Oedipus Rex as a philosophical and political strategy 1

Introduction

This article analyses the intellectual strategies that are discernible in two classical works of philosophy – namely, Michel Foucault’s different interpretations of Oedipus Rex. It will examine how Foucault, through his reading of Sophocles, challenges most standard models of the history of philosophy while also in some sense upholding them. The article also aims to show how Foucault’s history of philosophy sought to distance itself from a canon of the writing of history – represented by the Paris School. Finally, the article will describe how Foucault’s understanding of ‘tragedy’ varies in parallel to his intellectual position. With all these elements, and in dialogue with Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of intellectuals, I ask how much Foucault innovates with respect to the practice of ‘internalist’ commentaries of the philosophical canon.

Foucault’s two commentaries on Oedipus Rex mark two significant moments of his career. With them, he opens and closes the 1970s, both inaugurating and ending a specific period of his work. Comparing the beginning and end of that decade one notices that, while Foucault’s political commitments remain, they change their ideological cues. After his famous courses on governmentality, and later on neoliberalism, Foucault returned to the Greeks and gave us a new version of the democratic lesson contained in Sophocles. This effort was undertaken in his course of 1979–1980, known as Du gouvernement des vivants (On the government of the living).

Oedipus is also explored in his first course at the Collège de France in the early 1970s, an institutionally significant moment to devote himself to Greek thought, which could grant enormous prestige. Then, Foucault set himself two ambitious tasks. Firstly, he constructs a model for the analysis of philosophy, which has as its antagonist Aristotle and the practices he continues to inspire. Secondly, he proposes a genealogy of the penal practices of democracy, culminating in an analysis of the tragedy Oedipus Rex. Both matters intersect. The model of philosophy cultivated by Aristotle is complemented by the lessons of Sophocles’ drama, which epitomises the figure of the tyrant deposed by the democratic assembly. It is only when this political event occurs that it becomes possible to separate knowledge and power (Foucault, 2011, p. 187). Democracy is thus considered the condition of possibility for the separation of sophistry and philosophy.

In one respect, this thesis is not original. The link between democracy and philosophy was the subject of Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Detienne, two historians from the Paris School whose works Foucault knew well. Foucault adds something specifically his: Aristotle is, for him, the model of the scholastic thinker. It was he who established the inaugural division that set forth what could be considered philosophy – its opposition to sophistry. This split ends up being reproduced by later philosophers and is an example of an event that has reverberated across epochs – one which Foucault wishes, if not to eliminate, at least to undermine. Moreover, for Foucault, this distinction also impacts the history of criminal justice in democracy.

Here two tasks become paramount. A first has to do with elucidating how to read the classics. One may ask why Foucault, when putting forward another way of interpreting the history of thought, addresses both Aristotle and Sophocles – the former as representative of an inaugural event in the history of philosophy and the latter in the history of law. To achieve this, this article relies on Bourdieu’s ideas on how to decipher philosophical texts, which will be supplemented with references to Spinoza.

Secondly, this article asks what Foucault teaches us, with his different readings of Oedipus, about Athenian democracy in general and democratic assemblies in particular. I will especially draw attention to one issue: Foucault’s two readings of Sophocles can serve as an index of two theoretically and politically different moments in his work.

Oedipus as traversing fields

Oedipus Rex allows Foucault to bring together two concerns: one political and one philosophical. When Foucault dictates his first course, he is committed to criticising the life conditions of prisoners. Michel Foucault positions himself politically in a debate on popular justice, which took place between 1970 and 1971. In January 1971 Foucault participates in a press conference where the Groupe d’information sur les prisons (GIP) is launched. French Maoists, accompanied by Jean-Paul Sartre, argued for a model of the People’s Court, in opposition to bourgeois justice. Foucault, on the contrary, rails against the very idea of the ‘Tribunal’, which always assumes the thesis of a neutral judicial apparatus capable of playing a moderating role.

While Foucault criticises the Court’s genealogy by reference to Oedipus Rex, one cannot but recall that, in the same period, Sartre defended the People’s Court in Lens that was examining the death of 16 miners in a work-related accident. The Russel Court, also supported by Daniel Cohn Bendit, was another judicial paradigm from which Foucault distances himself (Artières et al., 2003, p. 15; Foucault, 1994, p. 138).

Thus considered, Foucault is in a process of theoretical reformulation. The Foucault of the 1970s maintains continuities with that of the 1960s, but also differences in terms of his political commitments. The challenges he faces, as a militant and as a philosopher, are unprecedented. How should he articulate his activism and his thinking, especially, as he inaugurates his series of lectures at the Collège de France? Foucault will propose a genealogy of penal power and philosophy and show there is a homological relationship between both, based in a specific conception of truth. With Oedipus, Foucault’s militancy became philosophically relevant; also, with Oedipus, ancient thinking helped clarify current penal practices. Later, in Du gouvernement des vivants (1979–1980), Oedipus will serve to analyse the link between government and different conceptions of truth. References to Aristotle and the connection of tragedy with a specific conception of philosophy will disappear.

