Chapter 4 Foucault, Regimes of Truth and the Making of the Subject Daniele Lorenzini In this chapter,1 I explore the rich and complex articulation between two of the main projects that characterise Michel Foucault’s work in the 1970s and the 1980s: on the one side, the project of a history of truth and, on the other, the project of a genealogy of the modern (Western) subject. From this perspective, the year 1980 is to be considered a crucial turning point, since it is in his lectures at the Collège de France, On the Government of the Living, as well as in those at the University of California, Berkeley and Dartmouth College, About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self, that Foucault explicitly connects and articulates in an original way these two projects. After addressing the meaning and ethico-political value of Foucault’s history of truth, focusing above all on the shape it takes in 1980—namely, a genealogy of a series of ‘regimes of truth’ in Western societies—I offer an analysis of the related project of a genealogy of the modern (Western) subject and more precisely of Foucault’s account of the processes of subjection (assujettissement) and subjectivation (subjectivation) within the Christian and the modern Western regimes of truth. I eventually argue that the essential political and moral issue that Foucault raises is not whether the subject is autonomous or not, but rather whether he or she is willing to become a subject of critique by opposing the governmental mechanisms of power which try to govern him or her within our contemporary regime of truth and striving to invent new ways of living and being. A LITTLE HISTORY OF TRUTH The project of a history of truth, or better, of the relationships between subjectivity and truth in Western societies, underpins more or less explicitly each 63 Cremonesi et al._9781786601049.indb 63 9/7/2016 5:08:45 PM 64 Daniele Lorenzini and all of Foucault’s 13 series of lectures at the Collège de France, starting from his inaugural lecture, The Order of Discourse (Foucault 1981). One of the key moments of such a project is to be found in the ‘little history of truth in general’ that Foucault sketches, in a four-page ‘parenthesis’, at the beginning of the 23 January 1974 lecture of Psychiatric Power, where he distinguishes between two different technologies or ‘series’ of truth in a way that is reminiscent of the theses we also find in Lectures on the Will to Know (Foucault 2013, 31–32). On the one hand, the scientific or epistemological conception of truth, that Foucault calls ‘truth-demonstration’, is characterised by two features. First, the principle of the omnipresence of truth: ‘There is truth everywhere, in every place, and all the time’, since ‘the question of truth can be posed about anything and everything’. Therefore, according to Foucault, ‘For a scientific type of knowledge nothing is too small, trivial, ephemeral, or occasional for the question of truth, nothing too distant or close to hand for us to put the question: what are you in truth?’ (As I show in what follows, in On the Government of the Living this statement acquires a more explicit ethico-political dimension, since Foucault will eventually apply it directly to the subject: it is the subject, indeed, who in Western societies is required to answer the question, ‘Who are you in truth?’) Second, the principle of the (potentially) universal access to the truth: ‘No one is exclusively qualified to state the truth’, because—from the standpoint of the scientific conception of truth— the possibility for the subject to grasp the truth depends on ‘the instruments required to discover it, the categories necessary to think it, and an adequate language for formulating it in propositions’, and not on the ‘mode of being’ of the subject himself or herself (Foucault 2006, 235–36). It is worth noting here that during the first lecture of The Hermeneutics of the Subject, speaking precisely of the problem of the subject’s access to the truth, Foucault traces his famous distinction between ‘philosophy’ (or, to use the language of Psychiatric Power, the ‘philosophico-scientific standpoint of truth’) and ‘spirituality’ on the grounds of the necessity for the subject, in the latter case, to operate a series of transformations on himself or herself. Indeed, spirituality postulates that ‘the truth is never given to the subject by right’ and that therefore he or she must change, shift, become to some extent other than himself or herself in order to have right of access to the truth (Foucault 2005, 15). On the contrary, Foucault argues, ‘The history of truth enters its modern period’ when it is assumed that ‘the condition for the subject’s access to the truth, is knowledge [connaissance] and knowledge alone’ (Foucault 2005, 17)—in other words, when the problem of the subject’s access to the truth comes to be linked to ‘a technology of demonstration’ (Foucault 2006, 236). On the other hand, however, there is a more ancient and ‘completely different standpoint of truth’, which has been ‘gradually pushed aside or covered Cremonesi et al._9781786601049.indb 64 9/7/2016 5:08:45 PM 65 Foucault, Regimes of Truth and the Making of