of Nico Carlucci
"It 's a strange courage you give me
,
old star shines only when nothing in the dawn
A grant"
William Carlos Williams
I want to put the focus of debate contemporary thought of Michel Foucault. I wonder if this makes sense to do so via the Internet. The latter is crossed by a code of writing precise and perhaps away from "literature."
In many ways, what the French philosopher theorize is close to Anthropology.
In this short speech, then we try to understand it.
time of 'wandering
Meanwhile, what is clear is that Foucault was neither a structuralist nor a historicist (Paul Vayne: Foucault's thought and Man , Milano, Garzanti, 2010).
as he called himself, the scholar was a thinker "skeptical", away from all transcendences companies. In other words, was an intellectual "new", a "philosopher of the intellect" often attacked and criticized by its own power that he, conversely, was revealing in his studies.
Anthropology empirical as someone likes to call it? Well, certainly Foucault likes historical criticism that is first of all challenge in the human history beyond the power, economy, religions. And 'as is also the science of culture, anthropology as a wind that comes suddenly.
To understand the madness, sexuality and punishment of the prison system, in other words, the culture, Foucault points on the analysis of their "speeches" that handles with clarity. The men of a certain age living through these speeches and they do, according to the French philosopher, implicitly. Not universal, then, but "discursive practices" that about love, see, for example, write and speak the ancient pleasures of aphrodisiacs, centered behavior love of a 'was, at the same time, modest and devoid of sin.
Leaving, then, from what you "say" and was done with the outline of the customs, language, knowledge, standards, laws and institutions. In summary, highlighting the "device" as he calls Michel, in the final analysis, are performed using "discursive practices".
Culture Why do not you say?
All the historical facts to which Foucault refers is singular, unique. He does not think that there are general truths from which words and stories originate. In this it is evident the influence of Nietzsche's philosophy in the French thinker claims to be successor.
underlies the history of mankind there is nothing real, rational. We need to "track down the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality" ( The archeological know, Gallimard, Paris, 1969).
Foucault, for his part, but touches on several occasions, it uses the concept of culture. What he called the boundary of the customs, language, etc.. are the reality, a "complex whole", the culture within which I also put the "speech" that he, conversely, puts everything else. And that we would not, really, "a first " of history, but only the evolution of our species and its "freedom." Men have never ceased, in fact, to build themselves, ie to continuously move their subjectivity, to constitute itself into an infinite series and multiple. When the implicit allusion
Foucault's "discursive practice" we could translate it with the concept of the unconscious revealed by anthropological studies of cultures. Not unconscious and unaware that, conversely, relies on Freud. Both are the "unspoken" but treated as two different points of view. The former involves the processes of history, the encounter of an interior with an exterior. The unconscious believes in its universality, is not fixed and the unconscious. This is done in the making, over time, has a "life". Skip quiet man and does not know! For Foucault
anthropology "problems" dissolve into questions of history. And certainly the work then becomes that of "the construction of these facts of history," which in itself does not exist. So, I add, the wandering scholar, philosopher and anthropologist who may even be wrong, in search of "truth" as possible.
The divine fire of the Holy
In the work of indispensable Foucault lacks the category of the sacred that is not separable from the power to which the French intellectual devotes pages thanks to a wonderful lucidity uncommon. Yes, the Holy in the sense of Rudolf Otto (1896-1937), the mysterium tremendum ", which, remember, is rooted in the inexorable power that enters the game in the field of Death.
logic of power, the logic of the sacred, then, highlighted by Ida Magli in his acute study of cultural models.
Foucault writes that his goal was "to show how the coupling of a series of practical regime of truth-form a device of power-knowledge" (The Birth of Biopolitics . Course at the College de France 1978-1979 , Feltrinelli, Milan, 2005).
Madness, for example, is input according to Michel, a "device" that made it a reality, a regime of "truth" and "practices" of a certain age. The madman was, in turn, inspired by the "divine fire" or hospitalized as mentally ill. And this is true. But the madness belongs to the Sacred, the world of prophecy and ecstatic vision, size, or holiness, or accepted a drugged hallucination.
The philosophy and anthropology, then, meet, talk, argue, get angry, the one accuses the other and vice versa, go together, breathe, love and reach conclusions that "not concluded". The questions begin to tap, at the heart and mind, every time, at the start-over.