To be sure, Aristotle and Oedipus are not anodyne subjects in the field of philosophy. On the first, Heidegger proposed an interpretation that Foucault pursues, at least partly, even against the precautions of Pierre Aubenque – a French scholar whose work, according to the editors of the course, Foucault was familiar with. The second subject, Oedipus, was also the focus of Claude Lévi-Strauss and, in dialogue with him, Jean-Pierre Vernant. That dialogue will appear in a book co-authored with Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who, like Foucault, was an advocate for the rights of detainees. In the first case, with Aristotle, Foucault dialogues with the history of philosophy, but also with the Paris School itself (including Vernant and Vidal-Naquet) and its method for reading the classics. Through Oedipus, Foucault strengthened his intellectual and political links with this school, but also with an audience of activists for whom Foucault’s ideas offered a philosophical front. Intellectual and political choices are difficult to separate when writing at the centre of a large intellectual space. When Foucault later comes back to Oedipus, the choice will be another context, with other political networks, and with different problems and interlocutors.

The truth of men without attributes

According to Foucault, Aristotle was responsible for the isolation of philosophy and for its degeneration into decontextualised commentary. Foucault commits himself instead, as it is well known, to the tradition of Nietzsche, which orients philosophy outwards, linking knowledge and power. To clarify how Aristotle’s self-referential philosophy (arguing for a truth that is independent of power) could be founded, Foucault sets forth a two-pronged approach. First, he isolates the content of Aristotle’s ideas, and then he traces the history of their conditions of possibility.

Foucault works by employing homologies. He understands these as different spaces in which identical oppositions can be translated, though always following their own internal logic. Between the democratic conception of truth and a closed, self-referential philosophy (on a supposed intimacy with truth), Foucault finds a huge formal similarity. To clarify this, he relies on events in Greek social and political history. In the aristocratic world, truth was constructed through conflict: two contending parties submitted their cases to the gods while under oath, thus risking divine anger. Gradually, the ‘ordeal’ as a mode of settling disputes starts to disappear and, in its place, truth as ‘confirmation’ starts to predominate. This happens first in criminal trials, later in philosophy. It is not accidental that it is precisely that kind of ‘truth’ that Aristotle opposes to the sophists (Foucault, 2011, p. 82). In both criminal trials and philosophy, a common epistemological artefact begins to appear: that of the pure observer, with no other qualities than his or her openness to the world.

The context is that of a demographic crisis – a hyper-materialist Foucault is even interested in the diet of the ancient Greeks – which drives new imperial ventures. Colonisation elicits political inventions to tame differences. A common currency makes economic exchanges calculable, written law categorises crimes – all examples of (and accompanied by) processes of general social equalisation. For instance, through the hoplite phalanx, collective power in war becomes key, in contrast to the feats of Homeric heroes. In parallel, the knowledge of craftsmen becomes central for democratic life. The democratic revolution is accompanied by a military revolution and ruptures between various elites. The manufacturing establishment will ally itself with artisans and peasants against agrarian land-owners and, in the midst of class conflicts, tyrants will appear – prescient men who, after standing out in battle, appease social conflicts. Oedipus, defeating the Sphinx, is a good model of such a tyrant.

The development of a tax system and the creation of democratic institutions (such as courts) allow the social and political integration of the population. At least in appearance, democracy thus separates truth and power. But these developments do not convince Foucault: political practices hide economic domination (Foucault, 2011, p. 154). It is true that Foucault only analyses in detail the Solonian democracy, which had censitary suffrage. He pays less attention to the democracy that follows Efialtes and Pericles, precisely the most advanced and which sets the stage for Oedipus Rex. Nonetheless, Foucault’s formulations are categorical: the people’s political power is a fetish; currency only simulates the common distribution of capital, as do democratic rotation procedures. The economic elite and its dictums are paramount, the rest are simulacra: ‘Under the law . . . one finds the rupture that hides the dependence of the political in relation to the economic’ (Foucault, 2011, p. 155). At that point, his thesis is that the law, the currency and democracy domesticate the aristocratic warrior. This is an example of equalisation, as it introduces rules which force desires of revenge to operate under legal procedures. Crime thus becomes impersonal, cold, a mere debt with the state (Nietzsche, 1980, pp. 71–82). Nietzsche and Marx are both behind this denunciation of democracy as concealing the class exploitation and power on which laws are built.

Let us now turn to Oedipus, a drama where Foucault’s homologies become manifest. Foucault’s interpretation is inspired by Jean-Pierre Vernant, who had polemicised with psychoanalysis, drawing from Ignace Meyerson’s historical psychology. According to Vernant, Sophocles operates in a complex milieu and does not ‘represent’ economic or psychic positions, but instead brings them into dialogue. The tragedy, as a genre, has common features and psychoanalysis candidly confuses one of such features with the key for understanding the genre. Freudian readings of Oedipus are much like believing, Vernant quips, that Aeschylus’ Agamemnon deals with the unconscious desire of wives to liquidate their husbands (Vernant, 2002a, p. 85).

