The Theme of Suffering in the Work of M. Foucault

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Abstract

The article reveals the foundations of the theme of suffering in M. Foucault's concept. This topic unfolds at the level of Foucault’s discursive analysis and references to the concept of biopolitics. Knowledge becomes the unifying link for such contradictory phenomena. At the same time, the key thesis in the thinker’s approach is as follows: any knowledge about the world and a person’s place in it is transmitted through symbolic exchange, affects the subject's attitude to the surrounding reality. Suffering appears as a result of the rupture of symbolic exchange under the influence of biopolitics. The gap releases sacred knowledge about the world based on the value-semantic structures of human individual and collective existence. Biopolitics and government aim to gain access to this knowledge. The article examines this approach and evaluates the tools of biopolitics’ impact on the individual in comparison with the psychiatric power that complements such influence. Foucault traces the history of insanity to substantiate the idea of increasing suffering of subjects, extrapolates this idea to the modern social world to demonstrate its socio-political and socio-economic vulnerability. The article shows what grounds Foucault offers for conceptualizing suffering in the context of the powerful influence of biopolitics on a social subject. It is revealed that the government, according to Foucault’s approach, launches the flywheel of biopolitics, which sets, among other things, the goal of seizing this knowledge. A continuation of biopolitics is the psychiatric power, which is also interested in obtaining knowledge.

About the authors

Evgeniy A. Popov

Altai State University

Author for correspondence.
Email: popov.eug@yandex.ru
ORCID iD: 0000-0003-3324-8101

DSc in Philosophy, Professor, Professor, Department of Sociology and Conflictology

66 Dimitrova St., Barnaul, 656049, Russian Federation

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