 Hello, everyone. My name is Mario Tello, and I teach in the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies and Comparative Literature. It's my pleasure to welcome you to this evening's event, a panel discussion of Paul Allen Miller's new book, Foucault's Seminars on Antiquity, Learning to Speak the Truth, just published by Bloomsbury in the series Classical Receptions in 20th-century writing. I want to thank our Interdepartmental Programming Critical Theory for help with organization and publicity, and I especially want to thank Allen not only for having written a brilliant book, which has provided us with much food for thought, but also for his willingness to travel all the way from South Carolina in these still-difficult times. And thank you also to my wonderful colleagues in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies, Refereck, German, and Critical Theory, Karen Feldman, Ramona Nadaf, Mark Griffith, and Jim Porter for enthusiastically responding to my call and for generously bringing their own experience of the dialogue between critical theory and antiquity to bear on this panel. Here, I want to underscore Ramona's role as the director of zone books, which played a major role in disseminating the work of structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers in English. Zone published, for example, the stunning Foucault slash Blanchot in 1990, a volume in which the two thinkers reside in lyrical adjacency. I have conceived of this panel as an opportunity to rethink aspects of Foucault's deep, sustained engagement with antiquity throughout his oeuvre and to reassess aspects of his influence on the discipline of classics since the 1980s. As Jim Porter puts it, Foucault's history of sexuality broke a number of taboos in classics. It opened a floodgate of pent-up energy that was just waiting for permission to say the previously unsayable sex. More than other theoretical orientations and analytical tools coming from Paris, Foucault's model provided classics with templates for research, some of them in areas that he never anticipated. To be Foucaultian, as Jim says, is not to have a pre-established method, it is to work in Foucault's deep wake and break new ground. As we consider Foucault's legacy in classics, we may reflect upon the impossibility of thinking of the ancient without also thinking of what is usually referred to as reception. We live in achronic times when the very distinction between now and yesterday, modernity and antiquity is uncannily blurred when the future seems difficult to separate from unsettling motions of regression. This is a moment when Foucault is frequently evoked and invoked as the theorist who, with his panoptic vision of discourse, power, bio-power, surveillance, and disciplinary technologies can help us understand, if not resolve, our current predicament and cope with the sense of loss, displacement, and alienation from time itself brought on by the pandemic. In our discussion of Allen's important, bold, and timely book, and around his acute analysis of Foucault's last Collège de France lectures, some of the questions that may emerge are, how shall we assess Foucault's enormous legacy on the study of ancient practices of the self, sexuality, and governmentality? How does his interest in antiquity help us appreciate and valorize the proximities of antiquity to the modern philosophical ideas with which Foucault is constantly in dialogue? What is his place in a zeitgeist tilting toward the post-human self or even the post-self? How can his notion of a liturgia and his stake on parisia help us theorize and practice inclusive, open, and anti-hierarchical approaches to antiquity, even as critical theory or anything that vaguely smacks of it is under attack in political campaigns in the school districts across the country? What do Foucault's edipus and his socrates still have to tell us today? How can he assist us in pushing against the dynamics of bio and necropower that antiquity has been irresponsibly used to enforce? What kind of discursive aschises can he promote in us now as we are precariously seeking to imagine a future for classics and for the humanities as a whole? I now want to introduce Paul Allen Miller, Carolina Distinguished Professor at the University of South Carolina. He is a literary scholar, an intellectual historian, a critical theorist, and also a visionary leader. Miller has changed the field by bringing together antiquity and modernity by demonstrating not only the deep engagement of post-modern thinkers with the classical past, but also how ancient philosophy and poetry, both Greek and Latin, preview and enact before our eyes the concerns and ideas of postmodernism. What he has accomplished in his career is prodigious, 10 monographs and 15 edited volumes, not to mention innumerable articles and book chapters. Allen has made outstanding contributions to scholarship on Greek lyric and tragedy, Plato, Hellenistic and Roman philosophy, and Roman satire and elegy. He is also an expert in the various exponents of French postmodernism, which, with his lucid prose, he makes accessible even to theory skeptics. I will just illustrate his incredible range by mentioning two of his monographs. In postmodern spiritual practices 2007, we discovered the revolutionary modern and postmodern force of Socrates thinking, of Socratic thinking, if we let ourselves be guided by Miller's deft exploration of the complexities of Plato's dialogues and of postmodern philosophy, which in a sense continues the work on ethical and epistemological negativity initiated by Socrates. Diottima at the barricades 2016 is a tour de force of erudition and interpretive subtlety, a work that going beyond intellectual history becomes a work of theory in itself. Miller displays a deep knowledge of French poststructuralist feminism's engagement with Platonic philosophy. The book masterfully shows how, in confronting Plato, arguing and battling with him, Sixu, Irrigaré, Kaufmann and Christeva turned their congenial enemy into a primary mover, Malgré-Louis, of current critical theoretical conceptions of gender sexuality and politics, with a distinctive ability to uncover the surprising unsettling potentialities of ancient philosophy. Miller guides us with flair and sheer originality through the meanders of its postmodern afterlife, thanks to his own diottima-like intervention at once gripping and liberating French theory and classical antiquity brilliantly illuminate and never cease to defamiliarize each other. Thank you again, Alan, for being here. So now I'll ask Alan to speak briefly about the book. Then we will have five responses of 10 minutes each in this order, Malgré-Fitt, Ramona Nadaf, myself, Jim Porter and Karen Feldman, and after these interventions, Alan will respond for 10 minutes and then we will open the floor for discussion. The event is being recorded and will soon be posted on YouTube. Thank you very much, Mario, and thank you for the more than generous introduction. And thanks to all of you for coming out on a Friday afternoon, a beautiful Friday afternoon. In 1980, Foucault's work makes two decisive turns which form the primary subject matter of my book. First, as announced at the start of his course at the Collège de France for that year, his topic will be the modalities through which power constitutes itself in relation to acts of truth for which he coins the neologism à l'éturgy. Pronouncements are manifestations of truth that constitute, reinforce, or legitimate specific forms of power and subjectivity. While truth had always been a central preoccupation, his later work focuses increasingly on the individual as a speaker of truth both to himself and others. Second, the texts and the archives on which he concentrates are no longer those of the early modern period. He begins his course in January 1980 with a vignette from Dio Cassius on the Emperor Septimius Severus and then proceeds to spend the next two sessions offering a reading of Oedipus before closing with an extensive exploration of the problem of confession, penance, and the baptismal remission of sins in the primitive church. From that point on, he concentrates on antiquity. The early 80s are, of course, the period during which Foucault began work on volumes two and three of the history of sexuality and was completing a draft of volume four, Confessions of the Flesh. Yet, while there are clear overlaps between the work he was presenting in his courses and the last books he published, nonetheless the seminars are anything but rough drafts of the published work. They are, with one exception, largely unconcerned with sexuality in either the broader or the more restricted sense defined by Foucault in volume one. Instead, they offer sustained encounter with the texts of the classical and early Christian era while seeking to trace the genealogy of the Western subject as a speaker of truth, focusing in large part on Socrates' Plato and their Stoic heirs. The central question in these courses become, what is the Western subject's relation to power when speaking the truth? How is this veridical subject formed? What constitutes these truths? And who is qualified to speak them? This book offers the first detailed account of these lectures that examines both the development of their philosophical argument and the ancient texts on which that argument is based. It aims to ask scholars and classics comparative literature and theory to rethink the late Foucault. When volumes two and three of the history of sexuality were published in English in 1986, classical scholarship was one of the last conservative redoubts in American humanities. The books set off an explosion. Foucault's texts were appropriated for a variety of polemics. They were received largely in abstraction from his ongoing teaching and absent a sophisticated understanding of his previous work and its place within French philosophy. The history of sexuality was taken by many for what it seemed to say it was, a history of sex. And if that's what it was, then many considered it a failed experiment, typical of the hubris displayed by French theory and its disregard for traditional scholarship. At the same time, Foucault had his advocates. He was embraced by many LGBTQ classicists, but also by others who were looking for more sophisticated ways of understanding sexual expression than could be gleaned from traditional readings of canonical texts, which often took refuge in politically loaded notions of nature, tradition, or normality. Indeed, Foucault's history of sexuality did as much as any text to help denaturalize heteronormativity and make possible a richer, less binary discourse about sex, sexuality, about bodies and pleasures. His was not in any sense a philological commentary on ancient texts or even an attempt to write a history of sexual conduct or expression. Sexuality for Foucault was not a thing. It was a discourse, a set of enunciations that provided definition and unity to a disparate group of behaviors, sensations, and functions, creating a singular entity, i.e. sex, that was not there before. The history of sexuality is the history of how that discourse came about. It poses a classic philosophical question. What is our truth and how did it come to us? Nonetheless, this fact was not understood by many of his initial classical interlocutors, most of whom had not read deeply in his other works, understood their philosophical context, nor were they aware of his teaching at the collège. The present work is an attempt to offer redress. Focused on the courses offered between 1980 and 1984, it examines Foucault's understanding of four topics, allaturgie or acts of truth, in which truth is shown not simply to be a property of things or of propositions, but an activity. It's something we do. Number two, the truth of the self, in which the technologies through which the subject forms itself and is formed by others are described. Number three, spiritual practices, in which the ability to know the truth is predicated on acts and exercises undertaken by the subject. And number four, parecia, the courage to speak the truth, whether to the assembled citizens, the prince, or oneself. Each chapter takes up one year of lectures and reads them both with and against the materials they cite. In the process, we see how Foucault's thought develops from one course to the next, giving a fuller philosophical contour to his later work that can be had from volumes two and three of the history of sexuality and isolation. In the end, we see that a central preoccupation in these last years, as it was in the beginning, was what is the truth? What is its relation to power? How do we come to speak it? And how do we know our own? Thank you. Thank you, Mario, for inviting me to participate in this panel. And thank you most warmly to Paul Anna Miller for coming to Berkeley to discuss with us his learned and stimulating new book. I am myself far from being a Foucault expert, and this is not faux-socratic irony. I really have not read more than a fraction of Foucault's work, and I do not think of myself as displaying much overt influence from Foucault's ideas in my own scholarship and interpretations of literature and culture. So my comments and questions today will necessarily be restricted in scope, and I fear in value. I will be speaking as what is sometimes called a classicist, but now is more accurately labeled a scholar of ancient Greek and Roman studies. So one might loosely say of antiquity, though as that term is often used, including in the title of Anna's book, Greek and Roman antiquity tend sometimes to be bracketed off from, for example, Jewish or early Christian or Near