Three years before his death, Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain that until recently remained almost unknown. These lectures—which focus on the role of avowal, or confession, in the determination of truth and justice—provide the missing link between Foucault’s early work on madness, delinquency, and sexuality and his later explorations of subjectivity in Greek and Roman antiquity.
Ranging broadly from Homer to the twentieth century, Foucault traces the early use of truth-telling in ancient Greece and follows it through to practices of self-examination in monastic times. By the nineteenth century, the avowal of wrongdoing was no longer sufficient to satisfy the call for justice; there remained the question of who the “criminal” was and what formative factors contributed to his wrong-doing. The call for psychiatric expertise marked the birth of the discipline of psychiatry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as its widespread recognition as the foundation of criminology and modern criminal justice.
Published here for the first time, the 1981 lectures have been superbly translated by Stephen W. Sawyer and expertly edited and extensively annotated by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. They are accompanied by two contemporaneous interviews with Foucault in which he elaborates on a number of the key themes. An essential companion to Discipline and Punish, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling will take its place as one of the most significant works of Foucault to appear in decades, and will be necessary reading for all those interested in his thought.
Three years before his death, Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain that until recently remained almost unknown. These lectures—which focus on the role of avowal, or confession, in the determination of truth and justice—provide the missing link between Foucault’s early work on madness, delinquency, and sexuality and his later explorations of subjectivity in Greek and Roman antiquity.
Ranging broadly from Homer to the twentieth century, Foucault traces the early use of truth-telling in ancient Greece and follows it through to practices of self-examination in monastic times. By the nineteenth century, the avowal of wrongdoing was no longer sufficient to satisfy the call for justice; there remained the question of who the “criminal” was and what formative factors contributed to his wrong-doing. The call for psychiatric expertise marked the birth of the discipline of psychiatry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as its widespread recognition as the foundation of criminology and modern criminal justice.
Published here for the first time, the 1981 lectures have been superbly translated by Stephen W. Sawyer and expertly edited and extensively annotated by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. They are accompanied by two contemporaneous interviews with Foucault in which he elaborates on a number of the key themes. An essential companion to Discipline and Punish, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling will take its place as one of the most significant works of Foucault to appear in decades, and will be necessary reading for all those interested in his thought.
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Overview
Three years before his death, Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain that until recently remained almost unknown. These lectures—which focus on the role of avowal, or confession, in the determination of truth and justice—provide the missing link between Foucault’s early work on madness, delinquency, and sexuality and his later explorations of subjectivity in Greek and Roman antiquity.
Ranging broadly from Homer to the twentieth century, Foucault traces the early use of truth-telling in ancient Greece and follows it through to practices of self-examination in monastic times. By the nineteenth century, the avowal of wrongdoing was no longer sufficient to satisfy the call for justice; there remained the question of who the “criminal” was and what formative factors contributed to his wrong-doing. The call for psychiatric expertise marked the birth of the discipline of psychiatry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as its widespread recognition as the foundation of criminology and modern criminal justice.
Published here for the first time, the 1981 lectures have been superbly translated by Stephen W. Sawyer and expertly edited and extensively annotated by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. They are accompanied by two contemporaneous interviews with Foucault in which he elaborates on a number of the key themes. An essential companion to Discipline and Punish, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling will take its place as one of the most significant works of Foucault to appear in decades, and will be necessary reading for all those interested in his thought.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226922089 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 06/04/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 519 KB |
About the Author
“A stunning set of lectures given by Foucault that focus on the history of “avowing” one’s acts and the truth of who one is. Foucault seeks to understand at what point it became important not only to confess to a crime, but to avow one’s act in public. For Foucault, avowal of one’s criminality before an established authority becomes a way of reestablishing that authority, and resisting avowal becomes tantamount to civil disobedience. The political implications of his analysis become especially clear in the interviews included here. This is wonderful and arresting read.”—Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley
Read an Excerpt
Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling
The Function of Avowal in Justice
By Michel Foucault, Fabienne Brion, Bernard E. Harcourt, Stephen W. Sawyer
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2014 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-92208-9
CHAPTER 1
INAUGURAL LECTURE
April 2, 1981
Dr. Leuret, avowal, and the therapeutic operation. • The supposed effects of truth-telling about oneself and of knowledge of the self. • Characteristics of avowal. • The spread of avowal within Western Christian societies: individuals bound to their truth and obligated in their relationships to others through the truth told. • A historical-political problem: how the individual binds himself to his truth and to the power that exerts itself upon him. • A historical-philosophical problem: how individuals are bound by forms of veridiction. • A counterpoint to positivism: a critical philosophy of veridictions. • The problem of "who is being judged" in penal institutions. • Penal practices and technologies of government. •Governing through truth.
