Lecture on Nietzsche, April 1971

We first generated a list of discussion questions:

•  p. 217 - Foucault wants to use Nietzsche to think a history of truth without relying on truth.  What are the distinctions between "truth," and "truth without truth"?
• p. 209 - Is a Nietzschean/Foucaultian genealogy of knowledge reliant on a rump materialism/biologism?
• What are the various senses of knowledge that Foucault discusses in this chapter?
• What is Foucault attacking here, via Nietzsche?  Particularly, what swatch of political philosophy is Foucault critical of (doesn't seem like just Aristotle)?
• p. 216 - What is the relationship that Foucault posits between violence and knowledge, and violence and error?
• p. 214 - What does it mean that knowledge-connaissance freed from the subject-object relation is knowledge-savoir?  

Subject Headings of Nietzsche Lecture

• I. Invention of Knowledge (202-208)
• II. What is Knowledge Before Truth? (208-214)
• III. The Event of Truth (214-219)
• 1. Will to Truth
• 2. Paradoxes of Will to Truth

We then discussed:

• Nietzsche's claim that knowledge is an invention, that knowledge does not precede itself, this seems to be a direct contradiction of an entire philosophical tradition, from Aristotle to Descartes to Locke.
• Although does Nietzsche contradict himself here when he traces knowledge to biological instincts and need?
• Perhaps Nietzsche's use of need here is an instrumental tool of critique.  And "need" is not just about preservation, but also about "flourishing," "becoming."
• What is knowledge prior to truth?  The need to unveil, to transgress something.  Also the need to preserve and grow.  Only after the invention of these knowledges is ascetic knowledge invented - truth - which suppresses the point of view of the body and erases partialities and limits.
• F says that Nietzsche wanted to put difference between the categories of subject and object, but this seems like a bad metaphor.  The point is that subject and object are the products of knowledge.
• How is Foucault using the term violence here?  In a metaphysical sense?  Physical sense?  Not just physical violence - fisticuffs, etc. - but also psychical violence.
• For N, the will to know is not an expression of knowledge or truth, but - simply - an expression of a will. 
• So F's critique is of any mode of disinterested knowledge.  Nietzsche is a key figure for breaking away from this mode of knowledge.
• Why does Foucault never go "meta"?  Following Nietzsche, likely never saw a particular problem in value claims - unavoidable.

Lectures on the Will to Know 3 Mar, 10 Mar, 17 Mar

NOTE: MEETING NEXT WEEK IS AT NORMAL 2:00-3:30 TIME.

The group began as per usual with questions... Our focus mostly was on Ch. 12 (17 Mar, 1971 lecture)...

1. What is it about writing that enables the shift of truth from effect to cause?  Why writing?  (p. 153)

2. Foucault speaks of 'the individual' on p. 175.  Does this ancient individual anticipate the modern disciplinary individual?  Does Foucault here in 1971 anticipate Foucault in 1975?  Or both?

3. How is death function here (p. 176)?  How does this anticipate later Foucault?

4. How does the discussion of truth in the lectures (p. 187) anticipate some of the later work on the ethics of truth?  Not only in the late ethics, but also in the Psychiatric Power lectures?  And what is the genealogy of truth here?

5. How do we connect the idea of the fictitious place of truth (on which power is founded) from pp. 193 to the earlier discussion of sophism?

6. Foucault develops a genealogical perspective, or at least a description of one, in lecture 12 at the end of the series -- see pp. 194-5.  Is the genealogical approach being described here adequate to the analyses that came before?  Is this supportable?  Were the earlier analyses genealogical, or more structural?  Were they both genealogical and structural(ist)?

7. Foucault ends the lectures with a discussion of four Nietzschean principles (p. 198).  With respect to the principle of exteriority, Foucault says that he will not analyze the text on the basis of the text itself.   Is this adequate to the lectures that preceded?

Discussion then ensued....

