Dotan Lesham
This chapter contextualizes Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism in the overall oeuvre of the Collège de France lecture series. Returning to Foucault’s inaugural lectures from 1970–1971, I suggest they should be read as a series of genealogical inquiries into regimes of veridiction. They were intended to bring Nietzsche’s project to completion by doing in history what Nietzsche had accomplished in philosophy: that is, writing the history of thought as a history of subjecting the will to know to the sovereignty of truth by showing how this knowledge forms a regime of veridiction when transcribed into power. This project was not only meant to free knowledge but, more importantly, to do so by surpassing the politics of truth. The project of writing the history of regimes of veridiction was to be completed by a series of lectures on the history of neoliberal governmentality, the prevailing prominent form of power. Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism suggest that this regime established in governmentality what he sought to do by writing its history: that is, by postulating a “conduct of conduct” that was not subjected to the sovereignty of any specific truth. In The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault described how this was done, both theoretically and technically. In economic theory it was achieved by releasing the market from being a site of veridiction, and by the way human capital frees homo economicus from the truth value imposed on it by the value of her labor. The same aim was achieved, as Foucault showed, by a change in the technologies of government and self: (1) through negative income tax, as a way of releasing the government of the poor from the regime that distinguishes between the “good” and the “bad” poor; and (2) the “anthropological erasure of the criminal” that brought about a “massive withdrawal with regard to the normative-disciplinary system.” Looking both at the change in theory and in the two localized apparatuses of a new regime of knowledge indicates that neoliberalism performs a massive overhaul of liberal governmentality. Like Nietzsche in philosophy and Foucault in history, this is done by dissociating knowledge of government and truth, which goes hand in hand with disassociating the subject from its intrinsic truth. As I will suggest in the third section of this chapter, which deals with critique, Foucault’s research into the neoliberal “post-truth” government led him, in the 1980s, to look for a critical ethos of parrhesiastic truth-telling as a way out1 of all forms of pastoral power.
Foucault: “The Opening Up of Fields of Problematization”
The debate concerning Foucault’s sympathies with neoliberalism, as reflected in his lectures at the Collège de France, has brought to the fore a fundamental question: How should one interpret these Collège de France lectures as a whole? One might embrace Bernard Harcourt’s “cautious interpretive position” and read the lectures as a “first draft: What he [Foucault] did not feel that he needed to say or necessarily wanted to say.”2 Another option is to accept Colin Gordon’s critique of Harcourt, and read each year’s lectures as a complete work that was never meant to be published in book form.3 Alternatively, the lectures might be read as if they enjoyed the status of a book, as implied by Daniel Defert in an interview he gave in 2010.4 Or, finally, one might follow Francois Ewald, who pulled out the “joker” of oral tradition to settle debates about what Foucault “the author” really meant to say.5
This question is far from settled, partly at least because the study of the lectures as a unified object of research is obviously at its very beginning. Moreover, the sheer magnitude of the subjects, ages, and systems of thought Foucault covered in these lectures puts such an inquiry seemingly beyond the capacity of nearly any living scholar.