the Subject over’ (Foucault also says ‘colonised’) by the demonstrative technology of truth: a truth which is ‘dispersed, discontinuous, interrupted’, which ‘will only speak or appear from time to time, where it wishes to, in certain places’ and which ‘is not waiting for us, because it is a truth which has its favourable moments, its propitious places, its privileged agents and bearers’. In short, it is a truth that, far from being omnipresent and universally accessible, ‘occurs as an event’ (Foucault 2006, 236–37). What seems to me particularly important to highlight here is that Foucault apparently presents this distinction as an opposition between two series in the Western history of truth: truth-demonstration versus truth-event, ‘truth-sky’ versus ‘truth-thunderbolt’. In the first series, the relationship between the subject and the object is a relationship of knowledge, whereas in the second it is a relationship of ‘shock or clash’, a ‘risky, reversible, warlike relationship’, that is, a ‘relationship of domination and victory, and so not a relationship of knowledge, but one of power’ (Foucault 2006, 237). However, Foucault’s aim is not exactly to retrace the history of truth-power instead of the history of truth-knowledge, as if they were two alternative histories. His objective, clearly inspired by Nietzsche, is rather to show that the second history is a part of the first and that truth-demonstration itself is nothing but one moment or one form of truth-event: I would like to emphasise the truth-thunderbolt against the truth-sky, that is to say, on the one hand, to show how this truth-demonstration, broadly identified in its technology with scientific practice, the present day extent, force and power of which there is absolutely no point in denying, derives in reality from the truthritual, truth-event, truth-strategy, and how truth-knowledge is basically only a region and an aspect, albeit one that has become superabundant and assumed gigantic dimensions, but still an aspect or a modality of truth as event and of the technology of this truth-event. (Foucault 2006, 238) By retracing this history of truth, which has of course both a political and an ethical value, Foucault’s intent is thus to show that scientific demonstration is only a ritual, that the supposedly universal subject of knowledge is only ‘an individual historically qualified according to certain modalities’ and that when we speak about truth we should always pose the problem of its production (and not exactly that of its ‘discovery’). Therefore, Foucault’s history of truth is an ‘archaeology of knowledge’ but also and at the same time a ‘genealogy of knowledge’, since it does not want to suggest that truth is nothing else than power, but rather aims at understanding ‘how truth-knowledge assumed its present, familiar and observable dimensions’ (Foucault 2006, 238–39) as well as at raising the question of the possibility for us today, to conceive and make use of truth differently. In other words, Foucault’s history of truth incites us to think otherwise and transform our common and shared conception of truth: Cremonesi et al._9781786601049.indb 65 9/7/2016 5:08:45 PM 66 Daniele Lorenzini truth is not first and foremost a scientific or epistemological issue, but a political, or better, an ethico-political one. REGIMES OF TRUTH AND THE PRODUCTION OF SUBJECTIVITY Truth is not inscribed in the heart of reality, as an essential and original attribute of it that we simply have to discover; instead, it is always produced in relation to a specific reality, and this production generates a series of effects that Foucault is interested in exploring—paying special attention to the processes of constitution of subjectivity. Starting at least from the first volume of his History of Sexuality and until his last series of lectures at the Collège de France, the main issue Foucault confronts is indeed how, when and why in the history of Western societies truth has been inscribed in the individual, thus giving rise to a peculiar form of subjectivity built on the space of ‘interiority’—a field of thoughts, desires and feelings that the individual is asked to decipher ‘as subjective data which have to be interpreted, which have to be scrutinised, in their roots and in their origins’, in order to discover the truth of himself or herself (Foucault 2015, 68). Indeed, according to Foucault, the (historical) emergence of the obligation to discover the truth of ourselves in ourselves, as well as to manifest it through a discourse of avowal, is nothing but the effect of a series of techniques of power and of the self-inscribed within a regime of truth that digs in ourselves the very space in which it produces the truth we are asked to discover and to manifest. As Foucault writes in The Will to Know: The obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points, it is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, ‘demands’ only to surface; that if it fails to do so, this is because a constraint holds it in place, the violence of a power weights it down, and it can finally be articulated only at the price of a kind of liberation. Confession frees, power reduces to