Eastern or Islamic, let alone Chinese or Hindu or Buddhist antiquity. That would actually be one of my comments or questions or complaints, and I don't, when I ask questions or raise objections, I don't want to feel the complaints, the question about Alan's book and about Foucault's focus in his lectures and writings during the last few years of his life. One might like to hear or read more in Alan's book about Judaism and Christianity, which had intermittently occupied Foucault's attention in volume three of the history of sexuality and which Christianity at least, I think not so much Judaism, was to receive extensive attention from him in the posthumously published volume four, the Confession to the Flesh, a book that he was writing precisely during this same period, 1980 to 1984, though it had to wait until 2018 before finally appearing in print. Alan does several times refer us to Foucault's discussion of confession in that work in progress, but I think it would have been helpful to be given a more extensive and continuous account of the ways in which Foucault explores the links between, on the one hand, Stoic and other Greek or Roman processes of self-analysis and declaration to others of one's daily state of mind and behavior, and on the other hand, the links between that, and on the other hand, Christian notions and practices of confession as eventually institutionalized by the Roman Catholic Church. I'd like to hear more also about Foucault's analysis of the Christian notions of the flesh and of original sin, and perhaps even read these alongside his account of Sophocles' edifice and of living and speaking the truth. My curiosity about these issues may be caused at least in part by a bias built into my understanding of these issues, a bias caused by my viewpoint regarding Berkeley's role in the development and impact of Foucault's ideas and publications. What was the scene around here between, say, 1975 and 1984? Obviously, we're not here to discuss Foucault's biography, but the book, Alan's book, does dwell quite a bit on bias, on the life of the philosopher, and from time to time, the life of the sage, of Socrates, of Diogenes the cynic, of the rational human overlaps with the life of Foucault himself. Oddly enough, and this is completely off the wall. I don't know how many people these days read Robert Persig's Zen and the Auto Motorcycle Maintenance. That came out in 1974, and there's a lot of Plato and Aristotle sort of mixed in. Anyway, there are odd moments when I find myself, particularly when I recall that, I just said, I'm not talking biography, but we're told that, and there are photographs to confirm that Foucault visited Zabriskie Point in Death Valley and took LSD. The impact of California and including Berkeley was perhaps not negligible. Actually, I want to spend a moment on issues of persoprography and doxography that concern us here in Berkeley and with the classics department, as it then was called at UC Berkeley. Foucault visited Berkeley repeatedly on several occasions between 1979 and 1983, and he spent several weeks here at a time teaching seminars as well as giving public lectures. His hosts and sponsors at Berkeley were, as best I can recall, the French department, the philosophy department, especially professors Hans Luger and the late Hubert Dreyfus, and the anthropology department, especially the late Paul Rabinol. As for the department of classics, I got here in the 1970s, so I was here. We, the faculty and graduate students, were for the most part barely aware or barely paid any attention to Foucault's presence on campus. I don't know what my tone of voice is like. This is not meant to be a proud affirmation, but I never know with my accent and manner how that comes across. We were not a theoretically attuned or adventurous intellectual community back then, I'd say. A good, and there aren't many around still to contradict me, so if there are, you've catch me later if you think I'm being unfair. I was one of them, you know, I'm including myself in that crowd. We were a good, solid department, excellent in the philological and historical aspect of study in Greek and Roman antiquity, and with quite a lively ancient philosophy component, not by the standards of our discipline at large reactionary or closed-minded, but French critical theory, gender studies and structuralism had not much impinned on most of us as yet. It's embarrassing to look back on that era, and I think things did change very much for the better here in the 1990s. The philosophy department had a young Allen Code on his faculty. It had also as a part-time and very energetic late-career visiting appointment Gregory Vlastos, formerly of Princeton, who gave seminars year by year on ancient Greek notions of decay and justice, and especially on Socrates, as Vlastos worked on completing his career-capping book on that individual. We faculty and graduate students in Berkeley classics flocked to Vlastos's seminars, and some PhD students even wrote their dissertation with him officially or unofficially. Foucault? Not so much. It was not until the 1990s, for example, that Maud Leeson, whose superb trailblazing book Making Man is palpably and explicitly Foucaultian, she's a former graduate student of ours, actually read Foucault for the first time, she tells me. And although she was a graduate student here in classics, during the early to mid-1980s, she never attended any of Foucault's lectures. Her knowledge of Foucault and Bourdieu came to her indirectly by other Berkeley teachers from the Department of History, Anthro and English, and above all, from Peter Brown. He was the one exception. And on this classicist's disregard or opposition to French postmodern criticism is superbly embarrassingly well documented in the 2007 book that Mario described postmodern spiritual practices that Alan published. The exception was Peter Brown, who held a joint appointment here in history in classics from 1979 to 1985. And he was the only Berkeley classics faculty member, I would say, who really recognized what Foucault was about and why his work was potentially so valuable for us students of classical as well as late antiquity. And this recognition was mutual. Foucault quickly came to realize that Peter could be a vital resource to him for broadening and sharpening his understanding of early Christian texts, ideas and practices, where hitherto Foucault had worked closely with and relied especially on the deep knowledge and good judgment and independent sensibilities of primarily poor vein for literary texts and social practices, including family and erotics, and Pierre Hardeau for philosophical ideas and doxographies, as well as benefiting from the very strong French traditions of editing and translating the huge corpus of ancient medical texts, including the work of Aline Roussel for sexual and medical regimes and behaviors. Foucault had already, even before his Berkeley visit, read and appreciated Peter's book on Augustine, and he found when he visited Berkeley that Brown was uniquely qualified and intellectually attuned to help guide him through the intricacies of early Christian doctrine and ideological dispute, especially in the areas of asceticism, virginity and discourses of the sins and renunciation of the flesh. The mutual debts and commonalities between Brown and Foucault are freely acknowledged in their respective prefaces to their books written during the 1980s, and a characteristically charming personal reminiscence by Peter, who though retired is still actively present around Princeton's history department, is currently available on YouTube, a video edited and presented by Rice University professor of religion, Nicky Kasumi Clements. It's called Foucault's Confessions II, including a lovely chat about Peter, how he and Foucault sat down in the basilar talking about John Cassian, and obviously having an amazing mind-blowing experience of meeting a common intellect at last after all these years of lonely pioneering. So I would have liked in Alan's book to learn a bit more about the interfaces between Foucault's ongoing work on his period on the flesh, confession, martyrdom and Christianity, and his lectures on Greek and Roman antiquities, socrates and the cynics, the truth and parisia. What about the truth spoken by Justin Marder, Oregon, Augustine, John Cassian, even by Jesus, and Saint Paul? Myself as a European who moved to the Bay Area in the 1970s, full of optimism about the opening up of society, the evolution of morals and alternative lifestyles, and a tendon breakdown of the oppressive social restrictions and, as I naively thought, of racial ethnic barriers as well. I then began to find it puzzling and horrifying to watch and listen to the reassertion during the 1980s and up to the present of radical religious zealotry alongside nationalist and nativist resentments and fantasies, both in the USA and in other parts of the world. So I've wondered, like many of my generation, but also like classicists such as Gilbert Murray and E.R. Dodds from previous generations, what went wrong? Why and how did this failure of nerve occur on such a vast scale? How might the ancient history of sexuality, constructions of self and life technologies help us understand these present day phenomena? In that vein of retrospective bafflement, not quite despair, but personal, certainly disappointment with the state of the world, I wind up my comments on Alan's stimulating book with four general questions, sorry, questions about the book and about Foucault's mission and meaning or aim during these amazingly productive last few years of his life. First one, which Socrates was Foucault recommending that we emulate? There were so many to choose from. Plato's Socrates in the Apology asserts that he had remained throughout his life a private individual, idiotis, and has refrained from public affairs. Demo, see you in. Vlasdots used to point out that there was no record of Socrates ever speaking up in the Athenian Assembly against injustice, for example, of the Middolini debate. And his trial and conviction were apparently based on charges of impiety, not of excessive parisia and speaking the truth as such. In the Apology and elsewhere, we find him referring rather emphatically to divine voices and oracles and apparently looking forward to an afterlife for his soul. Altogether, some of us may feel he's not a very helpful or constructive model of a la third year for everyone to try to emulate. And as for Plato in the seventh letter, I'm going on too long already, but I won't get into that. The second question is around parisia versus martyrdom, or what is the truth, whose truth that's being uttered in the face of power? As I mentioned already, I'd love to hear more about the process and reasons through which the open-eyed, rational, self-chosen, self-fashioned life advocated by Stoics and cynics lapsed, as I would see it, into the blindly irrational, mystical faith in an eschatological truth, the capital T, and a supposed reality of Jesus' second coming and the imminent final judgment. The truth telling whose truth who determines what the truth is or what can be done in its name. The third question I ask is just a resistance to the condemnation of rhetoric, that from time to time I find in the book the contrast, the old contrast, already old in Plato's features we're told, between philosophy and rhetoric. I personally think we need a more widespread educational program in which everyone learns the skills and diagnostic techniques of rhetoric to help them make good life choices and reality checks in the face of multiple competing claims to truthiness. And we have Jim and Ramona on this panel as professors of rhetoric. I say their jobs are valuable. Let's keep it. And then the fourth question is about living according to nature, a phrase that the Stoics use and the cynics use, and particularly we're told that Diogenes the cynic modeled his life. He claimed that we should live according to nature. What does this entail for humans and other animals? What is the proper telos and purpose or Ergon function of a human being? In Aristotle's terms or say Alistair Macintosh to take a philosopher, social theorist, who was much under discussion in both philosophy and classics during the years when Foucault was visiting. How does a Foucaultian Tecne Biu stack up in relation to an Aristotelian model of a virtuous social life? At times it seems to resemble rather Nietzschean, aesthetically satisfying dandyism, which is a topic you phrase you delve into very interestingly, or neoliberal individualism or platonic esoteric fixation on idealized forms and a totalizing spiritualized notion of reality that many of us regard as illusory and fantastical. Here and there Foucault does refer to a social life involving a community of friends and Alan insists that Foucault's Tecne Biu is not solipsistic, but I like more reassurance about this, including even perhaps some suggestions about institutions and communal practices that could foster good and happy Biais for us all. I've gone on too long, as always. I'll stop. So the question about the relationship between speaking the truth and living according to nature or the question, as always for me, if someone starts promoting Platonism, I instinctively react with Aristotelianism. So I throw that back at you. Where does Aristotelianism fit into this? And I'll call it that. And I've experienced that in the parking lot with you, that reaction. Thank you, Mario, for inviting me and thank you for your book and the incredible intellectual history and philosophical acumen that you did. I loved how you were able to give us an intellectual