Life as a scandal of truth

Michel Foucault’s philosophical testament

Abstract

This article aims to interpret the last course taught by Michel Foucault at the Còllege de France, in 1984, extracting from it a kind of philosophical testament. I begin by seeking to make a parrhesiastic rendering of accounts emerge from this Foucaultian self-writing, in which Foucault speaks frankly about the dimensions of his work and his horizon of concern with the interweaving of three major themes: truth, power and the subject. Later, I analyze how these three themes are tied by Foucault around the central issue of his last course, the notion of parrhesia. I expose the development of the concept of parrhesia in connection with the theme of true life in the Socratic-Platonic tradition, in Cynicism and in primitive Christianity, to finally conclude that Foucault leaves us a vast legacy, including the mission of, from the tradition opened by cynicism, to promote a rewritting of the history of philosophy no longer as a metaphysics of the soul, but as an aesthetic of existence.