The History of Truth

Speaking of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault said that one day the twentieth century would be ‘Deleuzian’, emphasising how the French thinker’s philosophical system would sooner or later be recognised as a fundamental tool for understanding the present. This has indeed proved to be the case, but Foucault was certainly not unaware of the extent to which his own studies on madness, sexuality and the archaeology of knowledge would also have a long-lasting impact and continue to fuel a debate that extended beyond academic circles. The long-lasting impact of Foucault’s work has kept alive interest in the most topical subjects (the panopticon system of control he discusses in "Discipline and Punish," for example, although it is not always cited appropriately), but it has overshadowed certain aspects that reveal the breadth of his work and his focus on themes that trace philosophy back to its origins. Among these works is the course Foucault delivered at the University of Buffalo in 1972, dedicated to The History of Truth (translated by Valeria Zini for Einaudi), a series of lectures in which the philosopher analyses how the concept of truth and the relationship between truth and thought came to be established in Western society: This is a theme that runs through many of Foucault’s works (from Madness and Civilisation to the extraordinary 1981 course at Leuven centred on the truest meaning of confession, To Do Wrong, To Say True) and occupied his research right up to the end (shortly before his death, he emphasised: ‘My problem has always been that of truth’). The course begins with a premise highlighted as early as the first lecture, namely the reciprocal and simultaneous genesis of ‘power-knowledge’, ‘the intertwined formation of power and knowledge’: circumventing the problem of Marxist historiography, in which the subject is situated at the origin of knowledge, Foucault follows Nietzsche’s perspective, according to which knowledge is the distillation of a series of power relations. From this methodological approach (of which Foucault offers a valuable and fluid account here), the French philosopher examines how the distinction between true and false arose, the forms of judicial truth in Ancient Greece (with a splendid exploration of Homeric epic), the emergence of the figure of the judge in the Middle Ages, and the state’s need to punish those who cause disorder by relying on specific mechanisms of truth (such as that extracted through torture). Although the lectures end with the Middle Ages, the tools Foucault provides are so profound that they alter our perspective on the meaning of truth and its relationship with power in the contemporary world.

    

Michel Foucault
, "Storia della verità
", Einaudi, 380 pp., 25 euros