history, succinct summaries, and then go into a very acute and incisive philosophical analysis. I learned a lot. I fear I take up some of the questions that Mark brought up, but I don't think I'm going to give the answers that you want to hear, or that are going to satisfy you at all. So I might just rest in peace now. So from the start, Miller reminds us of the possible uses of Foucault in the present moment. I quote, Michelle Foucault is one of the most radical voices of the 20th century. Foucault's histories uncover a fossil record of our practices of truth, of our desires, pleasures, and intensities, which have been and therefore can be repurposed and re-elaborated from one struggle to the next. I will return to this question of repurposing, but first allow me to begin at the beginning of Foucault's use of the Greeks, which I learned from reading Allen's book. And first, Miller reminds us that already in his 1970-1971 lectures on the will to know at the Collège de France, Foucault was investigating archaic and classical Greece, where influenced by Marcel de Tien's The Masters of Truth in archaic Greece, he quote, examined how the concept of truth that we recognize today became established during the fourth and fifth and fourth centuries. It was a discursive event, quote, the product of social and political struggles in archaic Greece. And one can ask, why does he abandon this type of investigation? I think Jim might be talking to us of those social and political struggles when he, for example, talks about Plato. Only in the 1980s will Foucault seemingly make a radical decisive break with his earlier work, not only moving from early modern texts and archives to ancient one, as Allen reminded us already, but also in terms of his philosophical preoccupations. As Miller argues, quote, while truth had been a central preoccupation from the beginning, his later work focused increasingly on the individual as a speaker of truth, both to himself and to others. And I think we have to remember that he is not just speaking to himself, he is at the same time speaking to others. And that might be also another way of understanding the political actions, for example, of a Socrates who may not speak in the assembly, but speaks elsewhere to and with others. But we can discuss that. The ethical term, the return to subjectivity, marks the return of a figure largely a visible if not deleted from Foucault's first lectures, Socrates. Miller explains, quote, radical Socratic questioning occupies Foucault for the last five years of his life, not as an antiquarian interest, but as a way of thinking in a sustained manner about how the subject comes to speak the truth and about the courage needed to speak the truth while risking marginalization, misunderstanding, or even death. I, too, will now turn to Socratic Parasia as analyzed in the fall 1983 lectures at Berkeley, which were then published by Semiotext in 2001 under the title Fearless Speech. And thanks to Mark, we just got to hear about some of Foucault's experiences. And maybe he was on LSD when he was writing this book. And maybe that's why Socrates appears as he does in this book. I don't know. It's possible. He might have been hallucinating. Foucault clearly states his aim, quote, my intention was not to deal with the problem of truth, but with the problem of the truth teller or of truth telling as an activity. I bracket the other figures of truth tellers Foucault analyzes in these lectures and turned straight to Socrates, the specific activity of Socratic truth telling and the relations of power and speak speech activity established in the Socratic, not platonic paraciastic project. Let me start on the wrong side of the street. The good parasia is opposed to the bad negative kind, which Foucault tells us is a form of chattering, saying everything and anything one has in mind. This may be equated as Plato does with the democracy and with rhetoric. And I agree he has a problem Foucault with rhetoric and he too unthinkingly separates philosophy and rhetoric, but we can discuss that. But it doesn't have to necessarily and solely be that. One might name it careless speech, where the speakers do not think, do not qualify judgments and recklessly disregard the experience effect and meaning of their words. They tend little to whether their words benefit or harm the individual and or Paulus. Socrates in the early dialogues finds his best interlocutors in such careless speakers. The user of the fake parasia rambles on and on derelict in the moral qualities, I quote Foucault, required first to know the truth and secondly to convey such truth to others. Such ethical ontological truth is reserved for the speaker who uses parasia in a sincere, engaged manner where belief and truth coincide in the verbal activity. As Foucault says in the audio of the Q&A session of lecture one, which Berkeley has the audio version of and I listened to the Q&As with great pleasure recently because of you. Quote for Plato, there is no epistemological elaboration of the relation between truth and belief. The pariastase is one you can trust because he is a man whose beliefs are true and are true not only for him. With Descartes this will end says Foucault. The truth tellers frank, free and open speech is determined by the very specific context of a lived experienced encounter with the teacher who in this case is Socrates and the gadfly's use of this sharp, ellentic tool to cut through pretense, epistemic and ethical hubris and unacknowledged prejudice. Socrates, this user of fearless speech, is taken up by Foucault in Plato's law case, a dialogue equal parts dedicated to courage and to education. In a personal encounter with Socrates, not in the assembly, in the ultimately failed search quest for a definition of courage, truth telling traverses many planes, two of them. First, it is an education between unequals and status and wisdom between elders and youngsters, where the traditional sham, sophisticated pedagogical techniques are shown to be obsolete and injurious to the care of the soul and of the city. Second, whoever comes in contact with Socrates establishes new relations of power between logos, truth, courage and beos. In this game of truth inequality is a fact. I quote, since Socrates possesses in this relation to truth all the qualities that need to be disclosed in the interlocutor, Socrates contests the relation to truth of the interlocutor's existence. The aim of this Socratic paracistic activity then is to lead the interlocutor to the choice of that kind of life beos that will be endurian harmonic accord with logos, virtue, courage and truth. Despite the imbalanced power relations, and it's as we'll discuss not ever really despite, Foucault in his management of the figure of Socrates seems to me to rescue Socrates from Plato's politicized and reactionary figuration in the middle dialogues, especially in the Republic. As such, one might say Foucault's first depoliticizes Socrates by removing him from a platonic political ideology, interpretation and tradition. He then repoliticizes him by placing him in another context, that of the genealogy of Piresia, which Foucault argues in these lectures begins, insofar as the word Piresia first appears with Euripides. Socrates' distinction as regards political Piresia concerns precisely his introduction of a new term, Beos, into the earlier parasitastic triad of logos, truth and courage. And for time's sake, I'm not going to read you the whole quote, but what he says, and Mark alluded to this already, is that the difference with political Piresia is the introduction into the triad of this new term, Beos. I would especially appreciate hearing Alan's thoughts on this. I would say Foucault constructs a quite recognizable and not especially radical Socrates, whose discontent with those whose lack of critical reflection prohibit realization that their normative ontological and ethical frameworks, their wrongdoings endanger proper governance of self and the city and establish and perpetuate harmful social situations and power relations. When Foucault responded to students' questions about the privileged status and hierarchy between teacher and student, he underscored a double loss. The citizen in the act of Piresia loses privileges, risks losing privileges when opposing majority opinion. So do Socrates' interlocutors risk losing privilege. But Foucault also insists each gains in power in speaking dangerous truths, their own statuses are raised, their own specific relation to truth through frankness raises, and there is a transformation, a change in and to himself through quote, danger to the law, freedom and duty. I'm closing up. Foucault used Socrates to serve and ground his ethical turn. He took possession of him. Foucault has already been criticized extensively for what we shall say politely, overly trusting the teacher Socrates and by extension in these last lectures, at least Socrates insofar as he inaugurates the quote critical tradition of the West. Foucault might mistakenly be taking Socrates as a truth teller. A teacher who annunciates as he puts it in the Q&A session referred to above quote, believes only true to him. You trust the teacher because you suppose what he says is true, but the teacher is not always practicing paracia. How then might we or can we or could we use repurpose Foucault's Socrates today because of many of the obvious faults we can see in him. A thought arose as I read our Alan's study that Foucault's 1983 romanticized, idealized perhaps hallucinated paracetic Socrates might be taken today as a figure, a model of speech activity, a philosophical frankness in the debates emerging around the so-called cancel culture. As Miller notes, parasia is not simply quote an ancient technique of life or a philosophical concept, it is also central to the way Foucault understood the function of the philosopher in modern life, speaking truth to power, whether on prison sexuality or other forms of oppression. Parasia offers the possibility of a form of critique. Foucault's Socrates might prove useful to elaborating and recognizing the form of critique necessary today without lapsing into a degraded form of parasia. The question is how and what would that form of critique look like if it were to emerge out of Foucault's genealogy of parasia that he links to the critical tradition of the West? How can Foucault's Socrates become present in the present? How, I quote Miller on parasia, can Foucault's Socrates lead us quote to a revolutionary indictment of the existing state of things in philosophical reflections on ethics and our conception of the human and in science when it assumes the form of criticism of existing prejudices or dominant institutions. Thank you. In the first chapter of his book, Alain focuses on the centrality of Oedipus in both on the government of the living and the government of self and others. The lectures that Foucault delivered at the College de France between 1979 and 1983. Alain masterfully shows how in these lectures Sophocles Oedipus figures the complex interconnections of knowledge, power and the subject, what we can call the Foucaultian triad. As Alain observes the question guiding Foucault's reading of Oedipus the king in on the government of the living concerns quote the relation that obtains between the subject, its manifesting or producing truth act the verité and that subject adherence to a larger institutional structure, which both makes the truth possible and is made possible by the truth that is the police, the church, a government end quote. Foucault's and Alain's focus is Oedipus, the work ergon or the labor of truth and consequently of knowledge. For me, these labor encompasses the spasmodic exertions demanded of the subject by what Foucault calls pastoral power in all its diachronic metamorphosis. This labor is in other words an epistemic expenditure driven by the overlapping imperatives of bio power and care of the self. As we reread Foucault's discussion of Oedipal aleturgia in these pandemic times, I wish to direct our attention to a certain virality in Foucault's conceptualization of the knowledge power complex already hinted at by Delos, a virality that I argue becomes Oedipal through the atmospherics of verbal form in Sophocles play. Both Oedipus and Foucault are frequently evoked these days as we desperately seek out solutions or just comparanda for our current predicament. In 2020, the plague that sets Oedipus the king in motion figured prominently among the antecedents catalogued as a kind of genealogical diversion during the unfillable time of the lockdown, an archaeological response we can say to the sudden arrival of acrony. As for Foucault, we need only site Bernard Henry Levy's pamphlet The Virus in the Age of Madness whose first chapter is titled Come Back, Michel Foucault, We Need You. Here Levy refers to the discussion in both discipline and punish and the birth of the prison of the 18th century shift in state policy toward leprosy and plague. As Levy puts it, quote, exile to an island or a ghetto on the outskirts of the city, as was the practice with lepers and the insane, gave way to confinement of entire cities where all citizens were under house arrest and neighborhood watch patrols wrote up holdouts, end quote. Foucault has been used to articulate a controversial warning against the rise of, quote, medical power against the technologies of surveillance, but since the beginning of the pandemic, Giorgio Agamben has irresponsibly called, quote, the sanitary dictatorship. More fruitfully, Daniele Lorenzini has observed that asking for Foucault's theoretical and political help in these times can and should