miércoles, 19 de noviembre de 2014

Michel Foucault: El sujeto y el poder.

 

  Michel Foucault

 Filósofo francés que intentó mostrar que las ideas básicas que la gente considera verdades permanentes sobre la naturaleza humana y la sociedad cambian a lo largo de la historia. 

Sus estudios pusieron en tela de juicio la influencia del filósofo político alemán Karl Marx y del psicoanalista austriaco Sigmund Freud. Foucault aportó nuevos conceptos que desafiaron las convicciones de la gente sobre la cárcel, la policía, la seguridad, el cuidado de los enfermos mentales, los derechos de los homosexuales y el bienestar. 

Nacido en Poitiers, Foucault estudió filosofía occidental y psicología en la École Normale Supérieure de París. Durante la década de 1960, encabezó los departamentos de filosofía de las Universidades de Clermont-Ferrand y Vincennes (conocida de forma oficial como Centro Universitario Experimental de Vincennes). 

En 1970 fue elegido para el puesto académico más prestigioso en Francia, en el Collège de France, con el título de profesor de Historia de los Sistemas de Pensamiento. Durante las décadas de 1970 y 1980, su reputación internacional creció gracias a las numerosas conferencias y cursos que impartió por todo el mundo.

Las principales influencias en el pensamiento de Foucault fueron los filósofos alemanes Friedrich Nietzsche y Martin Heidegger. Nietzsche mantenía que la conducta humana está motivada por una voluntad de poder y que los valores tradicionales habían perdido su antiguo dominio opresivo sobre la sociedad. Heidegger criticó lo que llamó "nuestro actual entendimiento de ser tecnológico". 

 El pensamiento de Foucault exploró los modelos cambiantes de poder dentro de la sociedad y cómo el poder se relaciona con la persona. Investigó las reglas cambiantes que gobiernan las afirmaciones que pueden ser tomadas de forma seria como verdaderas o falsas en distintos momentos de la historia. Estudió también cómo las prácticas diarias permiten a la gente definir sus identidades y sistematizar el conocimiento; los hechos pueden ser entendidos como productos de la naturaleza, del esfuerzo humano o de Dios. Foucault afirmaba que la concepción de las cosas tiene sus ventajas y sus peligros. 

 El pensamiento de Foucault se desarrolló en tres etapas. La primera, en Locura y civilización (1960), que escribió mientras era lector en la Universidad de Uppsala, en Suecia, reflejó cómo en el mundo occidental la locura -que alguna vez se pensó infundida por inspiración divina- llegó a ser considerada como enfermedad mental. En esta obra intentó exponer la fuerza creativa de la locura que había sido reprimida tradicionalmente por las sociedades occidentales. En su segunda etapa escribió Las palabras y las cosas (1966), una de sus obras más importantes.  

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1. Biographical Sketch

Foucault was born in Poitiers, France, on October 15, 1926. His student years seem to have been psychologically tormented but were intellectually brilliant. He became academically established during the 1960s, when he held a series of positions at French universities, before his election in 1969 to the ultra-prestigious Collège de France, where he was Professor of the History of Systems of Thought until his death.

From the 1970s on, Foucault was very active politically. He was a founder of the Groupe d'information sur les prisons and often protested on behalf of homosexuals and other marginalized groups. He frequently lectured outside France, particularly in the United States, and in 1983 had agreed to teach annually at the University of California at Berkeley. An early victim of AIDS, Foucault died in Paris on June 25, 1984. In addition to works published during his lifetime, his lectures at the Collège de France, being published posthumously, contain important elucidations and extensions of his ideas.

It can be difficult to think of Foucault as a philosopher. His academic formation was in psychology and its history as much as in philosophy, his books were mostly histories of medical and social sciences, his passions were literary and political. Nonetheless, almost all of Foucault's works can be fruitfully read as philosophical in either or both of two ways: as a carrying out of philosophy's traditional critical project in a new (historical) manner; and as a critical engagement with the thought of traditional philosophers. This article will present him as a philosopher in these two dimensions.

2. Intellectual Background

Let us begin, however, with a sketch of the philosophical environment in which Foucault was educated. He entered the École Normale Supérieure (the standard launching pad for major French philosophers) in 1946, during the heyday of existential phenomenology. 

Merleau-Ponty, whose lectures he attended, and Heidegger were particularly important. Hegel and Marx were also major concerns, the first through the interpretation of his work offered by Jean Hyppolite and the latter through the structuralist reading of Louis Althusser—both teachers who had a strong impact on Foucault at the École Normale. It is, accordingly, not surprising that Foucault's earliest works (his long “Introduction” to Dream and Existence by Ludwig Binswanger, a Heideggerian psychiatrist, and Maladie mentale et personalité, a short book on mental illness) were written in the grip of, respectively, existentialism and Marxism. But he soon turned away quite decisively from both.

Although Jean-Paul Sartre, living and working outside the University system, had no personal influence on Foucault, the thought of him, as the French master-thinker preceding Foucault, is always in the background. Like Sartre, Foucault began from a relentless hatred of bourgeois society and culture and with a spontaneous sympathy for groups at the margins of the bourgeoisie (artists, homosexuals, prisoners, etc.). They were also similar in their interests in literature and psychology, as well as philosophy, and both, after an early relative lack of political interest, became strong activists. But in the end, Foucault seemed to insist on defining himself in contradiction to Sartre. 

Philosophically, he rejected what he saw as Sartre's centralization of the subject (which he mocked as “transcendental narcissism”). Personally and politically, he rejected Sartre's role as what Foucault called the “universal intellectual”, judging a society in terms of transcendent principles. There is, however, a tincture of protesting too much in Foucault's separation of himself from Sartre, and the question of the relation of their work remains a fertile one.

Three other factors were of much more positive significance for the young Foucault. First, there was the French tradition of history and philosophy of science, particularly as represented by Georges Canguilhem, a powerful figure in the French University establishment, whose work in the history and philosophy of biology provided a model for much of what Foucault was later to do in the history of the human sciences. Canguilhem sponsored Foucault's doctoral thesis on the history of madness and, throughout Foucault's career, remained one of his most important and effective supporters



Canguilhem's approach to the history of science (an approach developed from the work of Gaston Bachelard), provided Foucault with a strong sense (Kuhnian avant la lettre) of the discontinuities in scientific history, along with a “rationalist” understanding of the historical role of concepts that made them independent of the phenomenologists' transcendental consciousness. Foucault found this understanding reinforced in the structuralist linguistics and psychology developed, respectively, by Ferdinand de Saussure and Jacques Lacan, as well as in Georges Dumézil's proto-structuralist work on comparative religion. These anti-subjective standpoints provide the context for Foucault's marginalization of the subject in his “structuralist histories”, The Birth of the Clinic (on the origins of modern medicine) and The Order of Things (on the origins of the modern human sciences).

In a quite different vein, Foucault was enthralled by French avant-garde literature, especially the writings of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, where he found the experiential concreteness of existential phenomenology without what he came to see as dubious philosophical assumptions about subjectivity. Of particular interest was this literature's evocation of “limit-experiences”, which push us to extremes where conventional categories of intelligibility begin to break down.

This philosophical milieu provided materials for the critique of subjectivity and the corresponding “archaeological” and “genealogical” methods of writing history that inform Foucault's projects of historical critique, to which we now turn.

Publicado en la enciclopedia Stanford de Filosofía
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