-telling of self, which is to be measured by the exigencies of the instituted signification of truth against which, in perfectly Stoic fashion, it is exercised.<\/p>\n

The fact that this privatization (or individuation, if you prefer) of truth-telling determines how we investigate the relation between subjectivity and truth makes sense, given the rubric of modes of sovereignty and individuality that affect modern Western<\/em> institutions, which Foucault\u2019s research relentlessly pursues throughout. But, as all such investigations of Western modernity that take for granted Christianity as its continuously authorizing force \u2013 and they are legion nowadays, in what has become a rather fashionable industry \u2013 this specific genealogy is compromised in two ways: 1) it does not take seriously the theologization of political concepts and practices that takes place starting with Christianity\u2019s assimilation of Hellenic signifiers \u2013 this is a crucial adversary to Carl Schmitt\u2019s thoughtlessly proliferating thesis of the contrary (see at the very least, Jan Assmann\u2019s work); 2) it ultimately assumes (even if not exactly fully avowing it) that what we call \u201csecularization\u201d \u2013 an unfinishable project, as I have argued \u2013 is a sham. And I am not talking about secularization as the abolition of religion, which would be nonsense; I am talking about the reconfiguration of religion to what has always been the case but endemically suppressed: namely, that it is one human endeavor among many.<\/p>\n

In any case, it is my sense that at this stage in his thinking Foucault\u2019s Catholic formation is returning as a contested terrain versus his developed affinity for a pagan pre-Christian sensibility through which he hopes to articulate a radical politics of praxis \u2013 and this has a whole range of dimensions, including what we can call a critical governmentality, as well as a radical sexuality that would succeed in outmaneuvering the traps of interdiction in the making of desire. Two things, however, need to be teased out: 1) the fact that he seems not to have managed to overcome the fascination with the Christian imaginary of penitence \u2013 which carries all sorts of disciplinary demands, most significant of which is ascetic self-punishment; 2) the fact that, for all his far-seeing reconceptualization of critique and Enlightenment ethos that he ventures into in this late period, he does not seem to overcome his fascination for those late-Hellenistic\/Roman practices that, at the very least (historically speaking), carry with them the mark of a depoliticized society: as the exigencies of the polis and its essentially contested, precarious, and literally political <\/em>terrain has given over to the stable reproducibility of social practices, in those Hellenistic monarchies that after all welcome the structures of Roman Imperium, where private asceticism has triumphed over public agonism.<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t that he doesn\u2019t recognize these fine differences. It\u2019s that he hedges \u2013 and occasionally slips, in revealing fashion: One telling instance is when he talks about the \u201cmassive differences between pagan ethics and Christian morality\u201d in order to reverse it in the very next sentence to \u201cpagan morality and Christian ethics\u201d (39). Later on, he makes the stunning statement that \u201cthe appearance of Christianity made absolutely no rupture\u201d (257), in order to go on to discuss, just a couple of paragraphs later, of \u201ca mutation internal to Christianity\u201d that disrupts this \u201ccontinuum\u201d so that, in fact, \u201cthe problem evidently is to know where we draw the line of the break [coupure<\/em>]\u201d (258).<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s see more specifically. Almost all of Foucault\u2019s references to Greek texts are post-Aristotelian \u2013 this is especially important in terms of his discussion of bios<\/em> (to which I will shortly return). He correctly speaks of the \u201cphilosophical monotheism of the Stoics\u201d (40ff); yet, he still includes it in the inventory of paganism, where the key attitudes of the care of the self and the techniques of life, as they pertain to sexuality, remain for him the coveted objects of \u2018modern\u2019 subjectivity after its formation by Christian morality. He goes on to say that Christianity has concealed this inventory; that it has buried it deep in the ground from which \u2018modern\u2019 subjectivity emerges; that it has condemned it to oblivion (41). And he concludes: our critique as \u2018modern\u2019 subjectivities \u2013 our own project of reflection that is to be the care of the self \u2013 means to excavate this forgotten core which is both foreign and yet our own: \u201cPaganism is the other, and yet a certain grounding of ourselves. And if we want to return to this ground of ourselves, it is indeed this paganism, this absolutely other, absolutely lost paganism, that we must rediscover\u201d (42).<\/p>\n