1) How does writing effect the shift from effect of discourse to cause of discourse?  Truth as "effect" to truth as "condition" (155).  How does it shift from outcome of struggle to an idea of law/truth/justice as something that makes struggle unnecessary (Aristotle)?  Foucault's claim is not that writing effects this shift all on its own, but is part of a whole network of supports (cf. the quip on p. 150 against Derrida).

2) Why does Foucault shift the next year from the topos of antiquity to that of modernity?  Why abandon the 1971 project on the Greeks?  (Perhaps: it's not the proper object of inquiry for the methodological emphasis on struggle he is trying to develop.)

3) Methodological shifts...

  ... From hermeneutics to genealogy: "I have never tried to analyze the text on the basis of the text itself" (p. 198).  Foucault not against interpretation but rather against interpretation-ism.  How is Foucault moving outside of the text?

This has effects for the terms of the debate between Derrida and Foucault (see Foucault's quip on p. 198 against Derrida -- "get rid of textuality").

Will to Know, Lectures 17 Feb. and 24 Feb., 1971

The group began, as per its custom, with questions

Why the focus on Ancient Greece?  What is the point or even urgency of that particular focus?  One gets the impression that money has its origins in Greek antiquity, but why is Foucault not focusing on emergence of money elsewhere.

What is the relation between will to know and will to truth?  Is Foucault associating justice with truth and knowledge with power?  (See p. 120.)  Are these two different types of wills?  What is the relation between them?

What is Foucault's relation to Marx here?  Why is he sometimes giving Marxist explanations and at other times giving non-Marxist explanations?  Why the invocation of class conflict in one moment (p. 127) and then in the next more non-Marxist modes of inquiry (p. 142 where money is treated non-economically but more ritualistically)?

Discussion ensued... and it went like this...

Why the Greeks and only the Greeks?  Foucault does invoke Eastern sources here ("Asia", p. 118) but he doesn't go into the Asian Empires.  Why doesn't Foucault's genealogy get further back into the status of monetary measure in the East?  Foucault is focused on how the Greeks transformed their inheritance.  Is Foucault's focus here still primarily archaeological?  Is he trying to give a picture of 'Greek society'.  And yet it is proto-genealogical because within that static frame he is trace intra-arche transformations.

Turning to Foucault's discussion of money... We distinguished a few aspects...

Money as simulacrum (140ff.).

• Money is not a "symbol" (that 'points'?) but nor is it a "sign" (that 'represents') of an absent commodity
• Money is a "simulacrum" (that substitutes)

We discussed this and came up with a contemporary example or two.  Do carbon credits function as simulacra (of 'being ethical')?   What about payment for indulgences (for sins to be forgiven)?

Money as measure (142ff.).

• Money as measure enables a truth or establishes a truth (143)
• And this is linked to the production of justice (143)

Money is linked to truth not because it expresses the truth of value (that would be money as representative 'sign') but because it expresses the truth that is linked to justice.  The truth of money is justice.  Or is it a simulacrum of justice?  Yes, if we think of justice in terms of balance, order.  This is exactly the conception of justice Foucault has been tracing, under the heading of dikaion (related to krinein, not to dikazein; see lecture from 10 Feb 1971).

Money is a simulacrum of justice in the sense of dikaion, or a practice of justice that "becomes organization of the world" (110).  Money is a simulacrum of order.  It effects a substitution for order.

This brought us back to Foucault's discussion of justice and truth (and knowledge and power)...

Foucault discusses "two correlative transformations: truth becomes knowledge of things, knowledge shifts from domain of power to the region of justice (119).

Knowledge goes from a secret domain of mastery connoting power to a space that is twofold: it is both a space of truth and it is connected to justice.

Knowledge poses itself as disconnected from power, in become truthful and just, but the connection of knowledge and power remains in the background: "the Western fable has it that the thread of desire and innocence breaks the alliance between this power and this knowledge" (120).