Empirismo e ética em Michel Foucault: linguagem, discurso e subjetivação

Abstract

How can we understand the constitution of the subject in a work that so often changed its course, approached various fields of problematics, used so many distinct methodologies? Where lays the tipping point that creates the subject of all experience? Would it be in language, in knowledge and their discursive practices? Or would it be better to seek the subject in the power relations that constitute him? Is there space for freedom practices in an active exercise of subjectivation? Given these issues, we present the work of Foucault as a coherent body, despite its different modifications of trajectory. As we seek the subject in his philosophy, we find a philosophical project based on the notions of experience and practice, in which the world is thought of as production, and where any subject and object are only modulations: twin figures borne as ephemeral images in a kaleidoscope. Foucault's philosophy, therefore, is a notably empiricist philosophy that seeks the subject in a field of immanence, in a set of relationships that will constitute him as the subjective correlate of the experience. This empiricist search is what stands out in his work, whether in his analysis of the discourses and knowledges, of the artistic production in general and literature in particular, of the relations of power, or of the ethical dimension that stands exactly where the subject is convened, by the historical forms of morality, to take part in his own production of himself.