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TRUTH
I
n his final works, Foucault explains his overall project as a “history of truth”
centered on the relations between subjectivity and truth. Whereas the early archaeology focuses primarily on the formation of new objects and discourses of knowledge, and later, genealogy focuses on techniques of power and self-formation, the
problematic of truth is the overriding framework through which Foucault develops
these analyses. Throughout all of his work, in fact, Foucault’s question is how discourse, institutions, politics, and subjects are established within regimes of truth.
To emerge as a knowable object in reality is also always to enter into a regime
of truth, according to Foucault. A regime (or game) should be understood as a set
of rules and constraints divided between true and false discourses and practices
(EEW1, 297). With this notion, Foucault displaces the traditional correspondence
theory of truth, which holds that our knowledge must correspond with or relect
pregiven objects in reality. In order to correspond with these objects, a certain form
of subjectivity is required that would be able to access the truth of these objects and
hold onto this truth over time. In the history of philosophy, this subject usually takes
on a set of universal and ahistorical characteristics that are necessary to have access
to such knowledge. When the subject possesses these characteristics naturally and
without any necessary history or practice, Foucault calls this kind of subject one that
possesses truth through self-evidence.
Foucault’s philosophy of truth resists the notion that there is either an a priori
constituted subject or a pregiven object and instead examines the historical constitution of the subject, the object, and their interrelation. If truth, in Foucault’s thought,
is involved with correspondence, it can only be one that is historically produced
(Gros 2004, 11–12). His entire philosophical career involves a critique of the notion
of self-evidence and the subject and object that would naturally correspond in such
a relation. In his philosophy of truth, it can be seen that each period of his thought
involves a critique of self-evidence from a different vantage point, whether it be the
517
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518 / Don T. Deere
history of scientiic discourse, the immanence of power and knowledge, or the subject’s relation to itself.
Through the critique of self-evidence, Foucault situates the problem of truth
at the historical level, excavating the historical conditions of possibility of a given
regime of truth. This is the aim in combining key insights of the Kantian analytic
with history, in what Foucault calls the historical a priori. Instead of asking what it is
that makes possible a universal subject capable of knowledge in general, it asks what
embeds a subject within a particular regime of truth, what practices are required,
what discourses are accepted, and what cost is paid for the subject to enter into that
reality. At the same time, the question is one of the conditions behind an object
becoming a positive igure of knowledge. What procedures, what order of space, visibility, and time, what institutions, and what relations of power were required for an
object such as madness, perversion, delinquency, or the anthropological ideas of the
human being to emerge as knowable objects? For Foucault, a regime of truth is the
nexus between the historical conditions of possibility of the subject and the historical
conditions of possibility of the object. It is the site where truth names the constraints
and modalities required of both subject and object to enter the positivity of reality
and engage in a set of possible relations (EEW2, 459–460; EEW3, 242–254).
Relections on truth at the level of history generally tend toward the view that
truth is without history entirely, or that its history can only be one of progressive
unfolding and clariication. The latter, teleological view claims that through time we
are inally able to grasp the great truths of labor, life, language, psychology, sexuality,
human rights, liberal government, and so on. These were truths that always existed
outside of history, but to discover them it required the test of time and the trial and
error of inite human practice: slowly through history, the ininite unshakeable truth
reveals itself in the inite.
Instead of a universal theory of truth modiied by the modalities of teleological,
revealing, or obscuring history, Foucault thinks of a topology of truth in its history
and geography. Truth is linked to history in the modality of the event, which requires
an examination of its conditions of emergence and its geography of instantiation.
Truth is produced within a certain set of circumstances and produces a certain set
of behaviors and constraints. The truth-event opposes the notion of self-evident
demonstrative truth that can be found in any place or any time regardless of the circumstances. In short, Foucault would like to study a “truth which does not belong to
the order of what is, but to the order of what happens, a truth, therefore, which is not
given in the form of discovery, but in the form of the event, a truth which is not found
but aroused and hunted down: production rather than apophantic” (ECF-PP, 237).
