review

Michel Foucault, Le gouvernement de soi et des autres, Cours au Collège de

France, 1982–1983
Gallimard/Seuil: Paris 2008, €27, paper
382 pp, 978 2 02 065869 0

Michel Foucault, Le courage de la vérité: Le gouvernement de soi et des

autres ii, Cours au Collège de France, 1983–1984
Gallimard/Seuil: Paris 2009, €27, paper
351 pp, 978 2 02 065870 6

Michael Hardt

MILITANT LIFE

It is ironic that Foucault had to go all the way to ancient Greece to grap-
ple with contemporary political problems. Only at that distance, it seems,
could he see clearly, like the farsighted reader who holds the page at arm’s
length to focus. Arguably, Greek thought provided not only a temporal
remove from the present but also a disciplinary separation from politics:
what could be more iconic of scholarly seriousness than a return to the clas-
sics? Yet perhaps he also needed the safety of ancient Greece to experiment
with dangerous ideas.
Foucault’s reputation as an innovative theorist of power was firmly
established by Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Volume I,
published in French in 1975 and 1976, respectively. His thought takes on a
more experimental and, to my mind, more clearly political character, though,
in his annual lecture courses at the Collège de France, particularly the two
final courses in 1983 and 1984, which together form one extended investiga-
tion of the role of parrhesia—truth-telling or free, frank speech—in ancient
Greece. Here he seeks not only to challenge traditional modes of political
thought and action but to explore alternatives, even to the point of propos-
ing a form of philosophical and political militancy. On my reading, these last
lectures cast a new light on the political significance of Foucault’s work as a
whole and revise our understanding of his project’s trajectory.

new left review 64 july aug 2010 151

 152 nlr 64

Before discussing the lectures, though, it is useful briefly to situate them

in the arc of Foucault’s career and, specifically, in relation to his theories of
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power. Two of the most original propositions of Discipline and Punish and
The History of Sexuality, Volume I, led many critics to deplore what they con-
sidered his all-encompassing notion of power. The first proposition is that in
modern society there is no locus of power that dictates social order; rather,
power functions in capillary form through decentred networks of institu-
tions and apparatuses. Second, there is no ‘outside’ to power, such that the
subjects over which it rules are constituted by the functioning of power
itself. Accepting the first proposition, that there is no centre of power, clearly
undermines traditional forms of political thought and action, particularly
those aimed at social change. How can we identify the enemy and where
can we direct our political campaigns? Revolution can no longer be thought
in terms of storming the Winter Palace and toppling the locus of oppressive
power. Accepting the second proposition, however, that there is no outside
to power, creates an even more disorienting situation. If we ourselves—our
knowledge, desires and goals—are produced in the arrangements and appli-
cation of power, then we must stop thinking of politics in terms of repressed
subjects struggling for emancipation from the state, oppressive institutions,
or even the social norms of heterosexuality. How can we struggle for a differ-
ent society when we ourselves are constituted by power? Who is the subject
we are striving to emancipate? Many readers who pose such questions
come to the conclusion that Foucault would render transformative political
thought and action impossible.
These critiques, which have characterized a large portion of the reception
of Foucault’s studies of power, might be dismissed as merely a defensive reac-
tion by those his theories are meant most strongly to attack. Indeed some of
the loudest criticisms have come from proponents of the orthodox forms of
Marxism and party-based politics that Foucault sought directly to challenge.
His analysis of power, one might respond, makes politics a problem for them
but not for him. Foucault did, in fact, continue in these books to write, often
beautifully, of constellations of resistance that challenge the ruling power.
Furthermore, in this period his own political activity as a public intellectual
did not wane but if anything increased. He became one of the most promi-
nent and visible French intellectuals, defending the rights of prisoners, the
poor and the oppressed, in France and abroad, including Vietnamese boat
people, dissidents in Eastern Europe and revolutionaries in Iran.
Nonetheless, in my view Foucault’s studies of power did run into a con-
ceptual dead-end and posed a political problem for him as well; a rather
different one than that deplored by his critics, no doubt, but not any less seri-
ous. In his biography of Foucault, Didier Eribon recounts that after the 1976
publication of The History of Sexuality, Volume I Foucault was intellectually
 hardt: Late Foucault 153

fragile and unusually sensitive to criticism. For the next eight years he pub-
lished no books, an enormous gap given his previous productivity. What