lead us to a better sense of how biopolitics is always a politics of differential vulnerability, that is to say how it capitalizes on and aggravates class and race hierarchies. Today, however, I'm more concerned with virality or a kind of viral aesthetics that seem to bring together Idipus the king and Foucault's own theorization of power, knowledge, and the subject. My starting point is a statement from the 1970 to 71 lectures sur la volonté de savoir that Allen refers to in his first chapter. Foucault says, quote, the entire tragedy of Idipus is run through with the effort to transform into absurd facts the enigmatic dispersion of human events, murders, plagues, and divine threats, end quote. Through the metaphorical force of dispersion, the plague, a specific object of a liturgy in Sophocles play and beyond seems to contagiously inform both Foucault's language and epistemic labor itself. Plagues are essential to Foucault's conceptualization of bio power and bio history. As he puts it in the first volume of the tea of the history of sexuality, quote, the pressure exerted by the biological on the historical had remained very strong for thousands of years. Epidemics and famine were the two great dramatic forms of his relationship that was always dominated by the manners of death, end quote. However, just before the French Revolution, as he continues, quote, the period of great ravages from starvation and plague had come to a close and death was seizing to torment life so directly, end quote. In Foucault's words, methods of power and knowledge assumed responsibility for the life processes and undertook to control and modify them. The power-knowledge complex resulting from this historical turning point is reflected, if you will, in the backstory of Oedipus the King itself. Oedipus became king of thieves by defeating the Sphinx, plaguing the community. Yet, we might say, the biological continues to exert pressure on the historical with the contagious plague. The end of starvation and plague described by Foucault marked, in a sense, the beginning of bio power as we know it, that is what he calls the control over the relations between human beings. Insofar they are species, insofar they are living beings and their environment. In society must be defended another set of college lectures. Foucault, in fact, explains that at the end of the 18th century, epidemics were replaced by endemics. As he puts it, quote, death was no longer something suddenly swooped down on life as in an epidemic. Death was now something permanent, was something permanent, something that slips into life, perpetually gnaws at it, diminishes it, and weakens it, end quote. This description of death could not better capture our condition in these post or quasi post-pandemic times, a prolonged stagnation and entanglement in ongoing non-eventality, which, for Maurice Blanchot, constitutes the very experience of disaster. The only event, an invisible mover, is the virus itself, which presses upon our lives, gnaws at them, tearing the fabric of the social, aggravating pre-existing endemic viruses. From a Foucaultian perspective, our own post-pandemic times are, in a sense, a continuation of the time of biopolitics that began before the French Revolution. The post-pandemic life we are apparently getting used to, that is a coexistence with the virus that has perpetually slipped into us, may not be so different from the life we have lived all along, a life penetrated by the virus of biopower. This epochal virality of biopower, I argue, informs subliminally, mimetically, contagiously, Foucault's ideas of knowledge and power. It is as though knowledge, power, and even the subject are affected in Foucault's conception, and indeed in their very mechanics by the endemic virus of biopower. And in this virality, they have what I characterize as an edible form. In his 1986 book, simply called Foucault, Gilles Deleuze explains that power relations for Foucault are simultaneously local, unstable, and diffuse. They do not, Deleuze says, quote, emanate from a central point or unique locus of sovereignty, but at each moment, at each moment move from one point to another in a field of forces, end quote. As Deleuze continues, for Foucault, knowledge crosses different unities, tracing a diagonal line more akin to music than to a signifying system. Though Deleuze doesn't use these specific terms, it seems to be describing the physics of action that shape power and knowledge as operating through dynamics of dissemination, propagation, and viral circulation. Practicing a kind of Foucaultian archaeology or genealogy, I want to see this viral movement of power and knowledge as the effect or the effect of the viral biopolitics permanently embedded in this endemic epoch, stretching from before the French Revolution to the present time. In their viral form, in their atmospheric spread, knowledge and power never sees a lighting on us, infecting us. And it is at this point, before considering the subject, the third element of the Foucaultian triad, that I want to turn to Oedipus. In Oedipus, the king, verbal form becomes a viral force, filled with punts, anagrams, and alliterations. It figures and configures an obfuscated atmosphere, burdened, swollen by contagion. Phonemes and garafemes diffuse contagiously in the verbal ambience. Human breath, the channel of discourse, and healing and myasmic vapors blend into each other. Polyptotic density, in particular, figures contagion as the outcome of unwitting intimacies, opaically and expansively transmitting Oedipal pollution to the senses. The play's excessive linguistic dissemination, which has attractive deconstructive and psychoanalytic interpretations, can be conceptualized as a viral force spread into the atmosphere. Epistemic labor, the Foucaultian aleturgia, seems to be attenuated while grappling with diffuse relationalities, contagious atmospheric motions. In a passage discussed by Allen as the moment in which Oedipus imagines himself as a nircly Apollo, the sun who makes the darkness dissipate and the hidden appear, aleturgia seems to go beyond the subject. It becomes almost an impersonal operation circulating in the formal atmosphere. Oedipus asks Creon, when the throne of Thebes had met with this disaster that is the death of Lyos, what trouble was in the way and podon that prevented you from knowing it all? To which Creon responds, the Sphinx with a riddling song forced us to let go of what was obscure and attend to what lay before our feet, pros posi. If we consider pros posi together with em podon, which literally means in the way of feet, we can see the feet iconic or even metonymic of Oedipus' body, an essential clue in the aleturgia, punningly spread in the textual space like a contagion, turning the epistemic quest into a diffuse sensation which simultaneously clarifies and obscures the investigation. Situated in the interstices of dramatic irony, epistemic toil becomes a quasi impersonal swelling an infectious force beyond the subject. Delos observes that, quote, the relation between forces as Foucault understands them concerns not only men, but the elements, the letters of the alphabet, which group either at random or according to certain laws of attraction and frequency dictated by a particular language, end quote. In the essay The Thought Outside, Foucault speaks of, quote, an anonymity of language liberated and opened in its own boundlessness, end quote. As Lynn Huffer notes in Med for Foucault, a reading in light of queer feminism, for Foucault the subject is, quote, determinous or contiguous with an outside that is in a continual process of transformation and expansion, end quote. In Oedipus the king, the atmospheric congestion of verbal form swallows Oedipus himself, as reflected in his name, etymologically swollen foot, which in itself assimilates him to a force of expansion. In Delos's view, Foucault is drawn toward the idea of an impersonal subject referring to Foucault's lyrical essay, Lives of Infamous Men, Delos observes that Foucault claims for himself this infamy of men whose lives survive only through the isolated glimpses of archival resistance against the erasing power of state surveillance. Delos draws attention to the following sentence, which describes Foucault's interest in anonymous lives surviving in the archives of the Bastille, quote, I had gone in search of these sorts of particles in doubt with an energy all the greater for there being small and difficult to discern, end quote. Rather than belittling the lives of marginalized subjects breaking through disciplinary power, Foucault seems to impute their very survival or survivance to their becoming less than subjects, resurrected historical particularities that correspond to ever circulating particles. Delos connects this passage where we can say reemerging subjects become a different sort of bio power, the affirmative bio power of impersonal elementality with an emblematic phrase at the beginning of the use of pleasure, here explaining what motivated him to continue the project of the history of sexuality. He says, quote, it's quite simple. It was curiosity, not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself, end quote. This curiosity, which enables us to get free of ourselves, perhaps like sex itself, brings me back to Aleturgia, to its viral force, to the possibility that it may turn both subject and object into impersonal entities into particles. The care of the self is then, in a sense, a way to get free of oneself, living in post pandemic times, or in a time when bio power has become an endemic, intractable virus, means perhaps letting go of our subject position and embracing inter subjectivity or perhaps even the inter objectivity of circulating particles. Such inter objectivity is not just delusion, but also Foucaultian. It's not the position of an anti-edipus, but of edipus himself. Thank you. Thank you, Mario. I want to begin by expressing my thanks to Mario Tullo for taking the initiative to organize this panel and to Alan Miller for providing the occasion with his elegant new study, which offers a much needed comprehensive guide to Foucault's views of antiquity down to the last lectures at the College de France. Foucault was a prolific writer, lecturer, and thinker during the last decade of his life when he made his return to Greece and Rome. We are only now beginning to digest this complex legacy. The question I want to raise for discussion has three parts. First, how can we situate Foucault's work on antiquity in the context of his other prodigious accomplishments in the field of modernity? Second, is there a way to historicize Foucault to place him in his moment in time? And third, what use can be made in future studies of the past of his writings prior to his final shift to antiquity? I see a contrast and attention here. Foucault's focus on antiquity, a history of sexuality tied to questions about practices of the self, was narrow even by his own standards, given the brilliant sweep of his previous projects. The break occurs after the first volume with the history of sexuality, which established how discursive regimes intertwined with regimes of institutionalized power, positivized what they repress. They produced desiring, sexualized subjects. Returning to antiquity after 1970 to 71, in 1980, he looked for the same kind of phenomenon, discursive regimes that produced desiring sexual subjects. But it's here that things go a bit off the rails. With no institutions to target, there were none comparable to the clinical environments of the 19th century when sexuality was produced by sexology. Foucault had to come up with something to take their place. And what he settled on were individuals, bodies, pleasures, anxieties, and problematizations that were, so to speak, suspended in midair. In a telling moment in volume three, he teases out a notion of a quote, the subject's style of activity, end quote, which he says is more telling and more powerful than any system of rules, codes or conduct. It operates independently of any natural structure or positive regulation. This kind of self-stylization Foucault calls a form of experience. Its agent and object are said to be the ancient self, le sois, always understood as a first personal moi. In taking this turn or move, Foucault was abandoning his strong suit, institutional and cultural critique. Philosophical schools and certain everyday practices were marshaled into the service of supplying something like a normative structure within which to place the new focus on self-care. Culture was now refashioned into cultures of the self. Technological apparatuses like the panopticon or the clinic were replaced by arts and technologies of the self. In a further isolating move, sexuality was now redefined as a relation of the self to itself. On this view, the external world is made mostly irrelevant and interiority is discovered. Once this takes place, the self is free to enjoy autonomy, sovereignty and self-mastery in its own domain. The subject becomes enlightened and truth becomes the subject's own alethic unveiling of itself. By the same token, the subject becomes modern. As Alan puts it in his book, and I quote, to experience enlightenment is to have a moment of self-recognition which requires a separation of the self from its environment. To reason on one's own is to develop a new relation with the logos and hence with truth, end of quote. Alan is thinking of such of passages like the following from the hermeneutics of the subject quote, the truth enlightens the subject, the truth gives beatitude to the subject, end of quote. The subject does not have to do anything to adopt the