On The Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979-1980

MICHEL FOUCAULT

On the Government of the Living

LECTURES AT THE COLLÈGE DE FRANCE

1979–1980

Edited by Michel Senellart

General Editors: François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana

English Series Editor: Arnold I. Davidson

TRANSLATED BY GRAHAM BURCHELL

ON THE GOVERNMENT OF THE LIVING

© Éditions du Seuil/Gallimard 2012, edition established under the direction of François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana, by Michel Senellart. Translation © Graham Burchell, 2014

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First published 2014 by

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CONTENTS

Foreword: François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana

Translator’s note

Course summary

Course context

Index of notions

Index of names

FOREWORD

MICHEL FOUCAULT TAUGHT AT the Collège de France from January 1971 until his death in June 1984 (with the exception of 1977 when he took a sabbatical year). The title of his chair was The History of Systems of Thought.

On the proposal of Jules Vuillemin, the chair was created on 30 November 1969 by the general assembly of the professors of the Collège de France and replaced that of The History of Philosophical Thought held by Jean Hyppolite until his death. The same assembly elected Michel Foucault to the new chair on 12 April 1970.¹ He was 43 years old.

Michel Foucault’s inaugural lecture was delivered on 2 December 1970.² Teaching at the Collège de France is governed by particular rules. Professors must provide 26 hours of teaching a year (with the possibility of a maximum of half this total being given in the form of seminars³). Each year they must present their original research and this obliges them to change the content of their teaching for each course. Courses and seminars are completely open; no enrolment or qualification is required and the professors do not award any qualifications.⁴ In the terminology of the Collège de France, the professors do not have student but only auditors.

Michel Foucault’s courses were held every Wednesday from January to March. The huge audience made up of students, teachers, researchers and the curious, including many who came from outside France, required two amphitheaters of the Collège de France. Foucault often complained about the distance between himself and his public and of how few exchanges the course made possible.⁵ He would have liked a seminar in which real collective work could take place and made a number of attempts to bring this about. In the final years he devoted a long period to answering his auditors’ questions at the end of each course.

This is how Gérard Petitjean, a journalist from Le Nouvel Observateur, described the atmosphere at Foucault’s lectures in 1975:

When Foucault enters the amphitheater, brisk and dynamic like someone who plunges into the water, he steps over bodies to reach his chair, pushes away the cassette recorders so he can put down his papers, removes his jacket, lights a lamp and sets of at full speed. His voice is strong and effective, amplified by the loudspeakers that are the only concession to modernism in a hall that is barely lit by light spread from stucco bowls. The hall has three hundred places and there are five hundred people packed together, filling the smallest free space . . . There is no oratorical effect. It is clear and terribly effective. There is absolutely no concession to improvisation. Foucault has twelve hours each year to explain in a public course the direction taken by his research in the year just ended. So everything is concentrated and he fills the margins like correspondents who have too much to say for the space available to them. At 19.15 Foucault stops. The students rush towards his desk; not to speak to him, but to stop their cassette recorders. There are no questions. In the pushing and shoving Foucault is alone. Foucault remarks: It should be possible to discuss what I have put forward. Sometimes, when it has not been a good lecture, it would need very little, just one question, to put everything straight. However, this question never comes. The group effect in France makes any genuine discussion impossible. And as there is no feedback, the course is theatricalized. My relationship with the people there is like that of an actor or an acrobat. And when I have finished speaking, a sensation of total solitude . . .⁶

Foucault approached his teaching as a researcher: explorations for a future book as well as the opening up of fields of problematization were formulated as an invitation to possible future researchers. This is why the courses at the Collège de France do not duplicate the published books. They are not sketches for the books even though both books and courses share certain themes. They have their own status. They arise from a specific discursive regime within the set of Foucault’s philosophical activities. In particular they set out the program for a genealogy of knowledge/power relations, which are the terms in which he thinks of his work from the beginning of the 1970s, as opposed to the program of an archeology of discursive formations that previously orientated his work.⁷

The course also performed a role in contemporary reality. Those who followed his courses were not only held in thrall by the narrative that unfolded week by week and seduced by the rigorous exposition, they also found a perspective on contemporary reality. Michel Foucault’s art consisted in using history to cut diagonally through contemporary reality. He could speak of Nietzsche or Aristotle, of expert psychiatric opinion or the Christian pastorate, but those who attended his lectures always took from what he said a perspective on the present and contemporary events. Foucault’s specific strength in his courses was the subtle interplay between learned erudition, personal commitment, and work on the event.

