There are a few French words I decided to include in brackets. They are words which are translated as knowledge [savoir/connaissance] and the truth [la vérité/ce vrai]. Since the word “vrai” can be a adjective as well as a noun, I have tried to translate the noun “vrai” as “true” (as in “the true”) but sometimes the preceding article is a demonstrative, in which case I have translated it as “truth” (because “this true” and “that true” doesn’t quite work in English). The difference between “savoir” and connaissance, and their importance for Foucault’s work, is fairly well known. Generally, it is taken that “savoir” means knowledge in a more abstract or general sense, whereas “connaissance” tends to imply familiarity, expertise, or recognition. You can find useful references to this distinction in the translation notes in all three volumes of the Essential Works of Michel Foucault series published by the New Press (edited by Paul Rabinow). I have followed the convention of the English translations of his Collège de France lectures in not translating raison d'Etat (the reason of the State).
Again, this is more of a personal translation exercise, so expect there to be awkward phrasings, unclear sections, and outright inaccuracies.
Micheal Whelan's cover for Asimov's Foundation's Edge
Michel Foucault's lecture January 9, 1980, Du Gouvernement des Vivants.
The historian Dion Cassius recounts the following story regarding
the Roman emperor Septimius Severus who reigned, as you all know—well, as I
myself have known since yesterday, at any rate—at the turn of the 2nd
and of the 3rd century, between 193 and 211, I believe. Septimius
Severus ordered the construction of a palace, and in this palace, of course, a
great ceremonial room in which he gave audience, rendered his sentences, and
distributed justice. And on the ceiling of this room in his palace, Septimius
Severus had a representation of the sky painted, a representation of the starry
sky, and it was not unimportant which sky, nor unimportant which stars, nor
unimportant what position of celestial bodies were represented. He had the sky
above his birth represented, the conjunction of stars which had presided over
his birth and, consequently, over his destiny. Doing this—or rather having ordered
this done—Septimius Severus had, of course, a certain number of very clear and
explicit intentions which can be reconstructed easily enough. It was for him a
matter of inscribing the conjectural and particular sentences which he rendered
within the very system of the world, and of showing how the logos, which presided over the order of
the world and which had presided over his birth, was the same as that which
organized, founded and justified the sentences that he rendered. That which he
said in a particular circumstance of the world, that which was said in a
particular kairos as the Stoics would
say, was precisely of the very order of things secured up there, once and for
all. It was equally for him a matter of showing how his reign had been founded
on the celestial bodies, that he, a soldier of Leptis Magna who had seized
power by force and violence, had not seized power by mistake, nor by accident,
nor by some plot of men, but the very necessity of the world had called him to
the place where he was. And that which right could not establish—his reign, his
seizure of power—the celestial bodies justified once and for all. Finally,
third, it was a matter of showing in advance his own fortune, as emperor, and the
extent to which it was inevitable, inaccessible in that that it was impossible for
anyone—for some plotter, rival, or enemy that would be—to seize the throne
which was shown by the celestial bodies to belong to him alone, against whom none
in the future could prevail. His fortune was good, his fortune was secure—the
past had indicated it—but for the future things were definitely sealed as well.
Thus uncertain and particular acts, a past which had been made by chance and
luck, a future which none could know, certainly, but which some would have been
able to take advantage of in order to threaten the emperor: all of this had returned
to necessity and must have been seen on the ceiling of the room where he
rendered his sentences as truth [vérité]. What manifested itself here at
the lowest level—I was going to say on the floor—as power actually could and
must have been deciphered in the night sky.
Still, Severus
was a prudent man, and if he had his astral sky represented on the ceiling of
the room where he rendered his sentences, there was nevertheless a small piece
of that sky that he did not have represented, that he hid with care and which
was represented elsewhere: in the very chamber of the emperor where he alone—and
some of his regular visitors, no doubt—had access, and this small piece of the
astral sky which none had the right to see, that the emperor alone knew, was
what is called a horoscope in the strict sense, of course, which allows one to
see the final hour, the final hour being, obviously, the one of death. The sky
of death, that which fixed the end of the fate of the emperor, the end of his
fortune, none had access to it, certainly.
