Foucault's Criticism Research Articles

Do “sonho literário” ao “sonho político” da peste: Foucault, leitor (crítico) de Camus

A partir da oposição entre “sonho literário” e “sonho político”, pretendemos analisar a crítica que Foucault faz à “literatura da peste”, na qual se inclui o conhecido livro de Albert Camus. Ao final, procuramos sinalizar para o fato de que, tomando o caso do Brasil, é pertinente dizer, com Foucault, que as relações entre medicina e política constituem o pano de fundo das formas de normalização instituídas durante a pandemia do covid 19, mas que também, apesar das críticas de Foucault ao sonho literário, não podemos deixar de ver que as transgressões do necessário isolamento social, tem um ar de festa e de êxtase, num jogo permanente com a própria morte.

Entre a repressão policial e o saber médico: o controle social da loucura no Espírito Santo entre o fim do século XIX e os anos 1950

O presente artigo visa oferecer um panorama histórico do que foi o trato com o problema social da loucura entre o final do século XIX e os anos cinquenta do século XX no estado do Espírito Santo. Pautando-nos em uma análise do desenvolvimento de instituições e de saberes médicos em âmbito local, buscaremos compreender as principais características assumidas pela preocupação com o lugar do louco na sociedade capixaba ao longo do período em questão. Baseando-nos na crítica foucaultiana dos jogos de exclusão operados pelo saber científico na modernidade, sustentaremos a hipótese de que a institucionalização do trato com a loucura no Espírito Santo representou muito mais a ressignificação de antigas práticas repressivas e policialescas de exclusão do louco do corpo social local do que propriamente a sua superação. A fim de comprovar a hipótese em questão, analisaremos livros de entrada, prontuários e algumas entrevistas de funcionários daquela que seria a principal instituição responsável por modernizar e por superar o atraso em relação ao tratamento dos loucos nos anos 1950 em nosso estado: o Hospital Adauto Botelho.

A castração e seus efeitos estilísticos: da parresia foucaultiana a uma postura psicanalítica

Este artigo situa a castração como ponto fundamental de divergência entre Foucault e a psicanálise. Em primeiro lugar, trata-se de abordar a crítica de Foucault à psicanálise para apreender a especificidade desta última. Em seguida, busca-se demonstrar como a castração conduz a psicanálise e Foucault para duas posturas fundamentalmente diferentes do verdadeiro-dizer. A parresia permite indicar para o psicanalista, pelo seu avesso, as coordenadas de uma possível postura para sustentar a causa analítica. A estilística da existência esclarece, pelo seu avesso, o estilo analítico.

Normality in analytical psychology.

Although C.G. Jung’s interest in normality wavered throughout his career, it was one of the areas he identified in later life as worthy of further research. He began his career using a definition of normality which would have been the target of Foucault’s criticism, had Foucault chosen to review Jung’s work. However, Jung then evolved his thinking to a standpoint that was more aligned to Foucault’s own. Thereafter, the post Jungian concept of normality has remained relatively undeveloped by comparison with psychoanalysis and mainstream psychology. Jung’s disjecta membra on the subject suggest that, in contemporary analytical psychology, too much focus is placed on the process of individuation to the neglect of applications that consider collective processes. Also, there is potential for useful research and development into the nature of conflict between individuals and societies, and how normal people typically develop in relation to the spectrum between individuation and collectivity.

Foucault, Philosophy, and Literature

This article focuses on Foucault's “archeological” books: Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, and The Order of Things. It addresses two issues in particular: first, Foucault's criticism of modern philosophical and scientific knowledge about man, showing how this knowledge is based on Nietzsche's criticism of humanism in modernity; second, Foucault's thoughts about modern literary language, contending that it is an affirmative counterpoint to the historic-philosophical analyses of knowledge about man he carried out during this archeological phase. In addition, the objective is to situate Foucault's views on literature during this period of genealogies of power and subjectivity.

Security, Social Control, Democracy and Migration within the 'Constitution' of the EU

Moving from Michel Foucault's criticism, in the mid‐1970s, of a ‘theory of the State’, this paper addresses the relevance—for the current process of making the ‘Constitution’ of the European Union—of the obsolescence of the state concept and the emergence instead, in the course of the twentieth‐century, of an idea of ‘social control’ as a way to represent conditions for social order within the new mass democratic society. Such conditions, and the theory thereof, first developed in North America, and then increasingly in Europe after World War II and especially since the 1970s. From such a comparative‐historical perspective, the paper then tries to shed light on the debate that was ignited by Dieter Grimm on the very possibility of a ‘democratic constitutionalisation’ of Europe. The connections between language, social control, and a (democratic) European constitution are then discussed, and specific attention is given to the nexus that has been constructed in today's Europe between migration, criminalisation and security, as a sort of test bench of those connections.

