Foucault on Freedom and Truth

Abstract

Foucault disconcerts.In a number of ways, perhaps.But the way I want to examine is this: certain of Foucault's most interesting historical analyses, while they are highly original, seem to lie along already familiar lines of critical thought.That is, they seem to offer an insight into what has happened, and into what we have become, which at the same time offers a critique, and hence some notion of a good unrealized or repressed in history, which we therefore understand better how to rescue.But Foucault himself repudiates this suggestion.He dashes the hope, if we had one, that there is some good we can affirm, as a result of the understanding these analyses give us.And by the same token, he seems to raise a question whe ther there is such a thing as a way out.This is rather paradoxical, because Foucault's analyses seem to bring evils to ligh_t; and yet he wants to distance himself from the suggestion which would seem inescapably to follow, that the negation or overcoming of these evils promotes a good.More specifically, Foucault's analyses, as we shall see in greater detail, tum a great deal on power/ domination, and on disguise/ illusion.He lays bare a modem system of power, waich is both more all-penetrating and much more insidious than previous forms.Its strength lies partly in the fact that it is not seen as power, but as science, or fulfilment, even 'liberation '.Foucault's work is thus partly an unmasking.You would think that implicit in all this was the notion of two goods which need rescuing and which the analyses help to rescue: freedom and truth; two goods which would be deeply linked granted the fact that the negation of one (domination) makes essential use of the negation of the other (disguise).We would be back on familiar terrain, with an old Enlightenmentinspired combination.But Foucault seems to repudiate both.The idea of liberating truth is a profound illusion.There is no truth which can be espoused, defended, rescued against systems of power.On the contrary, each such system defines its own variant of truth.And there is no escape from power into freedom, for such systems of power are co-extensive with human society.We can only step from one to another .

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