Forma-de-vida e técnicas de si: problemas colocados à subjetividade a partir do pensamento de Michel Foucault e Giorgio Agamben

Abstract

This research begins with the crisis emerging within the context of subjectivities, which permeates the bipolarities involving inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion, bios

and zoe, qualified life and bare life, which separate life from its form and the form-of- life from life itself. The research problem unfolds as follows: how does Giorgio

Agamben consider the construction of subjectivity; how does he envisage overcoming the limits imposed by bare life captured by the state of exception and marked by the desubjectification caused by biopolitical mechanisms; how does the philosopher envisage a form-of-life, a human life, completely removed from the clutches of law and a use of bodies and the world that never ends in appropriation? Therefore, the answers

traverse the characterizations that involve the construction of the concepts "any- being," "remainder," and "form-of-life" in opposition to bare life; The concept of

"messianic power" inverts the use of bodies and things, desecrating the sacredness of life and ideal and material things. Along with these questions, Michel Foucault's influence on the development of Agambenian studies is clearly evident. For Foucault, the subject is constituted by disciplinary and biopolitical operators and devices of control. For Agamben, the subject is the result of exception operators and biopolitical devices. Thus, the techniques of the self, a Foucauldian concept used to understand the construction of subjectivity, must be analyzed in conjunction with the emergence of these modern and contemporary devices. For Agamben, a "Form-of-Life" can be constructed in opposition to Bare Life, and therefore, it is necessary to understand how the techniques of the self are correlated with these processes and how such "techniques of the self" intertwine with biopolitical devices and exception operators. Therefore, the last Foucault in the history of sexuality is also the Foucault who will attempt to understand subjectivity as a more intimate construction of each individual within themselves, while simultaneously being a subjectivity permeated by the emergence of disciplines and biopower, and in Agamben's case, exception. The "techniques of the self" are procedures of governmentality that subjects themselves develop to produce their bodies, produce themselves, produce their subjectivities, and produce their truths. Thus, the problematic that revolved around the understanding of subjectivity in Agamben unfolds into the problematic of understanding subjectivity also from Foucault's perspective. That is: how the techniques of the self, or which techniques of the self, can constitute a new form-of-life; how forms of veridiction are

correlated with the techniques of the self to construct a new form-of-life; how such an intertwining of forms of veridiction and the techniques of the self presents itself in extreme poverty; How do such techniques of the self and forms of veridiction correlate with messianic power? How do such techniques of the self contribute to and produce a new use of bodies beyond relations of appropriation and control? The objectives of this research are, at their core, to understand the form-of-life and its developments in relation to the exception in Agamben. That is, to identify the elements that allow us to define subjectivity for Agamben; to understand how the philosopher intends to transcend the limits imposed by bare life marked by processes of biopolitical desubjectification; to understand how it is possible in Agambenian thought to create a form-of-life, a human life, completely removed from the clutches of law, and a use of bodies and the world that is never reduced to a relationship of ownership or appropriation. The aim is also to understand the possible connections between Foucault's latest studies on the techniques of the self, the practices of the self, which involve technologies of the subject, and the development of the form-of-life in Agamben. For, in order to constitute a form-of-life, techniques of the self are necessary, whose truths of the self allow the subject to make himself, even if this form-of-life is constituted from the imponderable, the untimely.