Catherine Malabou - "Foucault’s last seminars: the 'other politics'" - 4.21.2021

okay i trust uh everyone has been able to join us um and i welcome all of you and um as they'd say in paris uh our catrine is it's a very good number and that's it's it's i'm absolutely delighted to have so many people attending this is uh in uh i think it's our third lecture um in our series of um public lectures that are being held throughout the year and so i'm very very happy to be um welcoming back catherine malabu who is one of our regular faculty and also lecturers and um so it's it's it's a great honor and uh welcome to catherine let me make just a couple um announcements first of all our next public lecture of this kind will be held on may 3rd and that is going to be with aisha liviana messina and her topic is the time of fragility and that will be something of a reflection on what we have been going through so that i look forward to that very much may 3rd um for for that event um and let me mention to you that uh catherine will be leading off our 2021 session um in our proper academic session um in june there's our course starts on june 19th with a seminar entitled unconscious and negativity freud lacan and their critical legacies and you can sign up for this now go to our website um on the the home page or our website will give you the proper uh avenue for signing up so um again we're delighted to have her in the in that lead off position in in the session um i will just mention to you that uh caffeine will accept questions and you can register these in the q a box available there please keep these questions relatively short um otherwise it's it's difficult for um the speaker to to handle all of the material and and to be able to move uh swiftly particularly after giving a talk so um we'll be grateful if you can uh make those uh questions uh succinct and uh katrina will do our best to address them um i want to thank finally i want to thank the faculty media and communicate for their partnership in this uh in this lecture series um it's nice to have them there in belgrade with us and um and with that i think i can i i let me just add one thing i i am not going through a long introduction of kathryn because um i want to say if you're here you know who she is um but i also uh i want to invite you to look at our website where we have a faculty bio page uh katrina's her background her her achievements are are well represented there so although it could be that we need to do updating she's very prolific so um but in terms of her background you can consult that page so with um with that let me pass the screen to katrin malabu and thank her once again for for coming tonight well thank you very much chris for this introduction thank you for inviting me to give this talk and thank you nemanja as well [Music] so i must say before i start that um this is a part of your work in progress so um i ask your patients because the conclusions are perhaps not yet definitive so um yes but we can discuss um i hope uh at the end so uh focusing on focus last seminars uh the government of self and others but most particularly the courage of truth i intend to challenge what has become a usual standardized way of reading them in these seminars foucault insisting upon their incompatibility would have achieved his move from politics to ethics through what he symptom of symptomatizes as what he calls the crisis of parisia i will come back to that in a moment that is the growing discrepancy between truth and democracy in ancient greece he would have developed his ultimate concept of resistance understood as a total withdrawal from the political scene the paradigm of such a withdrawal would be the cynic form of life developed in the courage of truth a form of life that radicalizes the motive of the care of the self they develop mainly in the hermeneutics of the subject and if the care of the self can still be seen as a negotiation between ethics and politics the cynic form of life would be a clear rejection of all idea of community and political agenda so tonight i would like to propose a different interpretation i do think that foucault never sought shelter into ethics thus preparing a neo-liberal individualistic affirmation of life but on the contrary announced through his reading of the cynics a passage to what he calls the other politics relying on a dismissal not of all politics precisely but rather of all idea of government which is of course dramatically different my contention is that what foucault describes as a crisis of parisia in the last seminars is less a crisis of democracy or politics in general than a crisis of government and the analysis of this crisis will will lead in the courage of truth to a secret split between two concepts of subjectivity my talk and of course i would like to show that this split between two concepts of subjectivity is the prefiguration for new thinking of anarchism so my talk is structured as follows first of all i will present the evolution of the concept of government in fukuoka and then i will come to the crisis of parisia and then in the third moment i'll come to anarchy in the last seminar in the courage of truth so first moment as we know there are three main steps in foucault's conceptualization of the concept of government the first one is quite traditional in the early text government is defined as i quote the supreme instance of executive and administrative decisions in state systems as the institution in the juridical meaning of the term devoted to the exercise of political