O “indivíduo perigoso”: o papel das formas jurídicas e do direito penal segundo Michel Foucault

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the relationship between Michel Foucault's theory and the Law, particularly Criminal Law, addressing a subject that has run through Western philosophy since its Greek origins. The study focuses on the figure of the dangerous individual, analyzed by Foucault in two texts from the late 1970s: the conference “About the concept of the ‘Dangerous Individual’ in Nineteenth-Century Legal Psychiatry” and the course Birth of Biopolitics. In these works, Foucault describes how the notion of the dangerous individual emerges and consolidates in the context of nineteenth-century racist theories, linked to processes of psychologization based on ideas of heredity and degeneracy. At the same time, we examine how this conception is later displaced and, to a certain extent, rejected by American neoliberalism, which reinserts crime and the criminal into the logic of the market. In this new perspective, crime is now understood as a risk inherent to individual action, comparable to a bet or investment, whose consequences must be accepted by the subject, without the mediation of subjective or psychological analysis of its causality. Ultimately, this work does not intend to offer a definitive answer to the question, but rather points to a new horizon for investigation: the permanence of these debates on the contemporary scene, especially within the scope of Brazilian criminal legislation.