Justice After Metaphor: The Dispute Beneath the Dispute in the Chomsky–Foucault Debate

Neo-Caravaggist Version of The Debate. AI Image

Introduction — Before Political Disagreement

The 1971 exchange between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault is commonly framed as a confrontation over power, authority, or human nature. Yet beneath these visible disagreements lies a more prior tension, one unfolding at the level of language itself. Before they disagree about politics, they diverge over whether the terms that make political judgment possible possess any stable authority.

Throughout the conversation, certain words recur with quiet insistence: creativity, justice, legal, illegitimate, correct. Their repetition is not incidental. Each thinker is attempting, in real time, to determine who, if anyone, has the authority to stabilize their meaning.

This instability does not interrupt the debate; it gives it urgency. The exchange reveals a philosophical difficulty that precedes ideological division: are political concepts entities awaiting clarification, or historical formations whose authority depends on forgotten metaphorical acts? Political disagreement, the dialogue suggests, begins only after the status of its language has already been tacitly decided.

Chomsky and the Need for Orientation

Chomsky repeatedly returns to the necessity of orientation. Social transformation cannot proceed through critique alone; it requires some sense, however provisional, of what counts as better.

“There is some sort of an absolute basis… ultimately residing in fundamental human qualities, in terms of which a ‘real’ notion of justice is grounded.”

The hesitation contained in “some sort” signals philosophical caution rather than metaphysical certainty. Chomsky does not claim privileged access to justice; he argues instead that political action becomes unintelligible without at least the working assumption that something like it exists.

A subtle but decisive distinction follows. Semantic indeterminacy does not suspend practical necessity. Words may resist final definition, yet action cannot wait for conceptual closure. Even disobedience presupposes evaluation, one resists because something better is imaginable.

Chomsky further insists that the state may declare an action illegal and still be mistaken. The power to impose a signification is not identical with the legitimacy of that signification. In this respect, somewhat unexpectedly, he approaches a Foucauldian sensitivity to the relation between discourse and power. Yet he moves beyond it just as quickly: some actions, he maintains, are genuinely unjust.

What emerges is a form of pragmatic realism. Concepts may be imperfect, but they are not empty. Justice functions less as a possession than as a semantic attractor, a meaning toward which political judgment continually reaches, even without the guarantee of full comprehension.

Foucault’s Genealogical Intervention

Foucault shifts the terrain with a question whose simplicity conceals its force: do you justify illegal acts in the name of justice, or in the name of struggle?

The question exposes what might otherwise remain unexamined. Is justice foundational, or retrospective? Universal, or tactical?

When Foucault remarks that “the idea of justice… has been invented and put to work… as an instrument of power,” he is not dismissing justice as false. He is redescribing it functionally. Justice is not discovered so much as produced, less an essence than a strategy emerging within relations of force. The direction of explanation reverses. Rather than justice grounding political action, struggles generate the discourses through which actions become justified.

The gesture is unmistakably Nietzschean. What comes into view is the lingering metaphysical hope that justice stands outside history, untouched by the conflicts that shaped it. Once that hope is suspended, a disquieting possibility appears: every appeal to justice may carry within it the sediment of earlier formations.

Nietzsche and the Persistence of Metaphor

The suspicion has a clear precursor in Nietzsche: “What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms.”

Concepts, on this account, are hardened metaphors, inventions that have outlived the memory of their invention. Through repetition they acquire the texture of necessity; authority begins precisely where history disappears. Genealogy becomes, in this sense, a disciplined remembrance of conceptual forgetting.

Foucault does not merely echo Nietzsche; he operationalizes the insight. Where Nietzsche traced the emergence of values from struggles among forces, Foucault examines how concepts continue to function inside networks of power long after their contingent origins have faded from view. Justice is neither illusion nor eternal form. It is a civilizational artifact whose effectiveness depends partly on our tendency to forget that it was made.

Two Ontologies of Meaning

Beneath its political vocabulary, the debate reveals a deeper philosophical divergence, nothing less than two competing ontologies of meaning. For Chomsky, concepts are imperfect yet referential; they aim at something real, even if that reality is only partially grasped. For Foucault, concepts are historical formations expressing particular regimes of power.

The irony is difficult to overlook. Chomsky, the theorist of innate linguistic structure, ends up defending semantic grounding, while Foucault, the historian, exposes semantic contingency. One trusts language enough to orient politics; the other distrusts it enough to interrogate its conditions.

Comparatives such as “better justice” intensify the tension: better according to what measure, and who establishes the scale? Neither thinker entirely escapes the predicament. Chomsky cannot avoid grounding; Foucault cannot step outside the language he destabilizes.

Conclusion — What Remains of Justice?

Late in the debate, Chomsky remarks that if a revolutionary regime were to destroy human freedom, he would oppose it. The statement reveals a non-negotiable commitment: some human values must be real enough to guide refusal.

From a Nietzschean perspective, however, the insistence on the word real may signal a lingering metaphysical nostalgia, the hope that beneath historical distortion there remain true human needs, true dignity, true justice.

The exchange leaves us with a question that echoes Nietzsche himself: what becomes of justice once we remember that it may be a forgotten metaphor? Chomsky reminds us that action without orientation is blind. Foucault warns that orientation derived from unexamined concepts may quietly return us to familiar structures of power.

Politics thus appears suspended between two risks: grounding ourselves in fabrications mistaken for universals, or dissolving the very vocabulary that makes critique possible. The debate endures because neither danger can be eliminated. We act with concepts whose authority we cannot fully secure, yet cannot abandon. Before politics begins, that deeper dispute is already deciding how, and whether, justice can speak.

References

Chomsky, N., & Foucault, M. (2006). The Chomsky–Foucault Debate: On Human Nature (J. Elders, Ed.). New Press. (Original debate held in 1971).

Derrida, J. (1982). White mythology: Metaphor in the text of philosophy. In Margins of Philosophy (A. Bass, Trans.). University of Chicago Press.

Nietzsche, F. (1979). On truth and lies in a nonmoral sense. In Philosophy and Truth (D. Breazeale, Trans.). Humanities Press. (Original work written 1873).