Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Daniele Lorenzini. The Force of Truth: Critique, Genealogy, and Truth-Telling in Michel Foucault. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. 192 pp.

Review by Johanna Oksala

21 September 2023

In The Force of Truth, Daniele Lorenzini sets out to accomplish three ambitious tasks. First and foremost, the book aims to “offer the first comprehensive interpretation of Foucault’s project of a history of truth” (p. 119). Lorenzini contends that Foucault’s history of truth, or more specifically “a genealogy” of “regimes of truth,” is the common thread that runs from his investigations into Nietzschean genealogy in the early 1970s to his analyses of parrhesia and techniques of the self in the 1980s (p. 5). The book thus refutes the still common misconception in Foucault scholarship according to which Foucault undertook genealogies of power/knowledge mechanisms in the 1970s, but then abandoned this project and turned to an apolitical study of ethics in the 1980s. Lorenzini convincingly shows that Foucault’s late work remains thoroughly political in the sense that it continues to study the ways that human beings are governed by truth, as well as the ways they can use truth as a critical, ethico-political force against mechanisms of power. Lorenzini accomplishes this by combining in an innovative way Foucault’s analyses of parrhesia with J. L. Austin’s and Stanley Cavell’s insights into performative and passionate utterances.

Second, the book is a timely intervention into the current debates on post-truth and Foucault’s significance for them. Lorenzini argues, again compellingly, that we need to steer clear of the false dilemma of either conceding that truth is only an effect of power, or strenuously defend the value of absolute truth against fake news and alternative facts. Foucault’s rejection of the Truth—truth understood as timeless and absolute—does not amount to a rejection of truth altogether. Rather, Foucault’s history of truth should be understood precisely as an attempt to criticize the claim that such an understanding of truth is necessary to stop our critical theories and practices from dissolving into relativism.

Lorenzini explicates the distinction Foucault drew between games of truth and regimes of truth. While every game of truth has a formal structure and explicit rules that autonomously establish the distinction between true and false statements, regimes of truth importantly include the historical and sociopolitical context into which every game of truth is necessarily embedded, as well as the actual individuals who must concretely play the game. The distinction between games and regimes of truth then makes it possible to argue that Foucault avoids epistemic relativism whilst maintaining the possibility to criticize the value and effects of truth. Foucault’s genealogies of truth are primarily questioning the necessity to submit our conduct to the normalizing prescriptions derived from truths, particularly in various confessional regimes of truth.

Third, Lorenzini also aims to bring the Habermas-Foucault debate to a definite close by arguing that “critics and apologists of Foucault alike have so far failed to grasp the possibilizing dimension of his genealogical project, and with it, its normative force” (p. 106). It is here that I find Lorenzini’s project less compelling.

Lorenzini’s first step is to show that, consistent with the tenet that where there is power there is resistance, Foucault’s genealogical inquiries almost invariably comprise moments where the focus is on counter-conducts and historical struggles against mechanisms of government and regimes of truth. The examples that Lorenzini lists include the counter-conducts of virginity, convulsion, hysteria, suicide, and the rebellion of Nu-pieds. The argument is that if counter-conduct was possible for these individuals and groups, “it is possible for us as well” (p. 112).

Analyzing historical forms of counter-conduct does not fix the alleged normative deficit at stake in the Foucault-Habermas debate, however. Not only is it far from certain that what was possible in the past will be possible today, but this question would have to be decided on the level of historical and empirical facts, not normative commitments. In other words, while it might be easy to concede that Foucault shows, through concrete historical examples, that individuals were able to undertake “a multiplicity of specific, contingent, fragile, but real forms of counter-conduct,” that is no reason yet why we should undertake them (p. 112).

Lorenzini must make a further claim: reading Foucault’s investigations of these counter-conducts will “instill in his audience a sense of ethico-political commitment towards the subjugated individuals of the past – a commitment to carrying on their struggles in the present, albeit in a different form” (p. 114). Foucault’s genealogies have “normative force” because they constitute an ethico-political “we” encompassing not only the individuals who endured and fought against the regimes of power in the past, but also us, Foucault’s contemporary audience, who presumably come to share the transhistorical, ethico-political commitment to struggle against the subjugating effects of governmental mechanisms and regimes of truth.

Habermasians will most likely be unconvinced by this vague commitment to “the struggle” given that Lorenzini admits that Foucault’s genealogies cannot give us any concrete advice on what to do nor identify the criteria that would distinguish the subjugating regimes of truth from the harmless or critical ones (p. 113; also see p. 44). In addition to Habermasians, many Foucauldians might also be dissatisfied with Lorenzini’s transhistorical and formal account of resistance. Which of the vastly different historical struggles of the variously subjugated individuals that Foucault highlights are we asked to continue and why?

What I take to be Lorenzini’s core ethical contention—namely that Foucault’s genealogies, while not providing any explicit normative grounding, nevertheless have normative force in the sense that they convey ethico-political norms through their pathos, choice of subject matter, manner of investigation, or perlocutionary effects—is an insight that has been defended in different forms by several Foucauldians (including me). While this insight is undoubtedly central for understanding Foucault’s work, I am not convinced that Lorenzini’s eloquent iteration of it will bring the seemingly interminable Foucault-Habermas debate to an end.