Michael Hardt The Militancy of Theory

Critique has become the primary mode of prac-

ticing theory, at least theory conceived as a political intervention, and yet I sense today a growing dissatisfaction with the political capacities of critique. The term critique, of course, covers a wide variety of practices: relatively generic means of fault finding, methods to question the truth of authority, techniques to reveal the figures of power that operate in dominant discourses or ideologies, and even the specific Kantian procedures of investigating the limits of human understanding, reason, or judgment. The differences among these modes of critique are significant, but all of them today face the charge that they are insufficient as political methods insofar as they lack the capacity both to transform the existing structures of power and to create alternative social arrangements. I suspect, in fact, that the persistence of melancholy as a primary affect of much contemporary theory derives from the recognition of this inability of critique to fulfill its transformative promises. And yet such expressions of dissatisfaction with critique generally are not accompanied by propositions of a different practice of theory as political intervention. Our field of theoretical possibilities is so limited, in fact, that the only alternative to critique often

The South Atlantic Quarterly 110:1, Winter 2011 DOI 10.1215/00382876-2010-020 2010 Duke University Press

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seems to be uncritical theory, that is, some method of affirmation of, collaboration with, or accommodation to the existing forms of power. In the very last period of his life, Michel Foucault articulated as an alternative to critique a form of philosophical and political militancy that offers rich possibilities for theory now.1 Foucault was obsessed with Kants brief text, What Is Enlightenment? and he analyzed it in several lectures and interviews. The occasion that interests me primarily here is his lecture at the Collge de France on January 5, 1983, which inaugurated a two-year sequence of courses on the government of self and others, in which Foucault traced the genealogy of truth telling or free, frank speech in ancient Greek thought.2 The situation of this opening lecture with respect to the courses that follow presents a curious juxtaposition. In what way does Kants study of modernity and the Enlightenment introduce the ancient problematic that Foucault investigates in the remainder of the courses? Or, to reverse the question, how do the ancients accomplish the tasks and resolve the problems raised by Kant? On my reading, Kants essay allows Foucault to articulate the limits of critique and to define a new model of theory and the theorist. With Kant, he establishes the role of theory as the exit from minority, a social project aimed at both autonomy and democracy. Against Kant, though, he recognizes critique as an insufficient means to accomplish this project. By a long, circuitous route through ancient Greece, then, he arrives finally at a notion of philosophical and political militancy, beyond critique, which appears to be an adequate means to struggle for autonomy and democracy. Foucaults initial proposition reading Kants essay is that theory is characterized by a specific relation to the present: theory now. In modernity the task of theory is to ask what characterizes our present and our age, and who is the collective subject that belongs to it. Theory, Foucault explains, is a surface of the emergence of a present (Gouvernement, 14). He interprets this task relating to the present and its subject as marking an essential division within not only Kants thought but modern European philosophy as a whole. The major line of Kants work and the conception of critique developed in his central works ask what are the conditions and limits of knowledge. The legacy of this line of Kants thought is represented primarily today, according to Foucault, in the practices of Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy. But there is a minor line in Kant, including this essay on enlightenment, that conceives critique instead as the investigation of our contemporary field of experiences and the conditions of possibility of these experiences. The legacy of this minor line is represented primarily by what

