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Untimely Historiography? Foucault’s

“Greco-Latin Trip”
Susan C. Jarratt
Published online: 06 Jun 2014.

To cite this article: Susan C. Jarratt (2014) Untimely Historiography? Foucault’s “Greco-Latin Trip”,
Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 44:3, 220-233, DOI: 10.1080/02773945.2014.911559

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 Rhetoric Society Quarterly
Vol. 44, No. 3, pp. 220–233

Untimely Historiography? Foucault’s

“Greco-Latin Trip”
Susan C. Jarratt

Around 1980, Michel Foucault took a new direction in his historical work. This essay poses a
question about the historiographical stance Foucault adopts in his late lectures by contrasting them
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with an early essay, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” The central question concerns the status of
“critical history,” a term Foucault derives from Friedrich Nietzsche. The turn toward ethics in the
later work combines with Foucault’s urge toward a rapprochement with philosophy as a discipline
and his engagement with canonical works of antiquity in a constellation of effects that seem to
blunt the critical edge of his earlier historiography. It is finally through a turn toward the Cynics
very near the end of his career that Foucault revives a form of historiographical untimeliness.

Among his contributions to numerous domains of contemporary humanistic stud-

ies, Michel Foucault’s historiography has been an especially stimulating resource
for rhetoric scholars. His methods—archaeology, genealogy, history of thought—
inspired the earlier surge of scholarly interest in historiography in our field. For
this Rhetoric Society Quarterly special issue’s revitalization of the untimely in his-
toriography, Foucault’s relatively early and influential essay on Friedrich Nietzsche
bears rereading. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” which appeared originally in a
1971 edited collection, Hommage à Jean Hyppolite, and became available in English
in Donald F. Bouchard’s 1977 collection, Language, Counter-memory, Practice, drew
from a range of Nietzsche’s texts, but most pointedly from On the Genealogy of
Morality and the Untimely Meditations in support of a genealogical method in his-
tory. In his editor’s note, Bouchard proposed that the essay’s “importance, in terms
of understanding Foucault’s objectives, cannot be exaggerated” (76), an assessment
that invites reconsideration now in light of Foucault’s completed body of work.
The essay begins with a color: “Genealogy is gray, meticulous, and patiently
documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on doc-
uments that have been scratched over and recopied many times” (Sec. 1). Gray/grey

Susan C. Jarratt is Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine,
243 Humanities Instructional Building, Irvine, CA 92697, USA. E-mail: sjarratt@uci.edu

ISSN 0277-3945 (print)/ISSN 1930-322X (online) © 2014 The Rhetoric Society of America
DOI: 10.1080/02773945.2014.911559
 Foucault’s “Greco-Latin Trip” 221

came from Nietzsche himself, who coded the “English hypothesis-mongering” of

Paul Ree in his study of morality as blue:

It is quite clear which colour is a hundred times more important for a genealogist
than blue: namely grey, which is to say, that which can be documented, which can
actually be confirmed and has actually existed, in short, the whole, long, hard-to-
decipher hieroglyphic script of man’s moral past! (On the Genealogy of Morality 8)

In each case, there is an emphasis on documentation, on the labor of the historical

work of discovery, in terms many historians would recognize. We have here an argu-
ment to track down and document morals or morality rather than assume them in
terms of pre-existing categories such as good and evil (in the way of “the English,”
such as Hume, according to Nietzsche; On the Genealogy 8). As it develops, how-
ever, Foucault’s reconstruction and appreciation of Nietzsche’s historiography has
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less to do with documentation per se—with “relentless erudition” (Sec. 1)—and