In his archaeological texts from History of Madness through The Archaeology of
Knowledge, Foucault develops a methodological principle: the rejection of the universal from the start in order to examine the event of knowledge and its rules of
construction. Traditionally, the history of science has taken the “universality” of a
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Truth / 519
scientiic discovery and used it as a ilter to examine the history of errors and mistakes leading up to this truth. The truth then allows us to separate it from all of the
errors and ideologies that led up to its discovery (Gros 2004, 13). In short, the purity
of the scientiic lineage leading up to this truth is extracted from its accidental and
erroneous history.
Foucault’s archaeological method is the inverse of this. Instead of starting with
the universal, he starts with a particular discourse and excavates the archaeological
conditions that made such a discourse possible. As he would later explain in a lecture
at the Collège de France:
[I]nstead of deducing concrete phenomena from universals, or instead of starting
with universals as an obligatory grid of intelligibility for certain concrete practices,
I would like to start with these concrete practices and, as it were, pass these universals through the grid of these practices. . . . It was the same question in the case
of madness. . . . If we suppose that it does not exist, then what can history make of
these different events and practices which are apparently organized around something that is supposed to be madness? (ECF-BIO, 3; see also EAK, 207)
Madness should be supposed not to exist, in the sense that it does not have any ahistorical or universal reality that we can use to interpret its particular historical variations. Instead, the key to understanding the truth regime of madness is found in the
rules and practices by which madness was produced as an object to be known and
controlled, along with the forms of subjectivity that it produced and constrained.
So, the truth of madness is not to be discovered internal to some true or false definition of “madness in itself” but is instead the very reality produced by a game of
truth. Truth does not correspond to some pregiven object, as in the classical correspondence theory of truth, but instead truth is itself productive of and produced by
reality.
It should be noted here that Foucault is not interested in any and all games
of truth or a critique of science as such. His interest, instead, is in those discourses
and games that involve the truth of the human subject, or how “the subject himself becomes an object of possible knowledge” (EEW2, 460). Namely, the task is
to see how a possible “science of the human” developed and how a truth game was
crystallized around the human. As Frédéric Gros writes, “man is fundamentally
thought in [Foucault’s] work as an animal of truth” (Gros 2004, 11, Gros’s italics). All
of Foucault’s analyses aim to excavate the processes through which man has become
both an object and a subject of truth: from the human sciences to the incitement of
discourse where the subject seeks to constantly produce and discover an inner truth
through confession and self-examination (see EHS1).
The analysis of madness can then be situated as the initiation of Foucault’s studies of man’s enmeshment within a game of truth. History of Madness examines how
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520 / Don T. Deere
the Renaissance understanding of madness as a force inhabiting the entire cosmos
was transformed into a psychological truth of the human being. How was the seat of
the truth of madness shifted from the fabric of the cosmos to an exclusive location
within the human being? Furthermore, how did the truth of madness as the irrational exterior to human reason serve to found the truth interior to modern reason?
Foucault shows that the division between madness and reason is not established
on some pure rational decision. It is not a positivistic universal that can retrospectively be separated from its accidental history. Instead, the modern truth regime of
madness is rooted in a political and economic history of division: the great coninement of the mad and the poor across Europe in the seventeenth century. This position of exclusion was a fundamental condition of possibility for the division between
madness and reason and for the emergence of mental illness as a scientiic discourse
and object of study. In the great coninement, the mad had not been separated from
indolence and other forms of social deviance. Yet, it was in this space of coninement
where the irst doctors of mental illness began to articulate a scientiic discourse
based on the emergent order of visibility and sayability. However, even the scientiic
basis on which these doctors could make their statements about mental illness was
lacking. This construction was instead based on a complicated subjection of the mad
through new structures of recognition and relexivity. The famous liberation of the
mad from their chains in France was coupled with the development of a whole new
structure of subjection whereby the mad were led to recognize and internalize their
own illness: physical chains substituted for psychical ones. Further, this was a discourse rooted in a igure of authority, the medical person, which did not yet have a
scientiic basis for understanding madness.
In this sense, the scientiic status of the truth of madness as mental illness is
shown to have its archaeological roots in a game of division and exclusion that is not
evidenced on the surface of its discourse. The self-evidence of the mad subject as a
natural scientiic object to be studied is thrown into question, and the event of madness in its formation of rules and divisions is shown to be the proper site of investigation of its truth regime. The self-evidence of knowledge would set up a direct
correspondence wherein the subject is not transformed or constrained in order to
come into relation with the truth. Instead Foucault studies the processes through
which this relation between subject and object is made possible: at what price and
with what history does an object emerge as something that can be known? What
effects of constraint, obedience, and subjection must subjects pass through in order
to be knowable as objects of truth?