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we call theory. Foucault characterizes this minor line as both an ontology of the present and an ontology of ourselves (ibid., 22). By ontology here Foucault clearly is not referring to an immutable, eternal being, as do conventional conceptions. The ontology of the present and ourselves, of ourselves in the present, can only be a process of becoming. This seemingly paradoxical notion of ontology as process in the present, a being of becoming, is key to Foucaults conception of the potential role of theory and the theorist. The philosophical relation to the present is an active and collective relation, that is, not merely a matter of registering or even evaluating the present but acting on and transforming it. The task of theory is to make the present and thus to delimit or invent the subject of that making, a we characterized not only by our belonging to the present but by our making it. It is not clear yet, though, how Foucault imagines we can accomplish this transformative and constitutive task. The mandate that Kant sets for his present is to exit from minority. The term Kant uses, Unmndigkeit, which is sometimes translated as immaturity, refers to those who are legally underage for certain activities like having sex or buying alcohol. The specific form of minority he has in mind, though, is not necessarily related to age: the minority we must exit is the state in which we do not think or decide for ourselves. In order to understand the process of exiting, Foucault insists, we have to ignore the metaphors of youth or infancy Kant uses to describe this state of minority. Kant refers, for example, to our reliance on a Gngelwagen, a kind of walker, a contraption with wheels and a harness for infants who cannot yet walk on their own. If we were to interpret this state of minority as something like the natural infancy of humanity, then the process of exiting from minority would seem to be natural or predetermined on the model of biological development, as with time a youth passes naturally to adulthood. Unlike the infant, however, we already possess the understanding necessary to exert our majority. We do not need to grow up to gain the powers to think and act for ourselves. They are already latent within us and simply need to be activated. To exit from minority is thus for Kant an injunction: sapere aude!have the courage to activate the means you already possess to think for yourself, to decide for yourself, to achieve autonomy. Kant goes one step further to emphasize that such an exodus is extremely difficult to achieve individually; instead, that public or social subjects should enlighten themselves and exit from minority is much more likely. We should have the courage, then, together to make an exodus from the rule of authority, to throw off our habits of obedience, and to realize our capacities to govern

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ourselves. This is what I take to be the core argument that Foucault finds inspiring in Kants text. This is also what it means to say that theory is characterized by a specific relation to the present. Kants conclusion that his present is defined as not an enlightened age but an age of enlightenment, a project of exodus, indicates not only registering or analyzing the present but also and more importantly making the present and identifying or even constituting the subject that can achieve its autonomy. Such an active process of exodus and constitution is what I understand to be necessary to fulfill Foucaults call for an ontology of the present and an ontology of ourselves. To appreciate the active and constitutive role attributed to theory here, compare it to Foucaults reading of Kants text five years earlier in his lecture published as What Is Critique? In that lecture he identifies Kants call to autonomy and enlightenment with critique or, really, the critical attitude. Foucault conceives the project to exit from minority here as a refusal of authority and an act of insubordination in the face of power and government:
If governmentalization is indeed this movement through which individuals are subjugated in the reality of a social practice through mechanisms of power that adhere to a truth, well, then! I will say that critique is the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its effects of power and question power on its discourses of truth. Well, then!: critique will be the art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability. Critique would essentially ensure the desubjugation of the subject in the context of what we could call, in a word, the politics of truth.3

Foucault ends his lecture by claiming that critique and the exit from minority coincide in a certain decision-making will not to be governed.4 An exchange in the question-answer period reveals that Foucault is not entirely settled on this conclusion. An attentive listener, Jean-Louis Bruch, a Kant scholar, points to an ambiguity in Foucaults presentation. At several points in the lecture he refers to critique in relative terms with formulations such as the art of not being governed quite so much, but in the final sentences he uses an expression that seems to be absolute: the will not to be governed. Foucault is somewhat flustered by the question and responds that he misspoke with his formulation at the end of the lecture, which would imply, he says, a fundamental anarchism and an originary freedom, absolutely and wholeheartedly resistant to any governmentalization. Instead, he meant to present critique in terms of the project not to

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be governed thusly, like that.5 My reading of this error on Foucaults part is indicative of his dissatisfaction with the negative conception of the theoretical project here. I imagine that the relative notions of resistance not being governed in this way or so muchdo not match in his mind the Kantian injunction to autonomy or Foucaults own ambitions. The more heroic-sounding absolute formulation, the will not to be governed, may seem to him a more satisfying closing. Perhaps at the same time that Foucault is promoting critique in this lecture he feels dissatisfied with it for the reasons I cited earlier: its inability either to transform the existing structures of power or to create alternative social forms. Perhaps this critical attitude is too easily compatible with the dictum by Frederick II that Kant cites in his essay: Argue as much as you like and about whatever you like, but obey!6 In any case, it is significant that when Foucault returns to Kants essay in his 1983 lecture he no longer presents the exit from minority in terms of critique but as an ontology of our present and ourselves, which, at least on my reading of those phrases, requires a constitutive project to create an alternative subjectivity and a new world.7 In his 1983 lecture, Foucault also explores another limitation of critique, one that poses a contradiction or paradox within Kants own project. In effect, Foucault develops Kants hint that the project to exit should be not an individual but a social process. Twisting Kants text we might misread the notion of minority here to mean not only a dependent state, as Kant clearly intends it, but also a social minority. (This misreading, although possible in English and French, does not make sense with the German Unmndigheit.) Minority from this perspective refers to the few who can think and act for themselves and thus registers the existing social and political hierarchies. Everyone may possess in some sense the capacities for autonomy, but current social conditions prevent the majority from activating them and require instead their obedience. Exodus thus means a collective project to overturn the existing structures of hierarchy and obedience and render active the thinking and action of all. Linking these two senses of the exit from minority, in other words, conjoins the striving for autonomy with that for democracy. The enlightenment role of intellectuals, as well as political leaders, thus becomes something much more than critique: to destroy their own minority status, or to generalize to others the powers of autonomous thought and action they exercise. Foucault emphasizes the contradictory nature of this task through an inventive reading of a passage in Kants text. Kant gives three examples of how we remain passive and obedient in relation to intellectuals: If I have

