Speaking the Truth about Oneself

Lectures at Victoria University, Toronto, 1982

Michel Foucault, Henri-Paul Fruchaud,Daniele Lorenzini, Daniel Louis Wyche

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226623054
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Now in paperback, this collection of Foucault's lectures traces the historical formation and contemporary significance of the hermeneutics of the self. Just before the summer of 1982, French philosopher Michel Foucault gave a series of lectures at Victoria University in Toronto. In these lectures, which were part of his project of writing a genealogy of the modern subject, he is concerned with the care and cultivation of the self, a theme that becomes central to the second, third, and fourth volumes of his History of Sexuality. Foucault had always been interested in the question of how constellations of knowledge and power produce and shape subjects, and in the last phase of his life, he became especially interested not only in how subjects are formed by these forces but in how they ethically constitute themselves.In this lecture series and accompanying seminar, Foucault focuses on antiquity, starting with classical Greece, the early Roman empire, and concluding with Christian monasticism in the fourth and fifth centuries AD. Foucault traces the development of a new kind of verbal practice—"speaking the truth about oneself"—in which the subject increasingly comes to be defined by its inner thoughts and desires. He deemed this new form of "hermeneutical" subjectivity important not just for historical reasons, but also due to its enduring significance in modern society.

The Seminar, June 1982

First Meeting

[ . . . ] the last text, as you see, is a photocopy of a translation of the Alcibiades. We’ll have a look at it first. Then the first texts are xeroxed from [ . . . ] and the third part is the Correspondence of Cornelius Fronto. That makes three different materials. And among the texts of Epictetus, there are still three different parts. The first one has three pages, the first three pages, that make this text. And those three pages will be the third part of what we have to study today. The three next pages, Chapter 16, “About Providence,” are the second part and the last two pages [ . . . ] [The] last two pages will be the first part of what we have to study today. OK? Plato, Alcibiades, then Epictetus, Book 3; Epictetus, Book 1, Chapter 16; and Epictetus, Book 1, Chapter 1. And then, if we have time, a letter . . . two . . . three letters from Marcus Aurelius to Fronto. That’s it. OK?

Really I would like to ask you several things [ . . . ]. I would really like you to take the initiative in this seminar for several reasons. The first one is that it is the first time in my life—in spite of the fact that I’m rather old—[this is] the first time that [I’ve] run such a seminar with foreign people, people I don’t know . . . [So] I don’t know [ . . . ] if you are interested, what you have studied and so on. I’m ignorant of you, and that’s a first difficulty. The second thing which makes things rather difficult is that my English, as you may have noticed, is not perfect. And I was told that I could run the seminar in French, and I prepared my stuff in French, but I am afraid that it couldn’t be possible. First thing at least I would like to ask you is, Do you think that we could do this seminar in French or both in French and in English—you speak English if you like and I speak French—or do you prefer that I try to speak in my broken English rather than my childish French?

—[Personally I can do both, French or English.]

—Are there people who don’t understand any French?

—And how many people could speak French? So, well, I’ll try to do it in English. The third reason why I would like you to take the initiative is that during the lectures of course I am obliged to speak, and maybe I speak too much, too long, and so on, and I don’t know exactly what are your reactions, how far you are responsive to what I have said, and if you are interested or not, if it’s too technical or not . . . or insufficiently technical . . . and so on. So what I suggest would be for those two hours, first that you speak very freely and frankly about what you want concerning our meetings or the lectures or the seminars. Then, after that, we could read together. Or no, we could speak about the Alcibiades so far as some of you had the opportunity before the seminar to read the text of the Alcibiades, since it was this text, or part of it, that I have commented [on] in my last lecture.1 So we could do that, react to this text, to the interpretation I have proposed to you. Then, after that, we could read together the texts of Epictetus, and I have prepared a kind of commentary about these three texts of Epictetus, and then, if we have time left, we could read together the letters of Marcus Aurelius and Fronto. How do you say that? First, free discussion, reactions, then discussion about the Alcibiades, then discussion about Epictetus, and then Marcus Aurelius and Fronto. Is it OK? So who wants to speak first?

