Cristianismo e racionalidade política moderna em Michel Foucault

Abstract

Based on On the Government of the Living, a course taught by Michel Foucault in 1980 at the Collège de France and published only recently in 2012, the article intends to follow the reading of early Christianity and its relation to modern political rationality (keeping in mind that in Foucault´s approach regimes of truth are always articulated to regimes of power). Foucault studies different procedures of manifestation of truth and several practices and devices (such as baptism, confession, penance, and the direction of conscience) that constitute Christian subjectivity and, consequently, Western subjectivity. In his reading, Foucault highlights two basic obligations for the functioning of pastoral power (which will tend to extrapolate the field of religious practices to invade the domain of politics in modernity): obey completely (do not want anything by yourself) and do not hide anything (tell all about yourself).