Aula 4 Saber, Poder e Sujeito

Knowledge, Power, and the Subject are three dimensions that interact with each other in interdependent relationships. Understanding that power produces knowledge and vice versa is central to a good reading of Michel Foucault, but it also helps us to elucidate the political use of his work. "We must first admit that power produces knowledge (and not simply by favoring it because it serves the system or applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge are directly implicated; that there is no power relation without a correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor knowledge that does not simultaneously presuppose and constitute power relations. These "power-knowledge" relations should not then be analyzed from the perspective of a subject of knowledge who would or would not be free in relation to the power system; but rather, it is necessary to consider that the subject who knows, the objects to be known, and the modalities of knowledge are all effects of these fundamental implications of power-knowledge and its historical transformations. In short, it is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but power-knowledge, the processes and struggles that traverse and constitute it, that determine the possible forms and fields of knowledge." - Discipline and Punish In this lesson, the role of Philosophy, a topic that needs to be widely debated, also comes into question. Making visible what is already visible. "It has long been known that the role of philosophy is not to discover what is hidden, but rather to make visible what is precisely visible—that is, to make appear what is so close, so immediate, so intimately linked to ourselves that, because of this, we do not perceive it. While the role of science is to make known what we do not see, the role of philosophy is to make visible what we see. From this point of view, the task of philosophy today could well be: what are the power relations to which we are bound and in which philosophy itself, at least for 150 years, has been paralyzed? (FOUCAULT, 2006b, pp. 42/43)." - Ethics, Sexuality and Politics. In Dits et Écrits, Volume V. #MichelFoucault #Foucault