A way to measure how foreign, or how other, this core grounding condition has become \u2013 how profoundly it has been forgotten, repressed, covered over by Christianity, so as to become other \u2013 is to understand that the \u201ctechniques of life\u201d, the arts of living developed by the Stoics (especially insofar as these techniques pertain to sexuality), are not in fact tantamount to \u201crules of conduct\u201d, codes of behavior or \u201ccomportment\u201d (253). This would mean that they would obey a set of institutionalized values \u2013 they would be mere repetition of what is already constituted and remains uninterrogated. Rather, these techniques of life are not rules of conduct precisely because their object is not conformity to a standard but the transformative work of the subject itself, the living being itself body and soul, as it were, for this work pertains to both somatic and psychical practices \u2013 soul having no transcendent meaning whatsoever. [Foucault: r\u00e9gime du corps, r\u00e9gime de l\u2019\u00e2me<\/em>]<\/p>\n

From this account, Foucault goes on to determine the significance of bios<\/em> in the Greek world \u2013 but what Greek world? His examples of the three different modes of Greek life for men \u2013 political, economic (chrematistic), philosophical (p. 254-255) \u2013 are historical manifestations of an imperial era. Such division would be inconceivable in the polis \u2013 and not only in the democratic polis. This is particularly significant insofar as the domain of truth is solely reserved for the third, the philosopher. As if the political life is not engaged in regimes of truth; as if the enormous history of ostracism in Athens is a matter of mere whim; or worse, as if Antigone\u2019s other regime of the law is mere insubordination, false presumption, contempt of court.<\/p>\n

But \u2013 to continue with this see-saw, this hedging \u2013 Foucault correctly argues that, in the absence of any notion of subjectivity in the Greek world (in any archaic society, I am sure he would add), \u201cbios<\/em> is [tantamount to] Greek subjectivity\u201d (255) because the subject is a project \u2013 it is a made, it is an object of techn\u0113<\/em>. And \u201ctechn\u0113<\/em> is not a code as to what is permitted or what must be defended; it is a systematic ensemble of actions and a certain mode of action\u201d \u2026 \u201cdestined to work upon a determined object toward a certain number of transformations\u201d (253). This technical apparatus is possible because of two distinctive social-imaginary conditions \u2013 distinctive in relation to \u2018modern\u2019 \u2018Western\u2019 Christian-derived subjectivity.<\/p>\n

One<\/u> is the separation of bios<\/em> from zo\u0113<\/em>, which is fundamental to the cosmological universe of the Greeks. The living substance of being (zo\u0113<\/em>) is not adequate to account for a person\u2019s life. Something else takes place in addition, and it is this project, the making of a life<\/em>, that matters. This project is resolutely worldly, and it can be nothing else because one\u2019s bios<\/em> (and the techn\u0113<\/em> one employs to make it) has no transcendent principles that authorize it and no transcendental significance outside the very finite experience that it itself produces.<\/p>\n

Which brings us to the second<\/u> distinction: What Christianity brings into the picture, Foucault tells us, is a whole other separation to bios<\/em> vs. zo\u0113<\/em>: the division between life in the world and the after-life in an otherworldly, transcendental Elsewhere. (This is all zo\u0113<\/em> on both counts; bios<\/em> slowly drops out of the picture, or relegated to mere history, biography.) Because the first zo\u0113<\/em> is but a preparation for the second, which is the life that really matters, the non-life that is eternal life, you would expect that to a certain measure the technai peri ton bion<\/em> of the pagans would get passed on, even if just formally. Except that there is a fundamental disconnect, because these pagan technai<\/em> are entirely outside the framework of a beyond: \u201cthey don\u2019t think in terms of a beyond, or in terms absolute and common; they think in terms of ends that each poses to oneself\u201d (256).<\/p>\n

I will continue with Foucault\u2019s thinking on this immanent techn\u0113<\/em> in a minute, but to round out my point about the difficult intersections, both backward and forward from the standpoint of the Stoics \u2013 to the world of the polis and to the after-world of Christianity, respectively \u2013 I would like to just mention (and only mention) two unexamined issues, which may become threads for discussion:<\/p>\n

First<\/u>: Missing in Foucault\u2019s otherwise correct account is some sort of reflection on the significance of Aristotle\u2019s notion of z\u014don politikon<\/em>, that is to say, the fact that the political dimensions of life are already set to embody the very substance of living being, zo\u0113<\/em> before it becomes bios<\/em>, or physis<\/em> before it is crossed by nomos<\/em>. Admittedly, Aristotle\u2019s notion is strange in Greek writing, even if there is a great deal of preceding ground to justify it (pre-Socratic cosmology), but I mention it here because it\u2019s relevant to the problem of biopoetics<\/em> to which I will shortly come to.<\/p>\n

