Ethics and Subjectivity: Practices of Self-Governance in the Late Lectures of Michel Foucault

Political TheoryVolume 36 Number 3

June 2008 377-402© 2008 Sage Publications

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Author’s Note: Thanks are owed to the following for their comments on earlier versions ofthis paper: the two anonymous reviewers for Political Theory, Harvey Goldman, AlanHouston, Jeffrey Lomonaco, Jennifer London, Wayne Martin, Tracy Strong, and the partici-pants in the 2006 Political Theory Workshop at the University of Chicago. An earlier draft ofthis paper was also presented at the Western Political Science Association meeting of 2004.Revisions were completed under the generosity of a Harper Fellowship with the University ofChicago’s Society of Fellows.

Ethics and SubjectivityPractices of Self-Governance in theLate Lectures of Michel FoucaultNancy LuxonUniversity of Minnesota, Minneapolis

Contemporary accounts of individual self-formation struggle to articulate amode of subjectivity not determined by relations of power. In response to thisdilemma, Foucault’s late lectures on the ancient ethical practices of “fearlessspeech” (parrhesia) offer a model of ethical self-governance that educatesindividuals to ethical and political engagement. Rooted in the psychologicalcapacities of curiosity and resolve, such self-governance equips individualswith a “disposition to steadiness” that orients individuals in the face ofuncertainty. The practices of parrhesia accomplish this task without fabricatinga distinction between internal soul and external body; by creating not a “bodyof knowledge” but a “body of practices”; and without reference to an externalorder such as nature, custom, tradition, or religion. The result is an “expressivesubject” defined through expressive practices sustained by a simultaneousrelationship to herself and to others. Individuals develop themselves notthrough their ability to “dare to know” but as those who “dare to act.”

Keywords: parrhesia; Foucault; self-governance; subjectivity; ethics

1. Introduction

Modern individuals are faced with the paradoxical task of living againstthemselves and experiencing their lives in certain important ways asbeing “impossible.” From the mid-19th century on, moderns havebecome accustomed to the claim that our experience of the world leaves us

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divided—whether we characterize this division as one of misrecognition(Hegel), alienation (Marx), ressentiment (Nietzsche), neurosis (Freud), orbad faith (Sartre), the division is present, is variously constitutive of indi-viduals, and is on many accounts what impels moderns towards political andethical responsibility. What remains, then, is the challenge of living with,overcoming, or transforming these divisions. Jürgen Habermas and MichelFoucault have variously sought to understand whether, in Nietzsche’s words,“we must mistake ourselves”; that is, whether our self-misunderstandingsare necessarily formative. Even as both claim Kant as a progenitor and articu-late a sense of modernity as “new,” “the actual,” and “the real”—the momentwhen philosophy becomes historically self-conscious—the two thinkershave radically different commitments to the place for knowledge and cri-tique in the process of subject-formation. At stake for both thinkers is theeducation of individuals for a modern subjectivity in which individuals giveethical content to political practices in freedom.

With my argument, I contend that Foucault’s late work on the ancientethical practices of parrhesia (fearless speech) can be read as a partialresponse to Habermas, and an attempt to think beyond the political andepistemological impasses of Discipline and Punish. It is also more thanthat. If the radicality of Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality, vol.1 lies in the haunting unease prompted by Foucault’s claim that individualsunwittingly replicate the very structures that are the conditions and limitsto their claims to self-hood, then others have since tempered the productivecoherence of disciplinary techniques and their contribution to radical politics.What remains, then, is the lingering fear that even an imperfectly coherentnormalization leaves us with no better options than simply muddlingthrough, and tacking endlessly between the Scylla of universals and theCharybdis of particularity. For those unpersuaded even by Foucault’s ini-tial argument, what remains is a frustration with the seeming inability ofindividuals to discover and assert normative principles by which to act. Inresponse to these twin concerns about modern self-division and the groundsfor principled actions, Foucault’s late work on the practices of “fearlessspeech” offers neither an equivocal appeal to the “way of the world” noran evasion of the question “what is to be done?” Instead, I argue that theselectures offer a model of “expressive subjectivity” composed of practices ofethical self-governance that would prepare individuals for ethical subjectivity,prompt them towards political action, and find them in their relations toothers rather than founding them on claims to knowledge. The practices ofparrhesia thus offer an alternative manner of subject-formation and mode of



truth-telling, one that initially appears to mimic the elements of subject-formation in Discipline and Punish. And yet, the constituent structure ofparrhesia is such that it accomplishes this task without fabricating a dis-tinction between internal soul and external body; by creating not a “body ofknowledge” but a “body of practices”; and without reference to an externalorder (such as nature, custom, tradition, religion). Parrhesia “educates,”rather than “produces,” individuals.

What expressive subjectivity offers is a set of practices by which tomove beyond the “epistemological grammar” of humanism and to strikeout along what Foucault self-consciously calls “a different way.” Ratherthan beginning with individuals as divided against themselves, Foucaultinstead examines the external, personal relationships that bind doer to deedand one person to another. Solitary individuals are not to be taken as start-ing points; the relations that bind them to one another are. In such a con-text, individuals are quite literally what they do; they achieve constancy andethical excellence not by attaining an ideal, but by cultivating a “dispositionto steadiness” in an uneasy context lacking in absolute values. Where pre-vious accounts advocating ethical responsibility leave responsibility to be amatter of heroic personality or tragic ethos, Foucault’s lectures contribute agreater level of specificity to the practices in play, and soften the edge ofimpossibility. Contrary to the earlier concerns of Habermas and others, par-rhesia’s work on the self does not imply an aesthetic turn inwards, nor doesit turn to the human sciences to codify and reproduce any insight gained.Rather than a “knowing subject,” produced in reference to a defined bodyof knowledge and some external order, the “expressive subject” draws onthe structural dynamics of parrhesiastic relationships to give ethopoeticcontent to her actions. Rather than being urged “dare to know,” individualsare encouraged to “dare to act.”

While the practices of parrhesia might also afford modern readers adifferent set of resources for rethinking practices of free speech, of democ-ratic contestation, or of rhetorical persuasion, these are not the resourcesFoucault mobilizes.1 Just as in his writings on the discourses of madness,sexuality, governmentality, and biopower, Foucault remains most interestedin parrhesia as a concrete set of practices that condition the parameters ofindividual self-development. Parrhesia gains ethical and political saliencenot because it refines our understanding of free speech as such, but becauseit outlines a set of concrete practices that school individuals in the arts ofinterpretive discretion required to make our partial understandings andparticular claims politically and ethically robust.

Luxon / Techniques of Self-Governance 379



2. Beyond Humanism and Choice

Foucault’s turn towards the ancients finds its impetus in the ongoingdebates in France about the relationship between politics and ethics.Following France’s undistinguished experience with collaboration duringWWII, French post-war philosophy grappled with the theoretical founda-tions of the individual and the basis of his ethical responsibilities. Bothphilosophical and political debate were especially dominated by Jean-PaulSartre, who exercised influence not only through his courses for thestudents of l’École Normale Supérieure but also through his newspaper LesTemps Modernes and his political involvement with the Communist Partyof France (PCF). Early on, these debates wrestled with the dilemma of find-ing a moral basis for political action, without forsaking France’s historicinvestment in secularism.

Foucault’s ethical sensibility is standardly situated against the universalsof humanism. Indeed he claims, “What frightens me in humanism is that itpresents a certain form of our ethics as a universal model worthy for anytype of liberty. I think that our future contains more secrets, more possibleliberties, and more inventions than humanism allows us to imagine in thedogmatic representation given it by the various groups on the political spec-trum …”2 Yet the problem Foucault identifies with humanism lies in theresponse it prompts in adherents; it encourages them towards a dogmaticfiliation with a singular ethical vision rather than impelling them towardsthe interpretive work that might allow individuals to discriminate betweena multiplicity of ethical models and relationships.