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accounts for this long interruption? I would speculate that the studies of
power left him in a state of intellectual crisis or, at least, with a need to reo-
rient his project. He had successfully articulated an extraordinary critique
of power and traditional forms of politics, but was not able to advocate a
new politics or propose the adequate means to struggle for a new society.
Just before his death in 1984 he completed the manuscripts for the next
two volumes of the history of sexuality, The Use of Pleasure and The Care of
the Self, which focus on the modes of subjectification, especially the forma-
tion of ethical subjects, in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. These final
books, although startlingly original, rich and fascinating in many regards,
seem to retreat from the analysis of power and problems of collective action,
substituting for them ethical issues, such as the care of the self. The trajec-
tory of Foucault’s work thus appears to turn away from unresolved issues
of political praxis.
During this period of crisis or reorientation in the late 1970s and early
1980s, however, Foucault’s courses at the Collège de France served as a
proving ground to work through political problems and experiment with
alternative modes of political thought. The Collège is an elite scholarly insti-
tution that does not have students or award degrees. Every year from the
time of his election to the chair of ‘the history of systems of thought’ in
1970, Foucault gave a course of weekly public lectures on some aspect of
his current research (the only exception was his sabbatical year, 1977). The
thirteen lecture courses are now being published, at a deliberate pace: eight
have appeared in French and six of those in English. Readers familiar with
the polished arguments and obscure, erudite references of Foucault’s books
may well find his style in these lectures surprisingly teacherly. Typically
he presents the major lines of the text for the week; outlines the general
historical frame to situate it (often apologizing for generalizations); sum-
marizes the relevant secondary literature; explains key terms; and frequently
repeats or summarizes what he has said the previous week (apologizing
for that, too). In contrast to his books, then, which show us only the final
product, the courses give us a glimpse of Foucault at work, frequently
doubting himself and sometimes changing direction while testing various
hypotheses and theories.
What interests me most about the courses is their political experimen-
tation and the way they explore, sometimes in a very roundabout way,
contemporary political problems. One particularly fascinating example is
Foucault’s 1979 course, The Birth of Biopolitics, in which his analyses of the
development of neoliberal economic thought in post-war West Germany
and, to a lesser degree, the United States served indirectly to work through
 154 nlr 64

a political conflict that had erupted over a year earlier. In November 1977
the West German government demanded the extradition from Paris of
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Klaus Croissant, a lawyer representing the Red Army Faction (a.k.a. Baader-
Meinhof Gang), charging him with overstepping attorney privileges and
materially aiding his clients. Foucault mobilized to defend Croissant and
the principle of the right to asylum, even to the point of having his ribs
fractured by police in a clash outside La Santé prison where Croissant was
held. He refused, however, to sign a petition supported by many promi-
nent French intellectuals, most notably his long-time friend Gilles Deleuze,
which not only defended Croissant but also claimed the West German state
was becoming fascist. The petition incident was traumatic for Foucault, in
particular because it broke his relationship with Deleuze, whom he did not
see again before his death.
I interpret Foucault’s 1979 course as a defence and explanation of his
position in the Croissant affair through its argument that the West German
state is not fascist but neoliberal. This proposition, of course, continues
Foucault’s earlier rejection of the notion of the state as the locus of power,
which he derided as ‘state-phobia’. In contrast to fascism, he explains,
neoliberalism operates through plural and decentralized governmental
mechanisms defined by entrepreneurial logics and market rationality: a
state supervised by the market, rather than a market controlled by the state.
I think that Foucault’s motivation for contesting the claim of a ‘fascist state’
is also explained by the politics such a term implies, though he does not say
this explicitly. Although many people use the term ‘fascist’ today simply as
an extreme but relatively generic political insult—think of those who called
the Bush government or the us Patriot Act fascist—in the late 1970s, par-
ticularly in groups like the Red Army Faction and the Italian Red Brigades,
the claim carried specific political consequences: since the state was fas-
cist, the only effective means to oppose it was armed struggle organized
in highly disciplined, clandestine bands. Foucault’s analytical conclusion,
then, that the West German state was not fascist, was directed also, and
perhaps even primarily, against a specific form of action. As in his earlier
studies of power, however, here too Foucault was much more successful
in undermining mistaken political strategies than proposing alternatives.
He provided no positive propositions regarding the appropriate modes of
struggle against neoliberalism.
Foucault addressed fundamental problems of politics—even contempo-
rary political action—most substantially, in my view, in his two final lecture
courses, Le gouvernement de soi et des autres [The Government of Self and
Others] and Le courage de la vérité [The Courage of Truth]. Both have been
meticulously and intelligently edited by Frédéric Gros; the first of the two will
be published this year in English. (In the fall of 1983, Foucault delivered a
 hardt: Late Foucault 155