sovereignty so classical definition of government the government is parallel to the sovereign it is the institutional form of power the first major transformation occurs in the seminar called society territory population which is from 1980 in french where the neologism governmentality appears and will take the lead as we know on the analysis of sovereignty that foucault will progressively abandon governmentality focuses refers a quote to the institutions procedures analysis analyses and reflections calculations and tactics end of quote that target population and normalize their behaviors and this is also the birth where governmentality is contemporaneous for foucault with biopolitics so uh this is uh of course a major transformation but there is a last one and this last decisive transformation occurs precisely in the last seminars with the concept of i quote government by the truth in which verite truth has to be understood as parisia that is as we know truth telling or what foucault calls free spokenness why did foucault feel the need to i quote develop the notion of government of man by the truth it may seem a bit strange after all these books devoted to governmentality so i could fuco from the government of the living he says over the last two years i have i have tried to sketch out a bit this notion of government which seemed to be to me to be much more operational than the notion of power in the broad sense of mechanisms and procedures intended to conduct men to direct their conduct to conduct their conduct but now i would like to try to show you how you cannot direct men without carrying out operations in the domain of truth and operations that are always in excess of what is useful and necessary to govern in an effective way the manifestation of truth is required by or entailed by or linked to the exercise of government and the exercise of power in a way that always goes beyond the aim of government and the effective means for achieving it so pereza this kind of extra government within government something that goes he says beyond governments strictly speaking is defined once again as truth telling frankness it is a specific kind of truth irreducible to scientific truth it is he says i quote a manifestation of truth in the form of subjectivity that goes beyond the realm of knowledge if government understood according to meaning number one institutional and meaning number two governmentality always implies the act of giving orders and uh the the obedient obedient answer the concept of government by the truth is profoundly disrupting the logic of commandments and obedience this because governed by the truth is a common concern to those who govern and those who are governed government's parisia presupposes an isomorphism that is an identity of form between the self of the rulers and the self of the subject rather than operating as a logic of commandments and obedience the parasystic government is defined focuses as a partnership a partnership with oneself and with oneself and others pereza amounts i quote to constituting oneself as the partner of oneself when one speaks by binding oneself to the statement of the truth and to the act of stating the truth end of quote and of course this binding with oneself is also a binding with others foucault is adamant pereza is alien to commandment and obedience he says on page 336 in the courage of truth where there is obedience there cannot be perisher because parisia he goes on is a way of freely binding oneself so we would have a very the very strained concept of a government government by the truth without the logic of commandment and obedience it is fuco says the condition of possibility for justice justice as he explains the hermeneutics of the subject cannot work hand in hand with commandment and obedience and he says in hermeneutics taking care of oneself is to take to care about justice so um we might uh ask ourselves why then foucault is maintaining this concept of government uh when it is clear that because parisia breaks with commandments and obedience it cannot be called properly speaking a commandment this question will become more and more present as fuco goes on in the last seminars it is clear that what he is looking for at this stage with the government by the truth is what he call what he calls a common light between the rulers and the rule that would in fact abolish the difference between them i quote that the suffering may be open to the truth and that there was a sight a place a location for truth-telling in the relationship with the sovereign is recognized by some authors like plato truth can constitute a common climate or light between the governors and the governed this is in the government government of self and others truth can constitute a common climate or light between the governors and the government so that again we we may ask ourselves why maintaining this notion of government we of course understand that this common climate this common light constitutes the site the space of democracy the uh the site of ideal transcendental democracy where everything is transparent when truth is the rule second moment of my talk so the first moment was the evolution of the concept of government now i come to the analysis of pereza in the two last seminars and in the very end of foucault's work that is once again the government of self and others and the courage of truth it is clear that in the very last seminars fuku develops an analysis that undermines this optimistic one and affirms in the end this the impossibility of this common