A philosophical life: the Socratic PARRESIA against the coercions of power

Abstract

Foucault demarcates the limits of modern society from the well-known shift from the sovereign state to biopower, through the relationship between power, life and death. His thesis is that, before the 18th century, the sovereign was symbolized by the gladius, which meant that he exercised over his subjects “the power to cause death or to let live”. From classical times onwards, due to a profound transformation in the mechanisms of power, the right over death shifted to be based on the demands of a power that “manages life”. In this new configuration, we find two axes of biopower: disciplines (governing the bodies of individuals) and biopolitics (governing the population). Until then, Foucault's thinking has been marked by the constant coercion of power-knowledge mechanisms over the subject. However, at the last moment of Foucault's thinking, called an “Ethics” or “Aesthetics of existence”, the philosopher turns to the Greeks to find a critical thinking in which individuals are not mere effects of a power that coerces and subjects, but of a life as a work of art, a philosophical life, as we will think of Socrates.