Foucault’s Anti-Oedipus

Abstract

Between Foucault and Deleuze-Guattari, there is a striking contrast on the notion of truth. While the latter elides it as a problem in their project of a “generalized pragmatics,” Foucault finds in it the key to link Anglo- American theories of the “speech act” to his analyses of “power-knowledge.” The link is confirmed first in the continuity between L’Archéologie du savoir (1969), ostensibly a methodological book, and of the Leçons sur la volonté de savoir, the course of Foucault’s first year (1970-1971) at the Collège de France, and then above all, in his reading of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, which was taken up again several times in the 1970s and 1980s. Truth is always analysed here as an essential function to govern the self and others by telling the truth, and this function is accomplished, according to Foucault, through the ‘game of halves’ that he discovers in Sophocles’ tragedy, drawing on the work of Pierre Aubenque and Marcel Detienne. The two halves being the just and the true, Foucault also discovers the game in the research of George Dumézil. The contrast between Foucault and Deleuze-Guattari is thus evident as well as in their way of referring to Dumézil.