Even as Foucault’s earliest writings avoid humanism by condemning it,his research consistently treats those themes—most notably, moral psy-chology, freedom, and truth—often associated with the political and philo-sophical projects of the Enlightenment. Tellingly, rather than directlyengaging these themes, critical responses to Foucault’s published workhave focused in large extent on how to read his books, and on the place theyleave for political action; for some, these two issues are not necessarily dis-tinct.3 The nature of this critical response, to be sure, has varied a great dealacross fields, from the enthusiastic embrace of philosophers of science, tothe general disapprobation of Anglophone classicists.4

Across all of these responses, the one commonalty is an uncertainty as tothe grounds upon which to judge and evaluate his work, along with the sensethat his work constituted an attack on those engaged in the “caring profes-sions.” When Georges Canguilhem states, “In Foucault’s thesis, it is mad-ness that is primarily at issue, not mental illness; it is exclusion, internment,




and discipline that is primarily at issue, not asylum, assistance, and care,”5

he means not that Foucault leaves the last set of issues untouched, but thatFoucault inverts the terms on which these discussions are generally con-ducted. The result is not only to undercut the humanistic impulses attachedto, in this case, mental illness, but also to disorient the academic readerhabituated to a particular—and usually humanistic—frame of reference.6

Some critics come close to asking whether his books are books at all. Thisdisorientation is intentional; indeed, Foucault refused to write a preface tothe second and third editions of Madness and Civilization on the argumentthat such agenda setting would oblige the reader “to consent to a ‘declara-tion of tyranny.’”7 Foucault thus writes not to disable ethical impulses butinstead to provoke reflection on the interpretive framework invoked and theadequacy of any attempted response. Not only does Foucault himself refuseto play the part of the moralist—a position more willingly adopted bySartre—but he also embeds himself and his reader into the interpretive con-text generated by his writing. At the beginning of his work on the ancients,Foucault theorizes this interpretive move more explicitly as “the intent …not to pursue the unspeakable, nor to reveal the hidden, nor to say the unsaid,but on the contrary to capture the already-said, to collect what one has man-aged to hear or read …”8 Considered in light of these comments, Foucault’spreoccupation with moral psychology, freedom, and truth is with these con-cepts as part of the modern “already-said” that gains political and ethicalpurchase through an interpretive working-through. The narrative occasionedby self-formation is not driven by an ethical ideal—it is not allegory—nor isit driven by the forward-moving, plot-based action of desire. Instead, itworks with the ambiguous ethical resources already possessed by individu-als, and leaves to them the final shaping of these resources into somethingmore. Foucault’s work thus strikes a nervy chord not just with the episte-mological claims that intellectuals use to guide their work, but also with theethical principles that drive their self-understanding as intellectuals.

In its crudest formulation, Foucault’s intellectual trajectory is away froma philosophic investigation of the humanist subject and towards the condi-tions of political possibility. Where, in the investigations of the human sci-ences “man never found himself at the end of the destinies charted formankind,”9 political subjects have known a different history: “in the courseof their history, men have never ceased to construct themselves [on theirown], that is to say, to displace continuously their subjectivity, to constitutethemselves in an infinite, multitudinous series of different subjectivities,and that will never end and never place us in front of something that wouldbe Man.”10 Moving away from the “doubled” subject that characterizes his




earlier work cannot be, however, a simple refusal to grant such a subjectstanding in his own work. And while the earlier work does suggest thatindividuals forsake a “legislative” model in which their claims to subjec-tivity extend to others, the later work seems a different “exemplary” modelthan one that stipulates that individuals must believe in certain values whileaccepting the impossibility of their realization.11 Instead, the shift that dom-inates the later work, is the shift to personal relationships sustained by prac-tices that, following the imperative at the close of What is Critique? to notbe governed, take their starting point from the very asymmetries of theserelationships.

The subtleties of Foucault’s ethical subjectivity premised in personalrelationships and expressed through actions sustained over time are sharp-ened by their contrast to Sartre’s own work on ethics and subjectivity. Sartreclaims that the primary obstacle to morality is evasion, and turns to twoconcepts—“birth” and “desert”—to make such cowardice all but impossi-ble. Sartre anchors the individual in the very “facticity” of his existence; themere fact of being born into the world necessitates that individuals assumeresponsibility for it and for themselves.12 Repeatedly, Sartre asserts thatindividuals “deserve” the world that they are born into; that is, they acquiremoral obligations by acquiring a context or a world.13 Yet even as Sartrehopes to translate his commitments to the material conditions of “facticity”into a philosophic appreciation for the everyday, he fails adequately toproblematize everyday relationships and their relation to the past. Hisaccount neglects the extent to which social relations rely on a conception ofthe past in order to make sense of actions undertaken in the present. Bymaking “birth” the origin of responsibility, Sartre implies a birth in which onemust immediately claim oneself and one’s context.

Such a childhood-less conception of origins renders individuals depen-dent on themselves alone for guidance in facing up to their terrifying free-dom and making the authentic choices that ethical living demands. Even inSearch for a Method, when Sartre speaks in the language of “praxis, cre-ation, invention”14 and about those life projects that bind present and futuretogether, these continue to lack firm anchorage in any past. Lacking aninfancy, it is unclear how such individuals could form themselves ordevelop attachments to others such that in choosing a project for them-selves, they could simultaneously choose for all others. The a-contextualconception of “desert” does not allow us to make sense of our intuition thatdifferent people have different claims on us, or that our ethical responsibil-ities to others are not—and need not be—uniform. In seeking to protect




humans’ liberty, Sartre gives them a set of responsibilities—and so a sover-eignty over themselves—so strong that they must strain the very social rela-tions they shun. Such stoic heroism would seem to work against thedevelopment of any meaningful relationships of reciprocity.

Instead, Foucault starts down what he self-consciously terms “anotherroad.”15 Unlike Sartre, he cannot assume that a single act of existentialchoice is sufficient means—or the only means16—by which to govern one-self. That assumption of individual coherence is too great.17 So Foucaultmust also ultimately refuse18 the liberatory ethical project offered by some-thing like Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus; desire remains a conceptthat is future-oriented, rather than genealogical, and so one governed byunending longing and lack.19 For Foucault, such desire can only be relievedthrough the impetus to discourse and to greater knowledge in the hopes ofcatching up to one’s beloved—so much is clear from the stinging accountof Freudian psychoanalysis that opens History of Sexuality, vol. 1.

So Foucault returns to the point he identifies in modern philosophy atwhich the status of individuals could be critically engaged and taken as thestarting point for investigation. He thus returns to Kant’s claim that ourimmaturity is one that is “self-imposed.”20 In considering immaturity asself-imposed, Foucault turns to those personal relationships that could edu-cate individuals to the variegated terrain of ethical responsibility. WhileKant’s relationships to priests, doctors, and books are consistently glossedas ones of dependency, Foucault finds in parrhesia a resource for rethink-ing the interpretive education offered by the “messy middle” of those per-sonal relationships as-yet unstructured by their endpoint and not predefinedby their beginnings. Such relationships potentially offer a context in whichthe past can be problematized, the future left unforeclosed, and the presentalways ready-at-hand; they also provide a structure for the reconsiderationof ethical obligations and responsibility; and they accomplish both of thesetasks without recourse to the private terms of taste. With ancient ethics,Foucault finds a similar turn to personal relationships in order to rethink thelink between ethical self- and political governance and to cultivate thosepractices and resources used not in agonistic contest,21 but to develop con-stancy through one’s own “daily régime.”22 By considering individuals asembedded in a relational context, Foucault makes these relations constitu-tive of the horizon of ethical experience, their dynamics contributory tomotivations for action, and their structural constancy sufficient to generatestable ethical norms binding one individual to another. The dynamics ofcertain personal relationships contain within them the resources to educateindividuals to the arts of ruling and being ruled.




