‘What I am trying to do is the history of the relationship that thought maintains with truth, the history of thought insofar as it is thought about the truth. All those who say that for me truth doesn’t exist are simple-minded.’ Michel Foucault. (1996) [1984]. The concern for truth. In Foucault Live. collected Interviews, 1961-1984. …
Delacampagne But don’t the public expect the critic to provide them with precise assessments as to the value of a work? Foucault I don’t know whether the public do or do not expect the critic to judge works or authors. Judges were there, I think, before they were able to say what they wanted. It …
Lord knows how many times myths, legends, stories and tales – or anything else we generally consider ‘untrue’ – have been subjected to ethnological study. But after all, isn’t truth-telling also embedded in the dense and complex tissue of ritual? It too has been accompanied by numerous beliefs, and accorded strange powers. So perhaps there …
Philosophy is that which calls into question domination at every level and in every form in which it exists, whether political, economic, sexual, institutional, or what have you. To a certain extent, this critical function of philosophy derives from the Socratic injunction “Take care of yourself,” in other words, “Make freedom your foundation, through the …
‘I don’t think there is actually a sovereign founding subject, a universal form of subject that one might find everywhere. I am very skeptical and very hostile towards this conception of the subject. I think on the contrary, that the subject is constituted through practices of subjection, or, in a more autonomous way, through practices …
‘Showing that scientific demonstration is basically only a ritual, that the supposedly universal subject of knowledge is really only an individual historically qualified according to certain modalities, and that the discovery of truth is really a certain modality of the production of truth; putting what is given as the truth of observation or demonstration back …
‘Now the critique of knowledge I would propose does not in fact consist in denouncing what is continually – I was going to say monotonously – oppressive under reason, for after all, believe me, insanity (déraison) is just as oppressive. Nor would this political critique of knowledge consist in flushing out the presumption of power …
‘What I wanted to do was in the order of philosophy: can one reflect philosophically on the history of knowledge as historical material rather than reflecting on a theory or a philosophy of history. In a rather empirical and clumsy fashion, I envisaged a work as close as possible to that of historians, but in …
‘What is philosophy if not a way of reflecting, not so much on what is true and what is false, as on our relationship to truth? … The movement by which, not without effort and uncertainty, dreams and illusions, one detaches oneself from what is accepted as true and seeks other rules – that is …
‘It seems to me that the philosophical choice confronting us today is the following. We have to opt either for a critical philosophy which appears as an analytical philosophy of truth in general, or for a critical thought which takes the form of an ontology of ourselves, of present reality. It is this latter form …