Foucault’s aim is not, however, to claim that the scientiic discourse of mental illness is in itself true or false or even ideological. Mental illness possesses its
own truth regime and a reality that is not at all illusory. The task is not to propose
its falsiication by referencing some greater truth but instead to expose its conditions of construction, thus demonstrating that truth never rests purely on its own
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Truth / 521
foundations but is always bound to a relation of otherness in its ties to a long institutional and political history. As Foucault claims in his inal unpronounced notes to his
inal lecture at the Collège de France, “truth is never the same” (ECF-COT, 340).
Foucault’s archaeological examination of scientiic discourse initiated a number
of critiques against the Marxist theory of truth, critiques that were further developed in his genealogy of power. In fact, Foucault claims that the prominent powerknowledge dyad of this period was intended as a displacement of Marxist ideology
theory (FCF-GDV, 74–78). Generally speaking, ideology theory supposes that a critique of a given discourse as false or ideological will allow one to attain a deeper
underlying truth: smashing the veneer of ideology opens up the path of the real and
the true. For Foucault, there is no deeper layer of reality that can be found underneath the surface and there is no deeper truth that he claims to reveal underneath
the divisions and constraints of a truth regime.
Ideology theory claims, furthermore, that false appearances are due strictly
to the machinations of power and that the brilliance of truth could tear down this
facade. This schema is evidenced in the great battling cry of political analysis and
activism: “We must speak truth to power.” This cry is quite familiar to the history
of the West, such that Foucault situates its emergence with the Greeks, all the way
back to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Plato’s political philosophy (EEW3, 30–32).
This cry supposes that if we were able to penetrate the iron gates of power with
all of the brilliant and incriminating truths it has been hiding, then power would
simply collapse and lose the legitimate grounds for its justiication. In short, it is
supposed that truth and power are external to one another and that power can only
legitimate itself through an illusory or deceptive relation to the truth. Foucault’s
intervention into political analysis is to show that we should no longer consider
truth and power in relations of externality but instead consider them in a ield of
immanence. Every form of power is supported by a network of truth relations, and
every regime of truth carries with it effects of power (EEW3, 132–133). Just as he
refused it in the study of madness, Foucault will refuse the claim that a truth regime
is false or ideological because it is produced by and produces relations of power.
Instead, he will aim to show that truth is itself immanent to power and produces
power relations.
Truth, then, is not a strictly epistemological problem where the purity of knowledge is opposed to the effects of coercion produced on the subject through power.
Instead, truth involves relations of force that compel certain conducts and produce
forms of subjectivity. As Foucault explained in an interview, “My problem is to see
how men govern (themselves and others) by the production of truth (. . . not the production of true utterances but the establishment of domains in which the practice
of true and false can be made at once ordered and pertinent)” (EEW3, 230). This
deinition of his problem, which could apply to his entire corpus, points to the way in
which the direction of human conduct is always compelled by a discourse or ordering
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522 / Don T. Deere
of the true and the false. Political power is unintelligible without the deployment of
truth as a matrix through which subjects govern themselves and others.
In moving away from epistemological models to a study of political regimes
of truth, Foucault will study the role of truth in relation to the history of juridical
forms. The relationship between what he will call veridiction (the establishment of
veridical domains or truth regimes) and juridical forms or jurisdiction is present in
most of his studies during the 1970s. These analyses show the points at which political technologies move between a foundation and legitimation rooted primarily in
juridical forms to one rooted primarily in a regime of truth. Generally speaking,
this is the framework of analysis for Discipline and Punish. In this work, Foucault
provides a genealogy of the process through which the juridical question of “what
did you do?” is displaced by a question of truth about the subject: “who are you?”
(EDP, 17–19). The whole apparatus of disciplinary power is predicated on this new
technology of truth that seeks to ind the truth of the individual, rather than one that
seeks to establish whether a certain infraction was broken, requiring a codiied punishment. Modern governmental power is thus primarily supported by veridiction,
the division between the true and the false, and only secondarily tied to jurisdiction,
the division between the permissible and the nonpermissible.
