12 January 1983

Abstract

LAST WEEK I BRIEFLY reminded you of the general project, which is to try to analyze what may be called the focal points or matrices of experience like madness, criminality, and sexuality, and to analyze them according to the correlation of the three axes which constitute these experiences: the formation of forms of knowledge (savoirs), the normativity of behavior, and the constitution of the subject’s modes of being. I also tried to indicate the theoretical shifts involved in this kind of analysis when one is studying the formation of forms of knowledge, the normativity of behavior, and the subject’s modes of being in their correlation. It seems to me in fact that when one tries to delineate the formation of forms of knowledge in this perspective, the analysis should be conducted not so much as the history of bodies of knowledge, but on the basis of and from the point of view of the analysis of discursive practices and forms of veridiction. The first theoretical displacement to be made was this transition, this shift from the development of bodies of knowledge to the analysis of forms of veridiction. The second theo­retical displacement to be carried out consists in freeing oneself from any would-be general Theory of Power (with all the capital letters), or from explanations in terms of Domination in general, when analyzing the normativity of behavior, and in trying instead to bring out the history and analysis of procedures and technologies of governmental­ity. Finally, the third displacement consists, I think, in passing from a theory of the subject, on the basis of which one would try to bring out the different modes of being of subjectivity in their historicity, to the analysis of the modalities and techniques of the relation to self, or again to the history of this pragmatics of the subject in its different forms, some examples of which I tried to give you last year. So: analysis of forms of veridiction; analysis of procedures of governmentality; and analysis of the pragmatics of the subject and techniques of the self. These, then, are the three displacements that I have outlined.

Reminders of method.∽ Definition of the subject to be studied this year.∽ Parrēsia and culture of self.∽Galen’s On the Passions and Errors of the Soul. ∽Parrēsia: difficulty in defining the notion; bibliographical reference points.∽An enduring, plural, and ambiguous notion.∽Plato faced with the tyrant of Syracuse: an exemplary scene of parrēsia.∽The echo of Oedipus.∽Parrēsia versus demonstration, teaching, and discussion.∽The element of risk.