In an archived draft at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Foucault describes two questions haunting him since 1963: “Why are we obliged to tell the truth about ourselves? Which truth?” Foucault poses these two questions in 1980 in drafts for his lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, and I see in these two questions two argumentative threads that weave through Foucault's changing History of Sexuality series over his last decade. These two threads correspond to the dimorphism Foucault frames in (...) Part III of Confessions of the Flesh between confessing monks and married men, that correlates with the distinction between “veridiction” and “juridiction” as two forms relating subjectivity and sexuality. To help tease out these threads, I make two recommendations for how to read Confessions of the Flesh in this following review essay: (1) situate Confessions of the Flesh in relation to Foucault's History of Sexuality series which spans his last decade from 1974 to 1984 and (2) untangle two major threads of Confessions of the Flesh in Foucault's treatment of Cassian and Augustine, as progenitors of veridiction and juridiction respectively, which together produce the conditions for modern disciplinary subjects. (shrink)

"Draws on philosophical and novelistic texts from the Western European and Russian canons to explore a crucial moment in the epistemological history of narrative and present a nonreductive way of conjugating the histories of philosophy and ...

This article pays close attention to Michel Foucault's theory that political regimes are enlightened through courageous free speech. A Foucaultian enlightenment occurs not when philosophical reason completely replaces superstition and enthusiasm in the public sphere, but instead when the parrhesiast partially organizes competing claims to know and to speak the truth. While much of the recent scholarly literature on Foucault’s later lectures emphasizes the political importance of the parrhesiast, less attention has been paid to the overlap and/or incompatibility between parrhesia (...) and the other modes of truth-telling. Below, I explain Foucault’s analysis of the basic modes of philosophical truth-telling: prophesy, philosophy, teaching, and parrhesia. I provide examples of speakers working within these modes in the ancient and modern world. I explain the overlap and tension between these modes, and I analyze Foucault’s partial organization of them through the image of the parrhesiast. I briefly compare Foucault’s position to the agonistic democratic theory of Chantal Mouffe and distinguish Foucault’s view from consensus-based views of public reason. Finally, I provide practical and theoretical examples of parrhesiastic activity in the contemporary world. (shrink)

This essay addresses the relationships between prescription and description in legal rules. The analysis will focus on the culture-laden connotations of factual categories implied in all legal sentences and/or provisions. This investigation is spurred by the need to assess the impact of cultural difference in people’s understanding of legal imperatives and, symmetrically, how that impact is to be considered in the application of law. Differences in ways of categorizing the world could position the cultural pre-understanding required by law, and the (...) pluralism recognized and protected by constitutional principles and human/fundamental rights discourse, at a crossroads. Hence, even when we find an illegitimacy or an ignorance about what legal rules do not explicitly state but instead implicitly presuppose, this does not exclude that behind that ignorance there may be something worthy of legal protection. A question emerges: is it legitimate and reasonable to consider the ignorantia facti resulting from differing ways of categorizing the factual world as automatically and uncritically subject to the principle ignoratia legis non excusat? The essay continues with an assessment of the possible consequences of ignorantia facti in the administration of justice in multicultural societies and migration contexts. For this purpose, the opportunity for an intercultural use of law—including within national law—will be considered as a means of avoiding the discriminatory application of ignorantia facti. This topic will be addressed by leveraging both semiotic and cultural-anthropological analytical tools, including the well-known greimasien “contrat de véridiction”. (shrink)

Despite the proliferation of studies on corporate social responsibility (CSR), there is a lack of consensus and a cardinal methodological base for research on the quality of CSR communication. Over the decades, studies in this space have remained conflicting, unintegrated, and sometimes overlapping. Drawing on semiotics—a linguistic-based theoretical and analytical tool, our article explores an alternative perspective to evaluating the quality and reliability of sustainability reports. Our article advances CSR communication research by introducing a theoretical-cum-methodological perspective which provides unique insights (...) into how to evaluate the quality of CSR communication. Particularly, we illustrate the application of our proposed methodology on selected U.K. FTSE 100 companies. Our two-phased analysis employed the Greimas Canonical Narrative Schema and the Semiotic Square of Veridiction in drawing meanings from selected sustainability/csr reports. In addition, we present a distinctive CSR report quality model capable of guiding policy makers and firms in designing sustainability/csr reporting standards. (shrink)

