Foucault Michel: Subjektivnost i istina

Michel Foucault: Subjectivity and truth

Translation from French: Mirna Šimat

In the work Subjectivity and truth, Michel Foucault starts from the question "How, at different times and in different institutional contexts, was the subject established as an object of possible, desirable or even necessary knowledge?", and "How were the experiences we can get about ourselves and the knowledge that is shaped by it organized through certain schemes? How were these schemes defined, evaluated, recommended, imposed?" Foucault claims that it is clear "that neither reference to original experience nor the study of philosophical theories about the soul, passions or body can serve as the main backbone of such an investigation". Therefore, it takes as a guiding thread "techniques of the self", i.e. "procedures (...) that are offered or prescribed to individuals in order to strengthen their identity, preserve it or change it depending on a certain number of goals, thanks to the relationships of self-control or self-knowledge". In this sense, Subjectivity and Truth is connected to his in-depth research from the works The Use of Pleasure and Self-Care, that is, it sheds light on Foucault's reflection on man, subjectivity, corporeality, sexuality, etc., on the trail of a critical reaffirmation of ancient philosophy.
From a review by Hrvoj Jurić

French philosopher, psychologist and political theorist Michel Foucault (1926–1984). He taught at many universities (since 1970 at the Collège de France). Philosophically, he reflected on the origin of theories and practices of human science. He started from the notion of discourse as a set of assertions, practices, qualification schemes and objects of analysis that, although incompatible and contradictory, share a set of discursive rules that govern them. He opposed the opinion that started from the understanding of the history of civilization as an uninterrupted history of progress governed by increasing rationality and believes that, on the contrary, the development of humanity was decisively influenced by discontinuity, interruption and randomness, as well as by the arbitrary and irrational. He introduced the concept of government into the philosophical analysis and brought it into relation with the science of man, thus presenting the original theory of the system (state).

How is knowledge possible and how can a knowing subject who goes through that experience recognize that it is really true knowledge? The philosophical problem of "subjectivity and truth" is a kind of resolution of the tension between two judgments. Truth cannot exist without a subject for whom this truth is true, and it is questionable whether a subject as a subject can really access truth. Is it technically possible and theoretically legitimate to use the procedures and criteria inherent in the knowledge of the object for the knowledge of the subject? "What about us, what should we do, how should we behave if it is true that there is and must be a certain truth about us, and moreover a truth that is told to us through what we reject as far as possible from us, that is through madness, illness, death and crime?"