Lope de Vega – Fuenteovejuna

• Theme: Collective justice, resistance to tyranny, popular sovereignty.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna dramatizes an act of radical resistance: the townspeople of Fuenteovejuna, oppressed and abused by a corrupt feudal commander, rise up and kill their tyrant. When the king’s inquisitors demand to know who committed the act, all answer: “Fuenteovejuna did it.”

This is not merely a tale of collective defiance—it is, through Foucault’s lens, a luminous event of ethical subjectivation, in which a community inscribes its own moral law onto the flesh of sovereign power. It dramatizes the way truth, power, and the self are intimately co-produced—not in elite academies or royal courts, but in the grain of peasant speech, gesture, and silence.

Foucault often described the historical emergence of what he called bio-power: the modern state's expansion into the management of populations, bodies, and behaviors. But Fuenteovejuna, centuries earlier, already suggests the outlines of this surveillance structure. The Commander governs not by brute violence alone, but by discipline, humiliation, and sexual control—especially of women. His governance is an early exercise in pastoral power, a regime where power is individualized, invasive, and framed as care or authority.

However, the town’s rebellion is not the substitution of one power for another. It is a rupture—a counter-conduct. As Foucault explored in The Care of the Self, there exists the possibility of constructing an ethos, a way of life not predicated on submission, but on the aesthetics of self-conduct. Here, the people of Fuenteovejuna invent a communal form of ethics rooted not in law, but in solidarity, refusal, and memory.

Their repeated invocation—“Fuenteovejuna did it”—becomes a speech act of resistance, an early form of what Foucault calls truth-telling (parrhesia). In this parrhesiastic moment, truth is not dictated from above but arises from shared risk. No individual confesses; all voices become one. The truth becomes collective, anonymous, and unpunishable—precisely because it dismantles the individualizing logics of judicial power.

The play also stages Foucault’s concept of subjugated knowledges—knowledges repressed by dominant discourses. The peasants’ understanding of justice, womanhood, loyalty, and memory are dismissed by elite structures, yet it is precisely these submerged epistemologies that erupt, giving birth to action. Laurencia’s speech, when she chastises the men for their cowardice, is a moment of parrhesiastic explosion: a woman demands political agency and gendered dignity.

Ultimately, Fuenteovejuna is an ethical mirror that reverses the vertical axis of sovereignty. Power is not possessed—it circulates. And when a people remember their own capacity to conduct themselves according to a shared code of dignity, history shifts.