Title: Foucault on the History and Politics of Truth
Lecturer: Paul Patton (Scientia Professor of Philosophy, The University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia)
Chairperson: Guanjun Wu (Professor, Department of Politics, East China Normal University)
Date: 2 pm, December 19th, 2017 (Tuesday)
Venue: Room 3102, Building of School of Humanities, Minhang Campus, ECNU
Sponsor: Si-mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, ECNU
Abstract of the Lecture:
In this talk, I will outline the ambitions and origins of Foucault’s proposed history or ‘morphology’ of the will to know. I will explore some of its debts to as well as departures from Nietzsche’s inquiries into the origins of knowledge and the value of truth. Although this project was announced at the beginning of Foucault’s first course of lectures at the Collège de France with explicit reference to Nietzsche, in fact it drew heavily on the ‘archaeology of knowledge’ that he had developed in the late 1960s without reference to Nietzsche. Moreover, as he later explained, one of the sources of this project was the search for a different approach to the Marxist problem of the relationship between knowledge and social relations. While he found some aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy useful for this project, there were also important differences between them. Foucault sought above all to emphasize the conflictual and violent origins of truth, within subjects of knowledge as well as in society. He relied exclusively on the war model of power that he later abandoned, at the expense of Nietzsche’s more comprehensive understanding of human drives and their relation to power.
Brief Introduction of the Lecturer:
Paul Patton is Scientia Professor of Philosophy at The University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Deleuze and the Political (Routledge, 2000), Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics (Stanford, 2010), and numerous articles and book chapters on Foucault and Nietzsche.