The article elucidates the concept of subjectivity in Karl Marx, while providing an analysis from a Heideggerian and a Foucaultian perspective. Furthermore, the aim of the article is to determine the relevance of the categories elaborated by Heidegger and Foucault in the analysis of the Marxist concept of subjectivity. In order to achieve this goal, the article is divided into three sections. First, the concept of subjectivity is studied as it appears in Marx’s works. Second, a Heideggerian reading of that (...) concept is reconstructed from elements of the “early” and “later” Heidegger. Third, a Foucaultian reading of subjectivity is proposed from the coordinates of the notions of governmentality, veridiction and subjectivation. It is concluded that the readings of Heidegger and Foucault are, respectively, insufficient and partially sufficient, which does not exclude, however, the possibility of adding nuances to them in order to develop, with contributions from all three philosophers, a kind of “post-Heideggerian and post-Foucaultian Marxism”. (shrink)

This article explicates a valuable but undernoticed point of contact between John Dewey and Michel Foucault. Both agreed that thinking arose in the context of problems such that the work of thought for both proceeds by way of working through and working over problems. Both affirmed that thinking arose in problematic situations; that it was about clarifying those situations, and that ultimately it was directed towards achieving a degree of resolution of what was problematic in the situation. Both agreed that (...) thinking—or inquiry—was not fundamentally about the representations of a situation; either those produced by a contemporary thinker or as an exercise directed at historical materials. Both agreed that a history of ideas as autonomous entities, distorted not only the process of thinking as a practice, but also the reasons for which it had been engaged in, often with a certain seriousness and urgency, the first place: that is to say, such approaches covered over the stakes. Both agreed that the stakes involved something experiential and entailed a form of logic (or in Foucault’s later vocabulary a mode of ‘veridiction’), in which the thinker could not help but be involved. (shrink)

Recent literary methods have opened new possibilities in reading and understanding the logic of narratives. The Greimassian approach offers such a possibility. Though Greimas’ approach is by now accepted as part of the canon of narratology, some of its components have not yet received due attention. This is the case with his ‘veridictory square’, a diagram that applies especially to texts where oppositions such as truth-falsehood, hero-villain and subject-anti-subject are prominent themes. This article aims to demonstrate that these kinds of (...) narratives, such as Susanna, do not concern themselves with objective truth but persuasion about truth, that is, veridiction. Truth telling in those stories corresponds to manipulation, exercising a particular cognitive doing or causing to appear as true. In other words, such a manipulation of truth aims at causing people to believe. Using Greimas’ veridictory square built on opposing modalities of being and seeming, the contrast between reality and appearance, this article provides insight into the games of truth in Susanna and thus offers a new inspiring way of reading these kinds of stories. (shrink)

Setting out from the difficulty of translating the Foucauldian notion of aveu, this paper proposes an account of Foucault’s concept of confession in the years 1979-1983 surrounding the writing of Confessions of the Flesh. I focus on Foucault’s relative failure to bring together the complementary dimensions of confession as confession of sins and confession of faith in early Christianity. Foucault’s attempts to tackle this challenge nonetheless reveal a number of crucial aspects of his thought throughout the 1970s, e.g., the critique (...) of the notion of ideology and the role that critique played in the setting of Foucault’s “critical philosophy of veridictions”. A comparison with the lectures given at Louvain and the Collège de France suggests that Foucault took an original and rather solitary path in Confessions of the Flesh, which may explain the surprises awaiting the reader. Finally, I propose an explanation of Foucault’s final shift away from Christian confession towards Greek parrhesia, pointing to the key role of the idea of a “duty of truth”. This idea led Foucault to an original approach to confession and the illocutionary force of statements. (shrink)

This paper situates the dream-hypothesis in Descartes’s First Meditation within the historical ontology of ourselves. It looks at the way in which the dream enters into and transforms Descartes’ relation to his “system of actuality.” In order to get free from his confinement within his system of actuality – an actuality defined by relations of power-knowledge, government, veridiction, and subjectivity – Descartes draws on the disruptive, negative capacity of the dream. But, while Descartes draws on the dream to get (...) himself free and to establish a way of thinking and living differently, he also disqualifies the dream as a positive source of knowledge, truth, or subjectivity. Excavating this ambivalent place of the dream in the genealogy of our present, we aim to recover the dream not only in its negative power but also to open up the possibility of re-imagining its positivity as a form of counter-conduct, problematization, and element in the care of the self. This paper represents one piece of a larger genealogical study that examines the history of relationships between the arts of dreaming and the problematization of power-truth-subjectivity. (shrink)

Contemporary research in the field of Foucauldian studies on education have pointed to a growing imbrication between educational practises and neoliberal ideas. The problematization of such scenario would lead to two premises, grounded on a general hypothesis for the analysis of the educational present. The first premise: nowadays, the educational or, to be more precise, educationalizing practises—since they would not deal only with the schooling effort, but also with the diffusion of a great number of pedagogical initiatives of non-formal character—consists (...) in an efficient rationality of governing of oneself and others. The second premise is that such educationalizing movement consists not only in the expression but also in the typical modus operandi of the current governmentalization processes, which aim at a large-scale administration of the multiplicity of populations now in terms of a lifelong educatibility for the citizens. These two premises sustain the hypothesis that the present educational practises do not restrict themselves to the mere condition of reiterative apparatus of imperatives extrinsic to them, but have in fact cemented themselves as a generative locus of the veridiction/subjectivization games capable of overrunning the whole social space. (shrink)

