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Foucault's Political Ethics?

To paraphrase Habermas' question, where can we find the normative foundations of Foucault's work? Less ambitiously: what is the normative framework or quite simply and even more modestly, what are the hints Foucault offers us to develop some kind of ethics – be it personal or political, or both – in his vast and diverse work? There are many meanings that can be ascribed to phrase ‘Foucault's ethics’ and many bases that can serve as a starting point to develop it. I am going to do it in the following way, building the conception from epistemic grounds. I will start from the distinction between two kinds of truth- procedures he makes: the investigation (l’enquête) and the trial (l'épreuve), and argue that the second one is the real basis for Foucault's ethics. I will then connect it to the two types of spirituality he discusses in his latter Collège de France lectures, one before and one after Descartes, the second one being connected with the elision of the subject and the first one (the one Foucault’s ethically interested in) connected with the techniques of the self and the transfiguration of the subject through knowledge in Antiquity. Finally, I will try to give political dimension to Foucault’s ethics by connecting trial and care of the self to parrhesia, as the courage of true speech that is by definition public and political. In this way Foucault’s ethics is given political dimension that ‘flows’ smoothly from congruent epistemic and ethical bases: trial as truth, care of the self as ethics and parrhesia as ethical politics. Finally, following James Miller's lead, these dimensions that together make a passionate (and somewhat mystical) life of philosopher, can be traced in Foucault's own life path, earning him a contested label of the ‘last philosopher’ after Nietzsche.

Foucault ; political ethics ; truth-procedures ; investigation (l’enquête) ; trial (l'épreuve) ; parrhesia

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