From “do as I say” to “do as I do”: Foucault or writing as an art of not governing

Foucault ou a escrita como arte de não governar

Abstract

This study seeks to highlight three ways in which the relationship between writing and the art of governing manifests itself. It first examines the critical attitude – or the “art of not being governed like that”– in the religious movement of devotio moderna through a specific reading of Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ and proceeds to examine Jesuit pedagogy as a machine to rarefy writing and govern the (and through the) written word. The article culminates with an invitation to revisit Michel Foucault’s work by looking at what his texts do, rather than what they say or what is said about them. As a teacher-researcher who wrote to both distance himself from his self and to transform himself, Foucault represents a process of subjectivation through writing in which the mediator no longer appears in the attire of the ascetic monk, in the neutral speech of the school manual or in the intimidating form of the inaccessible author, but as a “friend of the text” that is chosen by affinity and to which one can assign the role of a writing instructor. How can we envisage a pedagogical relationship based on writing as an art of neither governing nor being governed?