Here, I will read the lectures as a unified piece of work and abstain from dealing with the question of their significance for our understanding of the corpus of the published “author” Foucault. Although it would be futile to dismiss Defert by saying that each year’s lectures were delivered as a tidily arranged narrative (rather like Foucault’s books), I do not believe these narratives should be read as if they were published books. It is evident in those lectures, which are not transliterated from Foucault’s recorded words, but rather based on his prepared texts, that these writings in no way resemble a book; they do, however, resemble lecture notes. Moreover, as Gordon states, the lectures that were taped demanded some “editing to avoid over-faithful reproduction of the accidental hesitations of oral delivery.”6 Thus, I will read the lectures for what they are: a series of lectures that comply with his obligation as a Collège de France professor to report regularly on his research. They represent “the exoteric version” of his research at that time7 and, as Foucault himself attested, he struggled to find a more fitting version of these lectures over the years.8 Thus, I subscribe to a position aligned with that stated and repeated in the Foreword to each annual lecture series by the editors, Francois Ewald and Alessandro Fontana, that the lectures should be read “as the opening up of fields of problematization [that] were formulated as an invitation to possible future researchers.”9
In his inaugural lectures from 1970–1971, Foucault outlined the research program he would pursue in his years at the Collège de France. This research agenda was repeated in The Birth of Biopolitics lectures, with a more nuanced terminology, in the form of genealogical inquiries into how certain regimes of veridiction are pegged to power in different apparatuses of conduct of conduct, whether these forms of power are psychiatric, disciplinary, sovereign, or pastoral. It was toward the end of that decade, following his research into these forms of power, that Foucault reached the conclusion that the form of power operating in neoliberal governmentality is the “techne technon, episteme epistemon” of the present. This also suggests a reading of Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism in this specific context: seeking a way out of that specific form of power. Indeed, we see a shift in the object and agenda of his lectures following those on neoliberalism. As well as a return to antiquity, and following Foucault’s inquiry into the origins of pastoral power in early Christianity, this change constituted a shift in his attention from regimes of veridiction and technologies of government that was intended to make room for the subject and the relation of self to self.10 This shift was not only meant to complete the missing third element in the knowledge-power-subject triad; it was also aimed at finding a way out of the modern constitution of this triad in which, according to Foucault, there was simply too much power at play.11
Genealogy: The Will to Know
Foucault’s inaugural lecture series at the Collège de France opened with four “methodological” lectures that outlined his research agenda for his subsequent years as Chair of History of Systems of Thought.12 In these lectures, Foucault subscribed to a genealogical research agenda based on his reading of Nietzsche. According to his interpretation, genealogy can “bring to light the history of a certain will to the true or false, the history of a certain will to posit the interdependent system of truth and falsity.”13 Such a genealogy, which he excavated from Nietzsche, recounted the histories of the birth, working, and logic of what Foucault later called regimes of veridiction, stating:
Obviously, a history of truth should . . . involve the genealogy of regimes of veridiction . . . truth relationship finding its privileged expression in discourse, the discourse in which . . . what can be true or false is formulated; the regime of veridiction, in fact, is . . . the set of rules enabling one to establish which statements in a given discourse can be described as true or false.14
These genealogical inquiries into the histories of the prevailing forms of power and their respective regimes of veridiction complement (and copy) in the field of history the same task performed by Nietzsche in philosophy. That is, setting the will to know free from the sovereignty of knowledge imposed on it ever since Aristotle15 in a systematic way for the first time in the history of Western thought. In other words, to “write a history of the force of truth, a history of the power of the truth, a history, therefore, to take the same idea from a different angle, of the will to know.”16
The remaining On the Will to Know lectures from 1970–1971 are dedicated to a demonstration of just such a genealogical inquiry into the will to know and its subordination to truth in pre-classical Greece.17 When reading Foucault’s lectures from the 1970s, one finds him conducting such genealogies, in which he demonstrates how specific regimes of veridiction participated in forming disciplinary, psychiatric, and sovereign forms of power.18 Foucault would see these regimes of veridiction as only secondary to the governmentality that occupied him in the 1977–1979 lectures. Those, in turn, can be described as a genealogical inquiry into governmental regimes of veridiction that “throughout the West” have formed “the line of force” from its creation in the Christianity of late antiquity as pastoral power, up to its present neoliberal configuration that “has constantly led toward the pre-eminence over all other types of power—sovereignty, discipline, and so on.”19
As Foucault describes rather schematically in the inaugural Collège de France lecture published as The Order of Discourse, genealogical research combines a “genealogical section” and a “critical section”;20 each is governed by different principles. The former, according to Foucault, engages in “happy positivism.”21 Too happy, perhaps, as suggested by Daniel Zamora’s piece in Jacobin, which started the debate concerning Foucault’s relation to neoliberalism.22 Or, happy to the right degree, as implied by Francois Ewald, who called the neoliberal lectures an apology for neoliberalism in general, and for Becker “the most radical of American neoliberals” in particular.23 The critical section of genealogy, according to Foucault, is assigned the task of exposing how this particular regime of veridiction excludes and inflicts violence on excluded subjects, just like the two other, less subtle, exclusionary forms of (1) prohibition and (2) “division and rejection.”24 Although not explicitly stated, it seems that the genealogical task that Foucault took upon himself was to insert a wedge not so much between the will to know and knowledge itself, that is, to disassociate philosophy from truth (as this had already been achieved by Nietzsche). Rather, Foucault’s genealogical incursions into the histories of the present were meant to problematize the need of specific regimes of truth to exercise power imposed by the workings of the different regimes of veridiction he explored in the 1970s. These explorations were meant, in turn, to bring about the possibility of a power formation in which truth does not play the exclusory role it played throughout the history of the West, and which obviates the accompanying violence inflicted on the excluded subjects.