silence; truth does not belong to the order of power, but shares an original affinity with freedom: traditional themes in philosophy, which a ‘political history of truth’ would have to overturn by showing that truth is not by nature free—nor error servile—but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power. (Foucault 1978, 60; translation modified) In his 1980 lectures at the Collège de France, On the Government of the Living, Foucault inaugurates his project of a genealogical investigation of the links between manifestation of truth, government of human beings and constitution of subjectivity—thus explicitly coupling his original project of Cremonesi et al._9781786601049.indb 66 9/7/2016 5:08:45 PM 67 Foucault, Regimes of Truth and the Making of the Subject a history of truth in terms of an archaeology and a genealogy of knowledge with the project of a genealogy of the modern (Western) subject. With a view to carry out this ‘new’ project, he introduces a series of methodological tools which turn out to be crucial in order to answer the following question: why does truth play such a crucial role within the procedures of government of human beings and within the processes by which they are constituted as subjects in our Western societies? In other words, Foucault raises here the problem of the government of human beings through the manifestation of truth in the form of subjectivity: Why and how does the exercise of power in our society, the exercise of power as government of human beings, demand not only acts of obedience and submission, but truth acts in which individuals who are subjects in the power relationship are also subjects as actors, spectator witnesses or objects in manifestation of truth procedures? Why in this great economy of power relations has a regime of truth developed indexed to subjectivity? (Foucault 2014a, 82; translation modified) One of the main philosophical and political issues Foucault wants to raise is that of the contemporary domination of what he calls ‘confessional sciences’ (sciences-aveu). These ‘hybrids’—like psychiatry, psychoanalysis, criminology and so on—rely (paradoxically) on the technologies of both truth-event and truth-demonstration: indeed, the truth they ‘discover’ about the subject is supposed to be universal and objective (like every other scientific truth), but at the same time they promise to the subject nothing less than his or her ‘salvation’ in the lay form of healing (Foucault 1978, 64). It is precisely of this kind of truth, and of the dominant regime of truth in our contemporary Western societies—a regime of truth ‘indexed to subjectivity’ which requires from the individual to say not only ‘here I am, me who obeys’, but in addition ‘this is what I am, me who obeys’ (Foucault 2014a, 82)—that Foucault intends to retrace the genealogy. During the first half of the 6 February 1980 lecture, he discusses at length a concept which is crucial in order to understand the ethico-political value of such a genealogy and its relevance for us today: the concept of regime of truth. Foucault introduces this concept for the first time in 19752 and develops it in his 1976 interview ‘The Political Function of the Intellectual’, where he argues that ‘truth is not outside power, nor deprived of power’, but is, on the contrary, ‘produced by virtue of multiple constraints and it induces regulated effects of power’. He thus defines a regime of truth as the types of discourse [a society] harbours and causes to function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true from false statements, the way in which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures Cremonesi et al._9781786601049.indb 67 9/7/2016 5:08:45 PM 68 Daniele Lorenzini which are valorised for obtaining truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. (Foucault 1977b, 13; translation modified) Therefore, in Foucault’s works of the 1970s, the concept of regime of truth refers to the well-known circularity and essential link he establishes between power and knowledge—since truth is connected ‘by a circular relation to systems of power which produce it and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which redirect it’ (Foucault 1977b, 14; translation modified). In other words, a regime of truth is the strategic field within which truth is produced and becomes a tactical element necessary for the functioning of a number of power relations within a given society. In the first lecture of On the Government of the Living, however, Foucault announces an explicit shift he wants to make with regard to the notion of power/knowledge: he says he would like to get rid of this notion and try to develop instead the notion of ‘government by the truth’. In Security, Territory, Population (Foucault 2007a) and The Birth of Biopolitics (Foucault 2008), he already elaborated the notion of government as a series of mechanisms and procedures intended to conduct the conduct of human beings; hence, his objective in On the Government of the Living is ‘to develop the notion of knowledge in the direction of the problem of the truth’ (Foucault 2014a, 12; see also Foucault 2013, 1–5), or better, in the direction of a genealogy of