Discurso, função sujeito e ideologia no pensamento de Michel Foucault: Interfaces com Michel Pêcheux

Abstract

My writing for this Dossier aims to think about Michel Foucault's contributions to the field of language, taking the specificities of the concepts of discourse, subject function and ideology, establishing parallels to the same concepts used by Michel Pêcheux and their implications for Discourse Analysis (AD). The hypothetical idea that I will cover is that discourse in Foucault's perspective is not directed as an extension of 'language sciences' - such as linguistics, logic, grammar and even AD - but acquires an eminently philosophical character, which does not can be reduced to scientific and epistemological questions, although it does not exclude them. Pêcheux and Foucault co-create the concept of 'discursive formation', but the first relates it directly to ideology and class struggle, while discourse in Foucault's perspective is not a production of what is said by something or someone, but a set on which they can be determined the dispersion of the subject and its discontinuity in relation to itself. While the subject of Pecheutian discourse is affected by ideology and unconscious, which makes him an effect of language, also establishing his 'place of speech', for Foucault, the subject is the one who can use a certain statement depending on the occupation of a place institutional, of its technical competence, according to practices admitted in an entire game of truth, depending on the different positions it occupies in the discourse. The ideology for AD of French Pecheutian affiliation is the organizing principle of discursive formation, a mechanism that authorizes what is said. Already in Foucault, a discourse does not annul its relationship with ideology, but puts it back into question as a discursive formation, functioning not as the component of the discourse, but rather as one of its components. It follows that the functioning of ideology can only be described as a discursive practice, among other practices. On a practical level, Foucault never attempted to develop an operational discourse analysis device, on the contrary, he aims to show that our conceptual and disciplinary support bases are barely effective.