Foucault and Witches. Confessional Subjectivities and Resistance of the Flesh (original) (raw)

2012, Materiali Foucaultiani

"Foucault and Witches. Confessional Subjectivities and Resistance of the Flesh Foucault is often accused of focusing too much on the omnipresence of power, while giving only scant attention to the productivity of struggle and resistance against it. In an attempt to correct this view, the present article tries to cast a fresh look on pastoral power through an exploration of the role of witchcraft and possession in the thought of the French philosopher. Both witchcraft and possession are thus exposed as practices of resistance, inscribed in a system of power relations to which they were the “odd term”, a resistant extension undermining power from within. According to Foucault, the end of witchcraft and the rise of the problem of possession illuminate the emergence of a new strategic field of power relations centred not on the juridico-political paradigm, but on the production of subjectivities through positive incitement of the relationship of the self with the self. This is what I call “a confessional society”. Keywords: Pastoral, Biopolitics, Confession, Witches, Possession, Resistance of the flesh." http://www.materialifoucaultiani.org/en/rivista/volume-i-number-1.html

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