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a book to have understanding in place of me, a spiritual advisor to have a conscience for me, a doctor to judge my diet for me, and so on, I need not make any efforts at all.8 The philosopher who writes a book, the pastor who offers moral guidance, and the doctor who gives medical advice often intend to foster the free thinking and action of others. Kants point, though, is that their authority, regardless of their intentions, generates obedience not autonomy in others. Moreover, to emphasize the point dramatically and bring it closer to home, Foucault reads these three everyday examples, the book, the pastor, and the doctor, as references to Kants three critiques. In the example of the book, he explains, the question of understanding [Verstand ] is primarily at stake as it is in Kants Critique of Pure Reason; the pastor treats moral consciousness and moral practice as does Kants Critique of Practical Reason; and, finally (here Foucault admits that his interpretation is a bit more strained), the doctor deals with judgments of how we should live as Kant does, at least in part, in the Critique of Judgment. Reading Kants examples as self-referential in this way makes all the more powerful and biting the paradox of the position of intellectuals in the project of enlightenment. Kants critical project is focused primarily on revealing the limits of our faculties, which determine our legitimate usage of them, but also throughout his work the project for autonomy is referenced, explicitly or implicitly. A central argument of the Critique of Pure Reason, for example, is that, within the limits revealed by the analytic of reason, we have to each, individually, make use of our powers of understanding in an autonomous way, without reference to external authority. And yet the authority of the book has (or can have) the opposite effect: if I have a book to serve as my understanding, Kant explains, I need not exert myself at all. The legitimate usage of understanding, practical reason, and judgment proposed in Kants critiques are all bound by this paradox. Intellectuals and social leaders, even when they preach autonomy, by their authority alone, generate obedience. Kants project of enlightenment or liberation seems at this point to be entirely blocked. Intellectual, social, and political leaders, themselves capable of thinking and acting on their own, are not able to lead others and humanity as a whole out of minority. And why arent they able to do so? Foucault asks rhetorically to explain Kants position. Well, precisely because they began by putting others under their own authority so that these others, thus habituated to the yoke, cannot stand the freedom and the emancipation [affranchissement] that they are given. Those who are used to the yoke, Foucault continues, force the leaders who wanted to liberate

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them to reinstitute the yoke. And consequently, he [Kant] says, it is the law of all revolutionshe writes this in 1784that those who make them fall necessarily under the yoke of those who wanted to liberate them (Gouvernement, 33). The two senses of minority create an impasse. Members of the general population cannot initiate a process of liberation because of their minority in the first sense, that is, their inability to think and act for themselves. Exiting from minority is not spontaneous and requires organization and training. And yet those few who are capable of autonomy cannot lead others out of minority because they themselves are a minority in the second sense, that is, because of the structures of hierarchy and authority that define their social position. In order for us to exit from minority in the first sense, then, to generate the courage to think and act for ourselves, to leave behind the practices of passivity and obedience with respect to authority, we must also, at the same time, exit from minority in the second sense, that is, destroy the social structures of hierarchy and authority that perpetuate obedience. This implies the inevitable failure to achieve a general liberation of not only revolutionary leaders, Foucault believes, but also Enlightenment philosophers like Kant himself. Kants unwillingness or inability to pursue the exodus from minority in this second sense helps explain why in the second half of his essay the project for enlightenment and generalized social autonomy remains stunted. It might appear on first reading that Kant does explain how enlightenment can be achieved socially by dividing public and private such that autonomy is appropriate in the public and obedience in the private, but Foucault argues that Kants public/private division limits the space of autonomy by not only distinguishing between social domains but also designating two modes of using our faculties. Kant maintains that a private use of our faculties, that is, an attitude of obedience, is appropriate for certain groups of people and specific public occupations. We rightly make private use of our faculties, for example, when we act as cogs of an administrative or institutional machine. Writers and intellectuals instead, Kant explains, make public use of their faculties by addressing the universal. The separation of the minority thus reappears, reinforced. Without exiting from minority in the second sense, as social hierarchy, there is no way to exit in the first sense and create a general process toward autonomy. It should not seem paradoxical, then, when Kant couples his plea for autonomy with the mandate to pay your taxes and obey the rule of Frederick, king of Prussia, and the authorities of public order. Foucaults analysis here pushes further the wedge between critique