The keys for understanding Oedipus are, instead, many: his low-class origin, his vague awareness that he is not who he believes to be, his appearance of a cursed child, his genius, and his courage that leads him to marry Jocasta – although, crucially, lovelessly. After eliminating the Sphinx, the law demanded it be so. A mixture of tyrant and scapegoat, Oedipus condenses two Greek institutions: the use of scapegoats to ward off epidemics (human sacrifice) and, through ostracism, the resolution of intra-elite conflicts. Every year, the town assembly met and decided over ostracism procedures. Subsequently, under a quorum of 6000 voters, the name of those being ostracised was written on ceramic plaques. This policy stopped in 417 after the Solonian period (something that Foucault does not refer to) (Vernant, 2002b, p. 128).

Foucault does not write on ostracism, but he does so on tyranny, seeking to trace through Oedipus the history of the Athenian penal system. Louis Gernet, also associated with the Paris School, had already connected tragedy and legal thought. Foucault takes this to the extreme and turns Gernet’s hypothesis into a protocol for analysis (Leonard, 2005, pp. 79–86). Oedipus is a believer of truth-as-corroboration – rejecting the divine knowledge of Tiresias, prophet of Apollo. Thus understood, kings are unable to find the truth on their own, as it comes from the testimony of witnesses (i.e. servants and slaves). In this tragedy, rational knowledge corroborates what was enunciated by the gods, although exclusively thanks to the work of humble men. Kings, who promote rationality, become subject to it – just as tyrants fall before the very people they swore to oversee (Foucault, 2011, pp. 233–234). Thus, Sophocles’ message is that only the law governs the city – and, as we know, for Foucault the law always masks economic domination.

Pierre Bourdieu, in an enthusiastic review of Vidal-Naquet and Lêveque’s Cleisthenes the Athenian, praised the homological framework the book employs. The search for homologies, wrote Bourdieu (1964, pp. 163–164), ‘far from being a methodological fantasy, [allows for] the pursuit of parallels between two different domains of human activity [and] is the condition of understanding an exceptional moment in history’. Throughout his oeuvre, Bourdieu will make constant use of this tool, for example in his sociology of philosophy (Moreno Pestaña, 2005). Hence, Vidal-Naquet and Lêveque, besides consolidating the turn towards Classical Greece to understand the present, proposed ground-breaking methodological innovations. Foucault is inspired by them, if employing a particular approach and somewhat changing their political implications. For him, the law and the truth are crucial for class alliances. Extraordinary men and women, their feats and their ordeals, vanish. In their place, there are now investigative procedures undertaken by individuals without outstanding qualities, without attributes.

Scholastic power and Aristotle

Let us once again turn to Aristotle and philosophy. Foucault is interested in how philosophy is defined in opposition to sophistry by upholding the link between ‘words’ and ‘things’ and the dependence of the former on the latter. Foucault believes Aristotle has thus performed a formidable political sleight of hand, with both institutional and intellectual consequences. All philosophers, Aristotle claims, seek the truth, but not the sophists. To define oneself by the pursuit of truth supposes that philosophers know at least vaguely what truth is, while not possessing it in its entirety. Such a situation forces philosophy to become commentary, to continually revisit the thought of past eras to see what they can contribute. For the sophists, however, hermeneutics is a distraction. Sophists turn words into a power game, where truth matters little. And how do they achieve that? They play with a structural gap of language: we have only a limited number of words to refer to an infinity of things, and hence we name as the same that which is different. The perfect equivalence between words and things is impossible, and sophists take advantage of this fact by misnaming. Against them, Aristotle argues for understanding truth as the summoning of reality as witness, thus forever excluding sophists from philosophy.

Foucault constructs a radical opposition between the sophists and Aristotle and understands it as the underbelly of philosophy. His first movement is a radicalisation of Aristotle’s ideas, framing them as a conception of language as revelation. His second movement is to argue that this understanding of truth depends on the triumph of certain legal procedures, through which truth becomes detached from the heroic character of who utters it, focusing instead on witnesses. In this way, Foucault brings together democracy, Oedipus and the evolution of legal practices and class struggle. Through Aristotle, philosophy’s cornerstone is indifference to power.

Scholastic operations

Let us now examine how Aristotle separates truth from power. Firstly, he establishes, as far as philosophy is concerned, a crucial link between truth and error. Philosophers do not only hide things because they keep them for a select audience or want to test readers’ understanding – they hide as they show. On this point Foucault is not particularly clear. The Aristotelian understanding of philosophy entails a perspectivism, as philosophers reveal as much as they hide. For this approach, philosophical readings are inexhaustible, as the text always promises to harbour a hidden treasure. Aristotle does not seek to show the biases of writers – as rationalists would – or to decipher the text through rhetorical figures – as poets would. The essence of philosophy is always open for commentary. There is no progress in philosophy, and hence, ‘there is no philosophical ostracism’ (Foucault, 2011, p. 36). Thus, everything to do with poetry and politics is foreign to philosophy.

