Critique and power: Michel Foucault at the crossroads of Enlightenment

Author(s)

Anderson Aparecido Lima da Silva

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2019-02-28

Examining board members

Franklin Leopoldo e Silva; Márcio Alves da Fonseca; Salma Tannus Muchail; Yolanda Gloria Gamboa Muñoz; Pedro Paulo Garrido Pimenta

• Advisor: Franklin Leopoldo e Silva

Abstract

\"What is Enlightenment?\" Michel Foucault revisited more than once to the prominent question raised in the eighteenth century in order to challenge the imbrication between forms of rationality and effects of power in modernity. At the core of this connection, he emphasizes the role of resistances that follow, enmesh and transform this field of multiple interactions, highlighting what he called, in the late 1970s, a \"critical attitude\" towards the present. This thesis confronts interpretations - like Axel Honneth\'s one - that consider Foucault as a \"theorist of power\" and assign to his work an idea of rationality as a process of the expansion of individual and collective domination that would cause the impossibility of any critique and also of the emancipation of subjects. The main purpose of this thesis is to emphasize that Foucault does not use in his analyses any conception of rationality as an universal invariable - a meta-anthropological and meta-historical one -, instead his analyses aim at highlighting the history and geography of rationalities, encouraging a \"rational critique of reason\" that includes the critique of the actual effects of power. This is because Foucault does not conceive the power on strict repressive terms, such as deprivation or restriction of liberty or a pure phenomenon of domination, but as strategic games of power relations and resistances within the complex of configurations and transformations of the forms of social and subjective organization. The critical attitude - as a way of thinking, a political and ethical attitude, an understanding and a critique of the present - is one of the driving forces of this possible change. Following the underground thread that connect it to Kant, Foucault emphasizes that the critical attitude may assume different forms according to the different philosophical traditions and historical contexts. In addition to the dialogue with Max Weber, this thesis analyses the interlocution of the French philosopher with some authors and issues of the Critical Theory, especially those raised by Adorno and Horkheimer, in order to explore their affinities, tensions and particularities. I argue that it is in this dialogue that the foucauldian attitude manifests and affirms its singularity to reinstall the question of Enlightenment as a current, open and urgent question. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 13/21308-3 - Michel Foucault: the philosophy, the history
• Grantee: Anderson Aparecido Lima da Silva
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate