Michel Foucault, leser av Oidipous Turannos

Abstract

Michel Foucault as Reader of Oidipous Tyrannos

This article gives an overview of Michel Foucault’s various engagements with Sophocles’ tragedy over a period of fifteen years, and the six lectures that are currently available. The ambition is to show how Foucault’s work on the Greek drama is less an exercise in classical scholarship (and the story of its progress) than a series of test-cases for Foucault’s shifting theoretical and political interests. Hence, in various ways, the three lectures from the early seventies approach Sophocles from an explicitly Nietzschean perspective, particularly highlighting the power-knowledge economy at stake in what Foucault regards (drawing on Jean-Pierre Vernant) first and foremost as a political drama about the foundation and transition of political power. While sharing many of the analytical insights from Foucault’s earlier work, the three lectures from the early eighties discard the power-knowledge-matrix as an analytical tool, focusing instead on the various procedures for truth-production in the drama, and the different and conflicting forms of veridiction (truth-telling). Rather than focus on the potential philological merits of Foucault’s lectures, driven as they are by his methodological and philosophical concerns, this article emphasizes how any engagement with Antiquity is necessarily embedded in the politics and polemics of the present. Accordingly, this article finds that Foucault’s re-readings of Oidipous Tyrannos come across as attempts to identify present-day concerns; they should thus be regarded as that which Foucault terms “contributions to a critical ontology of ourselves.”