series of six lectures at the University of California, Berkeley that summarize

his project in the two Collège de France courses. Edited transcripts of tape-

review
recordings of these lectures were published in 2001 as Fearless Speech.)
The opening lecture, given in January 1983, presents a detailed reading
of Kant’s ‘What is Enlightenment?’, which implores us, Foucault explains,
to focus on the ‘now’: to construct an ‘ontology of ourselves’ that reveals both
the conditions of the present and the means by which we are constituted
as subjects. Foucault turns immediately in the second lecture, though, and
for the subsequent two years to study ancient Greek political thought. The
disjunction is extreme: how do the ancient Greeks allow him to respond to
Kant’s injunction regarding the ‘now’ and the need to articulate an ontology
of ourselves? As I suggested earlier, Foucault seems to need a safe distance
in order to grapple with the present. Yet the fact that he introduces the course
with these Kantian questions should indicate that, at the very least, he is also
trying to work through contemporary political problems.
One of the central problems that Foucault addresses is announced by the
course title: the relation between ethics—the government of the self—and
politics: the government of others. Whereas Foucault’s other investiga-
tions of ancient thought, including volumes two and three of the History
of Sexuality, focus primarily on the care of the self and individual practices,
he seeks in these courses to extend that framework to questions of collec-
tive political action and government. A second central preoccupation in the
lectures is the nature of political discourse and its relation to political action.
Foucault declares repeatedly that he has gone to ancient Greece in search of
the origins of political speech and, in particular, a form of politics based on
the courage to speak the truth to others and oneself. Both of these objectives
are encompassed by what probably constitutes the overarching frame for the
courses: the problem of democracy, or really democratic speech.
The immediate task Foucault sets himself is to trace the genealogy in
ancient Greek thought of parrhesia, a term rendered alternatively in English
as truth-telling, free speech or frank speech. That we have no adequate mod-
ern translation for parrhesia is a symptom of the fact that it long ago dropped
out of our conceptual vocabulary. Foucault approaches this task through
the strategy of periodization that he employed throughout his career: he
discerns three primary periods, or paradigms, for the use of parrhesia in
ancient Greece and then tries to distinguish the defining characteristics of
each. The first period covers roughly the golden age of Athenian democ-
racy, the 5th century bc, and focuses on classic texts such as Euripides’s
Ion and Thucydides’s accounts of Pericles’s speeches. Foucault begins
with an analysis of the role of truth-telling in political speech, perhaps the
supreme achievement of Athenian democracy; he argues that the ability of
courageous figures like Pericles to speak truth in public constitutes the core
 156 nlr 64

of democratic practice. Parrhesia is thus the foundation of democracy and, in

turn, democratic society is the proper site of parrhesia.
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However, Foucault discerns a conflict in these texts between parrhesia

and isegoria, the equal right to give one’s opinion in public debate. Whereas
isegoria denotes a constitutional or juridical equality, parrhesia is character-
ized by difference and inequality. ‘Not everyone who is able to speak can
speak truth’, Foucault asserts:

True discourse introduces a difference or, rather, it is tied by both its condi-
tions and effects to a difference: only some can speak truth. And once only
some can speak truth, once this speaking-truth emerges in the field of democ-
racy, at that moment a difference is created by the ascendance exercised by
the ones over the others.

