The "Present"- foucault

(Text continued)

Once More, Philologically

This is why Foucault, in one of his contributions to a book entitled Technologies of the Self,

asserts that ‚*t]he question, I think, which arises at the end of the eighteenth century is: What

are we in our actuality? < ‘What are we today?’‛29  This passage does not only reveal—more

                                                

25

 Ibid., 170.

26

 Ibid., 113.

27

 Ibid., 114. 

28

 Ibid.

29

 Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gut-

man, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 145.

De Boever: The Allegory of the Cage

14

so than some of the other translations of Foucault’s work on the Enlightenment—Foucault’s

explicit interest in actuality.  The shift that one finds from the first question to the second—i.e.

the shift from ‚actuality‛ to ‚today‛—also marks one of the main problems of translation in

Foucault’s essay on the Enlightenment, as well as in his lectures on Kant’s essay.  The problem

lies in Foucault’s use of the term ‚les actualités,‛ usually translated as ‚the present.‛  From the

opening paragraphs of Foucault’s essay, it is obvious that ‚the present,‛ ‚today,‛ is a major

concern in his engagement with the Enlightenment.  However, to translate ‚les actualités‛

merely as ‚the present‛ means to lose the notion of actuality that is inscribed in the original

French term, ‚les actualités.‛  In French, ‚the present‛ is of the order of the actual: to inquire

into the present means to inquire into the actual.  Foucault’s main critique of such a concep-

tualization of the present will be to insist on the potential, specifically on the ‚potentiality not

to.‛  From this perspective, the present becomes contingent (in Scotus’ and Agamben’s sense

of the word): it could also always have been otherwise.  If we are still living in the present of

the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment is thus not so much ‚les actualités‛ but, rather, poten-

tiality—specifically, the ‚potentiality not to.‛30 

Foucault’s obsession with the tension between actuality and potentiality, and speci-

fically with the word actual, is particularly obvious in the French original of his lectures on

Kant’s essay. Enlightenment is ‚la question du présent,‛ he states, ‚c’est la question de l’ac-

tualité.‛31  Note how the present, ‚le présent,‛ is immediately translated here into the actual,

‚l’actualité.‛  ‚Qu’est-ce qui, dans le présent, fait sens actuellement pour une réflexion philo-

sophique?‛32  Here Foucault establishes once again the connection between the present and the

actual, this time through his use of the adverb ‚actuellement‛: ‚What is it that, in the present,

makes sense today *actuellement+ for philosophical reflection?‛  At a crucial point in the first

lecture, Foucault insists very forcefully on the centrality of actuality for his reflection on the

Enlightenment by asking: ‚Quelle est mon actualité? < Quel est le sens de cette actualité?  Et

qu’est-ce que fait le fait que je parle de cette actualité?‛33  ‚What is my present? < What is the

meaning of this present?  And what causes me to speak of this present?‛  In each of these

cases, ‚actualité‛ could just as well have been translated by ‚actuality.‛  Whereas the reader of

the English translation risks encountering a text that is obsessed with the present—an en-

counter that would not entirely be missed, since the present is obviously a central concern in

Foucault’s text—the reader of the French original encounters in addition a text that is obsessed

with actuality.34 

At the end of his first lecture on Kant, Foucault evokes specifically the tension between

actuality and potentiality that informs Agamben’s work. He asks: ‚Quel est le champ actuel

                                                

30

 John Rajchman comes very close to stating this in his introduction to The Politics of Truth: John Rajchman,

‚Enlightenment Today‛ in Sylvère Lotringer (ed.), The Politics of Truth, trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine

Porter (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 9-27. See in particular page 15.  

31

 Michel Foucault, Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres: Cours au Collège de France 1982-1983, ed. François

Ewald, Alessandro Fontana, and Frédéric Gros (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 13.

32

 Ibid.

33

 Ibid., 15.

34

 All translations from Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres in both this paragraph and the following are mine. 

Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 7-22.

15

des expériences possibles?‛35  ‚What is the present *actuel+ field of possible experiences?‛  En-

lightenment, for Foucault, will have to do with separating out from the actuality of what one is

‚the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think.‛  Enlightened

freedom thus comes about not as a state that would be achieved once and for all but as a

process, a kind of ‚work‛: it is a ‚patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty.‛36 

Enlightenment is thus inscribed at the very end of Foucault’s essay in the aesthetico-ethical

practices of self-cultivation that Foucault at this point in his career is analyzing in his work on

sexuality.  It is theorized here as an ‚art of existence,‛37 a form of what Foucault in the second

volume of The History of Sexuality calls the ‚technè tou biou‛38 or ‚care of the self.‛  In ‚What is

Enlightenment?‛ Foucault theorizes Enlightenment as an ‚art of living,‛39 a practice which be-

comes part of the practices of the ‚cura sui‛40 that he reveals to be a central concern in classical

philosophy.  In the Enlightenment essay, the ‚labor‛41 implied by the ‚care of the self‛ is tur-

ned into the ‚undefined work of freedom.‛  Enlightenment is a social practice through which

one attends to oneself and thus, ultimately, to others.42  

Elena: 

What Foucault undestands by enlightenment I understand by religion: an art of living.

In this paragraphs it's even clearer that what he is talking about is in the Fourth Way System, the art of being present. 

But there are multiple difficulties in the fact that we have the tendency to realize that we need to be present but then not in the present of our historical conditioning but in the present of our own self having transformed our historical reality: actualized it. 

Another difficulty is in the tendency to negate our historical reality by neglecting it and separating from it as is done in cults instead of assuming and transforming it. In this case cults can be the traditionally understood cults but all other institutionalized behaviors that "mechanically" "unconsciously" reproduce the status quo.