Where Foucault’s previous books all began with a self-admittedly “dra-maturgical” impulse, his first foray into self-formation in The Use ofPleasure opens not with spectacle but with its own turn, less of a turninwards than one towards self-assessment. As if to acknowledge the pro-fessional unsettling he has previously provoked in others, Foucault prepareshis reader for his own professional reorientation. This maneuver bothacknowledges and acts out the background concern behind many explo-rations of self-development—the relation of such self-fashioning tophilosophers, and their potential role in politics. By emphasizing the man-ner of being and the mode of truth-telling at stake, Foucault thus speaks tothe problem he had earlier identified with humanism’s insistence on singu-lar models of truth-telling and liberty. His goal is to offer not an ethics ofabsolute values, but a set of expressive practices independent of any appealto the absolute values offered by nature, religion, tradition, sexual identity,or the human. Foucault’s turn towards expressivity in his late lectures is inmany ways a return to his initial concern for those structures that sustainsignificance, meaning, and expression.

3. A Model for Ethical Self-Governance

When Foucault returns to his lectures at the Collège de France in 1981,his audience expects to hear a continuation of his analyses of biopower andgovernmentality. His lectures on ancient ethics, however shocking a turnfor Foucault’s interlocutors at the time, instead develop the “arts of gov-ernment” in a very different manner. Much though they appear to take up avery different set of texts and concerns, they offer a new “way in” to think-ing about power relations as Foucault had earlier sketched as “a sort ofcomplex composed of men and things. The things with which in this sensegovernment is to be concerned are in fact men, but men in their relations,their links, their imbrication with those other things which are wealth,resources, means of subsistence, the territory with its specific qualities, cli-mate …”23 Crucially, the arts of government are ineluctably and irreduciblyarticulated through relationships.

What develops in these late lectures, then, is not an aesthetic turninwards to quietistic practices of the self, but an effort to articulate a dif-ferent kind of governance of “men in their relation to that other kind ofthings”: individuals as they relate to themselves, to others, to their environ-ment. Towards this end, from these late lectures I have reconstructed amodel of ethical self-governance premised on what I term the “disposition




to steadiness” by which individuals might develop themselves differentlyas ethical subjects. Such a disposition offers a set of specific practices andtactics by which to supersede the disciplining effects of governmentality;the “expressive subject” that ensues conceives of individuals in terms thatdo not set the soul over the body, that do not make the relationships of self-formation into techniques of discipline, and that do not result in a “know-ing subject” developed in reference to a body of knowledge (savoirs).

3.1 Curiosity and Resolve

The late modern conception of individuals as fundamentally dividedagainst themselves seeks not only to capture a disjuncture between self andcultural order, but also to account for basic ethical motivations; their onto-logical and psychological make-up ineluctably compels self-reflexive indi-viduals to face the demands of the day. Side-stepping this putative division,Foucault instead begins with basic human capacities to remark, describe, andremember, and concentrates on the effect provoked by their elaboration andexternalization. In taking up the challenge of going neither deeper nor further“inside,” Foucault notes that if the truth teller, or parrhesiastes, is “really totake care of [others], he must go find them there where they are.”24 Foucaultthus turns to two relatively unrefined capacities—curiosity and resolve25—asthe means to work past the dependency provoked by ethical unease.26

Foucault describes, in the example of Serenus, one of Seneca’s students, that“[h]e does not know exactly what is the reason for his wavering, but he char-acterizes his malaise as a kind of perpetual vacillating motion which has noother movement than ‘rocking.’” This malaise, “due to the instability, theunsteadiness of his mind,” prevents him “from advancing towards the truth,towards steadiness, towards the ground.”27 In parrhesiastic practices—whichrange from ambulatory exercises, to writing, to meditation—the initial chal-lenge is simply to retain a sense of curiosity towards one’s suddenly unfa-miliar experience, and to extend this curiosity into an understanding ofdifferent potential responses and their entailments.

In singular contrast to Foucault’s earlier work, the emphasis on curios-ity and resolve neither creates nor relies on a distinction between internalsoul and external activity. These are not the first movements of a “knowingsubject.” Where the search for a Freudian desire might take one inwards,and the reactivity of Nietzschean ressentiment recoils viciously backwards,the first moments of parrhesiastic self-formation remain at the surface ofactivity. In its first instances, the practice of parrhesia preserves the imme-diacy of one’s experiences; it is an attention to one’s initial responses and




actions that hangs suspended before any movement to judgment. Instead ofcensorship—a mental activity by which one accords one’s actions withsome external standard of right and wrong—individuals are encouragedsimply to be present to themselves before turning to ideals or to the will ofanother for cues on how to interpret this present reality. In this manner, thecuriosity that initially prompts an individual to seek out a parrhesiastesgradually becomes claimed by himself; it further requires a resolve to sub-mit oneself to persistent self-examination, even as one is not sure where itwill finish or entirely how to proceed.

The ontological status of this curiosity and resolve remains ambiguousover the course of the lectures. At times, it appears part of that matière biosor “life material” that sounds rather like Freud’s Rohstoff of the id orNietzsche’s “raw material.” In these moments, it appears to be ontologicallyprior to the individual to be formed. More often, this matière bios gainsontological status by being worked over and elaborated through a relation-ship with another and with truth. Rather than a fixed object of study, itbecomes subject to evaluation as it is formed, molded, and stamped in itspublic presentation; the ethical matter and the process of shaping it areindistinguishable. In Foucault’s previous work, such questions are criticalfor identifying the extent to which individuals are formed by terms that arenot theirs, and for determining whether their formation into a coherent selfis predicated on a division between internal (soul, conscience) and external(body, matter).28 Even as curiosity and resolve serve as important psycho-logical motivations, they are themselves neither ethically nor constitutionallydeterminate. Their emphasis instead displaces attention onto the activity ofself-formation, and the relations to others that sustain it. By turning to thesebasic psychological capacities, Foucault softens his Nietzschean commitmentsand returns to the point at which illness was simply weakness and requiredtraining in strength and endurance, such that one turns to educators for adifferent sort of guidance.

3.2 The “Disposition to Steadiness”

With parrhesia, individuals become schooled in those techniques andpractices that would enable them to direct and cultivate their activities thatare at once a care of the self and a care for others. The appeal of parrhesia liesin its consistent focus on the present and the immediate (alternately, leprésent, le réel, and l’actualité). Less a problem of epistemological uncer-tainty, the shakiness addressed by parrhesia is an inability to orient and steadyoneself through one’s relations to oneself, to others, and to truth-telling. The




challenge, then, is for the techniques of parrhesia to develop these relationsto oneself and to others into a different, steadier manner of being. For par-rhesia to provide a model of ethical self-governance, however, these prac-tices must be able to form coherent subjects without these relationshipsbeing ones of discipline and constraint, and without objectifying the indi-vidual into a “body of knowledge.” Parrhesia’s paideic techniques must notbecome an orthopaedy.