The
starry sky of Septimius Severus, above his justice, is almost the exact inverse
of the story of Oedipus. As Oedipus was the one who had his fate not above his
head, in a starry sky represented on a ceiling, but attached to his feet,
attached to his step, attached to the ground and to the paths that ran from
Thebes to Corinth and from Corinth to Thebes. It was in his feet, it was under
his feet that his fate lay, a fate that none knew, neither he nor any of his
subjects. A fate which was to lead him to his ruin, certainly, and it must not
be forgotten that, at the beginning of Sophocles’s piece, one sees Oedipus
himself, called on by a population prey to plague, also rendering a ceremonial
sentence. He also pronounces that which must be done, and he pronounces: the
one whose stain is responsible for the plague in the city of Thebes must be
driven out. He had therefore, also, rendered a sentence; a sentence which
inscribes itself, also, in the inevitability of a destiny. But this
inevitability of destiny which will recapture and give its sense to Oedipus’s
sentence is precisely the trap in which he will fall. And while Septimius
Severus rendered his justice and rendered his sentences in order to inscribe
them in an absolutely visible order of the world which establishes them in right,
in necessity, and in truth [vérité], the unfortunate Oedipus rendered
an fatal sentence which inscribed itself in a destiny entirely enveloped in
night, in ignorance, and which constituted, consequently, his own trap.
And one could find another analogy—a
bit sophisticated—in the fact that, if a piece of the sky of the ceiling of the
audience room of Septimius Severus was missing, there was a fragment of the
mystery of Oedipus and of the fate of Oedipus which was nevertheless not
unknown. There was a shepherd who had seen what had happened at the moment of
Oedipus’s birth and who had seen how Laius had been killed. It was the shepherd
in the heart of the countryside that they will finally seek and who will bring
his testimony. And it is he who will say that Oedipus is guilty. In the heart
of the countryside of Thebe, there was therefore a small piece of the fate of
Oedipus, known by and visible for at least one person. It was in a way the
equivalent of the chamber of the emperor, but it was a hut of a shepherd. And
in that shepherd’s hut, the destiny of Oedipus came about, or in any case
manifested itself. The emperor hid the sky of his death. The shepherd knew the
secret of the birth of Oedipus.
You can see that the Anti-Oedipus
exists, of course. Dion Cassius had already met him.
You will tell me that this is all a
slightly cultural and sophisticated game, and that if Septimius Severus had in
this way a starry sky represented above his head which presided over his
justice, over his destiny, over his fortune, if he wanted men to actually read what
happened in policy, that which he did in terms of power, it was nothing but the
games of an emperor seized by the vertigo of his own fortune. After all, this
African soldier had scaled the empire; it was quite normal that he looked to a
sky of magico-religious necessity to establish sovereignty which right [droit]—for
that matter also magical and religious—could not itself recognize. And this was
a man fascinated by Oriental religions; it was completely normal that he tried,
for his part, to substitute the magical order of celestial bodies for the
reasonable order of the world, for the reasonable order of the world that his
penultimate predecessor, Marcus Aurelius, had himself wanted to implement in a
Stoic government of the Empire. It was like a magical, Oriental, religious echo
of what the great Stoic emperors of the 2nd century had wanted to
build: to govern the Empire from the interior of a manifest order of the world
and to ensure that the government of the Empire would be the manifestation of
the truth [vérité] of the order of the world.
In fact, if it is true that the
individual political situation of Septimius Severus, as well as the climate in
which the notion of imperial government during the 2nd century was reflected,
could justify his concerns and could inscribe the exercise of his power in this
manifestation of truth [vérité] and thus justify his abuse of
power in the very terms of the order of the world—if, therefore, all this
climate, this context, this particular situation could justify it, I believe
that one would still have great difficulty in finding an example of power which
was exercised without being accompanied, in one way or another, by a
manifestation of truth [vérité]. You will tell me that, on the
one hand, the whole world knows this, that I have not stopped saying it,
rehearsing it, repeating it. How, in effect, can could one govern men without
knowledge [savoir], without knowing [connaître], without informing itself, without having a knowledge
[connaissance] of the order of things and of the conduct of individuals? In
short, how could one govern without knowing [connaître] that which one governs, without knowing [connaître] the ones that one governs and
without knowing [connaître]
the means of governing and knowing these men and knowing these things? Still,
and it for this reason that I have become a little bit attached to the example
of Septimius Severus, I think we should quickly be suspicious that it is not just
this, simply and completely. In other words, that this is not simply the need—I
was going to economic—to know [connaître]
what one governs and how to govern, it is not simply this utilitarian need
which allows for an understanding of the measure of the phenomenon that I tried
to indicate, to know the relation between the exercise of power and the
manifestation of the truth [vérité].
