Biopolitics are the only weapons that can fight biopower – the alt’s cynicism collapses solvency.

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii64/articles/michael-hardt-militant-life.pdf)// [King K]

In the third and final period of the genealogy Foucault focuses on the Cynics, the Socratic philosophical movement particularly active roughly from the first century bc to the fourth century ad that counted Diogenes, Antisthenes and Crates among its founders. Few philosophical texts from the Cynics survive, but we do have numerous accounts of their lives, many of which are at least in part apocryphal. These lives are what interest Foucault most, because they extend and transform the Socratic mandate to make one’s life an expression of parrhesia: that is, they turn the injunction to live a ‘true life’ into a militant, political project.

The Cynics practised parrhesia, Foucault explains, through a kind of public, critical preaching, often aimed against social institutions. They also sought to enact the truth through scandalous behaviour that exposed to public view aspects of life that are generally hidden. They ate in public, walked naked, and even masturbated in the city square. Two fundamental principles of the true life for the Cynics were exposure and poverty: not only destroying any division between private and public, but also releasing the Cynic from the limits of individuality, so as to be able to construct a life addressed to humanity as a whole. Indeed Foucault remarks that in this regard Franciscans and other Christian ascetics are at least partial inheritors of the ancient Cynics in the mediaeval world. This does not mean that he interprets the Cynics’ practices as stripping life of pleasure. I suspect, although he does not say this, he would see a greater range of pleasures in their open social practices, even in their extreme exposure and poverty; but his target lies elsewhere. The askesis of the ancient Cynics, Foucault claims, is ‘a militancy that aims to change the world, much more than a militancy that would seek simply to furnish its adepts with the means to arrive at a happy life’. The life the Cynics proposed is a militant life that struggles to change both ourselves and the world.

One of the stories Foucault finds most fascinating about the life of Diogenes, the philosophical hero of the Cynics, was his visit to the Oracle at Delphi. The Oracle famously pronounced Socrates the wisest of men, which Socrates interpreted to mean that he was the most aware of his ignorance. But Diogenes was instructed by the Oracle to ‘falsify the currency’, that is, transform the value of money. What a wonderful and mysterious mandate! In the context of today’s global financial crisis it could be a powerful political slogan. Scholars explain that the obscure phrase could derive from reports that Diogenes’s father, Hicesius, who worked in the mint in Sinope, was exiled after being charged with counterfeiting. Foucault notes such historical explanations but sets them aside and instead interprets the mandate conceptually, with reference to the fundamental principle of Cynicism: how to live one’s life. The proximity of the Greek word for currency or money, nomisma, to that for law or norm, nomos, reinforces Foucault’s interpretation of the slogan as a mandate to revalue all values, to change one’s life so as to change society as a whole. Indeed one hears striking echoes of a politicized Nietzsche and his injunction to transvalue all values in Foucault’s analysis. To falsify the currency clearly emphasizes the difference between the Platonists’ search for individual knowledge and the Cynics’ struggle for social change. The care of the self is enlarged to the care not only of a few others but of humanity as a whole. In terms of philosophical doctrine, Foucault argues, the ancient Cynics contributed little, merely adopting and transforming various traditional formulations. Their singular contribution instead is to make life the centre of a philosophical and political project.

Foucault defines the Cynics’ primary goal as ‘militant life, the life of combat and struggle against the self and for the self, against others and for others’. The only true life for the Cynics is a life transformed, and the only way to achieve such a life is to create another world out of this one. The true heirs of the ancient Cynics in the modern world, he claims, are revolutionaries whose lives enact a—sometimes violent—rupture with the conventions and values of the dominant society. Foucault adds in a polemical aside that this revolutionary life is radically different, even opposed to, the activism of contemporary political parties that call themselves revolutionary, which are really defined by a strict conformity of life.

The key to the shift accomplished by the Cynics is the development of the terrain of life—a militant life, a revolutionary life—as the locus of politics. Foucault needs the discovery of biopolitics, one might say, to grapple fully with politics. To understand this we must make a terminological distinction, which Foucault himself does not employ consistently, between biopower and biopolitics. Biopower, which he first theorizes in the mid-1970s, is a form of power in which the life of populations becomes the central object of rule, not only or even primarily through the destruction but also the creation of life. Foucault explores this deployment of power over life or, rather, through life in the context of sexual behaviours, medical practices, racial discourses, economic paradigms, and so forth. The militancy of the ancient Cynics, however, is clearly an entirely different politics of life. Biopolitics is the realm in which we have the freedom to make another life for ourselves, and through that life transform the world. Biopolitics is thus not only distinct from biopower but also may be the most effective weapon to combat it.

Foucault’s lectures end rather abruptly after his analysis of the Cynics. My intention was not to stop with the Cynics, he explains on the final day, but to demonstrate how ancient Cynicism constructs a different relation between life and parrhesia, casting the discourse of truth in terms of a true life. The trajectory of the courses is thus incomplete; but through his analyses of these three periods Foucault already indicates the outlines of a powerful political project. In briefest summary one might say that the first passage—away from the democratic Athenian political terrain of the government of others to the Socratic paradigm of the care of the self—allows him to focus on life as the centre of transformation. Through a second passage, and with the aid of the Cynics, he brings this back to the field of politics as a militant, transformational life: from Pericles the virtuous orator, speaking the truth in public, to Socrates, the wise advocate of self-knowledge; and finally to Diogenes, the militant striving to create a new life that changes the world.

This three-part trajectory of Greek thought bears intriguing correspondences to the arc of the final decade of Foucault’s own career. The first passage, from his studies of power in the mid-1970s to his explorations of the subject and the care of the self in the early 1980s, allows him to reorient his project towards the ethical practices of life; which he subsequently shifts, in a second passage that begins to take shape in these lectures, towards the biopolitical terrain of militant action. No longer does he focus on the functioning of power or its apparatuses of discipline or control, but rather explores political thought and action as a realm of freedom, oriented toward changing not only ourselves but also our world.