the relations between autos (the first person, the I) and alethurgy within the ‘history of the truth in the West’ (Foucault 2014a, 49–50). Foucault’s 1980 definition of the concept of regime of truth is thus no longer modelled on the notion of power/knowledge. On the contrary, he explicitly introduces here the dimension of subjectivity, (re)defining a regime of truth as ‘that which determines the obligations of individuals with regard to the procedures of manifestation of truth’ (Foucault 2014a, 93). This narrower and more specific definition highlights the role played by the individual within the procedures of manifestation of truth, since the truth is not creator and holder of the rights it exercises over human beings, of the obligations the latter have towards it, and of the effects they expect from these obligations when and insofar as they are fulfilled. In other words, it is not the truth that so to speak administers its own empire, that judges and sanctions those who obey or disobey it. It is not true that the truth constrains only by truth. (Foucault 2014a, 96) This means that under every argument, every reasoning and every evidence there is always a certain assertion which does not belong to the logicoepistemological realm (that is, to the ‘truth-demonstration’ series), but which is rather a sort of commitment, of profession, and has the following form: ‘If it is true, then I will submit; it is true, therefore I submit.’ And even if in some games of truth it is almost invisible, even if sometimes it goes so Cremonesi et al._9781786601049.indb 68 9/7/2016 5:08:45 PM Foucault, Regimes of Truth and the Making of the Subject 69 much without saying that we hardly notice its presence, this ‘therefore’ that links the ‘it is true’ and the ‘I submit’, thus giving the truth the right to say ‘you are forced to accept me because I am the truth’—this therefore does not arise from the truth itself in its structure and content. Such a ‘you have to’ of the truth is, according to Foucault, a ‘historical-cultural problem’ (Foucault 2014a, 96–97), or better, an ethico-political problem, since the acceptance by the individual of this therefore gives rise to a process of subjection and subjectivation. Indeed, every regime of truth requires the individuals who are implicated in it to engage in a specific self-constitution. For instance, in Descartes’ Meditations, the subject can say, ‘I think, therefore I am’ only if he or she is ‘qualified in a certain way’, that is—according to Foucault—only if he or she is not mad, only if he or she has constituted himself or herself and has been constituted by his or her society as someone who is not mad (Foucault 2014a, 98–99). In short, there is always a specific subject associated with a given regime of truth, a subject who constitutes himself or herself and is constituted by this very regime of truth precisely when (and as long as) he or she accepts the therefore that links the ‘it is true’ and the ‘I submit’. This is why, in 1980, Foucault’s long-term project of a history of truth (in the form of a genealogy of our contemporary regime of truth) comes to be deeply articulated with another project—one that Foucault explicitly describes in his lectures at the University of California, Berkeley and Dartmouth College in terms of a ‘genealogy of the modern [Western] subject’ (Foucault 2015, 21). It is on this project that I would now like to focus, exploring the way in which Foucault analyses the Christian regime of avowal (aveu) as the historical framework within which ‘a relation between the government of human beings and … reflexive truth acts’ (Foucault 2014a, 82) has been constituted—that is to say, as a fundamental piece of the genealogy of the regime of truth indexed to subjectivity that characterises our contemporary Western societies. CRITIQUE, COUNTER-WILL AND THE GENEALOGY OF THE MODERN SUBJECT At the beginning of his 1981 Louvain’s series of lectures Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling, Foucault refers to the famous scene in which the French psychiatrist François Leuret forces—through repeated freezing showers—one of his patients to avow his own mental illness, and thus cures him (Foucault 2014b, 11–12). Even if ‘to make someone suffering from mental illness recognise that he is mad is a very ancient procedure’, based on the idea of the incompatibility between madness and recognition of madness (Foucault 2015, 19–20), Foucault notes that something strange is happening here, since Cremonesi et al._9781786601049.indb 69 9/7/2016 5:08:45 PM 70 Daniele Lorenzini in the mid-eighteenth century the treatment of madness already tried to organise ‘along the same lines as medical practice’, that is, to obey the dominant model of pathological anatomy: the new truth-therapy—in order to discover the truth of the illness—required the doctor to observe the symptoms of the body rather than to listen to the discourse of the patient. Therefore, according to Foucault, behind this scene we can detect the transposition, within psychiatric therapy, of a very old religious and judicial procedure, namely this ‘long history of avowal’, these ‘long-held beliefs in the powers and the effects