With their development and refinement in the 1970s, Foucault’s desk was quickly invaded by cassette recorders. The courses—and some seminars—have thus been preserved.

This edition is based on the words delivered in public by Foucault. It gives a transcription of these words that is as literal as possible.⁸ We would have liked to present it as such. However, the transition from an oral to a written presentation calls for editorial intervention: at the very least it requires the introduction of punctuation and division into paragraphs. Our principle has been always to remain as close as possible to the course actually delivered.

Summaries and repetitions have been removed whenever it seemed to be absolutely necessary. Interrupted sentences have been restored and faulty constructions corrected. Suspension points indicate that the recording is inaudible. When a sentence is obscure there is a conjectural integration or an addition between square brackets. An asterisk directing the reader to the bottom of the page indicates a significant divergence between the notes used by Foucault and the words actually uttered. Quotations have been checked and references to the texts used are indicated. The critical apparatus is limited to the elucidation of obscure points, the explanation of some allusions and the clarification of critical points. To make the lectures easier to read, each lecture is preceded by a brief summary that indicates its principle articulations.

The text of the course is followed by the summary published by the Annuaire du Collège de France. Foucault usually wrote these in June, some time after the end of the course. It was an opportunity for him to pick out retrospectively the intention and objectives of the course. It constitutes the best introduction to the course.

Each volume ends with a context for which the course editors are responsible. It seeks to provide the reader with elements of the biographical, ideological, and political context, situating the course within the published work and providing indications concerning its place within the corpus used in order to facilitate understanding and to avoid misinterpretations that might arise from a neglect of the circumstances in which each course was developed and delivered.

On the Government of the Living, the course delivered in 1980, is edited by Michel Senellart.

A new aspect of Michel Foucault’s œuvre is published with this edition of the Collège de France courses.

Strictly speaking it is not a matter of unpublished work, since this edition reproduces words uttered publicly by Foucault. The written material Foucault used to support his lectures could be highly developed, as this volume attests.

This edition of the Collège de France courses was authorized by Michel Foucault’s heirs who wanted to be able to satisfy the strong demand for their publication, in France as elsewhere, and to do this under indisputably responsible conditions. The editors have tried to be equal to the degree of confidence placed in them.

FRANÇOIS EWALD AND ALESSANDRO FONTANA

1. Michel Foucault concluded a short document drawn up in support of his candidacy with these words: We should undertake the history of systems of thought. Titres et travaux, in Dits et Écrits, 1954–1988 , four volumes, eds. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), vol. 1, p. 846; English translation by Robert Hurley, Candidacy Presentation: Collège de France in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 1: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth , ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997) p. 9.

2. It was published by Gallimard in May 1971 with the title L’Ordre du discours , Paris, 1971. English translation by Ian McLeod, The Order of Discourse, in Robert Young, ed., Untying the Text (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981).

3. This was Foucault’s practice until the start of the 1980s.

4. Within the framework of the Collège de France.

5. In 1976, in the vain hope of reducing the size of the audience, Michel Foucault changed the time of his course from 17.45 to 9.00. See the beginning of the first lecture (7 January 1976) of Il faut défendre la société. Cours au Collège de France, 1976 (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1997); English translation by David Macey, Society Must be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976 (New York: Picador, 2003).

