Foucault in Brazil

Between 1965 and 1976, Michel Foucault went to Brazil five times. Although his stays were short, he established relationships with intellectuals and activists that, Marcelo Hoffman argues, furthered his philosophical questioning, social critique, and legacy. Foucault in Brazil documents Foucault's travels, lectures, and publications in Brazil, as well as his dialogues with intellectuals such as Roberto Machado, Maria Lúcia da Souza, Ubirajara Rebouças, and Marilena Chauí. At times, it also explores a provocative question: Just how important was Foucault's experience of the Brazilian dictatorship—its torture and discipline—for the development of his ideas that would culminate in Discipline and Punish, first published in 1975?Hoffman's book consists of six chapters, with its core structured around Foucault's visits to Brazil: his lectures, his audiences, and the evolving Brazilian dictatorship during which they took place. Chapter 2 considers his time in Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte in 1973, chapter 3 his exchanges with Rio-based intellectuals on ideas of social medicine and control in 1974, chapter 4 his political mobilization in São Paulo in 1975 in the context of torture and repression, and chapter 5 his engagement with Karl Marx in Salvador in 1976. Throughout these chapters, Hoffman does an excellent job examining Foucault's reception in Brazil, demonstrating how Brazilians, as readers of Foucault, were “decades ahead of their counterparts in the French-speaking and English-speaking worlds” (p. 27).In Brazil, as it turns out, Foucault gave talks and published texts in Portuguese that would take years and sometimes decades to appear in other languages (even if he always wrote and spoke in French). These include “Truth and Juridical Forms” and “The Birth of Social Medicine.” He also lectured in Brazil on the first volume of his The History of Sexuality prior to its publication, leading to a review in Portuguese by Chaim Samuel Katz that “may have been the very first one . . . anywhere in the world” (p. 101). If nothing else, Hoffman sheds new light on how important Brazil was for Foucault as an audience and how he cultivated relationships to disseminate his thinking. This is a common trope in French–Latin American intellectual exchange, even for those Frenchmen who did not spend significant time in Latin America. Maria Eduarda da Mota Rocha's edited volume Bourdieu à Brasileira (2023), for example, shows how Pierre Bourdieu, who never stepped foot in Brazil, became one of the dominant figures in the Brazilian social sciences.As a contextual intellectual history, Hoffman's book situates Foucault in the arc of the Brazilian dictatorship and synthesizes a wide array of scholarship that will be useful to those less familiar with it. He also makes two arguments that are bound to generate further debate among Foucault specialists, acolytes, and critics. The first is that Foucault's long silence about the repression of the Brazilian dictatorship was calculated. Positioning himself against those who see Foucault as complicit with the Brazilian regime, Hoffman argues that “Foucault disclosed another figure of the militant: not only the outspoken combatant in the streets but also the quiet opponent who breaks his or her silence only at a well-calculated and propitious moment in a public space through the prompting of others” (p. 94). The second argument has to do with Foucault's reading of Marx. Many see Foucault's break with the Communist Party and his critiques of Marxism as inaugurating a more conservative turn in his thought; his critique of the state has been read by some, too, as an apology for neoliberalism. Hoffman's reading of Foucault in Salvador (chapter 5) pushes back against these interpretations, showcasing Foucault's readings of Capital at a time when he is held to have abandoned Marx.What is clear in Foucault in Brazil is that the country was an invaluable space for the great French philosopher and in a very different way than his other stomping grounds. Hoffman provides a welcome Latin Americanization of a thinker whose non-European experiences have been captured in Simeon Wade's Foucault in California [A True Story—Wherein the Great French Philosopher Drops Acid in the Valley of Death] (2019) and Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi's Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment (2016). Latin America clearly mattered to Foucault, and Foucault mattered and still matters to many Latin Americans. Hoffman tells us about how this came to be.Historians will naturally be curious to know about the sources for Foucault in Brazil, and in conclusion I should make it clear that the book is not archivally based. Hoffman is thorough in his compilation of Foucault's bibliography—in French, Portuguese, and English—as well as in his analysis of the Brazilian scholarship on which he depends. His close readings of Foucault are also commendable. There are moments, however, when his examination of the role of French and Brazilian diplomats and Brazilian agencies such as the Department of Political and Social Order (DOPS) and the National Information Service (SNI) would have benefited from archival work. Readers will sometimes get the impression that Foucault slipped through the cracks of state actors, when in reality he benefited enormously from French agencies that helped him and Brazilian ones that seem not to have been particularly worried about him

Democracy · Development economics · Dictatorship · Economics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Resistance (ecology) · Sociology · Solidarity · Brazilian cultural history and politics · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Gender, Sexuality, and Education · Law