of “truth-telling” in general and, in particular, of “truth-telling about oneself”’ (Foucault 2014b, 13–14). In his numerous analyses of the practice of avowal, Foucault’s main objective is to study the complex set of relations between subjectivity, truth and power in Western societies and to question the postulate according to which, for one’s own salvation (or in order to be healed), one needs at some point to tell the truth about oneself to someone else. As Foucault puts it in the first volume of his History of Sexuality, confession in Western societies has long been and still is ‘one of the main rituals we rely on for the production of truth’, one that has spread its effects far and wide—in medicine, education, family and love relations and, in general, in almost every circumstance of our everyday life (Foucault 1978, 58). However, we should be careful and avoid the idea that avowal is just a technique imposed on individuals from the outside and whose effects are limited to the production of a certain discourse of truth about a fixed and pre-existing subject. Avowal is of course a technique of power and, potentially, of domination, but, on the one hand, ‘in the strictest sense, an avowal is necessarily free’, since avowal is an engagement (Foucault 2014b, 16), and, on the other, through the procedure of avowal the individual is produced as a subject who bonds himself or herself to the truth he or she avows. Therefore, if one gets rid of the injunction to avow and the mechanisms of power linked to it, one does not finally free one’s own ‘true self’ or ‘nature’, since there is no such thing according to Foucault. In On the Government of the Living, as we have seen, Foucault elaborates on the concept of regime of truth in order to stress the necessary co-implication, in Western societies, of the exercise of power in the form of the government of human beings, on the one hand, and the ‘truth acts’ that they are required to perform, on the other. Hence, Foucault stresses very clearly that the production by an individual of a certain true discourse about himself or herself is also a way for the individual to construct himself or herself as a specific subject—a subject tied to the truth he or she verbalises. This construction, however, can take at least two different forms. It takes the form of a ‘subjection’ (assujettissement) when the individual is required to tell the truth about himself or herself in order for a certain mechanism of power to govern him Cremonesi et al._9781786601049.indb 70 9/7/2016 5:08:45 PM Foucault, Regimes of Truth and the Making of the Subject 71 or her (as in the example of Leuret), but it can also take the form of a ‘subjectivation’ (subjectivation)—a notion that constitutes one of the main cores of Foucault’s work of the 1980s and which refers to the construction of oneself as a subject through a certain set of practices or techniques of the self. More precisely, subjectivation implies two moments: a first, reactive moment, which can be defined as a moment of ‘de-subjection’ (désassujettissement) and consists in resisting and trying to get rid of the mechanisms of power that govern the individual within a certain regime of truth; and a second, creative moment, which is strictly speaking the moment of subjectivation, that is, of the invention of a different form of subjectivity, implying a series of ‘practices of freedom’ and the inauguration of new ways of life (Foucault 1997, 282–83). It is within this framework that it is possible to raise the problem of the practices of resistance vis-à-vis a given regime of truth, and the related issue of the role of the individual’s will in Foucault’s account of the processes of subjection and subjectivation. In his 1978 lectures on Security, Territory, Population, Foucault forges the notion of ‘counter-conduct’ as the correlative of that of conduct (Foucault 2007a, 201). Thanks to these notions, it becomes possible for him to take into account the essential link between ethics and politics, and to highlight the strategic role played by the relationship of oneself to oneself in the government of human beings as well as in the possibility to resist it. Indeed, if to exercise power means to try to conduct the conduct of others, that is to say, to try to ‘structure the possible field of action of others’, freedom constitutes the very ‘condition for the exercise of power’, or better, of this specific form of power that Foucault calls ‘government’: government can only be exercised on free individuals, and only as long as they remain free, that is, as long as they are faced with ‘a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments may be realised’ (Foucault 1982, 789–90; translation modified). Therefore, between the governmental mechanisms of power trying to conduct the individual in a specific way and the possibility he or she has to conduct himself or herself in a different way, the field of his or her freedom is clearly defined by his or her acceptance or refusal to be conducted by this particular mechanism, to let himself or herself be conducted in this specific way. This possibility of refusal constitutes the first, necessary step of a practice of