Discourse, matter and power: dialogues between Michel Foucault and Judith Butler

• Grant number: 25/10146-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: November 01, 2025
• End date: May 31, 2029
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - Ethics
• Principal Investigator: Silvana de Souza Ramos
• Grantee: Cezar Maxwel do Prado
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project aims to investigate, in the works of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, the status of discourse and the ways in which it materially produces bodies, delimiting their contours of intelligibility based on different power matrices. Initially, we aim to study how Foucault works with the notion of discourse in the different moments of his theoretical trajectory, highlighting in each of them the epistemic, political, and ethical function of discourse, that is, the conditions of possibility for its emergence as knowledge, the political forms linked to these conditions, and the modes of subjectivation fostered by different discursive practices. In a second moment, we intend to delve into Butler's works to observe the applications of the archaeological and genealogical methods, elaborated by Foucault, on certain objects of study understood as products of discursivity, such as gender and other social markers. In this sense, we will defend the hypothesis that Foucault's elaborations on discourse will be fundamental for understanding what Butler will call "abjection," as that which escapes the culturally defined and materially established norms of intelligibility, also being that which fosters transformations in the social body itself.