Abstract
In various interviews Michel Foucault refuses to take on the political role of what he calls a ‘prophet’, someone who tells others, ‘here is what you must do — and also: this is good and this is not’.2 According to Foucault, intellectuals can contribute to political change by employing critique to undermine what appears in the present to be stable, certain or necessary: ‘The work of an intellectual … is, through the analyses he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions.’3 Foucault develops a historical form of critique that he calls ‘genealogy’ to engage himself and his audience in a deep transformation of their relationship to their own present, in order to open up new paths for thinking and acting differently. His genealogical narratives show present conditions to be the result of contingent relations and practices of power, revealing some of them to be dangerous but also open to resistance. Still, he insists, whether and how to resist power relations in the present must be decided by those who will be participating in such a battle themselves.4
Q: Many people look at you as someone who is able to tell them the deep truth about the world and about themselves. … As an intellectual, do you feel responsible toward this function of seer, of shaper of mentalities?
MF: I am sure I am not able to provide these people with what they expect. I never behave like a prophet. My books don’t tell people what to do.
Michel Foucault1
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Notes
M. Foucault, ‘An Ethics of Pleasure’ [1982], in S. Lotringer (ed.), Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, 2nd edn (New York: Semiotext(e): 1996), 380 (hereafter FL). Years in square brackets refer to the year in which the respective interview was conducted (or published, if noted as such).
Foucault, ‘Clarifications on the Question of Power’ [1978], FL, 262.
Foucault, ‘The Concern for Truth’ [first published in 1984], FL, 462. Of course, while Foucault says that he does not tell others what to do, this quote (and numerous others given below) indicates that he does not keep to such a restriction regarding what he says to other intellectuals. One might think that the dangers of intellectual prophecy discussed in Section 2 of this chapter do not apply when it is a matter of intellectuals telling other intellectuals what they ought to do, but it is possible that such concerns could still be raised. This could then open up a line of inquiry into the legitimacy of Foucault’s pronouncements about the political role of intellectuals, according to his own concerns. Such a study, while potentially important, would take me beyond the argument of this particular chapter.
M. Foucault, ‘Truth and Power’ [first published in 1977], in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, edited by C. Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 126 (hereafter PK).
Foucault, ‘The End of the Monarchy of Sex’, [first published in 1977], FL, 225.
M. Foucault, ‘Intellectuals and Power’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, edited by D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 207. This is the transcript of a conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze that took place in 1972.
Foucault, ‘Body/Power’ [first published in 1975], PK, 62.
For some useful overviews of the debate about the relation between Foucauldian genealogy and archaeology see T. Flynn, ‘Foucault’s Mapping of History’, in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, edited by G. Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 28–46;
G. Gutting, ‘Foucault’s Genealogical Method’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 15, 1990, 327–343. I discuss only genealogy in this chapter, since it is in his genealogical critiques that Foucault focuses most directly on the role of intellectuals in supporting or undermining relations between power and knowledge.
M. Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in The Politics of Truth, edited by S. Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997), 132 (hereafter PT).
M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by A. Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 31 (hereafter DP).
Foucault, ‘What our Present is’ [1981], PT, 158.
M. Foucault, Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, translated by R. J. Goldstein and J. Cascaito (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), 33–34. The interviews in this book were all conducted in 1978 (hereafter RM).
M. Foucault, ‘Questions of Method’, in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 84–85. This is an extensively revised text based on a roundtable discussion between Foucault and several historians, first published in 1980. See also Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, PT, 126–127.
Foucault, ‘The Concern for Truth’, FL, 462–463; Foucault, ‘What Calls for Punishment?’ [1983], FL, 424–425. Of course, one might say that an intellectual has to have in-depth knowledge of particular aspects of the present in order to reveal the complexities of and problems with them, and this might seem to be adequate to ground suggestions of solutions that are likely to be effective. But I believe that Foucault would still reply that potential solutions must nevertheless be tested in practice.
J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 282–286.
R. J. Bernstein, ‘Foucault: Critique as a Philosophic Êthos’, in The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 156–157.
Michael Walzer also calls for intellectual prophecy: ‘We still require … what Foucault calls “general intellectuals”. We need men and women who tell us when state power is corrupted or systematically misused, who cry out that something is rotten, and who reiterate the regulative principles with which we might set things right.’ M. Walzer, ‘The Politics of Michel Foucault’, in C. C. Hoy (ed.), Foucault: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 66–67.
M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, translated by R. Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 58–70,135–159.
See, e.g., Foucault, ‘Questions of Method’, in Burchell et al. (eds), The Foucault Effect, 82–85; Foucault, ‘The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom’ [1984], FL, 441–442.
M. Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–1983, edited by F. Gros (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 64–68 (hereafter CF83).
Foucault, Fearless Speech, edited by J. Pearson (New York: Semiotext(e), 2001), 17–18. This is a series of lectures that Foucault gave in Berkeley, California in the fall of 1983.
CF83, 56, 62–63, 66; M. Foucault, The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others II: Lectures at the Collège de France 1983–1984, edited by F. Gros (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 10–12 (hereafter CF84).
M. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982, edited by F. Gros (New York: Picador, 2001), 366–409 (hereafter CF82). The care of the self is discussed in depth throughout this course; see 315–487 for examples of how it is achieved through philosophical exercises directed towards one’s habits, dispositions, emotions, usual ways of acting as well as one’s beliefs and ways of thinking.
Ibid., 28. In an essay first published in 1982, Foucault explains that he uses the terms ‘governing’ and ‘government’ in a wide sense, to refer to structuring ‘the possible field of action of others’ and thus directing their conduct. M. Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edn (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1993), 208–226, at 221.
I. Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’, in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), 41.
According to Edward McGushin, ‘it is impossible not to hear [parrēsia] as a self-description on the part of Foucault’. E. F. McGushin, Foucault’s Askêsis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 102.
See, e.g., Foucault, ‘What is Critique?’, PT, 51–53. For an excellent overview and critical analysis of Foucault’s attempts to address Kantian-inspired questions without recourse to the transcendental, see B. Han, Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001).
Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, PT, 124–125. See also Foucault, ‘What is Critique?’, PT, 49–61. Although I have suggested here that we can read Foucault’s own parrēsia as resembling that of Kant to some degree, others have pointed out the strong similarities between Foucauldian and Cynic parrēsia. See, e.g., T. Flynn, ‘Foucault and the Politics of Postmodernity’, Noûs 23, 1989, 187–198.
M. Foucault, ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics’ [1983], in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 231.
M. Foucault, ‘The Return of Morality’ [1984], FL, 468–470.
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Hendricks, C. (2012). Prophecy and Parrēsia: Foucauldian Critique and the Political Role of Intellectuals. In: de Boer, K., Sonderegger, R. (eds) Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230357006_13
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