light and this in all political regimes in tyranny as paradoxically in democracy and we of course understand that foucault implicitly refers to the current political state of democracies behind his greek mosque in the government of self and others foucault equates what he calls the crisis of parisia with the crisis of democracy in fact this common like this idea of a common life common light between the rulers and the rule will have had a very short life because very quickly foucault says that this common light well it has he says existed once i will come to that in a moment but why why is it necessarily um entering a state of crisis because truth-telling supposes equality among citizens and of course as i said equality between the rulers and the rule equality nevertheless in greece is dual it has two names foucault reminds us isonomia and isaac goria foucault says azonomiya roughly is equality of all before the law isaigoria is in the etymological sense of the term the equality of speech that is to say the possibility for any individual provided of course that he is part of the demos to have access to speech puko agrees that the these two forms of equality are first difficult to distinguish but they are nonetheless different he adds that the name politics in greek does not only refer to politea which is the title of aristotle aristotle street is polytaya that is the republic and its constitution politics in greece also refers to junastea that gave the name dynasty dunastella and fukus says the greek word dunastea designates power the exercise of power in what sense he adds the problems of the politea are problems of the constitution i would say that the problems of dunastea are problems of the political game that is to say problems of the formation exercise limitation and also guarantee given to the ascendancy exercised by some citizen over others so we understand that dynastaia is what threatens the equality requested by the politea on the one hand there is the polit the political problems of the constitution and on the other there is the political political game that is the way in which some citizens necessarily have a kind of superiority over others what does that mean we remember the two equalities isaac or isil isaiah isonomia and isaigoria truth telling requires a talent and isaigoria you remember is equality of speech the possibility for any individual to have access to speech yes but no one is equally talented to speak some are more talented than others when it comes to public speech and the more talented have an ascendancy a dynasty a superiority over others the influent man possesses the keys to the political game a quote foucault in the democratic game set up by the politea which gives everyone the right to speak someone comes on the scene to exercise his ascendancy which is the ascendancy he exercises in speech and in action and of course so if isonomia is algebraic equality everyone has a right the same right isagoria is proportional equality everyone has a right to speak but only according to one's own talent in proportion to one's own talents the most talented have the dunastea over the others so we then see how isagoria is a form of equality that introduces inequality within the city those who possess the parisiastic skill at a high level are naturally meant to govern others so what foucault discovers is that in fact parisia reintroduces the logic of government because those who are more talented are commanding the others i said there was only one exception like the common light the uh common climate was reached only once in greece and this with pericles foucault quotes two cds who praises pericles i quote to have been at the same time the single most influent man and yet not to have exercised exercise his power through paraja in a tyrannical or monarchical way but in a truly democratic manner so that pericles all alone as he may be being the most influential and not just one among a group of the most influential is the model of this good functioning of this good adjustment of politea and parisian so pericles is altogether talented one of the most talented and at the same time one of the most democratic person but this once again happened only once in in the history of greece after the death of pericles foucault goes on the balance was definitely destroyed hence the fourth athens foucault goes on will represent itself as a city in which the game of democracy and the game of parisia of democracy and of truth-telling do not manage to combine and suitably adjust to each other in a way which will enable this democracy to survive this representation the this image of the bad adjustment of democracy and truth of democracy and truth-telling is found in a number of texts and of course parisian after pericles then becomes only flattery dimaggoji and as foucault says false truth telling that's why parisian appears as both the condition of possibility and of impossibility for democracy a quote it introduces something completely different and irreducible to the egalitarian structure of democracy and of course when we arrive at this paradox there is no democracy without true discourse but the death of true discourse is inscribed in democracy and i quote foucault again these are i think the two great paradoxes at the center of the relations between democracy and true discourse at the center of the relations between parisia and politea a dynastya indexed to true discourse and the politea indexed to the exact and equal distribution of power so in fact the balance between parisia and