more to do with a conceptual unmasking of the “truth of history” as it was tra-
ditionally practiced in Europe in the nineteenth century. Disparity, discontinuity,
division, and difference: these are key words in the essay (Sec. 2); history should
be found in a “non-place” where the human cannot be consoled by the “play of
recognitions” (Sec. 4): “Nothing in man—not even his body—is sufficiently stable
to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men” (Sec. 5).
In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault makes a point of disarticulating his-
tory and philosophy: “history has a more important task than to be a handmaiden
to philosophy; it should become a differential knowledge of energies and failings,
heights and degenerations, poisons and antidotes” (Sec. 5).
Despite the somber gray beginning, the tone of the essay is playful, cutting,
irreverent; the emphasis, epistemological. Displacing origin with descent in all its
complexity, Foucault insists on a radical revisioning of how one constitutes the truth
of the past. A “genealogy of values, morality, asceticism, and knowledge” cultivates
“details and accidents”; through their emergence, “once unmasked,” we find “the
face of the other” (Sec. 2). Where ancient Greece makes a brief appearance in this
essay, Foucault rues the fact that Plato declined to turn Socratic philosophy against
itself but instead put it to use in the consecration of metaphysics (Sec. 6). In a
taxonimizing gesture so characteristic of his work, Foucault outlines a three-part
categorization of “anti-Platonic” historiography: parodic (against the real), disso-
ciative (against finding the roots of identity), and the sacrificial (against the survival
of a subject of absolute knowledge) (Sec. 7). Foucault seems to revel here in play—
with the lowly, the derisive, the ironic (Sec. 2)—and in the prospect of revitaliz-
ing the buffoonery of history: he envisions genealogy as history in the form of a
concerted carnival—as a charade (Sec. 2).
At the close of the piece, Foucault reiterates Nietzsche’s categories of historical
practice from the Untimely Meditations—the monumental, the antiquarian, and
the critical—with an emphasis, as we might expect, on the critical: “The Untimely
 222 Jarratt

Meditations discussed the critical use of history: its just treatment of the past, its
decisive cutting of the roots, its rejection of traditional attitudes of reverence, its lib-
eration of man by presenting him with other origins than those in which he prefers
to see himself ” (Sec. 7). Historiographers of rhetoric have worked from Foucault’s
and Nietzsche’s insights to generate new histories of rhetoric (Ballif; Davis; Hawhee;
Jarratt; Vitanza), and Foucault’s own work up to this point can be understood as
“critical” history. But Foucault goes on to write: “Nietzsche, however, reproached
critical history for detaching us from every real source and for sacrificing the very
movement of life to the exclusive concern for truth” (Sec. 7). This brief acknowledg-
ment of Nietzsche’s qualification, “raised in the name of the creative and affirmative
powers of life,” may speak out more clearly now that we have a new, late body of
work from Foucault. Does critical history, or revisionist historiography, sacrifice the
“very movement of life”? Is Foucault still practicing “critical history” in his later
works? How timely or untimely are these insights in light of his later work?
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In the years intervening between 1977 and Foucault’s death in 1984, his scholar-
ship took an unexpected path. Volume 1 of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality
(published in French in 1976; the English translation in 1978—hereafter HS) was a
critical point of intervention for thinking and practice in historiography, and partic-
ularly in studies of sexuality and gender in the United States. Calling into question
the “repressive hypothesis”—the assumption that power over the body operates
through taboo and prohibition, Foucault posited a new regime of discourses about
sex arising in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Christian confession
enjoined the subject to transform sex into discourse, thereby constructing a sys-
tem of control. Methodologically consistent with his earlier genealogical studies of
madness and prisons, Foucault’s introduction to HS presented what Frederic Gros
terms a “political reading of power apparatuses” (508–509).
Although Foucault had planned volumes to follow on the body and flesh, per-
verts, populations and races, and related subjects, there followed an eight-year
publication gap, succeeded by the appearance of Volumes 2 and 3 of HS (The Uses
of Pleasure and The Care of the Self ) in 1984, the year of his death. During that
interim, Foucault continued lecturing at the Collège de France every winter. The
recent reconstruction of these lectures based on tape-recordings and notes reveals
how comprehensively Foucault’s historical site of inquiry shifted from the European
institutions and disciplines of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries to
writings from ancient Greece and Rome. In fact, these late works—Volumes 2 and
3 of HS, lectures published as Hermeneutics of the Subject, Government of Self and
Others, and Courage of Truth, as well as a sequence of lectures delivered at Berkeley
in the fall of 1983, published as Fearless Speech—demonstrate a deep emersion in
ancient texts. The recent translations of these late lectures into English have sparked
a new wave of scholarly engagement in the United States, including attention from
scholars in the history of rhetoric.
Is there something “untimely” in Foucault’s adoption of the classical period as
an area of study in the final years of his life? Did Foucault’s shift in subject matter
 Foucault’s “Greco-Latin Trip” 223

