Michel Foucault

Foucault, however, suggests the need to invert this Kantian move. Rather than asking
what, in the apparently contingent, is actually necessary, he suggests asking what, in the
apparently necessary, might be contingent.
These anti-subjective standpoints provide the context for Foucault's marginalization of
the subject in his “structuralist histories”, The Birth of the Clinic (on the origins of
modern medicine) and The Order of Things (on the origins of the modern human
sciences).

Obras
Historia de la locura en la época clásica-1972
Raymond Roussel (muerte y el laberinto)-1963
Nacimiento de la clínica-1963
Las palabras y las cosas-1966
La arqueología del saber-1969
Vigilar y castigar-1975
Historia de la sexualidad-1976
La voluntad de saber
El uso del placer
El cuidado de sí
Curso en el Collège de France (1970-1984).

These purport to offer universal scientific truths about human nature that are, in fact,
often mere expressions of ethical and political commitments of a particular society.
Foucault's “critical philosophy” undermines such claims by exhibiting how they are just
the outcome of contingent historical forces, and are not scientifically grounded truths.

Foucault plantea una invesión de la crítica kantiana: En lugar de ver las condiciones
trascendentales y necesarias en lo contingente, quiere encontrar el carácter provisional,
de estas estructuras del conocimiento que se presentan como intemporales.
Así, en el caso de la locura en la época clásica (siglos XVIII y XIX en Francia) lo que
se presenta como un descubrimiento científico objetivo e incontrovertible (la locura
como una enfermedad mental), es en realidad el producto de compromisos éticos y
políticos bastante cuestionables.

Las palabras y las cosas- una arqueología de las ciencias humanas.

Expande el mismo método arqueológico desarrollado en la medicina y la psiquiatría a
las ciencias humanas como la economía, biología y la filología.
Un análisis global de lo que el conocimiento significaba y como este significado se
transformó desde el Renacimiento al presente.

La arqueología del saber

The premise of the archaeological method is that systems of thought and knowledge
(epistemes or discursive formations, in Foucault's terminology) are governed by rules,
beyond those of grammar and logic, that operate beneath the consciousness of
individual subjects and define a system of conceptual possibilities that determines the
boundaries of thought in a given domain and period.
La arqueología permite ver la historia desde un punto más objetivo, que no depende de
las condiciones del sujeto individual del conocimiento, y puede mostrar cómo son
relativas las formas de conocimiento de una época determinada. Sin embargo no puede
mostrar cómo se da el cambio de una forma de conocimiento a otro.
La genealogía busca solucionar este problema, inspirada en Nietzsche (orígenes bajos).
At the core of Foucault's picture of modern “disciplinary” society are three primary
techniques of control: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and the
examination. To a great extent, control over people (power) can be achieved merely by
observing them

he examination (for example, of students in schools, of patients in hospitals) is a

method of control that combines hierarchical observation with normalizing judgment. It
is a prime example of what Foucault calls power/knowledge, since it combines into a
unified whole “the deployment of force and the establishment of truth” (184). It both
elicits the truth about those who undergo the examination (tells what they know or what
is the state of their health) and controls their behavior (by forcing them to study or
directing them to a course of treatment).

Panopticon: It is the instrument through which modern discipline has replaced pre-
modern sovereignty (kings, judges) as the fundamental power relation.

So understood, sex for the Greeks was a major part of what Foucault called an
“aesthetics of the self”: the self's creation of a beautiful and enjoyable existence.

These studies of ancient sexuality, and, particularly, the idea of an aesthetics of the self,
led Foucault to the ancient idea of philosophy as a way of life rather than a search for
theoretical truth.