In a series of lectures from 1973 in Rio de Janeiro, “Truth and Juridical Forms,”
Foucault traces out an even longer history of this relation between truth and jurisdiction, leading from the Homeric era, through the tragedy of Oedipus and the
medieval practices of inquiry, up to the practices of examination and panopticism in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (EEW3, 1–89). What these histories show
is the increasing instantiation and prioritization of procedures of truth over jurisdiction in the ield of politics. Stated otherwise, there were always procedures of truth
embedded within jurisdiction, but increasingly truth became a principle of veriication, rationalization, and individualization, exerting a much greater force than jurisdiction itself.
Modern veridical forms have increasingly moved away from truth-events and
rituals (such as the Homeric trial by test or combat) toward a reign of demonstrative
truth where there is a totalizing grid of all possible subjects to be known and controlled. The Panopticon is one such example of a totalizing tableau vivant where all
subjects can be placed and known at all times. In this case, we see how demonstrative
truth is not tied to a purely scientiic history but a political history that set up the
conditions for subjects to be observable, controllable, and visible at all times and all
places.
In Foucault’s inal works on the technologies of subjectivity, the problematic
of the government of human beings (self and others) by truth is developed to focus
more extensively on the government of self by truth. If his earlier studies examined
the government of others by truth in more depth, his later work will show the network that lows between self and other, and between politics and ethics. These late
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Truth / 523
studies do not come at the expense of the studies on power but instead deepen the
analysis of the government of human beings by truth. A theory of power in itself was
never his aim, explains Foucault, but rather a study of techniques of subjection and
relexivity: “I am working on the history, at a given moment, of the way relexivity of
self upon self was established, and the discourse of truth linked to it” (EEW2, 452).
The analysis of technologies of subjectivity, furthermore, deepens the critique
of self-evidence and the demonstrative reign of truth. Here, Foucault examines the
different rituals and procedures through which subjects recognize or speak truths of
themselves. With each of these late studies, he accounts for a different set of practices that are required of the subject to encounter or speak a truth, and none of them
begin with the idea of a natural subject with immediate access to the true (EEW1,
290). Since Descartes, philosophy has searched for a direct and natural relationship
between the subject who knows and the object it knows. In what Foucault cautiously
terms the “Cartesian moment,” the subject takes on a form of self-evidence where
there is a direct interior link between the I think and its access to a clear and distinct
truth (ECF-HOS, 14). This Cartesian moment founds a relationship between subjectivity and truth that is free from ritual, practice, askesis, and self-transformation.
It is a form of subjectivity freed from what Foucault calls “spirituality,” or the set of
necessary transformations required of the subject to access the truth (ECF-HOS,
15–16). Foucault’s interest in the practices of self in antiquity addresses a variety of
different modes of spirituality; that is, the modes of how the subject is formed in
relation to an event of truth.
Foucault assigns a term for this relationship between subjectivity and the event
of truth in his 1979–1980 course at the Collège de France, “Du Gouvernement des
Vivants”: alethurgy or alethurgical forms (FCF-GDV, 8–9). Alethurgy combines the
Greek word for truth, aletheia, with the verb for work or production, ergon. Thus,
etymologically speaking, alethurgy refers to the production of the truth. Foucault
certainly has a critique of Heidegger in mind here by proposing a reformulation of
the Greek term to emphasize the production of truth rather than its unveiling or disclosure. For Foucault, truth has no underlying substratum to be unveiled or disclosed.
Instead, alethurgical forms will consider the production of truth through rituals and
practices where the subject manifests, recognizes, speaks, or forms an obligation
to truth. Whereas archaeology investigated the historical event through which a
broader regime of truth came into place at the level of scientiic discourse, alethurgy
will focus more directly on the event of truth as it occurs through the practices and
rituals carried out by and through the subject. What are the rituals and procedures
through which a truth gains its force at the level of the subject? What effects of
transformation does truth have on the subject, and how have we established such a
devotion to truth in the history of the West?
