The genealogy of the will to truth:

the polycephalic event in Michel Foucault’s Lectures on the will to know

Abstract

In the early 1970s, the concern for a better definition of discursive practices permeates the research horizon of French philosopher Michel Foucault. The notion of discursive event gains prominence on his first course at the Collège de France, Lectures on the will to know. Taking what he denominates “Nietzsche system”, Foucault focused on the emergence of an ethics of truth in classical Greece that would not have its origin in a philosophical system like that of Aristotle. In this perspective, the true discourse would be an effect of rather diverse practices and would be shaped by political-economic and legal-religious demands. Thus, the exclusion of sophistic reasoning undertaken by Aristotle would be the ultimate effect of several transformations that affected the seventh and sixth centuries b.C. in Greece, not a single discursive event of this type of relationship with the true discourse. What Foucault wants to show is that “an event is always a dispersion; a multiplicity. It is what happens here and there; it is polycephalic”.