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and liberation. Critique is not only incapable of the positive project to generate an ontology of ourselves and create a new social world, but it can even serve to obstruct it. The critical project is conducted by a minority: those who have already achieved the autonomy to think and act for themselves or those with superior knowledge reveal the truth that is generally obscured by popular opinion or dominant ideology. One might object, of course, that critique is often (even always?) intended to give others an adequate understanding and thus guide them to autonomy and allow them to think and act on their own, opening the critical standpoint to all or at least to the majority. But this is exactly the fallacy against which Foucault reads Kant here. Even Kants three critiques, which delimit and reveal our powers of reason, understanding, and judgment, do not necessarily lead to our autonomy but can instead serve as obstacles to it. The authority established by critique, following Foucaults argument, is an obstacle to the increased autonomy of those it is aimed to help. Exiting from minority in Kants sense, in other words, must be coupled with exiting from minority in the second sense, as a project of generalized insubordination and liberation that critique cannot accomplish. At this point Foucault has to leave Kant and seek elsewhere a form of philosophical and political practice beyond critique. Indeed, Foucault does leave Kant after this introductory lecture and begins a two-year trajectory through ancient Greek thought, but this juxtaposition begs a series of questions. If theory must not only discover the nature of our present and the task of our present but also constitute the mechanisms and subjects, the we, capable of making this present, then how do Foucaults subsequent courses fulfill this task? If critique is not adequate to this constitutive task, then what alternative model for theory does he propose? My hypothesis is that Foucault maintains the goal derived from Kant through these courses on the Greeksthe project of generalized autonomy or universal liberation, such that all are able and have the courage to think and act for themselvesand that in the place of critique he develops a militant notion of philosophical and political practice to accomplish this. This is not the only argument he pursues in these courses, of course, but it is an important and recurrent thread. In fact the distance of ancient Greece releases Foucault somewhat from the pressures of the present and the contentiousness of the contemporary political terrain. Reading the ancient Greeks allows him to work slowly and eventually to reapproach the problematic from a new perspective. The explicit task Foucault sets himself for these two years is to trace

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in ancient Greek thought the concept of parrhesia, which is most often translated as truth telling or frank, free speech. It becomes clear as the courses proceed, in fact, that he is interested specifically in the relation between parrhesia and democracy. His primary method, as in his other works, is to periodize, distinguishing a first period, roughly the fifth century BCE, in which democracy and truth telling coincide; a second period, centered on the figure of Socrates, in which truth telling and democracy are considered to be incompatible; and a third period in which the ancient Cynics develop a philosophical and political practice that makes truth telling a form of life. I am most interested in this third period, but I need briefly to characterize the first two in order to demonstrate the central questions and the arc of Foucaults thought in these courses. In the first period Foucault immediately finds a virtuous relation between parrhesia and democracy, which seems at first sight to answer the task he set when reading Kant, uniting the two senses of the exit from minority. He reads some of the classic texts of Athenian democracy, such as Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War, in which he focuses on Pericles famous orations, and Euripides plays, especially Ion. The virtuous democratic leader, he finds, is defined as a parrhesiastes, that is, one who has not only the ability to speak the truth, or knowledge of the social or political situation, but also and perhaps more important the courage to risk speaking the truth in public. The ignorant person who speaks politically in public is one figure of a bad democratic leader, but the more significant threat to democracy is the political flatterer or rhetorician who lacks courage and says what people want to hear. Political truth telling is a dangerous act, Foucault explains, especially for the speaker. Unlike performative speech, which aims at a predictable outcome, political parrhesia is an event the results of which are always unknown. As it is for Kant, courage is key here, but now the focus of the injunction shifts from knowing to truth telling: not dare to know but dare to speak the truth politically. And to Foucault, at least, the result seems at first to coincide with democracy. In the context of Pericles orations, for example, political parrhesia is central to democratic government, and in turn, a democracy is the proper terrain of truth telling. Foucault quickly reveals conflicts that emerge within democratic thought and practice, however, even in these classic texts of Athenian democracy. One central conflict he explores poses parrhesia against isegoria, that is, the equal right of all to speak in public. Equality translates quickly here to indifference in contrast to the difference marked by parrhesia: few know

