Each Tuesday in the TELOSscope blog, we reach back into the archives and highlight an article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Marcus Michelson looks at Jean-Michel Landry’s “Confession, Obedience, and Subjectivity: Michel Foucault’s Unpublished Lectures On the Government of the Living,” from Telos 146 (Spring 2009).
Why do we obey? Even when people rebel, it seems they simply reconstitute a form of obedience. We all know the old cliché “they aren’t rebels, they’re just following a ‘rebellious’ social code.” The way people dress, their hairstyle, tattoos, earrings, piercings, etc., only seem to reinforce our belief in their obedience to well-defined social practices. Even if we aren’t all playing by the same rules, we are all playing by rules. Do we even know what it would mean anymore to rebel? In the meantime, cultural critics admonish our decline, criticizing us for adhering to more philistine, insipid, or self-defeating values. But doesn’t this criticism amount to saying that we are just obeying the wrong thing, whereas obedience itself is simply presupposed? Could obedience really be ubiquitous, and if so, how did we get this way? On the other hand, how can we describe a legitimate form of autonomy?
In all honesty, children playing under the shadow of the presidential statue in the Lincoln Memorial, sweethearts embracing behind the slabs of the World War II plaza, or families picnicking in the shade of the Vietnam Memorial, seem odd and incongruous. Monuments are rarely expected to act as recreational spaces. Rather, the heavy subject matter solemnified in each should lend to reflection and concentration. The opposite, however, is the case with the Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, where the plaza filled with uniform rectangles of various heights provides visitors with a place to sunbathe, to cuddle, to play, to eat. In her article 
Even the first-time reader of Freud recognizes some outdated theory, in part because he or she has already heard Freudian psychology made fun of as part of the pop culture understanding of psychotherapy. But has Freud’s legacy—talk therapy—become obsolete in education as well as in practice? In his 2002 article 
How long ago was 9/11? Is this really a new era? What does it look like? For many, for perhaps all of us, the terrorist attacks eight years ago came as a surprise and brought us to question our understanding of the world around us. Our answers have emerged in renewed and reinvigorated passions for social and international justice. Collectively, however, there is no one vision we can all subscribe to. Some blame the United States for the terrorist attacks; others call for the government to hunt down the terrorists and kill them. In the heat of the moment, emotions flare and opinions are erratic. 
Recent discussions surrounding the death of Senator Ted Kennedy and talk about health care reform have reintroduced some of the most fundamental questions about justice and society into American political discourse. As ill-informed and histrionic as many of today’s arguments are, the matters being discussed are of great importance. And while at first it may not seem to have much relevance to the issues currently discussed, Plato’s Republic is in many ways the first comprehensive and influential work of Western political philosophy. The key questions of the Republic—the roles of social groups, the ideal qualifications for civic leaders, and the guiding principles for society—continue to have great contemporary relevance. 