stance, he merely has to adopt a certain enlightened and conscious attitude towards what he is doing and towards himself doing. That's a quotation as well. The self is its own institution, a self-instituted entity created ex nihilo, self-fashioned, it exercises self-care. Foucault calls this inquiry a genealogy of the subject, so conceived his work on antiquity belongs to a project that he calls a history, describes as a history of the present. The task was ambitious but also ambivalent. Which present did he have in mind? The answer is plainly his own, the one to which he belonged, but that present stretches back to the dawning of enlightenment and forward to the introduction of normative categories that restrict the movements of subjects as in the case of sexuality and its deviant others, but also in the penal system or in the biopolitical realm. Here is where the story gets interesting. If ancient subjects are in some sense ancestors of modern subjects, they need to be made accountable for practices that eventuated in the kinds of disciplinary formations that Foucault set out to critique in his earlier work. This is what they do in fact for Foucault at least some of the time. Insofar as they practice an asceticism that bears the DNA of Christian ascetic spiritual practices, they do this precisely. Compare what he says in his interview on the genealogy of ethics. I quote, we can see that in this activity of the self on itself, the ancients developed a whole series of austerity practices that the Christians later directly borrowed from them. We are not talking about a moral rupture between tolerant antiquity and austere Christianity, end of quote. But the pagans are not entirely or not always this. At other times, they seem to represent an alternative to the modern repressive hypothesis in an area before sexuality and a freedom that antidates the Christian shackling of the self, a freedom and a willing to selfhood that is defined as an autonomous, I'm quoting again, an autonomous self finalized art imparting value to the whole of life, end of quote. But this is where another complication arises. Foucault's ancients are uncandly modern, not just pre-modern and proto-Christian at times, but modern in the sense that Foucault outlined in his earlier essay on Continent Lightment and also elsewhere, for example, the essay, What Is Critique? In both places, he notes that modernity is not a periodizing concept, but an attitude that floats free of time, applicable to the pre-modernity of the Greeks and the modernity of Kant. It is, I quote, a mode of relating to contemporary reality, a voluntary choice, a way of thinking and feeling. The task involves taking on and cultivating a way of thinking and feelings one's ethos, a way of feeling modern, constructing oneself, producing oneself, here I'm, you know, be not him, producing oneself as modern through an aesthetic elaboration of the self in his words. We expect to hear the word aesthetic, and yet what Foucault writes is aesthetic. Foucault was forthright about his allegiance to a Kantian project in the same essay and elsewhere, but his declaration applies with equal validity to his writings on antiquity. Another quotation, I have been seeking on the one hand to emphasize the extent to which a type of philosophical interrogation, one that simultaneously problematizes man's relation to the present, man's historical mode of being and the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject is rooted in the Enlightenment, end of quote. The subject at both ends of Foucault's historical project then, but also in between, is divided as an aesthetic and an aesthetic creature, a creature fashioned through reflexive discipline and punishment. Foucault was never more Nietzschean than here in this ambivalence towards the spiritualized self, and I might refer you to the genealogy of morals, especially the third essay, but all the way through. I want to close with one last question. Is Foucault's present our present? I do not believe that it any longer is, and in fact, I believe that Foucault's theory of the self, in this form at least, the one I've been discussing, was already contested in his own lifetime. Two fragmentary quotations will help to make the point. Quote one. If finally the simple consciousness requires the dissolution of this entire world of inversion, then it cannot demand of the individual that he withdraw from the world for even diogenes in his barrel is conditioned by it. Quote two. One of the most persistent trends in modern philosophy since Descartes and perhaps its most original original contribution to philosophy has been an exclusive concern with the self, an attempt to reduce all experiences with the world as well as with other beings, human beings, to experiences between man and himself. End of quote. The first statement is from Hegel. I left out a part where he vilifies self care. The second from Hannah Arendt. What both share, even if they agree on little else, is that care for the self bespeaks a loss of world, a withdrawal from reality, an exposure of the self to nothing but itself as in stoicism. So Arendt, although I think she is wrong about that. But not among the cynics, so Hegel, those citizens of the world, which is to say individuals who were maximally exposed to the world. Both Hegel and Arendt were railing against the Cartesian turn to self that can't made into a transcendental premise and a sovereign in its own domain. Foucault's antiquity summons up exactly the specter they were turning away from, that of the rising bourgeois neoliberal sovereign ego, ego. Contemporary theories of community, of ecology, of the post human, plasticity, the queer, the racialized, or the disabled in human, not to mention much of modern philosophy since Sartre and Bataille, have rejected the very idea of the self and its truth and have made its dissolution, not its care and fashioning, into an object of ethical concern. Studies of antiquity reared in this new environment are already beginning to discover antecedents to the rejection of first personal experience and its grip on truth in the writings of the Presocratics and Socrates, the Cynics, and the Roman Stoics. The object of concern here is not selves, but beings, ontological, elemental, political, racialized, and differently abled, yet always vulnerable human beings, or beings rather I should say. With these contemporary, what these contemporary theories offer is a way to write for ourselves a new history of our own present. Foucault's view of the subject may not play a role any longer in this endeavor, but that doesn't mean that classics no longer needs Foucault. It does. What remains unexplored in ancient studies are the large-scale institutional critiques and his critique of the unitary subject that Foucault developed before his final work on antiquity. It is from this Foucault that we have much to learn and emulate. I also want to thank Mario for the opportunity to participate in this event, and also thanks to Paul Ellen Miller for writing this book that so thoroughly encapsulates these Foucault lectures and makes them so approachable while maintaining their complexity. For my 10 minutes, I want to do a few different things. First, I want to focus on the theme of truth and truth-telling with respect to Hegel and Heidegger, but first I'm going to return to a question that Alan must be very tired of, namely how he views the continuity or discontinuity between these lectures and Foucault's late work that comes out of them, compared to the earlier work on punishment, madness, clinics, and so on. Yeah, you stole my thunder already. It's okay. I want to try out the idea that the later work concretizes or literalizes certain philosophical elements in the earlier work and ask what the ramifications are if that is the case. So first, as Miller recounts volumes two and three of the history of sexuality and has already been said, produced some shock and dismay when they appeared in 1986 in English. Care of the self? Use of pleasure with regard to ancient Greece? Where was the Foucault of power as a dynamic network or field of discursive layers and the human sciences in modernity? Volume one of the history of sexuality along with discipline and punish and other early works had made their arguments about impersonal and dispersed agency, the field of forces, and then care of the self, the self, the individualized practices described in volumes two and three, including parisia, spiritual practices, and the references to more freedom there. These made Foucault in 1986 seem less radical and more liberal, critical of governmentality and favorable towards self, individual self-fashioning. This sounds consummately liberal. Foucault's earlier analyses of medical psychiatric and penal internment with their systemic and dynamic focus and their dialectical strands uncovering contradictions and tensions certainly indebted to Jean-Ypolliet. All this made Foucault seem Frankfurt adjacent. Not a historical materialist by any means and not a thinker of class and not a teleological thinker and not a liberal thinker but a radical thinker pulling out by the roots our beliefs about our own intellectual categories and heritage, a genealogist of power dynamics and institutions whose genealogies led to some potentially revolutionary conceptions of authority, everyday disciplinary practices, and the regimentation of the body for instrumental purposes. The exposure, for instance, of the micro control of the body of the soldier and of the famous panopticon. These were indictments and even deconstructions of power insofar as Foucault was showing that power is not top down but a dynamic network or field and Foucault gave us these sweeping phenomenological political analyses that called into question traditional authorities, ingrained habits, social pillars, and so on. After all that, he comes to care of the self. Miller specifically evokes the dismayed reader. He even ventriloquizes that reader lamenting that this Foucault sounds like stuffy old Mortimer Adler but Miller responds that we have to see Foucault's entire corpus as concerned in different ways with what it means to tell the truth and especially to tell the truth about oneself. Yes, of course, as Miller said, there are differences between the early Foucault and these late lectures but I see Miller as insisting on a continuity in a way that revises somewhat my understanding of the early work, but not entirely. I want to emphasize that my response here is not a lament and I am not dismayed and still I want to ask if the lectures and the emphasis on telling the truth about oneself are indeed less continuous with earlier work than Miller suggests. Certainly, there is some continuity, discursive regimes, self-productions, of course confession. For me, a useful strand for understanding their connection is observing how telling the truth about oneself ends up literalizing certain philosophical gestures and I'll say more about that. I want to ask Miller, who doesn't have to answer after all of this, but I want to ask to what extent he may see the ramifications of these concretizations in effect, especially insofar as the key theme in the 1980s lectures is not just what it means to tell the truth but what it means to tell the truth about oneself as he emphasizes. So again, I'll talk briefly without lament or dismay about Hegel and Heidegger and their legacies in the dialectical and alephurgical practices and conditions that are recounted and analyzed in the lectures and in Miller's book. So let me first point out with regard to Foucault and Hegel that Foucault argues in the lectures that the phenomenology of spirit is all about care for the self. Foucault states about 19th century philosophy in the hermeneutics of the subject, lectures from 1982, quote, a certain structure of spirituality tries to link knowledge, the activity of knowing, and the conditions and effects of this activity to a transformation in the subject's being. The phenomenology of spirit after all has no other meaning, end quote. Hegel, in other words, is already a retrieval of some sort of the care of the self practices making up philosophy. A less obvious reference for approaching practices of care of the self and Hegel might be Hegel's 1793 tuning in essay in which Hegel asks how our practices, feelings, doctrines, objective religion, subjective religion and communal elements interwoven in religion where religion is the housing of morality, understood by Hegel less as rational doctrine and against Kant and more in line with Foucaultian virtue and care for self. How Hegel asks, is that kind of religion cultivated? And he turns to wisdom. He writes wisdom is something quite different from enlightenment, quite different from ratiosination. Wisdom is the soul's elevation through experience deepened by reflection over its dependence on opinion and the impressions of sense. Wisdom does little rationalizing. This is all Hegel and he finishes when it speaks it does so only from the depths of its heart. End of quote. We have here a Hegel quite important for care of the self insofar as the interwoveness of virtue, wisdom, experience and practice is emphasized. So Foucault does identify a certain Hegelian strand of care for the self in the vein he is studying in ancient Greece. But I would suggest that one difference between the lectures and Foucault's earlier examinations of power knowledge is the less philosophical dialectical approach to the description of truth telling about oneself in the lectures. That is, the truths and tellings in the lectures, the late lectures, do have dialectical elements. Mario's already talked about the