6. Gérard Petitjean, Les Grands Prêtres de l’université française, Le Nouvel Observateur , 7 April 1975.

7. See especially, Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire, in Dits et Écrits , vol. 2, p. 137; English translation by Donald F. Brouchard and Sherry Simon, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology , ed., James Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998), pp. 369–392.

8. We have made use of the recordings made by Gilbert Burlet and Jacques Lagrange in particular. These are deposited in the Collège de France and the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

The French word pénitence may be translated in English as penitence, where perhaps it is the sense of repentance, contrition, remorse, etcetera, that is accentuated, and penance in the narrower sense of the specific penalty or punishment (in the form of ascesis, discipline, mortification, etcetera) given for sins committed, and also in the more general sense of the whole sacrament of penance in the Catholic Church (comprising repentance, confession, the penalty or satisfaction, and remission). In these lectures, the French pénitence translates the Latin paenitentia, which, in early Christian Latin, translates the Greek metanoia (conversion). The most common English word for paenitentia/metanoia in translations of the Bible (King James and Standard Revised versions) and of the early Church Fathers is repentance. I have translated pénitence as either repentance or penance depending on the context. However, the reader should bear in mind that repentance perhaps falls short of the early Church sense of paenitentia/metanoia, and that in these lectures penance does not usually mean penalty or punishment, and, unless explicitly indicated, does not refer to the sacrament of penance.

The French aveu is usually translated into English as confession, but can also be translated as avowal, admission, acknowledgement, etcetera. As Foucault notes in the lecture of 6 February 1980, when used with regard to Christianity, it is usually understood in the modern and religious, sacramental sense of confession (French: confession) as this has existed since the end of the Middle Ages. It is a central theme of these lectures that this form of confession is the result of much more complex, numerous, and rich processes by which Christianity bound individuals to the obligation to manifest their . . . individual truth and that this sense of confession (confession) "seems to have covered over all other forms of confession (aveu)" (p. 103). Hence, aveu, in these lectures, covers a more extensive range of reflexive truth acts than just the modern or sacramental sense of confession. As with the French aveu, no single English word adequately captures the specific generality of this family of practices, and distinctions between these practices cannot be mapped directly onto the distinction in French between aveu and confession. I have translated aveu as confession throughout. In English, the word confession extends over the fields of both aveu and confession in French, but the limitations of the word, and of any other single term with regard to the variety of practices discussed by Foucault, should be kept in mind. It is perhaps worth noting that throughout his lectures at Dartmouth in 1980, About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self,* which were given in English, Foucault used the English confession where the French would have been aveu. Where it has seemed necessary or useful to mark the distinction between aveu and confession, the word being translated is indicated.

The following abbreviations are used in the endnotes.

* About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth (1980), Political Theory, 21/2, May 1993.

9 JANUARY 1980

The hall of justice of Septimius Severus. Comparison with the story of Oedipus. Exercise of power and manifestation of the truth. Alethurgy as pure manifestation of truth. No hegemony without alethurgy. Constant presence of this relation between power and truth up to modern times. Two examples: royal courts, raison d’État, and the witch hunt (Bodin). The project of this year’s course: to develop the notion of government of men by the truth. Shift with regard to the theme of power-knowledge: from the concept of power to that of government (lectures of the two previous years); from the concept of knowledge (savoir) to the problem of the truth. Five ways of conceiving of the relations between exercise of power and manifestation of the truth: the principles of Botero, Quesnay, Saint-Simon, Rosa Luxemburg, and Solzhenitsyn. The narrowness of their perspectives. The relation between government and truth, prior to the birth of a rational governmentality; it is formed at a deeper level than that of useful knowledge.

