Alessandro Fontana

Society must be defended : lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76

SOCIETY MUST BE DEFENDED is a full transcript of the lectures given by Foucault at the College de France in 1975-76. The main theme of the lectures is the contention that war can be used to analyse power relations. Foucault contends that politics isa continuation of war by other means. Thus, any constitutional theory of sovereignty and right is an attempt to refute the fact that power relations are based upon a relationship of conflict, violence and domination. The book is coloured with historical examples, drawn from the early modern period in both England and France, with wonderful digressions into subjects as diverse as classical French tragedy and the gothic novel.

4 March 1981

The three great transformations of sexual ethics in the first centuries CE. ~ A reference text: Plutarch’s Erotikos. ~ Specificity of Christian experience. ~ Plan of The Dialogue on Love. ~ The comic situation. ~ The young boy’s place: central and passive position. ~ The portrait of Ismenodora as pederast woman. ~ The break with the classical principles of the ethics of aphrodisia. ~ The transfer of the benefits of the pederastic relationship to within marriage. ~ The prohibition of love of boys: unnatural and without pleasure. ~ The condition of acceptability of pederasty: the doctrine of the two loves. ~ Plutarch’s establishment of a single chain of love. ~ The final discredit of love of boys. ~ The wife’s agreeable consent to her husband.

Subjectivity and Truth

The first € price and the £ and

1 February 1984 Second hour

price are net prices, subject to local VAT. Prices indicated with * include VAT for books; the €(D) includes 7% for Germany, the €(A) includes 10% for Austria. Prices indicated with ** include VAT for electronic products; 19% for Germany, 20% for Austria. All prices exclusive of carriage charges. Prices and other details are subject to change without notice. All errors and omissions excepted. M. Foucault F. Ewald, A. Fontana, F. Gros (Eds.) Subjectivity and Truth

The birth of biopolitics : lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79

[…*] I HAVE TRIED THEN to pick out the relationships and differences between the parrhesiastic mode of truth-telling and, first, the prophetic mode of truth-telling, and then that of wisdom. And now I would like to indicate, very schematically and allusively, some of the relations between parrhesiastic veridiction and the veridic-tion of someone who teaches—I would prefer to say, basically, of the technician. These characters (the doctor, the musician, the shoemaker, the carpenter, the teacher of armed combat, the gymnastics teacher), frequently mentioned by Plato in his Socratic and other dialogues, possess a knowledge characterized as tekhnē, know-how, that is to say, entailing particular items of knowledge, but taking shape in a practice and involving, for their apprenticeship, not only a theoretical knowledge, but a whole exercise (a whole askēsis or meletē).1 They possess this knowledge, they profess it, and they are capable of teaching it to others. The technician, who possesses a tekhnē, has learned it, and is capable of teaching it, is someone obliged to speak the truth, or at any rate to formulate what he knows and pass it on to others; and, of course, this distinguishes him from the sage. After all, the technician has a certain duty to speak. He is obliged, in a way, to tell the knowledge he possesses and the truth he knows, because this knowledge and truth are linked to a whole weight of tradition.