In the first instance, Foucault’s reading of parrhesia alters the terms onwhich individuals are formed. Rather than mapping an external standard ontodocile bodies, Foucault emphasizes the activities that structure individualrelations to others. The significance of activity lies in the possibility for itstempo and unfolding to be controlled by practitioners and maintained as cen-tral to their sense of self. Foucault flatly states, “With the Greeks, it was theact that constituted the important element: it was over the act that one had toexercise control, and of which we had to define the quantity, the rhythm, theopportunity, the circumstances.”29 Activity so preserves the immediacy ofone’s experience and emphasizes the pace and process of self-adjustment; toconcentrate instead on the nature of acts would be to risk locating a “stealthy,resourceful, and dreadful power”30 in negative ideals outside oneself. Wherethe spatial imagery of the Panopticon organizes bodies by mapping a spatialorder onto them, parrhesia maintains individuals as defined by the particular-ity of elaboration and pacing they give their practices.

The practices of parrhesia thus educate individuals to what I term a “dis-position to steadiness.” As individuals improve their ability to manipulatetheir curiosity, they learn to forestall immediate reactions and instead tomaintain a steady attitude towards themselves, to attend to changes andreactions, and to sift through a raft of information—some sensory, someanalytic—before drawing a conclusion. Individuals must try to navigate thetwo extremes of unblinking fixity and mindless distraction.31 Repeatedly,Foucault insists that it is a form of “self-mastery” over those distractions—forgetting, uncertainty, longing—that might displace an individual from theimmediacy of her experience. Instead of seeking the “truth” about oneself,individuals instead develop those dispositional qualities that allow them tomaintain a steadiness of orientation to their chosen ideals. Techniques inmoderation enable individuals to control the pace with which they turnover, consider, and digest the experiences encountered through their dailyregime. Such steadiness gains continuity through its elaboration as “memory”in exercises such as those of self-examination, memorization, meditation,and writing. This continuity, however, is one of persistency and return,rather than one of stubborn constancy.




Such a disposition to steadiness is tricky to situate as an ethical structure.Where Aristotle might advocate a “golden mean” between the extremes ofa virtue and vice, as Foucault reads parrhesia he gives little attention to vari-ations in doctrinal content. Instead, practices gain ethical content from themanner by which individuals develop them into a “harmony of words anddeeds.” Their manner of living, rather than the state of their soul, is exam-ined as they bring their words (logos) to bear on their life-deeds (bios) inthe testing of this life (épreuve de vie). Ethical self-governance and theindependence it brings are attested through the acts one undertakes and thespeech-act (l’énoncé) with which one testifies to these publicly; one “daresto act” rather than “dares to know.” The épreuve itself tests not proximity toan ideal but responsiveness; the elaboration of a life continues, shifts, anddevelops even after the épreuve—it is a marker of where one is, rather thanwho one is definitely. Lacking a single evaluative standard by which indi-viduals can be evaluated and knowledge about them organized, parrhesiainstead outlines a body of practices.

The question remains, however, as to how coherent such an individualwould be and whether her vantage point could adequately serve as one ofethical critique. Even as parrhesia must rest on normative convention, itrequires greater reflexivity from individuals as they take these norms asstarting, rather than stopping points. Different from confessional technolo-gies, parrhesiastic techniques teach student two capacities: they teach anindividual to set his standard of value and then begin the patient labor ofmoving between this standard and the world-at-hand. Relations to himselfand to others provide both a context of immediacy and one for the recogni-tion and sustenance of these values through a community, but without thecreation of a universal ethical code to be internalized as conscience. Again,Serenus’ discomfort results not from epistemological uncertainty—heknows the relevant ethical guidelines—but an uncertainty of how to disposehimself to these guidelines in his relations to others. Parrhesiastic practicespush individuals towards an assertion of interpretive authority in whichthey claim less a stable identity than a site or context for judgment: theirmanner of living emerges through the framing of context, the invocation ofguidelines, and the arrangement of their experiences into a publicly sus-tainable account. From parrhesia emerges a subject able to undertake thehard work of judgment aided by guides not yet supplanted by rules.

What emerges from the emphasis on activity, pace, and timing is morethan an openness of mind. Personal relationships provide the context inwhich actions are modulated, techniques of moderation forged, and theactivities of bios composed and tested. These personal relationships offer a




model in which to cultivate, express, and act on ethical steadiness; that is,they offer a structured relationship in which education is not simply thestory-telling of an experience of provocation and transfiguration, butinstead emerges from the dynamic tension and revision of two individuals’vantage points and the norms that compose them. The first instance ofstory-telling relies on the heroic account of an individual’s encounter with,resistance to, and overcoming of potentially coercive Others and norms; itis an account whose beginning (the claiming of heroic or artistic status) isdefined by the continuous reassertion of its end (contest and resistance ofstabilizing norms). To return to the earlier discussion of Sartre and Deleuze,it is an account structured by desire (to be otherwise), one ignorant of theparentage of a nonheroic past, and risks being fundamentally conservative(change is localized in the heroic individual).

Yet if, as argued earlier, parrhesiastic accounts concentrate their atten-tion on the “messy middle” of personal interactions and relationships, thentheir effects are more subtle and rely on parrhesiastic educators as thosewho serve as points of orientation rather than “orthopaedic individualists”who straighten or correct, or agonistic competitors who seek to carry it offover their opponents. Even as parrhesiastic encounters are highly charged,they represent a commitment to the interpretive and strategic arts of nego-tiation. To use another as a guide or a touchstone means to use her as amarker or signpost—a buoy, perhaps, in troubled waters—by which to getone’s bearings. The basanos simply recalls individuals to themselves.Motivated by curiosity and resolve rather than desire, parrhesiasticaccounts of oneself narrate an interaction not an experience, compose apublic site of judgment not a character, and leave postponed the finality oftheir endings. Parrhesia’s vantage points are multiple such that “it is amatter of bringing into congruence the gaze of the other and that gaze whichone aims at oneself when one measures one’s everyday actions … .”32 Forsuch an account not to collapse into normalization requires not that normsbe forsaken but rather that congruence—the harmony of words and deeds,rather than the singularity of intention—and interpretive modulation ofmeasurement be sought. In keeping with this attention to site, direction ofthe timing and pace of activity become a matter of controlling those strate-gies that bear on and would govern over oneself. Alluding to Plato’sRepublic, Foucault allows that different individuals may achieve differentharmonies that achieve different effects on the ear; no single model of eth-ical self-governance exists. Parrhesia’s contribution as an educational prac-tice, then, lies in its ability to school individuals in a common set of ethicalpractices; this body of practices both provides a measure of continuity and




coherence to the practitioner’s development, and establishes a basic com-monalty across practitioners even as the content and effect of their practiceslooks distinctively different. Self-governance becomes less a matter of obey-ing grammatical criteria than achieving prosody in one’s manner of living.

The work of judgment thus becomes quite different and possibly moreuncomfortable. Although the terms in the first moment of judgment are theparrhesiastes’s own, it should lead “not so much [to] a decipherment of theself by the self as an opening one gives the other onto oneself.” And yet thisopening is one in which “one opens oneself to the gaze of others and putsthe [other] in the place of the inner god.”33 Both student and educator post-pone the neutral finality of juridical examination or authorial control overthe content of the account being narrated; instead, curiosity about theworld-at-hand and commitment to the relationship generate an ethical siteof assessment. To the act of judgment, the interlocutor brings his own expe-riences to bear on the act of judgment and so is poised to judge either moresharply or more compassionately. Parrhesia divides the individual into nei-ther act nor intention, but instead challenges the equilibrium and valuationachieved through one’s relation to oneself and to others.

