Permanent transgressions and the insurrection of subjected knowledges: reflections on normalisation and the uses of the archaeological-genealogical method by Michel Foucault

reflexões sobre normalização e os usos do método arqueológico-genealógico de Michel Foucault

Abstract

The article permeates risk theory by glimpsing processes of construction and deconstruction of identities that can eventually free themselves from the constraints of dominant subjectivity and build themselves up as transgressors of the limits of hegemonic discourse. This openness proposes that typically modern conceptions are placed and crisis to weaken the margins, the limits, of scientificity, of rationality, to allow tensions to emerge between knowledge and ignorance, inclusion and exclusion, subjectivity and subjection, all to be reconstructed from a turnaround of subjected knowledges. In Foucault's work, the fundamental perception of the definition of author appears, that is, the one who discourses and thus interferes in the world. It is thus proposed that science, rationality and truth are mere ornaments, as long as they are stripped of those who materialise them. The establishment of this perspective proposed by Foucault was opposed by authors such as Jünger Habermas and Simone Goyard-Fabre, who attributed to the French philosopher an epistemologically empty discourse, leading to philosophical nihilism. The article seeks to demonstrate the inconsistency of the criticisms levelled at Foucault, explaining that his proposal follows the path opened up by Nietzsche in the sense that knowledge is a relationship of power and domination. Foucault's proposal consists of dissecting how social practices engender domains of knowledge in order to construct objects, concepts, techniques and, above all, new subjects, subjects of knowledge and these conceptions are permanently open to subversion, to transgression, in other words, to different forms of construction. This is done through the use of a specific perspective, known as the archaeological-genealogical method, in order to observe how truths, institutions and powers reflect needs and objectives that can be traced through the history of systems of thought. It concludes, using the example of Jean-Michel Basquiat, that the distance between subjection and emancipation is not a distant space because the power that flows from human relations is always at stake and knowledge is always being manipulated.