In the first of his Leçons sur la volonté de savoir (December 9, 1970), Foucault set himself the goal of the history of a "double transformation": (1) the birth of "philosophico-scientific discourse", in other words, of philosophy, and (2) the "liquidation" of "sophistry" in favor of "apophanticism". What was taking shape in 1970/71, in the first lecture at the Collège de France, in no way heralded the publications on the history of sexuality, begun in 1976 with La Volonté de savoir, and completed in January 2018 with Les Aveux de la chair. It was, in fact, primarily a critique of Aristotle. With the expression "will to know" paralleling "will to power" imposing both a direct reference to Nietzsche and, indirectly, to the Heideggerian interpretation of Nietzsche, Foucault's lecture tied together two threads: one Aristotelian, the other Heideggerian. Pursuing the deconstruction of the Heideggerian "Grand Narrative", in 2018 we have mainly followed the first, focusing on the Foucauldian idea of the "violent division of the true and the false", one of the elements of the "system of exclusion" supposed to govern the will to know, "insofar as it itself exercises a role of exclusion on discourse". For Foucault, there is in fact an event in the history of truth that coincides with the birth of philosophy, makes it possible and gives it form: the "displacement of truth", which took place in the Greek world between the 6th and5th centuries BC. After a reminder of Foucault's borrowings from the "English analysts" Austin and Searle, enabling him to articulate the distinction in The Archaeology of Knowledge between sentences, propositions, statements and speech acts, we turned to the analysis of this "displacement of truth", presented in the 1970 lecture as Plato's shift from the act of enunciation to the statement itself, then, almost at the end of the road, in 1982-83, in Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres, the analysis of the "drama of true discourse", defined as that of "facts of discourse which show how the very event of enunciation can affect the being of the enunciator" who has the courage to speak the truth. We were thus led to distinguish the 1983 Platonic theses on the "reality of philosophy" drawn from Foucauldi's rereading of Letter VII, requiring philosophy and the philosopher himself to be not simply discourse, λόγος, but work, ἔργον, full act of veridiction, and the Platonic-Aristotelian theses on logos, analyzed in 1970-71, as founding "logic".
In the lessons of January 6 and 13, 1971, Foucault evokes the two distinct but complementary operations carried out by Plato with the liquidation of the sophists, then Aristotle, with the perpetuation of sophisms. It is in the analysis of this perpetuation that he slips in a few remarks on the Middle Ages. This analysis itself repeats Kant's gesture of excluding medieval logic, asserting that since Aristotle, logic "had not been able to take a single step forward". With regard to the "displacement of truth", we have shown that Foucault himself displaced onto the figure of the sophist a central element of his analysis of the poet's function in the work that underpins his analyses - Marcel Detienne's "never-quoted" Les Maitres de vérité dans la Grèce archaïque, published by Maspero in 1967: the fact of exercising a power, that of "telling the truth".After evoking verses 27-28 of the Theogony, where Hesiod mentionsfactual"realities"(ἔτυμα), then proferred "truths" (ἀληθέα), we returned in detail to the elements of poetic truth (ἀλήθεια) according to Detienne: an "assertoric" truth, "fundamentally different from our traditional conception"; a truth that consists neither in "the agreement of the proposition and its object", nor in that "of a judgment with other judgments", for, in archaic Greece, the opposite of truth is not "falsehood", but oblivion (Λήθη). We then turned to Bernard Williams' critique of Detienne, and began, on this basis, an examination of J. Bouveresse's critique of Foucault. In this connection, we dwelt on the notion of alèthurgie, introduced in the 1979-1980 lecture on the Government of the Living as "the set of possible verbal and non-verbal procedures by which we bring to light what is posited as true, as opposed to the false, the hidden, the unspeakable, the unforeseeable, the forgotten", then, having recalled the Foucauldian principle stipulating that there is "no exercise of power without an alèthurgy", we presented two critiques of J. Bouveresse: 1) Foucault does not take into account the ordinary use of language; 2) he never considers "the question of truth a parte rei, but always only a parte veridictionis and more precisely a parte veridicentis ". This last formula provided an opportunity to revisit the distinction between "verificator", "verifier" (truthmaker) and "truthbearer" (vériporteur), and to highlight the role of "veridiction" in the semiotics of discourse and the textual semantics of A.J. Greimas, integral parts of Foucault's field of presence at a time when he was setting up his work on dire-vrai and parrêsia.