In a work on the moral treatment of madness published in 1840, a French psychiatrist by the name of Leuret explained the method he used to treat one of his patients. Treated and cured, he insisted. Mr. A. suffered from delirium of persecution and hallucinations. One morning Leuret led him to the lavatory and stood him under a shower. A lengthy exchange began, which I will summarize. The doctor asked the patient to recount in detail his delirium.
Doctor Leuret: "There is not one word of truth in all of this. What you are saying is sheer madness, and it is because you are mad that we are keeping you at Bicêtre."
The patient: "I don't think I'm mad. I know what I saw and heard."
The doctor: "If you want me to be happy with you, you must obey, because everything I am asking of you is reasonable. Will you promise never to think of your delusions and never to speak of them again?
The patient promised, with some hesitation.
Doctor Leuret: "Up to now, you have been unable to keep your word. I cannot count on your promises. So, you will receive a shower until you avow that everything you have said is pure madness."
The ice-cold shower fell upon his head. The patient admitted that his imaginings were nothing more than madness and that he would make an effort. But he added: I am admitting it "because I am forced to."
Another ice-cold shower.
"Yes sir, everything I told you was sheer madness."
"You were mad then?" asked the doctor.
The patient hesitated: "I don't think so."
A third freezing shower.
"Were you mad?"
The patient: "Is it madness to see and hear?"
"Yes."
So the patient finally stated: "There were no women who insulted me, and no men who persecuted me. All of it is madness."
I will not continue. As you may imagine, by dint of applying shower after shower and through one avowal after another, the patient was finally cured. Since he had recognized that he was mad, he could no longer be so.
This is very clearly an idea that one finds throughout the history of psychiatry. One cannot simultaneously be mad and be conscious of the fact that one is mad; perceiving the truth drives away the delirium. And among all of the therapies that were applied to madness throughout the centuries, one finds thousands of attempts or tricks that were imagined to make the patient aware of his own madness. But Leuret was looking for something else. Or rather, he was looking to obtain this result in a very particular way. He was not at all attempting to persuade the patient. At the deepest level, he did not care in the least what happened inside the patient's consciousness. He wanted a specific act, an affirmation: "I am mad." Avowal was the decisive element in the therapeutic operation.
* * *
I have been struck by this passage by Leuret for some time. Its immediate historical context can be established easily enough. The famous law of 1838 had recently been passed in France establishing cooperation between an administrative power that decided on the obligatory imprisonment of certain mentally ill patients and the medical authority that was granted the responsibility for confirming, treating, and ultimately curing the illness. It is clear that Leuret accorded the patient's "avowal" an important role. The patient himself had to seal the certificate that imprisoned him. Following the doctor and the prefect, the patient was the third voice that confirmed his own madness. At the same time, through this avowal, he gave himself over to a medical action that was to set him free. This was an absolutely logical piece in the system of therapeutic confinement: "I give you the right to lock me up; I am giving you the possibility of healing me." This is the meaning of the avowal of madness: avowal signs the asylum contract.
