Telling the Truth, or not: Notes on the Concept of Ethics in Foucault and Agamben

In 1997, taking his mark from the last text Foucault wrote before he died, Agamben examines the implications that accompany the definition of truth as an errancy, a straying. Drawing on the insights provided by Agamben’s lecture, this article analyses the different perspectives from which the two philosophers study the issue of truth, and the consequent conceptions of ethics which they elaborate. Throughout his multifarious reflections, Foucault maintained his critique of a universal and ahistorical truth, revealing the strategic games that legitimate every conception of truth. Hence, his idea of ethics consists in displacing oneself from the actual discourses and historical relations that subjectivate and subject the individual, in order to constitute one’s own subjectivity. On the other hand, the ontological perspective from which Agamben aims to integrate and correct Foucauldian thought leads to a conception of ethics as the deactivation of every form of life and the suspension of the dynamics of constitution in order to regain the original potentiality of the human being.