Secondly, for Aristotle, there are only individual philosophers, whose proper names cannot be dissolved into common nouns – for example referring to their place in political or literary quarrels. Philosophers are condemned – if they do not deviate from philosophy – to continually discuss with their predecessors, to eternally accompany them in their pursuit of truth. A philosopher’s comment focuses on truth and forgets any conditioning factor: philosophy is protected from history, which is only anecdotal and never touches on the fundamental. The history of philosophy is the history of philosophers.

To be sure, this is true only of philosophers worthy of the name. Because, thirdly, this de-historisation is predicated on the exclusion of sophists. The latter considered ‘words’ as ‘events’ and embarked themselves on power struggles – certainly through the medium of discourse, but only with the goal of disarming opponents. Thus, all philosophers must learn to protect themselves from discursive ‘fencing’. Philosophers, learning to identify sophisms, remain attached to things and considers that discourse should serve them; sophists, on the contrary, use words as tools.

There are two further issues concerning the exclusion of sophists. Firstly, Foucault does not challenge the Platonic and Aristotelian characterisation of the sophists. The so-called sophists encompassed many philosophical practices and, this is the second issue, diverse political commitments. In that sense, the label of ‘sophist’ constitutes an enormous rhetorical operation that serves to include, in the most ‘sophistic’ way possible, what is different under a common name. ²

Thus considered, Foucault’s analysis is not particularly reliant on political precision. Vernant and Detienne linked sophists to democracy, with a political space where argumentative public discourse informed the leadership of the polis. Detienne (2006, pp. 205–207) understood sophists to be completely uninterested in the truth, embracing an agonistic conception of language. Foucault also compares them to transgressing authors (for example Roussel, Brisset and Wolfson) who break the rules of language. Sophistry is associated with literary madness and heroic ordeals. Through these ordeals, individuals challenge each other to accept the consequences of their oaths – that is, that confrontation will settle who is right. Foucault does not point this out clearly but seems to suggest it: sophists live, without logical or moral coercion, close to the shifting boundaries of what is considered ‘real’. In fact, similarly to how Aristotle chastises sophists, democratic law will bring forth ordeals and heroes to latter replace them with typified procedures and individuals with no other qualities than to be witnesses. ³

A scholastic critique of scholasticism

Foucault is very severe with ‘commentary’ as a philosophical procedure. However, his own work does not seem to abandon some of its pitfalls, as at times it can be accused of projecting his own ideas to Greek history. That explains why Foucault’s sophists are peculiar. They resemble, somewhat anachronistically, some of their favourite authors, ignoring in them all that links them politically to the emerging democracies. Undoubtedly, they are Nietzschean sophists. In posthumous writings published as The Will to Power, Nietzsche applauded them as masters of relativism, defenders of the idea that all morality depends on conflict and context, and counted Democritus and Protagoras as part of a formidable movement of ‘intellectual probity’. Nietzsche equates sophists and democracy and understands the cynical discourse of the Athenians in Milos – as narrated by Thucydides – as an example of the morality of the polis and its intellectuals. Nietzsche’s viewpoint is debatable, as is Foucault’s (Nietzsche, 2000, pp. 300–302). ⁴ In his analysis of Oedipus, Foucault sees the truth come from the mouths of a slave from Thebes and a servant of Corinth. Two humble individuals unveil the enigma that brought the plague to the city. Alongside Nietzsche, however, Foucault reconstructs sophists as agonistic and unprincipled. How much that resembles what we know – for example, of Protagoras – is something Foucault himself does not question.

Some sophists, specifically Protagoras, could be connected to a political philosophy that argues for the appointment of positions in a democracy. Interestingly, this is explained by Édouard Will, one of the authors who, according to the editors of his courses, Foucault read extensively to inform his image of the Greek world. Democracy, always reliant on accountability and rotation, differentiates between leadership positions to be appointed and to be drawn. The former required technical skills, the latter common sense and a desire for justice. Will referred to the words of Athenagoras, who comes to us through Thucydides, before the assembly of Syracuse, where he differentiates between those competences that are specific to the rich and those that are common to all citizens (Will, 1999, p. 440). Needless to say, such questions concerning the sophists were not at the centre of Foucault’s attention.

It is also the case that Foucault’s Aristotle is strangely idiosyncratic. After all, years later, Castoriadis declared Aristotle to be the last philosopher of democracy. In any case, when he sets forth his politics, Aristotle devotes himself to the enormous empirical task of compiling constitutions. One might ponder to what end does he seek to clarify the constitutional changes in Athens or of the aristocratic and democratic components in Sparta, if philosophy is completely cut off from actual politics. Foucault’s is, without a doubt, a schematised Aristotle, a paragon of scholasticism, occupying a clear position in a structural homology: that opposing the democratic word with philosophy as a pure activity. For Foucault (2011, p. 251), the same Aristotle that chastises Oedipus as a tyrant excludes the sophists for not adhering to disinterested truth.