But Leuret's gesture seemed interesting to me for other reasons as well. This scene took place during a period when the treatment of the mad was being organized along the same lines as medical practice, when medical practice obeyed the dominant model of pathological anatomy: For the doctor to understand the truth of the illness, he needed to listen, not to the words of the patient, but to the symptoms of the body. And yet, compared to this scientific norm, the doctor's demand for an avowal on the part of the patient seems very strange—as if the medico-administrative logic that had made avowal so necessary introduced a practice that was foreign to the demands of psychiatric knowledge and that could grant it authority, as much in the eyes of the administration as in the eyes of medicine.
Indeed, a strange element with a long history inserted itself at this moment. I am not only thinking of the place and the form it had taken in judicial and religious institutions. I am thinking of old meanings or values that remained within it, and the origins of which we know so little. Just behind the avowal sought by Leuret, one feels tightly the connection, so often recognized, between purity and truth-telling (only the pure can tell the truth; an ancient theme that one finds in the necessity of virginity and in the necessity of continence in order to receive the word of God). Thus, one may recognize as well the theme that truth-telling purifies (and that evil is extracted from the body and the soul of the one who purges it through avowal). Or even the idea that to speak the truth about something annuls, erases, or wards off this very truth (my soul is cleansed or whitened if it avows its darkness).
There is, then, a long history of avowal behind this particular case of avowal demanded by Leuret. There are long-held beliefs in the powers and the effects of "truth-telling" in general and, in particular, of "truth-telling about oneself." [...] Yet one thing strikes me as unique and astonishing: Lord knows how many times myths, legends, stories, and tales—or anything else we generally consider "untrue"—have been subjected to ethnological study. But after all, isn't truth-telling also embedded in the dense and complex tissue of ritual? It too has been accompanied by numerous beliefs, and accorded strange powers. So perhaps there is an entire ethnology of truth-telling to be pursued.
But in Leuret's practice, you sense that there is more than the mere weight of such a troubled past. The requirement of avowal also introduced a new problem. While the medicine of the period tended to lay out and consider case by case the symptoms that constituted something like the natural language of illness, while the medical world tended to grant the right to true discourse solely to doctors who analyzed and interpreted the language of symptoms, in this case Leuret introduced between the illness and the doctor the discourse of the patient and the question of what was true and false for the patient. He not only set forth the obligation of the sick patient to tell the truth; he also posed as an essential question for his therapy the relationship of knowledge that the patient had with himself. To ground his practice, establish his therapeutic intervention, and open up the possibility of healing, the doctor needed the patient to formulate a discourse of truth about himself. From Leuret not only to Freud but also to a whole set of practices, it is easy to recognize the vast development which remains with us to this day.
In any case, it is out of this peculiar scene, at the crossroads between a distant tradition and a recent practice, that the idea came to me to study "the obligation of truth-telling about oneself." I will begin by proposing a brief analysis of what may be understood by avowal (an analysis of the "speech act"). Then I will sketch an overview of the historical and philosophical problems that it seems to me tie together the practice of avowal. Finally, I will come to the reason why I am here: the practice of avowal in judicial and especially penal institutions.
* * *
A French dictionary states that avowal is a written or oral declaration through which one admits having said or done something. It adds, as an example, avowing a fault. It seems to me that we can retain from this definition the following general framework; that is, in avowal, the one who speaks affirms something with regard to himself. But as soon as one moves slightly deeper, this definition no longer seems sufficient. On the one hand, it says far too little about the act of avowal itself. To declare, even solemnly or ritually, that one did or said something is not sufficient to constitute an avowal. If I declare that I have a specific profession, it is not an avowal. I may recognize publicly that I have pronounced certain words, but this would not necessarily be an avowal either. Must one turn then toward the content of the affirmation, toward the nature of what has been affirmed, as the example in the dictionary suggests? In that case, if I were a drug trafficker, the declaration of my profession would be an avowal. Or, for example, recognizing something I had said would be an avowal if what I said was a lie. But now, this is no doubt asking too much, and it leads to an overly narrow definition. After all, I may avow my age or my love, a sickness or suffering. In short, avowal is something more than a simple declaration, but it is something other than the declaration of a fault committed by the speaking subject.