democracy politaya and dunastaya is impossible so i'm reaching here the turning point of my reading and start the third moment which will be the longest one because of course because of this crisis of democracy and this crisis of parisia many readers as i said to start with have concluded that foucault was desperate and that he was starting to dismiss the political at this stage because he thought that the crisis of democracy was inevitable and that no form of resistance could ever stop this well this crisis and because he showed that even perasia itself as i said was in fact embedded in the logic of commanding and obedience that is a logic of government so many readers have thought that foucault was saying that the only way was to withdraw in oneself to develop this kind of individual asceticism we've read so much about with the technologies of the self with the care of the self etc on the contrary i would like to demonstrate that the crisis of parisia and the crisis of democracy did not lead foucault to turn his back on politics at all but rather as i said to start with to radically challenge the concept of government in all senses of the term government governmentality government of the self government of others government by truth fuco in the end came to the conclusion that these different versions of government or remain centered around the duality of commandments and obedience that is around what jose will call a few years later i quote the axiomatic of domination and perisia makes no exception far from abandoning politics foucault in the end will on the contrary accomplish a highly political gesture nothing less through his analysis of cynicism than a move toward anarchism that is a suspension over the theory of the suspension of all governments it says in the courage of truth and it is i mean i think the english translation does not really uh restitute the uh the french so in english it is uh the cynic transposes anew the idea of an other life into the theme of a life whose otherness must lead to the change of the world and other life for an other world in french it is a change that leads from an from an other life to a life order an other world to a world order in it plays with the place of the adjective and i do think that this life other and this world other is also a politics other and that this politic others is anarchy the courage of truth as i announced is the place where this happens after positing or repeating the crisis of democracy that was already developed in the government of self and others the seminar i think this is a very fascinating seminar it suddenly proceeds down a steep grade and precipitates the text very quickly from plato to the cynics provoking at full speed a series of splits ruptures that lead to an anarchist ending parish da first then plato two then the self three and consequently subjectivity four find themselves split in two and the concept of government damaged by those splits finally explodes in the first moment that is the session of february 7th 1984 foucault starts elucidating plato's analysis of the crisis of parisia and democracy in republic 7 and laws in particular first split parisia is broken in two in plato for plato foucault says either democracy makes room for parisian in which case it can only be a freedom which is dangerous for the city or parisia is a courageous attitude which consists in undertaking to tell the truth in which case it has no place in democracy okay so this is the first split but nothing really uh interesting at the moment if we just stop there okay we know that plato uh is develops a strong critique of democracy so either there is a democracy in democracy but it is dangerous for the city or parisia becomes something that has no place at all in democracy okay but from there which is quite a traditional reading of plato foucault will introduce which is much more interesting a split within plato's thinking itself making appear in a schizophrenic way almost two platoons there are two plato's facing the crisis of parisian a crisis that is extremely dangerous for the philosopher in two different ways the first plato or foucault's first plato affirms that when the parishia is in a critical state the philosopher has to do his or her best to become the educator or counselor of the prince in order to try to rescue perisher to lead the prince back to parisian through education etc the second plito thinks on the contrary that there's only one thing to do when pereza is in a critical state becoming a dissenter because the incompatibility between truth and the political game in general is definitive the philosopher then in the second case foucault says has to beat farewell to the political arena and its procedures so once again it is true that this sentence is ambiguous because one might deduce from it that the philosopher that foucault says that the philosopher just has to abandon politics but this is not at all the case it is the second plato is opening another politics la politique ut the first plateau is the one of the author of alcibiades the second plato is the author of lucky's and foucault will proceed to a reading of the two dialogues and he does not introduce simply a difference or a distinction between between them but a genuine dissociation that once again is a genuine dissociation that happens within the platonic corpus and this dissociation prepares the split of the concept of the self and a split of the concept of the subject and it is amazing to see how this happens once again in plato with plato and in plato what