Contemporary accounts of individual self-formation struggle to articulate a mode of subjectivity not determined by relations of power. In response to this dilemma, Foucault's late lectures on the ancient ethical practices of “fearless speech” (parrhesia) offer a model of ethical self-governance that educates individuals to ethical and political engagement. Rooted in the psychological capacities of curiosity and resolve, such self-governance equips individuals with a “disposition to steadiness” that orients individuals in the face of uncertainty. The practices of parrhesia accomplish this task without fabricating a distinction between internal soul and external body; by creating not a “body of knowledge” but a “body of practices”; and without reference to an external order such as nature, custom, tradition, or religion. The result is an “expressive subject” defined through expressive practices sustained by a simultaneous relationship to herself and to others. Individuals develop themselves not through their ability to “dare to know” but as those who “dare to act.”
Such are the approaches taken by Arlene Saxonhouse in Free Speech and Democracy in Ancient Athens (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Sara Monoson in Plato's Democratic Entanglements (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Bryan Garsten'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 Rabinow in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago 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 " Two Kinds of `New Historicism' for Philosophers," New Literary History21, no. 2 (Winter 1990): 343-64; and Georges Canguilhem, "On Histoire de la folie as an Event ," in Foucault and his Interlocutors, ed. Arnold Davidson (Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, 1997). For a historicist response, see Paul Veyne "Foucault Revolutionizes History," in Foucault and his Interlocutors. On Foucault's public intellectual and private aesthetic practices, see "Moral Identity and Private Autonomy," Michel Foucault, Philosopher, ed. Timothy J. Armstrong (New York: Routledge , 1992) and "What is Enlightenment?: Kant and Foucault,"The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1994 ).
4.
Pierre Hadot , La Philosophie comme manière de vivre, Entretiens avec Jeannie Carlier et 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 his Interlocutors. Averil Cameron constitutes an exception here: " Redrawing the Map: Early Christian 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 disorientation.
7.
Canguilhem, "On Histoire de la folie," 32. Foucault also had the preface original to the first edition removed from the new editions.
8.
Foucault, "Self Writing," Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. vol. 1 of Essential Works of Foucault 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 DEII, 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 and Society, vol. 24, no. 4 (November 1995): 489-506.
12.
Sartrian existentialism achieves its fullest elaboration in Being and Nothingness; a condensed 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, see Sonia 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 analytique de la politique" in DEII, 540.
16.
Foucault, " À propos de la généalogie de l'éthique: Un aperçu du travail en cours" in DEII, 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 the Freudian 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 enthusiastic preface 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 texts and argues that they lack the concern for self-purification that arises later; Diogenes, in his account, 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 "aesthetics of existence" is not a turn towards the human and the individual away from the divine and metaphysical; it is not a version of 19th century dandyism. Nor is it not simply a substitute for 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 the identity of those who practice parrhesia does not rely on some concept of an "other." Although Foucault does not build this comparison, a contemporary politics in the spirit of parrhesia would look very different from a Nietzschean-inspired politics such as that elaborated by William Connolly. See Identity | Difference ( Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991) and Tracy Strong's review in Ethics, 102, no. 4 (July 1992): 863-65. For a different account of the relations between Nietzsche, practices of the self, and politics, see Tracy Strong'sFriedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration ( Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
22.
Through use of the word "régime"-which in French variously means "system of governance," "diet," and "rate of activity"-Foucault knits together issues in governance and self-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 Colin Gordon (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's later use of tranquilitas and fermitas. See Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (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 in Heidegger 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," DEII, 540-41.
36.
Foucault, Le Courage de la vérité, 22 février 1984, CD4B 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, CD1A.
40.
Foucault, " Entretien avec Michel Foucault," DEII, 913.
41.
Foucault, " À propos de la généalogie de l'éthique," DEII, 1430.
42.
Foucault, " Entretien avec Michel Foucault," DEII, 912-13.
43.
See Le Courage de la vérité, 21 mars 1984, CD10A.
44.
Foucault, " La Philosophie analytique de la politique," DEII, 537.
45.
Ibid.
46.
Ibid.
47.
Ibid.
48.
Ibid, 537-41.
49.
Ibid, 540-41.
50.
Foucault, "L'homme est-il mort?"DEI, 569.
51.
Foucault, " Qui êtes-vous, professeur Foucault?" in DEI, 643.
52.
Foucault, " L'homme, est-il mort?" DEI, 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," DEI, 541.
55.
Foucault, " Entretien avec Michel Foucault," DEII, 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," DEII, 851.
58.
Ibid, 851-52.
59.
Additionally, Foucaultian self-governance cannot be the romantic self-invention imagined by Richard Rorty by which rapport à soi is a "refusal to be exhaustively describable in words 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," DEII.
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 by personal relationships of parrhesia and the scandal provoked by the cynic Diogenes in public life reinforces this distinction.