In describing Foucault as “neoliberal,” Zamora is supported by the apparent lack, or perhaps more accurately, the scarcity of critical analysis in the lectures. However, this scarcity doesn’t necessarily indicate an embrace of neoliberalism by Foucault; or, more importantly, by those researchers who responded to the invitation to read the neoliberal lectures “as the opening up of fields of problematization” by completing what is clearly missing from the critical section.
It may be worth considering that Foucault demonstrated such an extremely happy positivism in the neoliberal lectures because he discovered that neoliberalism presented a Nietzschean governmentality; that is, an all-penetrating form of power that is not subjected to the sovereignty of any particular truth. This interpretation aligns with Ewald’s reading of Foucault’s apologia for neoliberalism in general, and for Becker in particular:
[what] Foucault is searching for is a theory, a non-moral theory, and a non-juridical theory. The challenge is to be free from morality and from the law. . . . You [Gary Becker] propose a theory of man . . . that is non-moral and non-juridical. And that is, for him at this time . . . very important. Gary Becker for Foucault is a moment in the very long story of truth-telling—of a truth-telling free from a moral and juridical framework.25
One of the crucial points Foucault makes in his lectures is that neoliberalism is a novel form of government.26 What is the nature of its newness? A careful positivist reading of the neoliberal lectures reveals that Foucault presented two grand theoretical maneuvers, and two technical ones, whereby neoliberalism released both governmentality and the subject from the sovereignty of truth still imposed on them by the classical liberals. This was done, according to Foucault, by introducing a market criticism of any truth revealed in political and governmental action.27
The first theoretical maneuver is found in Foucault’s description of how the ordoliberals released the market from being a site of veridiction that, if left to its own devices, would supposedly reveal the true order of the cosmos. As presented by Foucault, the ordoliberals did this by reframing the market as a site of pure competition that is not at all a natural phenomenon.28 Instead of manifesting the truth of a providential order, the market becomes a man-made artifact, an artificial institution governed by formal principles. Such a disentanglement of truth from the market rules out the existence of a universal subject of economic knowledge, whether it be the state or any other actor, as by definition all are blind to the economic processes. Recalling that, according to Foucault, in liberalism the market as a site of veridiction was already thought of as the necessary by-product of the multiplicity of economic agents (and not of the sovereign), then denying that regime of veridiction its power over the market necessitates freeing homo economicus from the role assigned to him as bearer of that particular truth. Moreover, the logic of the market economy must infuse the whole of society29 in a way that leaves no room for the appearance of a (moral) truth of non-economic subjects.30 As can be seen, both state and society—the two truth-bearers in modern governmentality as well as its true effect—no longer express any non-economic truth. Such a maneuver, then, leaves no room for truth to appear anywhere but in the relation of self to self.