Understanding Aristotle through a scholastic model was precisely the aim of one of the great unfinished works of José Ortega y Gasset: The Idea of Principle in Leibniz and the Evolution of Deductive Theory. Ortega complained about the terrible effect that the ‘splint’ of Aristotle produced in European thought. Like Foucault, Ortega characterised scholasticism as a way of carrying out an internalist history of ideas. Thus, Ortega lamented, ideas are misunderstood, as they are always part of a dialogue and conflict within a specific context. Scholastic readings, Ortega says, resemble solutions to problems that remain missing. They are games of classification that degrade philosophy into fanciful terminological commentaries. One reads the sophists in the context in which they were captured by Nietzsche and, in such a way, we project our present on their experience. But, as the scholastic philosophy resides in atemporal terms, all this is inconsequential (Moreno Pestaña, 2012).

Might Foucault have read Ortega? It is unlikely, although not impossible. Ortega’s work was published by Gallimard (in the ‘Bibliothèque des idées’ collection, edited by Jean Wahl in 1970, titled L’Évolution de la théorie déductive: L’idée de principe chez Leibniz). What concerns this article, however, is, instead, a common theoretical problem: the internalist reception of philosophy that arose, in both philosophers, from a confrontation with ancient philosophy. In the case of Foucault, this emanated from his critical history of scholasticism.

Models of the history of philosophy

I will now contrast Foucault’s model for the analysis of philosophical commentary to that proposed by Pierre Bourdieu, who critiqued three models of scholasticism. The first, derived from Kant, only attended to the interplay of ideas with themselves. Evidently, philosophers have their own lives and customs, but when they speak qua philosophers they only pay attention to reason. The second model, exemplified by Hegel, understands the history of philosophy as a triumphal march of reason, where each moment surpasses the previous one and prepares the next, which in turn is integrated into a model of reason which continually becomes more sophisticated. The third model Bourdieu explores is epitomised by Heidegger. Herein it is a matter of finding a foundational historical event, present in the ancient world, and which shapes our present. That event is described, as Marcel Detienne complained, through exclusively philosophical means. Reading canonical philosophers in an original manner, the return to the origins consecrates the reader and commentator as author (Bourdieu, 1997, pp. 54–59).

Against such models, Bourdieu turns to Spinoza, proposing to recover his method of analysing sacred texts for the history of philosophy. To understand the books of prophets, Spinoza explained, we must know how their lives and customs are connected to the discursive register they employ and who are the agents responsible for their canonisation – that is, who included them in the sacred texts. Among the three dimensions implicit in Spinoza’s approach – the social trajectory of authors; their intellectual choices; and their reception – there can be relations of homology. Whether that is the case or not is for Bourdieu an empirical matter.

This last point – the canonisation (or lack thereof) of authors – would elicit certain questions on several of Foucault’s theoretical choices, which would require a revisiting of the history of philosophy. Who standardised the vision of an Aristotle that upholds language as representation? (our answer is Heidegger). ⁵ Who merges together all sophists into the same set, despite their differences? Plato and Aristotle, doubtlessly, but also Foucault. In this way, paradoxically and perhaps unwittingly, Foucault resorts to a standard narrative of the history of philosophy, which Bourdieu associates with Heidegger. Foucault presents us with a great division at the dawn of our civilisation, and while the account of history diverges, its format is identical. As a philosopher, and despite his otherwise subversive disposition, Foucault placed himself within a great history of decadence, with culprits and victims. Hence, it is appropriate to question both this historical account (with an unequivocally Heideggerian flavour) and the portrayal of victims and culprits, the sophists and Aristotle.

Foucault’s analysis is in some respects a compromise. On the one hand, his view of Greece repeats standard assertions, supported by a debatable historical account. On the other, he chooses an approach to the philosophical past in explicit opposition to the commentary of texts, attempting to link social and political history with the emergence of pure philosophy. Two events play an essential role in the story presented by Foucault. One, the evolution of the Greek legal system, where a new test system based on witnesses replaces aristocratic systems of confrontation. This is accompanied by a second event, a broad strategy of appeasement of sharp class conflicts, where the political inclusion of people is allowed in exchange for maintaining fundamental economic structures. Foucault considers, according to his ideas at the time, that such inclusion still allows for class domination, without exploring in detail how the relevant institutions operated. Neither the reordering of the tribes by Cleisthenes, nor the organisation of the city, nor the social groups that tend to compose them are described by Foucault. ⁶ Not even the Heliea, the People’s Court, whose power is manifest in Oedipus, is explored in detail. Though this Court is meant to produce verdicts as emanating independently from power – an idea Foucault opposed – we know nothing about who founded the institution or how it was designed. Nor does Foucault mention ostracism, the institution of elite control that Jean-Pierre Vernant describes as key for understanding the relationship between Thebes and Oedipus. Oedipus was, according to Vernant (2002b, p. 128), an example of those providential men that Athenian democracy could expel from the city to avoid deadlocks among its elites. Later, when Foucault turns to Oedipus again or intervenes in relation to democracy in 1982–3, he shows a similar disdain for the institutional architecture of democracy.

