'The body is also, in Foucault, the site of subjectivation'

It was on June 25, 1984, that the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926, Poitiers) died in Paris. He left behind one of the most emblematic works in the history of philosophy, composed of a series of keys that would allow us to observe the secret ways in which power operates. Months earlier, Foucault destroyed a significant portion of his manuscripts and in his will prohibited the publication of anything that might have been overlooked. But more than four decades after his death, his archive has allowed for numerous posthumous editions that, in the long run, have also forged diverse views on the philosopher.

Foucault's work encompasses multiple concepts in constant change, making it complex but also allowing it to remain relevant after almost half a century. For this reason, Professor Edgardo Castro (Argentina, 1962), a scholar of the French author's intellectual heritage, in his book Introduction to Foucault: A Guide to Orienting and Understanding a Work in Motion (Siglo XXI Editores, 2023), presents a map of Foucault's thought and explores its conceptual transformations, crucially linked to the intellectual influences the French author acquired throughout his life.

His book owes much to the Foucault archive, housed in the National Library of France and the Institute for the Memory of Contemporary Publishing (Imec), as Castro comments in an interview: “What the practice of the history of contemporary philosophy teaches me is that authors 'enter' something like 'the dimension of the archive.' The best-known, and at the same time most scandalous, case is that of Nietzsche,” whose posthumous work was used by the Nazis to justify their ideology, it is worth adding. “Foucault is also in that dimension. This means that texts are already beginning to be published several years after the author's death, even texts that were previously unknown, such as Philosophical Discourse , a kind of archaeology of philosophy, which is neither a course nor a manuscript, but an essay.” Thus, the Foucault archive encompasses not only the author's work during his lifetime and after his death, but also the way in which these notions continue to operate in the analysis of reality. Let's look at some of them.

One of the central themes of Foucault's work was security. Today, we live in a state of uncertainty regarding the preservation of our lives, both economically and socially; we seek a guarantee of security from those who govern us. But what can we say about this Foucauldian notion?

In Foucault, security and liberalism are inseparable. What is Foucault's operation? Well, one tends to think that liberalism was the representation of freedom, and Foucault tells us: no, liberalism is the era of security. There appears the dark side of something we hadn't seen before. It's a very interesting intellectual operation, because Foucault tries to construct a genealogy of modern thought, where the reason of state isn't referred to Machiavelli; there, liberalism appears as a question of security, which would be its main problem, since it is what produces the possible conditions of freedom. What's interesting is that—we, who have grown accustomed to thinking about modernity in terms of freedom—Foucault leads us to discover it in terms of security, and there are two important elements here: one is that our most frequent representation of modernity follows a juridical register, and it's clear that modern law is fundamentally the law of individuals. But Foucault doesn't follow that path, but rather that of the history of medicine, where exactly the opposite occurs. After exploring individual medicine, Foucault explores social medicine, and there he discovers the phenomenon of population, of biology. Liberalism, in Foucault's analysis, is the governance of population phenomena, biologically, something I insist on.

We tend to think of modernity as the triumph of freedom, but it has also been the paranoia of security.

Could this search for security facilitate a new rise of fascism?

I insist: we tend to think of modernity as the triumph of freedom, but it has also been the paranoia of security. In other words, Descartes is a paranoid who believes everyone wants to deceive him, even God. I say this somewhat comically. And Hobbes is also a paranoid who believes everyone can kill him, even his neighbors and his family. There is a security paranoia that inhabits modernity and is at the historical root of the totalitarian phenomena of the 20th century. For Foucault, security would specifically be the management of the random. Security devices govern or manage random phenomena, and the way they generally manage them is statistically. That in itself doesn't necessarily have a fascist dimension, but it's clear that security can become the discourse that justifies what one would characterize as the minimum of fascism, which is the disregard for individual rights. That is what happens in the functioning of the security discourse. Of course, the political experience of the 20th century teaches us that in this discourse of security, the old sovereign power to kill can be reactivated, as in the totalitarian phenomena that led to mass exterminations.

Foucault's criticism of humanism lies in the number of crimes that can be justified under this concept. In light of Foucault, what criticism could be made of what we currently consider humanism?