Becker’s (and others’) theoretical maneuver of turning the economic subject from a man of exchange (according to his true nature) into an entrepreneur of the self takes care to rid the subject of truth. So, human capital is the second apparatus to free power from truth. Its role is to transform the economic subject into the correlate of the post-truth political economy of the neoliberal market. It does so by applying the economic analysis to the unexplored domain of the relations of self to self that up until then had been thought to be non-economic.31 Applying the economic analysis to this sphere, in turn, allows for the extension of the economic grid into other domains that were also previously considered non-economic. As a result, homo economicus is no longer seen as possessing any truth (divine, human, natural, etc.), but is reduced to a creature who accepts reality “as is.” The domain of the relation of self to self is turned into an entrepreneur—capital relation (with a zone of distinction as they share the same body)—while the askesis of that new self-capital is geared toward the generation of income. At this point, one can see how the relation between neoliberal governmentality and the neoliberal subject has come full circle. This is achieved via the conceptual apparatus of “innovation” that is thought of as the product of investment in human capital. As described by Foucault, innovation as a product of investment in human capital is conceptualized as the sole engine of progress, which in turn is itself thought of as measurable economic growth. Moreover, as growth is the only goal of any economic policy, and the measure against each policy is evaluated, attaining and maintaining growth requires that no space in the self is left un-capitalized. However, there is more to this, as transforming the human self into capital becomes a target for governmental power. In the process of capitalizing the self, the economic subject is released from the truth value imposed by her labor, as envisaged by Marx and other classical liberal political economists. It also frees the entrepreneur of the self from the sovereignty of the consumer and his truth imposed by the neo-classical economists. This is done, according to Foucault, by turning consumption into yet another form of the relation of the self to itself as human capital.
Foucault also demonstrated how this post-truth governmentality is put into action in two domains that correlate to the government-subject distinction he introduced between the German and American versions of neoliberalism. According to this somewhat schematic typology, the German ordoliberals focused on releasing government from the grip of the liberal regime of veridiction, while the more radical American anarcho-liberals focused on freeing the subject from her own truth. The technological apparatus of the first kind of neoliberalism discussed by Foucault deals with management of the poor population, while the second deals with the subjectivity of the criminal. Like the relation between the market and human capital, this distinction is somewhat artificial, as the two are intertwined.
The first domain covered by Foucault is, as stated, state management of the poor. This comprises an analysis of the discourse concerning the implementation of negative income tax by the French neoliberals, which he sees as the cornerstone of the neoliberal inverted social contract. As Foucault demonstrates, negative income tax relieved the management of the poor from the liberal regime of veridiction,32 which distinguished between the “good” and deserving poor, who are included in society, and the “bad” poor, who are excluded. This was guided by a regime of veridiction that examined the causes of poverty. The neoliberals, as described by Foucault, did not care to investigate the causes of poverty, but focused instead on treating the effects of poverty, remaining indifferent to its causes.33 It should be noted that Foucault’s analysis of this inverted social contract sounds rather Marxist in its terminology. He opens up the field of problematization, that is, of the critical side of genealogy, by paving the way for researching how the erasure of the capital/labor dichotomy is removed and the poor/remainder of the population is reintroduced by transforming labor into human capital and thereby pacifying the effects of inequality in the social domain.
The second domain is Becker’s “anthropological erasure of the criminal”34 that boils down to a “massive withdrawal with regard to the normative-disciplinary system.”35 In this case, Foucault addresses the other side of the government-subject relation by looking at the change in the truth of the subject who breaks the law. As he sees it, the erasure of the truth of the homo penalis and homo criminalis engendered by governing both as a homo economicus36 is a vehicle of expropriation of domains that were given to another form of power, namely that of discipline. This form of power is rendered useless by denying its regime of veridiction its counterpart in the figures of homo penalis/homo criminalis that by now possess no distinct abnormal truth enabling the enforcement of disciplinary power, or any other power founded on the hidden truth of the one who breaks the law (or, for that matter, the abnormal in the psychiatric institution). Rendering the disciplinary useless, says Foucault, allows for the inclusion of those who had been excluded and violated by the veridiction regime pegged to the working of disciplinary power in the penal system and the psychiatric institution by the exclusionary apparatus of division and rejection.