Here it might be asked, and Foucault poses this question himself: why continue
using the notion of truth for these practices and rituals? The archaeological studies
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524 / Don T. Deere
emphasized the process through which the human became an object of scientiic
discourses of truth. Yet, Foucault wants to show that truth had a different history
and a different set of rules prior to the modern scientiic understanding of truth as
objective and demonstrative. Truth has not always presented itself as an ahistorical
and unconditioned object (see also Detienne 1999). These studies in antiquity aim to
restore the modality of the event to the advent of truth. In a late interview, Foucault
clariied this emphasis on truth:
After all, why truth? How did it come about that all of Western culture began to
revolve around this obligation of truth which has taken a lot of different forms?
Things being as they are, nothing so far has shown that it is possible to deine a
strategy outside of this concern. It is within the ield of the obligation to truth
that it is possible to move about in one way or another, sometimes against the
effects of domination which may be linked to structures of truth or institutions
entrusted with truth. . . . Thus, one escaped from a domination of truth not by
playing a game that was totally different from the game of truth but by playing
the same game differently, or playing another game, another, with other trump
cards. (EEW1, 295)
There is no pure outside to the truth game but only a different set of rules and a different set of possible cards. Foucault’s studies of the ancient world do not then seek
to escape games of truth but to examine a different set of rules and cards by which
these games were played. In order to do this, they analyze games of truth that are
speciically tied to the character of the event: in terms of rituals, practices, forms of
speech, and askesis.
In this movement to examine a whole different set of truth games free from
the demonstrative reign of self-evidence, Foucault will show the different forms
in which truth was not primarily predicated on an epistemological but rather an
ethical (or political) relation in antiquity. For example, in The Hermeneutics of the
Subject, he shows that modern philosophy has entirely overlooked the fundamental link between the care of the self (epimeleia heautou) and truth in antiquity. The
maxim at Delphi, know thyself (gnothi seauton), has almost completely overshadowed this other history. Foucault shows the Hellenistic practices through which
self-care was always required of the subject in order to have access to truth, and
where self-knowledge only had meaning with respect to a preliminary care of the
self. A reexamination of the igure of Socrates in The Apology illuminates the centrality of this theme of self-care. Here, Socrates is fundamentally a character who urges
others to take care of themselves, and it is only through such care that they might
eventually attain the path to wisdom. This theme is clearly present in all of Stoic
philosophy as well, and Foucault shows that it was, in fact, a fundamental concern
of all of antiquity.
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Truth / 525
In The Courage of Truth, Foucault extends his studies of parresia
(frank speech
or fearless truth-telling) from the previous year’s course, “The Government of Self
and Others,” and shows the way in which the true discourse of a subject is bound not
to a condition of knowledge but an ethical and political condition. For example, in
Plato’s Laches, Socrates’ ability to speak the truth is predicated not on a correspondence with his knowledge but on an ethical relation of mastery he has achieved in
his deeds. Thus, it is through the harmony between words and deeds that Socrates
has access to the true and frank discourse of parresia
. The Cynics radicalize this
harmony and ask the question: what is the form of life such that we can make the
brilliance of the truth appear in the very form of our existence? The Cynics arrive
at a point where parresia becomes a confrontational form of life over and above a
confrontational form of speech. Thus, we see that the alethurgical appearance of
truth is already produced in the mode of existence itself, in the bios, which does not
necessarily await the articulation of the logos to become visible: “In short, Cynicism
makes life, existence, bios, what could be called an alethurgy, a manifestation of truth”
(ECF-COT, 172). Arriving at the end of Foucault’s philosophical career, we are quite
far from the reign of self-evidence. Instead truth is manifested in the scandalous
practice of Cynic critique, one that brilliantly appears through bios rather than logos
with the force of an event.
In concluding, it is worth considering two critiques often posed to Foucault’s
philosophy of truth. The irst is the claim that Foucault is nothing more than a radical relativist and so must not be able to tell us very much about truth. This claim
fails to grasp the nature of a regime of truth that is precisely not just any set of
rules or rituals but ones that have been historically instantiated to have determinate
effects on the very being of the subject. The radical relativist would have no interest in games of truth, because the radical relativist thinks that there are no rules of
constraint and that any and all acts may pass as true depending on the beliefs or
opinions of the individual. This position could not be further from Foucault’s view
that we must understand the speciic constraints that lead us to formulate and carry
out truths on ourselves, whether it be in scientiic studies that objectify the subject,
practices of power that conduct the subject, or in the ethical relations that the subject holds to itself. Truth is always embedded within a network of constraints and
possible actions.
