The fabrication of a history of truth in Michel Foucault

• Grant number: 22/02134-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Master's degree
• Start date: December 01, 2022
• End date: May 31, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - History of Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Pedro Paulo Garrido Pimenta
• Grantee: Rodrigo de Oliveira Figueiredo
• Supervisor: Orazio Irrera
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Université Vincennes Saint-Denis (Paris 8), France
• Associated to the scholarship: 20/08046-3 - The fabrication of a history of truth on Michel Foucault, BP.MS

Abstract

In the first conference of The Truth and Juridical Forms, Michel Foucault claims to have as one of his goals to show that political and economic conditions are not an obstacle to the subject of knowledge, but that through which it is formed, and therefore the condition for the production of truth. For Foucault, all knowledge is produced from political conditions - from power relations - and not despite them. In this same conference, he also states that it was Nietzsche's conception of knowledge as an invention that allowed him, from then on, to formulate the idea that truth has a history - the history of the formation of domains of knowledge from practices. Armed with this idea, Foucault brought into prominence, in some of his works and courses of the 1970s, the mutual implication between power and knowledge as an element of explanation for the production of subjects and objects. One of the central points of my master's research is to show how Foucault managed to distance himself from a kind of thinking that he calls, also in this first lecture of The Truth and Legal Forms, "academic Marxism". For him, this was a tendency that, from the model of the analysis of ideology, conceived power as a factor that obscures the subject's relations with truth. Given the importance that the critique of the notion of ideology assumes in the formulation of Foucault's "politics of truth" - an importance that he reiterated in several works and interviews -, I intend, at this stage of research, to investigate how he understood and moved away, at the time he undertook his own genealogical investigations, from forms of analysis that made use of this notion, and how this departure can be understood in a more general framework of Foucault's differences with Marxism. In order to carry out this purpose, it will be of fundamental help to have the academic supervision of Prof. Orazio Irrera, from Université Paris 8, a professor who has been working on this topic. During a six-month internship I will be able to meet with his research group, other researchers in the area who live in France, and also to have access to Foucault's archives that are currently in the National Library of France (BnF). (AU)