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the truth and even fewer have the courage to speak it in public. Democracy thus requires paradoxically the ascendance of a minority and the establishment of the authority of leaders such as Pericles. Foucault elaborates:
Just because everyone can speak does not mean that everyone can speak the truth. True discourse introduces a difference or, rather, it is tied, both in its conditions and its effects, to a difference: only some can speak the truth. And as soon as only some can speak the truth, when this truth-telling has emerged in the field of democracy, at that moment is produced a difference that is the ascendance of some over others. True discourse and the emergence of true discourse are the very root of the process of governmentality. If democracy can be governed, it is because there is a true discourse. (ibid., 167)

The paradoxical relation that Foucault notes between Kants critical project and his injunction to exit from minority returns here. Just as the book, the pastor, and the doctor in Kants framework, by their own authority, pose obstacles to others thinking and acting for themselves, so too do Pericles orations, by his ascendance over others and the difference his truth telling establishes, conflict with equality and democracy. In one of his many brief asides about contemporary theory, Foucault in the midst of this analysis of the internal conflicts of Athenian democracy attacks the trend of theorists today to focus on the political (designated as masculine in French, le politique) rather than politics (la politique), a trend that has only increased in the decades since Foucaults time. Nothing seems to me more dangerous, he warns, than this famous slippage from politics to the political, which in many contemporary analyses seems to me to serve to mask the problem and the set of specific problems that are those of politics (ibid., 146).9 Usage of the terms in colloquial French is inexact but gives us a first approximation of how Foucault understands the distinction: politics generally refers to the struggles and negotiations of power relations, whereas the political denotes a more removed, philosophical view of structures and relations of power. This corresponds too roughly to how the terms function in current theoretical discussions. In the section of his lecture preceding this passage, Foucault poses the political as the analysis of politeia, including questions of the constitution and organization of the power structure and its legal framework, separate from the terrain of politics, that is, the dynamics of power [puissance] and struggle. Foucault is not saying, of course, that one should not conduct analyses of structures and relations of powerthat is, after all, the primary focus of his major books of the mid-1970s such as Discipline and Punish and the first

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volume of The History of Sexuality. His point, rather, is that such analyses of power must be linked to the political terrain of struggle. Perhaps the passion with which Foucault denounces this dangernothing seems to me more dangerousrelates to the fact that his own studies of power have sometimes been criticized similarly for not engaging sufficiently with the terrain of political struggle. Although his comments in this passage are brief it would be interesting on another occasion to use his provocation as a point of departure for a more extended evaluation of the uses of the political in contemporary theory. In any case, in the context of Foucaults reading of Kant, the political separated from the terrain of political struggle corresponds to the standpoint of critique, whereas, as we will see, politics points toward a militant perspective beyond critique. When Foucault moves from the first to the second period, roughly from the fifth to the fourth century BCE, one might expect him to find a means to reknit the connections between parrhesia and democracy and to solve the conflicts of democracy that had emerged earlier, but his genealogy points in the opposite direction. Parrhesia and democracy become increasingly incompatible. No longer is democracy the privileged site of parrhesia as it had been in the previous period; it is on the contrary the site in which the exercise of parrhesia is most difficult (Courage, 54). For Socrates, who is the central figure of Foucaults analysis in this period, in a democracy where everyone, even the servants and the slaves, can speak freely, truth telling in the positive sense, as the courage to speak the truth, is expelled from society. What seems to fascinate Foucault, in fact, is how Socrates, firmly convinced that Athenian democracy is incompatible with truth telling, shifts the terrain of parrhesia from politics to ethics. Socrates mission, he explains,
is very different in its development, form, and objective from the political parrhesia and the political veridiction about which we have spoken until now. It has another form, another objective. This other objective, in effect, is to make it such that people pay attention [soccupe] to themselves, that each individual pays attention to him- or herself as a reasonable being having a relationship to truth founded on the very being of his or her mind. And that is how we have now a parrhesia on the axis of ethics. (ibid., 79)