Second<\/u>: the question of Christian techn\u0113<\/em>, if we choose to continue to call it that. The development of the troublesome Christian category of the \u201cflesh\u201d and the disciplinary measures taken to combat it, even at the limit to efface it \u2013 chiefly, the entire machinery of penitence and repentance as self-punishment\/self-cleansing that I mentioned at the outset \u2013 surely derails the aspirations of a \u201ccare of the self\u201d that is to bring back to modern subjectivity its lost forming and transforming (or governing and self-governing) capacities in order to combat the structures of institutionalized governmentality.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Let me conclude, by further examining this matter of technai peri ton bion<\/em> by the one crucial element I have only just mentioned: the issue of truth.<\/p>\n

I go back to the beginning of the seminar. The matter of truth, in addition to all the dimensions discussed, also carries a crucial methodological weight. Foucault begins by asking, what he interestingly calls, the \u2018positivist question\u2019: \u201cHow can there be truth of the subject when there cannot be truth except for a<\/em> [specific] subject?\u201d (13). Recognizing that, historically speaking, there is always \u2013 unavoidably, in all social and cultural situations \u2013 a regime of truth that one inhabits, a regime of truth that already determines what subjectivity (as a category) is and means, in language but also in practice, Foucault raises the question of possibility as to how, within this regime, one may seek, or indeed one may tell, the truth \u2013 one\u2019s truth \u2013 as if it were not already (pre)determined. This \u201chow\u201d is the key, the crucial point of inquiry: what makes that happen?<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat mark, that is to say also, what wound or what opening, what constraint or liberation, produces in the subject the recognition of the fact that there is, concerning him\/her [specifically], a truth to be told, to be sought, rather than a truth already told, a truth imposed?\u201d (14)<\/p>\n

This \u201cwhat\u201d \u2013 which is also a \u201chow\u201d \u2013 is the point at which we can speak of governmentality not in terms of instituted<\/em> modes of control but as instituting<\/em> terms of self-governance. (In broad terms, this is also the gist of my recent attempts to speak of a \u201cleft governmentality\u201d.) Now, we recognize that whatever may be the parameters of instituting<\/em> \u2013 the opening, the thing to be sought, to be acted upon, the pursued \u201ccare of the self\u201d \u2013 they cannot evade the domain of the instituted<\/em>: what is imposed, what is already established as mode of knowing (including self-knowing), what \u201cwounds\u201d you with its mark of power, what subjectifies. The interplay between wound (blessure<\/em>) and opening (ouverture<\/em>) cannot be outmaneuvered, but Foucault here chooses to focus on those parameters of subjectification that lie in front of the subject, not already established within: parameters that open up the space of the truth of the subject to be told. So, truth is a \u201csystem of obligations\u201d as he tells us, independent of the question of what is or is not true from this or that perspective, and subjectivities, as experiences of self and other, are constituted by means of encountering these instituted bindings, these parameters of obligation.<\/p>\n

Again, we can choose either to remain focused on the binding or instead to focus on the opening. Foucault\u2019s work has been essential in our understanding of the first, but in this phase of his work, he is drawing attention to the second. (As he also does with critique and Enlightenment ethos, from the texts that have become famous and discussed extensively). I repeat, these are not two phases or two moments but part of the whole package, if you will. It\u2019s just that the emphasis here is on the act<\/em> rather than the form, on the making (or the telling) than the made or the told. I consider this an essential methodological<\/em>, if I may put it this way, component of this phase of Foucault\u2019s work, which does not, however, contradict the genealogical project. On the contrary \u2013 and this, if I may say, is unique to Foucault: What\u2019s remarkable about this methodologically is that he conducts an inquiry of praxis\/performance as opening to doing, telling, seeking in terms of a resolutely historical account of what has been done, told, established, and achieved. [To me this matters a great deal as a matter of reflection on how we work \u2013 how we think and judge (krisis<\/em>), how we imagine and take account \u2013 and I would like to invite discussion specifically on it.]<\/p>\n