entail a change in historiographical methodology? Did the turn to ancient Greek and
Latin texts and figures signal a retreat from pressing political concerns of his present,
such as the possibility for queer life and the treatment of people on the margins? A
single essay would not be sufficient to address these questions in full, a task now
in process across a broad spectrum of Foucault scholarship.1 In what follows, I will
sketch some impressions of Foucault’s ethos during this period gleaned from some
of his observations about the change in direction of his scholarship, and then from
the lectures themselves. The inward turn of the method combines with Foucault’s
urge toward a rapprochement with philosophy as a discipline and his engagement
with canonical works of antiquity in a constellation of effects that seem to blunt the
critical edge of his earlier historiography. The evocations of Socrates and the Cynics
in Courage of Truth, lectures from February and March of 1984 just before his death
in June, allow us to arrive at some provisional conclusions about historiographical
untimeliness and its implications for rhetoric.
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Foucault’s Account
In a number of contexts, Foucault directly addressed the change in direction of his
work from studying systems of power relations on a large scale as in Discipline and
Punish to the study of ethics, responding to critics who saw in the shift “a radical
rupture with his interest in processes of power, a move away from this genealogical
project of the 1970s” (Lemke 33; Poster; see also Blasius 198). In two lectures at
Dartmouth in 1980, Foucault presents this turn quite simply and clearly. Under the
broad project of studying the constitution of the subject across history, his work
formerly

dealt with [subjects] formed in those institutions like hospitals, asylums, and pris-
ons, where certain subjects became objects of knowledge and at the same time
objects of domination. And now I wish to study those forms of understanding
which the subject creates about himself. (“About the Beginning” 203)

In these lectures, a preview of Volumes 2 and 3 of HS, Foucault offers “govern-

ment” as the term that designates a “versatile equilibrium with complementarity
and conflicts between techniques which assure coercion and processes through
which the self is constructed or modified by himself ” (203–204). In an “autocri-
tique,” Foucault asserts that in his earlier work, he over-emphasized techniques of
domination. In the writing to come, he will concentrate on technologies of the self.
His chief examples at this point are the rules and practices adopted by elite Romans
influenced by Stoicism in the post-classical period: Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus

1 In the introduction to a recent (2010) essay from the journal Parrhesia, Thomas Lemke observes that “the
reception and appraisal of Foucault’s work [is] even more intense than during his lifetime. . . . Today, it is
quite impossible to give an exhaustive overview of the monographs, edited books, articles and PhD theses
that have used Foucault” from fields as diverse as “political science, sociology, media studies, gender studies,
criminology, and postcolonial studies” (31).
 224 Jarratt

Aurelius, among others. Passages from first-century philosopher Seneca offered in

this lecture speak to the matter of “recalling the truth forgotten by the subject,” the
truth residing in “what he ought to have done [by remembering] . . . a collection of
rules of conduct” (207).
In this context and others, Foucault characterizes the new directions in his work
in terms of both departure and continuity. Initially interested in the Christian con-
fession, Foucault, through his study of antiquity, is drawn to earlier pagan sources
and their account of practices of “the care of the self.” From the confession, Foucault
turns to other scenes of truth telling as signal discourse events; from the politi-
cal reading of power apparatuses, he turns to an ethical reading of practices of the
self and to friendship as a way of life. At the same time that he acknowledges this
change, Foucault also argues that his methodology is consistent across his work:
“Connecting together modes of veridiction, techniques of governmentality, and
practices of the self is basically what I have always been trying to do” (Courage of
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Truth 8). Whereas philosophy has always been concerned with truth, and he has
consistently turned the problematic toward the production of truth, he now turns
to ancient Greek and Latin sources to explore a “mode of being of discourse which
claims to tell the truth” (Government of Self and Others 309).
In a very late interview (January 1984), Foucault emphasizes the ethical orienta-
tion of his recent studies, again with reference to the Stoics. He is interested in “an
ascetic practice,” an “exercise of the self on the self” through which one attempts
transformation (“The Ethics of the Concern” 282). With emphasis on the key term
“ethics,” Foucault offers a formulation that brings together life practices, thinking,
and power: “ethics is the form freedom takes when it is informed by reflection”
(284). His interlocutor in this interview attempts at several points to get at the polit-
ical valence or specificity of Foucault’s formulation, continuing to introduce the
term “liberty” and “liberation” into his questions. In every case, Foucault (grace-
fully) turns aside the implication that there is a political program entailed here—a
“polemic”—or any specific political position. These moves are recognizable in the
Foucauldian field, even from the earliest work, where analyses of the discursive fields
of disciplines such as medicine and law were never convertible into policy or polit-
ical action plans. Nonetheless, there is something different about this late phase,
something unsettling to some of Foucault’s readers. In the terms of our inquiry
into the “untimely,” we could say that Foucault seemed to be moving away from
the cutting, critical edge of his earlier studies more toward the “timely”: i.e., the
conventional or traditional, mode of engagement with his material. This sense of
retreat is not grounded in a simplistic assumption that working with canonical texts
in ancient Greek and Latin would be in and of itself conservative. The huge and con-
tentious body of work on sexuality studies in antiquity inspired by Foucault’s work
serves as evidence that the impression comes from elsewhere.2