[First], it seems to me –and here
again, we’ll stay with the example of Setimius Severus—that the truth whose
manifestation accompanies the exercise of power easily overflows the knowledges
[connaissances] which are useful for government. After all, what could have been the
immediate, rational need that Septimius Severus had for the stars that he had
represented above his head and above the heads of the ones over whom he
rendered justice? It must not be forgotten that the reign of Septimius Severus
was also the period of a certain number of great jurists like Ulpian and that
juridical knowledge [conaissance], juridical reflection, was far from being
absent in the very politics of Septimius Severus. And beyond even knowledge
[connaissance], of the knowledge [savior] of jurists like Ulpian, there was need
for the supplementary, excessive—I was going to say non-economic—manifestation
of truth.
Second, I think what must be underlined is the
very manner in which this truth [vrai]—this slightly luxurious, slightly
supplementary, slightly excessive, slightly useless truth [vrai]—is manifested is
not completely of the order of knowledge [connaissance], of a formed,
accumulated, centralized, utilized knowledge [connaissance]. In the example of
the starry sky, one sees a species of the pure manifestation of the true
[vrai]: a pure manifestation of the order of the world in its truth [vérité], a pure manifestation of the destiny of the emperor and of
the necessity which presides over him, a pure manifestation of the truth [vérité] by which, in the last instance, the prince’s sentences are
established. A pure manifestation, a
fascinating manifestation, which is essentially destined no so much to
demonstrate, to prove something, or to refute the false, but simply to show, to
reveal the truth [vérité]. In other words, it was not for
him a question of establishing, by a certain number of processes, the truth [vérité ]of such and such thesis, such as the legitimacy of his power
or the justice of such and such sentence. It was not a question, therefore, of
establishing the accuracy of the true [vrai] in opposition to a falsehood which
would be refuted or eliminated. It was essentially a question of making the
true [vrai] itself emerge against the background of the unknown, against the
background of the hidden, against the background of the invisible, against the
background of the unpredictable. It was not, therefore, a question of
organizing a knowledge [connaissance], it was not a question of the
organization of a utilitarian system of knowledges [connaissances] which would
be necessary and sufficient for the exercise of government. It was a question
of a ritual of the manifestation of the truth [vérité], maintaining
with the exercise of power a certain number of connections which certainly could
not be reduced to utility, pure and simple—even if calculation is not
absent—and what I want to try to recapture somewhat is the nature of the
connections between this ritual of the manifestation of the truth [vérité] and the exercise of power.
I say “the ritual of the manifestation of the truth [vérité]” because it is not purely and simply a matter here of what we would
call a rational activity, more or less. It seems to me that the exercise of
power, of which one can find an example in the story of Septimius Severus, is
accompanied by an ensemble of verbal or nonverbal processes, which therefore could
be of the order of collected information, of the order of knowledge, of the
order of collection by tables, sheets, bills, of a certain number of pieces of
information, but which could as well be of rituals, of ceremonies, of various
operations of magic, of divination, of consultation with oracles, of gods. It’s
a question thus of an ensemble of processes, verbal or nonverbal, by which one
brings into play—and this could be just as well be the individual consciousness
of the sovereign as the knowledge [savoir] of his counselors or some public
manifestation—something which is affirmed or set out as truth [vrai], being
certainly in contrast to a falsehood which was eliminated, disputed, refuted,
but also perhaps through extracting from the hidden, through the dispersal of
that which is forgotten, through the exorcism of the unpredictable.
So I will not simply say that
the exercise of power supposes in those who govern something like knowledge
[connaissance], a useful and useable knowledge [connaissance]. I will say that
the exercise of power is quite constantly accompanied with a manifestation of
truth [vérité] understood in a very large sense. And
in order to try to find a word which corresponds not so much to the knowledge
useful for those who govern, but to that manifestation of truth [vérité ] correlative to the exercise of power, in searching for words I
found one which is not very respectable since it was only used but at one time,
and even still in another form, by a Greek grammarian of the 3rd or
4th century—well, the scholars will correct me—a grammarian named
Heraclides who used the adjective άληθουργής to signify
that someone speaks the truth [vérité]. Άληθουργής is the truthful [véridique]. And therefore, in forging
from άληθουργής the fictive word alêthourgia, alethurgy, one can call “alethurgy” the ensemble
of possible processes, verbal or non, by which one brings into play what is set
out as true [vrai] in opposition to the false, to the hidden, to the
inexpressible, the unpredictable, the forgotten, and one can say that there is
no exercise of power without something like alethurgy. Or again—since you know
that I adore Greek words—of the exercise of power called “hegemony” in Greek,
not in the sense which we now give to this words (simply put, hegemony is the
act of being at the head of others, of leading them and of leading, as it were,
their conduct) I will say: there was most likely no hegemony which could have been
exercised without something like alethurgy. That is to say, in a barbaric and
bristling way, that what one calls knowledge [connaissance]—that is, the
production of truth [vrai] in the consciousness of individuals by
logio-experimental processes—is after all only one of the possible forms of
alethurgy. Science, objective knowledge [connaissance], is only one of the
possible cases of all these forms by which one can manifest the true [vrai].
