Éthos crítico e governamentalidade em Michel Foucault

Abstract

Is it possible to point out the main question for the philosophical exercise today? In this respect, Michel Foucault's answer is straightforward: the critical diagnosis of our actuality. Starting from this position of the author, the objective of our text is to discuss the meaning of Philosophy, characterizing itself as a critical exercise and its main function: to identify the relevant event in the present time, thus designating the diagnostic activity as specific to philosophy. Starting from this position, the vision about the meaning of Philosophy ceases to be a mere adhesion to systems or dogmas, characterizing itself as a critical exercise, with the objective of trying to think differently from what is thought and the most crucial still: to identify the relevant event today, which can be treated philosophically. Our hypothesis, to be worked on, is based on the observation of a philosophical, ethical and political activism, described as an attitude or, moreover, as an ethos in Foucauldian reflection, which encompasses all of his work, but which becomes more poignant in his, so-called, last phase or ethical phase, involving the theme of governmentality. Starting from this theme, we will discuss the link between ethics and politics, precisely because it is the link between freedom, truth, power and resistance; highlighting the relationship between the practice of the government of others and the exercise of self-government. It makes it possible to analyze the articulation between truth, political action and governance, when it comes to identifying the existence of a political attitude that gains the outline of an ethical attitude in refusing to be governed in such a way. At this point, the author turns to the critical ethos as a practice of freedom as a form of refusal to exercise excessive governance in the conduct of individuals.