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Power, Nietzsche and the Greeks: Foucaults

Leons sur la volont de savoirPosted July 20, 2011

Areopagus from the Acropolis, Athens

by Stuart Elden

Michel Foucault, Leons sur la volont de savoir: Cours au Collge de France, 1970-1971, suivi de

Le savoir ddipe,

edited by Daniel Defert,

Paris: Gallimard/Seuil

The most recently published lecture course from Michel Foucaults time at the Collge de France is

his first, entitled La Volont de Savoirthe will to know or the will to knowledge. To avoid

confusion with the first volume of hisHistory of Sexuality, which reused the title, the editor, Daniel

Defert, has chosenLeonssur la volont de savoiras this volumes title. The addition of lectures

on is appropriate, as this volume includes two pieces not originally delivered in Paris: a lectureon Nietzsche from later that year, to make up for a missing lecture from the Paris transcript, and a

manuscript on Oedipus that served as the basis for lectures in the Americas over the next couple of

years, developing themes from the course. Unlike the other courses published to date, this volume is

based almost entirely on Foucaults manuscript for the course, rather than transcribed from tape

recordings of the actual delivery. Defert has done exemplary work in making these texts available,

and supplemented them with useful notes and an essay contextualizing the course. An English

translation is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan by Graham Burchell, but is unlikely to be out

before 2013.

The course ranges widely in its content and theoretical engagements. Foucaults inaugural lecture,

published as The Order of Discourse, was delivered on the 2nd December 1970, and this course

began the following week. Foucault discusses, among many other things, AristotlesMetaphysics,

the Sophists, HomersIliad, Hesiod, justice and injustice, agrarian crises, the role of the army,

money, law and economy in ancient Greece, Oedipus and Nietzsche. The reading ofOedipus, which

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is explicitly opposed to Freuds sexual reading, is concerned with the history and politics of truth

and knowledge. As Defert perceptively notes, the reading ofOedipus sits in relation to the rest of

the course rather as the discussion of VelasquezsLas Meninas does to The Order of Things: it

illustrates the key themes being discussed through a reading of a work of art.

Another key element of the course, and one that is likely to generate much interest, is the material

on Nietzsche. Despite Foucaults oft-cited interest in Nietzsche, only a couple of pieces on him

were ever published. The most sustained is the Nietzsche, Genealogy, Historypiece published in1971. Here Foucault develops different themes, especially concerning the history of truth, though

there are moments where related issues emerge. Foucault uses Nietzsche to trace the invention of

knowledge, and the later invention of truth, suggesting that for Nietzsche truth relates to the will

under the form of constraint and domination not liberty but violence (p. 206). He suggests that,

following Nietzsche, and against the warm softness of a phenomenon, we must develop the

murderous tenacity of knowledge (p. 198). His reading is influenced by works across Nietzsches

career, especially early manuscripts on truth and The Birth of Tragedy, rather than just On the

Genealogy of Morality.

One of the things that is striking about the course is that here we find a Foucault who is deeply

engaged with Greek thought. This alone should act as a correction to those who thought his turn tothe Greeks was a late phase in his work. It should also be noted that here the project of genealogy is

very clearly a complementary analysis to that of archaeology, rather than its replacement, and that

genealogy is first brought to bear on knowledge, then truth, and only subsequently to concerns with

power. Yet while the discussions of knowledge and truth in themselves are important, it is likely

their links to the question of power that will prove the most interesting for readers.

Foucault is already beginning to sketch out the themes that will occupy him for the rest of his

career. While there is no overlap of material withDiscipline and Punish and the volumes of the

History of Sexuality, there are very many connected themes. Foucault is interested, for example,

with the relation between truth and torture [la supplice]; the complicated interrelations between the

exercise of power, the construction of knowledge, and the constitution of truth that we find inmechanisms of confession; and the way structures of knowledge allow, enable and constrain the

exercise of power.

Yet it not simply that in this course the theme of power emerges and takes a central role in his

thought, but that the very transition Foucault will find towards the end of the classical age is

paralleled in Greek thought and politics. Foucault is forging his conceptual vocabulary through an

analysis of the Greeks, but also in looking at their political transformations. He suggests, for

instance, that in the archaic period knowledge is found naturally located in the hands of

functionaries: knowledge is a state service and a political instrument. It follows that its character is

necessarily secret. It can neither circulate nor spread. It is linked directly to the possession of

power (p. 113); but that the justice-truth link and the knowledge-power break are never

definitively acquired; they remain continually in question (p. 115).

It is in the analysis of juridical and political practices in ancient Greece that perhaps the most

striking analyses are found. These include the management of agrarian crises, particularly in terms

of fragmented lands and the legacy of colonization; advances in the army, especially in terms of the

developments of mining techniques and the use of iron, and the new types of inter-city and intra-

city warfare; the emergence of a new class of artisans; and wider political transformations including

production, slavery, and the development of urban civilization. There is an important discussion of

the development of written legal codes (nomos) and money as an institution, not simply of

exchange, but of distribution, allocation and social correction. Foucault also spends a good deal of

time discussing popular power, as the reverse side of the plans of Plato, Aristotle and the legislators.

As well as the conceptual aspects of this discussion, it is important to link this to Foucaults ownactivism, especially the foundation of the Groupe dinformation sur les prisons at the same time.

Their manifesto was read by Foucault on 8th February 1971; about midway through the delivery of

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this course.

In some of the most striking passages of the course, Foucault suggests how the Greek statesman

Solon was crucial to the transition to the Greek polis, a political community where the citizens as a

whole share power, and where that power is exercised through them all (p. 153). In a passage

linking themes across Foucaults career, he declares it is there that can be mapped the place of a

knowing and neutral [connaissant et neutre] subject, the form of an unveiled truth and the content of

a knowledge [savoir] which is no longer magically linked to the repetition of an event but to thediscovery and maintenance of an order (p. 157). Perhaps most interestingly, Foucault suggests that

the transition effectuated by Solon means that power is no longer exclusively held by someone;

no longer universally endured by others; and no longer concentrated in time and space in ritual

gestures, words, commands or instances (p. 153). Just as Foucault would argue for a time two

millennia later, power should not be understood as a top-down model of domination, concentrated

in a single source and exercised over those who do not have it; and it is not focused in spectacular

bursts or displays but operates through what he would later call a micro-physics of small actions

and continual operations.

It is clear from this course that Foucaults analysis of power develops out of his work on

knowledge; is theoretically enriched by his engagement with Nietzsche; and is born out of hisreading of the Greeks. While the first two claims were evident to all careful readers of his work; it is

in the last of these that the courses biggest surprises are to be found. As the back cover of the

French edition suggests, we can no longer read him as before.