The second critique leveled against Foucault asks about the truth content of his
own utterances that he produces in his books, essays, and interviews. In response to
this question, Foucault claims that his books should be read as experiences and not
as factual claims to be veriied as true or false (EEW3, 239–246). Foucault’s aim in
writing philosophy is not to expose us to some deeper truth, for this would return
his work to the very ideology theory that his work aims to displace. Instead, these
experience books aim at the immanent critique of the intolerable effects of power
and subjection that certain discourses of truth hold for the subject. The aim is not
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526 / Don T. Deere
to break free from the regime of truth as such but to locate the points of resistance
where the rules of the games might be constructed otherwise. These points of resistance are most often located in those places where Foucault sees the possibility of
restoring the status of truth as event over and against a demonstrative truth that
appears self-evident.
This philosophy of truth is certainly not one that seeks to provide a theory of
truth as such. It is instead a critical history of different truth regimes, with the aim
being not to show that any particular regime is true or false but to demonstrate the
rules of construction and the effects and constraints that these regimes have on the
subject. In our own time, these constraints have increasingly become ossiied around
the self-evident and necessary notion of truth as demonstration (see also Lorenzini
2010). Foucault’s histories aim to shatter the self-evidence of demonstrative truth by
showing that truth is itself an event with its own conditions, history, and spatiotemporal foundations.
Demonstrative truth is true regardless of its place or time; dwelling everywhere,
it can be known by anyone at any time. It is a truth waiting to be discovered and
one that is progressively clariied and grasped through history. The truth-event is by
contrast like a lightning bolt that transforms those who come into contact with it.
It is a truth belonging to the order of force and not to the order of knowledge. This
truth is a
dispersed, discontinuous, interrupted truth which will only speak or appear from
time to time, where it wishes to, in certain places; a truth which does not appear
everywhere, at all times, or for everyone; a truth which is not waiting for us, because
it is a truth which has its favourable moments, its propitious places, its privileged
agents and bearers. It is a truth which has its geography. (ECF-PP, 236)
In this sense, all of Foucault’s studies aim at studying truth as an event to show the
conditions of space, time, the distribution of bodies, knowledge, and power that
enable a particular truth to emerge and gain force at a particular time and place. If
Foucault’s own discourse is allied to a truth claim, it is to the character of truth as
an event. It is a discourse that works to produce this effect of transformation on the
level of force and not strictly on the epistemological level of what is to be known.
Perhaps, then, a different experience of truth in its force as an event could open the
points of contingency where this “animal of truth” might shatter the dominion of
demonstration with the brilliance of a lightning bolt.
Don T. Deere
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Truth / 527
See Also
Historical a Priori
Knowledge
Parresia
Power
Self
Spirituality
Martin Heidegger
Suggested Reading
Detienne, Marcel. 1999. The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece. Cambridge, MA: Zone Books.
Flynn, Thomas R. 1985. “Truth and Subjectivation in the Later Foucault,” Journal of Philosophy
82, no. 10:531–540.
Gros, Frédéric. 2004. “Michel Foucault, Une Philosophie de la Vérité,” in Michel Foucault:
Philosophie Anthologie, ed. Arnold I. Davidson and Frédéric Gros. Paris: Éditions Gallimard,
pp. 11–25.
Lorenzini, Daniele. 2008. “‘El Cinismo Hace de la Vida Una Aleturgie.’ Apuntes Para Una
Relectura del Recorrido Filosóico del Último Michel Foucault,” Revista Laguna 23:63–90.
2010. “Para Acabar con la Verdad-Demostración. Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault y La
Historia de los ‘Regímenes de Verdad,’” Revista Laguna 26:9–34.
Prado, C. G. 2006. Foucault and Searle on Truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
chap. 3.
Revel, Judith. 2009. “Vérité/Jeux de Vérité,” in Le Vocabulaire de Foucault. Paris: Éditions Ellipses,
pp. 64–65.
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