resistance—namely, a counter-conduct. In his 1978 lecture, ‘What Is Critique?’, Foucault elaborates on these ideas and suggests that we should define critique as an ethico-political attitude based on ‘the will not to be governed thusly, like that, by these people, at this price’ (Foucault 2007b, 75). How are we to interpret this formula? During the 12 March 1980 lecture of On the Government of the Living, Foucault raises the problem of obedience in Christian spiritual direction, Cremonesi et al._9781786601049.indb 71 9/7/2016 5:08:45 PM 72 Daniele Lorenzini arguing that the submission of one’s own will to the will of the other does not consist in a ‘transfer of sovereignty’, because in Christian spiritual direction ‘there is no renunciation of will by the individual’ (Foucault 2014a, 229). Although in his analyses of the same issue in Security, Territory, Population it was already implicit that in order ‘to act so that one’s will, as one’s own will, is dead, that is to say so that there is no other will but not to have any will’ (Foucault 2007a, 178), the disciple must want to ‘suppress’ his or her own will, it is only in 1980 that Foucault explicitly claims that Christian spiritual direction requires, as a sine qua non condition, the positive exercise of the disciple’s will. Indeed, in order for the master to govern him or her, to conduct his or her conduct, the disciple’s will must remain intact, since it is essential for the good functioning of the relationship of direction that he or she wants his or her will to be entirely submitted to that of his or her master, who is supposed to tell him or her in every circumstance what he or she must will (Foucault 2014a, 229–30). As a consequence, the link that ties disciple and master is free and voluntary, and the direction itself ‘will last, function and unfold only insofar as the one directed still wants to be directed’, because he or she is ‘always free to cease wanting to be directed’. This ‘game of full freedom, in the acceptance of the bond of direction’, is crucial: Christian spiritual direction does not rely fundamentally on constraint, threat or sanction (Foucault 2014a, 230). The structure of obedience constitutes of course the condition, substratum and effect of Christian spiritual direction, but we should not consider it as a perfectly oiled ‘subjugating machine’. Its force lies in the fact that it constantly rests upon the individuals’ (free) will to be conducted; but this is also its weak spot, because the ‘I want’ which is essential for the good functioning of pastoral government (and of governmentality in general) can never be abolished. Therefore, it can always, at least in principle, shift and become an ‘I do not want anymore’. Therefore, through the notion of critique, Foucault emphasises the importance, in every practice of resistance, of the exercise of what we could call a counter-will, since, in order to break the (governmental) relationship of obedience, the individual must withdraw his or her consent to be conducted like that. To do so, he or she has to contest and detach from the form of subjectivity that these specific governmental techniques—and this specific regime of truth—aim at constituting and imposing on him or her. But contesting the form of subjectivity that is imposed on individuals in order to build an other subjectivity is not an easy task: indeed, if the concrete functioning of governmental mechanisms of power rests on the freedom of individuals, it is also essential to governmentality to produce discourses that ‘neutralise’ this freedom, thus giving individuals the impression that there is no real choice to be made. The different forms of governmental power have in common one Cremonesi et al._9781786601049.indb 72 9/7/2016 5:08:45 PM Foucault, Regimes of Truth and the Making of the Subject 73 crucial feature: they can operate exclusively on the basis of an original consent (‘I want’) which has to be reiterated at every moment by individuals, but they constantly re-inscribe it within the framework of a ‘You must’ aimed at convincing them that this consent is the only possibility they have if they wish to achieve salvation, happiness, well-being and freedom itself. The possibility to say ‘I do not want’ (to be governed, directed, conducted like that), in other words the possibility to withdraw one’s own consent to be governed in this specific way, is thus ‘masked’ from the beginning, presented as inaccessible, or constructed as something essentially non-desirable. Foucault’s history of truth and genealogy of the modern (Western) subject can help us to unmask this governmental ‘trap’, giving us the chance to perceive it and to open the space for the practice of a counter-will and the experimentation of new ways of being ‘subjects’. CONCLUSION Foucault’s concept of regime of truth, then, does not aim at showing that there is no escape from our contemporary regime of truth and the related way of constituting us as subjects; on the contrary, it can be used as a critical tool in order to highlight that our regime of truth is essentially historical and contingent. We are not naturally or necessarily bound to it, or obliged to accept it and to shape