PROBLEMATIZATION AND CRITICAL GESTURE IN MICHEL FOUCAULT’S THOUGHT

Abstract

Our aim in this essay is draft some small notes about Michel Foucault's conception of criticism, linking it to – or making it indistinguishable from – the exercise of what the French thinker called problematization in some of your later texts. Extending an analytical movement that began a long time ago, we defend that Foucault's critical exercise, understood as a permanent and infinite work, would be something indistinguishable from a movement of incessant questioning of the present time. A movement, in the matter of fact, capable of generating a constant state of alert for the ways in which we constitute ourselves as subjects. Such analyzes aim to provide subsidy for educational researchers interested in making use of Foucault's conceptual apparatus but concerned with not transmuting the methodological tools elaborated by Foucault into chains of thought. To do so, we defend the use of plastic notions of problematization and a certain Foucauldian conception of criticism.