Socrates thus preaches the ethical mandate not only to know yourself but also to speak the truth to and about yourself, which requires just as much courage as political truth telling. At this point in the genealogy, it seems as though we are even fur-

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ther than when we started from a project to exit from minority as a general social process of liberation. From the political and democratic terrain of Pericles Athens, we have retreated to an ethics of individual knowledge and care in Socrates. On Foucaults reading, in fact, for Socrates the individual mandate to exit from minority and become autonomous is not only separate from but seems even to exclude the social and democratic project to exit from minority by destroying hierarchy. But Foucault also finds in Socrates a key that will allow him to return to the terrain of politics with a new perspective. Socrates, Foucault claims, casts the truth and truth telling not only in terms of knowing oneself but also as a mode of life, as living a true life. He calls on us to have the courage not only to speak the truth to and about ourselves but also to live in a way harmonious with that truth. Foucault finds in Socrates the emergence of life, of the mode of life as the object of parrhesia such that we must constantly put our lives to the test to discern what in them is true (ibid., 135). Truth telling for Socrates becomes a mode of life or, rather, a challenge for life. The political importance of this relation between truth telling and life comes into view only in the third period of Foucaults genealogy in which he treats the Cynics, who were active roughly from the first century BCE to the fourth century CE. Few philosophical texts written by the Cynics survive today, but Foucault is interested not primarily in their doctrines but rather in their mode of life. (And we do have many accounts of the lives of the Cynics, which are the texts Foucault primarily reads.) The Cynics deploy the notion of the true life as a militant life aimed at transforming ourselves and the world. The Cynics life, Foucault explains, is a dogs life, as the Greek word kunikos indicates (ibid., 224). The first two aspects of the dogs life demonstrate the Cynics courage to provoke and scandalize society. First, like dogs and other animals, they dare to do in public view what normal people do only when hidden. Second, Cynics are like dogs in their poverty, without protection, exposed to the elements as well as to the scorn of others. Foucault is fascinated by stories, for example, in which Cynics walk naked or even masturbate in public and then chastise those who object as hypocrites because they do the same in private. The Cynics courage of truth consists in their putting themselves in the position to be condemned, rejected, scorned, insulted by people for the manifestation of what people admit or pretend to admit at the level of principles (ibid., 215). The true life of the

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Cynics is a life of absolute exposure. By exposing your life, you both open it up to others and risk it. Foucault does not conceive of the militancy of the Cynics, though, as only the power to scandalize. Two other aspects of the dogs life demonstrate for him the Cynics courage to attack and combat the dominant society. Cynics bark and bite the social institutions and practices they oppose. And finally Cynics are vigilant guard dogs of the true life. Cynic combat, Foucault explains, is a voluntary and constant combat, an explicit aggression that is addressed to humanity in general, to humanity in its real life as horizon or object to change, to change it in its moral attitude (its ethos) but, at the same time and through that, to change it in its habits, conventions, its ways of life (ibid., 258). What Foucault identifies as militant life in the practice of the Cynics is a struggle against the self and for the self, against others and for others. The Cynics may not be the first to conceive of philosophy as militancy, he concludes, but they give it a distinctly open and violent form.10 The Cynics inherit from Socrates the focus on life and the identification of truth telling with the true life, but they change it radically. Rather than the project to know oneself and care for oneself, the Cynics aim, on the one hand, to attack the self in order to make it new, and on the other, they refuse to separate the care of the self from the care of humanity, the government of the self from the government of others, which they seek equally to attack and to transform. The only way to discover such a life, a new life, a life transformed, is to transform our world, to make of this world another world (Courage, 227, 288). The correlate to this militancy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Foucault claims, is revolutionary action and the revolutionary life. The militancy of the Cynics is biopolitical, even though Foucault does not use the term here, insofar as it makes life itself the terrain of political action. To understand this, I make a terminological distinction, which Foucault does not employ consistently, between biopower and biopolitics. The biopower that Foucault begins to analyze in the late 1970s is a power exerted over and through the life of populations, not so much in his estimation a power to kill but a power to create and maintain life through health practices, sexual regulation, genetic experimentation, racial policies, medical paradigms, economic systems, and so forth. The biopolitics he finds in the militancy of the Cynics, however, approaches life in an entirely different way. They struggle to destroy the dominant modes of control and constitute

