Justice,

Judgment, Positivity and Discourse

in Michel Foucaults Lectures On The Will To Know


The Lectures on the Will to Know develop along two main lines. On the one hand,
the question of the mutation of truth that is of the concealment of its agonistic
nature occupies a great part of Foucaults interest. On the other hand, it is on
the question of the emergence of the law as nomos and of the mutation of the
Archaic Greek logos that Foucault also spends a great deal of time. At the
crossroads of these two lines, the question of the mutation of the relationship at
stake between discourse and the speaker that is to say a specific mutation of
the practice of discourse itself may provide a way to shed light on a potential
relationship in Foucaults bibliography between the 1970 will to know and the
1976 will to knowledge (both homonymous in French [La volont de savoir]).

In this paper, I will attempt to question this potential relationship by analysing,
with the help of other key texts that are directly related to the Lectures on the
Will to Know, how the mutation of agonistic discourse that is the mutation of
practices found in Archaic Greek justice as well as in tragedy may let the
concept of sovereignty (defined in Truth and Juridical Forms as the union of
power and knowledge) emerge as a central concern in Foucaults philosophical
trajectory: a concept that needs not only to be understood in its political
dimension but also as an ethical concern which confronts us to the question of
speech and discourse as practice an aspect on which Foucault comes back in
his last years at the Collge de France (i.e. in The Government of the Self and
Others I & II, 1982-1984) where the question of parrhesia becomes central.

Finally, I will attempt to show that the problem of the relation between the
speaker and his speech can also provide a basis to understand how Foucault
treated the problem of the amphibology of the modern subject (both subject and

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object - sovereign and alienated). In the first volume of The History of Sexuality.
The Will to Knowledge, the a priori possibility of knowledge as a faculty
[connaissance] and the production of its related objects of knowledge [savoirs] is
what conditions the constitution of a modern subject led to a finite yet infinite
representation of the self.

I) Truth and justice, a mutation:

To guide us in this investigation, we might benefit from coming back at the Order
of Discourse, the inaugural lecture at the Collge de France given on December,
2nd 1970 where the question of the will to truth is already at stake. Foucault
says:
For the Greek poets of the sixth century BC, the true discourse (in the strong and
valorised sense of the word), the discourse which inspired respect and terror,
and to which one had to submit because it ruled, was the one pronounced by
men who spoke as of right and according to the required ritual; the discourse
which dispensed justice and gave everyone his share; the discourse which in
prophesying the future not only announced what was going to happen but
helped to make it happen, carrying mens minds along with it and this weaving
itself into the fabric of destiny [] a day came when truth was displaced from
the ritualised, efficacious and just act of enunciation, towards the utterance itself,
its meaning, its form, its object, its relation to its reference (Foucault: 1981, 54).

The will to know gets concealed with the emergence of the Western
metaphysical tradition. The true discourse, which was the prophetic words of the
poets or of the oracle gets replaced by the so-called immediacy of knowledge
[connaissance] as the product of the unquestioned possibility of an encounter
between a knowing subject and a knowable object.

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The diagnosis is clear: the emergence of knowledge [connaissance], which
establishes the distribution of truth and falsity, is historical and its genealogy is
possible. It comes from the fact that the truth-value of a discourse no longer lies
in the event of its utterance (and therefore no longer corresponds to an act
which disappears as it is performed) but in the positivity of a discourse, which
can be said, repeated, written and most importantly divorced from the sovereign
act of the speaker. The mutation of such a discourse, which appears in the
philosophical tradition as the neutralisation of the agonistic justice and of
tragedy, is made possible once knowledge [connaissance] as a priori condition of
possibility constitutes the world as a representation subjected to truth instead of
a relentless conflict of forces. A series of relationships could be drawn from the
invention of knowledge [connaissance] as the faculty providing the possibility
for knowledges [savoirs] and the mutation of discourse which leads after Homer
to what Foucault calls nomos. There is a sense in which the move from thesmos to
nomos echoes the move which occurs within the judiciary practice itself. During
the February, 17th 1791 lecture, Foucault mentions:

In its foundation, in its first word, justice will have to be the law, nomos, the law
of men, which will truly be their insuperable law only if it is in conformity with
the order of the world. The decision of justice will have to be right, the sentence
will have to express dikaion and alethes, the just and the true, that which is fitted
to the order of the world and things, and which restores this very order when it
has been disturbed. (Foucault: 2013, 120).

