Conflicts of truth: Foucault and Habermas in dispute
Abstract
While it is usually assumed that conflicts have little to do with truth, the article argues that fundamental socio-political conflicts are always also conflicts of truth. To
support this thesis, the conceptual history of the term conflict is first outlined. This shows that the modern sociological concept of conflict highlights the forces and power relations at work in social systems but largely ignores the linguistic and epistemic dimensions of conflict. To address this shortcoming, Habermas’s linguistic and truth-theoretical foundation of sociology and Foucault’s concept of the regime of truth are contrasted with each other. Habermas emphasizes the dissensual character of truth claims and points out that it is the participants’ orientation towards truth that drives conflicts. However, insofar as he conceives of truth as a transcendental reference point located outside the experiential reality of social actors, he overlooks the genuine socio-political dimension of conflicts of truth. By contrast, Foucault allows us to see socio-political upheavals as crises or conflicts that affect a society’s regime of truth, understood as the complex interplay of governmental techniques, subjectivation practices, and forms of truth-telling.
Riferimenti bibliografici
Arendt, Hannah (1967), Truth and Politics in Arendt Hannah Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, Viking Press, New York 1969: 227–264.
Austin, John L. (1955), How to Do Things with Words, Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1975.
Bogner, Alexander (2021), Die Epistemisierung des Politischen: Wie die Macht des Wissens die Demokratie gefährdet, Reclam, Ditzingen.
Derrida, Jacques (1972), Signature Événement Contexte, in Derrida, Jacques, Limited Inc. Galilée, Paris (Signature Event Context in Derrida, Jacques Limited Inc. trans by S. Weber and J. Mehlman, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1988: 1-24.)
El-Mafaalani, Aladin (2019), ‹‹Alle an einem Tisch: Zwischen Teilhabe und Diskrimierung», in Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, n. 69 (9-11): 41-45.
Foucault, Michel (1975/76), Il faut défendere la société, Cours au collège de France, 1975–1976, Gallimard, Seuil, (Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, trans. by D. Macey, Picador, New York 2003).
Foucault, Michel (1977), Truth and Power in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. by C. Gordon, Pantheon Books, New York 1980: 109-134.
Foucault, Michel (1979/80), Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres, Cours au collège de France, 1979-1980, Gallimard, Seuil (On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979-1980, trans. by G. Burchell, ed. by M. Senellart, Palgrave Macmillan, London 2014).
Foucault, Michel (1983), Discourse & Truth, and Parrēsia, ed. by Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Daniele Lorenzini, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2019.
Foucault, Michel (1984), «The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom» in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984. Vol. I, The
New Press, New York 1997: 281-302.
Furet, François (1978), Interpreting the French Revolution, University of California Press, Cambridge 1981.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1960), Truth and Method, Bloomsbury, London 2004.
Habermas, Jürgen (1971), Reflections on the Linguistic Foundation of Sociology: The Christian Gauss Lecture in On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction: Preliminary Studies in the Theory of Communicative Action, MIT Press, Cambridge 2001, pp. 1-103.
Habermas, Jürgen (1972), Wahrheitstheorien, in Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1995: 127-186.
Habermas, Jürgen (1981), The Theory of Communicative Action, Beacon Press, Boston 1984.
Habermas, Jürgen (2005), Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, Polity, Cambridge 2008.
Habermas, Jürgen (2022), «Reflections and Hypotheses on a Further Structural Transformation of the Political Public Sphere», in Theory, Culture & Society 39 (4): 145-
Koselleck, Reinhart (1959), Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society, MIT Press, Cambridge 1988.
Lorenzini, Daniele (2015), «What is a ‹Regime of Truth?›», in Le foucaldien Vol. 1 (1): 1-5.
Lorenzini, Daniele (2023), The Force of Truth: Critique, Genealogy, and Truth-Telling in Michel Foucault, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2023.
Lyotard, Jean-François (1983), The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, Manchester University Press, Minneapolis 1988.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1873), On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense, in Writings, The Birth of Tragedy and Other, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1999: 139-153.
Nothdurft, Werner (1998), Konflikt, in Ueding, Gert (ed.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik. Bd. 4. De Gruyter, Tübingen: 1232-1238.
Posselt, Gerald (2023), Die Zerbrechlichkeit der Welt: Hannah Arendts ‹Wahrheit und Politik› revisited, in Römer, Inga, Stenger, Georg (eds.), Faktum – Faktizität – Wirklichkeit.
Phänomenologische Perspektiven, Meiner, Hamburg: 153-177.
Posselt, Gerald, Seitz, Sergej (2023), «Truth and Its Political Forms: An Explorative Cartography», in Contemporary Political Theory online 29 Dec.: 1-20.
Rancière, Jacques (1995), Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1999.
Rorty, Richard (2006), Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, Standford University Press, Stanford 2006.
Simmel, Georg (1908), Conflict in Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms, Leiden 2009: 227-306.
Quest'opera è distribuita con Licenza Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