Looking at these theoretical-technical doubles of government-subject-truth relations, it becomes clear that neoliberalism, as described by Foucault, offers a massive overhaul of liberalism. This is achieved mainly by dissociating a knowledge of government and truth on the one hand, and the subject and truth on the other. This seems to be the reason Foucault, who insists on speaking of capitalisms and liberalisms in the plural (much like the German ordo/neoliberals), says that unlike socialism there is a “form of liberalism [that] doesn’t have to be true or false.”37 It is my contention that this form is neoliberalism.
Critique in the Neoliberal Lectures
Although Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism present plenty of happy positivism, a growing number of future researchers accepted the invitation to engage with neoliberalism critically. They have taken up the challenge, basing their work on his positivist analysis of this form of power, and are doing so in growing numbers due to the continuing crises of neoliberalism ever since it stopped generating solid growth a decade ago. However, it is also noteworthy that upon a careful reading of the neoliberal lectures, one can see that they open up fields of problematization in nearly every subject they address. There are ample examples: first, the growth of judicial demand that is a byproduct of the entrepreneur society;38 the reserve army of employable people39 that ensures the inverse social contract;40 the embrace of inequality as an intended goal of neoliberal governmentality;41 setting the question of the future prospects for neoliberalism as depending on whether it can model the exercise of both state and society by the principles of a market economy42 on the one hand, and the problem of the applicability of homo economicus as the grid applied to every social action,43 on the other. The former, as mentioned earlier, is tested by the completely formal and value-free element of economic growth.44 And there is more. The inflationary critical tendency of state-phobia that fears the growth of state apparatuses;45 the problematization of the intrusion of the human capital approach into human bodies,46 as well as presenting neoliberalism as “do not laissez-faire” government—to name but a few.
However, it seems that the kernel of Foucault’s critique of neoliberalism is found in his conclusion that the neoliberal subject is eminently governable.47 In light of my reading of Foucault on neoliberalism offered above, it seems plausible that the reason why homo economicus is eminently governable and functions as a correlate of neoliberal government48 is because, and not in spite, of freeing the subject’s will to know from the sovereignty of truth that was still imposed on it by classical liberal governmentality. Put differently, introducing a wedge between truth and power does not free the truth-less subject from government. To the contrary, as Foucault would have it, this truth-less regime is “no less dense, frequent, active, and continuous than in any other system”;49 and regardless of the question of how reasoned neoliberal governmentality is, it is a system in which in any case we are surely facing too much power.50 Lacking the freedom that is derived from the relative autonomy of the relation of self to self, as well as denying the individual the possibility of being subjected to different kinds of government with their competing veridiction regimes, only makes the subject more governable.51
It is true that Foucault lays the ground for the critical side of a genealogical inquiry into neoliberalism, a critique that presents neoliberal post-truth governmentality as just as intrusive and violently exclusive. This form of government intensifies control over the governed and therefore robs them of the relative freedom they enjoyed in classical liberalism (or, for that matter, in the mercantile system due to its inefficiency). But I believe that the answer to the question, “where is Foucault’s critical engagement with neoliberalism?” lies elsewhere. It seems to me that such a critique is found in those lectures that follow the neoliberal series, and in which Foucault returns to premodernity and inquires into three distinct genealogies. The first of these is a genealogical enquiry into the point of formation of the pastoral regime of veridiction inherent in a governmentality that feeds on, and is the correlate of, a truth of a subject that was not pegged to any form of power up until then. In the second, Foucault inquires into the point of formation of a subject who is guided by truth prior to the Christian invention and institutionalization of its correlate in the form of a truth-telling that goes hand in hand with the new form of pastoral power. As Foucault concluded that the “way out” of this form of governmentality had to pass through the relation of the self to self, he turned to study the “golden age of the culture of the self,”52 in which care of the self was relatively free from subordination to a regime of veridiction. As he describes in The Hermeneutics of the Subject, what makes this age golden is that the ethos was not subordinated in the service of the polis as in classical Greece, nor to the Christian economy of the souls. The third inquiry, which occupies the last two lecture series, is dedicated to a genealogy of the critical attitude in Western philosophy. This is done by returning to its crystallization in pre-Christian antiquity while, again, focusing on the same age in which he examined the ethos of the care of the self in and for itself.
