A urgência do presente: atitude crítica e ética da liberdade em Michel Foucault

Abstract

This work starts from the displacement - pointed out by Frédéric Gros - in which the Foucaultian analyzes develop a new conception of subjectivity, truth and philosophy. The implications of this displacement are numerous and refer mainly to the concepts of critical attitude and ethics of freedom. The critic is understood as a philosophical attitude that needs to be reactivated frequently, by problematizing the relations between knowledge/power/subject, without presupposing any cognitive privilege; and ethics is understood as the work by which the subject constitutes himself. Both are seen as exercises of freedom. A freedom whose foundation is the concrete possibility of a constant questioning of the truth and a permanent transformation of the subject. Freedom, for Foucault, is something that only exists in the act, a practice that receives its meaning when it is exercised. The idea to be defended here is that the critical attitude with its ethical character presupposes a permanent problematization of our truths, a constant construction of our subjectivities and a philosophy that responds to the appeals of our actuality. Just like freedom; subject, truth, and philosophy are practices that only make sense if they are effectively articulated. It is in this context that we can diagnose and understand the present, so that, through a critical philosophy and an ethic of freedom we can change what we think it needs to be changed. The present urges for new practices of freedom, but they presume the care of the self as a prerequisite, that is, we can only make their ontology in terms of freedom practices that presuppose a transformation of the subject through relations in which he engages freely