Michel Foucault

Hoje eu gostaria de começar analisando as primeiras ocorrências da palavra parrhesia na literatura grega, como a palavra aparece nas seguintes seis tragédias de Eurípides: Fenícias; Hipólito; As Bacantes; Electra; Íon; Orestes. Nas primeiras quatro peças, a parrhesia não constitui um tópico importante ou tema; mas a própria palavra geralmente ocorre num contexto preciso que nos ajuda no entendimento de seu significado. Nas últimas duas peças – Íon e Orestes – a parrhesia assume um papel muito importante. De fato, eu penso que Íon é inteiramente consagrado ao problema da parrhesia, uma vez que investiga a questão: Quem tem o direito, o dever e a coragem de falar a verdade? Esse problema parrhesiástico em Íon é levantado na estrutura das relações entre os deuses e os seres humanos. Em Orestes – que foi escrito dez anos mais tarde e, por essa razão, é uma das últimas peças de Eurípides – o papel da parrhesia não é nem de longe tão significativo. E ainda assim a peça contém uma cena parrhesiástica que garante a atenção na medida em que é diretamente relacionada a questões políticas que os atenienses estavam então levantando. Aqui, nessa cena parrhesiástica, há uma transição concernente à questão da parrhesia tal como ela ocorre no contexto das instituições humanas. Especificamente, a parrhesia é vista como uma questão tanto política quanto filosófica.

E agora algumas palavras sobre esse seminário. O ponto de partida. Minha intenção não era lidar com o problema da verdade, mas com o problema de dizer a verdade ou do que diz a verdade como uma atividade. Com isso quero dizer que, para mim, não era uma questão de analisar os critérios internos ou externos que possam permitir a gregos e romanos, ou a qualquer outro povo, reconhecer se uma declaração ou proposição é verdadeira ou não. A questão para mim foi, outrossim, a tentativa de considerar dizer a verdade como uma atividade específica ou como um papel. Mas, mesmo no âmbito dessa questão geral do papel do narrador da verdade.

Les rapports de la pensee critique et de la reflexion anthropologique seront etudies dans un ouvrage ulterieur. C'est sur cette note que s'achevait la breve Notice historique que Michel Foucault avait place en tete de l'edition de sa traduction de l'Anthropologie de Kant (Vrin 1964). La note annoncait sans aucun doute l'ouvrage a venir, d'abord caracterise, des 1963, comme le livre sur les signes, et qui paraitra en avril 1966: Les mots et les choses, une archeologie des sciences humaines. En realite, la courte notice historique, de trois pages, en ouverture de la traduction du texte de Kant ne proposait qu'un extrait fort reduit de ce qui avait constitue l'element principal de la These complementaire soutenue en Sorbonne le 20 mai 1961: Introduction a l'anthropologie de Kant, et dont Jean Hyppolite etait le rapporteur. Si la these complementaire, intitulee Genese et structure de l'anthropologie de Kant, etait restee inedite (a l'exception de la traduction de Kant), ce n'est pas que Foucault en eut ete insatisfait: suivant les conseils des membres du jury, il allait bientot, des l'automne 1963, en faire le materiau central de son grand livre a venir. D'ou l'interet considerable de la presente edition qui donne pour la premiere fois l'Introduction complete, Genese et structure de l'anthropologie de Kant, et qui permet ainsi au lecteur d'entrer dans l'atelier d'un penseur dont l'oeuvre entier aura ete nourri par un debat critique avec Kant: qu'est-ce que l'homme? Qui sommes-nous? Comment se constituent le sujet epistemique et le sujet ethique?

Three years before his death, Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain that until recently remained almost unknown. These lectures—which focus on the role of avowal, or confession, in the determination of truth and justice—provide the missing link between Foucault’s early work on madness, delinquency, and sexuality and his later explorations of subjectivity in Greek and Roman antiquity. Ranging broadly from Homer to the twentieth century, Foucault traces the early use of truth-telling in ancient Greece and follows it through to practices of self-examination in monastic times. By the nineteenth century, the avowal of wrongdoing was no longer sufficient to satisfy the call for justice; there remained the question of who the \u201ccriminal\u201d was and what formative factors contributed to his wrong-doing. The call for psychiatric expertise marked the birth of the discipline of psychiatry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as its widespread recognition as the foundation of criminology and modern criminal justice.   Published here for the first time, the 1981 lectures have been superbly translated by Stephen W. Sawyer and expertly edited and extensively annotated by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. They are accompanied by two contemporaneous interviews with Foucault in which he elaborates on a number of the key themes. An essential companion to Discipline and Punish, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling will take its place as one of the most significant works of Foucault to appear in decades, and will be necessary reading for all those interested in his thought. &nbsp

I would like to suggest another way to go further toward a new economy of power relations, a way which is more empirical, more directly related to our present situation, and which implies more relations between theory and practice. It consists of taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point. To use another metaphor, t consists of using this resistance as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, and find out their point of application and the methods used. Rather than analyzing power from the point of view of its internal rationality, it consists of analyzing power relations through the antagonism of strategies.[…]Let us come back to the definition of the exercise of power as a way in which certain actions may structure the field of other possible actions. What, therefore, would be proper to a relationship of power is that it be a mode of action upon actions. That is to say, power relations are rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconstituted "above" society as a supplementary structure whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of. In any case, to live in a society is to live in such a way that action upon other actions is possible-- and in fact ongoing. A society without power relations can only be an abstraction. Which, be it said in passing, makes all the more politically necessary the analysis of power relations in a given society, their historical formation, the source of their strength or fragility, the conditions which are necessary to transform some or to abolish others. For to say that there cannot be a society without power relations is not to say either that those which are established are necessary or, in any case, that power constitutes a fatality at the heart of societies, such that it cannot be undermined. Instead, I would say that the analysis, elaboration, and bringing into question of power relations and the "agonism" between power relations and the instransitivity of freedom is a permanent political task inherent in all social existence.[…]In effect, between a relationship of power and a strategy of struggle there is a reciprocal appeal, a perpetual linking and a perpetual reversal. At every moment the relationship of power may become a confrontation between two adversaries. Equally, the relationship between adversaries in society may, at every moment, give place to the putting into operation of mechanisms of power. The consequence of this instability is the ability to decipher the same events and the same transformations either from inside the history of struggle or from the standpoint of the power relationships. The interpretations which result will not consist of the same elements of meaning or the same links or the same types of intelligibility, although they refer to the same historical fabric, and each of the two analyses must have reference to the other. In fact, it is precisely the disparities between the two readings which make visible those fundamental phenomena of "domination" which are present in a large number of human societies.Michel Foucault has been teaching at the Collège de France since 1970. His works include Madness and Civilization , The Birth of the Clinic , Discipline and Punish , and History of Sexuality , the first volume of a projected five-volume study