our subjectivity and our way of living on it. The idea that the truth—no matter what kind of truth—gives us no choice, that we are forced to submit to it and build our conduct in accordance to it, turns out to be an extremely dangerous ethico-political trap that Foucault can help us to unmask and overcome in the direction of the creation of a new ethics and a new politics whose aim is to criticise the domination of our contemporary regime of truth. As Judith Butler rightly observes, there are two interrelated dimensions in Foucault’s notion of critique: ‘On the one hand, it is a way of refusing subordination to an established authority; on the other hand, it is an obligation to produce or elaborate a self’ (Butler 2009, 787). Thus, Foucault’s notion of critique possesses the same structure as what I have described as a process of subjectivation, or better, they aren’t separate but are the two sides of the same coin. Indeed, subjectivation too implies a reactive moment, which is the moment of de-subjection or counter-conduct, and a creative moment, which consists in the invention of a different form of subjectivity. The tight link that it is possible to establish between critique and subjectivation allows me to conclude by highlighting a crucial point: for Foucault, the essential issue of political and moral thought is not whether the subject is autonomous or not, or how we could give the subject the possibility to exercise his or her Cremonesi et al._9781786601049.indb 73 9/7/2016 5:08:45 PM 74 Daniele Lorenzini autonomous capacity of choosing and acting, because there is no subject outside the processes of subjection and subjectivation. The subject is itself a process, a becoming, and the fundamental question Foucault urges us to pose is whether we are willing to become subjects of critique, thus positively constituting ourselves by opposing the governmental mechanisms of power which try to govern us within our contemporary regime of truth and striving to invent new ways of living (together) and of being subjects. NOTES 1. Several parts or earlier versions of this chapter were given as talks to the workshop ‘Michel Foucault: Self, Government and Regimes of Truth’ at the University of Chicago in 2013, to the international conference ‘Foucault: The Masked Philosopher’ at Bar-Ilan University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2014 and to the seminar ‘Foucault 13/13’ at Columbia University in 2016. I am indebted to Miguel de Beistegui, Arnold Davidson, Béatrice Han-Pile, Bernard Harcourt and Dror Yinon for their insightful comments. 2. See Foucault (1977a, 23), where, however, regime de la vérité is misleadingly translated as ‘system of truth’; see also Foucault (2003, 164). REFERENCES Butler, Judith. 2009. “Critique, Dissent, Disciplinarity.” Critical Inquiry 35: 773–95. Foucault, Michel. 1977a. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, Michel. 1977b. “The Political Function of the Intellectual.” Radical Philosophy 17: 12–14. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel. 1981. “The Order of Discourse.” In Untying the Text: A PostStructuralist Reader, edited by Robert J. C. Young, 48–78. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Foucault, Michel. 1982. “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry 8: 777–95. Foucault, Michel. 1997. “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom.” In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow, 281–301. New York: The New Press. Foucault, Michel. 2003. “Society Must Be Defended:” Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. Edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. New York: Picador. Foucault, Michel. 2005. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982. Edited by Frédéric Gros. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. 2006. Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973– 1974. Edited by Jacques Lagrange. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cremonesi et al._9781786601049.indb 74 9/7/2016 5:08:45 PM Foucault, Regimes of Truth and the Making of the Subject 75 Foucault, Michel. 2007a. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978. Edited by Michel Senellart. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. 2007b. “What Is Critique?” In The Politics of Truth, edited by Sylvère Lotringer, 41–81. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. Edited by Michel Senellart. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. 2013. Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1970–1971. Edited by Daniel Defert. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. 2014a. On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979–1980. Edited by Michel Senellart. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. 2014b. Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice. Edited by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 2015. About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Lectures at Dartmouth College, 1980. Edited by Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Daniele Lorenzini. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Cremonesi et al._9781786601049.indb 75 9/7/2016 5:08:46 PM