Let us return to Leuret and the avowal he hoped to obtain:
1. Leuret was not seeking the avowal of a fault. Perhaps it was something unknown or invisible? No, because the patient was obviously mad. He had demonstrated his madness throughout the interrogation and Leuret was already convinced of it. The avowal did not advance his understanding one bit. What separates an avowal from a declaration is not what separates the unknown from the known, the visible from the invisible, but what might be referred to as a certain cost of enunciation. Avowal consists of passing from the untold to the told, given that the untold had a precise meaning, a particular motive, a great value. Thus, for Mr. A., not to say that he is mad or to refuse this declaration was to give grounds for his request to leave. Or, in another situation, when someone declares his love, it is an avowal if this declaration runs the risk of being costly.
2. But this is not all. There was an important moment in the scene between Leuret and his patient when the latter said: "Fine, yes, because you have forced me, I admit that I am mad"—a statement that was sheer common sense because under the shower, the freezing shower, he was indeed forced. And it is the doctor's response that is rather nonsensical because he retorts: "That is not sufficient for me. I will impose another shower on you so that you recognize in full liberty that you are mad." This is a well-known pretension on the part of a power that seeks to constrain those it forces to be free. And yet, in the strictest sense, an avowal is necessarily free. The inquisitors of the Middle Ages knew this very well: for the declarations pulled out through torture to qualify as an avowal, they had to be renewed after the torture. Why must an avowal, even when it is obtained through force, be considered free in order to take on its moral, juridical, and therapeutic effects? The reason is that avowal is not simply an observation about oneself. It is a sort of engagement, but an engagement of a particular type. It does not obligate one to do such and such a thing. It implies that he who speaks promises to be what he affirms himself to be, precisely because he is just that. There is an inherent redundancy in avowal that appears clearly, for example, when we avow our love for someone. If it were merely a question of observing a de facto situation, the "I love you" would be a pure and simple affirmation. If it were a question of promising one's love, it would be a promise or a vow that could be sincere or not, but it could be neither true nor false. But when the sentence "I love you" functions as an avowal, it is because one passes from the realm of the unspoken to the realm of the spoken by voluntarily constituting oneself as a lover through the affirmation that one loves. One who avows a crime, in a sense, commits to being the author of the crime. By that I mean he not only accepts the responsibility, but he also establishes this acceptance on the fact that he did commit the crime. In an avowal, he who speaks obligates himself to being what he says he is. He obligates himself to being the one who did such and such a thing, who feels such and such a sentiment; and he obligates himself because it is true. Leuret's patient commits to being mad. Not to claim that ... [undecipherable].
3. But this is not yet sufficient to characterize avowal. When Leuret's patient finally says, "Fine, yes, I am mad," he is giving in. He says what he had not wanted to say, but in saying it, he gives himself over to the power the doctor sought to exercise over him. He accepts it. He submits. This is, moreover, what the doctor understands and seeks, who then takes immediate advantage of it to say: "So now you will obey me." In the strictest sense, avowal can only exist within a power relation and the avowal enables the exercise of that power relation over the one who avows. These things are obvious when these power relations are institutionally defined: as in the case of judicial avowal, or confession within the Catholic Church. But it is all the same in relationships that are far more fluid and mobile. For the declaration "I love you" to be an avowal, the other must be able to accept, refuse, break out in laughter, slap the person, or say, "I will speak about this with my husband." In short, avowal incites or reinforces a power relation that exerts itself on the one who avows. This is why all avowals are "costly."