plato prepares according to foucault is a decisive divorce between the self understood as soul and the self understood as life bios in the hermeneutics of the subject foucault asked it was a bit earlier than the courage of truth he asked what is this self i must take care of in order to be able to take care of the others i must govern properly in the courage of truth chapter 9 he affirms that the answer to this question what is the self that i must take care of in order to be able to take care of the others i must govern properly he affirms that the answer is not at all the same in alcibiades and in laches because once again in alcibiades the self is the soul and in lakes the self is life the living self this apparently thin difference incomprehensible even is in the soul the very principle of life is in fact opening a secret breach in foucault's political thinking in the courage of truth the idea that the government by the truth renders necessary a suspension of government of hierarchy and a substitution of free partnership for the logic of commandment and obedience disappears forever it disappears because of the double crisis of parisia and democracy foucault in the courage of truth does not believe in the free binding anymore in the free partnership definitely there is an incompatibility between government and parishia that's why the discourse is now different when parisia is possible within the political political game and such is the case in the acibi ideas then it has to speak the traditional language of the government perisha is only possible at the cost of recognizing accepting its complicity with the government that's why the first plato believes in educating the prince in a way that teaches him how to govern himself just as he governs the other by a quote establishing a type of hierarchy and a type of power in his soul and in relation to himself which is of the same order has the same form the same structure as the power exercise in his monarchy so we see clearly that the only way to save parisia and the relationship between parisia and politics is to reintroduce clearly frankly the parisia into the logic of government by teaching the prince to govern himself just as he governs the other and to govern his soul just as he governs his monarchy but there is the other plato and there is also the other foucault that is also the other self and this one cannot be commanded or controlled because it cannot be governed at all and this other self is life at this point foucault starts reading la case this dialogue seems to have it says a fairly similar starting point to the extent that it raises the issue of training young people just like in azerbaijas because as ibadis is a young man who wants to become a political governor so uh at first sight the two dialogues deal with educate the political education but in reality foucault goes on the dialogue like this follows a completely different line of development why pogo goes on the question of what exactly it is that one must take care of is never raised in the lakers the theme is we must take care of young people teaching them to take care of themselves but it is not said what this themselves that they must take care of is exactly or rather it is not said and yet it is but precisely it is not said by designating the soul as the immortal reality to which one must turn one's attention and which must be the first and last objective of the care of self what we must take care of is not the soul it is life bios that is to say the way of living what constitutes the fundamental object of epi melee that is discipline is this modality this practice of existence goes when we compare the lakes and the asi bodies we have the starting point for two great lines of development of philosophical reflection and practice on the one hand philosophy as that which by prompting an encouraging man to take care of themselves lead them to the metaphysical reality of the soul and on the other philosophy as a test of life a test of existence and the elaboration of a particular kind of form and modality of life of course i'm sorry it's a bit long but i think it's very interesting of course there is no incompatibility between these two themes of philosophy as test of life and philosophy as knowledge of the soul however although there is no incompatibility and although in plato in particular the two things are profoundly linked i think nevertheless that we have here the starting points of two aspects two profiles as it were of philosophical activity of philosophical practice in the west on the one hand a philosophy whose dominant theme is knowledge of the soul in which form in which from this knowledge produces an ontology of the self and then on the other a philosophy as test of life of bios which is the ethical material and object of an order oneself these two major profiles of platonic philosophy of greek philosophy of western philosophy are fairly easily decipherable when we compare the dialogues of the lakes and the alcibiades with each other so sorry for this long quote but we can see that this divorce which is not really one foucault says but it in fact it will become one divorce between philosophy as knowledge of the soul and of course also politics as knowledge of the soul and as a test of life will determine the two main lines uh historical lines of development of western philosophy and politics and foucault will show that the second one will be repressed by the first one that the second one that is the test of life will disappear or at least become clandestine