You will
tell me that this is just a scholarly discussion and a slightly irrelevant
amusement since, if it is true that in entirely general terms one can say that
there is no exercise of power, that there is no hegemony, without something like
rituals or forms of the manifestation of truth—no hegemony without alethurgy—after
a certain number of centuries all this was fortunately diverted otherwise by
the problems, techniques and processes more efficient and more rational than,
for example, the representation of the starry sky above the head of the
emperor; now one has an exercise of power which is rationalized as the art of
governing and that this art of governing has given rise to, or is resting on, a
certain number of objective knowledges [connaissances] which are the knowledges
[connaissances] of political economy, of society, of demography, all a series
of processes. I am entirely in agreement. That is, I am slightly entirely in
agreement. I am, rather, partly in agreement and I don’t mind admitting that
the series of phenomena to which I have alluded, through the story of Septimius
Severus, is a sort of residual aura testifying to a certain archaism in the
exercise of power, that all this has now more or less vanished and we are at
the rational art of governing that I spoke of last time with you. I would like
to simply point out two things.
First, in this domain, like in all
others, that which is marginal and that which is residual always has, when one
examines it rather closely, a heuristic value. And the too much or the too
little is very often, in this order of things, a principle of intelligibility.
Second, also without doubt, these
things have lasted for a lot longer than one would believe. And if Septimius
Severus is sufficiently representative of a climate very situated, once again, at
the turn of the 2nd and of the 3rd century—this story of
the manifestation of truth [vérité] understood in a very large sense as
alethurgy around the exercise of power—all of this is not dissipated, as if by
magic, either under the effect of the suspicion that Christianity was capable
of having for this kind of magical practice, or under the effect of Occidental
rationality from the 15th-16th centuries. One could—I
will come back to this, perhaps, if I have the time on the next occasion—evoke
a very interesting article by a certain Denise Grodzynski, published in a book
whose editor is Jean-Pierre Vernant (the book is called Divination and Rationality), on the struggle that the Roman
emperors of the 3rd and 4th centuries had led against
these magical practices and the manner in which they tried, up to a certain
point, to purge in a way the exercise of power of this surrounding, [and which
shows] sufficiently all of the difficulties there were and all the political
stakes behind it. But one could also speak much more belatedly—for example in
the 15th and 16th centuries, and early 17th—of
the princely and royal courts of the end of Middle Ages, of the Renaissance and
through the 17th century, of what was, as one knows, some very
important political instruments. We know equally what “the homes of culture,”
as one says, they were. And what does “the homes of culture” signify, what
sense does it have? Perhaps it is necessary to say: the places of the
manifestation of truth [vérité] rather than, simply, the homes of
culture. It is completely certain that there were many immediately utilitarian
reasons for the interest the princes of the Renaissance period had in reassembling
around them a certain number of activities, of knowledges [saviors], of
information [connaissances], of practices, a certain number of individuals who
were what we call creatures or cultural vehicles. It was a question, it is
true, of creating around the prince a nucleus of competencies permitting him,
rightly, to affirm his political power by ancient structures, structures, let
us say in any case, feudal or anterior. It was a question also of providing a
centralization of knowledges [connaissances] during a period when a certain
religious and ideological splitting risked constituting a too heavy
counterbalance in opposition to the prince. It was a matter, in the period of
the reformation and the counter-reformation, of being able to control, up to a
certain point, the violence and the intensity of these ideological and
religious movements which were more or less, whether they like it or not,
imposed on the prince.
There was some of this. But I think
that the phenomenon of the court also represented something else and that, in
the extraordinary concentration of activities that we, once again, call
cultural, there was a sort of expenditure in the court, a pure expenditure of
truth [vérité] or a pure manifestation of truth [vérité]. In the place where power is, in the place where power must have
been, in the place where one wants to show effectively that it is there where
power resides, there the truth [vrai] must be. And in the place where truth
[vrai] could not be, in the place where the manifestation of truth [vrai] could
not be, power could not have been there, or it would have been very weak, or it
would have been incapable of being power. The force of power is not independent
of something like the expression of truth, well beyond what is simply useful or
necessary for governing well. The reinforcement of princely power that one sees
[during] the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries we can
call, of course, a constitution of all a series of knowledges [connaissances]
that one could deem useful for the art of governing, was also a series of
rituals, of manifestations of knowledge [savior] which goes from the
development of the humanist circles up to the very curious and very constant
presence of sorcerers, astrologers, and soothsayers in the entourage of the
prince up to the early 17th century. The exercise of princely power
during the 16th century, as during time of Septimius Severus, could
not do without a certain number of these rituals and it would be very
interesting to study the character of the soothsayer, sorcerer, astrologer in
the courts of the 16th-17th centuries.