—[ . . . ] if you could elaborate on that a bit more, and talk about what the distinctions between different classes of citizens might mean for what you’ve been talking about.

—Yes, yes, that’s a good question. But maybe, first of all, I would like, is there any question or critiques or anything to say about the formal aspect of the things about the lectures? I have heard, for instance, that you couldn’t understand exactly that I have said or at least—it’s the fault of my bad pronunciation—that you couldn’t catch the names I told. That’s true? No?

The second question I would like to ask is, Do you think that what I am telling you, what I have tried to tell you about the epimeleia heautou and the taking care of oneself and so on is that . . . isn’t it too far from what you are supposed to study in a seminar on semiotics and things like that? I’m afraid to disappoint you!

—[ . . . ]1f

—[ . . . ] In a cafeteria discussion today, some people were [wondering] why you decided to go back to late antiquity, Greco-Roman philosophy, and early Christianity. [ . . . ] We have people on a lot of different levels taking part here: some people who have been studying this themselves, some people who have been keeping up with your own studies, and we have heard different explanations in the past. [ . . . ] But I think it would be helpful if there was more of an explanation for this choice of material . . . I think you covered this to some extent in your first lecture, in the explanation of the four different technologies, but I think that a lot of people are still out in the cold on that.

—Yes, well, you see, the reason why I went back to this stuff, late antiquity or postclassical, Hellenistic period, Greco-Roman period, and so on, the reason is that what I have tried to do from the beginning is not exactly a history of sciences or a history of institutions like asylums, prisons, and things like that. Of course I was interested in this field, but when I had studied those things, those institutions, and so on, the reason was that the deep problem I wanted to treat was the history of our subjectivity. It is not a history of sciences, it is a history of subjectivity. And I think that our subjectivity—and that’s for me the main difference with what we could call the phenomenological experience . . . no, the phenomenological theory—subjectivity is not a kind of radical, of immediate experience of oneself, but there are a lot of social, of historical, of technical mediations between ourselves and ourselves. And the field of those mediations, the structure, the effects of those mediations, that’s exactly the theme of my research from the beginning.

For instance, each of us has a certain relationship to his own madness. He has conscience and experience of [ . . . ] the part of himself which is supposed to be mad. He has, to madness in general and to himself as possibly mad, a certain experience. And I think that this experience of oneself as possibly mad is of course historically, socially, culturally, determined. And I will make an exaggeration saying that all of us have a kind of asylum inside of himself, but it is a way to exemplify what I want to say. Each of us has a kind of prison inside himself, and his relation to law, his relation to transgression, his relation to crime, to sin, and so on has not only a historical background, but there is a part of history, of historical structure, of this inside relation, in each of us, you see. And that was the reason why I have studied madness, why I have studied the prison and so on, and now when I am studying sex and sexuality, I put the question in the same light. I don’t think that the relation we have to our own sex is something so immediate as people could think. There is not only a historical framework, but a historical structure of our sexual subjectivity. And I have tried to study that from the sixteenth century on to now.

But I became quickly aware that it was nearly impossible to take the sixteenth century, or the end of the Middle Ages, or the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, as a point of departure. And reading all those texts, quickly I came to the conviction, I became convinced that I had to come back, go back to late antiquity, the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman period as the real historical point of departure of this kind of subjectivity, this kind of consciousness, and so on. And the relationships between asceticism and truth in late antiquity and early Christianity seem to me to be [ . . . ] a historical point of departure [ . . . ].

—Part of what I was suggesting is that if that fact could work its way into the lecture a little bit it could be helpful . . . A lot of people are coming not having studied this period, so it’s dry material in some senses.

—Well, maybe I’ll try in the beginning of the next lecture to explain that a little.2 That’s your suggestion?

—I don’t know what other people feel about it, but that’s what I picked up from . . .

—Yeah, sure. I’m grateful that you tell me that.

—I heard both sides: classicists feeling that you were giving short shrift to the ancients and people who aren’t interested in that [ . . . ] [You need a] good middle ground.