THE HISTORIAN DIO CASSIUS recounts the following story¹ about the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus,² who, as you all know—well, at any rate, as I know since yesterday—ruled at the end of the second and beginning of the third century, between 193 and 211 I think. Septimius Severus had a palace built³ in which there was, of course, a large ceremonial hall where he granted audience, delivered his judgments, and dispensed justice. On the ceiling of this hall, Septimius Severus had a representation of the star-studded sky painted, which did not represent just any sky, or any stars in no matter what position. What was exactly represented was the sky of his birth; the conjunction of the stars that presided over his birth and so over his destiny. His reasons for having this done are quite clear and explicit and fairly easy to reconstruct. For Septimius Severus the purpose was, of course, that of inscribing his particular and conjunctural judgments within the system of the world and of showing how the logos that presided over this order of the world, and over his birth, was the same logos that organized, founded, and justified his judgments. What he said in a particular circumstance in the world, in a particular kairos, as the Stoics would say, belonged precisely to the same order of things as that fixed once and for all on high. He also wanted to show how his reign was founded by the stars, that it was not an error that he, the roughneck from Leptis Magna, had seized power by force and violence, that it was not by chance or as the result of any human plot that he had seized power, but that he had been called to the position he occupied by the very necessity of the world. His reign, his seizure of power, which could not be founded by the law, was justified once and for all by the stars. Finally, third, it was a matter of showing his, the emperor’s good fortune in advance, and how it was fated, inevitable, inaccessible, and the extent to which it was impossible for anyone, conspirator, rival, or enemy, to seize the throne that the stars had shown was due to him, and which henceforth nothing could overcome. His fortune was good, it was certain, the past indicated this, but for the future too things were definitively sealed. Thus, uncertain and particular actions, a past made of chance and luck, and a future which of course no one could know, but from which some might take advantage to threaten the emperor, were all turned into necessity and had to be seen as a truth on the ceiling of the hall in which he passed judgment. What manifested itself as power here, down below, I was going to say at ground level, could and had to be deciphered in truth in the night sky.

Severus was nevertheless a prudent man, since if he had his astral sky represented on the ceiling of the hall in which he passed judgment, there was however a small patch of this sky that he had not had represented, that he carefully hid, and that was represented only in another room, the emperor’s own, to which only he and no doubt some of his household had access, and this small patch of astral sky, which no one had the right to see, which only the emperor knew, was, of course, what one calls the horoscope in the strict sense, that which enables one to see the hour, this being, of course, the hour of death. Of course, no one had access to the sky of death that fixed the end of the emperor’s destiny, of his good fortune.

The star-studded sky of Septimius Severus, above his justice, is almost obviously the exact opposite of the story of Oedipus.⁴ For after all, the destiny of Oedipus was not above his head in a star-studded sky represented on a ceiling, but attached to his feet, to his steps, to the ground and to the paths going from Thebes to Corinth and from Corinth to Thebes. His destiny was in his feet, under his feet; a destiny known to no one, neither him nor any of his subjects. A destiny that was going to lead him to his ruin, of course, and we should not forget that, at the start of Sophocles’ play, when called upon by the population beset by the plague, we see Oedipus too deliver a solemn judgment. He too says what must be done, and he says: the person whose defilement is responsible for the plague in the city of Thebes must be driven out.⁵ He too, therefore, delivered a judgment, and one that is also inscribed in the inevitability of a destiny. But this inevitability of a destiny, which will take up again and give its meaning to the judgment pronounced by Oedipus, is precisely the trap into which he will fall. And whereas Septimius Severus dispensed his justice and delivered his judgments in such a way as to inscribe them in an absolutely visible order of the world that founded them in right, necessity, and truth, the unfortunate Oedipus delivered a fateful judgment that was inscribed in a destiny entirely shrouded in darkness and ignorance, and that as a result constituted his own trap.

And we might find another—somewhat contrived—analogy in the fact that while a fragment was missing from the sky on the ceiling of the hall where Septimius Severus held audience, there was a fragment of the mystery and destiny of Oedipus that was however not unknown. There was a shepherd who had seen what happened when Oedipus was born and who had seen how Laius was killed. It is this shepherd, hidden away in the countryside, who in the end will be sought out and who will give his testimony. And it is he who will say that Oedipus is the guilty one. So, deep in the countryside of Thebes there was a small piece of the destiny of Oedipus that was known and visible to at least one person. There was something like the equivalent of the Emperor’s private room, but it was the shepherd’s hut. And in this shepherd’s hut Oedipus’s destiny came true or at any rate manifested itself. The emperor hid the sky of his death. The shepherd knew the secret of Oedipus’s birth.