And the raison d’Etat which
I tried, two years ago, to put together in some genetic moments, was in a sense
an entire restructuring effectively utilitarian and calculating, let us say, of
all the alethurgies which would be proper to the exercise of power. It was a
question at least, in effect, of putting together a type of knowledge which was
in some way internal to the exercise of power and useful for it. But the
constitution of the raison d’Etat was
accompanied by an entire movement which was obviously of the negative and
opposing view: one had to drive out the soothsayers of the king’s court and one
had to substitute for the astrologers, for this species of advising which was
at the same time the possessor and invoker of the truth [vérité], a real [véritable]
minister who was capable of providing the prince with a knowledge that was a
useful knowledge. The constitution of the raison
d’Etat is the restructuring of all the expressions of truth [vérité] which were bound to the exercise of power and to the organization
of the courts.
And consequently, one can—if was one is interested in it—to consider
that the phenomenon of the expulsions of sorcerers at the end of the 16th
century was not purely and simply a phenomenon of reconquest by the Church and,
therefore, up to a certain point, by the State, of the entire level of the
population which was, essentially, only superficially Christianized in the
Middle Ages. This phenomenon is, of course, fundamental; I absolutely do not
want to deny it. The expulsion of sorcerers was the consequence of the
Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, which is to say that it happened at a
speed superior to that at which Christianization had occurred, which had been
rather slow and rather superficial in the preceding centuries. The expulsion of
the sorcerers represents this well. But there was also a driving out of
sorcerers, of soothsayers, of astrologers which happened in the upper levels,
and similarly in the royal entourage. And the exclusion of the soothsayer from
the courts is chronologically contemporary with the last and with the most
intense of the purgings of the sorcerers in the lower class. Thus one must see
here a phenomenon in some sense forked, which looks in two directions, the
direction of the entourage of the prince and the directions of the lower class.
One had to eliminate that type of knowledge [savoir], that type of
manifestation of truth [vérité], that type of alethurgy, for a certain
number of reasons, in the lower class as well as in the entourage of princes
and in the courts.
One could recover here a very important figure and that is, of course,
Bodin. Bodin, as everyone knows, was, by his Republic, one of the theoreticians of the new rationality which presided
over the art of governing, but who had also written a book on sorcery. So, I
know, there are some people—their name and their nationality unimportant –who
say: yes, of course, Bodin, if he did these two things, if he is the theorist
of the raison d’État and the great
exorcist of demonomania at the same time, if he is demonologist and theorist of
the state, that is all just because developing capitalism needed a workforce,
and sorcerers were also abortionists; it was a matter of stopping the brakes on
demography in order to be able to supply capital with the workforce it needed
in its factories in the 19th century. This reasoning, as you can see,
is not absolutely convincing (though it is true that I have caricatured it).
But it seems to me more interesting to look for the two registers of Bodin’s
thought in the connections which must exist between the constitution of a
rationality proper to the art of governing under the form, let’s say of raison d’État in general and, on the
other hand, the exorcism of that alethurgy which, under the form of demonomania,
but also of divination, occupied, in the knowledge [savoir] of princes, a place
in which the raison d’État must
substitute. In the end, all this was definitely a possible domain of study.
That’s it for the introduction of some of the themes which I would
like to speak of this year. Roughly, you see, what it will be about, what will
be elaborated a bit, is the notion of the government of men through truth, of
which I had spoken in previous years. But what do I mean by “elaborate this
notion?” Of course, it is a matter here of displacing things from the point of
view of the theme, now worn and overworked, of knowledge-power [savior-pouvior].
This theme, knowledge-power, is not itself but a way to displace things from
the point of view of a type of analysis in the history of thought which is more
or less organized, or which turned around, the notion of dominant ideology. Two
successive displacements, if you will like: one going from the notion of
dominant ideology to that of knowledge-power, and moreover now, the second
displacement, from the notion of knowledge-power to the notion of government
through truth.