—Yeah, certainly.

—I think part of the problem is that it’s very difficult for someone to pick up certain threads to which they might object, or to snipe at particular remarks, when they’re not sure just how you’re knitting these threads together. [In some cases, it is even more difficult, because you may] pick up the thread again later on, and weave it more deeply into the structure of where you’re going. So without a clearer understanding of just why you’re putting certain structures in place, it is difficult for participants to make certain objections or pose certain questions, especially because the lectures are in a sense already concluded in your presentations. I for one would like you to elaborate a little bit on the careful distinction that you initially made between individualism and a technology of the self.

—Well, that’s a very good question. My purpose was to speak about it in the last lecture. So maybe we can start [with] that, but it will be the historical and social background of all that. The problem is why those technologies of the self have been so important in this period—I mean the beginning of the empire—and the explanation which most of the historians of ideas at least would give would be “Well, it is the rise of individualism in the Greco-Roman societies.” But I don’t think that is [a] good explanation, for a lot of reasons. Among them, the fact that the people who practiced this care of oneself, or the people who were the theoricians of the care of oneself, these people were not at all individualistic figures, they were not at all people retiring from social or political life, they were not at all people who were not interested or were not active in the political field. People like Plutarch, in his small town, [were] very active; he was involved in all the social and political life of the province. And of course somebody like Seneca, who was the minister, the prime minister of Nero, has during the last years of his life been involved in a very intense political life, political activity. So I think that the rise of individualism and the decay of the collective life of the city is not, cannot be considered as, the reason of the development of those technologies of the self.

The second great reason is that those technologies of the self are very archaic, and you can see the development from the elder documents we have about Greek life. So individualism cannot be the reason of the development of those technologies of the self.3 The problem is to analyze the reason why at a certain moment people [who] were really involved in social and political life have presented, developed, new forms of techniques of the self. That could be the theme of the last lecture. [But] I don’t know if I catch exactly the question you were asking.

—[ . . . ] I had understood you to make a distinction in the first lecture between a technology of the self as an apparatus of power engaging the personality which is related to, for example, the [linguistic-sociality mode]2f of man, and an individualism which didn’t seem to be attached to that technology, which seemed to be simply a hinge that everyone . . . that functions as a hinge that belongs to everyone including the body and the society at large.

—Hinge?

—Gond.

—Gond.

—[Charnière.]

—For example, the body and the social personality, the hinge by which the body is related to the social personality. [It] seems to me that we’re distinguishing first a level which you termed individualism insofar as everybody must [acknowledge the difference] between the body and the social personality, our own habits . . .

—But I won’t make a difference between, or at least this kind of difference, between body and social personality. We don’t need any hinge to relate body to social personality. Our body is a part of society, our body is a part of our social personality, and . . .

—It’s OK, but then is there a distinction, or am I misunderstanding you, between this unity described as, in quotes, “individualism,” and this unity as enclosed by technologies of the self?

—Well, I would say . . . I would rather say that individualism is a result of certain kind of techniques of the self. And I would say the reverse: I think that most other people would say that, if the techniques of the self have developed, the reason is the [rise] of individualism. I should say that in the history of those very numerous techniques of the self, at certain moment, for certain reasons, and of course we have to explain, to elaborate those reasons, at certain moment those techniques of the self take the shape and have as a result the form of an individualism. I don’t know if that is exactly an answer to your question. No?

—I had thought you had made that clear . . .

—Between individualism and techniques of the self?

—I’m not sure I understand the question either. Perhaps someone else could elaborate . . .

—Maybe I think that . . . I have the feeling that you touch an important point, but I can’t catch exactly what is your question. Maybe we could do: one, to write in a few words your question, or a few pages if you want, give me the paper, I’ll read it and try to give an answer either in a lecture or in the seminar or in a conversation with you. Because I think it’s a very fundamental question. So there is no reason to treat this question, to answer this question now or later on or at the end. I think that I have to answer this question, I’m sure that I have ...