Abstract
Autore:
Fassin Giovanni
Titolo:
"Potere e memoria. Appunti sulla genealogia in Foucault"
This article tries to explain how the question of power arises in Michel Foucault’s work, with special regard to the concept of discursive practice, conceived in its ontological capacity to produce spheres of political life. It is a radically nihilistic conception of life and language in their reciprocal intertwining; this implies a prevalence of the " horizontal " dimension of practices, rather than the " vertical" relation between a political authority pole and the social body. Developing the Nietzschean genealogy of morals in an ontology of power, Foucault moves towards a progressive superimposition and intertwining between power and knowledge, where the Nietzschean " will to power " is reshaped as " will to knowledge ". It marks an extreme conception of the speech act theory, revised as the establishment of interpretation as discursive domain upon the living multiplicity: knowledge, conceived in its power dimension, has a social ordering function in the double sense of the term. This also allows Foucault to go beyond the phenomenological conception of the Lebenswelt (that is now used simply to refer to the historical emergence of different styles of experience, established within the discursive level), and to pose a primary relation (paradoxal at first sight) between the living and power, conceived as the power of death in the struggle of forces that occur in the relational level of practices.
These results are furthermore developed in the definition of a critical question, built through a new reading of the Nietzschean and Heideggerian problem of nihilism. The critical question also focuses upon the subject: if the life that the subject is living is produced within the sphere of power, conceived as a pet of relations of forces that extends to the whole social field, are there ambits of freedom for individuals? Following the main thurst of this question, Foucault regards the production of memory as the basic performance of power. The memory produced by power is based however upon an oblivion, oblivion of the historical emergence of the domain of the truth, and, in particular, in the disciplinary technologies of the present, the oblivion of the political dimension of practices. It is a revision and radical transformation of the Heidegger’s figure of the " oblivion of truth ", which is now subtracted to the escatological results that seem inevitable within the Heideggerian refletion. This allows us to see in the genealogy as critical knowledge a counter-memory, a knowledge of the struggle that ultimately wrecks this oblivion of power. In this way, Foucault poses the ultimate questions about genealogical thinking, leading it to a definitive impasse, which turns out to be an exposure to the limit that is constitutive of an ontology of finitude.