4. Finally, avowal has one characteristic, which is no doubt the most singular and difficult to discern. When Leuret makes his patient avow "I am mad," of course, he does not suppose that he will cease to be mad just because he has said this. Rather, he wants to constrain him into accepting his status as mad. And yet he considers that the mere fact of stating this will modify the relationship between the patient and his madness, his way of being mad, and therefore his illness. In the same way, if the criminal who avows is not judged in the same way as the one whose crime was established by proof and testimony, it is because avowal is supposed to modify his relationship to his crime. To avow one's love means to begin to love in another way; otherwise, it is simply informing the other of one's sentiments. While avowal ties the subject to what he affirms, it also qualifies him differently with regard to what he says: criminal, but perhaps susceptible to repent; in love, but it has now been declared; ill, but already conscious and detached enough from his illness that he himself can work toward his own healing.
Let us say then, to summarize all this, that avowal is a verbal act through which the subject affirms who he is, binds himself to this truth, places himself in a relationship of dependence with regard to another, and modifies at the same time his relationship to himself.
* * *
Avowal is thus a rather strange figure within language games. And yet it has had a deep cultural reach and a considerable institutional legacy in our society since antiquity. Does one find it to the same extent in other societies and civilizations? A proper response would require a much lengthier investigation, so I cannot answer this question. But if we restrict ourselves to "our" societies—to Western Christian societies—it seems to me that, without much in the way of speculation, one could speak of a massive growth of avowal: not necessarily a continuous growth, but by stages and thrusts, with stops and rapid accelerations. This growth tended—and this is undoubtedly one of the traits of our societies—to tie the individual more and more to his truth (I mean, to the obligation to tell the truth about oneself), to make this truth-telling function in one's relationships to others, and to commit oneself through this truth which is told. I do not mean that the modern individual ceases to be bound to the will of the other who commands him; but more and more, this connection overlaps and is tied to a discourse of truth that the subject is led to maintain about himself.
I would like to indicate but a few aspects of this process of growth by sketching out a somewhat presumptuous overview.
First, there was an institutional extension. The number of institutions that called for avowal came to encompass the realms of justice, of medicine, and of psychiatry (personal relations).
Second, there was an extension within the institutions: in Christianity, for example, through penance (not before the fixed confession); then, in the thirteenth century, once a year; and then each month; later, every eight days; and then the examination of one's conscience and the direction of one's conscience.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling by Michel Foucault, Fabienne Brion, Bernard E. Harcourt, Stephen W. Sawyer. Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
Editor’s Preface
INAUGURAL LECTURE
April 2, 1981
Dr. Leuret, avowal, and the therapeutic operation. — The supposed effects of truth-telling on oneself and of knowledge of the self. — Characteristics of avowal. — The spread of avowal within Western Christian societies: individuals bound to their truth and obligated in their relationships to others through the truth told. — A historical-political problem: how the individual binds himself to his truth and to the power that exerts itself upon him. — A historical-philosophical problem: how individuals are bound by forms of veridiction. — A counterpoint to positivism: a critical philosophy of veridictions. — The problem of “who is being judged” in penal institutions. — Penal practices and technologies of government. — Governing through truth.
FIRST LECTURE
April 22, 1981
A political and institutional ethnology of truthful speech. — Truth-telling and speaking justice. — Scope of the study. — Veridiction and jurisdiction in Homer’s Iliad. — The competition between Menelaus and Antilochus. — The object of Antilochus’s avowal. —Justice and agon; agon and truth. —The chariot race and the challenge of the oath, two liturgies of truth, two games designed to represent justly the truth of their respective strengths. — A ritual of commemoration. — Veridiction and jurisdiction in Hesiod’s Works and Days. — Dikazein and krinein. — The oath of the accusers and the co-jurors in dikazein: a game of two parties, the criteria being the social status of the adversaries. — The oath of the judge in krinein: a game of three parties, the criteria being dikaion. — The social weight of adversaries and “the reality of things”: dikaion and alethes.