If only a few have the capacity and the courage to speak the truth in politics,
and accept the risks that this brings, then parrhesia implies an agonistic,
unequal field in which leaders such as Pericles ascend to a position of author-
ity. By focusing on parrhesia Foucault thus sees a paradox emerging within
the heart of Athenian democracy, in which equality and truth-telling are
irreconcilably at odds. Democracy can either affirm equality at the expense
of parrhesia, giving all equal right to say whatever they want in politics, or
affirm parrhesia at the expense of equality, conceding authority to virtuous,
truth-telling leaders.
At this point Foucault moves to the next period in his genealogy, inves-
tigating the passage from the 5th-century bc attempts to locate parrhesia in
democracy to the resolutely undemocratic, or even anti-democratic, analyses
of parrhesia in the 4th century bc. He dwells at great length on this period—
the entire second half of the 1982–83 lecture course and more than half the
1983–84 series—concentrating primarily on Socrates and Plato. His read-
ings of Phaedo, Alcibiades, Laches, Apology, Plato’s letters, and other familiar
texts are rich and inventive, full of all kinds of fascinating tangents. Foucault
devotes almost an entire lecture, for instance, to explaining an intrigu-
ing, original interpretation proposed by his friend, Georges Dumézil, of
Socrates’s famously obscure final words, ‘Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius.
Pay the debt and do not forget.’ Foucault clearly enjoys this engagement
with the Socratic tradition, even though, or perhaps because, it is such con-
ventional philosophical terrain and so distant from the mode of practising
philosophy for which he was famous. ‘As professor of philosophy’, he jokes
at the end of one session, ‘at least once in life one has to teach a course on
Socrates and the death of Socrates. It’s done. Salvate animam meam.’
The thread that ties together Foucault’s readings of Plato, despite his
frequent wandering, is the incompatibility of democracy and truth-telling.
In effect, the paradox of democracy that he perceives nascent in Thucydides
 hardt: Late Foucault 157

and Euripides in the earlier period is now in full bloom and serves as basis
for a concerted opposition to democracy. Why, Foucault asks, for example,

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does Socrates not speak and act politically in Athens? Socrates explains, after
being condemned to death, that if he had spoken the truth publicly and polit-
ically the Athenians would have killed him even earlier. ‘The powerlessness
of true discourse in democracy’, Foucault concludes, ‘is not due, of course,
to true discourse, that is, to the fact that the discourse is true. It is due to the
very structure of democracy.’ Just as Socrates thinks he is saving his own life
by staying out of politics, so too he seeks to preserve truth-telling by keeping
it out of democracy. The appropriate field of truth for Socrates is not politics
but ethics; that is, the government not of others but of the self. Know your-
self, speak the truth about and to yourself, and care for yourself: these are
the Socratic mandates that affirm the centrality of parrhesia.
Foucault is particularly fascinated by the ways in which Socrates makes
life and one’s mode of life the central object of parrhesia. In Laches, for
example, Socrates engages with Laches and Nicias, distinguished Athenian
generals and paragons of courage, and leads them to question conventional
conceptions of what it means to be brave. At issue in the dialogue is how to
determine who is the best teacher of youth; but Foucault focuses on how
Socrates leads his interlocutors to evaluate a person’s worth, as teacher
but also more generally, by examining the way he lives, his form of life.
Socrates’s superiority, which emerges as the dialogue unfolds, is due not
only to his courage in speaking the truth but also to the harmony of what he
says, how he says it and how he lives. Socrates thus elevates truth-telling to
a mode of life.
Here Foucault steps back to make the kind of enticing but unsubstanti-
ated generalization typical of these lectures. Socrates, he claims, proposes
two modes of philosophical practice which subsequently divide to define
the two primary branches of modern European philosophy: one that con-
centrates on knowledge and the exploration of the mind and the other
that treats philosophy as an épreuve de la vie, a test or examination of life,
which considers bios itself an ethical and even aesthetic matter. Foucault
is interested here primarily in this second branch and, specifically, in
how the examination of life can become a properly political task.
In the third and final period of the genealogy Foucault focuses on the
Cynics, the Socratic philosophical movement particularly active roughly
from the first century bc to the fourth century ad that counted Diogenes,
Antisthenes and Crates among its founders. Few philosophical texts from
the Cynics survive, but we do have numerous accounts of their lives, many of
which are at least in part apocryphal. These lives are what interest Foucault
most, because they extend and transform the Socratic mandate to make
 158 nlr 64