Of course, there is a difference between the two displacements. If to the notion of dominant ideology I have
tried to oppose the notion of knowledge-power, it is because one could make
three objections to the notion of dominant ideology. First, it postulated a
poorly constructed theory, or didn’t postulate theory at all, of
representation. Second, this notion was indexed, at least implicitly—and
without being able, moreover, to rid itself in a clear way—to an opposition of
the true and of the false, of reality and of illusion, of the scientific and of
the nonscientific, of the rational and of the irrational. Finally, third, under
the word “dominant” the notion of dominant ideology evaded the impasse of all
the real mechanisms of subjection [assujettissement]; it rids itself of the
map, in a way , it passed it off to another hand, in saying: in the end, it’s
for the historians of knowledge [savior] the how and why some in a society
dominate others. In opposition to this view I tried a little to put into place the
notions of knowledge [savior] and of power. The notion of knowledge [savior] had
for its function, rightly, the setting aside of the opposition of the
scientific and the nonscientific, the question of illusion and of reality, the
question of the true [vrai] and of the false. Not to say that these oppositions
had neither sense nor value—this is not what I wanted to say. I wanted to say
simply that it was a matter, with knowledge [savior], of posing the problem in
terms of constitutive practices, practices constitutive of the domain of
objects and of concepts, inside which the oppositions of the scientific and of
the nonscientific, of the true [vrai] and of the false, of reality and of
illusion were capable of setting their effects. As for the notion of power, its
function was essentially to substitute for the notion of the system of dominant
representations the question, the field of analysis, of the procedures and
techniques by which relations of power are made.
Now, the second displacement from the point of view of this notion of
knowledge-power [savior-pouvoir]. It is a matter thus of disposing of this
latter in order to try to develop the notion of government by the truth [vérité]. Of disposing of the notion of knowledge-power as one has disposed
of the notion of dominant ideology. Anyway, when I say this, I am absolutely
hypocritical since it is clear that one does not dispose of what one himself
thinks as one disposes of that which others think. Consequently, I will
certainly be more indulgent with the notion of knowledge-power than with that
of dominant ideology, but it is for you to reproach me. In the incapacity thus of
treating myself as I have treated others, I will say that it is a question
essentially—in passing the notion of knowledge-power for the notion of the government
of the truth—of giving positive content differentiated from the two terms of
knowledge [savoir] and of power. So in the courses of the last two years, I
tried to sketch somewhat this notion of government, which seems to me to be a
lot more operative than the notion of power; “government” being understood, of
course, not in the narrow and current sense of the supreme authority of
executive and administrative decisions in the statist systems, but in the large
sense, and the old [sense] moreover, of the mechanisms and procedures intended
to conduct men, to direct the conduct of men, to conduct the conduct of men. It
is in the general context of this notion of government that I tried to study
two things by the way of examples: on the one hand, the birth of the raison d’État in the 17th
century, understood not as a theory or representation of the State but as the
art of governing, as a rationality elaborating the very practice of government
and, on the other hand, contemporary liberalism, American and German—this is
what I did last year—liberalism being understood, here as well, not as an
economic theory or as political doctrine but as a particular way of governing,
a particular rational art of governing.
For this year I would like to elaborate the notion of knowledge in the
direction of the problem of truth [. . . I would like,] furthermore, today, to
remain a bit on the level of generalities in order to try to situate the
problem a little better, being given that the example of Septimius
Severus and his starry sky is not completely adequate to understand it, and to
reconstruct a little more closely the questions to be posed for a historical
analysis. It is a commonplace to say that the art of governing and, say, the
play of truth [vérité] are not independent of each other and
one cannot govern without entering in one way or another into the play or truth
[vérité]. All of these are commonplaces, and all
these commonplaces, to tell the truth, these themes, I believe that one could–by
way of completely provisionary location—look to four or five principle forms in
modern political thought (I say, “modern political thought” in the very large
sense of the term, which is to say from the 17th century). Five ways
to conceive of the possibility of the connection between the exercise of power
and the manifestation of truth [vérité].
The first form, the oldest, very general form, very banal, but which had
its force of innovation and its effects of rupture, to be sure—it’s been three
centuries—is simply the idea that there could be no government without the ones
that govern indexing their actions, their choices, their decisions to an ensemble
of true knowledges [connaissances vraies], of rationally justified principles
or of exact knowledges [connaissances], which do not simply come under the
prince’s wisdom in general, or simply under reason, but of a rational structure
which is proper to a domain of possible objects and which is the State. In
other words, the idea of a raison d’État in
Modern Europe seems to me to have been the first way to reflect and to try to
give a precise, assignable, manageable, utilizable status of the connection between
the exercise of power and the manifestation of truth [vérité]. In sum, it was the idea that the rationality of governmental
action, that is the raison d’État and
that the truth [vérité ] which must be expressed, is the truth
[vérité] of the State as an object of
governmental action. Call it the principle of Botero, provided that Botero was the
first one, or one of the first, that formulated most systematically the
principle of the raison d’État.
