What is Critique?

## Citation

Foucault, Michel. "What is Critique?" *The Politics of Truth*, edited by Sylvere Lotringer, Semiotext(e), 2007, pp. 41-81.

## Summary

"It seems to me that there has been in the modern Western world [...] a certain way of thinking, speaking and acting, a certain relationship to what exists, to what one knows, to what one does, a relationship to society, to culture and also a relationship to others that we could call, say, **the critical attitude**." (42; emphasis added)

"Critique only exists in relation to something other than itself: it is an instrument, a means for a future or a truth that it will not know nor happen to be, it oversees a domain it would want to police and is unable to regulate. All this means that it is a function which is subordinated in relation to what philosophy, science, politics, ethics, law, literature, etc., positively constitute." (42)

"There is soething in critique which is akin to virtue." (43)

Starting in Christian pastoral, the idea that men need to be governed in order to be saved; in the 15th century to the Reformation, an explosion in the art of governing people, twofold - first, in terms of secularization, and second proliferating the art of governing into other areas (parenting, pedagogy, economics, etc.). And in the face of this happening, in the 15th and 16th century, the critical attitude comes to be formed - as negation or in opposition to how to govern/be governed. "I would like to therefore propose, as a very first definition of critique, this general characterization: **the art of not being governed quite so much**." (45, emphasis added) Some related anchoring points:

1. "During a period of time when governing men was essentially a spiritual art, or an essentially religious practice linked to the authority of a Church, to the prescription of a Scripture, not to want to be governed like that essentially meant finding another function for the Scriptures unrelated to the teaching of God. [...] Let us say that critique is biblical, historically."
2. "Not to want to be governed like that also means not wanting to accept these laws because they are unjust because [...] they hide a fundamental illegitimacy. [...] Let us say here critique is basically a legal issue."
3. "'To not to want to be governed' is of course *not* accepting as true [...] what an authority tells you is true, or at least not accepting it because an authority tells you that it is true, but rather accepting it only if one considers valid the reasons for doing so." (46)

"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." (47)

Foucault relates his notion of critique to Kant's *Aufklarung* (Enlightenment), which exists "in relation to a certain minority condition in which humanity was maintained and maintained in an authoritative way. Second, he defined this minority as characterized by a certain incapacity in which humanity was maintained, an incapacity to use its own understanding precisely without something which would be someone else's direction." (47-48)

-Foucault's question, in relation to the *Aufklarung*, how would Kant describe critique? His response: "Critique will be what he is going to say to knowledge: do you know up to what point you can know? Reason as much as you want, but do you really know up to what point you can reason without it becoming dangerous? **Critique will say, in short, that it is not so much a matter of what we are undertaking, more or less courageously, than it is the idea we have of our knowledge and its limits.**" (49) (Compare with Foucault's "Hermeneutics of the Subject" and the *gnothi seauton* imperative to "know theyself") This exercise requires courage, and in turn discovers the principle of autonomy. **"Kant set forth critique's primordial responsibility, to know knowledge."** (50)

Historical developments that help found critique:

1. Positivist science, which "basically had confidence in itself, even when it remained carefully critical of each one of its results"
2. "Development of a State or a state system which justified itself as the reason and deep rationality of history" and which rationalized the economy and soceity
3. "This stitching together of scientific positivism and the development of States, a science of teh State, or a statism, if you like" (50)

After tracing a brief historical trajectory of how the problem of Enlightenment was handed down in the German and French traditions respectively, this leads Foucault to a "reciprocal and inverse problem of that of the [Enlightenment]: how is it that rationalization leads to the furor of power?" (54)

This question becomes one for both history and philosophy, since it takes the subject as its object, asking how we know and have come to be constituted - "the question is being raised: 'what, therefore, am I,' I who belong to this humanity, perhaps to this piece of it, at this point in time, at this instant of humanity which is subjected to the power of truth in general and truths in particular?" (56)

Here, we go full Foucauldian - triangulating power, truth, and the subject. But the focus on the 18th century is not a privileging of it; "I would say instead that it is because we fundamentally want to ask the question, *What is the Aufklarung?* that we encounter the historical scheme of our modernity. The point is not to say that the Greeks of the 5th century are a little like the philosophers of the 18th or that the 12th century was already a kind of Renaissance, but rather **to try to see under what conditions, at the cost of which modifications or generalizations we can apply this question of the *Aufklarung* to any moment in history, that is, the question of the relationships between power, truth and the subject.**" (57) This, for Foucault, is a historical-philosophical framework.

A question, going forward: "What false idea has knowledge gotten of itself and what excessive use has it exposed itself to, to what domination is it therefore linked?" (58-59) This entails a shift of focus from knowledge to power - not trying to find out the truth of a matter, but rather "what are the links, what are the connections that can be identified between mechanisms of coercion and elements of knowledge, what is the interplay of relay and support developed between them, such that a given element of knowledge takes on the effects of power in a given system which it is allocated to a true, probable, uncertain or false element, such that a procedure of coercion acquires the very form and justifications of a rational, calculated, technically efficient element, etc." (59)

-Take that, Neil deGrasse Tyson ! "In school, rarely do we learn how data become facts, how facts become knowledge, and how knowledge becomes wisdom.")

Interrelation of knowledge and power - no knowledge can exist without conforming to the shape permitted by power; no mechanism of power can function if not done so in accordance with the "procedures, instruments, means and objectives which can be validated in more or less coherent systems of knowledge. **It is therefore not a matter of describing what knowledge is and what power is and how one would repress the other or how the other would abuse the one, but rather, a nexus of knowledge-power has to be described so that we can grasp what constitutes the acceptability of a system**, be it the mental health system, the penal system, delinquency, sexuality, etc." (61)

**A method:** "Let us say, roughly, that as opposed to a genesis oriented towards the unity of some principial cause burdened with multiple descendants, what is proposed instead is a ***genealogy***, that is, something that attempts to restore the conditions for the appearance of a singularity born out of multiple determining elements of which it is not the product, but rather the effect." (64)

The ultimate question: "How can the indivisibility of knowledge and power in the context of interactions and multiple strategies induce both singularities, fixed according to their conditions of acceptability, and a field of possibles, of openings, indecisions, reversals and possible dislocations which make them fragile, temporary, and which turn these effects into events, nothing more, nothing less than events? In what way can the effects of coercion characteristic of these positivities not be dissipated by a return to the legitimate destination of knowledge and by a reflection on the transcendental or semi-transcendental that fixes knowledge, but how can they instead be reversed or released from within a concrete strategic field, this concrete strategic field that induced them, starting with this decision not to be governed?" (66)