2 Foucault’s engagement with antiquity in sexuality studies is a fascinating topic with its own very rich

bibliography. For a recent lively and rigorous critique from a classicist, see James Davidson.
 Foucault’s “Greco-Latin Trip” 225

The Figure of Philosophy

I saw a figure emerge who was constantly present as the indispensable partner,
at any rate the almost necessary helper in this obligation to tell the truth about
oneself . . . [,] the presence of the other who listens and enjoins one to speak . . ..
[He could be a] doctor, psychiatrist, psychologist, or psychoanalyst—could be a
professional philosopher, but he could be anybody. (Foucault, Courage of Truth 5)

In my view, Foucault’s late work comes to seem less “untimely” not because of the
shift to ethics nor because of his unwillingness to turn the project of investigating
the production of truth—the game of truth-telling—into an advocacy of libera-
tory political speech. Neither does it lie in Foucault’s failure to offer an account of
rhetoric in antiquity that accords with our discipline’s current understanding of the
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history of the field (Walzer). Rather, I would suggest that, especially for scholars
already familiar with ancient studies, Foucault’s late work at points seems less “crit-
ical” in the Nietzschean sense (until the final lectures on the Cynics) because of the
figures who populate—and become admirable—in it: the social and political worlds
from which they emerge, the philosophical canons from which they are drawn, and
the value that attaches to them through Foucault’s readings. From the aristocrat Ion
in Euripides’ drama, to Pericles, hero of the Athenian democracy, to Socrates, the
hinge of parrhesiatic genealogy, and on to the stalwart Stoics of the Roman imperial
world, we are at many points invited to contemplate and, implicitly, admire canon-
ical figures from a conventional history of ancient history/philosophy/rhetoric.
Of course Foucault scholars will immediately object that we are not supposed to
consider these figures in their empirical historical “reality,” nor in terms of their
status and interpretation within more conventional philosophical, rhetorical, or his-
torical modes of analysis. Foucault consistently reminds us that we are not in search
of the truth, in the way of analytic philosophy, but of games of truth and scenes
of truth telling. But evoking such scenes places Foucault himself and the readers
imaginatively within them. As Foucault famously acknowledged in another inter-
view, “I never wrote things other than fiction, and I am perfectly conscious of it.
But I believe that it is possible for fiction to operate inside truth” (qtd. in Lévy 315).
We are invited to appreciate the discourses of Seneca, Plutarch, and Marcus Aurelius
as exemplary of the discourses of the “care of the self,” while their biographies and
the values their life practices endorsed are not subject to evaluation or judgment
within Foucault’s frame of analysis. I accept the general Foucauldian position on
critique and value as Judith Butler lays it out recently:

Critique will be dependent on its objects, but its objects will in turn define the very
meaning of critique. Further, the primary task of critique will not be to evaluate
whether its objects—social conditions, practices, forms of knowledge, power, and
discourse—are good or bad, valued highly or demeaned, but to bring into relief
the very framework of evaluation itself. (“What is Critique?”)
 226 Jarratt

But then the burden falls on the process of crafting, or “bringing into relief,” the
framework, and that process is inevitably located in bodies, lives, histories, and
texts.
To take the Greco-Latin trip with Foucault, a “virgin” reader (as Simon Goldhill
says), it’s best to suspend one’s pre-existing knowledge of the complexity of this
history, as well as the expectations based on Foucault’s earlier work that we will
be exploring the domains of the dispossessed or of those who engage in transgres-
sive behavior. Foucault locates his inquiry securely within the world of canonical
texts detailing the experiences of elite men, most of them quite conventional in
their habits and secure in their social positions. Consider a passage from Plutarch
he offers as an example of ethical practice in the 1984 interview:

You must learn the principles in such a constant way that whenever your desires,
appetites, and fears awake like barking dogs, the logos will speak like the voice
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of the master who silences his dogs with a single cry. You become the logos; the
logos becomes you. . . . [Ethos takes a shape that is] good, beautiful, honorable,
estimable, memorable, and exemplary. (“The Ethics of the Concern” 286)

Pertinently, his interlocutor asks, “Is this where you situate the analysis of power?”
Foucault’s response mentions “non-slavery” as a required condition for Roman
life that indexes “power,” but he has nothing more to say about slavery or slaves.
Later, concerning complex relations with others: “it is important for a free man
who conducts himself as he should to be able to govern his wife, his children, his
household; it is also the art of governing” (287). A scholar acquainted with Stoic
philosophy would have opinions about Foucault’s appropriation of Plutarch’s com-
ments in this instance, and about Foucault’s representations of Seneca and Marcus
Aurelius. Wolfgang Detel, for example, in a study of Foucault’s engagement with
classical antiquity, notes the unexplained gap in his studies of enkrateia (self-care or
self-mastery) and the virtues such as sôphrosunê (self-control, prudence) to which
such practices lead. While readers are invited in to the history of ancient philos-
ophy at points, there is little contextualization of the examples used in support
of an account of self-care. We can certainly extrapolate from Foucault’s examples,
imagining a whole range of exercises in the care of the self located in a variety of
cultural spheres, but the repeated evocation of the narrow world of elite, excep-
tional men advising each other within a close circle of friendship has a stifling
quality. Rather than “an unstable assemblage of faults and fissures” (“Nietzsche,
Genealogy, History” Sec. 6), we find in Foucault’s vision of the ancient world con-
siderable stability with a set of familiar figures acting in socially accepted ways.
In fact, the process is value-free: there is no framework for critique of any partic-
ular set of values or norms adopted in “care of the self.” Practice, or “self care,” is to
be valued in and of itself, independently of the values embedded in any particular
practice.
Another way to critique my objection would put it in terms of the anthropo-
logical: the ethical practice of self-care, the rejection of the search for a truth of
 Foucault’s “Greco-Latin Trip” 227

the subject in favor of the exteriorization of discourses of truth pursued through

the relationship of the speaker and listeners, does not specify nor depend on any
particular normative discourse or on the social position of the interlocutors: the
scene of truth-telling, the effort and care are themselves the ethical achievement.
But as Judith Butler points out in her careful and sympathetic reading of Foucault’s
ethics of self-care, “Our narratives come up against an impasse when the condi-
tions of possibility for speaking the truth cannot fully be thematized, where what
we speak relies upon a formative history, a sociality, and a corporeality that cannot
easily, if at all be reconstructed in narrative” (Giving an Account 132). She goes on
to note that the speaker runs the risk of becoming dispossessed through the telling.
For Foucault’s exemplars, their histories, socialities, and corporealities are accessi-
ble through traditional sources. While Foucault emphasizes the risk of free speaking
through his later work, for the most part, his narrative dramatizes for us neither the
costs of self-care nor the prospects of dispossession.
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One might object that such a critique of Foucault is located in a romanticiza-

tion of the liminal or the anti-normative. In a recent lecture on the problem of
normativity in queer theory, Michael Warner has offered a related insight concern-
ing Foucault’s treatment of the scene of truth telling in antiquity and the question of
normativity. Foucault’s late lectures do not pursue anti-normativity, Warner asserts,
but rather break down that barrier between self-positing and normativity where the
former is freedom and the latter is restraint. Drawing on the work of Foucault’s
teacher Georges Canguilhem, Warner proposes “normativity” as the power to cre-
ate new norms as things change; life itself makes “norm” a concept of value, not an
anti-rational vitalism. Warner’s caution is valuable, but he goes on to confirm his
own sense of the limitations of the scene of truth-telling repeatedly produced in the
late lectures. The one-on-one, dyadic relationship appears as a kind of “englobing
encounter,” one that does not account for social discourse—highly mediated and
variegated.
This observation is particularly pertinent for those of us in rhetoric for whom the
democratic encounter is the central point of reference. The genealogy of free speak-
ing laid out in the lectures of January through March 1983 (published in English
as The Government of Self and Others; hereafter GSO) in fact singles out Pericles as
the exemplary free-speaker of the democracy. Pericles, according to Foucault, can be
verified as “good,” and therefore capable of genuine parrêsia, his status obviating the
problem of parrêsia for democratic institutions: because anyone could say anything,
there was no “ethical differentiation” (35–36). In a recent essay on Foucault’s late
lectures, Carlos Lévy comments at length on the figure of Pericles in the February 2,
1983 lecture (GSO). For Foucault, Pericles represents the “paradigm of democratic
parrêsia,” communicating the truth “or at least what he thinks to be the truth while
respecting the principles of democracy” (Lévy 318). Even setting aside the issue that
Thucydides never mentions parrêsia in the Histories, nor discusses it as a value, the
speeches themselves do not focus on truth but on efficacy in relation to strength
 228 Jarratt