Oedipus, which is shown to display the contradiction and conflict between different regimes of truth. And as Miller emphasizes, the point of the elenchic exercise, the way Socrates conducts the questioning of his interlocutor was to convince the interlocutor that his soul is incoherent, quoting Miller to break the hold of the immediate upon the soul. End of quote. But these are what I would call literalized or historicized scenarios of dialectics. In Hegel's phenomenology in contrast, truth telling about oneself is always a lesson of failure and wayward effects. This is because when spirit tries to tell the truth about itself, it presumes an immediate relation between telling and being and between the self and what the self tells and between the self that tells and the self whose truth it tells. And that immediacy always turns out to be mediated. So for instance, conscience states, I am my duty. But how can duty be mine if it's universal? And how can I be immediately related to something external to me? And how can each moral consciousness state that same thing I am my duty and yet be not identical to each other moral consciousness? In holding to its own self, conscience turns out for Hegel to be evil precisely where it is insisting on its goodness. More immediately relevant to the Foucault, in the phenomenology's chapter on reason, Hegel describes the failures of ethical consciousness's declaration, everyone ought to speak the truth. So in the phenomenology, ethical consciousness finds that that declaration, everyone ought to speak the truth, is undone by its own mediations. Hegel details how the command the declaration requires addenda. For instance, everyone ought to speak the truth if he knows the truth and so on. And hence the contingency of content does not live up to the universal demand of the form of the declaration. Thus it turns out Hegel writes, I quote, whether the truth will be spoken by this ethical consciousness is left up to the contingency of whether I know it and can convince myself of it and with that there is nothing further said other than it is a confused model of truth and falsity, which ought to be said. End of quote. But the very idea of telling the truth about oneself as Miller exhaustively explains it seems less deeply Hegelianly dialectical than did Foucault's work on prisons and clinics which laid bare the contradictions of those institutions missions and effects their discourses and their productions. Again, I'm not lamenting but I'm asking whether this perspective on dialectics might shift Miller's view of the continuity of these lectures with the earlier work. Now I'll turn briefly to Heidegger. Foucault's Allethergy as quoted by Miller refers to an act quote through which the subject speaking the truth manifests itself by which I mean to say represents itself to itself and is recognized by others as speaking the truth. End of quote. Allethergy clearly echoes Heidegger's invocations of allatheia as the Greek word that for Heidegger indirectly discloses what truth in its innermost quasi essence is namely allatheia, unforgetting, unconcealment. With his term Allethergy, I would suggest Foucault is literalizing and concretizing a Heidegarian yearning for a supposed ancient Greek understanding that is supposedly lost not a knowledge, but an experiential wisdom, a way of living truth. That allatheia truth element for Heidegger, however, is ontological metaphysical. He would not appreciate that, but I will call it that. It's not concrete and humanized as it is for Foucault. Truth for Heidegger, as in his 1930 essay, The Essence of Truth, gets successively unfolded in a quasi transcendental fashion a la Kant to exhibit ever deeper strata of enabling conditions of truth, each of which Heidegger calls truth. So specifically, truth defined in a common sense way as correspondence between statements and reality turns out to be possible only on the basis of the event of disclosure, also called truth, that in turn is only possible on the basis of a prior concealment out of which something can be disclosed, also called truth. So truth telling in a literal sense of someone saying true things is already several levels removed from the disclosure concealment dynamic that I would argue is what Heidegger will ultimately call truth. I am wondering about how Miller sees the ramifications of the differences between Foucault's phenomenalized, concretized, literalized truth telling and the ontological truth of disclosure that is Heidegger's concern. A similar slippage occurs if we look at the different connotations of the word conditions. Miller describes how Foucault was interested in, I quote, kinds of discourse that were spoken and the conditions under which one could speak the truth within them, psychiatry, medicine, economics, linguistics, painology, sexuality, and a quote. The conditions in those contexts are in large part worldly conditions in discipline and punish. How does judicial torture result in a body that produces and reproduces the crime in the history of sexuality volume one? How is sexual confession induced through various mechanisms that Foucault lists of clinical codification? These concrete empirical conditions are conditions of speaking truth that are not in the ontological or quasi transcendental register of enabling conditions of truth in the way of Heidegger. There is a narrative resemblance, though, between the plot of Heidegger's history of the forgottenness of Aletheia and Foucault's history of the care of the self. As Miller recounts, I quote, Foucault defines the modern era by the loss of spirituality in the domain of knowledge, end quote. This is exhibited in the self's reduction to the unprepared punctual app perception of the Kogito. With this, the truth of the self separates from scientific truth. The subject's self-relation as foundation of truth and ancient philosophy is lost, as with Heidegger, the understanding of Aletheia is lost. And we have instead the subject's alienation from truth in modernity with a host of what Miller calls political and spiritual pathologies that result. This is quick and dense, and I know there are plenty of other people here who want to talk about Foucault. So I'll just quickly summarize my remarks. They could be understood as questions, but they don't have to be considering all the other remarks we've had. My comments summarize. The lectures exhibit all kinds of debts to Heidegger and Hegel. Whole section on Kant got dropped for later. I see the lectures as portraying scenes that concretize dialectical conundrums where the phenomenology remains more formally dialectical and portrays scenes that are far from concrete. I also see the lectures as concretizing Heidegger's history of metaphysics in a history of care for the self. And as phenomenalizing in Aletheergy, the truth that for Heidegger is always only a play of disclosure and concealment. So in closing, telling the truth about oneself is a radical act. Disclosing the regimes of power knowledge is a radical act. There are different kinds of radical, different kinds of roots, and different kinds of uprooting. And now I'm eager to hear other views of Foucault's radicality in these lectures, and especially, of course, of Allen Miller's. Thank you. So thank you. What a rich banquet I have to choose from here. And I'm going to have a very difficult time restricting myself to 10 minutes. But we'll give it a go here. Starting off with Mark's wonderful response, on a certain level, we just have to stipulate Foucault's Western centrism. It's a fact. I would have liked to have talked more about the material on Christianity in the book, and particularly about volume four. Quite simply, there's only so much room in a book. And I was primarily interested in the work on antiquity. And so things got left out. But I think what's really crucial in the relationship between these texts and the volume four is there is this kind of progression that Foucault traces from the Oedipus, where the key moment in Oedipus for him, really from the first time he talks about it in 1970, until he gives a lecture in 1981 at Levant, is the moment when truth is predicated on the experience of the subject. So he identifies three pairs that he calls a symboli. And there's a divine pair. There's Apollo and Tiresias. There's a royal pair. There's Oedipus and Jocasta. And then there are the two shepherds. And going very quickly and schematically, he argues that what we really see in Oedipus and its ethical significance is that the truth only becomes actualized when it's reducible to the experience of two individuals who have no mandate for truth, who have no warrant for truth other than their experience, because they are slaves. And that then leads to Oedipus's confession. And so this is a key moment because at this point, he says, our experience becomes an object of knowledge in a way that it has not before. And this very much, I think, and I argue in the book, corresponds with a similar recognition of the subject as separated from the object as the predicate for knowledge that you see in the cave contemporaneously, and that Heidegger says really marks this shift from the older notion of Alethea to a new one that's based on accuracy and correspondence. Once that shift is made, then it becomes possible to have certain internal technologies of the self, both in terms of a Socratic inquiry and the kinds of relationship between master and student that we see there, but also ultimately the Stoics. And that, he wants to argue, I think, really forms the predicate for the Christian notion of the flesh, that you first have to have experience as this object of examination before it can then be subjected to this kind of deep suspicion where there's a notion that behind your experience, there is a true self, there is something to be ferreted out that then has to be confessed, which allows you to come up to a higher truth through confession. And that in turn, and again, I'm going very quickly and very schematically, is the predicate for a sexual self where you have an interiorized essence that is to be understood, is to be ferreted out that then identifies you as heterosexual, homosexual, perverse, normal, this whole panoply, this whole table of identities. So that's where I think he's going with all this. And why I think the publication of Volume 4 is in fact really significant because I don't think you understand the rest of what's going on, what the whole purpose of Volumes 2 and 3 were without reading Volume 4. As for rhetoric, I'll just say my next book is on Cicero. So stay tuned. I want to think a little bit, though, about virginity in terms of Christianity, because I think it's really important that Foucault sees virginity, and he talks about this a lot in book 4 in Volume 4, but he also talks about it in subjectivity and truth as a technique paribion, as an art about life. It is not simply a deprivation of sexuality. It is a way of forming a self, a way of forming enjoyment at a very extreme level. So I think he sees a kind of continuity here, and it centers around the question of ascesis. And as for LSD, would that it were so easy? For those of us who lived in the 70s, we'd have a lot more books. As for what do we do with Socrates from Professor Nadoff's wonderful response, Paul Vann wrote an essay where he was trying to talk about what Foucault's notion of antiquity was and how it wasn't really an idea that we should return to antiquity, that there's some kind of ideal here. And he has this wonderful metaphor that I think is really correct, that what antiquity is and what Socrates is for Foucault is like introducing another card within a game. So you're playing a game of cards and you have a standard deck and then somebody introduces a kind of joker, another card, which allows you to make somewhat different moves. It doesn't necessarily change the rules of the game right away, although if you introduce enough new cards it will. But the idea is not so much that we can become Socrates, but thinking about Socrates offers us different ways of articulating a self-relation, different ways of articulating a relation to truth. I think it's important to remember the context of these lectures too, that Foucault was talking in the early 80s, he was very interested in seeing, he was criticized a lot for not more supporting the socialist government of Mitterrand. And he wanted to establish a place for the philosopher to speak and to criticize power and to criticize government and to criticize politics without becoming an advocate for a specific set of policies. He didn't see that. For him, the purpose of the philosopher is not to advocate for or against the specific nationalization of Renault or for a specific set of tax breaks or incentives. And therefore you needed to get behind the socialist government's policy on this or toe the communist line on that. But rather to interrogate the truth per se, we can say that that's a cop out, but for him, the real of philosophy is not the advocacy of a given position. He would advocate given positions, he would just say that's not part of being a philosopher per se. As for the Cartesian moment, I think something really important is happening right there. There's this notion that at the Cartesian moment, there's a separation of experience from truth. The cogito is this kind of blank moment that doesn't require sort of any experiential activity, self relation to access the truth. And what this really does is it is particularly problematic, this notion of truth as completely separate from an experiential practice for the humanities, I think, particularly for those of us in classics and in literature. His emphasis