This is, I posit, a case of selective attention. Foucault explores social and political history without detailing how democratic institutions function and the effective power that ordinary citizens acquire through them. This can be attributed, firstly, to his radical outlook, which believes all reforms aim to divert people’s sovereignty, especially economic. The people are included in political institutions in exchange for not sharing the land. Solon, in the manner of a social-democratic collaborator, seeks to appease conflicts through class collaboration and offers political representation so as to avoid altering economic structures (Foucault, 2011, p. 154). In a gesture of ‘Nietzschean communism’ (Moreno Pestaña, 2006), Foucault recalls that the cult of Dionysus, the popular god of distribution, inspired no reform: ‘There was never a “Dionysian” power or legislation, as there was no exhaustive redistribution of wealth’ (Foucault, 2011, p. 166).

Secondly, it is also the case that Lêveque and Vidal-Naquet, Foucault’s main references, did not always focus on the details of Athenian democracy. They hardly mention the mechanisms of drawing lots and elections, although both they and Jean-Pierre Vernant insist on the revolutionary character of the reforms of Cleisthenes, fundamentally in the creation of a citizen space alien to the networks of familial domination. On the other hand, Foucault had classic texts – such as Plato’s Protagoras – though which to improve his depiction of the sophists and which provide a philosophical account of democratic participation. Closer to him, François Châtelet (1990, pp. 85–98) offered a solid description of the institutional functioning of democracy. Nevertheless, Foucault still understands all sophists through Callicles.

When Foucault returns to Oedipus and democracy many years later, his Marxism has all but disappeared and with it any reference to class struggle. However, on democracy and its assemblies it will suffice to read Euripides’ Ion and Pericles’ speeches collected by Thucydides. Foucault’s reading of Oedipus, practically identical to his earlier one, is not structured around social conflicts, but on the link between government and truth. In this context, and distanced from his earlier leftist politics, Foucault (2012, pp. 12, 76) flirts with a particular version of anarchism, which opposes power but for which there is nothing outside power relations. The institutional complexity of the demos’s power in Athens was not particularly interesting for said anarchism. This inattention is a recurring phenomenon in his reading of the ancient world at a time when, without the Marxist parameters of analysis, Foucault’s philosophy is increasingly concentrated on internalist readings of established authors. To give another example, in the 1980s, Stoic thought interests Foucault. On the subject, there were studies on Stoics’ connection to class conflicts – particularly a well-known article by Ilsetraut Hadot, wife of Pierre Hadot, whom Foucault admired. Ilsetraut Hadot (1970) demonstrated how the problem of private property divided the Stoics and placed them in opposing sides during the turbulent episodes that surrounded Gracchi’s reformation attempts in Rome. Neither on this topic nor on others will the reader find many references to their social and political context. Further, Vidal-Naquet had published Moses Finley in French in 1976, inaugurating an original reflection on Athenian democracy. The Invention of Athens, Nicole Loraux’s thesis, and Castoriadis’s own seminars are testament to a growing sophistication in our knowledge of Athenian democracy. For whatever reasons, Foucault does not explore this new knowledge in detail.

Continuing the critique of scholasticism

As stated above, Foucault brings together an innovative discourse, at least in the beginning of the 1970s. A decade later, that judgement must at least be qualified. Notwithstanding Foucault’s prodigious conceptual apparatus, it ought to be settled in what sense it departs from a traditional account of the history of ideas. My conclusion is not particularly flattering: on some planes I consider that very little. Nevertheless, one can examine Foucault’s oeuvre through him from a bridging of Bourdieu’s sociology with his own critiques of scholasticism. Both reject a type of philosophy that can be described, with the help of Bourdieu and Spinoza, as one whose bases are intellectual prowess and established texts. I posit that, still following Spinoza, there are at least three types of philosophical commentary, connected with institutional dynamics (Moreno Pestaña, 2005).

First, Spinoza spoke of a ‘cordial commentary’, in which the text is treated as a testimony of love and which is believed to harbour an inexhaustible wealth. This type of internalist commentary aggressively dismisses anyone daring to question the infinite richness of a text. Foucault is radically opposed to this approach, which he critiqued not only in the course here considered but also in the lecture ‘What is an author?’ After all, such ‘cordial’ interaction with the text, common in contexts of hyperspecialisation, serves fundamentally to integrate their authors into intellectual communities that ‘manage’ the thought of a philosopher – something that Foucault himself never did. Within such communities or schools, the faithful tend to compete through Spinoza’s second type of commentary, consisting of confronting the venerated tradition with others to criticise the latter. As in the first type of commentary, the tradition itself is taken as an absolute reference. However, the aim is now to compare: fundamentally to applaud coincidences and chastise differences. This practice requires greater institutional solidity, entails more risk and at the very least a broadening of the intellectual investments of authors – more than should only canonical texts. Finally, a third tradition of commentary, which Spinoza called ‘speculative’, characterises creative readings, in which texts are pretexts to always unearth the same overarching principle. Thus, theoretical ambition is combined with a remarkable practical fickleness. ⁷ Speculative commentary is most common in established authors – uniquely capable of assuming such risks. Such readings of texts epitomise the dream of a great common philosophical tradition where ideas are connected without external referents. Marcus Aurelius can dialogue with Kant and Machiavelli with Democritus: all conversations can happen on the dead philosophers’ island.