for Athenian leadership of the empire: for the “Pericles” given voice by Thucydides,
“There is no ethical issue of any kind—neither justice nor truth are at stake” (Lévy
318). As Lévy observes, not truth but power (dusnous) is of primary concern to
Pericles, who tries to persuade the Athenians that, even though their empire was
perhaps unjustly acquired and tyrannical in nature, it would be now too dangerous
to give up (319).
But the possibility for the good leader in the demos closes down after Pericles, at
least in GSO. Foucault’s point with Pericles himself and with Ion in the Euripides
play is that, for fifth-century Athenians, not just anyone can distinguish himself as
a free-speaker: one must be an exceptional person. So isegoria (equal access to the
public forum) is really not what it seems, and this paves the way for the monarch and
the need for the philosopher to use parrêsia in relation to the Prince. From these lec-
tures to those that followed in the fall of 1983 (delivered at Berkeley and published in
2001 as Fearless Speech), Foucault’s genealogical account shifts in interesting ways.
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The whole treatment of Pericles as the ideal democratic politician is missing from
Fearless Speech, as is the very interesting discussion of democratic practice (and
good parrêsia) as joust, rivalry, and confrontation (GSO 174). We find instead a
fairly lengthy discussion of Dio Chrysostom, listed by Philostratus among the sec-
ond sophists (although of a philosophical type), with an extended treatment of the
Fourth Discourse on Kingship featuring an imaginative reconstruction of Diogenes
conferring with Alexander (115–133). Foucault brings in Dio under the heading
of a Cynic parrhesia, describes him as an intellectual, “possibly as a professional
rhetorician” and as involved with Musonius Rufus, the Stoic philosopher; and also
references his exile by Domitian (Fearless Speech 123). Foucault refers to Dio’s dis-
course as a kind of preaching, and a “provocative dialogue,” offering a reasonably
full rhetorical analysis of the dialogue.
Foucault’s genealogies, especially moving into Fearless Speech, have a fresh, if
not “cutting,” quality, especially in the philological outline of uses of parrêsia. He
claims that, in setting out the limits, conditions, and consequences of truth telling,
we uncover “the roots of what we would call the ‘critical’ tradition in the West”
(170). But the familiarity of those conditions for scholars of antiquity, and particu-
larly in rhetoric, blunt the critical edge Foucault claims. The larger arc of Foucault’s
genealogy is actually familiar to scholars of rhetoric: the potential for political free-
speech recedes with the decline of democracy and is supplanted by the council of
princes in the face of monarchy and empire. One could argue that Jeffrey Walker’s
alternative history (genealogy) of rhetoric as essentially epideictic across the archaic,
classical, Hellenistic, and Roman eras is more genuinely “critical” in the Nietzschean
mode than Foucault’s. What remains “Foucauldian” about the late work is the
focus on discourse and practice. What changes—in a way one might characterize
as more traditional, or less “untimely”—is Foucault’s movement toward a certain
figure of philosophy, far different from the cutting and carnivalesque character of
his Nietzschean days.
 Foucault’s “Greco-Latin Trip” 229

