Queering Plato: Foucault on Philosophy as Self-fashioning and Resistance in Plato’s 7th Letter
This paper argues that the late Foucault’s final focus on antiquity and ethics does not represent a withdrawal from the political but rather a renewed from of engagement. The task of the philosopher is not to tell people who to vote for, or what tax plan to adopt, or even what laws should or should...
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| الحاوية / القاعدة: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/trans, |
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| المؤلف الرئيسي: | |
| التنسيق: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| اللغة: | Anglais |
| منشور في: |
TRANS-
2021
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| الوصول للمادة أونلاين: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| الملخص: | This paper argues that the late Foucault’s final focus on antiquity and ethics does not represent a withdrawal from the political but rather a renewed from of engagement. The task of the philosopher is not to tell people who to vote for, or what tax plan to adopt, or even what laws should or should not regulate sexual conduct, although the philosopher like anyone else will have opinions on these topics, but those opinions are not per se philosophical. The philosopher rather stands as an index of truth in relation to the political, as someone who is willing to take personal risks to speak the truth regardless of party or program, as someone who has formed him- or herself in the commitment to that truth, not simply as a profession but as a mode of life. The philosopher d’après Foucault, in forming him or herself as a truth-teller, creates spaces of resistance, not by telling people what they should believe, nor by enforcing ideological or party discipline, but by allowing subjugated forms of knowledge to come to the fore, by problematizing the space in which government seeks to inscribe individuals (especially the marginalized), and by making possible new forms of experience whose truth has yet to be imagined. This can be seen most clearly in Foucault’s engagement with Plato’s Seventh Letter. |
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