On Daniele Lorenzini’s “Critique and Possibilizing Genealogy,” chapter 5 of The Force of Truth: Critique, Genealogy, and Truth-Telling in Michel Foucault
Questions
(p. 109ff) Genealogy’s normative force: in its framework for action, in its we-make, how does genealogy commit us (normatively)?
(p. 109) Game of Truth (genealogy) – Regime of truth (commitment to form)
(p. 38) What does genealogy possibilize that was not previously possible?
(p. 110) Where should we read counter-conduct exemplars (textual and philosophical status)?
Parrhesia – speaking truth to power and its perlocutionary power as ethico-political force. What about instances in genealogy where there is no speech (or silence), non-linguistic forms that also operate as a force of resistance? Also: what about non-disclosive force (disclosive authenticity)?
(p. 118) A “we” without a “they” – can Lorenzini speak about “a counter-hegemonic we” without naming a “hegemonic they”? How are we to understand this commitment which nonetheless remains indeterminate (or, in some structural way, open)?
(p. 112) Insofar as they are normative, the possibilities that genealogy excavates: either no determinacy or they do, but then there is a need to establish continuity between past and present (continuity objection – Smyth) – it is not clear that you can get sufficient continuity out of possibility.
(p. 114ff) Generates, constitutes, incites a “we” – how?
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Lorenzini ends by claiming that Wendy Brown’s objection to Foucault regarding his tacit assumption of the givenness of the desire for freedom can be answered by his account (p. 124). But does it? Can it explain why people are attached to their own subjection?
What is possibilizing? – It involves looking at legacies of resistance or counter-conducts but it is strong: it involves identification and commitment (it commits us to action). It sounds like ethos, like character. It has to do with a practical possibility and not necessarily a metaphysical one.
Parrhesia is a concept specific to the category of pastoral power specifically but Lorenzini uses it to describe aspects or elements that may not be part of that specifically.
Two readings of the commitment and continuity – “they did, we can do it” or “we are them, therefore it's a possibility”.
How is the binding to the commitment or we take place? It seems that it is not psychological but practical. How does action come into play? And are readers committed already and come for guidance or is the commitment produced as one reads?
What could be the mechanism? – People read books and sometimes they supply them with reasons for acting in a certain way. We get a formal identification with the “we” of resistors and we struggle with that “we”. Is it like this? Two further questions: (1) does genealogy do that particularly well or does e.g. literature do it better? And (2) is that the thing that genealogy does well?
Lorenzini has a strong view that genealogy produces the normative force: it “derives its capacity to constitute a concrete framework for action (a transhistorical “we”) allowing genealogy itself to answer the question “Why resist” by generating a sense of ethico-political commitment in its audience” (p. 117).
