The truth between the self and the other: Modernity and psychoanalysis in Foucault

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to articulate the category of truth and the records of identity and difference in the analysis of Michel Foucault on modernity and the discourse of Freud. By identity, we understand the order of distribution of words and things in a given period of history, and by difference, it is what is out from the thought, is foreign and appears as an event. However, this arrangement between the self and the other is the condition of possibility of this analysis, one that investigates the historical truth of who we are, as well as a criticism of yourself, which includes the possibility of the thought reinventing itself, overcoming its limits. In that scenario, psychoanalysis emerges as a discourse of the unconscious, which points to the finitude of man and to the tragic experience of madness. Therefore, it is a modality of thinking where the events introduce new forms of truthfulness.