Political Spirituality: Parrhesia, Truth and Factical Finitude

Abstract

This chapter adapts Foucault’s “analytic of finitude” to provide an analytical framework. It does so by first drawing a distinction between soteriological finitude, in which things are encountered sub specie aeternitatis, and modern factical finitude in which things are posited ad infinitum. If modern philosophy seeks to give concrete epistemic form to factical finitude, modern politics seeks to give it concrete political form via the application of positive knowledge. Encountering factical finitude’s order of things ad infinitum, modern rule becomes committed to the infinite government of finitely knowable things. The problematic of truth and rule continues, nonetheless, to contest the hegemony that positive knowledge and rule has attempted to exercise in modern times: for “the manifestation of truth is much more than making known” (Government of the Living: 77). The chapter goes on to adapt Foucault’s later preoccupation with political spirituality and the courage of truth, largely but not exclusively focused on the classical world, to an analytic of the intersection of modern truth, rule and spectacle. Given Foucault’s proscription of it, why, and how, spectacle? Because no truth teller has ever claimed that truth is transparent. As Foucault therefore also notes, truth telling requires, “ways of making truth itself appear against the background of the unknown, the hidden, the invisible and unrepresentable” (Government of the Living: 6).

The objective of truth telling is therefore less the city’s salvation than the individual’s ethos (Michael Foucault, The Courage of Truth, The Government of Self and Others II, Lectures at the College de France 1983–1984, ed. Frederic Gros and Arnold I. Davidson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 65.