Editor: These passages are from Foucault’s original manuscript for “What is critique?” but weren’t included in his presentation to the Société française de Philosophie – the version that was published in 1978 in French and later in two separate English translations in 1996 and 1997. These passages appear in the new edition and translation of “What is Critique?” published in English in 2024.
This quick genealogy of the “critical way,” and its location within the great process of governmentalization, has of course been done with the aim of resituating it within a broader history than simply the Kantian moment, making it something other than the legacy of a particular stream of philosophical thought. But it was also to link it to those elements of religious life that I think have marked it from the beginning:
-Critique as something that [challenges] governmentality (in either its general or particular forms) and its principles, methods, and results, and raises the question of the salvation of each and all: whether salvation means eternal bliss or simply happiness.
-Critique as the suspension of the combined effects of power and truth, by the person who is subjected to it.[…]
– The roots of critique in the history of Christian spirituality also explain why the critical attitude is not content to demonstrate and refute in general. It doesn’t speak to everyone in general, it is addressed to each and all. It tries to establish a general consensus or in any case a community of scholars, scientists, and enlightened minds. It’s not enough for it to say what it has to say for once and for all. It needs to be heard, to find allies, to have converts to its own conversion, to have followers. It works and battles. Or rather, its work is inseparable from a battle against two orders of things: on the one hand, an authority, a tradition, or an abuse of power; on the other, its complement—inertia, blindness, illusion, or cowardice. In short, it is against excess and for awakening.
In a word, critique is the attitude of challenging the government of people understood as the combined effects of truth and power, and this in the form of a battle which, starting as an individual decision, aims at salvation for all.
[…]
There is no owner or theoretician when it comes to critique. The universal and radical critic doesn’t exist. The critic in himself and of himself doesn’t exist. But in the West, every activity of reflection, form of analysis, or knowledge bears within itself the dimension of a possible critique. In any case, it is a dimension that is perceived as necessary, desirable, and useful; but it leaves one wanting, it’s not sufficient in itself and as a result provokes mistrust and, as it happens, critique.
Beloved and despised critique, mocked mockery; its assaults are ceaselessly attacked by those it attacks, because all it does is attack and because its whole existence is about being attacked.
Michel Foucault, “What Is Critique?” & “The Culture of the Self”. Edited by Henri-Paul Fruchaud, Daniele Lorenzini, and Arnold I. Davidson. Translated by Clare O’Farrell, Chicago University Press, 2024, pp.26-7, 21.
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