Second, a bit later, one encounters another manner of linking the art
of governing and the play of truth [vérité]. It is, at
first glance, a paradoxical, utopian mode of connection, which nevertheless was
historically very important. This is that idea that, if government governs
effectively not with wisdom in general, but with the truth [vérité], that is to say, with the exact knowledge [connaissance] of the
process which characterized that reality which is the State—that reality which
constitutes a population, a production of wealth, a labor, a commerce—if it
governs with the truth [vérité], it should have to govern all the less.
The more it indexes its action with the truth [vérité], the less it
will have to govern in the sense of having to make decisions which it will
import from on high, according to more or less uncertain calculations, over a
people who will accept it well, more or less. If the truth [vérité] is able to succeed in constituting the climate and the light common
to the governing and to the governed, you see that a moment must arrive, a kind
of utopian point in history, when the empire of truth [vérité] will be able to make its order reign without the decisions of an
authority, without the choices of an administration having to intervene
differently than as a formulation, evident to all the world, of what must be
done. The exercise of power will thus never be but an indicator of truth [vérité]. And if this indicator of truth [vérité] happens in a
sufficiently demonstrative manner, all the world will agree and at the limit it
will no longer be necessary to have a government, or government should be only the
reflective surface of the truth of society and of economy in a certain number
of minds which will have only to reflect the truth in those who are governed.
The governing and the governed will be in some way actors, co-actors,
simultaneous actions of one piece that they play in common and which is of
nature in its truth [vérité]. This idea, the idea of Quesnay, is the
idea of the physiocrats. To summarize: the idea that if men were to govern
according to the rules of evidence, there would no longer be men who govern,
there would simply be the things themselves. Call it, if you like, the
principle of Quesnay, who, in spite of once again his abstract and
quasi-utopian character, has had considerable importance in the political
thought of Europe.
And one could say that what has passed afterwards, that which one sees
develop in the 19th century, in the order of the reflections on the
ways of linking the truth [vérité] and government, is in the end only the
development or the dissociation of this physiocratic idea. You find, in fact,
in the 19th century the idea—it is also very banal but whose
importance is very great—that if the art of government is fundamentally tied to
the discovery of a truth [vérité] and to the objective knowledge
[connaissance] of this truth [vérité], this implies the constitution of a
specialized knowledge [connaissance], the formation of a category of
individuals also specialized in this knowledge [connaissance], and this
specialization constitutes a domain which is not exactly proper to politics,
which defines instead an ensemble of things and the relations which, in any
case, will have to be necessary for politics. Roughly, you see well that this
is the principle of Saint-Simon.
In opposition to this a little while later one finds, in some ways,
the inverse: if a certain number of individuals present themselves as
specialists of the truth [vérité] who must be necessary for politics, it
is because, in the end, they must be hiding something. This is to say that if
it were the case that all individuals who live in a society knew the truth and effectively
knew what happens in reality, in depth, then the apparent competence of others
was not by destiny but by hiding—or in other words, if everyone knew everything
about the society in which they live, government would simply no longer be able
to govern, and there would immediately be a revolution. Let us knock down the
masks, let us discover things as they happen, let us all take by our awareness
of the society in which we live, of the economic processes of we are
unconsciously the agents and the victims, let us take our awareness of the
mechanisms and of exploitation and domination—and as a result the government
falls. An incompatibility, consequently, between the finally acquired evidence
of what really happens—evidence acquired by all—and the exercise of government
by some. The principle, thus, of universal awareness as the principle of the
overthrow of government, of regimes, and of systems. That is what Rosa
Luxemburg formulated in a famous phrase: “If the whole world knew, the
capitalist regime would not last twenty four hours.”
Across from this we would be able to say that, much more recently, another
manner of conceiving and defining the connections between the manifestation of
truth [vérité ] and the exercise of power has been
added. A manner exactly inverse to that of Rosa Luxemburg. It is what one could
call the principle of Solzhenitsyn, which consists in saying: perhaps, if the whole
world knew, the capitalist regime would not last twenty-four hours but,
Solzhenitsyn says, if the socialist regimes were to last, if is precisely
because the whole world knows. It is not because the governed are unaware of
that which happens, nor is it because some among them know but others do not
know; it is on the contrary because they know and to the extent that they know,
to the extent that the whole world is cognizant of the evidence of what happens,
it is to this extent that things do not budge. This is precisely the principle
of terror. Terror is not an art of government that hides in its targets, in its
motives, and in its mechanisms. Terror is precisely the governmentality of the
naked state, of the cynical state, of the obscene state. In terror, it is the
truth [vérité] and not the false that immobilizes. It
is the truth [vérité ] that chills, it is the truth that
renders itself by its evidence, by the evidence obvious everywhere, that
renders itself intangible and inevitable.