As the education comes to a close, the student is able to return to the initialparrhesiastic relationship, and scrutinize it anew for previously unrecog-nized instances of either manipulation or ethical distinction (éclat). In bothinstances, the emphasis lies resolutely on the manner by which individualsrelate to one another; the terms neither of authority nor of moral obligationare set in advance. With its insistence on context, practices, and relational-ity, parrhesia introduces a greater degree of nuance into conceptions ofmoral desert.34 Rather than insisting that all others have equal claim to ourtrust and honesty—through something like a categorical imperative—theparrhesiastic encounter teaches individuals those strategies by which indi-viduals can choose to trust—or not. It is as much an education in sincere sus-picion as in sincere trust. As an ethics, it demonstrates the notable advantageof enabling an expressivity not merely of openness, trust, and engagementbut also of where these virtues need necessarily be held in restraint.

3.3 The Expressive Subject

Where Foucault’s reading in ancient texts began as an inquiry into theprehistory of Christian confessional technologies, and the gradual natural-and humanization of those practices that made humans recognizable assuch, it finishes with an ethical community independent of a telos.Parrhesia prompts individuals to consider their work on the self in light of




their social relations to others. The effect is to rework the terms of moralobligation and the way such terms and obligations structure a community,in movement towards an ethical community defined in reference to its owninternally generated norms rather than to an external order.

Parrhesia would seem to offer an example of how the movement toassess claims to value at least begins with local, personal relationships evenas it requires a broader set of collective practices to sustain such claims.Foucault explains, “A long time ago one knew that the role of philosophywas not to discover what is hidden but to render visible precisely what isvisible; that is to say, to make appear what is so close, what is so immedi-ate, what is so intimately linked to ourselves that because of all this we donot perceive it.”35 It is through the act of redescription that the “expressivesubject” submits events to be considered according to local distinctionsbetween truthfulness and falsity. For such reflection to generate ethical val-ues, the parrhesiastic mode of truth-telling would need to be brought to bearon other values—such as liberty or security—central to that community;such a relationship would enable this mode of truth-telling to be stableunder reflection and to acquire value itself. The intuition here is that truth-telling practices are collectively, not individually, maintained.36 Such publicredescriptions test the truth content of these events and claims for the pre-sent of “now and around here”; the mode of truth-telling is resolutely localand articulated in terms of the community at hand.37 As historian PaulVeyne has commented, it is “less a philosophy of truth than of speaking-truly.”38 It offers a mode of truth-telling that results in the creation of an eth-ical structure capable of establishing and assessing a provisional harmonyof words and deeds.

Read against Foucault’s earlier work on populations and biopower, suchethical deliberation would need to work against the tendency, when settlingon the ordering of values, to forget that the process of such an ordering isnot itself an order and emphatically not a natural one. Individuals wouldneed to establish some means of giving priority to some values over others,or at least to understanding this valuating process. Yet from critical atten-tion to their own experiences, and their capacity for self-governance, indi-viduals would seem to gain a different ability to talk about hard cases andexceptions to governing norms. No longer dependent on the terms andauthority structures of external order, individuals need not push thesebeyond the borders of community from a subjectivity defined from fear.Instead, the psychology of ethical self-governance is different—it educatesindividuals to a manner of understanding better equipped to consider chal-lenges to ethical standards of value. As areas of weakness, not illness, these




hard cases will become new sites of ethical work; they will be occasions forongoing care, not singular cure, of oneself and one’s community.

If by the end of Discipline and Punish, “the soul has become the prison ofthe body,” then steadiness is the attempt to dismantle that prison. The move-ment of adjustments that contribute to steadiness is the movement betweenthe “prison” from which one perhaps starts, towards another mode of exis-tence (une vie autre). One cannot simply exit the prison willfully and withone swift movement; the exit or Ausgang must be created and its way pre-pared slowly in advance. Thus, the steadiness that grounds parrhesia rendersit less a ceaseless questioning that risks either being aimless, destabilizing, ordissipating into ineffective critique than a set of practices that enables indi-viduals to become grounded and to thoroughly inhabit themselves.

4. From Self-Governance to Political Engagement

More than a philosophical concern for the terms of subjectivity,Foucault’s work is backed by a lively interest in the material conditions ofpolitical community. Yet, despite his own fierce political commitments,Foucault also harbors a deep caution in moving too quickly from philosoph-ical insight to programmatic political application. If the “disposition tosteadiness” recalls Weber’s vocation for science, then it is worth remember-ing that Weber also stipulates that his educator is not a leader. Foucault’smove to historicize reflects this caution and is a first but tentative step in thedirection of a new politics. It “actualizes” these practices by rendering thempresent, current, and concrete. The move to denature false objects and to lookat practices rather than individuals reflects a turn to the relations that consti-tute politics. The turn to these relations is not made from fear of harm—it isnot a remedy for the psychic injuries of classification (The Order of Things),normalization (Discipline and Punish), or incitement to speech (History ofSexuality, vol. 1). Foucault even castigates those who would retract theirpolitical commitments from a psychology of fear. Instead, this turn is madebecause these collective practices constitute the resources individuals have towork with as they develop themselves ethically and act politically. In thissense, Foucault has been said to historicize the synthetic a priori knowledgethat informs Kantian ethics.39 While these ancient ethical practices do notimmediately constitute a politics in their own right, they serve as neighbor-ing practices—practices that support, sustain, and render sensical other,related practices—to those that are political, and so require a common cur-rency or vocabulary of values, however contingent to that society.




Consistently, Foucault had been preoccupied with the possible relation-ships of ethics and politics. In an interview from 1980, he comments that acertain window of opportunity has opened up in the late 20th century notseen since the end of feudalism: “We are perhaps at the beginning of crisisin the re-evaluation of the problem of governance.”40 The nature of this cri-sis is at once ethical and political—Foucault comments that modern liber-ation movements seem to be in need of an ethics,41 even as he says that whatis crisis are ultimately the procedures and techniques that guaranteed “theguidance (le guidage) of individuals by one another.”42 To the extent thatparrhesia has political effect, it leads to a different politics of re-formationrather than a revolutionary politics. Yet, Foucault cautions that the parrhe-siastes does not have “the mission of a legislator, or even a governor … Itis a relation to the self, it is the relation of a doctor. … who will heal andbring [others] an education, an education thanks to which they will be ableto assure their own healing and happiness.”43 The parrhesiastes is an educa-tive healer, not a legislator; he does not aspire to the position of Solon.

So, Foucault responds to the liberatory politics of someone like Deleuzeinitially by reworking its terms and later by moving away from it altogether.In 1978 after the publication of Discipline and Punish and as his researchfor The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 is underway, Foucault speaks improvi-sationally on the role of the intellectual during a trip to Japan. In additionto the “pedagogical philosopher”44 of Plato advising Dionysius II, Foucaultalso outlines the “anti-despotic philosopher” who “will remain, in relationto power, independent; he will laugh at power.”45 At this point, power andtruth are not yet distinct and opposite—Foucault claims this opposition fol-lows later—and instead one finds the model of “the philosopher [as] mod-erator of power, the philosopher [as a] grimacing mask before power.”46

Foucault then wonders if perhaps philosophy could not once again playsuch a role. Rather than serving a foundational role to science, Foucaultspeculates “the role for moderation in relation to power merits once againbeing played.”47 While philosophy might retain the sense of vitality evokedby this laughter that faintly echoes in different historical moments, Foucault’slaughter is made powerful by its restraint.

