FOUCAULT'S GAMES: FROM THE TRUTH OF DESIRE TO THE COURAGE OF TRUTH
game; desire; psychoanalysis; truth; parrhesia.
Although not always explicit, Michel Foucault's interest in psychoanalysis was deep and enduring. Too deep, perhaps, to make him a mere partisan; but lasting enough to, without detracting from its rigor, engender in him frequent changes of perspective in relation to her. The Will to Knowledge (1976) and the other volumes of the History of Sexuality (1984a, 1984b, 2018) illustrate this. The first presents a set of essays critical to the founding concepts of psychoanalysis, and the others, from a genealogical perspective, take up essential notions such as “sexuality” and “desire” from it. However, The Will to Knowledge can also be approached from other perspectives, as an “invitation to philosophy” and as a “philosophical game”. In the first case, it should not be interpreted as an invitation to philosophical discourse, but rather to philosophical practice. In the second, it is the fact that its origin comes from practices that contain game characteristics that allows it to be conceived as a philosophical game. In view of this, there are two objectives: to contextualize the conception of The Will to Knowledge through a survey of Foucault's relationship with psychoanalysis and to theoretically situate Foucault's philosophical game from a review of the philosophical notions of game. In a second moment, the notion of desire is problematized and the problem of true-saying is addressed within the scope of the ethical constitution of the subject. Here too, there are two objectives: to point out the passage from “criticism of the truth of desire” to “appreciation of the courage of truth” as constituting an ethos; and to articulate the “philosophical way of life” with “parrhesia”. At this point, some questions arise: given the innumerable forms taken by parrhesia throughout history, should we not admit that the practice of parrhesia is largely adaptable and, therefore, subject to adaptation to the contemporary world? Given the functions historically performed by parrhesia, is it not reasonable to assume that, once acclimated to certain current scenarios, this practice should be recognized as a device for the ethical constitution of the subject? Furthermore, is it not likely that the parrhesiastic game, by maintaining a constitutive relationship with the truth, would exert a decisive influence on the ethical formation of the subject who opts for the intellectual way of life? Finally, apart from some hypotheses and ideas linked to them, the problems and arguments reproduced here are largely based on reviews of primary and secondary literature, as well as on works by Michel Foucault's interlocutors.