An exploration of the connections between law, science, and truth, this paper argues that ‘truth’ is an evolving, rather than fixed, concept. It is a human creation, and the processes, or standards, by which it has been evaluated have changed over time. Currently knowledge production is anchored in the natural sciences but reproduced and validated by philosophical rationalisation. There are two problems with this technique of knowledge verification (or ‘veridiction’). First, the natural sciences are not, in fact, practiced according (...) to their ideal forms; and second, the Queen of Sciences, physics, underwent two fundamental paradigm shifts in the early nineteenth century. General relativity and quantum theory entered the scene, sending ripples throughout science, and the social sciences. These changes too have been slowly absorbed by philosophy, giving rise in part to the postmodernist and deconstructivist movements. I chart this gradual evolution of truth and knowledge production in physics and in law and analyse the resistance it has faced from both classical law and classical physics. Finally I argue that this resistance could be overcome, if legal theory, and especially legal positivism, would embrace a more accurate and up-to-date understanding of the science it purports to examine and emulate. (shrink)

En dépit d’obstacles épistémologiques et idéologiques dont le présent article rappelle succinctement la genèse, les rapports entre droit et religion dans l’Occident médiéval ont été abondamment explorés, au travers, notamment, d’études consacrées à la science canonique, aux procédures ecclésiastiques et aux qualifications juridiques. En revanche, les limites, les zones de contact et les points de passage entre ces deux régimes de véridiction et de normativité que sont le droit et la religion, ont été laissés dans l’ombre. Sans prétendre couvrir le (...) champ d’une enquête aussi titanesque, cet article entend pointer quelques-uns des problèmes qui se posent dès que l’on aborde en historien les rapports que l’Église catholique – forme institutionnelle par excellence de la religion chrétienne – a entretenus avec le droit, et indiquer quelles sont les pistes actuellement empruntées dans ce sens. (shrink)

This paper aims to analyze the alleged inversion of truth discourse ́s appraisal in Michel Foucault’s works between the early seventies and his last lectures of the eighties. We propose that, by reconstructing the contraposition between philosophical discourse and sophistical practice and the dispute between Socrates’s parrhesia and rhetoric presented in each moment, the question can be treated as the problem of truth discourse’s operation on the field of social practices. Considering the ethical and political stipulations and effects of both (...) the rhetorical techné and the philosophical techné of discourse, we understand that between the “rhetorization of philosophy” and the “ontology of veridiction” that Foucault introduces in each occasion, there is not an inversion of perspective. Instead, there is a specification of the philosophical truth-telling as a practice that, confronted with other discourses indifferent to the truth, manifests a deep concern and commitment with a situated and relational construction of the ethos and the life in common. (shrink)

This article analyses the attempts to promote economic and social development in the Third World through techniques of empowerment and participation. Based on Michel Foucault’s analytics of government - notably the notion of self-technologies - we analyse two empowerment projects for women. We argue, first, that empowerment projects seek to constitute beneficiaries as active and responsible individuals with the ability to take charge of their own lives. Thus, empowerment should be viewed not as a transfer of power to individuals who (...) formerly possessed little or no power, but as a technology seeking to create self-governing and responsible individuals, i.e. modern citizens in the western liberal sense. Second, through the intertwinement of anthropological knowledges and radical action research, knowledge about the local has become an authoritative mode of veridiction (regime of truth) in development interventions. By seeking to instigate and activate ‘local knowledges’, participatory development interventions entail a crucial recasting of the governing of the target population who are now supposed - on the basis of rational decision-making, such as cost-benefit analysis - to freely join the power-loaded game of the active citizen. Third and finally, it is also maintained that the role of the developer (now labelled ‘facilitator’) is profoundly recast. By basing themselves on the subjective involvement of the individual developer, the participatory approaches recast development as an art form that puts at stake the ethical practices of ‘facilitators’ and beneficiaries alike. (shrink)

This article analyzes the theme of childhood in the films of Abbas Kiarostami in the context of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which toppled the secular, modernizing regime of Shah Reza Pahlavi and ended in the establishment of Islamic Republic of Iran under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini. It pays special attention to the Institute for the Cultural Development of Children and Adolescents, or Kanun. Founded during the Shah’s regime with the objective of creating educational materials, Kanun played an important role (...) in Iran’s artistic-cultural production, both before and after the Revolution. Its cinema department, where several filmmakers started their careers, became known as the birthplace of New Iranian Cinema. This article examines how six of Kiarostami’s films, produced between 1970 and 1989, discuss the position of children in Iranian society. In particular, it considers the changes wrought by the Revolution and the founding of a new historical subject based on a different framework for childhood. After a discussion of the use of films as a source for research, three framings of childhood in Kiarostami are presented: the child on the margins of society, the child at the center of society, and the child of the Revolution. The article closes by arguing that through narrative experimentation that uses childhood as a vehicle to explore the ideals of the revolutionary process, Kiarostami’s cinema serves as an inflection point for the modalities of veridiction and subjectivation and a peculiar type of ethical-political struggle. (shrink)

