Socrates and Biopolitics: An Essay on Care, Truth-Telling, and Destituent Power

Abstract The article argues that Plato’s trilogy on Socrates’ death ( Apology , Crito , Phaedo ) are foundational texts of Western biopolitics. While drawing partly on Foucault’s last courses at the Collège de France, the article outlines a Socratic version of affirmative biopolitics, which entails a particular form of care, truth-telling, and destituent power. Socratic truth-telling consists in relentlessly testing and examining one’s own life and that of fellow citizens with the aid of logos. It is a life-affirming practice because it seeks to empower Socrates and his fellow citizens to live virtuously, by redirecting the focus of care from material goods (power, reputation, honors, wealth) to the cultivation of both virtue and human mortality. In so doing, Socratic truth-telling also functions as destituent power because it radically contests the ethical and political status quo. Whereas Socratic destituent power is located outside institutional politics and is therefore not political in the narrow sense of the word, it is political at a more fundamental level because it stands in an agonistic relationship to both civil society and the established political order. This new biopolitical interpretation of Socrates deviates from mainstream narratives and theories of biopower (Foucault, Agamben, Mbembe).