The Politics of Adoption: Gender and the Making of French Citizenship

Conclusion

Conclusion We should try to imagine and create a new relational right that permits all possible types of relations to exist and not be prevented, blocked, or annulled by impoverished relational institutions. —Michel Foucault, “The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will”1 The Politics of Adoption is an invitation to question what makes a community , to shift the issue of biology from a perspective centered on the significance of vital ties to a critical analysis of technologies of power through which we conceive ourselves as living beings.2 This approach implies abandonment of a belief in the predictability of social behavior and thus recognition of the ambivalence of community ties as simultaneously alienating and empowering.3 It suggests that the material nature of these ties still hinges, in today’s discourse, upon a set of unreal representations. In 1969 Michel Foucault wondered “how . . . it [could] happen that at a given period something could be said and something else has never been said.”4 I would address this programmatic question to public policies on adoption: how could it happen that at a given period something could be done and something else was never done? I have shown that the administration of parenthood is built on biologically based representations of the body (now used as a measurement of good parental practices), but that this trend is itself part of a broader phenomenon of the naturalization of the social body—namely, the production of a national collective imagination . This phenomenon generates its own natural and counternatural figures that inhabit kinship policies and render public decisions operative. Two main implications stem from this reflection: From the standpoint of the social sciences, how can we analyze the ghostly figures that haunt public policies? And from the standpoint of adoption, what epistemological upheaval is required to make still-virtual social configurations come real? In other words, how can we work toward transforming the pastoral regime in which we live? 132 Conclusion Foucault’s later work—especially his courses at the Collège de France, titled Le gouvernement de soi et des autres and Le courage de la vérité— reacted against the systematism of grand theories of power by proposing a critical analysis of the potential epistemological-historical conditions of true discourse. Applied to an analysis of public policies, this viewpoint leads to a view of such policies not “according to the logic of subjects, but as a function of their relations, that is to say according to the practices that produced and constantly transform them.”5 Discourses do not exist prior to public policy (in the form of framework, reference point, or path)6 any more than they are the outcome of it. They are the very locus of it. There is thus no causal explanation to be found beneath the discursive statement, because subjects and objects exist only in their enunciation .7 What needs to be understood is how one statement is linked to others in a given epistemological context—how chains of“true discourse” are assembled and undone. But Foucault goes further still, arguing that analysis of the potential epistemological-historical conditions of true discourse is not content to understand “through what types of discourse have we tried to tell the truth about the . . . subject” but seeks the form taken by “the discourse of truth which the subject is likely and able to speak about himself.”8 In his study of the Greek philosophy of “concern for the care of self,”9 Foucault points to three crucial poles that are interlocked like Borromean rings: governmentality (politieia, or discourse on the best possible government), morality (ethos, or discourse of individual prescriptive ethics), and truth-telling (aletheia, or discourse on ways of producing the truth).10 Parrhesia refers to a philosophical attitude that recognizes the interdependence of these three poles. But there where ancient philosophers, notably the cynics, viewed parrhesia as work on the self in front of others—horizontal, so to speak—Christianity in highly varied ways verticalized this practice, which became the manifestation of a mistrust of self. That mistrust was expressed through a quest for salvation either through mysticism (confidence in God) or asceticism (fear of God’s judgment). This shift was the pivot around which pastoral institutions were articulated.11 Yet whereas the Greeks made governmentality, morality, and truth-telling resonate in the process of subjectivization, the Christian era made this subjectivization dependent upon a collective truth that, having become secularized over the centuries, has become the justification for public policies...