Courage and Cost: Socrates and the Cynics

But what of that Cynic sophistic philosopher, Dio, who came on the scene in
the Fall 1983 lectures like a grain of sand in the oyster? And which Socrates will
Foucault offer us ultimately? In the final lectures, delivered in February and March
of 1984 and transcribed in Courage of Truth (hereafter CT), Foucault arguably comes
back around to the Nietzschean moment. Butler’s way of posing the question of
value and risk (drawing on Foucault himself) can be brought to bear here: “How
much does it cost the subject to tell the truth about itself?” (Giving an Account 112;
see also Foucault, “How Much Does It Cost?”). The question of cost—of risk—a
key element of parrêsia throughout the lectures, comes to life most dramatically
with a differently imagined Socrates. Although Foucault works with the Apology at
length, it is his final turn to a lesser-known dialogue, Laches, that more successfully
begins to sketch the anti-Platonic figure proposed in the Nietzsche essay. Concerned
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with the search for a definition of “courage”—andreia, manly virtue—the dialogue

features former soldiers who are sons of soldiers seeking guidance from a younger
Socrates. But the interlocutors set aside heroics on the battlefield, as well as voting
on their ideas, and avoid agonistic and shaming moves. “Courage” is never satisfac-
torily defined, nor is the matter of education referred upward to the status of the
soul. The friends are prompted to give accounts of their lives, and genially agree at
the end of the dialogue to continue their “schooling,” despite their age. In contrast
to Alcibiades, where Socrates directs the course of the soul, in Laches, his role is to
prompt and encourage men to take care of themselves; in the latter, philosophy is
a test of life and existence, a certain modality of life (CT 127), not a path toward
knowledge of the soul.
There continues to be a return to philosophy as a discipline, as an “old, tradi-
tional” preoccupation: “I would like to recall how I arrived at this problem. I came
to it from the old, traditional question, which is at the very heart of Western
philosophy: relations between subject and truth” (CT 3). With the extensive treat-
ment throughout this period of Socrates as the critical point of reference and
ur-philosopher, Foucault seems to be fulfilling something of a disciplinary require-
ment: “There you are. So, as promised, this week I have finished with Socrates. As a
philosophy professor one really must have lectured on Socrates and the death of
Socrates at least once in one’s life. It’s done. Salvate animam meam” (CT 153). The
Latin phrase is from the Christian confession, in full: Dixi et salvavi animam meam,
I have spoken and saved my soul. The irony is rich, but with an echo of finality,
valedictory.3 In this vein, Foucault’s comments about the achievement of this read-
ing of the Laches dialogue and the transition to the second half of the book on the
Cynics (CT 160–163) are some of the most eloquent in his late work. He has written
about the “courage of truth-telling also when it is a question of giving form and style

3 Louis Althusser, in notes on a text by Karl Marx published in 1982, comments on Marx’s use of this

phrase at the end of his Critique of the Gotha Programme. See Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi for their
English translation of his notes.
 230 Jarratt

to life” (CT 161). Taking up that idea or caution of Nietzsche’s about the potential
drawback of critical history, Foucault writes about the aesthetics of existence, about
“bios as a beautiful work” (CT 162):

There is, of course, a history of the metaphysics of the soul. There is also . . .
a history of the stylistics of existence, a history of life as possible beauty. . . .
We should recall that man’s way of being and conducting himself, the aspect his
existence reveals to others and to himself, the trace also that this existence may
leave and will leave in the memories of others after his death, this way of being,
this appearance, this trace having been the object of his aesthetic concern. . . .
This aesthetics of existence is an historical object which should not be neglected
in favor of a metaphysics of the soul or an aesthetics of things and words.
(CT 162)

It is notable that, just at this point of poetic self-revelation, Foucault offers a