Here, the link between the mutation of truth and the mutation of justice appears
very clearly. In the case of the krinein or of the dikaion, justice is agonistic and is
made through the act of confrontation. Its truth-value is inscribed in its actuality
and performance. Even though in Hesiods Works and Days the fact that the
dikaion gets linked to alethes already shows the possibility of the retrieval of the
divine justice for the justice of men, both the krinein and the dikaion kai alethes

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maintain their relationship to the thesmos which implies the order of the ritual
and the need for a specific performance. During the March, 3rd 1971 lecture,
Foucault clearly specifies that the thesmos needs to be uttered, and uttered
ritually, for it come into play. It has no existence, or at any rate, actuality, outside
of this singular emergence. The memory that keeps it is not a sort of mute, ever
alert presence (Foucault: 2013, 150). Furthermore, this memory is not a matter
of individual or collective consciousness so much as a form of both property and
power: what deserves to be kept in memory has to be jealously preserved, due to
its effectiveness, in closed groups which use it as an instrument of power
(Foucault: 150-151).

Two main features emerge from the characterisation of the Archaic Greek
concept of truth and practice of justice. On the one hand, truth is understood as a
performative memory, a memory which only gets actualised through its very
utterance. On the other, justice either as krinein or dikazein does not exceed
the actuality of its agonistic dimension, it does not exceed the boundaries of the
confrontation. This move is particularly important as it will provide a basis to
understand how the emergence of philosophical discourse has altered this
performative and actual dimension to resolve (and subsume) it under the
dialectics of truth.

To do so, we need to pay attention to one of Foucaults sources (which - as Daniel
Defert notes in his course context does not appear in Foucaults
documentation). Nor does Foucault himself quote it. However, as Defert adds:
the notes in the margins of Masters of Truth attest of their use (Foucault: 2013,
281). I want to speak of Marcel Dtienne, who provides a very clear definition of
what krinein meant for the Greeks. He writes about the memory of the poets:

But was the memory of these poets a psychological function like our own? Jean-
Pierre Vernants studies show that the ends achieved by the deified memory of

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the Greeks were, in fact, quite different from our own. It did not aim to
reconstruct the past according to a temporal perspective. [] Sung speech,
delivered by a poet with the gift of second sight, was efficacious speech. Its
peculiar power instituted a simbolicoreligious world that was indeed reality
itself. (Dtienne: 1996, 42-43).

Dtienne and Vernants contributions lead us to reconsider the meaning and the
role of aletheia and its specific link to the question of memory. Aletheia is, in
Hesiods Works and Days, the non-forgetfulness which stands on the side of the
peasant. It is through the non-forgetting of the true words of the poet that
aletheia appears. Thus, we see that truth is, in Archaic Greece, above all a matter
of memory. Dtienne clearly addresses Heideggers famous etymological analysis
of the word which is found in On the Essence of Truth. Whilst Heidegger
understands the proper etymology of aletheia to designate the movement by
which Being discloses or conceals itself through the process of its appearance
that is to say its withdrawal from concealment, Dtienne sees the privative a- as
the negation of lethe that is to say unforgetfulness. Dtienne and Vernants
readings, by stressing the importance of the forgetfulness/unforgetfulness
couple, allow us to move away from ontology and to put an emphasis upon the
role of discourse either as actual performance or as positivity divorced from the
point and the moment of its emergence. In opposition to themis which is still
linked to ritual performance (and therefore to performative memory), the
nomos, Foucault writes, is:

Inscribed in stone, present in the midst of everyone without anyone having to
formulate it, [it] is no longer uttered by anyone in particular, it speaks as if by
itself, in its own name. [] Passed on by pedagogy, imposed by examples lost in
the mists of time, here too, it does not belong to anyone. Adapted to nature, it
comes under its authority (Foucault: 2013, 153).

