Protrepsis

Editorial

Hermann Omar Amaya Velasco — 2025-05-31

Michel Foucault: Method or Perspective? Horizons and Paradoxes of Intellectual Work (Outlines and Conjectures for the Transmission of Michel Foucault's Work)

Luis Fernando Macías García — 2025-05-31

The aim of this paper is to articulate and structure the following aspects related to a possible conception of the method in Michel Foucault's research and teaching. It will mainly try to show how, during many years of working as a professor, we have considered the problem of method as a question of intelligibility. This essay considers the problem of method, morality, the intellectual's profession and the problematic of his intervention in the field of the social sciences as a horizon of reflection.

Technobiopolitics: Algorithmic subjects and resistance devices. An analysis from Foucault's perspective.

Christian Guillermo Gómez Vargas — 2025-05-31

The article analyzes the concept of automatic subject in the context of neoliberal capitalism, integrating perspectives from Foucault´s analysis, considering new interpretations of Marx´s philopsophy. This concept depicts how contemporary social and production relations function in such a way that individuals are stripped of their own agency, becoming mere mechanisms of a capitalist automaton apparatus, generating a deeply alienated form of subjectivity. The article´s objective is to highlight the philosophical implications of this transformation on subjectivity, suggesting that power in modern capitalism is shown not only through direct coercion, but through surveillance and normalization mechanisms that compromise individual behavior and perception. Foucault´s work is crucial to think and illustrate how these dynamics of control have evolved towards a digital algorithmic surveillance which reinforces the subject´s loss of agency. It raises the urgency of developing resistance strategies that defy these control devices while reaffirming the need to restore the sense of autonomy and human freedom. Foucauldian´s reflection on power and subjectivity thereby becomes the foundation for imagining a critical way of life that not only questions the prevailing systems but also aspires to an ethic that promotes freedom and care of the others as disruptive practices in the face of the capital´s dominion. Such as the notion of care of the self or the meddling of art, understood as a counter-dispositive, as opposed to the hegemonic discourses of power and meaning.

Mutations of power in capitalism. From the disciplinary body to the subject of entrepreneurship in Foucault's neoliberalism

Enrique G. Gallegos — 2025-05-31

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the mutations of the concept of power in Michel Foucault's philosophy. To this end, two problems are taken as the core of analysis: the disciplinary body and the subject of entrepreneurship. On these two axes, it is examined, firstly, how, based on the genealogical analysis of closed spaces (such as workshops, prisons, barracks and hospitals), together with the administration of plague and leprosy, and the panoptic design of prisons, the disciplinary body is constituted. In this way, docile, useful and productive bodies are produced as effects of the power of disciplines. This distances Foucault from the concept of power in political science or legal theory, as a quality, attribute, or function. The article also specifies how the genealogical study of power raises the emergence of a disciplinary society that would be the basis for the development and take-off of capitalism. Based on the category of the technologies of power, secondly, the passage from the disciplinary body to the subject of entrepreneurship is proposed. In Foucault, we can find a whole typology of technologies of power: technologies of sovereignty, technologies of security, technologies of sex, technologies of the self. This concept of technology is key to understanding the passage from the disciplinary body to the subject of entrepreneurship in neoliberalism. Neoliberalism develops its technology of power, which Foucault calls technologies of environmental, whose objective is to produce a subject who internalizes the logic of the market, the calculation of costs and benefits, competition and returns; and whose social, daily and family relations operate under the form of the enterprises. Finally, some brief conclusions are presented, including the thesis of the author's sympathy for neoliberalism.

The Unwritten Foucaultian History of Sexuality: The Flesh and the Body.

Juan Cruz Cuamba Herrejón — 2025-05-31

This article carries out a detailed, contextual and punctual reconstruction of one of the versions of Foucault's manuscript, contained in box LXXXIX of his archives kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and which was to be the second volume of History of Sexuality entitled The Flesh and the Body, which was ultimately not published. The reconstruction referred to is centered on the concept of flesh and the apparatus of confession, making a genealogical review of its three main models, namely the accusatory, the inquisitorial and the examiner. In this manuscript, flesh is understood as the element that connects the soul to the body through sexuality. The present text closes with Foucault's recovery of the definition of the modern subject as an animal of confession and asks to what extent this subject continues to be such and to what extent it could cease to be so.

Technologies of the Self and Subjectivity

Hermann Omar Amaya Velasco — 2025-05-31

This text presents an analysis of the meaning of human rights, conceived as a distinctive attribute inherent to human beings by virtue of their humanity. By critically examining this definition, the essay offers a reflection on the assumptions and potential risks of grounding human rights in the framework of natural law and in universalist conceptions of the human. Drawing upon Michel Foucault’s notions of technologies of the self, power, and biopolitics, the argument seeks to trace an alternative set of premises for rethinking the foundations of human rights. The central thesis posits that it is possible to articulate a minimal principle of intelligibility for human rights by reconstructing the notion of subjectivity developed by the French philosopher, particularly during the final years of his intellectual trajectory in the 1980s.