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not only a new life for themselves and others but also another world. From this perspective biopolitics is not only distinct from biopower but is also the primary weapon with which to attack it.11 Yes, it is anachronistic to cast the terms biopower and biopolitics back into ancient Greece. Foucault is well aware, similarly, that his use of the term militant to describe the life of the Cynics is anachronistic. Such anachronisms should serve to remind us that the object of Foucaults analysis is not really the ancient but the contemporary world. As he emphasizes in his reading of Kant that opens the courses, the object is to theorize the present and arrive at an ontology of ourselves and our world. Ancient Greece provides him, it seems to me, with a means to defamiliarize our present and approach it from a new anglea safe distance from which to explore dangerous contemporary problems. At this point we can step back and see the overall trajectory of Foucaults genealogy, which centers on two primary passages that connect the three periods of ancient Greek thought. First, from the fifth-century political discourse of Pericles and democratic Athens, in which truth telling and democracy seem inseparable, Foucault moves to the fourth-century ethic discourse of Socrates in which truth telling and democracy are completely incompatible and practices of truth instead are sought in the care and knowledge of the self. But the Socratic focus on life prepares the terrain for a second passage in which the Cynics cast the true life as a militant biopolitics aimed at transforming the self and the world, shifting back from ethics to politics. In effect, Foucault traces an arc in the development of parrhesia from politics to ethics and back to politics or, really, biopolitics. Foucault did not intend, however, for this trajectory to end with the Cynics. He ran out of time in this course and died less than two months after the final session. He did not have the opportunity to bring the courses properly to a close and reflect on how the problems he opened earlier had been either resolved or posed differently. Two open issues in particular interest me: democracy and critique. The trajectory of Foucaults genealogy through ancient Greece suggests that in the third stage with the Cynics the problem of democracy would be resolved. A great deal of Foucaults analyses of parrhesia in fifth-century Athens is dedicated to the virtuous relationship between truth telling and democracy. He also devotes central attention to the dangers of democracy for truth telling in his readings of Socrates in the next period. In Foucaults lectures on the Cynics, however, the issue of democracy completely disappears. One could presume that the Cynics militant

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life is somehow meant to be understood as a new form of democracy, one that is compatible with parrhesia as a true life, but in fact Foucault does not find in their thought or practices the construction of any social structures that could sustain a notion of democracy. I think Foucaults political enthusiasm regarding the Cynics becomes clearer if we conceive this as a response not to the problem of democracy but to that of the exit from minority, which Foucault poses in the very first lecture. He is particularly concerned when reading Kant that the authority of intellectual, spiritual, and political leaders poses an obstacle to the exit from minority, that is, the becoming autonomous of others. Perhaps the militant life of the Cynics is so appealing to Foucault in part because the Cynics do not command authority. If anything, in fact, they invite scorn and ridicule. And yet through their attacks on social institutions and conventions they seem to have the power to transvalue all values and create a new life, not only for themselves but also for others. The militant life of the Cynics does not stand above the lives of others, so to speak, as a vanguard organization, but rather seeks to change social life while being a part of it, exposed to others. One would have to go well beyond Foucault, however, to develop this stance of militancy into the structures and practices of a democracy. The militant life of the Cynics might also function for Foucault as an alternative to critique as a primary mode of theoretical and political intervention. This militancy is certainly not a rejection of critique. Foucault recounts how strongly the Cynics attack the dominant social norms and institutions through provocations and scandalous actions. Like dogs, the Cynics bark and bite. But militancy is not only critical. Militancy aims also at constructing a new life and creating or at least prefiguring a new world. Militancy, in other words, has an entirely different relation to governmentality than does critique. Whereas critique aims, as Foucault says, at the art of not being governed so much or in this way, militancy seeks to govern but to govern differently, creating a new life and a new world. This is how we should understand the general title he gives for the two years of courses, The Government of Self and Others. Here is where I think Foucaults analysis of a biopolitical militancy poses the greatest challenge for theory today and presents the most exciting prospects. But Foucault does not go very far to elaborate this new terrain. If we are going to explore it, we will have to do it largely without Foucaults help. One place to start is with the forms of militant research that have emerged in recent years both inside and outside the academy, which understand the locus of theory and the production of knowledge as taking place