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This shift is key in the argument I am trying to put forward. What I would like to
essentially retrieve from this reading of the Lectures on the Will to Know, in
relation to Foucaults definition of parrhesia as speech-act in the last two lecture
courses at the Collge de France and to the mutation of sovereignty Foucault
describes in Truth and Juridical Forms, is the increasing distance which takes
place between the speaker and his discourse, a distance which provides the
space for the symbolic structure of signification which emerges from knowledge
[connaissance] as the faculty of knowing and links the true discourse to the idea
of a hidden and decipherable naturalness: to the possibility of ontology, the idea
that the logos must be linked to what is, that words stand for things which
remain (either hidden or disclosed) and that the retrieval of this knowledge
[savoir] corresponds to the freeing of what is in essence. In other words, the
obliteration of discourse as an act alters the relationship to memory and time.
Indeed, for the Masters of Truth if we accept Dtiennes reading no a priori
truth-value can be conferred to the utterance of the true and just discourse itself.


II) Speech-act, parrhesia and the exteriority of discourse:

On the very question of the nature of discourse, I would like to make a quick
reference to Foucaults last two lecture courses at the Collge de France. In the
Courage of Truth, we find an opposition between the Cynic and the Socratic (or
philosophical parrhesia). It would of course be to hasty to claim that we can
simply transpose the analogy which opposes the agonistic logos of tragedy and
the stabilised logos of knowledge to the confrontational and agonistic discourse
of the Cynic versus Socratic discourse. Indeed, within the scope of his
philosophical ethics, Socrates also confronts common sense and performs, in the
fashion of Oedipus who refuses the words of the oracle and puts them to the test,
a form of inquiry. In a sense, the Socratic philosophical quest and confrontation
to death could be qualified as an agonistic but yet not tragic test. The test
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[zetesis] he performs against the divine truth puts the knowledge of gods at stake
and exemplifies the dismantlement of Archaic Greek sovereignty Foucault
mentions either in the Lectures on the Will to Know or in Truth and Juridical
Forms. Sovereignty is no longer the couple formed by knowledge and power or,
even more precisely, the very fact that the logos is efficacious and therefore
powerful. If the gods are yet still in power, they no longer speak a true discourse
and become tyrannical. In fact, each time Foucault chooses to focus on the study
of a tragedy (whether Sophocles Oedipus Rex or Euripides Ion), he insists on the
dismantlement of the couple formed by power and knowledge. It becomes mens
task to inquire and restore the truth. However, Socrates gesture does not exactly
consist in affirming truth within the mere space of a speech-act. Socrates is not
Solon.

Platos philosophical contribution has already brought forth a new relationship

to discourse and memory: when Socrates in the Crito explains that it is better to
undergo rather than to commit an injustice, he is not performing an act of
political parrhesia, he is taking care of his soul in accordance to an ethical
conduct which leads him to obey a higher form of justice in relationship to a
memory which is no longer the one of the seer or of the poet, but the one of
Mnemosyne, remembrance: it becomes ontological. It is interesting to note that
just as the Sophists, the Cynics are said to be without a homeland. They were
obviously known for living as nomads but it also echoes the fact their discourse
lacks an ontological basis (Foucault: 2011, 299). At the same time, Foucault says
about them that they are the true sovereigns:

Crowned sovereigns, visible sovereigns, as it were, are only the shadow of the true
monarchy. The Cynic is the only true king. And at the same time, vis--vis kings of the
world, crowned kings sitting on their thrones, he is the anti-king who shows how hollow,
illusory, and precarious the monarchy of kings is (Foucault: 2011, 275).