is on the experience of truth, the action of truth, the life of truth, and humanistic activity, I would posit, our enjoyment, our self overcoming in the encounter with the text or the work or the performance is predicated on there being a truth of our experience. It is an unrepeatable truth. It is not truth in the scientific sense. Foucault once says, you know, truth is far too important to me for there to only be one kind. But this is a moment that I think is actually untheorizable, this moment of the encounter between the experiential truths of the subject in relationship to these other kinds of truths, these non-repeatable truths that is untheorizable by neoliberalism. And I think that's important when Foucault is too often assimilated to the neoliberal. For Mario's wonderful paper, I mean, I could go on about Bernard Henri Levy. I think he engages in a kind of irresponsible neoliberal utopianism that doesn't recognize the necessity of power. I've talked elsewhere about Agamben and his, I think, artificial separation of Beos and Zoe and the kind of determinism that he sees in that separation in Aristotle. Foucault, on the other hand, really argues for a Beos aletheis, a true life that he sees in the cynics and the cynics as a means of resistance. The cynics, he argues, may not have left behind a body of doctrine. They may have left behind a set of procedures. They may not have left behind a set of procedures that can be operationalized into a machine for producing information. But they clearly have left a legacy that is embodied in the antics of the Franciscans as the subversive order of mendicants who discomfited the privilege orders of medieval Europe. More importantly, for our purposes, he argues that the true errors of the cynics are to be found in 19th century Europe's revolutionary movements. American anarchism, think Emma Goldman, the Russian nihilists and early Bolsheviks. He says, the style of existence proper to militant revolutionaries breaks with and ought to break with the conventions, the habits, the values of society. And it ought to manifest directly by its visible form, by its constant practice and its immediate existence, the concrete possibility and evident value of another life, another life that is the true life. This theme of the true life so fundamental and at the same time so enigmatic and interesting, that true life whose problem has already been formulated by Socrates and whose theme has not ceased, I believe to run through the whole of Occidental thought. So I think this is really important because when we argue that Foucault is, particularly the late Foucault is in some ways apolitical or is withdrawing, he's very much making the argument between a kind of life and a direct revolutionary tradition. And I take that as not an offhand remark, but it's something central to the way he wants to link governmentality, which he talks about over and over in these lectures. I mean, the next to the last series is called the government of the self and others and the formation of the self. So there is, I would argue, a direct politics in this work. Foucault's emphasis on the BIOS and its aesthetic qualities is neither a celebration of dandyism for its own sake nor a flight from politics, but a deliberate and calculated attempt to reclaim alternative modes of truth, modes of truth that do not depend upon the abstraction of human existence for their validity, modes of truth that it wants to firm individual existence and offer the means of resistance to a capitalist, biopolitical, technological hegemony that threatens the existence of not only of entire populations, but also our own. Jim is obviously right on a certain level that Foucault is no longer involved in the same kind of institutional critique he was in his early work. Although, as I've just argued, I think there is a direct relationship between his notion of the subject and the self and the theme of governmentality. But I was just reading this morning, ladies and gentlemen, the series of lectures from 1975 where he's going through and he's talking about, you know, legal psychiatry and comparing legal psychiatrists to ubera, you know, you don't find that kind of critique in these late lectures, you know, and that is perhaps too bad. But I do think you find something about the courage of truth. And I want to argue that perhaps now more than ever, particularly for those of us in universities, and I speak as a recovering vice provost, the courage of truth, the willingness not only to practice truth as a professional thing, but to have a direct relationship to truth as a self in relation to power is crucially important. I wrote a piece called, let's see if I can, tyranny, fear and paracia, truth in the new neoliberal university or how do I know I'm not Heidegger. And I was talking particularly about, you know, Heidegger becoming, you know, chancellor under the Nazis, and then thinking about all the university administrators under Trump who thought, you know, this is okay, we can manage. It's not going to be that bad. It's going to be okay. I speak as someone who actually had the governor of my state appoint a general to be the president of the University of South Carolina, a general who was given this post as a consolation prize because he was not made national security advisor and Mick Mulvaney who's from South Carolina got on the phone. And I can provide documentation for all this. This is not just gossip. So, you know, it seems to me this ability to think about truth and my particular relationship as a subject as an actor is not something that's not part of my present. And, you know, Foucault saw in the ancient philosophers and ethics of truth a set of practices for forming the self as a speaker of fearless truth. What is more important for our purpose and for Foucault is not to find simple or a timeless model, but to discover a model of truth telling that does not abstract the act of truth, what Foucault calls out of from our persons that does not reduce the truth and hence our knowledge, our research, and our teaching to a set of defined repeatable skills that make no demands on either the speaker or the hearer. Truth is not a job. Truth is not a program or a set of routines. If knowledge is what is strictly repeatable in abstraction from the speaker, the knowledge is simply another commodity that has no bearing on our being. It is a means to an end and the university within this world assumes its role in the instrumentalization of existence for ends we cannot rationally question because those ends are abstracted from the means themselves. They are not knowable and testable in terms of a repeatable, quantifiable truth. Carried to its logical extent, extreme, we end up with a radical split between a world of the purely operational and a world of values, which are defined as personal beliefs, matters of faith, individual choices, and are therefore immune to scrutiny. Hence in the name of a purely operational rationality, a total irrationalism becomes exalted. We see evidence of this irrationalism in the rise of various fundamentalisms and conspiracies. Finally, responding to Karen and I feel like this is all too jagged and doesn't hang together enough, but it is what it is. I love the idea that the later work concretizes the philosophical themes of the early work. I think that's absolutely true. I think it does so, concretizes it specifically in terms of the question of how does power produce specific kinds of human beings, what is the relation between these structures and our experience, and how do I act? I love the phrase Frankfurt adjacent, and I will steal that. Scrolling here. Is Foucault's later work less dialectical in the Hegelian since the early work? I think that's clearly true. Foucault had a profound ambivalence about Hegel. I mean, Epolite was his professor. He wrote his master's thesis with Epolite on Hegel, but he has this great quote. I believe it's in the order of knowledge where he says, every time you think you get away from Hegel, he's there standing around the corner waiting for you. I know it's my experience at least. He's always there. As for Heidegger, I think it's important to realize the way Deitian is mediating through his metre de la vérité, is mediating this sort of rethinking of Heidegger's concept of truth, and trying to concretize it in terms of specific historical structures. I think that text, particularly for the 1970 lectures on la volonté de Savoie, is really important and has a lasting effect on Foucault. But you're clearly right. He's clearly constantly throughout these late lectures responding to Hegel, responding to Heidegger, responding to Kant. He's frequently also responding to Derrida and Freud. There is this whole sort of parallel dialogue that's happening at the same time that I think we've only really just begun to uncover. But thank you everyone for being so patient. Yes, this was an amazing audience. Thank you for coming out, so many of you, and thank you for your stamina, your patience. If anybody has any questions, that would be fantastic, so I can come around. Yes, and you can speak in the microphone. Hi. Does this work? Yeah. Okay, great. Thank you all very much for a more stimulating Friday afternoon than I anticipated. Not because I didn't anticipate that this would be stimulating, but just my Fridays are kind of boring. I was thinking about institutions. I was wondering if we could press a little bit. In what sense these lecture, like Ramona posed a question, what did the lecture form of so much of this, how does that shape or contour the teaching? And then I started thinking about in what sense these Foucault's turn to antiquity might be a turn to a theory of education. You look at the government or the scene of education, you think about the foundational presence of classic, particularly the study of classical antiquity and the forms of truth that was said to propose at the beginnings of the modern research university. And so I wonder about where does the university fit in? Where does education fit in in these attempts to give an account of truth telling and antiquity? And in particular, think of the figure of Socrates. One of the attractions of Socrates might be that he's precisely outside of an institution, or at least that's the story we might tell. So I guess the question would be, in what sense are these lectures on antiquity and specifically on truth telling and antiquity attempts to think about the institution of the university as Foucault inhabited it? We've heard a lot about how he inhabited Berkeley. We've heard some about how he inhabited the College de France. We've heard something about how he was interested in concrete scenes of dialectics, more than abstract senses of dialectics. I mean, this is a broad set of questions, but I'd like to press on the contextualization of these lectures in institutions of education. So as I'm sure you probably know, the College de France is a unique institution. It has no students. It only has auditors. So no one gets a grades. There are no exams given. And Foucault, as all the members of the College lectures once a year, he routinely had up to 600 people. The amphitheater would hold 300 and they regularly had to open another amphitheater where it was just piped in. They couldn't see him. So these were public acts. I mean, I think that's important to remember. And there were public acts that were, yes, they existed in an official structure, but they weren't part of the educational system per se. Sometimes he laments this fact because he finds it very stifling that it's a one-way conversation. He several times he tries to set up smaller seminars with people to meet so that there can be more interaction. But these are the terms of the appointment. When we think about why Socrates was executed, one of the charges is corrupting the youth. And one of the charges, the way Socrates talks about, at least in Plato's Apology, is taking young people and teaching them to ask their parents impertinent questions. And they find that annoying. And I think in many ways, part of what Foucault's doing is addressing this audience and trying to convince them to have this kind of ethical commitment to the truth as a moment of political resistance, I think. And he wants to stand for, I think, a moment of integrity there. At least that's my term. That's not his term. Where the act of truth is an immediately instrumentalized, economized, metabolized into this larger system. And it's ironic that he does this at, of course, the pinnacle of the French university system because the Collège de France is what everyone dreams of. It's the perfect job. Can I just intervene very briefly? Jim, you took seminars. Jim was a graduate student in Complett. I told you the classics, graduate students didn't go to Foucault's seminars. Jim did. He was in a different department. How did he run seminars here? I mean, because that wasn't 500 people. Not in a Socratic way. It was no, but he had an outline. It was very firm. I've never seen anyone use triads so frequently and triads within triads. It was very extraordinary, but that is the French way. I almost would say Cartesian and geometrical in the way he presented his stuff. But he was open for discussion all the time, which he probably enjoyed and didn't get at the Collège de France. I went to one lecture at the Collège de France when I was in college and I kind of didn't get what was going on because I was just so blown away. And I just went up to him to ask a question and he did not answer me. But there wasn't accessibility even at the Collège. But I mean, I'm not going to waste time on this, but I think at one point talking, though