Workshop and message
Online
Our Yale Workshop for Theory and Contemporary Critical Thought continues its activities during this pandemic world of COVID-19. There are many reasons to do so; however, one alone is the right and valid one: the graduate students, friends, and thinkers who animate it are willing to do so. Thinking together is –as I understand– the right way to show mutual support and solidarity. COVID-19 is an organic single-strand RNA virus surrounded and protected with a lipid layer taking the form of a crown that has organically transformed our ways of interacting with one another.
For this session, we are reading some of the lectures Michel Foucault delivered at the PUC, in Rio de Janeiro, with the title “A verdade e as formas jurídicas” –“Truth and Juridical Forms”. Through the genealogy of some institutions, the question Foucault asks is: what is the statute and the regime of truth that can be found out by means of juridical forms? What do these juridical forms look like? How are they connected with the emergences of criminal law (droit pénal, derecho penal)? Isn’t the pénal, political from a to z? How? Some of those juridical forms seem to be a thing of the past, like the ordeal, the test, or the inquisition, but, are they? Let’s just put those nouns in the presence of our discourses of truth-gathering and our regimes of truth: test, ordeal, inquest. Do they sound familiar? How can we de-normalize them? Should we?
The current crisis has given a completely new meaning to other important parts of Foucault’s research interests. In the first place, those that include forms of institutionalization. Second, the emergence of the concept of biopolitics, which, in Foucault’s research is directly linked to the genealogy of liberalism and its metamorphoses. Our current voluntary and necessary reclusion, social distancing, and forms of separation back to the nation and to the nuclear family are, indeed, both forms of institutionalization and biopolitical devices. Will we normalize them?
I am a simple convener of Iberian Connections. It is my duty to thank the institutions that make possible that Iberian Connections, and our commitment to Medieval and Early Modern Studies and Contemporary Critical Thought, are alive. And I do it very happily.
It is my privilege, above all, to thank the graduate students, lecturers, staff, and faculty who are the essential part of Iberian Connections and animate it with their intellectual and personal energy. This crisis has put an incredibly heavy burden on their shoulders: now, they have to teach classes online, for which they have had to all but stop their research, learn new skills, change their schedule, share their personal and private space, and even reduce their time for well deserved rest, in order to adapt at a quick pace, to the new and pressing circumstances. Their generosity, at the expenses sometimes of their health and time, must be thanked. And I thank them, I thank you.
- Jesús R. Velasco