The Cynical parrhesia is a form of speech-act which does not bear any truth-
value delayed or distanced from its utterance, they perform a discourse which is

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not doubled nor alienated from itself. In the Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault
notes that Socrates ethical conduct is not yet linked to a strict examination of the
self in the modern sense. The goal of remembrance is not to discover the yet
ignored truth of the self but to seek again what has been lost in oblivion.
Therefore, the Socratic quest is grounded on a pre-given (yet never-fully
actualised) ontological ground. This is why Foucault insists on the fact that such
a care of the self is a practice, a use which still corresponds to an ethical conduct
and not to the care of the soul as substance. This indicates that the Socratic
knowledge of the self is not yet the Aristotelian knowledge as connaissance, the
one which implies the co-naturalness between the subject of knowledge and the
act of knowing. It is indeed through the process of knowledge that the nature of
the subject gets actualised. This move echoes the progression of Oedipus Rex in
which it is actually through the quest for knowledge that Oedipus fully realises
whom he is. It is once the words of the shepherd have been uttered that he truly
becomes a parricide. Here again the disjunction between power and knowledge
plays a great role: Oedipus becomes the tyrant who knows too much and can
therefore no longer occupy the legitimate place of power. In Truth and Juridical
Forms, Foucault writes:

The tragedy of Oedipus is rather close, then, to what will be, a few years later, Platonic
philosophy [] the important thing is what will be fundamentally devalorised, discredited,
both in Sophocles tragedy and in Platos Republic: the theme, or, rather, the figure, form, of
a political knowledge both privileged and exclusive. What is targeted by Sophocles
tragedy and Platos philosophy, when they are placed in a historical dimension, what is
aimed behind Oedipus sophos [] is the famous sophist, the professional of political power
and knowledge (Foucault: 2000, 30-31).

As Foucault reminds us in the Lectures on the Will to Know, the real ostracism of
sophistry does not actually happen with Plato but with Aristotle who, by
deducing the faculty of knowledge [connaissance] from naturalness, makes the
existence of a discourse disjointed from its truth-value impossible. Any discourse
becomes either true or false, words are no longer a mere exteriority with which
one can play a game. Foucault says:

Whatever the philosopher says, in his philosophical discourse at any rate, he will be in the
truth, even if he is himself a man of little virtue or a bad citizen; something of the truth will
pass into his discourse, and, on the other hand, his discourse will never completely die out
(Foucault: 2013, 36).

From the twist Aristotelian philosophy applies to ethics to the modern scientific
distribution of truth and error, the primary significance of practice has fade
away. The speaker is always already taken up within a relationship to the
knowledge1 of truth. In both cases, there is a transcendental relationship to any
discourse which makes it stand on its own, separated from the speech-act, in an
unavoidable relationship to truth.

III) Truth and veridiction in modernity:

I would like to say a few words on how the divorce between discourse and
speech-act may be used to reread Foucaults 1976 History of Sexuality: the Will to
Knowledge. In this text, we no longer deal with a mere will to truth or desire for
truth but with the will to the truth of desire. The injunction to speak about ones
desire Foucault famously mentions is a symptom of such a reversal. The
constitution of the modern subject is a product of the empirico-transcendental
doublet Foucault mentions in The Order of Things. In order for the truth of such a
subject to come to light, the disjunction between power and knowledge or in
this case between speech and scientific discourse must be realised. Both in The
Will to Knowledge and in the Birth of the Clinic, the shadow of the Masters of

1
In this very case, I believe the two notions of knowledge both as connaissance and savoir could
overlap.
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Truth who possess the efficacious speech still wanders. In both cases however,
the confessor and the physicist replace the poet or the seer. In The Will to
Knowledge, Foucault writes:

The truth did not reside solely in the subject who, by confessing, would reveal it
wholly formed. It was constituted in two stages: present but incomplete, blind to
itself, in the one who spoke, it could only reach completion in the one who
assimilated and recorded it. It was the latters function to verify this obscure
truth: the revelation of confession had to be coupled with the decipherment of
what it said. The one who listened was not simply the forgiving master, the judge
who condemned or acquitted; he was the master of truth (Foucault: 1998, 66-
67).

We see here that the gaze of the doctor is the silent one who collects the
discourse of the speaker, validates it and welcomes it in the realm of truth. In the
same fashion, Foucault writes in The Birth of the Clinic:

Over all these endeavours on the part of the clinical thought to define its
methods and scientific norms hovers the great myth of a pure Gaze that would be
pure Language: a speaking eye. It would scan the entire hospital field, taking in
and gathering together each of the singular events that occurred within it; and as
it saw [] it would be turned into speech that states and teaches. [] The
speaking eye would be the servant of things and the master of truth (Foucault:
2009, 140-141).