SECOND LECTURE
April 28, 1981
The representation of law in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex. — A judicial paradigm. — Essential elements of the tragedy. — Two recognitions, three alethurgies. — Veridiction and prophecy. — Veridiction and tyranny. — Veridiction and witnessing avowal. — Grandeur of the parties, freedom to speak, and the effect of truth in the inquiry. — Recognition by the chorus, conditions for recognition by Oedipus. — From truth-telling to saying “I.” — A procedure that conforms to nomos, a veridiction that repeats the word of the prophet and completes that of the man of techne technes.
THIRD LECTURE
April 29, 1981
Hermeneutics of the text and hermeneutics of the self in early Christianity. — Veridiction of the self in pagan antiquity. — The Pythagorean examination of conscience: purification of self and mnemotechnics. — The Stoic examination of conscience: the government of the self and the remembering of codes. — The Stoic expositio animae: medicine of passions and degrees of liberty. — Penance in early Christianity. — The problem of reintegration. — Penance as a status that manifests a particular state. — The meanings of exomologesis. — A life in the form of avowal, an avowal in the form of life. — A ritual of supplication. — Beyond the medical or judicial, the model of the martyr. — Veridiction of the self and mortification of the self. — From the public manifestation of the self as sinner to the verbalization of the self: temptation and illusion.
FOURTH LECTURE
May 6, 1981
Practice of veridiction in monastic institutions of the fourth and fifth centuries: the Apophthegmata patrum and the writings of Cassian. — Monasticism: between the life of penance and philosophical existence. — Characteristics of the direction of conscience in ancient culture. — Characteristics of the direction of conscience in monasticism: an obedience that is continuous, formal, and self-referential; humility, patience, and submission; the inversion of the relationship to verbalization. — Characteristics of the examination of conscience in monasticism: from action to thought. — Mobility of thought and illusion. — Discrimen and discretio: avowal and the origin of thought. — Veridiction of the self, hermeneutics of thought, and the rights-bearing subject.
FIFTH LECTURE
May 13, 1981
Characteristics of exagoreusis in the fourth and fifth centuries. — Renunciation of the self. — Truth of the text and truth of the self. — The separation and adjustment of the hermeneutics of the text and the hermeneutics of the self in Protestantism. — Illusion, evidence, and meaning (Descartes and Locke). — Illusion of the self about the self and the unconscious (Schopenhauer and Freud). — Juridification of avowal in the ecclesiastical tradition from the fourth to the seventh centuries. — Co-penetration of exagoreusis and exomologesis in the first monastic and lay communities. — Characteristics and origins of fixed penance: the monastic model and the model of Germanic law. — Sacramentalization and institutionalization of obligatory confession in the thirteenth century. — Juridification of the relationship between man and God. — Forms and meanings of avowal in the confessio oris.
SIXTH LECTURE
May 20, 1981
Juridification in ecclesiastical and political institutions. — From God as judge to a state of justice: sovereignty and truth. — Avowal, torture, and inquisitorial tests of truth. — Avowal, torture, and legal proofs. — Avowal, sovereign law, sovereign conscience, and punitive engagement. — Auto-veridiction, evidence, and penal dramaturgy. — Hetero-veridiction, examination, and legal psychiatry. — Relating the act to its author: the question of criminal subjectivity in the nineteenth century. — Monomania and the constitution of crime as psychiatric object. — Degeneration and the creation of the criminal as object for social defense. — From responsibility to dangerousness, from the rights-bearing subject to the criminal individual. — The question of criminal subjectivity in the twentieth century. — Hermeneutics of the subject and the meaning of crime for the criminal. — Accident, probability, and indices of criminal risk. — Veridiction of the subject and the breach in the contemporary penal system.
Appendixes
Michel Foucault Interview with André Berten
May 7, 1981
Michel Foucault Interview with Christian Panier and Pierre Watté
May 14, 1981
Michel Foucault Interview with Jean François and John De Wit
May 22, 1981
The Louvain Lectures in Context
Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt
Acknowledgments to the French Edition
Acknowledgments to the English Edition
Index of Notions and Concepts
Index of Proper Names