Foucault's heraclitism and the concept of history

• Autor(a) principal: Cardoso Júnior, Hélio Rebello [UNESP]
• Data de Publicação: 2011
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UNESP
• Texto Completo: http://www.revistafenix.pro.br/vol26helio; http://hdl.handle.net/11449/126760
• topic: Foucault; Heráclito; Tempo; História

Deleuze states that Foucault would have created a new relationship between men and history, a relationship other than that established by the philosophers of history. In order to specify the steps Foucault took to accomplish this invention, I shall support, according to Deleuze, Foucault s Heraclitism as the basis for a genuine Foucaultian concept of history. After outlining the risks taken by Foucault s concept of history, I observe this concept at work through the three periods that perform his thought: Archeology, Genealogy and Aesthetics of Existence. The main characters that embody his concept of history through these periods are: a) the discontinuous profile of history; b) the denaturalization of would-be unhistorical objects; c) the historical dimension of body; d) the eddies of subjectivation in history. We shall focus our inspection on the turn made along Foucault s work when he takes into a new account the theme of subjectivity, mostly in the last two volumes of the History of Sexuality. Thus, our attention turns to the subjectivity defined as a process, in order to investigate individual identity as the result of history.