Cynicism, Resistance, and Art: Inquiries from Foucault's Late Work

Abraham G. Aldrete — 2025-05-31

This paper explores the relationship between cynicism, resistance and art from the perspective of the late Foucault. First, cynicism is analyzed as the courage of truth, understood not only as a radical critique of power, but also as a life practice that challenges established norms. From this basis, cynicism is examined as a form of resistance, considering how its disruptive potential allows to confront structures of domination and propose new forms of subjectivation. Subsequently, the relationship between cynicism and pleasure is addressed, highlighting that the cynical philosopher is not a slave to desire, but seeks simple and natural pleasures, in tune with nature. For the cynic, it is not a matter of rejecting pleasure, but of avoiding those desires whose satisfaction depends on others. Thus, the search for accessible pleasures, free from external ties, becomes a strategy of self-determination and resistance to the mechanisms of social control. Finally, the relationship between contemporary art and cynicism is analyzed. According to Foucault, Modern art no longer seeks imitation or ornamentation, but a radical exercise of unmasking and reducing existence to its essence. Thus, cynicism in art becomes a practice of truth that challenges the dominant discourses and reveals new possibilities of resistance.

Michel Foucault and Ethical Subjectivity in Social Mobilizations for Health in Colombia

Lu An González Santiago — 2025-05-31

The recognition of ethical subjectivities of reflexive indocility is possible from the dialogue with Michel Foucault in the context of social mobilizations for health in Colombia, it allows us to understand that the event is the production of the subject by the modes of government over life, subjects historically located in the health system who suffer the effects of regulatory discourses and the crises that produce critical and reflective experimentation of themselves as a strategic element to not be governed within the negative limits of the disease. On the contrary, it consolidates the governance of life through the constitution of an ethical subjectivity, an emancipatory bet that proposes access to the truth of oneself that challenges the effects of regimes as a liberating practice that nourishes critical resistance and self-care as a front in social struggles for health. In the present problematization it is coherent to evoke Foucauldian theory on governmentality to analyze the techniques of control over the life and body of patients and communities in contrast with the critical and reflective production in the constitution of the ethical subjectivity of patients as an axis of the current social mobilizations for health in Colombia.

Foucault’s Climactic Vitalism: A New Core of Resistance

Karla Castillo Villapudua — 2025-05-31

This article elaborates a reflection on Deleuze's reading of the late Foucault, particularly in the text ‘The folds or the inside of thought’. First, it reviews Deleuze's interpretation of the return to the Greeks in relation to the care of oneself and the care of others, oscillating between the axes of knowledge and power. Then, it presents how Deleuze argues that even though subjectivities are co-opted, it is possible to establish a power over life that resists any imposed codification or identification. Next, we analyze the affirmative biopolitics that coincides with that affirmative vitalism that Deleuze found in the relationship with himself explored by Foucault. Finally, we reflect on the liberating effectiveness of betting on a reactivation of vitalism through an affirmative biopolitics.

Abyssing Discursive Formations: Entanglements of Maya Ch'ol Being versus Being Someone in Life

Eleazar Jiménez López — 2025-05-31

Subjective experience is the problematic node that is posed in the first person as an effort to expose and expose oneself as a part of the historicized reality of the subject, that is, as a recounting of how modernity permeates us. Politicizing subjectivity is a daring attempt to shake off and strip oneself from a place of enunciation: from the Mayan Ch'ol being and being someone in life. Two positions that have constituted identity complementing each other, the first as an approximation to a current ontology and the second as a capitalist morality. The recounting of the damages is an effort to look differently. I am what they have made of me. The privatization of the body, soul, emotions and dreams are imperatives of the ontology of the present. The politicization of subjectivity raises possibilities of being different and distant from the current technologies of subjectivation. A crisis of existence is raised from remembering the past to understand the present and catapult the future. The three verbal tenses come into play, which ultimately enrich the discursive formations of the subject to make it a self-exploration of subjectivity. A necessary reflection is presented for the current times that one is for having and accumulating.

Nothing is total: Michel Foucault's turn and the figure of the archivist as an disobedient artist

María Yolanda García Ibarra — 2025-05-31

This essay locates the thought of Michel Foucault as a pioneer of the philosophical turn around the archive paradigm: by observing the documentary genesis, understood beyond historical traditions, and from the Foucauldian imprint, it will be possible to show how archival practices embody a sensitivity specific to the archivist-artist. The plot transitions of this work do not seek to exhaust the theme, on the contrary, the objective is to reveal a living line of work still in process and launched by creative subjectivities.