To escape from these procedures, it is not enough to denounce commentators, often simply engaged in cordial commentary. Those versed in the second and third type of commentary imagine themselves to be creators, although they often only execute variants of text commentary. Nevertheless, the work of some commentators should be recognised for its role in the conservation and organisation of texts. The same cannot be said of arcane readers of philosophy that imagine themselves as revealing, with their imaginary hermeneutics, a ‘true’ metaphysics. The Foucault here analysed, the critic of scholasticism, provides striking arguments against such practices; however, he himself is in some sense seduced by them. His vision of the separation, in Classical Greece, of knowledge and power, the birth of a myth of pure knowledge, has parallels with philosophies based on the myth of an absolute origin – in this case, a suspiciously Heideggerian interpretation of Aristotle, who represents the beginning of the downfall. The same can be said of Foucault’s reading of the sophists, a good example of stigma reversal, celebrating what others spurn, while still not doing justice to sophists themselves. Following Bourdieu’s and Spinoza’s recommendations, the issue would be instead to ask who grouped them together as sophists in sacred books in the first place.

Overall, by reading Oedipus through the legal system, Foucault continues an intelligent tradition of social history, which treats its text with the philosophical seriousness that is usually reserved, with colossal anachronism, to the domain of literature. In this way, he expands the canon of what is considered philosophically valuable. However, there is a caveat. Without wanting to be too severe, it is worth paying attention to the fact that Foucault comments twice on Oedipus, on two different moments of his intellectual project, without changing either the reading or the contextualisation. Is this due to the permanence of his vision of penal power in Athens? Or to a decontextualised use of canonical references? Maybe simply due to his fascination with that work? Keys to solving this issue, it seems to me, lie elsewhere, in a permanent tension between positioning himself as a reputable philosopher, while also seeking to supersede a common model of the history of philosophy. Foucault is thus legitimised as a reputable author who is unbound by historical doxa, although, for that, he must submit his reading to the judgement of the historian – a curious alchemy. In what follows this article zeroes in on a sensitive issue. Namely, how Foucault transforms the theses of a historian by granting them an ontological scope – while, incidentally, not acknowledging their origin.

Knowledge and morality in Athenian democracy

In his lecture of 17 March 1971, Foucault draws the following conclusion from Oedipus Rex. Oedipus, by his punishment after tainting Thebes with his crime, continues the religious tradition of the pursuit of purification. But now, and this is what is new, facts must be established through the courts. Divine punishment is no longer enough. What is the lesson? Only those without blemish can uphold the law, and the tyrant Oedipus, notwithstanding his exploits, was not one. That is why rulers must be wise, and not self-serving tyrants or the popular rabble. A wise person does not necessarily mean a philosopher, it can be Solon or a tyrant who allows himself to be advised.

Foucault thus radicalises Vernant. The latter, with regard to the character of Oedipus, saw a merging of the figure of the scapegoat (pharmakos) and of ostracism. Concerning scapegoats, for example, Athens selected two outcasts during the Thargelia festivities, with the aim of purifying the city, who were expelled in procession and abused. Both meanings are viable interpretations of this tragedy: he is both a marginalised individual (Oedipus the orphan) and an arrogant tyrant (Divine Oedipus). Both facets, as Aristotle explained, are outside the bounds of political life – one for a lacking and the other for an overabundance, one because of beastliness and the other because of divinity (Vernant, 2002b, pp. 120–129). Foucault constructs a whole political ontology around the Vernant hypothesis: knowledge must be free of all blemish, and that is the reason for Oedipus’ ultimate exclusion. Thus, while Vernant proposes a reading of this tragedy that is based on the historical reconstruction of institutions, in Foucault, we have a thesis on the destiny of the West.

Between Vernant and Foucault, if my reading is correct, one finds one of the typical problems of what Bourdieu called ‘scholastic epistemocentrism’. The analyst constructs a framework of oppositions, which allows him to understand an event within a system of differences. Here, Oedipus, situated between the outcast and the tyrant, breaks the common norm of politics. Nevertheless, for Bourdieu (1980, p. 51) the world is not a text and the logic of practice is to modify the schemes of oppositions according to changing circumstances. ⁸ Foucault, as interpreter of tragedies, tries to turn a reading protocol into a philosophy of knowledge. Foucault, quite encapsulated by his emphasis on discourse – though in other ways he also wants to move away from it – has too many references to a Heideggerian Aristotle and to Nietzschean sophists to entertain seeing how democracy is built through institutions. One has the impression that the actual histories of Sophocles and the courts of justice, of Aristotelian philosophy and of the epistemological assumptions of fifth-century democracy, escape Foucauldian oppositions; and one wonders what sort of philosophy one can undertake without such a history.