This paper argues against a common misunderstanding of Foucault's work. Even after the release of his lectures at the Collège de France, which ran throughout the 1970s until his death in 1984, he is still often taken to have made an "ethical" turn toward the end of his life. As opposed to his genealogies of power published in the 1970s, which are relentlessly suspicious of claims of individual agency, his final monographs focus on the ethical self-formation of free individuals. I (...) suggest that this basic misinterpretation makes possible interpretations of Foucault's work as being sympathetic to neoliberal government, by linking the ethical turn to a "liberal" or "neoliberal" turn in his thought. I present a case against the ethical turn by arguing that Foucault's main focus, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, is a concern for the ways in which we become obligated by truth. (shrink)

This paper situates the dream-hypothesis in Descartes’s First Meditation within the historical ontology of ourselves. It looks at the way in which the dream enters into and transforms Descartes’ relation to his “system of actuality.” In order to get free from his confinement within his system of actuality – an actuality defined by relations of power-knowledge, government, veridiction, and subjectivity – Descartes draws on the disruptive, negative capacity of the dream. But, while Descartes draws on the dream to get (...) himself free and to establish a way of thinking and living differently, he also disqualifies the dream as a positive source of knowledge, truth, or subjectivity. Excavating this ambivalent place of the dream in the genealogy of our present, we aim to recover the dream not only in its negative power but also to open up the possibility of re-imagining its positivity as a form of counter-conduct, problematization, and element in the care of the self. This paper represents one piece of a larger genealogical study that examines the history of relationships between the arts of dreaming and the problematization of power-truth-subjectivity. (shrink)

Using long-term anthropological observations at the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology in Houston, Texas, the article demonstrates in detail the creation of new objects, new venues and new modes of veridiction which have reoriented the disciplines of materials chemistry and nanotoxicology. Beginning with the confusion surrounding the meaning of ‘implications’ and ‘applications’ the article explores the creation of new venues (CBEN and its offshoot the International Council on Nanotechnology); it then demonstrates how the demands for a responsible, safe (...) or ethical science were translated into new research and experiment in and through these venues. Finally it shows how ‘safety by design’ emerged as a way to go beyond implications and applications, even as it introduced a whole new array of controversies concerning its viability, validity and legitimacy. (shrink)

In the final volume of his Homo Sacer series, The use of bodies, Agamben claims that for Foucault ethics never escapes the horizon of governmentality and therefore his conception of ethics is ‘strategic.’ In light of this criticism, motivated by Agamben’s Pauline conception of ‘use,’ we reassess the status and function of ethics in Foucault’s late lectures. We investigate how Foucault’s approach to ethics develops from his treatment of liberal governmentality and also how its methodological foundation is developed in an (...) interpretation of truth-telling in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Our interpretation emphasizes the ambiguous status of ethics in Foucault’s late work: on the one hand, Agamben is right that Foucault assigns an irreducible strategic function to ethics thereby connecting it intrinsically to governmentality. On the other hand, Agamben overlooks how Foucault’s interpretation of Sophocles implies a conception of governmentality which emphasizes how ethical practices cannot be captured solely in strategic terms. Foucault’s ‘anarcheological’ approach thus articulates a dimension of ethics that remains, using Agamben’s own terms, ‘ungovernable’ and therefore also genuinely creative. Even so, Foucault’s approach to ethics remains in Agamben’s perspective on the deepest level faced with an antinomy that Agamben seeks to mediate with his Pauline conception of ‘inoperativity.’. (shrink)

Both Michel Foucault and Barbara Cassin address Aristotle’s thought and the 5th century BCE sources attributed to the rhetorician Gorgias in order to reconstruct the history of the strategic exclusion of the Sophistics from the Western philosophical tradition. They retrace the scene of the rhetoric agon that Aristotle engaged with Gorgias. Both theorists’ arguments illuminate that the sophist has formulated an original account of political theatricality by talking about the scenes of the logos.

This essay provides an account of the role of ritual in governmentality through an analysis of key texts during the period roughly from 1973 through 1981. I claim that ritual plays an essential role in Foucault’s analysis of juridical forms and sovereign power as well as conduct and counter-conduct understood as features of governmentality and political rationality.