Again, we see that Foucault describes the move at work from a so-called neutral
and naturalistic observation to its inclusion in the language of description and
the veiling of this progressive dynamics by the myth of a logos that reveals the
truth without the need of a mediation. Everything available to vision can be
directly known and there is no longer any distinction between the seen and the

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said: objects are always already knowable and speak a truth which precedes
them. This absence of such a distinction in the actualisation of truth precisely
reminds us of the function of the Master of Truth in Archaic Greece.
What characterises the discourse of modernity since the 18th century is that it
attempts to overcome the discrepancy between words and things through
the constitution of what Foucault calls in The Order of Things the analytics of
finitude2. In order to stand as truth, the discourse of human sciences works on
the tension between the finitude of man and its temporal and normative
existence. This is the reason why discursive practices are brought back to a
discourse which makes them fit with truth (as the possibility to be either right or
wrong, normal or abnormal). Thus, Foucault writes in The Order of Things that
life, since the 18th century, has become a "quasi-transcendental", which is in a
sense a way of naming finitude. The discourse of truth which moves from
speech-acts to the dialectics of truth is in need for an ontological foundation and
closure.
A rgime of truth is always already a priori to any possible knowledge as relation
of correspondence between a knowing subject and a knowable object and of
exclusion between true and false, just as in the words of Canguilhem a statement
which is right or wrong is always first in truth 3. This is why Foucault coins the
French word vridiction in the last part of his lecturing at the Collge de France.
This word, which insists on the idea of telling, reveals that the possibility of truth
as mere speech-act has been concealed. Instead, we either find the encounter
between the clinical gaze and the description of the seen turned into medical

2
See Foucault, M., The Order of Things, chapters 8 & 9.
3
See Galile : la signification de l'uvre et la leon de l'homme , 1964, tudes d'histoire et de
philosophie des sciences, Paris, Vrin, 1968.
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knowledge (where the symptom becomes a sign) or the mechanism of
confession whereby a coupling of the said and the seen constitutes both the
condition of possibility and the very limit of the analytics of finitude: they are
turned into new knowledges [savoirs] which never cease to appear and are
therefore never finite. The metaphor of the speaking eye designates a discourse
which can never find closure, just as in the Preface to Transgression the eye
which is reversed back on itself signifies the abyss of knowledge opened up by
the death of God. The profusion of discourses has replaced negative theology.
The speaking eye (the reconstruction of sovereignty) is both a servant and
master just as the modern subject appears to be an instance of a speaking eye.
The ego who speaks scrutinises and discloses his desires. He is the speaking
master who triggers his own alienation. Let us just repeat the last words of The
Will to Knowledge: "the irony of this deployment is in having us believe that our
'liberation' is in the balance" (Foucault, 1998: 159).

Maxime Lallement - Manchester Metropolitan University
maxime.lallement@me.com
Origins Of Truth Conference at Stony Brook University, Manhattan, NYC
courtesy of The Foucault Society 21-22/02/2014

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References:

Detienne, M. (1999). The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece (p. 232). Zone Books.

Foucault, M. (2009). The Birth of the Clinic (p. 288). Routledge.

Foucault, M. (2011). The Courage of Truth - The Government of Self and Others
II, Lectures at The Collge de France 1983-1984 (p. 364). London: Palgrave
Macmillan.

Foucault, M. (1998). The History of Sexuality I: The Will to Knowledge. The

History of Sexuality, I - The Will to Knowledge (pp. 135159, 168). London:
Penguin Books.

Foucault, M., Davidson, A. I., & Burchell, G. (2013). Lectures on the Will to Know.
Palgrave Macmillan.

Foucault, M. (1981). The Order of Discourse. In Untying the Text: A Post-

Structuralist Reader (pp. 5178). Routledge.

Foucault, M. (2000). Truth and Juridical Forms. In Power (pp. 189). New York:
The New Press.

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