Vida e Pensamento como Obra de Arte

Abstract

This paper seeks a close relationship between the ethical and aesthetical dimensions of thought in philosophy and art. Working mainly with the work of the philosopher Michel Foucault, we seek to demonstrate a fundamental relationship between creations in the field of thought (in art and philosophy, fundamentally) and the creation of ways of life and existence. We seek to understand creation as a single process or movement, which engenders "works" and "bodies" creates worlds and new ways of living that will occupy these new worlds. To this end, we privilege in Foucault' s work two moments apparently distinct and separated in time: his texts about art (especially literature) and language in the 60s (until the beginning of the 70s) and his texts about the ethical dimension of philosophical thought, mainly, but also in art, that he will develop in the 80s. To achieve our goal, however, we do not use only Foucault' s work, since it is not our objective here to simply define what this relationship between life and thought would be for the philosopher, but to propose a conceptualization that goes beyond his work and seek a path for this kind of study: one that takes the lives of certain thinkers and their work as the same object of study. In this sense, the work of Gilles Deleuze, and his writing partner Felix Guattari, constitutes part of the central foundation of this text and gives substance to the concepts and the themes developed here. The way we understand concepts such as thought, life, body, creation, and many others, owes much to their work. In this dialogue between the three thinkers, and with the influence from literature, we seek to develop a thesis that makes possible a form of philosophical analysis that deals with lives, but distancing itself from biography, and deals with thought as free from the subject of knowledge and from notions such as authorship.