In his 1980 course, Foucault, after his research on “ power-to-know », gives a new place to the subject – a subject which is experienced in the injunction to speak about oneself in order to better submit to the other.
The course given by Michel Foucault at the Collège de France from January to March 1980, entitled Of the government of the livingconstitutes a key moment for understanding the Foucauldian shift, which leads him from the study of the major forms of modern Western power (power of sovereignty, disciplinary power, governmentalities of the Reason of State or neo-liberal) to the examination structures of subjectification among the Ancients. It is a complex, winding course, which consists less of the serene presentation of established results than of a restless movement of open research. We will begin by emphasizing the excellence of the editing work accomplished by Michel Senellart: precision, rigor and probity. The delicate balance between preserved orality and readability is perfectly achieved, and the annotation is particularly rich and precious.
The entry of the subject
The general title, as is often the case, does not fit well with the course content. It could lead us to believe that Foucault is completing the study of contemporary biopolitical modalities of the government of men. Foucault actually displays the desire to redefine his own concepts and to redefine the historical framework of his research. In the first lessons he multiplies new – and false – starts as if he was looking for balance and direction, at least general insight. Foucault, however, by claiming to go beyond his own concept of “ power-to-know » by that of “ government by truth », highlights an important dimension of his own conception of truth. The idea of a power-to-know » contained a double criticism: that of a founding or transcendental subject, but also that of the notion of dominant ideology, which reduced true discourse to the function of simple “ blanket “. In the first lessons of the course, the emphasis on accompaniment “ aleturgical » of power allows us to denounce something else: a utilitarian conception of truth. The manifestation of a truth goes beyond the simple effect of logical inscription of power. This alethurgical excess marks the entry on the scene of “ subject “. More positively indeed, the new concepts of “ aleturgy “, of “ government by truth “, of “ regime of truth » forged in the first lessons make it possible to problematize a “ subject » who would be an actor, an operator of the manifestation of truth. Studying a regime of truth no longer means (simply) studying the articulation of knowledge on forms of governmentality, but “ acts of truth » by which the subject constructs, according to precise procedures, a determined relationship to the truth. We are obviously still far from “ practices of subjectification » proposed by the Ancients, in that these techniques do not delimit subjectivity as its own sphere of consistency, but nevertheless the subjective moment becomes the living heart of the manifestation of truth. The truth manifests itself in and through the subject, but it does not yet manifest itself from and for him. The study of acts of truth will therefore still be that of “ bonds “, of the “ constraints ”, in the way in which a subject “ binds » to the discovery or enunciation of a truth, this link being less what gives it consistency than what maintains it in obedience. It remains that truth unfolds for the first time in an extra-discursive dimension, foreign to knowledge: that of an experience that the subject has of himself.
Baptism and penance
This conceptual rebalancing carried out in the lessons of January 1980 is decisive, and constitutes a solid framework for all the analyzes of the months of February and March. There is then no longer any question of methodology, Foucault devoting himself to the precise study of a certain number of “ acts of truth »: baptism and penance, in the two forms of exomologesis and exagoresis. In his Course location Michel Senellart underlines with great accuracy the importance of the lessons that Foucault devotes to the development by Tertullian of a new doctrine of baptism. In fact, baptism is no longer considered for him as the operator of salvation through the interiorization of a new light, through a purification which would be the final result of an educational initiation. Baptism is addressed to a subject who is not a subject of knowledge, but precisely a subject of trial, of a trial of himself by himself. Truth is no longer this knowledge which transforms a subject purified by divine illumination. It is a process which works on the subject, a continual testing of oneself by which the latter perpetually fights within himself what comes from the Other (the demon, Satan) and strives to gradually become other (less sinner or holier), by means of an endless internal struggle, of an indefinite mortification. This structure of an act of truth which constructs the subject as a continuous process of death to oneself through combat against an Other is essential for understanding Christian subjectivity. It takes on a greater transparency in Tertullian because Death and Life, the Self and the Other are exchanged without mediation, in the element of perpetual ordeal.
In the continuation of the 1980 course, Foucault studies two more classic forms of penance (which must be taken here in the broad and diversified sense of: work of interior transformation, self-imposition of suffering, verbalization of one’s faults), which add to this dimension of interior work that of exposure, of exteriorization by the subject of his truth as a sinner. The first form is exomologesis, which consists for a sinner, after having made confession to his bishop of a particularly serious fault, to enter into the status of penitent, a status which obliges him for the entire required period to mortification and privations, until the moment when he is admitted to reintegrate the community of the Church by means of a public ceremony. Foucault insists there on the ritualized dimension and “ theatrical » of this penance, which obliges the penitent to externalize, in his body, his behavior, his clothes, his own condition. The truth of the subject is staged, it passes through the exposure of the body. The second type of penance called “ exagoresis », implemented in the first Western monastic structures, is studied based on the recommendations of Cassian, within the framework of the directions of consciousness. This time the emphasis is placed on the continuous verbalization of states of consciousness. The acts of truth will then consist of a regular, exhaustive, continuous confession. Foucault insists on the reversal here of the charge of speech in relation to ancient tradition. In the ancient directions of existence, as especially developed by Hellenistic philosophy, it is the master who must speak and the disciple is kept silent.
However, in the Christian system, Foucault still remains centered on a problematization of the subject subject, even if this subjection indeed supposes an initiative (the person being directed produces from himself the “ acts of truth “). We indeed understand the provocative charge of the end of the 1980 course: it is a question of showing that these practices of self-verbalization put in place in the first monasteries (from which the injunctions of modern psychologies will derive) are part of a horizon of indefinite, perpetual obedience – in contrast, the ancient directions of existence finalize the formation of a freedom. Ask yourself “ who we are Really “, and endeavor to respond to it by means of production, in front of another who is silent, of self-discourse, establishing from oneself to oneself the interval of a secret to be revealed, that is our way, to us , to obey. The subjective structuring that encourages us to know ourselves better is the one that locks us into a system of obedience and self-denial. The first time that the Western individual gives himself as the object of his own discourse, that he objectifies himself by means of a verbalization of his secret thoughts, it is to establish a relationship of dependence with the Other endless. It was necessary for Foucault, in 1982, in his course on The hermeneutics of the subjectthe patient description of “ self-care » Greek, to finally be able to consider a subject which completes the relationship between oneself and oneself in the ethical consistency of liberating work on oneself, without introspection.