PANEL 11 / THE QUESTION FOR DESIRE AND CONTEMPORARY SUBJECTIVITIES FROM MICHEL FOUCAULT'S PERSPECTIVE
CONVENORS: SENDA SFERCO, ROBERTO MERRILL and ANTÓNIO BAIÃO
All inquiries about the panel should be sent to [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected].
Michel Foucault's philosophical perspective constructs its critical apparatus based on a historicization of the field of power relations that give rise to and sustain the link between knowledge, power and truth. Throughout his extensive work, but especially in the studies of the 1980s, his interest focuses on an analysis of the relations of subordination in which we, as subjects, elaborate our subjectivity. Desire emerges as one of the privileged notions when it comes to “giving veridiction” to the interiority of the subject. In his 1980-1981 course at the Collège de France, Subjectivité et Vérité, Foucault identifies desire as a kind of transhistorical category, a kind of entelechy that no one questions, and yet which is decisive for the modes of relation through which we interrogate our relation to truth. In the lesson of 7 January 1981, he states: ‘what experience can we have of ourselves, what kind of subjectivity is linked to the fact that we are always faced with the possibility and the right to say: “Yes, it is true, I desire”?’ (2014, p. 26). Foucault undertakes a genealogy of the subject that has the history of Western morality and its juridical form as its counterpart. The importance of Christianity in the omnes et singulatim mode of conducts of the subject's behaviors provides the groundwork for a relation of subjection that has desire as a key malleable piece in shaping our subjectivity. We are ‘beasts of confession’, he will say in 1976: we are obliged to give an account of our interiority, to externalize and discursively objectify our ‘identity’ in terms of desire. As ‘subjects of desire’, we
have become the herd of a market where desire provides the field of needs for a ‘second nature’, which asks us to obey a logic of reproduction and market-technical consumption that is increasingly poor in terms of experience.
Foucault's historical analysis, in a relatively solitary way in his time, seeks to critique the naturalization of the desiring relationship between subjectivity and truth in our present in order to open up the question of a different ethical and political elaboration in the present, one that enables other fields of experience for life with others. From the recovery of this historical-critical gesture as a key to the reading of our present,
communications capable of problematizing will be welcome:
All inquiries about the panel should be sent to [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected].
Michel Foucault's philosophical perspective constructs its critical apparatus based on a historicization of the field of power relations that give rise to and sustain the link between knowledge, power and truth. Throughout his extensive work, but especially in the studies of the 1980s, his interest focuses on an analysis of the relations of subordination in which we, as subjects, elaborate our subjectivity. Desire emerges as one of the privileged notions when it comes to “giving veridiction” to the interiority of the subject. In his 1980-1981 course at the Collège de France, Subjectivité et Vérité, Foucault identifies desire as a kind of transhistorical category, a kind of entelechy that no one questions, and yet which is decisive for the modes of relation through which we interrogate our relation to truth. In the lesson of 7 January 1981, he states: ‘what experience can we have of ourselves, what kind of subjectivity is linked to the fact that we are always faced with the possibility and the right to say: “Yes, it is true, I desire”?’ (2014, p. 26). Foucault undertakes a genealogy of the subject that has the history of Western morality and its juridical form as its counterpart. The importance of Christianity in the omnes et singulatim mode of conducts of the subject's behaviors provides the groundwork for a relation of subjection that has desire as a key malleable piece in shaping our subjectivity. We are ‘beasts of confession’, he will say in 1976: we are obliged to give an account of our interiority, to externalize and discursively objectify our ‘identity’ in terms of desire. As ‘subjects of desire’, we
have become the herd of a market where desire provides the field of needs for a ‘second nature’, which asks us to obey a logic of reproduction and market-technical consumption that is increasingly poor in terms of experience.
Foucault's historical analysis, in a relatively solitary way in his time, seeks to critique the naturalization of the desiring relationship between subjectivity and truth in our present in order to open up the question of a different ethical and political elaboration in the present, one that enables other fields of experience for life with others. From the recovery of this historical-critical gesture as a key to the reading of our present,
communications capable of problematizing will be welcome:
- The validity of the Foucauldian genealogical approach to the western subject of desire: the relationship between beast of confession and ideological animal, the role of Christianity, the critique of psi discourses, the confrontation with Freudo-Marxisms, the dialogue on Oedipus with Deleuze.
- The discussion between desire, truth and subjectivity in the face of the identity claim of contemporary subjectivities.
- The problematization of desire in relation to neoliberal capitalism: a modeler of subjective needs and a normalizing agent of the subject.
- The formation and management of times, spaces and desiring subjectivities in today's market: data, networks, platforms. The anthropological ‘relay’ (or return?) of artificial intelligence in the future.
- The intersection between the history of veridictions and the history of juridical discourse.
- The triangle of power: games of veridiction, procedures of governmentality and techniques of the self.
