Michel Foucault on Problematization, Parrhesia and Critique 139
into problems to which the diverse solutions will attempt to produce a response, this is what constitutes the point of problematization and the specific work of thought»15. However, this dimension of problematization as object of inquiry names just one side of Foucault’s critical project: indeed, while it is concerned with the analysis of «the problematizations through which being offers itself to be, necessarily, thought»16, it further problematizes the seemingly necessary character of the practices that have been produced on their basis, whereby problematization itself assumes the verbal meaning of an act of critical interrogation: «The role of an intellectual […] is, through the analyses that he carries out, in his own field, to question […] what is postulated as self-evident, to disturb people’s mental habits, […] to dissipate what is familiar and accepted, to reexamine rules and institutions and on the basis of this reproblematization […] to participate in the formation of a political will […]»17. As an activity of inquiry, problematization brings to light the problems that have triggered the development of particular practices, while simultaneously interrogating the way such problematics persistently condition our way of constituting and representing ourselves. This means that the objective of Foucault’s archaeo-genealogical investigations is not only to describe historical problematizations, but also to unmask and challenge them by questioning the inevitability and rational necessity of the practices, institutions, techniques and functions that have been construed as their responses. To put it differently, by unfreezing the problematizations frozen in sedimented, ossified practices and technologies Foucault strips the latter of their familiarity and naturalness, thus opening the theoretical and effective space for experimentally imagining new possibilities of relating to ourselves and to others. In sum, problematization denotes the two sides in which Foucault’s critical project is articulated: on the one hand, posing itself at the intersection of different practical vectors, it represents a contingent and anonymous regime of veridiction that determines the subject’s forms of experience (problematization as object of critical inquiry). On the M. Foucault, Polemics, Politics, Problemizations. An Interview, in M. Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. P. Rabinow, Pantheon Books, New York 1984, pp. 381-390, p. 389, text amended. 16 M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, p. 10. 17 M. Foucault, The Concern for Truth, p. 265, emphasis added. 15