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very strong qualification about the historical narrative he has constructed with the
Socratic dialogue as a “point of departure” (CT 162): “I am not in any way claiming
that concern for the beautiful existence is a Socratic invention or an invention of
Greek thought or philosophy at the turn of the fifth and fourth centuries” (CT 162).
And yet almost compulsively, he reiterates the founding moment for truth telling
in “this ethical modality which appeared with Socrates right at the start of Western
philosophy” (CT 163).
With his move to the Cynics, who occupy the last half of the book and the final
lectures, one could say that we are truly back to the Nietzschean in terms of the con-
tent, although the historical presentation is quite conventional. Foucault offers the
Cynics as a “pre-history” of philosophy as a practice, but in this practice, we find
a way of life rather than a system for establishing truth. Foucault seeks and finds
across the centuries a continuity of Cynic practice, and although the presentation of
Cynic practices will be familiar enough to anyone who has read a history of Western
philosophy, Foucault animates Cynic styles and grants critical value to the specific
ways of life they choose. The reduction of life to its barest elements, the refusal to
hide the body and its functions, “the general stripping of existence and opinions in
order to reveal the truth” (CT 171): for Foucault, these become not merely cases
of self-care but a “manifestation of truth” (CT 172). The cost of living this “scan-
dal of truth” is everything: the Cynic has no household, family, hearth, or country
(CT 170), and yet the Cynic can ask for the empire in place of an offer of a little
money.
This anecdote speaks to one of the principles attached to Cynicism by
Diogenes Laertius: “altering the currency”—paracharattein to nomisma (Foucault,
CT 238–239). Noting the etymological link between currency (nomisma) and law
or custom (nomos), Foucault observes that “to change the value of the currency
is also to adopt a certain standpoint towards convention, rule, or law” (CT 227).
We are in a different relation to value here, not merely practicing the care of self
but “taking up the coin, changing its effigy, and as it were, making the theme of
 Foucault’s “Greco-Latin Trip” 231

the true life grimace” (CT 227). In a series of questions, Foucault asks whether, “by
making the philosopher’s very existence their point of application . . . and form of
truth-telling, Cynic life puts the true currency with its true value into circulation”
(CT 246). Cynicism, Foucault writes, is not “just the insolent, rough, and rudimen-
tary reminder of the question of philosophical life”; rather, “it gave the theme of the
philosophical life its cutting edge” by asking, must a life of truth “not be an other life,
a life which is radically and paradoxically other?” (CT 245). This vision of another
life (vie autre) strikes many readers as the most powerful “fiction” Foucault offers,
one of a piece with his earliest studies of clinics and prisons—truly a vision of the
untimely.

Conclusion
Where would Foucault have taken his studies? In an appreciation of theorists who
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have helped her envision Greek antiquity differently, classicist/philosopher Barbara

Cassin mentions Foucault, remarking that he “certainly died a bit too soon, at least
as far as his relation to Greek philosophy is concerned. His last books, which look
directly at Greece, are absolutely conventional” (38). Without completely embracing
Cassin’s perhaps too harsh judgment, we can both criticize Foucault’s use of ancient
material and appreciate the contribution of this work—a precious and sometimes
poignant testimony to the efforts of a fascinating thinker who pursued his ideas vig-
orously to the very end of life. Without placing undue weight on the biographical
context, we can nonetheless take note of the provisionality upon which Foucault
insists in these final works. We might even consider this stance as another kind
of untimeliness. As an explorer of ancient scholarship, Foucault keeps his listeners
aware of his scholarly process (which books he has found in the library, what sec-
ondary scholarship he has uncovered and its orientation to the subject). He narrates
his conversations with other scholars and his dependence on them for assistance
with philological questions. The sense of movement continues to the very end–the
sense of provisionality and of the future potential for collaborative effort:

This problem, this theme of the relations between truth-telling and beautiful exis-
tence . . . would obviously require a whole series of studies. . . . [I]t is clear that
these are things which I have not yet analyzed myself and which it would be inter-
esting to study and discuss in a group, a seminar. No, I am not able at present to
lecture to you properly on this theme of the true life; maybe it will happen one
day, maybe never. I would like merely to give you just some sketches and outlines.
Anyone interested in this problem can study it more closely. (163)

Far from the insouciance, and the cutting, playful carnival of “Nietzsche, Genealogy,
History,” we are left with an earnest and open-ended Socratic scenario—the scholar
as student, inviting others into a never-ending inquiry. Foucault is pulled by tradi-
tion (“I’ve now treated Socrates”) and yet puts tradition—Socrates the Cynic—in
service of some of the untimeliness of critical history. Despite his dismissal of
 232 Jarratt

philosophy’s version of rhetoric (a move that becomes increasingly less decisive

and more nuanced over the course of these works), Foucault’s final formulations
about truth-telling resonate powerfully with thematics of rhetoric as scholars in the
discipline have come to understand its core elements across many ages: transforma-
tion through the encounter with the other, and the power of speech to reveal the
possibility of another life, another world.

Acknowledgments
I thank Michelle Ballif for inviting me to contribute to this issue and for providing
excellent editorial advice at a crucial time. Thanks also to Jonathan Alexander for
comments on an early draft.
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