Critique functions by questioning truth’s power effects and power’s truth effects

Evidence

Foucault himself asserts that if government is “a social practice of subjecting individuals by mechanisms of power which lay claim to truth,” critique will be “the movement by which the subject assumes the right to question truth on its effects of power, and power on its effects on truth,” for the “art of voluntary nonservitude [is] considered nondocility.” There is no critique without the author, whose docility is neither total nor assured. If anything, the author, as a post-Kantian subject, is entrusted with the task “not to [just?] discover what we are but to refuse what we are.” The task “nowadays,” Foucault insists, is to “build up what we could be” in order “to get rid of this kind of political ‘double-bind,’ which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures.” — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 84

Categorization

• DEFINE: Foucault’s operative definition of critique as voluntary nonservitude and refusal of what we are, against a political double-bind.
• XREF: connects to: Totalizing truth-seeking theory gets co-opted by the system’s optimization — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 154; Deconstruction questions truth-privileging without denying truth exists — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 243