Foucault's critique of humanism refers to the idea that there is such a thing as the essence of man, and that this essence is a task, a duty. But humanism and the human are not identical. One can have a philosophy of the human without it being a humanism, that is, without proposing a specific model or paradigm of man to which we should all conform. There is a political and theoretical critique of humanism, for it is not only that which allows us certain acts of freedom, but above all, it is that in the name of which we are subjugated, normalized. Foucault has an expression: 'humanism is the prostitute of thought,' because there is no one with whom he has not been. Because there has been humanist atheism, Christian humanism, Marxist humanism, liberal humanism... and Foucault is interested in how to think of man without referring to any essence.

'I regret that intellectuals are overshadowed by the levity of the networks'

Foucault has an expression: 'Humanism is the prostitute of thought,' because there is no one he hasn't been with. Because there has been humanist atheism, Christian humanism, Marxist humanism, liberal humanism.

Some of the most interesting Foucauldian assemblages are those developed by queer theory and feminism. I'd like to know to what extent Foucault actually leverages these discourses, but also where we find a limit to Foucault's thought in relation to them.

It's a discourse that requires a great deal of precision, because the queer movement and feminist movements encompass many things. But what did Foucault make possible? Look: politics in the 19th century, and at least until the mid-20th century, considered the institutional, the legal. Therefore, utopia had a legal form; that is, it was a politics that sought to produce a certain society. 1968, to give a reference date, changed the axis of utopias, or, if you will, of political imagination, because then politics no longer proposed changing a society from a political perspective, but rather changing politics from a social perspective. It's no longer a discourse about the citizen, but about bodies; it's not a discourse about the legal, but about practices. It's not a discourse about the legitimacy of authority, but about its scope, its limits, and even its necessity. Foucault contributed to this, and made these discourses possible. Now, there are two limits on the precise content of certain struggles or movements: first, Foucault died 40 years ago, and if there's one thing Foucault never wanted to be, it was a prophet, in the sense that we're not necessarily bound to the letter of his books. Second, Foucault has critical elements, in this case referring to the homosexual movements of his time. He was critical of this struggle being a legal struggle for certain rights. Here, there's the possibility of a discourse on the body, sexualities, and this goes hand in hand with the critique of humanism.

We arrive at one of Foucault's central concepts: the body. What kind of body does society need to constitute today?

I would recall the Platonic formula: the body is the prison of the soul. In the case of Michel Foucault, specifically in Discipline and Punish, the formula would be: the soul is the prison of the body. But it must be said that there is no single formula for the body; we must escape essentialisms. But in Foucault, there are two dimensions to what we call the body: one is the population dimension, that is, the body understood to simplify things statistically; the other is individual bodies. I could easily respond that current bodies are those that consume: beauty, health, devices that enhance it. But the body is also, in Foucault, the site of subjectivation; it is not just the devices; that is the problematization of the body that he poses to us in relation to our present day. The interest in the body was scandalous in the 1974 formulation, in a lecture when he said: "Capitalism is not a question of ideology; what interests capitalism is the body, and the body is at the center of capitalism, not ideology." This, in a Marxist audience of the time, was scandalous. In other words, politics has to think about the body: the body of the population, of individuals. In the History of Sexuality, which fundamentally focuses on the sexuality of the Greeks and the sexuality of Victorian societies, there are missing chapters that would be extremely interesting to include: sexuality during Nazism, sexuality in fascist countries; we would learn a lot from this. There is still much to explore in the body as a site of objectification—medical, economic, security—and of ethical subjectivation.

There is still much to explore in the body as a place of objectification—medical, economic, security—and ethical subjectivation.

Let's reframe Foucault in relation to one of the current events that allows us to observe the connection between power and knowledge: artificial intelligence.

It occurred to me that Foucault might have something to tell us about artificial intelligence, because in the 1970s, Foucault was interested in thinking about life without a subject, and that is the life of the population, and this concept that interests him so much, biopolitics, thinks about desubjectivized life. Foucault thinks about discourse without subjectivity, and it seemed to me that we found the conditions for thinking about artificial intelligence, because this is, ultimately, a form of non-subjective discursivity. However, at the end of his life, he also considered the connection between discourse and subject, which is the theme of parrhesia, that is, the courage to speak the truth, something that intelligence cannot give us, despite all its answers.

In Foucault, we find a reflective exercise in freedom. How can we understand and apply this courage to speak the truth today?

This is our great challenge: true discourse. Not the proclamation of truths, but the subject's commitment to what they say: what I say is what I am. Here I would take up something from an author for whom Foucault has not shown much sympathy, Aristotle, who said that "a city without parrhesia is not worth living, and a politics without true discourse is not worth living."

El Universal (Mexico) - GDA