The subject of truth: on Foucault's lectures on the will to know

Abstract

This essay argues that in order fully to appreciate the reorientation of Foucault‟s lecture courses from the 1980s around the concepts of “truth” and “subjectivity,” it is necessary to read closely his very first lecture course at the Collège de France, Lectures on the Will to Know (1970-1971), in which, for the first time, Foucault focuses on the event of truth itself, rather than on a discourse of truth within the social or human sciences. The lectures delineate the Aristotelian “morphology of knowledge” and “system of truth” that have dominated western thought, and, with Nietzsche, question its underlying assumptions. Specifically, they bring out a deeper, more complex phenomenon, identified as the “will to know,” which reveals the inextricable bond between truth, knowledge and power. Foucault‟s genealogy of truth reveals the historical and contingent conditions of emergence of a morphology of thought which presents itself as natural, necessary, and disinterested. In doing so, however, Foucault also leaves open the question of whether a different morphology, and a different subject of truth, might be possible – a question to which he returns in the 1980s.