Such a relationship between self-governance and political governance,between philosophy and politics, differs almost comically from the way suchlinks have been sought historically after Kant. Foucault cites Rousseau, Hegel,Marx, and Nietzsche as philosophers who all came to be associated withprojects in state formation, with or without good justification. Suchprojects—projects that tightly linked state formation with subject formation—claimed to do so in the name of liberty and ended in some form of




“bureaucratic terror.”48 In sketching this historical diagnosis, Foucault seeksto move philosophy and philosophers past either a model that separates phi-losophy and politics (as in Plato), or one that sets up philosophy as the“counter-power” to politics (as in Deleuze). Instead he seeks another rela-tionship, one in which philosophy “no longer consists of valorizing, in theface of power, the very law of philosophy.” Philosophy also thus “ceases tothink of itself as prophesy … philosophy ceases to think of itself as eitherpedagogy or legislation.”49

Earlier in his career, Foucault spoke almost angrily about Marxist-humanists as “those pallid faces of our culture” who support various “softmarxisms”50—a comment he misquotes a year later as a complaint against“soft humanists.”51 By his reading, Sartre represents the culmination of atrend in 19th century philosophy to concentrate on “existence”: “that is tosay, the problem of relations between individual and society, between con-sciousness and history, between praxis and life, between sense and non-sense, between the living and the inert.”52 As characteristic of thesepreoccupations, Sartre’s Question of Method closes the “Hegelian paren-thesis” by taking these ideas to their logical endpoint, an endpoint that forFoucault is an intellectual cul-de-sac.53 Instead, he heralds the beginningof a “non-dialectical culture” in which primary attention is given to therelationship between different domains of knowledge (savoir). The rolesketched for the intellectual also constitutes a refusal to play the part thatSartre played for a generation of normaliens: “Sartre … had been the lawof our thought and the model of our existence.”54

Yet Foucault later finds himself returning to many of the same themat-ics he associated with Sartre, albeit in a non-humanistic vein. While his ear-lier work illumed the dystopic aspect of these, his later work returns to thedilemma of political action with more insistence. Foucault notes that manyof those who work within prison institutions, along with others, reproachedhim when they were unable “to find in my books advice or prescriptionswhich would permit them to know ‘what is to be done?’ But [my] projectis exactly to write such that they cannot ‘know what is to be done’; suchthat the acts, gestures, discourse that until then seemed to follow fromthemselves become problematic, perilous, difficult. That was the desiredeffect.”55 Foucault here seeks a means to disable or disconnect the linkbetween knowing and doing, but without teaching individuals that theiractions ought to be unthinking or unexamined. He aims to regain the senseof difficulty, risk, and impossibility that accompanies any action that mustgeneralize or ground a set of institutions. So the expressive subject redirectsattention to the practices that sustain and support subjects in their expression




of ethical identity. It changes the grounds on which we seek to “know our-selves.” But what does the expressive subject tell us about the grounds fromwhich we act?

What Foucault provides through his analysis of parrhesia is a set of“practices in liberty” that constitute a “way out” of this set of dilemmas.Historically speaking, parrhesia operates before scientific rationalizationand Christian confession, so individuals need not harbor the same epistemo-logical skepticism that plagues their modern counterparts. As such, Foucaultcan viably claim that parrhesia functions as a separate and distinct system ofmorality than that found in late modernity. In terms of the cultural reasonsfor political inaction, the self-governance resulting from parrhesia wouldseem to provide the beginnings of a response to concerns about normaliza-tion. These practices provide a means to make individual resistance tobroader processes of normalization differently productive through theintroduction of reflexive distance into the process of self-formation.56

Elaborated in conditions of structured uncertainty, both parties agree tomake themselves vulnerable to frank speech and the indeterminate outcomessuch speech implies. Such barbed dialogues school the student in indepen-dence and, as a result, begin to confer the ability to act with sincerity andwith courage from positions of strength rather than from dependency on“experts.” In order for some measure of subjectivity to be retained, theauthority of the interlocutor must be preserved in its particularity. It “mustnot be crushed beneath a word (parole) prescriptive and prophetic.” Thenecessity of reform certainly must not serve as blackmail to limit, reduce, orstop the exercise of critique. Critique must not be the premise of a rationalethat finishes with “here, then, is what is left for you to do. It must be aninstrument for those who fight, resist, and who no longer want what is. Itmust be used in the process of conflicts, confrontations, efforts at refusal. Itmust not be as a law to the law. … The problem at stake is the subject-of-action—the action by which reality is transformed.”57

Although such passages are generally read with an eye to their languageof resistance and struggle, when read with the parrhesiastic joust in mind,their emphasis and their tone shifts. Salience instead attaches to critique asan instrument or process in political confrontations. Of greater interest thanthe confrontation itself are the techniques and strategies used in the strug-gle to accomplish something. The difference is that transformation occursonly when those who act “fight with and amongst themselves, have met upwith impasses, blockades, impossibilities, and have endured conflicts andconfrontations, when critique has played out in reality (aura été jouée dansle réel), and not when the reformers have instantiated (réalisé) their ideas.”58




Action requires a grasp of “the real,” an ability to articulate what is alreadyvisible, and that one can bring the techniques learned through self-gover-nance to bear on this reality.

Yet, although he believes such ethical work might prepare for publicengagement, Foucault avoids any claim that such ethical cultivation trans-lates directly into political action. Individuals may have a richer set of eth-ical resources upon which to draw and potentially enter politics, but itremains to them to make that choice. Forcing that connection might be per-ilous. A clue to the perils of such self-governance for politics appears inAlexander’s famously reported comment to Diogenes: “if I were notAlexander, I should like to be Diogenes.” Politically, this remark might beinterpreted as reflective of Alexander’s own humility and of the moderationwith which he exercised his own power. Yet it also alerts us modern read-ers to another danger: for Alexander to express himself as does Diogeneswould be to require him to be someone other than who he, in fact, is. Itwould be to deny his currency, his powerful position, and the very real rela-tions that constitute the political and social terms of community—inChristian terms, it would be an act of self-renunciation, while in Deleuzianterms it would be an act made from longing.59

In both instances, the cost of longing or self-renunciation would be thatstability of mind and presence to oneself that Foucault finds to be so diffi-cult to establish and so inherently fragile. Renunciation and desire simplyreturn individuals to the unsteady longing to be other than what they are.Paradoxically, the daily adjustments of parrhesia result in a greater steadi-ness both in thought and action. Requiring individuals to be otherwise is tounsettle them without educating them to the techniques by which they mightregain their balance. As a political program, then, its effects will be fleeting,as individuals are unable to situate themselves in these new ideals or to feelinvested in the relations—to themselves, to others, to truth—that sustain it.

5. Conclusion

Paul Veyne notes that in Foucault’s new schema, “what is opposed totime [as in ‘times past’] as well as eternity is our own valorization of thepresent.”60 Foucault’s use of the ancients considers this valorization both interms of abstract constitutive ideals but also in terms of finding value in theworld-at-hand. Undoubtedly, to many Foucault’s turn to the ancients willseem akin to one of plunder or to the despoiling of an archaeological dig.Yet these digs help us to understand our present in light of the past, and to




claim actively the inheritance it provides for us—an inheritance composedboth of stubborn, inconvenient facts and of faded glories. This move hasprompted some, like Nancy Rosenblum, to characterize Foucault as a Romanticsuffering from a “psychology of self-defense”61 or others, like RichardRorty, as “knights of autonomy” pursuing the “goal of self-overcoming andself-invention.”62 By critics, such charges would usually imply whimsicalimpracticality or irresponsibility. Yet Foucault speaks to Weber’s soberclaim that our heavens are in shreds and that the appropriate response isneither romantic despair, nor revolutionary exuberance, nor existentialanguish. Foucault’s turn towards parrhesia reflects not a selfish interest inself-fashioning, but commitment to a set of ethical practices that wouldfocus individuals squarely on their relations to others, and on their ownwords and deeds, as the necessary substance of ethical work.