So you see then that the anti-Oedipus, of course, exists. Dio Cassius had already come across it.

You will say these are all somewhat cultural and artificial games, and that if Septimius Severus had represented over his head the star-studded sky that presided over his justice, destiny, and fortune, if he wanted men to read in truth what he did in terms of power in politics, these were only the games of an emperor whose good fortune had gone to his head. After all, it was quite natural for this African soldier who had risen to the summit of the Empire to seek to found in the heavens of a magical-religious necessity a sovereignty that the law, which was just as magical and religious moreover, could not recognize in him. And it was entirely natural for this man fascinated by Oriental cults to try to substitute the magical order of the stars for the reasonable order of the world, for that reasonable order of the world that his last but one predecessor, Marcus Aurelius, wanted to implement in a Stoic government of the Empire.⁶ It was like the magical, oriental, religious echo of what the great Stoic Emperors of the second century wanted to do: govern the Empire only within a manifest order of the world and act in such a way that the government of the Empire be the manifestation in truth of the order of the world.

In fact, if it is true that the individual political situation of Septimius Severus, as well as the climate in which the notion of imperial government was reflected on in the second century, may justify Septimius Severus’s concern to inscribe the exercise of his power in this manifestation of truth and thus justify his abuses of power in terms of the very order of the world, if this climate, this context, this particular conjuncture may justify it, I think it would nevertheless be very difficult to find an example of a power that is exercised without being accompanied, in one way or another, by a manifestation of truth. You will say that everyone knows this, that I am always saying it, regurgitating it, and repeating it. How, in fact, could one govern men without know-how, without knowledge, without being informed, without knowledge of the order of things and the conduct of individuals? In short, how could one govern without knowing what one governs, without knowing those one governs, and without knowing the means of governing both these things and these people? Nevertheless, and this is why I have dwelled somewhat on the example of Septimius Severus, I think the suspicion can and should arise fairly quickly that it is not just and entirely a question of this. In other words, it is not simply utilitarian, I was going to say economic need that enables us to take stock of the phenomenon I have tried to point out, namely the relation between exercise of power and manifestation of the truth.

[First], it seems to me—and here again let’s stick with the example of Septimius Severus—that this truth, the manifestation of which accompanies the exercise of power, goes far beyond knowledge useful for government. After all, what immediate, rational need could Septimius Severus have for those stars that he had represented over his head and the heads of those to whom he dispensed justice? We should not forget that the reign of Septimius Severus was also the period of a number of important jurists, like Ulpianus,⁷ and that juridical knowledge, juridical reflection was far from being absent from Septimius Severus’s own politics.⁸ And beyond the knowledge of jurists like Ulpianus, he needed this supplementary, excessive, I was going to say non-economic manifestation of the truth. Second, what I think should be stressed is that the very way in which this somewhat luxurious, supplementary, excessive, useless truth is manifested does not entirely belong to the order of knowledge, of a formed, accumulated, centralized, and utilized* knowledge. In this example of the star-studded sky we see a kind of pure manifestation of truth: a pure manifestation of the order of the world in its truth, a pure manifestation of the Emperor’s destiny and of the necessity that presides over it, a pure manifestation of the truth on which the prince’s judgments are ultimately founded. We are dealing with a pure, fascinating manifestation whose principal intention is not so much to demonstrate or prove something, or to refute something false, but simply to show, to disclose the truth. In other words, for Septimius Severus it was not a question of procedures for establishing the truth of this or that thesis, such as the legitimacy of his power or the justice of this or that judgment. It was not a question, therefore, of establishing the correctness of what is true as opposed to the false that is refuted and eliminated. Essentially it was a question of making truth itself appear against the background of the unknown, hidden, invisible, and unpredictable. So it was not so much a matter of organizing a knowledge, of the organization of a useful system of knowledge necessary and sufficient for the exercise of government. It was a matter of a ritual of manifestation of the truth maintaining a number of relations with the exercise of power that, even if calculation is not absent from them, certainly cannot be reduced to pure and simple utility, and what I would like to take up again a little is the nature of the relations between this ritual of manifestation of the truth and the exercise of power.

