The embodiment of truth and the politics of community: Foucault and the cynics

Abstract

This article investigates Foucault’s analysis of the philosophical life of the Cynics in The Courage of Truth from the perspective of the Nietzschean question: how truth can be incorporated or embodied? In order to consider philosophy as a form of life and not merely as a doctrine or a science, the question of how can truth be lived or materialized in the physical body is obviously crucial. Whereas both Foucault and Arendt can be read as defenders of the philosophical life because of its ethical-political effects, Arendt argues that the Socratic philosophical life is a life that allows a distance to the body. By way of contrast, in Foucault’s analysis of the Cynics we find an idea of the philosophical life in which truth is revealed or manifest in the material body of life. This article takes up Esposito’s immunitary logic of biopolitics in order to argue that whereas the Platonic-Socratic philosophical life exemplifies an ascetic ideal that reflects an inherently immunitarian idea of politics, the philosophical life of the Cynics uses the communitary resources of embodiment so as to unite life and philosophy in a cosmopolitical form of life.