one’s life an expression of parrhesia: that is, they turn the injunction to live a
‘true life’ into a militant, political project.
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The Cynics practised parrhesia, Foucault explains, through a kind of

public, critical preaching, often aimed against social institutions. They also
sought to enact the truth through scandalous behaviour that exposed to pub-
lic view aspects of life that are generally hidden. They ate in public, walked
naked, and even masturbated in the city square. Two fundamental principles
of the true life for the Cynics were exposure and poverty: not only destroying
any division between private and public, but also releasing the Cynic from the
limits of individuality, so as to be able to construct a life addressed to human-
ity as a whole. Indeed Foucault remarks that in this regard Franciscans and
other Christian ascetics are at least partial inheritors of the ancient Cynics in
the mediaeval world. This does not mean that he interprets the Cynics’ prac-
tices as stripping life of pleasure. I suspect, although he does not say this, he
would see a greater range of pleasures in their open social practices, even in
their extreme exposure and poverty; but his target lies elsewhere. The askesis
of the ancient Cynics, Foucault claims, is ‘a militancy that aims to change
the world, much more than a militancy that would seek simply to furnish its
adepts with the means to arrive at a happy life’. The life the Cynics proposed
is a militant life that struggles to change both ourselves and the world.
One of the stories Foucault finds most fascinating about the life of
Diogenes, the philosophical hero of the Cynics, was his visit to the Oracle at
Delphi. The Oracle famously pronounced Socrates the wisest of men, which
Socrates interpreted to mean that he was the most aware of his ignorance.
But Diogenes was instructed by the Oracle to ‘falsify the currency’, that is,
transform the value of money. What a wonderful and mysterious mandate!
In the context of today’s global financial crisis it could be a powerful political
slogan. Scholars explain that the obscure phrase could derive from reports
that Diogenes’s father, Hicesius, who worked in the mint in Sinope, was
exiled after being charged with counterfeiting. Foucault notes such histori-
cal explanations but sets them aside and instead interprets the mandate
conceptually, with reference to the fundamental principle of Cynicism: how
to live one’s life. The proximity of the Greek word for currency or money,
nomisma, to that for law or norm, nomos, reinforces Foucault’s interpreta-
tion of the slogan as a mandate to revalue all values, to change one’s life
so as to change society as a whole. Indeed one hears striking echoes of a
politicized Nietzsche and his injunction to transvalue all values in Foucault’s
analysis. To falsify the currency clearly emphasizes the difference between
the Platonists’ search for individual knowledge and the Cynics’ struggle
for social change. The care of the self is enlarged to the care not only of a
few others but of humanity as a whole. In terms of philosophical doctrine,
Foucault argues, the ancient Cynics contributed little, merely adopting and
 hardt: Late Foucault 159

transforming various traditional formulations. Their singular contribution

instead is to make life the centre of a philosophical and political project.