I say ritual of manifestation of the truth because what is involved here is not purely and simply what could be called a more or less rational activity of knowledge. It seems to me that the exercise of power, an example of which we can find in the history of Septimius Severus, is accompanied by a set of verbal or non-verbal procedures, which may thus take the form of recorded information, knowledge, information stored in tables, records, and notes, and which may also take the form of rituals, ceremonies, and various operations of magic, divination, the consultation of oracles, of gods. So what is involved is a set of verbal or non-verbal procedures by which one brings to light—and this may just as well be the sovereign’s individual consciousness as the knowledge (savoir) of his counselors or as public manifestation—something that is asserted or rather laid down as true, whether in contrast, of course, with something false that has been eliminated, disputed, or refuted, or by dragging it out from the hidden, by dispelling what has been forgotten, by warding off the unforeseeable.

So I won’t say simply that the exercise of power presupposes something like a useful and utilizable knowledge in those who [govern].* I shall say that the exercise of power is almost always accompanied by a manifestation of truth understood in this very broad sense. And, looking for a word that corresponds, not to the knowledge useful for those who govern, but to that manifestation of truth correlative to the exercise of power, I found one that is not well-established or recognized, since it has hardly been used but once, and then in a different form, by a Greek grammarian of the third or fourth centuries—well, the experts will correct me—a grammarian called Heraclitus who employs the adjective alēthourgēs for someone who speaks the truth.⁹ Alēthourgēs is the truthful. Consequently, forging the fictional word alēthourgia, alethurgy, from alēthourgēs, we could call alethurgy the manifestation of truth as the set of possible verbal or non-verbal procedures by which one brings to light what is laid down as true as opposed to false, hidden, inexpressible, unforeseeable, or forgotten, and say that there is no exercise of power without something like an alethurgy. Or again—since you know that I love Greek words and that in Greek the exercise of power is called hegemony, although not in the sense we now give this word: hegemony is just the fact of being in the position of leading others, of conducting them, and of conducting, as it were, their conduct—I will say: it is likely that hegemony cannot be exercised without something like an alethurgy. This is to say, in a barbarous and rough way, that what we call knowledge (connaissance), that is to say the production of truth in the consciousness of individuals by logico-experimental procedures, is only one of the possible forms of alethurgy. Science, objective knowledge, is only one of the possible cases of all these forms by which truth may be manifested.

You will say that this is all academic debate and suchlike diversion, for, if we can say, speaking very generally, that for centuries there was no exercise of power, no hegemony, without something like rituals or forms of manifestation of the truth, that there was no hegemony without alethurgy, happily this has now all been brought down to much more effective and rational problems, techniques, and procedures than, for example, the representation of the star-studded sky over the Emperor’s head, and that we now have an exercise of power that is rationalized as art of government, and that this art has given rise [to], or depends upon, a number of bodies of objective knowledge like the knowledge of political economy, of society, of demography, and of a whole series of processes.¹⁰ I entirely agree. Well, I agree a bit, in part. And I am happy [to acknowledge] that the series of phenomena to which I have referred, through the story of Septimius Severus, is a sort of residual aura testifying to a certain archaism in the exercise of power, that all this has now almost disappeared and we have arrived at a rational art of government about which precisely I have spoken in the last two years’ lectures. I would just like to note two things.

First of all, in this as in every other domain, what is marginal and what is residual still has its heuristic value when one examines it closely, and that in this order of things the too much or too little is very often a principle of intelligibility.

