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).