almost uh through western history and it is very clear that in this last seminar he wants to revive it very clearly lacaze is about the education of two young men whose fathers are politicians who have been too busy to take care of them in their young age such a situation symbolizes a solitude of individuals that are abandoned by politics and more exactly it symbolizes once again the incompatibility between parisia as justice and the bad parisia as the selfishness of the political game in such a situation fukuo says the young man's self will have to find a way to fashion itself outside the logic of commandments and obedience outside the political game the technique of education as a way to govern one's soul as a monarchy as it operates in acidities is helpless there plato says in lacquers here education is not a question of competence it is not a question of technique it is not a question of teachers or of works of what then is it a question it is a question of the way in which one lives in greek antenatroponte it is the question of the way in which one lives so this is very enigmatic because how can we how can one substitute the way in which one lives for uh a technique uh a government of the self etc etc and yet this is how the lack is ends on this idea that the only way for these two young men to survive is to fashion their lives to form or sculpt their life and foucault concludes this theme of bios as object of care seems to me the starting point for a whole philosophical practice and activity of which cynicism is of course the first example so we started from a quite banal splits of parisia in plato then to a split we move to a split in plato himself that is between the lakes and the arsenaled and now we have this enormous split between soul and life and then rather abruptly tuko moves without transition from plato to the cynics he will show how the scenic philosopher is the highest example of the plastic imperative to form one's life about him foucault writes the cynic has suffered endured and deprived himself so that the truth takes shape in his own life as it were in his own existence his own body so perisia will become the form of life itself understood as the form well the bodily form uh the the very form of existence understood as empirical existence but what exactly is this difference between the soul and life because for plato also the soul determines the very incarnation of truth in the body so why this split between uh suke and bios between the platonic plato and the scenic plateau between asibadis and la case between those two modes of rules a dissociation a series of dissociation that in the end destroy the concept of government let me go back to plato a little bit in acid the hierarchical structure of the soul is rooted in the process of auto affection defined as reflexivity of course auto affection is not a term by plato but foucault uses it in order to designate this self-reflection on the soul fuco insists upon the fact that the soul for plato is a mirror that is it has the capacity to look at itself to mirror itself and this motif of mirroring is developed at length in the hermeneutics of the subject a quote from the hermeneutics if we want to know how the soul can know itself since we know now that the soul must know itself then we take the example of the eye under what conditions and how can the eye see itself well when it sees the image of itself sent back to it by a mirror however the mirror is not the only reflecting surface for an eye that wants to look at itself after all when someone's eye looks at itself in the eye of someone else when an eye looks at itself in another eye absolutely similar to itself what does it see in the other's eye it sees itself so an identical nature is the condition for an individual to know what he is the identical nature if you like the reflecting surface in which the individual can recognize himself and know what he is and of course so looking at one's eye in the eye of the other such is the mirroring structure of the soul but plato insists that the other in which i look at myself is not on a vertical level it's it's not an eye that is in on the same plane uh the same ground as mine because in fact the other's eye is the eye of god kiko goes on it is god then that we must look at for whoever wishes to judge the quality of the soul he is the best mirror of human things themselves we can best see and now and know ourselves in him so the source gaze has a double direction there is a certain horizontal of course direction but there's also a vertical one the soul while reflecting oneself looks above self-reflection in plato is always vertical because reflection is in itself a gesture of obedience reflection reflexivity is the arcade gesture of obedience to reflect upon oneself is always to look above by obeying the divine gaze while looking at itself the soul is then in its turn able to command that is to look down it finds itself empowered and then able to command others i could at this point the soul will be able to conduct itself properly and being able to conduct itself properly it will be able to govern the city that's why the economy of auto affection the economy of the soul and the logic of government as commitment and obedience are inseparable and that's why when parangia wants to play the game of politics it is inseparable from the soul the logic of government and the economy of auto affection and it would not be difficult to see that all definitions of government in western philosophy and political theory rely in one way or