Second, no doubt too things have lasted for much longer than one thinks. And if Septimius Severus is fairly representative of, once again, a quite precise context at the end of the second and beginning of the third century, this history of the manifestation of truth, understood in the very broad sense of an alethurgy around the exercise of power, was not dispelled as if by magic, either under the influence of the mistrust that Christianity may have had for this kind of magical practice, or due to the effects of the progress of Western rationality from the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries. We could—I may return to this next week if I have time—refer to a very interesting article by Denise Grodzynski, published in a book edited by Jean-Pierre Vernant entitled Divination et Rationalité,¹¹ on the struggle conducted by the Roman Emperors of the third and fourth centuries against these magical practices and on the way in which there was to some extent an attempt to, as it were, purify the exercise of power of this ambience, [and which shows] clearly all the difficulties encountered and all the political stakes behind this.¹² But, much later, for example in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, we could also [speak about] the princely [and] royal courts of the end of the Middle Ages, of the Renaissance, and still of the seventeenth century, which, as we know, were very important political instruments. We know too what cultural centers,¹³ as it is said, they were. And what does cultural centers [signify], what meaning did it have? Maybe we should say sites of manifestation of the truth rather than just centers of culture. It is quite clear that there were huge, immediately utilitarian reasons for the concern of Renaissance princes to bring together around them a number of activities, forms and bodies of knowledge, practices, and individuals who were what we would call cultural creators or vehicles. It is true that this involved creating a core of competences around the prince precisely enabling him to assert his political power over the old, let’s say feudal or in any case earlier structures.¹⁴ It was also a matter of ensuring a centralization of knowledge at a time when a certain religious and ideological division was in danger of forming an excessively significant counterweight to the prince. In the period of the Reformation and Counter Reformation, it was a matter of being able to control to some extent the violence and intensity of these ideological and religious movements that were more or less imposed on the prince whether he liked it or not.

There is that. But I think the phenomenon of the court also represented something else and that in the court, and in the extraordinary concentration in the court of what we could call cultural activities, there was a sort of pure expenditure of truth or a pure manifestation of truth. Where there is power, where power is necessary, where one wishes to show effectively that this is where the power lies, there must be truth. And where there is no truth, where there is no manifestation of truth, it is because there is no power, or it is too weak, or incapable of being power. Power’s strength is not independent of something like the manifestation of truth that goes far beyond what is merely useful or necessary to govern well. The strengthening of princely power that we see in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries called, of course, for the formation of a whole range of knowledge that could be said to be useful for the art of government, but also for a whole series of rituals, of manifestations of knowledge, from the development of humanist circles to the very strange and constant presence of sorcerers, astrologers, and seers in the entourage of the princes up until the beginning of the seventeenth century. The exercise of princely power, in the sixteenth century as in the time of Septimius Severus, could not dispense with a certain number of these rituals, and it would be interesting to study the character of the seer, sorcerer, and astrologer in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In a sense, raison d’État, some genetic moments of which I tried to reconstruct two years ago,¹⁵ is actually a whole, let’s say utilitarian and calculating reorganization of all the alethurgies peculiar to the exercise of power. It involved the development of a type of knowledge that would be, as it were, internal to and useful for the exercise of power. But the constitution of raison d’État was accompanied by a whole movement that was clearly its negative counterpart: the seers of the royal court must be driven out, the astrologer must be replaced by the kind of counselor who both possessed and invoked the truth, a real minister capable of providing the prince with useful knowledge. The constitution of raison d’État is the reorganization of all those manifestations of truth that were linked to the exercise of power and the organization of the courts.

