Violence as a discursive event: foucauldian contributions

Abstract

This article proposes a reflection on violence in Michel Foucault's thought, aiming to present it as a discursive event. Initially, we introduce the notion of the discursive event as developed by Foucault and explain his articulation between the discursive and the non-discursive, considering it as plural, heterogeneous, and marked by historical and social dispersion. Next, we explain that violence is constituted within discursive practices that name, delimit, and legitimize it. In this discussion, we bring together Foucault's own considerations on violence and demonstrate that, through discourses, it becomes inscribed in power relations, arises from discursive constructions of truth, and has direct connections with non-discursive practices. In this section, we also discuss gender violence, considered in this text as resulting from discursive events and directly correlated with non-discursive events. To attest to the effectiveness of this Foucauldian framework, we develop an analytical section, the last one, whose corpus is the podcast Praia dos Ossos. In this approach, we argue that this modality of violence constitutes itself as a discursive practice that produces subjects, normalizes bodies, and is strained by counter-discourses. In conclusion, we emphasize that approaching violence as a discursive event implies understanding it in direct relation to non-discursive events and as an effect of complex historical and institutional conditions.