Between Foucault and Brown: the writing of history and the role of the intellectual in the analysis of neoliberal subjectivation processes

Abstract

The article proposes a comparison between Michel Foucault's and Wendy Brown's research based on the criticisms and complementarities proposed by the American thinker derived from her reading of The Birth of Biopolitics. Initially, the explanation of how Foucault writes his historical research in the context of his critique of humanism has the function of helping to understand the differences in the intellectual roles adopted. The refusal of dialectical history appears linked, then, to the criticism of the figure of the universal intellectual supposedly capable of revealing an anthropological destiny. It is precisely in the development of an archaeological and genealogical way of doing history that the analysis of subjectivation processes makes sense for Foucault. Thus, Brown's critical interpretation is contextualized in relation to Foucauldian methodology. In addition to Brown's reading of Foucault's analysis of neoliberal subjectivation processes, in the development of the article, the author's own arguments about the impacts of neoliberal rationality on the political forces of the present are analyzed. Finally, we seek to point out the gains and dangers of the two perspectives in relation to the intellectual role they support.