How not to be governed? On the topic of aesthetics of existence in the philosophical project of Michel Foucault: an aesthetical-political ethics

• Grant number: 14/06031-8
• Support type: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Effective date (Start): August 01, 2014
• Effective date (End): March 31, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - Ethics
• Principal researcher: Salma Tannus Muchail
• Grantee: Fernanda Gomes da Silva
• Home Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Comunicação, Letras e Artes. Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 15/20331-7 - About Foucault's ontology of the present: an elaboration between Kant and Nietzsche, BE.EP.DR

Abstract

This project aims to follow the route of Michel Foucault's elaboration of the theme of the aesthetics of existence as a key element in the definition of his philosophical project. This theme, which appears forcefully in the last two volumes of the History of Sexuality, also has centrality on Foucault's reading of Kant's text on Enlightenment. Through the investigation of the place that this theme occupies in his writings, this work seeks to understand the passage from the analysis of the government of the bodies to the questioning of the government of self and how this movement is connected to the problem of "resistance." Refuting the readings that assert that on returning to the aesthetics of existence Foucault has abandoned the political field and returned to the universal subject, the project seeks to monitor the reflections that Foucault develops in retrospect about his own work. Following the steps of those past efforts of his production will allow us more than a hermeneutic approach of his work, but an extension of the question about how to think differently than one thinks, or even about the possibility of doing philosophy today; an effort, thereby, connected to a philosophical practice that seeks to establish an Ontology of the Present. (AU)