Foucault portrait. Flickr/Thierry Ehrmann. Some rights reserved.Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was one of the most influential
intellectuals of our era. His work on sites of power-knowledge such as asylums,
schools, hospitals, prisons, and factories continue to resonate and inspire
empirical-political work in sociology, politics, geography, anthropology, as
well as gender studies, international studies, urban studies, citizenship
studies, postcolonial studies, and, cultural studies.
Until recently, perhaps with support from how Foucault occasionally
portrayed himself as an archivist, a bookish image of him prevailed. With the
publication of his many lectures and speeches in Dits et Ecrits (1994) a rather different image of Foucault emerged.
We have yet to name this image – I would be inclined to call it ‘activist
intellectual’ as opposed to ‘public intellectual’ – but it involves performing as
a speaking subject in interviews, press conferences, meetings, gatherings, and
other sites where the task is ‘confronting governments’.
In these performances ‘government’ is neither an addressee
as such nor an object of analysis but something that the speaking subject
confronts as a political subject.
Foucault became quite concerned about the relationship
between the governed and governments. The distinction for him would not have
been analytical but a strategic one. For it was he who taught us that whether
in ancient Greece or modern France the exercise of power required political
subjects to be both governed and governing.
Foucault taught us that the activity of governing involved
both governments and the governed if not symmetrically, at least in a
contesting manner. To some extent, the main analytical point he made repeatedly
in different writings was that power relations traversed political subjects as
transmission points rather than fixed nodes and these relations involved both
governments and the governed.
But strategically, if not performatively, Foucault
increasingly found himself problematizing the relationship between the governed
and governments as a confrontation. And when I say he ‘found’ himself I really
mean sites of power where he found himself confronting governments through
speech acts. All the occasions Colin Gordon mentions in his introductory piece
on these speeches involves such sites of power. And as Gordon makes it clear,
there were many other such occasions.
It is important to emphasise though where Foucault seems to
have developed a nuanced understanding of himself as an activist intellectual,
he also seems to have consistently avoided Sermons from the Mount as an expert.
This did not mean that he would remain silent. On the
contrary, he seems to have found a space where as a truth-telling subject he
was indeed speaking truth to power by confronting governments, but his
truth-telling seems to have avoided authorizing himself as an expert
truth-telling subject.
The deliberate avoidance of any reference to his published
work seems to have enabled him to practice freedom as a speaking political
subject, in fact, a citizen, perhaps even a citizen to come – not only
exercising his rights and duties as a political subject but also calling upon
new ones by exercising them.
This is precisely why I emphasize that Foucault was practicing
a nuanced performative politics as a political truth-telling subject rather
than exercising judgement as an expert.
I don’t mean to suggest that Foucault somehow separated his
work and speech and that his speech acts were not motivated by his work. It is
just that he refused to authorise his speech acts by his expert knowledge as it
might have been received. This raises the question why many of his speech acts
came to light only later, so that we have begun to understand Foucault as a speaking
subject relatively recently, as Philippe
Artières has argued [1].
This is also why I think of his speech acts bringing into
being an activist intellectual rather than a public intellectual. While the
latter is authorised to bring knowledge to bear on public issues as an expert,
the former engages with political events as a citizen with rights and duties.
So then reading these speech acts and Gordon’s excellent
introduction to them I get the feeling that just when Foucault was indeed
working in the archives on parrhesia,
he was actually performing it outside. His 1982 course of lectures at the Catholic University
of Louvain and 1982-1983 Lectures in Collège de
France presented his thoughts on the subject of parrhesia, or the truth-telling subject [2]. To me his speech acts
and his work on parrhesia are
intimately related in ways that we have yet to understand.
I have written about his speech in Geneva and I consider it a
significant text. In Citizens Without
Frontiers I drew on the three principles that Foucault outlines in this
speech [3]. I especially focused on his point that organizations such as
Amnesty International and Medécins du Monde have created new rights to act
across borders. I thought Foucault would have been intrigued by the 1999 Nobel
Peace Prize acceptance speech by James Orbinsky, then director of Médecins Sans Frontières, when he
said ‘. . . we push the political to assume its inescapable responsibility’
[4]. Arguably, as I more recently argued, this speech had a significant
performative force [5].
I consider the two speech acts that Colin Gordon has
beautifully rendered into English here are two examples of Foucault’s parrhesia. The speech in Geneva is an
illustration of how Foucault makes connections between here and there and then
and now by crossing these boundaries, and by bringing a political subject into
being through the solidarity of the governed. The interview affirms the
solidarity that the speech urges: it places it in a context that grounds it.
NOTES
[1] Foucault,
Michel. Speech Begins after Death: In Conversation with Claude Bonnefoy
ed. Philippe Artières, trans. Robert Bononno (University of Minnesota Press,
2013).
[2] Foucault,
Michel. Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice
ed. Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt, trans. Stephen W. Sawyer (University
of Chicago Press, 2014); Foucault, Michel. The Courage of the Truth (The
Government of Self and Others II): Lectures at the Collège De France, 1983-1984
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
[3] Isin,
Engin F. 2012. Citizens without Frontiers. London: Bloomsbury. Also see Golder,
Ben. ‟Foucault and the Unfinished Human of Rights.” Law, Culture and the Humanities 6, 3 (2010): 354-74 and Whyte,
Jessica. 2012. “Human Rights: Confronting Governments?: Michel Foucault and the
Right to Intervene.” In New Critical Legal Thinking, edited by Matthew
Stone, Illan rua Wall and Costas Douzinas, 11-31. London: Routledge
[4] Orbinski,
J. 1999. Oslo Nobel Lecture: Médecins Sans Frontières, 10 December
1999 [cited 6 November 2015]. Source: http://goo.gl/9XzR6.
[5] Isin,
Engin F. 2016. “Enacting International Citizenship.” In Transversal Lines in IR: Perspectives from IPS, edited by Didier
Bigo, RBJ Walker, Emmanuel-Pierre Guittet and Tugba Basaran. London: Routledge.