To review, if you will: raison
d’État or the principle of rationality, that is Botero; economic
rationality and the principle of evidence, that is Quesnay; scientific
specification of evidence and the principle of competence, that is Saint-Simon;
reversal of the particular competence in universal awakening, the principle of
general consciousness, that is Rosa Luxemburg, and finally, consciousness in
common and fascinated by the inevitable, that is the principle of terror or the
principle of Solzhenitsyn. These are five ways of reflecting, of analyzing or,
in any case, of locating the connections between the exercise of power and the
manifestation of truth [vérité].
If I have raised this picture it is obviously not with the intent of
exhaustivity, nor with the intent of establishing a cavalier view which would
allow for the grasping of the essence and the coherence of the ensemble. I have
done nothing here but indicate some landmarks or, rather, revealed them as
purely indicative of some of the ways by which, in the modern period, one tried
to think through the connections between the art of governing and knowledge
[savoir] of the truth [vérité] or, again, between the exercise of
power and the manifestation of truth [vérité]. If I
enumerated them in this way, in a schematic manner, one after another, and in
pining them to a name, and thus to a date, it was not to say that each of them
characterized a very particular manner, a very particular moment, which would
have been an age of rationality, an age of evidence, an age of competence. This
is not the case—I did not want to show that from one to the next there was an
inevitable series. I above all did not want to say that the principle of
terror, for example, was already contained inevitably, necessarily, in germ, in nucleo, in the idea of a governmental
rationality, such that one could find it in the raison d’État of the 17th century. This is absolutely not what I wanted to say. To the contrary, I
wanted to indicate some ways of thinking through the relations between the
expression of truth [vérité] and the exercise of power uniquely in
order to try to show you the narrowness of each one.
A narrowness that one could mark in asserting this. Of these modern
ways (all dating from the three previous centuries) of reflecting on the
connections government-truth [on the one hand], all could have defined these
connections according to a certain real which would have been the State or
which would have been society. It is society which would be the object of
knowledge, it is society which would be the place of spontaneous process,
subject to revolts, the object-subject of the fascination in terror. And on the
other hand, another limitation of these analyses: you see, they take place
according to a knowledge [savoir] which always [had the] form of objective
knowledge [connaissance], more or less, of phenomena. Now, I would like to wind
up again on this side of these different schemas and to show you how it was not
from the moment when society and the State had had appeared as the possible and
necessary objects of a rational governmentality that the connections between
government and the truth had finally been formed. It did not need to wait for
the constitution of these new, modern relations between the art of governing and,
let us say, economic and social rationality in order for the bond between the
manifestation of truth [vérité] and the exercise of power to occur. The
exercise of power and the manifestation of truth [vérité] have been bound from a much more ancient time, at a level much more
profound, and I would like to try to show you—in taking a very particular, very
precise example which doesn’t even reveal the politics—how one could not
conduct men without operating in the order of the true [vrai], operations always
excessive in relation to that which is useful and necessary for governing in an
effective manner. The manifestation of truth [vérité] is always required
for, or is implied by, or is somehow bound to the activity of governing and the
exercise of power beyond the aim of government and its effective means of
operation.
It is often said that, behind all relations of power, there is in the
final instance something like a nucleus of violence and if power is stripped of
its rags it is the naked play of life and death that one finds. Perhaps. But
can there be a power without rags? In other words, can there effectively exist
a power which would happen by the play of shadow and of light, of truth [vérité]and of error, of the true [vrai] and of the false, of the hidden and
of the manifest, of the visible and of the invisible? Can there be an exercise
of power without a ring [anneau] of truth [vérité], without an
alethurgical circle that turns around it and which accompanies it? The starry
sky above the head of Septimius Severus, the starry sky above the head of those
who he judged, the starry sky as truth [vérité] which was
implacable about those who govern and those who were governed, the starry sky
as manifestation of truth [vérité], the starry sky, thus, above all of our
heads, puts political law between its own hands.
That’s it. Well, it is around these themes that I will try to
continue.
No comments:
Post a Comment