And yet, Foucault disclaims that his reading of Antiquity is a return to agolden age.63 Put more bluntly, the problem to which parrhesia might countas a response is not the same as that outlined in Discipline and Punish andHistory of Sexuality, vol. 1. Where those two works argued that individualswere over-steady, over-coherent, disciplined, in parrhesiastic practicesteadiness and a forever imperfect coherence are something to be attained.

This distinction draws attention to a fundamental difference between theactivity of ethical self-governance and political governance. Where ethicalself-governance is governed by norms of harmony, equilibrium, and steadi-ness, the norms constituting political governance are different. The dailyrough-and-tumble of politics rests on norms of dissent and contestation; inchoosing their leaders, debating political programs, and distributingresources, citizens argue and inveigh.64 Politics relies on the contestation ofthose collective practices that might facilitate the internalization of culturalnorms and values, and unfolds through the contest of claims.65 Where theart of self-governance takes as its goal a steadiness of disposition and a har-mony of words and deeds, modern political governance relies on an artfulinterruption of cultural attitudes and actions. While parrhesia contributes anethical steadiness to those who participate in such debates, its personal rela-tionships cannot be scaled so as to characterize politics. Differently fromwhat is often inferred in accounts of a Foucaultian politics of resistance,transgression is not the only possible mode of action, and critique does notautomatically entail resistance. Indeed the irreducibility of ethical relation-ships to a single subjectivity and the insistence on modes of responsivenesswould seem to extend to parrhesiastic politics. The extreme difficulty inestablishing one’s own harmony of words and deeds—and of mediatingrelations to others—should make individuals more substantively cognizant




of the value conflicts that characterize their community and less threat-ened by the existence of other manners of being. Politics, too, would seemto need multiple manners of being, modes of truth-telling, and models ofsubjectivity.

A different model of truth-telling and engagement might be especiallyneeded in those extraordinary moments when matters of political principleand foundation enter public debate. Here parrhesia makes a more obviouscontribution to political engagement. In such moments, the normative pressureis on forging or reforging a consensus, on repairing a break, on re-orientingthe community’s course. In such moments individuals seek consensus underthe pressure of political necessity, but they do so in the absence of settlednorms and values for evaluating such a consensus. Foucault’s work on par-rhesia suggests that to recognize such moments and adjust one’s responseaccordingly requires a discretionary capability and a capacity to settle onvalues one is willing to stand for. The practices of parrhesia offer a momentof observation key for those extraordinary moments of politics where thechallenge is not always to challenge, protest, and revolutionize (although itis often that), but also to consider what might be an effective and appropri-ate response to such challenges—to consider how and to what extent polit-ical norms and values ought be revised for a particular community at aparticular historical juncture. Indeed, what emerges from Foucault’s workon parrhesia is the necessary role not just of agitators, but also of specta-tors; spectators who hesitate, who observe, who gauge the possibilities forpolitical responsiveness. Just as those participants to the spectacle of thescaffold determine the response to public power—a vicarious revelry, aninversion of relations of authority, a challenge to the executionary power ofthe state—so do these spectators determine the political narratives to betold and the cultural values to be internalized.

Throughout his lectures, Foucault comments on those texts that wouldmake such ethical self-governance a precondition for participation in poli-tics; one must be able to rule oneself before attempting to rule others. Sucha claim is not unusual for texts that generally view the oikos and polis asdistinct from one another, modern interpretations and arguments to the con-trary. This claim serves as yet another reminder that Foucault does notclaim to be offering a straightforward solution to modern disenchantments.Instead, the modern challenge is the challenge of adaptation: to read thesepractices against our own and to consider whether in them we find a pre-history of a time very different than our own; a genealogy from which weare directly descended; or a model for ethical self-governance from whichwe can borrow and revise. The advantage of taking Foucault’s reading of




parrhesia as a model, is that it pushes us to recognize both the particularity inthis model’s application among individuals, and the possibility for there to beother models. If Foucault truly does not want to play the prophet or the moral-ist, and if his conception of liberty is of it as a set of practices, then parrhesiacannot count as a singular answer to the question, “what is to be done?”

By the end of this examination of parrhesia, we can see that ethicalsteadiness is the point of reference for these practices precisely because itcannot be achieved once and for all. Such harmony would strain againstother kinds of human excellence valued by modern society and specificallyagainst the daily activity of political governance. To say that other modelsof ethical self-governance exist is not only to be an ethical and method-ological pluralist; it is to understand better the nature of modern unsteadi-ness. Confidence in one’s values requires that one be able to articulate anddefend these with and against others in a community. Undoubtedly, suchefforts may cause a person to be plagued again with doubt and uncertaintyas to their validity. To know that these uncertainties arise not for a lack ofknowledge or of will, and to know techniques to manage them oneself(absent dependence on authoritative others), is already to enter differentlyinto politics.

Notes

1. Such are the approaches taken by Arlene Saxonhouse in Free Speech and Democracy inAncient Athens (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Sara Monoson in Plato’sDemocratic Entanglements (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); and BryanGarsten’s Saving Persuasion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).

2. See the 1982 interview, Michel Foucault, “Vérité, pouvoir, et soi,” in Dits et écrits II,eds. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 1601.

3. One of the first such works is the seminal analysis of Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinowin Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, Ill.: University ofChicago Press, 1983). For critical responses in the history of science, see Ian Hacking,“Michel Foucault’s Immature Science,” Noûs, 13, no. 1 (March 1979): 39-51; and his “TwoKinds of ‘New Historicism’ for Philosophers,” New Literary History 21, no. 2 (Winter 1990):343-64; and Georges Canguilhem, “On Histoire de la folie as an Event,” in Foucault and hisInterlocutors, ed. Arnold Davidson (Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, 1997). Fora historicist response, see Paul Veyne “Foucault Revolutionizes History,” in Foucault and hisInterlocutors. On Foucault’s public intellectual and private aesthetic practices, see “MoralIdentity and Private Autonomy,” Michel Foucault, Philosopher, ed. Timothy J. Armstrong(New York: Routledge, 1992) and “What is Enlightenment?: Kant and Foucault,” TheCambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1994).

4. Pierre Hadot, La Philosophie comme manière de vivre, Entretiens avec Jeannie Carlieret Arnold Davidson (Paris: Editions Albin Michel, Itinéraires du savoir, 2001), 215-19. See




also “Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse in Ancient Philosophy” in Foucault and hisInterlocutors. Averil Cameron constitutes an exception here: “Redrawing the Map: EarlyChristian Territory after Foucault,” The Journal for Roman Studies, 76 (1986): 266-71.

5. Canguilhem, “On Histoire de la folie,” 30.6. Foucault, “Human Nature: Justice versus Power” in Foucault and his Interlocutors.

This well-known interview with Noam Chomsky provides the starkest example of such dis-orientation.

7. Canguilhem, “On Histoire de la folie,” 32. Foucault also had the preface original to thefirst edition removed from the new editions.

8. Foucault, “Self Writing,” Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. vol. 1 of Essential Works ofFoucault 1954-84, ed. Paul Rabinow and trans. Robert Hurley (New York: The New Press,1997), 211.