another on this economy of auto affection that is of self-mirroring and self-reflection that is once again this economy of commandments and obedience the living self by contrast does not reflect itself does not govern itself properly speaking is an operatic dialogue because it doesn't give us any answer it does not explain what life does how the living self escapes the logic of the government and that's why foucault moves towards cynicism in so in a certain way cynicism is the answer to the opportunity uh question of the lack is what is life how could how can we substitute life for the soul this question will be answered once again in cynicism in a very radical way the scenic self is made of two halves like all cells but these two halves do not reflect each other because one of them is a dog first the scenic life the kunicos life is a dog's life and second it's a dog life because as fuco says it is indifferent it is indifferent to whatever may occur it is not attached to anything its content this self is content with what it has and it has no needs other than those it can satisfy immediately and here i think we have uh the strongest critique of auto affection on which once again all political philosophy and even delusions philosophy is grounded in of course there is no life without auto affection that is the capacity for the self to be in dialogue with itself life is the movement of this self dialogue of course this is true but what foucault says here is that it exists a type of auto affection that is at the same time indifferent to itself and this uh type of indifferent auto affection is the animal self the animal is of course auto affected but does not care about it so in human beings puko says animality is not a given it is a duty and of course that is that's why the scenic has to work and this is the meaning of to form one's life this is the meaning of um [Music] the imperative of shaping one's own life the cynic has to work to reach the state of animality to reach such a point of indifference and by indifference once again we have to understand the point of non-mirroring of the self of this work of course foucault gives a few examples he says i quote there is a whole series of anecdotes on this thiogenies observing how mice live and diogenes seeing a snail carrying its house on its back and deciding deciding to live in the same way further animality is an exercise it is a task for oneself and at the same time a scandal for others the bios philosophical as straight life is the human being's animality taking up as a challenge practiced as an exercise and thrown in the face of others as a scandal why is this bios philosophical breaking with the logic of government after all the animal and the dog in particular can easily be forced to obey one usually commands one's dog gives order to her so why is the logic of life different from the logic of the soul because if an animal and even a dog can be forced to obey if one can always command one's dog a dog cannot be governed because a dog does neither command to herself nor obey herself the indifference of auto affection to itself implies the absence of internal hierarchy of internal of an of a a difference between passivity and activity within oneself there is an absence of self-government in animality therefore a dog cannot be governed properly speaking she can only be dominated that is forced to make a difference between commanding and obeying but this difference will always remain exterior to her alien to her the dog is not ungovernable either it is or she is i would say non-governable and so is the cynic so i introduced this notion of non-governable which does not appear in foucault but it seems to to me to um translate what is at stake here the non-governable is not the ungovernable the ungovernable is still comprised in the logic of government it is simply its negative form the younger the ungovernable can be disobedience rebellion insurrections all these phenomena are occurrences of the ungovernable but the non-governable is what remains absolutely alien to the logic of government and something that is non-negotiable the non-governable cannot be governed it can only be dominated when its indifference becomes a threat foucault describes domination as the freezing the blocking of power relationships power relationships suppose a mobility a circularity between power and resistance the logic of government is a logic is a relation of power and focus shows that all forms of government engender their specific forms of resistance but the non-governable on the contrary paralyzes the circularity between power and resistance traditionally understood but it opens a new form of resistance puko says there are different interpretations of why diogenes was called the dog first because the dog's life is shameless second because it is indifferent third and this is surprising because it is diacritical they are critical in the sense that it helps making the difference between the good and the bad what does a dog's life have to do with critique the direct critical and the distinction between the good and the bad doesn't this distinction suppose the capacity to reflect and to determine the good and the bad as to possible governing principles at this point foucault analyzes the ethical imperative of cynicism which is change the value of the currency and this uh imperative in fact implies moving from the soul to life change the value of the currency does not amount to change the metal of the coin but the effigy of the coin it symbolizes the philosophical life