Nevertheless, we are reading courses that Foucault did not publish as texts, but merely as teaching drafts. And in Foucault there are always nuances. The connection between purity and knowledge was present, according to him, in Plato and Aristotle above all. I have covered Aristotle, and here have little to add. The defender of hybrid regimes was never in radical opposition to democracy. Conversely, Plato definitely was, at least in his Republic, although other works such as The Law contain less utopian and undemocratic political models. In any case, Foucault recognises that Aristophanes and Thucydides never embarked on a sweeping critique of democratic power. They still did not conceive of the demos as a beastly entity. Meanwhile, for philosophers, knowledge is linked to moral purity: the masses cannot deserve it.

This thesis implies a question concerning whether the masses may or should hold political power. An important and conspicuous matter in Du gouvernement des vivants is the complexity of Sophocles’ understanding of truth. References to Oedipus appear after expanding on the model of truth that inspired Septimius Severus, an emperor whose audiences were held under a representation of the sky as it was on the day of his birth. A totalising worldview supported his dictums. In contrast to this model of understanding destiny, strongly linked to a stoic viewpoint, is that of Oedipus, a man of fortune like the emperor, but whose truth does not reside in heaven, ‘but stuck to his every step, united to that ground and to those roads that went from Athens to Corinth and from Corinth to Thebes’ (Foucault, 2012, p. 5). Severus avoided giving his audiences under the stars as they would appear on the day of his death, but they were represented in one of his most private rooms. The truth of the emperor’s destiny lies in the stars, while for Oedipus, on the contrary, it lies hidden at the bottom of a shack in Thebes. These are for Foucault two distinct ways of bringing together government and truth. The cosmological legitimation of the emperor vis-a-vis the truth of the humble witness. Let us focus on this crucial point concerning, ultimately, the epistemological qualities of the citizen.

For a post-leftist Foucault in the 1980s, Oedipus Rex allowed us to ponder over changing ‘truth regimes’. He often developed novel conceptual tools for each of his interventions, only to briskly abandon them. I will not attempt, like many have, to find coherence in the totality of his oeuvre. But, in relation to ‘truth regimes’ Foucault seems to me to be onto something. All institutional practices entail procedures to obtain the truth: if one is a scientist, the application of the scientific method; if one is a believer, the learning of a doctrine and its personal observance; for a politician, the immersion in networks and apparatuses of power. Each of these procedures is sustained by underlying narratives. These may be, correspondingly, the victory of reason over obscurantism, the preparation for the return of the Messiah, or the ascent of democratic power or of the liberties. That root is beyond actual procedures, but without it, it is not possible to practise them convincingly. What is the belief that lies behind the procedures put into practice by Oedipus? Faced with Septimius Severus, whose power derives from the decrees of an incomprehensible deity, the power of the witness rests on a quality witnesses always have, but which now coincides with the decrees of Apollo and the words of Tiresias. Having seen what happened, two humble men solved the enigma of the plague that was ravaging Thebes. The audience and the jury – chosen by draw, composed of one layman for each tribe – of the tragedy was, as Vernant (2002a, p. 82) recalls, a kind of popular tribunal. The tragedy thus was also a political statement, hinting at a new truth regime.

Conclusion

Bourdieu (2016, pp. 178–179) argues that scholars’ readings of the classics often work as projective tests: one learns more about the categories with which they are carried out than about the subject on which they are applied. But it is not always simple to capture such categories: one needs an approach that is both institutional and intellectual. Nor does it seem easy to settle whether such strategies are conscious or not. Foucault found in Oedipus an intellectual legitimation of his role as a philosopher in the struggle against the French prison system; later he will read it as a statement on the plurality of truth. In turn, he employed Oedipus in his homological method, manifestly in the link between penal systems and Aristotle’s great struggle against the sophists. Moving away from both Aristotle and Oedipus Rex, Foucault intended to move away from a philosophical model of eternal comment. Nevertheless, I have argued that he did not succeed in this mission. He ended up falling, almost certainly against his will, into two tendencies of traditional philosophy: an apocalyptic reading of history and the employment of the evidence from the historical sciences to put together grand narratives with ontological pretensions. Although any social history of philosophy can learn much from Foucault’s critique of internalism in philosophy, it must depart from him in at least two aspects: firstly, in his sometimes stereotyped and unjust use of Aristotelian thought; secondly, in the linkage of this use with Heidegger’s reading. Foucault criticises the philosophical canon while, betrayed by the Heideggerian aroma of his reading, still heeding many of its suppositions.