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6 NoFo 1 (2009)

handle is hein.journals/nfdnsaisy6 and id is 1 raw text is: Editorial Having completed just over half of his College de France lectures from the 1973-1974 semester, Michel Foucault decided to 'open a parenthesis' at that point and to 'insert a little history of truth in general'.1 Without intending to do so, this digression explained the nature of the work of those venerable people who prepare and decide the hardest legal cases. That nature is alchemy, the art of transformation.2 I also realised that the researcher is a kind of alchemist as well, although pale and bookish in comparison to the idols she/he worships. Yet we are pow- erless to break the spell of our enthusiasm (it creeps into our dreams while we sleep) about those magical books, the legal dossiers which report the proceed- ings of our Master Wizards in gnomic cipher. We crave finding out how they spun lead into gold. Let me explain what Foucault said. Think of clouds. Everywhere behind the clouds is the sky, the vault of heav- en, the firmament. This is the tranquillity of the astronomic universe, the sphere next to God. On its stage pass the joyful but harmoniously recurring constel- lations of the heavenly bodies - that is, a display of never-changing knowledge, the amazing, wonderful, eternal and universal truth. This is the truth-sky, which Foucault holds as the dominating form, model and type of truth today. Now, compare the sky behind the clouds to a thunderbolt: a thunderbolt that plunges from a cloud, the spear of Zeus that angrily splits the sky asunder, divides it for a moment with an incomprehensible load of energy, then conjoins a deafening sound of crack, and a boom that rumbles the earth and everything on it. All is over within an eye-blink. This image, also, describes a form (model, type) of truth for Foucault: the truth-thunderbolt. 1 His lecture of 23 January in Psychiatric Power, 235-247, 235. 2A1-kimia (Arabic), 'the art of transformation'.

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