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Winter 2011

primarily collectively in social struggles.12 What we need to articulate, in order to live up to Foucaults aspirations, is theory as a form of biopolitical militancy that has the power to struggle against the life we are given and to make a new life, against this world and for another. Beyond critiques ability to limit how much and in what way we are governed, this militancy opens up a new form of governance.
Notes
I am grateful to Robyn Wiegman for a series of extended and productive discussions about the limits of critique and the potential for other modes of theory. Thanks also to Eric Cheyfitz and Grant Farred for helpful comments on this essay. 1 For two very different examples of the recent expressions of dissatisfaction with critique, see Bruno Latour, Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 22548; and Jacques Rancire, The Misadventures of Critical Thought, in The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), 2550. Regarding melancholy as the predominant affect of theory, see Wendy Brown, Resisting Left Melancholy, Boundary 2 26.3 (1999): 1927. 2 Michel Foucault, Le gouvernement de soi et des autres, Cours au Collge de France, 1982 1983 (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 2008), hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as Gouvernement; and Michel Foucault, Le courage de la vrit: Le gouvernement de soi et des autres II, Cours au Collge de France, 1984 (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 2009), hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as Courage. All translations from the French are mine. The first hour of the first lecture of these courses is published as The Art of Telling the Truth, in Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 13948. Foucault gave a series of lectures at Berkeley in fall 1983, between the two Collge de France courses, that summarize his arguments. The Berkeley lectures are published as Fearless Speech (New York: Semiotext(e), 2001). 3 Michel Foucault, What Is Critique? in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvre Lotringer, 2nd ed. (New York: Semiotext(e), 2007), 4181, 47. 4 Ibid., 67. 5 Ibid., 7475. 6 Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? in Political Writings, 2nd ed., ed. H. S. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 5460, 59. 7 See Foucault, What Is Critique? Judith Butler focuses on Foucaults ambiguity between not being governed and not being governed in this way or so much in her excellent reading of this essay, What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucaults Virtue, in The Political, ed. David Ingram (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 21226. I would argue that Foucaults shifting evaluations of critique that we read across these texts between 1978 and 1983 is intimately related to his questioning of the political effectiveness of his own project and his efforts to transform it during the last years of his life. I attempt to demonstrate a political reorientation in Foucaults work by focusing on his final courses in Militant Life, New Left Review, no. 64 (JulyAugust 2010): 15160.

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8 9

10

11

12

Kant, An Answer, 54. A footnote in Foucaults lecture refers as examples of this contemporary trend to essays by Claude Lefort, which were subsequently published in Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Cambridge: Polity, 1988); the essays were originally published in French as Essais sur le politique (Paris: Seuil, 1986). The conceptual matrix to which Foucault is responding is not very different from the one that predominates in U.S. and European political theory today. Lefort develops his notion of the political in relation to Hannah Arendt, who in turn refers to Carl Schmitt. Arendt and Schmitt remain today the primary references for those who mark the distinction between the political and politics. Foucault analyzes two figures that Epictetus used to describe the role of the Cynic that help us fill out a bit more what this militant life consists of. The first is the katascopos, the spy or advance scout on a reconnaissance mission across enemy lines. The militant life of the Cynic is meant to reveal in advance the dangers and possibilities of the future (Courage, 154 and 273). The other is the angel, who is charged with the task of announcing the truth (ibid., 158 and 283). Foucault also proposes as the most fundamental principle of the Cynics the intriguing mandate that the oracle at Delphi gives to Diogenes: Falsify the currency. For a brief analysis of this injunction, see again my Militant Life. On the distinction between biopower and biopolitics, see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 9395. For one proposition of militant research, see MTD Solano and Colectivo Situaciones, Hiptesis 891: Ms All de los Piquetes (Buenos Aires: De mano en mano, 2002).