{"id":86,"date":"2015-09-10T17:03:11","date_gmt":"2015-09-10T17:03:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/testing.elotroalex.com\/foucault\/?p=86"},"modified":"2015-09-10T17:03:11","modified_gmt":"2015-09-10T17:03:11","slug":"james-faubion-on-the-will-to-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/2015\/09\/10\/james-faubion-on-the-will-to-know\/","title":{"rendered":"James Faubion on the Will to Know"},"content":{"rendered":"

By James D. Faubion<\/strong><\/p>\n

In what appears as an appendix to his first year of lectures at the Coll\u00e8ge de France<\/em>, Foucault summarizes the task he has undertaken as a \u201ctest of the utilizability\u201d of the \u201cNietzschean model\u201d of the will to know, which dismisses classical precedent in rejecting the presumption that there is any intrinsic relationship between knowledge and the truth. Nietzsche\u2019s presumption instead is that knowledge, truth and the relationship among them are specific \u201cinventions\u201d that mask the sources that have given rise to them. He accordingly opens up the possibility of a distinctive analysis of the \u201chistory of truth\u201d that Foucault reads as being grounded in four basic principles:<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Exteriority: what gives rise to knowledge is something completely outside the order of knowledge itself;<\/li>\n
  2. Fiction: truth is falsification, error;<\/li>\n
  3. Dispersion: truth is the progeny of a heterogeneous multiplicity;<\/li>\n
  4. Event: truth is an effect.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Foucault invites us to understand these principles as principles of method. At the very least, he invites us to understand them as working hypotheses, speculations that could be put to a test that they might not survive.<\/p>\n

    The invitation is especially striking for what it does not extend: an embrace of any particular ontological commitment. In particular, it does not ask us to follow the Nietzschean model so far as to embrace his own candidate for what lies outside of knowledge, what produces truth as error and results in the appointment of the subject as its bearer\u2014the will to power. Nor does he mention the will to power in concluding the appendix. He writes instead that \u201cgoing outside the text so as to find the function of discourse within a society is what I call the principle of exteriority\u201d (199). Hors du texte<\/em>: not a will that we exercise or that exercises itself through us; instead a socially specific \u201cpolitical and economic caesura\u201d that leads a technics of proportionalities and equivalencies, to the sumbolon<\/em>.<\/p>\n

    It\u2019s fallacious to draw inferences from silence, but I think that we are at least entitled to take up such silence as a springboard for reflecting on the mode and substance of Nietzsche\u2019s influence not merely on Foucault\u2019s first lectures but also on the work that unfolds from that point forward.<\/p>\n

    The lectures, for their part, both begin and end with sustained commentaries on Nietzsche. They\u2019re not his first to do so. The lectures he delivered at Vincennes between 1969 and 1970 precede them, and they were informed by an insight (or impression) that Foucault had had perhaps a couple of years before: that in Nietzsche, a conception of the will to know (as la volont\u00e9 de savoir<\/em>)\u2014realized as a sort of subjunctive affirmation: \u201cmaybe this is the case!\u201d\u2014could be distinguished from and could not be reduced to the will to power. In any case, this is what Daniel Defert, in his spelling out of the context of the 1970-1971 lectures, cares to underscore (if only in a footnote\u2014but footnotes can be very important).<\/p>\n

    What Defert helps us begin to render articulate is the question of how we are best to understand the coupling and distinction that Foucault is soon to make between knowledge (savoir<\/em>) and power and of the dynamics of the relation between the two. This very general question devolves into two others that might be worthy and capable of discussion. First is the question of the extent to which Foucault sustains the distinction between the will to know and the will to power. This is a question that permits of a relatively straightforward answer: he does, if by way of omission.<\/p>\n

    At the outset of the first lectures, Foucault remarks that \u201cthe will to know\u201d could serve as a unifying rubric under which all of the work he had previously accomplished could be subsumed. From the first lectures forward to the (French) subtitle of the first volume of The History of Sexuality, he preserves the will to know, la volont\u00e9 de savior<\/em>, as a thematic touchstone. The will to power has no such role; it is notable for its absence. What\u2019s also notable is that the typical French translation of \u201cthe will to power\u201d is la volont\u00e9 de puissance<\/em>. Foucault\u2019s knowledge-power dyad is the dyad of savoir<\/em> and pouvoir<\/em>, and if the former is the object of a will, the latter is not. So far as I know, Foucault never writes of a volont\u00e9 de pouvoir<\/em>.<\/p>\n

    This is the sort of answer, however, that raises far more questions than it resolves. Scholars of Foucault have had to address explicitly his contrastive use of connaissance<\/em> and savoir<\/em>, not least because it is pivotal to his distinction between the pure disciplines and the disciplines that constitute the human sciences. But what is this \u201cwill\u201d that has savoir<\/em> as its specific object? This question may lead us to attend closely to Foucault\u2019s analysis of the will to power in the first lectures, but that such attention will yield a definitive result is improbable at best. Puissance<\/em> andpouvoir<\/em>: scholars have understandably rarely (if ever?) bothered to address this distinction, which has no comparable function in Foucault\u2019s work to the function that the distinction between connaissance<\/em> and savoir<\/em> fulfills.\u00a0 Yet, it registers a departure from Nietzsche\u2019s usage (at least in its French translation). That Foucault never conjures a volont\u00e9 de pouvoir<\/em> registers this departure all the more forcibly.<\/p>\n

    Then there\u2019s truth. Echoing the language of his characterization of the Nietzchean model and in apparent conformity with its principles, Foucault will come to characterize his investigations as having far less to do with \u201ctruth\u201d than with \u201ctruth effects.\u201d He will formulate the concept of \u201cregimes of truth,\u201d which might be read as a sociological analytic of the dynamics of knowledge, truth and power. In his inaugural lecture at the Coll\u00e8ge<\/em>, The Order of Discourse<\/em>, Foucault presents to his audience his long-term ambition to \u201cput again into question our will to truth,\u201d which he looks to follow Nietzsche closely in tying to the violence of exclusion and suppression. He turns and returns to the term not merely in the first lectures but also at several later junctures in his work. The valence of the term is often Nietzschean. It has, however, a somewhat truncated career. I am far from the first to note the glaring contrast between Foucault\u2019s shift from at least the letter of the ambitions he puts forth in The Order of Discourse<\/em> to his preoccupation in his last two years of lectures with the risks of parrhesia<\/em> and the lofty exercise of le courage de la v\u00e9rit\u00e9<\/em>, which I\u2019ll (pointedly) translate as \u201cthe courage to truth.\u201d The question that arises here is the question of the extent to which this shift implies an abandonment, even a subversion of the Nietzschean model\u2014the answer to which may not be as obvious as, at first sight, it seems<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    By James D. Faubion In what appears as an appendix to his first year of lectures at the Coll\u00e8ge de France, Foucault summarizes the task he has undertaken as a \u201ctest of the utilizability\u201d of the \u201cNietzschean model\u201d of the… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1680,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38954],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lecture-1-13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86","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\/1680"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}