So back to bios<\/em> and techn\u0113<\/em>, to conclude.<\/p>\n

Truth becomes institutionalized as an element of bios<\/em> specifically in the domain of sexuality. This is how Foucault stages the problematic: his question is \u201cwhat type of subjectivity is tied to the fact that we always exist within the possibility and the right (droit<\/em>) to say: \u2018Yes, it is true, I desire\u2019\u201d (17). The truth then, which is indissoluble from being (he says), invokes in this specific sense \u2013 the sense of desire, the sense of the sexual \u2013 an otherness, which is both within and without the self-in-the-making. This art of living is also always an art of dying \u2013 Foucault acknowledges this explicitly (30-31) and it is quintessential to the Greek social-imaginary of bios<\/em>; in this sense this art of the self is unavoidably implicated in an encounter with the other.<\/p>\n

But it would be too simple (and inaccurate) to imagine this otherness to exist in some transcendental elsewhere \u2013 Christian asceticism presumes this, and this is why it lies ultimately very far from the technai peri ton bion<\/em>. Rather, it would be more accurate to understand this otherness to emerge into the scene as the very essence of this techn\u0113<\/em>. \u201cThe arts of living [are] essentially centered not around the question of how to do [comment faire<\/em>], but how to be [comment \u00eatre<\/em>]\u201d (33). \u201cModification of being, passage toward the other from an ontological standpoint, opening to modalities of experience: this is what the arts of living are about\u201d (34).<\/p>\n

Because the significance of the arts of living is \u201cthe transformation of being\u201d they cannot be ultimately reduced to mere technique. If we are going to insist on the term biopoetics<\/em> \u2013 which Foucault uses in the margins of the seminar but does not elaborate on \u2013 then we need to differentiate it substantially from biotechnics<\/em>. No matter the essential, the required, dimension of techn\u0113<\/em> involved, the ontologically transformative making of the self cannot be reduced to mere discipline. To do so would mean, in my mind, to revoke this radically formative and transformative power, the sort of embedded political<\/em> capacity to contest established forms and to create as of yet other<\/em> forms. Biotechnics as an end in-itself is to depoliticize<\/em> the subjectivity that makes itself in this fashion, much like the use of oikonomia<\/em> as a mere governmental figure \u2013 I\u2019m thinking here of Agamben\u2019s use of the Aristotelian and then Early Christian notion \u2013 renders the politics it creates a matter of mere administration.<\/p>\n

A biopoetics is both predicated on and seeks to find and fashion an anthropological otherness that resides both \u2018within\u2019 the field of the subject-in-the-making \u2013 for how could self-transformation (what I call self-alteration<\/em>) take place? \u2013 and \u2018within\u2019 the field of the world in which technai peri ton bion<\/em> are exercised and truth is told \u2013 for how could this truth-telling be truth<\/em>, if not externalized, expressed, performed?<\/p>\n

To illustrate exactly what I mean, I end by quoting extensively again, from one of those moments where Foucault draws a definite line of separation against the Christian parameters he otherwise flirts with in the process:<\/p>\n

\u201cGreek bios<\/em> does not define itself, like Western or Christian subjectivity, around the possibility or the injunction toward a conversion, but around the continuous work of the self upon the self. And indeed, Greek bios<\/em> does not define itself in relation to some hidden authenticity that would have to be discovered in the very pathway toward the absolute term and movement of conversion. It defines itself like an approach, or perhaps more like an indefinite seeking, or finite only in the very form of [its] existence, of an end, an end that is at the same time achieved and not achieved\u201d (256).<\/p>\n

An inconvertible self then: because otherness does not exist out there in advance for one to convert to it. But nonetheless very much a transformable self: insofar as it inhabits otherness, even if never quite fully, therefore otherness ever sought \u2013 in the world.<\/p>\n

FOOTNOTES<\/strong><\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Such is the claim by Julia Cresswell in the Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins<\/em>, 2nd edition, OUP, 2009.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> I find useful here Derrida\u2019s use of the term tout dire<\/em>, which means not only to say everything<\/em> but to say anything<\/em>, whereby anything would include things that remain unsaid, not quite (yet) sayable, but in principle potentially sayable, even if as yet unthought in the specific terms of language.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Stathis Gourgouris Please allow me a philological indulgence as a point of entry. For a while now, in reading through these seminars, I have become intrigued by the homologous sonority between penance and penalty, enough to do a little… 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-1342","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\/1342","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=1342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1342\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}