A questão do desejo em Michel Foucault: a interpretação de uma experiência de retomada da vontade autônoma

Abstract

This doctoral thesis intends to unravel the issues surrounding the question of desire in French philosopher Michel Foucault’s (1926-1984) thought through the epistemological contexts of subjectivity, truth, and freedom. The development of such issues becomes clearer through the possibility of structuring an experience of return to autonomy on the subject’s part, which grounds itself in this process. The question of Foucauldian desire is divided and substantiated by historical milestones and conceptual milestones, which are articulated in Foucault’s work through ruptures and through meaningful continuities. The historical milestones of desire in Foucauldian thought are divided into the paths of literature, politics, and ethics. The conceptual milestones of desire within his body of work are classified in the outlines of aphrodísia (Antiquity), of flesh (early and late Christianism) and of sexuality (Modernity and Contemporaneity). The irruption of a history of truth, hereafter the primacy of the question of desire in Foucault, provides an understanding of freedom acts and of a production of memory of vulnerability. The truth of concupiscence and of desire, as well as the skepticism of truth and the fictionalization of truth, are included in the consideration that the irruption of the history of truth, underpinned by desire, within the Foucauldian theoretical framework, allows for a consideration of a return to the autonomous will, based on a reappropriation of vulnerability by the Foucauldian individual, one that is always in discontinuity with the norm, as an attempt to operate a microrevolution. The question of desire in Foucault is framed by the perspective of a will of precedence, of becoming other, of an exercise rupturing underpinned by the subject that struggles, a subject wrapped by the idea of microrevolution, that is, the struggle for the narrative of the memory of being made vulnerable; in other words, the memory of the underground conflicts of existence.