Vol. 3 No. 2 (2024)
Biopolitics

Articles

Po(e/li)tical Anarchaeology of the Outside: Essays on Foucault, Truth and Freedom

Published 2024-12-27 — Updated on 2024-12-28

  • Egor Dorozhkin

Egor Dorozhkin
M.I. Glinka Nizhny Novgorod State Conservatory

Abstract

Today, Michel Foucault's concept of disciplinary power is one of the most represented in the academic intellectual field. The common knowledge of Foucault's legacy gives rise to controversial perceptions of him, making him a convenient object of criticism. In particular, Michel Foucault is forgotten as a thinker who proposed one of the most subtle theory-practices of the liberation of the subject. The aim of this text is to explicate the philosophical foundations of Foucauldian archaeology, allowing us to take it beyond the ‘critical barbarism’ of contemporary culturalists and offer a formal-materialist interpretation. The article demonstrates that this kind of foundation is the problem of the impossible Outside as differential immanence and the consequent heterogeneity of truth. From the author's point of view, it is the heterogeneity, not the neutrality, of truth that is the main subject of archaeological research, and it is also the reason for Foucault's fundamental (un)coincidence of truth with freedom, which shaped his research on power and sexuality. There is no subject without truth, there is no truth without freedom, and in their absence there remain only the contingent possibilities of language, closed off from the outside and incapable of the mysterious in its simplicity ‘I say’. Thus, this article attempts to comprehend Foucauldian archaeology as going beyond the stable stereotype about it, capable of plunging into the actual problems of the new materialism and universalism.

Keywords

archaeology, Outside, negativity, atheology, truth, freedom, subject, optico-linguistic difference, differential immanence

PDF (Russian)

Author Biography

Egor Dorozhkin

Ph.D. in Philosophy, Associate professor, Department of Philosophy and Aesthetics, M.I. Glinka Nizhny Novgorod State Conservatory; Nizhny Novgorod, Russia.

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