and to lead the philosophical life implies to erase the first effigy on the coin which was the soul to replace it by another one which is the dogs in that case the coin ceases to be a mirror the change of effigy breaks the reflective surface it represents what remains unreflected in auto affection and reflexivity themselves that is life not the other life but the life other and then all of a sudden this truth we that we thought had disappeared reappears in all its splendor there is truth only when reflexivity is impossible the truth of cynicism is that truth cannot see itself which does not mean that it is blind but that it does not recognize itself in a mirror when foucault says with the cynics that truth can only bark he thinks contrarily to his previous contention that truth is non-governable it is something that can only be dominated because it can have it cannot govern itself it has this animal frankness when the cynic tells the king that he the cynic is the genuine actual king he does not disobey but he says that a monarchy that knows itself reflects itself can only be its own caricature far from being identical with itself foucault's greek subject is split torn between the monarchic government of the soul and the anarchist organization of the non-governable life the non-governable is the scenic form of parisia and the scenic form of parisia is the antique prefiguration of anarchism not an ethics once again or not only an ethics but also a politics order in the courage of truth foucault himself multiplies the references to anarchism i just quote one before i conclude he says the aspect of bearing witness by one's own life of the scandal of the revolutionary life as the scandal of the truth was roughly speaking dominant much more in the movements of the mid 19th century dostoyevsky should of course be studied and with dostoyevsky russian nihilism and after russian nihilism european and american anarchism anarchism is taking the courage for the truth which the greeks and greek philosophy laid down as one of the fundamental principles of the life of the truth to its extreme consequence so in the end the act of um the act of transforming oneself up to the point when oneself becomes indifferent to reflexivity indifferent to the the possibility of seeing oneself means that one becomes alien to the logic of government i know this is a very very strange uh way of putting things but the problem is that all forms of reflexivity as i tried to explain uh always uh imply a difference between passivity and activity and thus the difference between looking above and looking down between receiving the form and giving the form too that is between obeying and commanding so i would like to now uh conclude we know that foucault has expressed many times its distance from anarchism in the last seminars though a new concept of the self emerged and i think it is fuco's own self when parisia and the political game are seen are incompatible when truth-telling has become pure demagogy populism or post-truth or fake news etc it is too late to try to educate the soul of the corrupted ruler the philosopher has to change the value of his or her own currency and the answer to the crisis of democracy is the barking of anarchy in fact foucault it is true has expressed his distance from his distance from anarchism but at the same time this distance has always been ambiguous we know that in what is critique in 1906 he defined critique as the art of non-being of not being governed exactly more exactly not being governed like that not so much and he says i think that in fact the will not to be governed is always the will not to be governed thusly like that by these people at this price judy butler uh has a comment on this sentence she says fuco does make clear however that he is not posing the possibility of radical anarchy and that the question is not how to become radically ungovernable uh i'm not so sure once again i think the question is not the ungovernable but the non-governable it is true that foucault for example i quote a passage of an interview from 1973 in which she says i'm not an anarchist as i do not endorse this entirely negative conception of power but he also says i quote the position i adopt does not absolutely exclude anarchy and after all once again why would anarchy be so condemnable and he says in the government of the livings he has this very famous sentence instead of employing the word anarchy or anarchism which will not be appropriate i shall make a play on words let's again go a little against the trend and engage in word games so i will say that what i'm proposing is rather a sort of an archaeology so he plays with terms moving from anarchy to and archaeology so i plan to study this long archive of foucault's attitude or anarchy with all its ambiguity but it seems that in the end foucault had the courage of his own truth the courage to break the ambiguity and let appear as a new effigy the face of his and our kissing okay and i'm done thank you very much you

Channel: European Graduate School Video Lectures

Views: 4,532

Rating: 4.969697 out of 5

Keywords: Philosophy (Field Of Study), University, Curriculum (Literature Subject), egs, European Graduate School (College/University), The European Graduate School, Saas Fee, Switzerland (Country), Malta, PhD (Degree), Master's Degree (Degree), Critical Theory (Field Of Study), EGS Malta, European Graduate School Malta, Catherine Malabou, Foucault

Id: SIsEBB8G6aE

Length: 67min 30sec (4050 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2021