Foucault's Political Spirituality

Abstract

Recently, while rereading some material in The Essential Works of Foucault, I came upon a passage that pulled me up short and then sent me flying from my English translation to the French original. The passage, from an interview in May, 1978, contains one of Foucault's infamous attempts to sum up his life's work. It starts with the assertion that "since the beginning," Foucault has been asking himself a certain question: "What is history, given that there is continually being produced within it a separation of true and false?"1 He elaborates, then, expanding that question into four sub-questions: (1) "in what sense is the production and transformation of the true/false division characteristic and decisive for our historicity?"; (2) "in what specific ways has this relation operated in Western societies?"; (3) "what historical knowledge is possible of a history that itself produces the true/false distinction on which such knowledge depends?"; and (4) "isn't the most general of political problems the problem of truth?" (QM, 233). The paragraph ends with these extraordinary sentences: "How can one analyze the connection between ways of distinguishing true and false and ways governing oneself and others? The search for a new foundation for each of these practices, in itself and relative to the other, the will to discover a different way of governing oneself through a different way of dividing up true and false-this is what I would call 'political spirituality'" (QM, 233). I find this odd phrase "political spirituality"-which Foucault clearly applies to his own work2-intriguing and suggestive in a number of ways; to it I will devote the balance of this essay. But it was the phrase "search for a new foundation"-a phrase apparently definitive of Foucault's practice of "political spirituality"-that disturbed me enough to send me to the French. A search for foundations seemed utterly antithetical to the general movement of Foucault's work. I found it hard to believe he had ever asserted that his own work was a search for a new foundation for anything at all. As I discovered, the French is fairly opaque. Foucault made the statement more or less off the cuff, and the result is less than perfectly articulate.3 But I was relieved to note the absence of the French nouns for "search" and "foundation," as well as the verb for "to analyze." A less misleading and more helpful translation might be something like this: How to read the relation between ways of distinguishing true and false and ways of governing oneself and others? The will to found each of them ["them" being these practices: (1) distinguishing true and false and (2) governing oneself and other] entirely anew, each by the other (to discover an altogether different division [of true and false] by another manner of governing one-self and governing oneself otherwise by taking another division as point of departure), this is "political spirituality." (DC IV, 30, translation mine) Foucault is not talking about a search for a new foundation but about a transformative activity that creates its own departure points as a means of moving beyond itself. So whatever "political spirituality" is, it is not a search for foundations. To get a sense of what it is, we must read the whole passage in the context of the last several years of Foucault's work, primarily his work in ethics, which is the subject of the rest of this essay.4 By 1978, when Foucault made this statement, he had already explicitly reworked the notion of truth. In an interview in 1976, he said, "'Truth' is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation of statements. 'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power that produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend ita 'regime' of truth."5 Given this understanding of truth, which encompasses the dividing practices separating true from false, its political importance is undeniable, as Foucault had asserted before: "The essential political problem for the intellectual is not to criticize the ideological contents supposedly linked to science, or to ensure that his own scientific practice is accompanied by a correct ideology, but [to] ascertain the possibility of constituting a new politics of truth. …