Foucault in Brazil

Why Brazil?That is, why did Foucault make several trips to Brazil over the span of some ten years?After all, he had not published scholarly work related to Brazilian history or culture, nor was his work especially focused on the Western hemisphere or issues that would lead a scholar to turn their interests to Brazil, issues such as slavery or imperialism.Although it does not definitively answer the question (indeed, this question may be impossible to definitively answer), Foucault in Brazil offers readers a variety of intriguing responses to this question.In my remarks here today, I'll focus on two.Marcelo Hoffman deftly traces the significance of Foucault's five visits to Brazil during the decade spanning 1965-1976 in order to show how Brazil mattered for Foucault's thought and to show how Foucault's interventions in Brazilian cultural and political life continue to matter for us today.I want to develop two related themes that emerge from Hoffman's analysis: how Foucault understood the Brazilian authoritarian security state and how his engagement with this state provides us a model for how to engage with this type of state.After briefly explaining what I mean by characterizing Brazil as "an authoritarian security state," I review Foucault's various engagements in Brazil as presented by Hoffman.I conclude by briefly comparing Foucault's engagement in Brazil in terms of his intellectual praxis and his complicated relationship with Marx's thought.In addition to showing us how and why Foucault's engagement with Brazil matters, Hoffman's work contributes to a reassessment of Foucault.Once thought of as a cool intellectual who eschewed intellectual engagement (this was thought to be one of the key ways he distinguished himself from Jean-Paul Sartre), Hoffman presents us with a very different Foucault, one engaged in various social movements in way that brings him in closer proximity to the Sartrean engaged intellectual.For Hoffman this reconsideration of Foucault's role as an intellectual engaged with contemporary political debates entails a reconsideration of his relationship with Marx

Authoritarianism · Michel foucault · Politics · Praxis · TRIPS architecture · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Gender, Sexuality, and Education · Philosophy and Social Theory