The lectures titled The Courage of Truth are the last given by Michel Foucault at the Collège de France in February and March 1984. He died a few months later, on June 25, 1984. This context encourages the reader to see these lectures as a philosophical testament, especially since the theme of death is strongly present, particularly in the new reading that Foucault proposes, following Dumezil, for Socrates' last words ("Crito, we owe a rooster to Asclepius!"), considering them an expression of deep gratitude towards philosophy, which heals from the only serious illness: that of false opinions and prejudices.

This cycle of lectures continues and radicalizes the analyses of the immediately preceding year. There, Foucault's aim was to question the function of "truth-telling" in politics, in order to establish certain ethical prerequisites for democracy that cannot be reduced to the formal rules of consensus: these prerequisites are courage and conviction, spirit. With the cynics, this manifestation of the true is no longer simply inscribed in a risky public positioning, in a rhetoric, but in the very materiality of existence.

Foucault thus proposes a groundbreaking study of ancient cynicism, viewing it as a practical philosophy, an exercise in truth, a public challenge, an ascetic mastery over oneself and others. The scandal of true life is thus constituted as a contrast to Platonism and its transcendent world of ideal Forms.

“There is no establishment of truth without a substantial establishment of otherness; truth is never the same; there can be no truth except in the form of the other world and the other life.” M. F.

Michel Foucault was born in 1926 in Poitiers. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure (1946-1950), where he lived some of the most difficult years of his life, attempting suicide twice (1948, 1950). He began his academic career at the University of Lille (1953-1954), which he interrupted to work as an advisor on cultural affairs for the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Sweden and Poland. In 1960, he returned to France and the following year defended his famous dissertation on the history of madness at Sorbonne.

From 1965, he lived mainly in Tunis until the autumn of 1968, when he returned to Paris to take the direction of the Philosophy Department of the newly established University of Vincennes. In 1970, he was elected professor at the renowned Collège de France, in the chair he would name “History of Thought Systems.” He was a member of the Communist Party from 1950 to 1953. In 1971 he founded the GIP (Groupe d’informations sur les prisons /Group of Information on Prisons), which would disband the following year.

In late 1978, he traveled to Tehran and published a series of articles in support of the Iranian revolution. He died on June 25, 1984, from the HIV virus. He left a large number of works. Some, translated into Greek: The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, The Archaeology of Knowledge, The History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasures, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, The History of Sexuality: The Care of the Self, I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother: A case of matricide-fratricide in the 19th century, For the Defense of Society, Madness and Civilization, The Order of Discourse: Lecture at the Collège de France 1970.