Escravos, selvagens e loucos: estudos sobre figuras da animalidade no pensamento de Nietzsche e Foucault

Abstract

This study is a contribution to the line of research in epistemology, especially the educational episteme that dialogues with philosophical theories. Its general objective is to understand the problem of education (as a civilization project) Its specific purpose is to investigate three figures of animality in the philosophies of Nietzsche‟s and Foucault‟s, namely, the slave, the savage and the madman. For this purpose we follow the historical-philosophical method that seeks to reconstitute the sources For this purpose we follow the historical-philosophical method that seeks to reconstitute the sources of readings of both philosophers and their resonances in the current debate. In the first place, we interpret the posthumous text of the young Nietzsche titled The Greek State and some passages From the Government of the Living and The knowledge of Oedipus of of how liberal democracy concealed the slave life and how the of how the Greek aleturgie ends in the memory of slaves: ritual of truth which indicates the violent relationship between knowledge, power and tragic animality.Secondly, we analyze the figure of the savage by approaching some passages of Human, Too Human I with some ethnological findings of John Lubbock in his classic work Origins of the Civilization and the primitive condition of the man and later the figure of the cynical philosopher as savage, set forth in The Courage of Truth for, respectively, to approach the moralization of the wild soul by modern asceticism and the relation between cynical asceticism and animality. Still in this second part of the research, we analyze the phenomenon of cornarism and aphrodisia: categories that are covered in Twilight of the Idols and History of Sexuality II: the use of pleasures and that deal with the problematic relationship between appetite and pleasure, between vice and animality. Finally, the third part analyzes the figure of the madman and his status of animality, now as a figure of political domestication in collective deliriums, called by Nietzsche in addition to good and evil as a herd animal, now as an experiment of freedom pathologized in the image of the docile and productive animal exposed in History of madness. In the three investigative steps of this study we arrive at the fundamental nucleus of the thesis that is to make explicit the category of animality as a phenomenon closely linked to the problems between slave life and democratic life, between moral nature and shameful pleasures, between delusions of power and bestiality of the madman, sometimes as a deviant animal, sometimes as an experiment of animality in biopolitics.