Foucault and ethical universality

Foucault's resistance to a universalist ethics, especially in his later writings, is well-known. Foucault thinks that ethical universalism presupposes a shared human essence, and that this presupposition makes it a straitjacket, an attempt to force people to conform to an externally imposed 'pattern'. Foucault's hostility may be warranted for one - perhaps the usual - conception of ethical universality. But there are other conceptions of ethical universality that are not vulnerable to Foucault's criticism, and that are ethically and culturally important. I set out one such conception, and show why it matters. Paul Patton has argued that Foucault is best read as grounding his analyses of power in a 'conception of human being' traceable to Nietzsche. I explain why this does not amount to the ethical universalism that I sketch below.

"Sensitive Killers, Cruel Aesthetes, and Pitiless Poets": Foucault, Rorty, and the Ethics of Self-Fashioning

Michel Foucault's endorsement of an "aesthetics of existence" as an ethical response to the putative retreat of universal moral codes has been criticized as a dangerous formula for an ethics of self-fashioning which philosophically underwrites narcissism and aestheticist cruelty. A Foucauldian care of the self, so the argument goes, leads to a deficit of care for others. This essay advances a number of arguments in defense of Foucault's work. While certain models of self-fashioning harbor disturbing implications in terms of ethical responsiveness and care for others, Foucault's critics fail to acknowledge that not all forms of the aestheticization of ethics and the self result in anti-social or violent behavior. This is demonstrated by comparing Foucault's aestheticist care of the self and another model of self-fashioning-strong poetry-expounded recently by Richard Rorty. The former entails practices which encourage awareness of the contingency and fragility of the self as the product of a web of relations and events. Strong poetry, on the other hand, stems from the desire to fashion, glorify, and transcendentalize an idealized self. By examining a concrete case of aestheticist cruelty, the paper shows that the cold, imperious, and potentially violent aestheticism about which Foucault's critics rightly worry has much more in common with strong poetry. As a result, the concerns of his critics are misplaced. Secondly, it is argued that Foucault's aesthetics of existence is not only not an endorsement of narcissistic and aestheticist indifference to others but that, through a certain reflexive care of the contingent self, it has the capacity to cultivate feelings of curiosity and care in relation to others.

Foucault, politics and the autonomy of the aesthetic1

Abstract How should we read Foucault's claims, in his late work, for the relevance of ‘aesthetic criteria’ to politics? What is Foucault's implicit understanding of the nature of aesthetics and the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere? Would an ethics which gave a place to the aesthetic legitimize a politics of manipulation, brutality and aggression ‐ in short, a ‘fascist’ politics ‐ as some of Foucault's critics argue? In this paper, I examine key accounts of the fascist ‘aestheticization of politics’ ‐ from Walter Benjamin's classic essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), to Philippe Lacoue‐Labarthe's work on the relation between Heidegger's philosophy and the fascist theme of politics as the plastic art of the state. Through a discussion of Foucault's late work, the paper demonstrates the connection between Foucault's turn to ancient Greek ethical practices and his call for a contemporary renewal of the idea of ethics as an art of living. The aim of the paper is to show in what ways the ethico‐political position which is presented in Foucault's late work, far from contributing to a fascist politics, in fact provides ways of thinking about the relationship between the aesthetic and the political which avoid both mindless radicalism and totalitarian narcissism. In doing so, the key question is, ‘What's aesthetic about Foucault's “aesthetics of existence"?’

Power and Freedom: Opposition and the Humanities

With the publication of Discipline and Punish and the first volume of History of Sexuality, Foucault's critics begin to assert that his thinking about power, discipline, and the panopticon leaves no room for freedom or resistance to power. This line of criticism derives from the earlier charge that his archaeological method could not account for change. In Criticism Between System and Culture, for example, Edward Said argues that Foucault's work has been haunted by an asymmetry in his work between the blindly anonymous and the intentional. Foucault has been concerned . . . the subjugation of individuals in society to some suprapersonal disciplines or authority. In effect, Said insists that what Foucault has done to provide prodigiously detailed set of possible descriptions whose main aim . . . to overwhelm the individual subject or will and replace it instead with minutely responsive rules of discursive formation, rules that no one individual can either alter or circumvent.1 Of course, a number of key Foucauldian texts ground just such an interpretation. In a lecture of January 14, 1976, for example, Foucault speaks of the disciplines as displacing the order of sovereignty and producing a new code, a new norm: The code they come to define, Foucault writes, is not that of law but of normalisation. Foucault's lecture describes the relative displacement of juridical and sovereign organizations of power and right by a newer, modern