These genealogical inquiries into the history of the governmental regime of veridiction on the one hand, and into the ethos of truth-telling on the other, go together with what Foucault admitted was a “fetish” that he had developed for Kant’s article “What is Enlightenment?” during these years. It seems fair to connect the two efforts (as Foucault himself did) and by doing so to read Foucault as seeking an ethos of modern philosophy as a permanent critique53 that manifests the truth of an individual—one who is not a correlate of any form of pastoral power/governmentality. This form of power is identified as one in which the subject has to be governed and has to let himself be governed,54 and it is in relation to this form of power that the classical liberal envisioned critique as the art of not being governed quite so much.55 Put differently, I suggest reading Foucault the lecturer, following the neoliberal lectures, as someone on the lookout for a critical ethos of parrhesiastic truth-telling that the modern philosopher may pursue.
In this context, it seems plausible to read Foucault’s lectures on the enlightened philosophy of critique as a “way out” of the secularized governmentalization of pastoral power, a version that the history of our societies over the last four hundred years has “proved to be really demonic since they happened to combine those two games—the city-citizen game and the shepherd-flock game—in what we call the modern states.”56
Conclusion
In this chapter, I answered the question of Foucault’s relation to neoliberalism by situating it within the overall scheme of his Collège de France lectures. Thus, I reversed the question raised by Zamora: instead of asking whether Foucault was a neoliberal, I asked what role the lectures on neoliberalism play in Foucault’s entire oeuvre of lectures at the Collège de France. As shown, the neoliberal lectures ended a decade-long genealogical inquiry into the histories of specific forms of power that were currently at play. These genealogical inquiries were meant to retrace how each is pegged to a regime of veridiction, and in the process to allow a thorough critique of these forms of power, including the exclusionary violence they inflict. On a more radical level, writing the histories of how truth and power are entangled was intended to admit the possibility of freeing the will to know from the sovereignty of truth. Read against this background, the neoliberal lectures were supposed to be the pinnacle of this decade-long effort since in them Foucault (at last!) inquires into the preeminent form of power in its present and rising form. (Indeed, it has risen to world domination since the late 1970s.) However, contrary to expectations, Foucault’s research agenda changed dramatically upon studying neoliberalism. Inquiring into neoliberal governmentality, Foucault realized that it is indeed a novel form of government; that by adapting the technologies and theories of secularized pastoral power alongside a radicalization of the liberal critique of the market, neoliberalism was able to establish the long-sought-after wedge between truth and knowledge of government. But—and this seems to me to be a crucial point—Foucault also discovered that this kind of government does not free the individual at all from the grip of too much power; it only reinforces it. Moreover, neoliberalism’s future growth means there will be no place left in the subject’s relation of self to self (or in the state or in society, for that matter) that is not always already manipulated and governed. It also threatens to render meaningless the subject’s option of telling power “we don’t want to be governed like that, or at that price.”
