In the fall of 1980, Michel
Foucault visited a number of cities and universities in theUnitedStates. He
gave lectures at DarmouthCollege, the UCBerkeley, and PrincetonU and gave a
monthlong seminar and a public lecture at NYU. The two lectures published here
were delivered at Dartmouth on nov.17 and 24, 1980 under the titles
“Subjectivity and Truth” and “Christianity and Confession.” Foucault delivered
the lectures from texts handwritten in english. An earlier version of these
lectures was transcribed and edited by Thomas Keenan. I have reedited them, but
very lightly, to preserve their spoken quality, using tapes provided by
Dartmouth’s OfficeOfInstructionalServicesAndEducationalResearch: all the notes
were added during the editing process. Earlier, Foucault had given more or less
the same papers as theHowisonLectures at Berkeley on oct.20-21. I have added in
the notes some passages transcribed from theHowisonLectures for the sake of
filling out the lectures published here, and I thank PaulRabinow for his
assistance in this. (For instance, at one point in Berkeley, Foucault remarked
that “the title of these two lectures could have been, and should have been, in
fact, ‘About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self,’” a wish I have
honoured here.) On a few occasions, these lectures overlap slightly with other
published work by Foucault, which I have marked in the notes.
These lectures mark a
transition in Foucault’s work from studying systems of powerrleations
(DisciplineAndPunish and TheHistoryOfSexualityVol.1) to studying the creation
of Ethicalagency (TheHistoryOfSexualityVols.2.3.4). Indeed, with this transition
and from his earlier works on the History of systems of thought (Madness and
Civilisation, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, and the Archaeology
of Knowledge), Foucault begins to complete the analysis of three axes of
experience: truth, power, and Ethics. The lectures that follow hint at the
themes that would appear later in volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality,
works largely and undeservedly overlooked by politicaltheories. However, Foucault
said in a later interview upon their publication, when asked if he wrote these
last books “for” contemporary liberation movements, that he wrote them not
“for” them but “as a function of a present situation.” He said of volume 2, The
Use of Pleasure, the volume most about “sex,” that the problem of recent
liberation movements was similar to the one he studied in this book about
Ancient Greece: to elaborate an Ethics through sex. The third volume, The Care
of the Self, can be read (at least in part) as a perspective on how to adapt
and direct the power exercised by medical, quasi-medical, and Moral experts in
the time of the AIDS epidemic. Finally, the fourth volume, The Confession of
the Flesh, completed but as yet unpublished, is about early Christian sexual
Ethics. Its relevance to what concerns us today can be gleaned from a
discussion (recorded on the tape but not included here) between Foucault a gay
graduate student after one of the lectures printed here. The student questioned
Foucault’s endorsement of John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and
Homosexuality (Chicago, 1980) because of the patent hostility of Catholicism
toward homosexuality and sexuality generally. Foucault countered that an
antisexual Judeo-Christian Morality is a dangerous myth that is not supported
by historical evidence and has political implications. Rather, said Foucault,
what is significant for sexuality is that Christianity inaugurated a new
attitude of people not so much toward sexual acts and the code of sexual
Ethics, but toward themselves, and this new relationship of people to
themselves, the necessity to scrutinise and discover the truth about oneself
and then verbalise this truth to others, affected people’s attitude toward
sexuality. Both Freudian discourse on sexuality as well as the discourse of
self-disclosure as a talking cure are recognisable in the “small origins”
analysed in these two lectures.
The significance for
politicaltheory of these lectures is indicated by Foucault at the end of the
second one: “one of the main politicalproblems would be nowadays ... the
Politics of ourselves.” The lectures trace the geneaology of the self: its
constitution through a continuous analysis of one’s thoughts under a
hermeneutic principle of making sure they are really one’s own; and the self’s
iteration and social reinforcement through an ongoing verbalisation of this
self-decipherment to others. Foucault elsewhere analysed (The History of
Sexuality, Vol. 1) how techniques inherited from the Christian confession allow
for the self to be created and subjected within relations of power that
constitute modern social institutions. A Politics of our selves would entail a
recognition that if the self is “nothing else than the historical correlation
of the technology” that has come to create it, then the aim would be to get rid
of the “sacrifice which is linked to those technologies.” This sacrifice is
twofold: it is the creation of a positive foundation for the self by means of
procedures that at one makes us amenable to social control and dependent upon
it, as well as the production and then marginalisation of entire categories of
people who do not fit what the foundation posits as “normal.” We can rid
ourselves of the imposed sacrifice through what Foucault called a “critical
ontology of ourselves.” This is, he wrote, “at one and the same time the
historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with
the possibility of going beyond them... in the care brought to the process of
putting historico-critical reflection to the test of concrete practices” (The
Foucault Reader, p.50).
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