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Foucault defines the Cynics’ primary goal as ‘militant life, the life of
combat and struggle against the self and for the self, against others and for
others’. The only true life for the Cynics is a life transformed, and the only
way to achieve such a life is to create another world out of this one. The true
heirs of the ancient Cynics in the modern world, he claims, are revolutionar-
ies whose lives enact a—sometimes violent—rupture with the conventions
and values of the dominant society. Foucault adds in a polemical aside that
this revolutionary life is radically different, even opposed to, the activism of
contemporary political parties that call themselves revolutionary, which are
really defined by a strict conformity of life.
The key to the shift accomplished by the Cynics is the development of the
terrain of life—a militant life, a revolutionary life—as the locus of politics.
Foucault needs the discovery of biopolitics, one might say, to grapple fully
with politics. To understand this we must make a terminological distinction,
which Foucault himself does not employ consistently, between biopower
and biopolitics. Biopower, which he first theorizes in the mid-1970s, is a
form of power in which the life of populations becomes the central object
of rule, not only or even primarily through the destruction but also the crea-
tion of life. Foucault explores this deployment of power over life or, rather,
through life in the context of sexual behaviours, medical practices, racial
discourses, economic paradigms, and so forth. The militancy of the ancient
Cynics, however, is clearly an entirely different politics of life. Biopolitics is
the realm in which we have the freedom to make another life for ourselves,
and through that life transform the world. Biopolitics is thus not only distinct
from biopower but also may be the most effective weapon to combat it.
Foucault’s lectures end rather abruptly after his analysis of the Cynics.
My intention was not to stop with the Cynics, he explains on the final day,
but to demonstrate how ancient Cynicism constructs a different relation
between life and parrhesia, casting the discourse of truth in terms of a true
life. The trajectory of the courses is thus incomplete; but through his analyses
of these three periods Foucault already indicates the outlines of a powerful
political project. In briefest summary one might say that the first passage—
away from the democratic Athenian political terrain of the government of
others to the Socratic paradigm of the care of the self—allows him to focus
on life as the centre of transformation. Through a second passage, and with
the aid of the Cynics, he brings this back to the field of politics as a militant,
transformational life: from Pericles the virtuous orator, speaking the truth
in public, to Socrates, the wise advocate of self-knowledge; and finally to
Diogenes, the militant striving to create a new life that changes the world.
 160 nlr 64

This three-part trajectory of Greek thought bears intriguing correspond-

ences to the arc of the final decade of Foucault’s own career. The first passage,
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from his studies of power in the mid-1970s to his explorations of the subject
and the care of the self in the early 1980s, allows him to reorient his project
towards the ethical practices of life; which he subsequently shifts, in a second
passage that begins to take shape in these lectures, towards the biopolitical
terrain of militant action. No longer does he focus on the functioning of
power or its apparatuses of discipline or control, but rather explores politi-
cal thought and action as a realm of freedom, oriented toward changing not
only ourselves but also our world.
But the trajectory of Foucault’s career, of course, was cut short. The lec-
ture courses, in the end, raise more questions than they answer. Why, for
example, after exploring so thoroughly the crisis of democracy in the first
two periods of Greek thought does he not address it in relation to the Cynics?
Does their militant life somehow resolve or set aside democracy’s contradic-
tions? Or if democracy and equality are not the content of their struggle,
what makes the true life and new world they strive for a better life and a bet-
ter world? Finally, does Foucault’s enthusiasm for the Cynics indicate that
he views their biopolitical militancy as a model for effective contemporary
political action against neoliberalism and today’s forms of biopower? This
is an evocative, exciting idea but Foucault, unfortunately, did not have the
opportunity to develop it. We can only imagine how explosive would have
been this notion of biopolitical militancy if Foucault had been able to deploy
it not only at the safe distance of ancient Greece but also in his world.
Reading these courses, especially when focusing on their unanswered
questions and the project cut short, it is difficult not to think of Foucault’s
approaching death and see clues of it everywhere. He apologizes, for
instance, at the opening of the 1984 course that illness forced him to delay
the first lecture for a month, and repeatedly during the Spring he asks for-
giveness for ending sessions early because of fatigue. He died on 25th June
1984, barely two months after the end of the course. Foucault concludes
that final lecture, which one suspects he knows is his last, simply, movingly,
without completing the written text he prepared: ‘But finally, it is too late.
So, thank you.’