This conclusion, I propose, accounts for Foucault’s turn in the 1980s to inquire into the histories of the culture of the self and of truth-telling. In so doing he attended to “the urgent, fundamental and politically indispensable task” of a forming a critical ethos of truth-telling that could resist the present neoliberal formation of “political power, situating it in the more general question of governmentality.” For, as he said, such a task cannot “avoid passing through, theoretically and practically, the element of a subject defined by the relationship of self to self” that will “once again connect together the question of politics and the question of ethics.”57 As shown here, following the “neoliberal lectures,” Foucault looked for an ethos of truth-telling that would give birth to a politics with an innate “resistance to governmentality, the first uprising, the first confrontation to a society in a state in which nothing is political, but nevertheless everything can be politicized, everything may become political.”58
NOTES
1. On enlightenment as a “way out,” see Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 305–06.
2. Bernard Harcourt in Gary S., Becker, Francois Ewald, and Bernard Harcourt, “Becker on Ewald on Foucault on Becker: American Neoliberalism and Michel Foucault’s 1979 “Birth of Biopolitics’ Lectures,” University of Chicago Public Law Working Paper No. 401 (2012).
3. Colin Gordon. “A Note on ‘Becker on Ewald on Foucault on Becker’: American Neoliberalism and Michel Foucault’s 1979 Birth of Biopolitics Lectures.” A conversation with Gary Becker, François Ewald, and Bernard Harcourt (February 2013): https://foucaultnews.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/colin-gordon-2013.pdf.
4. Daniel Defert. “‘I Believe in Time…’ Daniel Defert Legatee of Michel Foucault’s Manuscripts. Interview with Guillaume Bellon.” Trans. by C. Roncato. Revue Recto 6 (2010): http://www.revuerectoverso.com/spip.php?article186.
5. Ewald, “Becker on Ewald.”
6. Gordon, “A Note on Becker.”
7. Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–84 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 2.
8. Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982. Trans. by Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2005), 1–2.
9. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. Trans. by Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), XIV.
10. Foucault, The Courage of Truth, 8–9.
11. Michel Foucault. “What Is Critique?” in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1997), 54.
12. See Daniel Defert in Michel Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1970–1971. (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 262–63.
13. Foucault, Will to Know, 4.
14. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 35.
15. Foucault, Will to Know, 5.
16. Michel Foucault, On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979–1980. Trans. by Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 101.
17. Incidentally, this proves that Foucault didn’t turn from modernity to antiquity in the 1980s, but at best, returned to antiquity.
18. Most of these forms of power are mentioned in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France (see Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” in R. Young, ed., Untying the Text: A Poststructuralist Reader (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 48–78.
19. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978. Trans. by Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 109.
20. Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” 70.
21. Ibid., 73.
22. On Zamora’s piece in Jacobin, see the introduction to this volume.
23. Ewald, “Becker on Ewald.”
24. Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” 53.
25. Ewald, “Becker on Ewald,” 5.
26. See, for example, Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 130–31.
27. Ibid., 246.
28. Ibid., 131.
29. Ibid., 201.
30. With the exception of appearing as the legal subject of arbitration between two or more human enterprises according to the arbitrary, formal (thus) truth-less rules of a game of the market.
31. Ibid., 219.
32. That is, of course, much older than the liberal adaptation of it and, as shown by Peter Brown, has its origins in late antique Christianity.
33. Ibid., 204–5.
34. Ibid., 258.
35. Ibid., 260.
36. Ibid., 249.
37. Ibid., 93.
38. Ibid., 149, 174–75.
39. Ibid., 144, 206.
40. Ibid., 202.
41. Ibid., 143.
42. Ibid., 131, 145.
43. Ibid., 268.
44. Ibid., 144.
45. Ibid., 187–89.
46. Ibid., 201.
47. Ibid., 269–70.
48. Ibid., 163.
49. Ibid., 145.
50. Foucault, “What Is Critique,” 54.
51. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 259–61.
52. Foucault, The Hermeneutics, 30, 81.
53. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” 312.
54. Foucault, “What Is Critique?” 43.
55. Ibid., 45.
56. Michel Foucault. “Pastoral Power and Political Reason,” in Jeremy R. Carrette, ed. Religion and Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999), 143.
57. Foucault, The Hermeneutics, 252.
58. See Foucault, Security, 390.