Christianity and forms of veridiction: Foulcaultian resonances

Abstract

The introduction of christianity as an object of analysis in the work of Michel Foucault marks a new moment in his intelectual course, Where the author commits hinself to the project of a geneology of ethic and forms of subjectivation in the West. The objetive of this paper consists in pointing to the importance os christianity in the formulations that Foucault made startings in the 1970’s, specially on what concerns to his studies on ethic, truth and subjectivity. For that, we analyzed the development of this the me in the intelectual’s work, specially the courses ministraded by Foucault in College de France. Another central point to the discussion were the concepts os exomologesis and exagoreusis, forms of penitence in christianity which points to a shift in how regimes of truth function in the West. The shift in paying penitence as a public performative act to a confession by word can be traced as a point of conection between christian practices and modern subjectivity, in that of which concers to the Productions of forms of interpretation and relation of the subject with itself based on confessional dispositives. Finally we searched, based on foucaultian thought, to make a paralel between the christian penitential dispositive of exagoreusis and different power-knowledge relations of modernity (such as law, psychiatry and psychology) that utilize the confessional alegory as a disciplinary practice and Productions of subjectivity and truth