Foucault, Oedipus, and Virality

Abstract

Foucault, Oedipus, and Virality Mario Telò (bio) In the first chapter of Foucault's Seminars on Antiquity, Paul Allen Miller focuses on Oedipus as a figure of the interconnections of knowledge, power, and the subject in the lectures that Foucault delivered at the Collège de France between 1979 and 1983—On the Government of the Living and The Government of Self and Others (Foucault 2011b and 2012b). In an extended reading of Oedipus the King in the former, Foucault uses Oedipus to theorize the "relation [that] obtains between the subject, its manifesting or producing truth, and that subject's adherence to a larger institutional structure, which both makes the truth possible and is made possible by the truth—i.e., the polis, the church, a government" (Miller 2021, 18). For Foucault, Oedipal alêthourgia ("truth labor") shows that, to see the truth, we need a care of the self—"we must … undertake practices that make us into a speaking and knowing subject that can recognize the truth" (Miller 2021, 25). This apparent centrality of the "knowing subject" is complicated, as Foucault emphasizes, by the major role afforded in Sophocles' Oedipal alêthourgia to slaves, the subjects to whom the state denies the privileged status of subjectivity. Since, for Foucault, truths in Oedipus the King "can only be accepted … when confirmed by the eyewitness testimony of slaves" (Miller 2021, 37), the Athenian slaves' status as non-citizens and thus, to an extent, non-subjects invites us to problematize the notion of the "knowing subject." Oedipal epistêmê ("knowledge") amounts to a process of expansion—of the individual's cognitive horizons and, apparently, also the social boundaries of who counts as a subject. However, this expansion operates through the pressure of biopolitical subjection—angry threats in Oedipus the King, or, in Athenian historical practice, the torture that extracts truth out of the slave's body.1 Yet a case can also be made that the expansive force of alȇthourgia exceeds and contests the very idea of subjecthood. Oedipal alêthourgia is an "anarchaeology" (Foucault 2012b, 79) because of the fact that an indispensable unknown is entrusted to a slave, whose "negative agency" is located,2 figuratively, in "the shepherd's hut," where Oedipus's destiny "came true or … manifested itself" (Foucault 2012b, 4). For Foucault, this hut is, with an obvious reference to Deleuze and Guattari, the "anti-Oedipus," a space homologous to the secret room of [End Page 383] the emperor Septimius Severus, which nobody had the right to see, a space where "the emperor hid the sky of his death."3 The Oedipal excess that concerns me, however, does not relate to the disastrous consequences of Oedipus's self-discovery,4 but rather to the process of the discovery, the "labor" (ergon) of truth reflected in the form of Sophocles' and Foucault's writing. I see this labor, in Foucauldian terms, as an expenditure driven by the overlapping imperatives of biopower and care of the self—or, we could also say, a continuing spasmodic exertion demanded of the subject by the diachronic metamorphoses of "pastoral power."5 The thesis I want to test is that alêthourgia is Oedipal in that it operates through a virality that turns the epistemic care of the self, in its wearying practice, into a way to get out of oneself. In these pandemic times, Foucault and Oedipus are frequently evoked together as we seek out solutions or just comparanda for our predicament. In 2020, the plague that sets Oedipus the King in motion figured prominently among the antecedents cataloged, for example in blog posts and op-ed pieces, as a kind of genealogical diversion during the unfillable time of the lockdown, an archaeological response, we can say, to the sudden arrival of achrony. In The Virus in the Age of Madness (2020), Bernard-Henri Lévy provocatively cried out, "Come Back, Michel Foucault—We Need You!," referring to the discussion in Discipline and Punish (1977) of the eighteenth-century shift in state policy toward leprosy and plague:6 "Exile to an island or a ghetto on the outskirts of the city, as was the practice with lepers and the insane, gave way...