A brief summary about our first POBICS seminar

As I posted the last week, yesterday we held the first session of the seminary about the Foucaultian's course by Deleuze with the first five chapters of the book "El Saber". 

The meeting was so interesting because we achieved to answer several questions about the Foucault's work. The index of the seminary was:

1. What is knowledge?
2. What is archeology? / Why do archeology?
3. What is a file?
4. Four Deleuzian thesis on the components of knowledge
5. Why Foucault is a Kantian?
6. What is a statement? / Criticism of traditional linguistics

During the two hours of the reunion we discussed about this questions, some easier to answer than others. The key idea is around the first question (what is knowledge in Foucault?) and how we can extract a statement. We deduced that extract, in this sense, is a synonymous of "compose" because there isn't a concrete way to operate in order to "catch" the statement from phrases, clauses, sentences or words.

The most important process in order to do this, is summarized in these points:

1. Build a corpus: a set of words, phrases ... where we clear regularities.
2. Where can we look for the corpus? In the foci of power.
3. The foci of power are drawn from the daily practices, not from great authors (this practice is inherited from the School of the Annales)

Along the session, Francisco Tirado drew at the blackboard the graphic you can watch in the blog's image. This represent an example about a sentence: "Yoga is a health practice". He showed this example because in the Deleuze's book is quite difficult to understand or apprehend what is a statement with the illustration he gives.

So we have the sentence "Yoga is a healthy practice" and we have "cut" the sentence:

Yoga: it has been a science, a way of life, not a practice. It never was linked to health, but happiness. Nonetheless,  today we can link it to the practice and health. This is because there is a rule that allows them to join: the imperative of health. The imperative of health is the extracted (or composed) statement of this sentence.

The imperative of health operates in different and heterogeneous systems forming the associated field: in medicine, yoga, day by day, the law ...

There is a particular object, is dispersed, is spoken. It is the boundary of the statement.

The subject is what is left out of the intersection of the heterogeneous systems, such as when we exceed the health imperative till hypochondria.

The concept is the intersection of all areas where health imperative works. What remains amid of the whole intersection.

That's all. We wait for you next week (Wednesday, Social Psychology department of the Autonomous University of Barcelona). We hope too your comments and answers to the questions we have posed. 

PhotoCredit: by my self at the seminary.