one can't talk about there being an institution of sophistic education and pedagogy, it was not institutionalized and there wasn't an institution of. But I think that would be, at least with his Socrates, a certain way to go in that direction of how he sees Socrates as overturning, criticizing and in some sense subverting that sophistic. And the problem there, of course, well, it doesn't necessarily have to be linked with his condemnation of rhetoric. It can be linked the way in which the sophists were more and more becoming voices of the law court. So that might be one way to think about it. And I just had one thing. Socrates, I mean, it's an incredible power trip all the time. Socrates is putting you down any time you meet him in any context. The irony, the ridicule, whatever it may even is. So it's a very lopsided relationship. Last time I used to emphasize that and how ineffective it was, how few good people he seems to have had following him. Even though he obviously made a big impression on people, he didn't seem to get much done in the way of building a following of Good Athenian. Vlasdoss, I was curious. I don't want this whole thing to be by Vlasdoss, good, Foucault, bad. You know, they were very different students of Socrates. I did notice as a published online catalog of all of Vlasdoss's dossiers of correspondence. He used to write a bunch of people's letters, sort of left, right, and center on. And oddly enough, I looked in the index and there's nothing about Foucault at all. It seems like they had no, I mean, they were both at Berkeley some of the time studying some of the same thing, but they're just on different wavelengths. But I would have, yeah, my worry about Socrates as an ideal is some of that. And then Plato, you know, his best friends were the Thirtieth Tyrants and his relative for the Thirtieth. So again, I'm not a big fan of their impact on the Athenian. Sorry. I'm not a fan of Tyrants either. Just so you know. I'm against tyranny as well. So thank you so much for this. I was so tired when I entered the room and I found it just absolutely enlightening and exciting. This is the fourth talk of the week that I've been at and it might be the best. So my question actually is about Iran. And I want to put a little bit of pressure on your that stipulates that Foucault is Western centric, because that is not necessarily needs to have been the case. In some ways, right, the writings on Iran are outrageous and kind of disastrous. And one reading, right, of this turn to the self was in fact that he had been a political idiot. And he knew he had been a political idiot and he abandoned writing about Iran suddenly. And then he seems to turn to exactly this set of lectures. And I kind of wonder whether in some ways his return to Greece and Rome is a return to safe harbor from this kind of Iranian experiment that he had momentarily entered into. And whether you have thoughts on that, I noticed Iran does not feature so prominently in the book. But yeah, so yeah, my question is does it does he need to have been so Western specific? And in fact, is this this antiquity rather contingent? So I mean, the whole Iran question is fascinating. And you're right. And when I say he's Western centric, I mean, mostly in most of his major published work. I mean, there are scattered hints about Zen Buddhism as an escapist here and there, particularly in some interviews he did in Japan. But you know, as far as a really serious engagement, I don't know. Yeah, he went to Iran. He got very interested in the revolution. He clearly realized that he had misjudged it later. And he doesn't talk. I think it was chastising for him in the sense of not talking about things that you don't know much about. And but I also think it was formative, because I actually read some of his work on Christianity as he's constantly always sort of looking over his shoulder about what happened in Iran, about formations of the self, but also about the way power connects with that. He's got this amazing quote, and I'm going to butcher it a little bit. But he talks about how there's a chain between governmentality that leads down through various structures, that leads down to the individual and the self's relation, and that that chain moves back and forth constantly. And that you can't have power at the macro level that doesn't produce certain kinds of subjects. And you can't have, and those subjects in turn, both enable power and are potentially a locus of resistance there. But he's talking about that particularly in the context of the early church practices. And I can't believe that his experience of political she-ism isn't on his mind at that time. I have no evidence, but other than the fact that we know he had these experiences that he wrote about them, that they caused him to reflect on the limits of his knowledge. And then suddenly he's writing about Christianity in this very particular way. I mean, he was interested in Christianity before, but I would be shocked if it didn't have an impact. I have a quick question about the difference between the Socrates and the stylization of Socrates and Diogenes. And you just pointed to that sideline, which is never very clear to me how to think these two different types of parisia. Because what you just drew a moment ago is this line that goes from Diogenes through into 19th century in Foucault's thinking, which is emphasizing the Diogenes type of style or the Diogenes style of intervention as something that I see as quite different from the Socrates questioning. And that always puzzled me in Foucault. I think he never really discusses this difference enough, but that might be my lack of knowledge. Wouldn't you say that Antisthenes has a student of Socrates and sort of imitator of Socrates and picking up on the bare feet and the ragged clothing and offending everybody. Antisthenes is then supposedly the teacher of Diogenes who exaggerates that even further. But of the different Socratic traditions, that notion of the barefoot hippie dog insultor, frank speaker is one version of Socrates, the philosopher and how to do philosophy. And others, I mean Aristotle is rather elegant. And so he still sees himself as in the tradition of, in this case, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and schools and everything is very proper. So you can make Socrates, since he didn't write anything like the Buddha and like Jesus, it's easy to commandeer him and turn him into what you want. And that would be my answer. What he said? I mean, I do think that one of the things, so the cynics were very clear in their self presentation as heirs of Socrates. And there is that. But I also think that Foucault is very interested in particularly making an argument. And this is more about what Foucault is doing than the relationship between the cynics and Socrates and making an argument about how this kind of Paris, this parasiastic subject, and this parasiastic subject who philosophizes with the body, you know, it is his presence, you know, becomes a kind of type within within the West, you know, through the Franciscans, you know, on up and it is in Paul Venn's terms, a kind of moral dandyism, you know, the that you see there. And so, you know, one of the things I talk about in the book is there is not a form of social existence that doesn't posit its ideal type of life, whether it's the new Soviet man, or, you know, the Japanese company man, and we too easily take away these kinds of stylizations from a social power and see them as somehow, oh, well, that's just individualism that that doesn't have any relation to these larger institutional structures of power. And I think he's pushing back very strongly on that. And I think Diogenes as this very provocative era of Socrates, who's out with his whole being, you know, is emblematic of that for him. And I think it's particularly powerful that he's talking about Socrates, you know, this philosophy of the body, when he's very, very ill, you know, I mean, those were his very last lectures. And he's visibly ill when he's at the lectern. So I don't think I don't think that's accidental either. Can you hear me? So now my voice will resonate. Thank you very much for your moving remarks. It strikes me as significant to somehow to recover the title of the event, which echoes the title of the book, right, learning to speak the truth, emphasizing the word learning as if truth telling could be a technique. Um, it seems to me that considering this question, that a consideration of this question cannot go without acknowledging the significance of the phenomenon of the voice. And I don't want to intellectualize this, I mean it quite literally. And it strikes me that only Mario's remarks came close to striking the forbidden cord, something like acknowledging the involuntary dimension of truth telling. So perhaps this is something like a request to speak to something as difficult as the most obvious, which is how do you know that someone is speaking the truth? How do you know whom to trust? And the fact is you cannot know. You feel it. And how do you feel it? Well, precisely you feel it by the voice. There's the labor itself of the truth that appears in the directness of the voice, the immediacy, the contours, the texture, the subtlety, the pain, the tempo, the trembling, the holding, the tension, the waiting, the hesitation, the expectation, all of that. So if somebody could speak to something like the significance of truth, which is carried by and which holds the voice itself, that would be great. I shrink from answering or in any way that would sort of contradict what I totally agree is a really vital component of a lot of context of truth telling. On the other hand, sincerity isn't the same always as truth telling. And there are fervent believers in God and the prophet in all kinds of things that I think are, you know, that many people, not just scientists, but think are mistaken and even evil in some cases. And their intensity with which they've experienced that and can express that may be genuine. But it doesn't mean that what they're talking about is actually is actually whatever you know that means. It may be true to them. So, you know, I speak that back not to reject your point that truth isn't just a matter of writing something down or expressing, but they're different. I mean, my problem when I was trying to write a short response to all the things that are going on in the book, I sometimes, you know, use the word truthiness as a reminder that truth is a very slippery notion. I think, you know, Alethea in various different usages in classical Greek is a valuable term to work with. Truth with a capital T, like reality with a capital R, I think is, you know, bunk. I think it's useless. I mean, it's not useful. You can use it in language, but I don't think there is sort of such a thing or such a condition that one can trust in finding it. So this is my by objection to plain and so on and to many forms of revealed religion. That is only me. I'm sorry. I have one thought. Maybe you mentioned something, Alan, which is an interesting one to connect with my presentation. So we have a moment where Oedipus is confronted with a truth, I guess, but it's not one that he produces. It's one that he witnesses. And it's in the configuration of two individuals who have nothing to do with him except that they know something about him that he doesn't know. And at that moment, some involuntary, I suppose, truth is uttered in a way, although I'm not sure we call it truth. The moment that he experiences what he does is hurtful and painful, but maybe that's a kind of truth. But at the same time, what's happening, what produces that truth in one of the slaves is torture. And so I have trouble accepting that condition of expression of truth in that moment. That's all it does happen. It correlates with what Lisa was saying, but it's also something quite different. And Mario's Mario's point, I think was very good, which is that it's circulate something circulates in the atmosphere. Truth attacks the subject. Viral. Yeah, it is. Do you want to have the last word, Alan, seven firties? Okay, okay. I'm going to go slightly adjacent. I'm going to go Frankfurt adjacent. But I was just talking with my graduate students about this line in subjectivity and truth that I think is fascinating. Foucault has this statement where he says, you know, the central question is why is there not simply reality? Why is there also truth? Reality cannot account for truth. Because if that were the case, then all truth would already exist all the time. You know, we don't have truth because it corresponds to reality, even though it may, but that doesn't explain the existence of the true discourse. So the real question is why is there this doubling of the world and what is it doing? And if you think about it, it in fact makes perfect sense, but it then emphasizes the truth is not something that reveals the world with a capital T or that is always the same. But it is, in fact, a human activity that has different personal and institutional coordinates that determine it. And it has different kinds. There are different kinds of truths. And some of them are revealed in the voice and are unrepeatable. The truth of you've just found out that your spouse or partner has betrayed you. And some of them are not like the fact that CO2 is accumulating in the atmosphere and the polar ice caps are getting smaller. And that's, you know, my tone of voice has nothing to do with with that particular truth. Okay, I think we can stop now. Thank you so much. Thanks to the audience. Thanks to Alan Wheeler. And thanks to my audience. This was a great event. Thank you.