As a result, we could—if anyone were interested—view the witch hunt at the end of the sixteenth century¹⁶ as not having been purely and simply a phenomenon of the Church’s and so, to an extent, State’s reconquest of a whole stratum of population that, basically, had been only superficially converted to Christianity in the Middle Ages. Of course, this phenomenon is fundamental; I have absolutely no wish to deny it. The witch hunt was indeed a repercussion of the Reformation and Counter Reformation, that is to say, of an acceleration of Christianization, which had been rather slow and superficial in previous centuries. The witch hunt did indeed represent this. But there was also a witch hunt, a drive against seers and astrologers that took place in the higher strata and even in the royal entourage. And the exclusion of the seer from the courts is chronologically contemporary with the latter and with the most intense witch hunts in the lower strata. We should therefore see [here] an as it were forked phenomenon that looked in both directions; in the direction of the prince’s entourage and in the direction of the lower classes. That type of knowledge, that type of manifestation of truth, of production of truth, of alethurgy had to be eliminated both in the lower strata, for a number of reasons, and in the prince’s entourage and court.

We can find here a character who is definitely important, and that is, of course, Bodin. Bodin, whom we know about on account of his République, who was one of the theorists of the new rationality that was to preside over the art of government,¹⁷ also wrote a book on sorcery.¹⁸ Now I know that there are people—their names and nationality are not important—who say: yes, of course, if Bodin does these two things, if he is both theorist of raison d’État and the great caster out of demon-mania, both demonologist and theorist of the State, this is quite simply because nascent capitalism needed labor and witches were also abortionists, it was a question of removing the checks to demography in order to be able to provide capital with the labor it needed in its factories of the nineteenth century. You can see that the argument is not entirely convincing (it is true that I caricature it). But for myself, it would seem more interesting to seek the two registers of Bodin’s thought in the relation there must be between the constitution of a rationality specific to the art of government in the form, let us say, of a State reason in general and, on the other hand, the casting out of that alethurgy that, in the form of demon-mania, but also of divination, occupied a place in the knowledge of princes that raison d’État had to replace. This would certainly be a possible domain of study.¹⁹

So much for the introduction of some of the themes I would like to talk about this year. You can see that broadly it will involve elaborating somewhat the notion of the government of men by the truth. I have spoken a little about this notion in previous years.²⁰ What do I mean by elaborate this notion? It means, of course, something of a slight shift in relation to the now worn and hackneyed theme of knowledge-power. That theme, knowledge-power, was itself only a way of shifting things in relation to a type of analysis in the domain of the history of thought that was more or less organized by, or that revolved around the notion of dominant ideology. So there are two successive shifts if you like: one from the notion of dominant ideology to that of knowledge-power, and now, a second shift from the notion of knowledge-power to the notion of government by the truth.

There is, of course, a difference between these two shifts. If I tried to set the notion of knowledge-power against the notion of dominant ideology it is because I think three objections could be made to the latter. First, it postulated a badly constructed theory, or a theory not constructed at all, of representation. Second, this notion of dominant ideology was pegged, implicitly at least, and moreover without being able to rid itself of it in a clear way, to an opposition of true and false, reality and illusion, scientific and unscientific, rational and irrational. Finally, third, under the word dominant, the notion of dominant ideology chose to overlook all the real mechanisms of subjection and as it were discarded the card, passing it on to another hand, saying: after all, it’s for historians to find out how and why some dominate others in a society. In opposition to this I tried therefore to establish the notions of knowledge and power. The function of the notion of knowledge (savoir) was precisely to clear the field of the opposition between scientific and unscientific, the question of illusion and reality, and the question of true and false. Not so as to say that these oppositions did not have any sense or value—that was not what I wanted to say. I simply wanted to say that with knowledge (savoir) the problem was to be posed in terms of constitutive practices, of practices constitutive of domains of objects and concepts within which the oppositions of scientific and unscientific, true and false, reality and illusion could come into play. As for the notion of power, its main function was to replace the notion of system of dominant representations with the question or field of analysis of the procedures and techniques by which power relations are actually effectuated.

Now, the second shift in relation to this notion of knowledge-power involves getting rid of this in order to try to develop the notion of government by the truth; getting rid of the notion of knowledge-power as we got rid of the notion of dominant ideology. Well, when I say this I am being utterly hypocritical, since it is obvious that one does not get