9. See the 1978 “Entretien avec Michel Foucault” with D. Trombadori, in DE II, 894.10. Ibid.11. For a discussion of doubles in Foucault, and the distinction between legislative and

exemplary projects, see David Owen, “Genealogy as Exemplary Critique,” Economy andSociety, vol. 24, no. 4 (November 1995): 489-506.

12. Sartrian existentialism achieves its fullest elaboration in Being and Nothingness; acondensed version of these claims can be found in Jean-Paul Sartre, “Freedom and Responsibility”and “Existentialism is a Humanism” in Essays in Existentialism (New York: Citadel Press,1993). For an excellent treatment of Sartre within the context of French post-war thought, seeSonia Kruks, Situation and Human Experience: Freedom, Subjectivity, and Society (New York:Routledge, 1990).

13. Sartre, “Freedom and Responsibility,” in Essays.14. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Vintage

Books, 1968).15. The roots for this new formulation of philosophy’s relationship to power emerge in an

unscripted address given during Foucault’s 1978 visit to Japan. See “La Philosophie analy-tique de la politique” in DE II, 540.

16. Foucault, “À propos de la généalogie de l’éthique: Un aperçu du travail en cours” inDE II, 1436.

17. “Interview avec Michel Foucault” by I. Lindung, reprinted in Dits et Écrits I (Paris:Éditions Gallimard, 2001), 687. Foucault consistently acknowledges his inheritance of theFreudian model of an unintegrated self.

18. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, The Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley et al,(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990 [1972]). Foucault writes an enthusiasticpreface to Anti-Oedipus and situates it as an important new ethics.

19. Gilles Deleuze, “Desire and Pleasure” in Foucault and his Interlocutors, 189.20. Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” in Kant’s Political Writings, 2nd edition,

ed. Hans Reiss and trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).21. These lectures surprisingly imply a different relationship of modern politics and

aesthetics to Christianity than what is often argued. Foucault draws on pre-Augustinian textsand argues that they lack the concern for self-purification that arises later; Diogenes, in hisaccount, becomes a liminal figure whose practices teeter at the edge of those “technologies”Foucault later attributes to the early Christians. He can more readily claim, then, that the “aes-thetics of existence” is not a turn towards the human and the individual away from the divineand metaphysical; it is not a version of 19th century dandyism. Nor is it not simply a substitutefor religion reliant on a secular “strategy of piety,” to use Connolly’s phrase. Parrhesia does




not need Nietzschean agonism to fight against a (newly secular) “pagan enemy” because theidentity of those who practice parrhesia does not rely on some concept of an “other.” AlthoughFoucault does not build this comparison, a contemporary politics in the spirit of parrhesiawould look very different from a Nietzschean-inspired politics such as that elaborated byWilliam Connolly. See Identity |Difference (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991) andTracy Strong’s review in Ethics, 102, no. 4 (July 1992): 863-65. For a different account of therelations between Nietzsche, practices of the self, and politics, see Tracy Strong’s FriedrichNietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).

22. Through use of the word “régime”—which in French variously means “system ofgovernance,” “diet,” and “rate of activity”—Foucault knits together issues in governance andself-governance with issues in medicine, psychology, and pedagogy. See Le Courage de la vérité,1 février 1984, CD 1A.

23. Foucault, “Governmentality” in The Foucault Effect, eds. Graham Burchell and ColinGordon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 93.

24. Foucault, Le Courage de la vérité, 21 mars 1984, CD 9A.25. These basic characteristics find different formulations over the eight centuries Foucault

treats. For example, they find one expression in concepts of eunomia, and another in Seneca’slater use of tranquilitas and fermitas. See Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. JosephPearson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001), 142-160.

26. For a very different approach to Foucault on curiosity—one that associates it with the“will to know”—see Paul Rabinow’s “Modern and Counter-Modern: Ethos and Epoch inHeidegger and Foucault” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault.

27. Foucault, Fearless Speech, 153-154.28. See Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (London: Routledge, 1993) and The Psychic Life

of Power (Stanford, Conn.: Stanford University Press, 1997).29. See “À Propos de la généalogie de l’éthique,” DE II, 1441.30. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley, (New York: Vintage Books, 1990),

41 and 43.31. Foucault, Fearless Speech, 137.32. Foucault, “Self Writing,” Ethics, 221.33. Foucault, “Self Writing,” Ethics, 217.34. For a slightly different take on moral desert, see Bernard Williams, Truth and

Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).35. Foucault, “La Philosophie analytique de la politique,” DE II, 540-41.36. Foucault, Le Courage de la vérité, 22 février 1984, CD 4B and 5A.37. Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton, N.J.:

Princeton University Press, 2002); Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1985).

38. Veyne, “Foucault Revolutionizes History” in Foucault and his Interlocutors, 153.39. Foucault, Le Gouvernement du soi et des autres, 5 janvier 1983, CD 1A.40. Foucault, “Entretien avec Michel Foucault,” DE II, 913.41. Foucault, “À propos de la généalogie de l’éthique,” DE II, 1430.42. Foucault, “Entretien avec Michel Foucault,” DE II, 912-13.43. See Le Courage de la vérité, 21 mars 1984, CD10A.44. Foucault, “La Philosophie analytique de la politique,” DE II, 537.45. Ibid.46. Ibid.47. Ibid.




48. Ibid., 537-41.49. Ibid., 540-41.50. Foucault, “L’homme est-il mort?” DE I, 569.51. Foucault, “Qui êtes-vous, professeur Foucault?” in DE I, 643.52. Foucault, “L’homme, est-il mort?” DE I, 569-70.53. Pierre Hadot, “La Figure de Socrate” in Exercices spirituels et philosophie (Paris:

Études augustiniennes, 1981), 77-116.54. Foucault, “Entretien avec Madeleine Chapsal,” DE I, 541.55. Foucault, “Entretien avec Michel Foucault,” DE II, 851.56. These late lectures thus address some of Alessandro Pizzorno’s concerns in “Foucault

and the Liberal View of the Individual,” Michel Foucault: Philosopher, ed. Timothy J.Armstrong (New York: Routledge, 1992), 204-11.

57. Foucault, “Table ronde du 20 mai 1978,” DE II, 851.58. Ibid., 851-52.59. Additionally, Foucaultian self-governance cannot be the romantic self-invention imag-

ined by Richard Rorty by which rapport à soi is a “refusal to be exhaustively describable inwords which apply to anyone other than himself.” See “Moral Identity and Private Autonomy”in Michel Foucault: Philosopher, 328-29.

60. Paul Veyne, “The Final Foucault and his Ethics” in Foucault and his Interlocutors, 227.61. Nancy Rosenblum,“Pluralism and Self-Defense” in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed.

Nancy Rosenblum (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).62. Rorty, “Moral Identity and Private Autonomy,” 328-34.63. Foucault, “À propos de la généalogie de l’éthique,” DE II.64. The distinction between the norms of ordinary versus extraordinary politics is made in

Gary Shiffman, “Construing Debate: Consensus and Invective in ‘Constitutional’ Debate,”Political Theory, 30, no. 2 (April 2002): 175-203.

65. Foucault, Fearless Speech. Foucault’s contrast between the harmony sought bypersonal relationships of parrhesia and the scandal provoked by the cynic Diogenes in publiclife reinforces this distinction.

Nancy Luxon is an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota. Her research lies withincontemporary political and social theory, and treats issues of education, political authority, andethics. She has recently published “Truthfulness, Risk and Trust in the Late Lectures of MichelFoucault” and is working on a book-length manuscript entitled ‘The Impossible Professions’:Freud and Foucault on doctors, educators, and ethical subjectivity.




Ethics and Subjectivity: Practices of Self-Governance in the Late Lectures of Michel Foucault

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