This article examines three terms associated with the take-up of Foucault’s analysis of the biopolitical, namely identity, nature and life. It argues that Foucault opposes their reduction respectively to sameness, to origin, or to some primordial force. These reductions not only fall into species of metaphysics, they fail to recognize the integration of difference and of constitutive relationality in Foucault’s conceptualization of the process of subjectivation and becoming as historically dynamic and mobile. The article emphasizes the importance of historicization and (...) of a constructive genealogy in Foucault’s approach, running counter to metaphysics, and opening new avenues for political action based on the recognition of the interiority of resistance to dispositifs of power and of the creative force in individuation. (shrink)

This article posits that in Foucault’s later work we find not a forgetting of literature, but a reformulation of the role that literature had come to occupy in his work, and that, in this later work, there is a trace of the texts on literary thought that he wrote from the 1960s to the mid-1970s. Drawing upon Foucault’s later work, I reconsider the key question: What relationship does literature, as literature, have with the political dimension of discourses? This necessarily goes (...) hand-in-hand with the classic question concerning the truth of literature: How does literature tell the truth? (shrink)

The ArgumentFew spaces have been given such great importance as national space. It is often seen as the fulfillment of a predestination–simultaneously geographical, political, ethnic, and functional – granted affirmation by history. This being especially true for the French territory with its ancient history.This paper takes a different approach as regards the establishment of knowledge concerning the national territory. Looking at two of the many ways of knowing the territory–proto-statistics and the map–it aims at showing that the acquisition of this (...) knowledge is a discontinuous, partly cumulative process, with social, political, and cognitive rationales, which were heterogeneous and even contradictory for a long period of time. (shrink)

Parfois déconsidérée, au cours du XXe siècle, parce que pensée comme la simple écume de processus historiques et sociaux plus profonds, la notion d'événement semble avoir, depuis, bénéficié d'un évident retour en grâce au sein des sciences humaines et sociales - en histoire et en philosophie au premier chef, mais aussi en sociologie, en anthropologie, en linguistique ou en psychanalyse. La référence à l'événement, très utilisée aujourd'hui, donne cependant lieu à des investissements multiples, suppose différentes manières d'articuler le temps et (...) l'histoire, met en jeu des conceptions non équivalentes de la subjectivité, et sous-tend des compréhensions de la rationalité très diverses. Mobilisant tour à tour les analyses de Fernand Braudel et de Reinhart Koselleck, de Jacques Rancière et de Michel Foucault, d'Henri Bergson et de Gilles Deleuze, de Walter Benjamin et d'Hannah Arendt, de Sigmund Freud et de Claude Lévi-Strauss, les essais qui composent ce volume explorent la cartographie complexe et variée des questionnements que la notion contribue à faire émerger et à nourrir."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

In order to think the becoming-political of women is it also necessary to think the becoming-woman of politics? It is clear that an analysis of changes in the paradigm of work and its feminisation, is above all else to understand if gender oppositions or the construction of sexual identities permit the emergence of new modalities of political aggregation or if, on the contrary, it is once again a question of thwarting disciplinary mechanisms. The deconstruction of the processes by which identity (...) becomes fixed is without doubt the price of a veritable politics of the multitude, and it is precisely here that women’s voices are precious: perhaps because they tell us that differentiation to the infinite and becoming-other have dragged generation down to its biological reduction and made possible a political ontology of creation. (shrink)

Moving from the analogy with Spinoza, the essay defines the figure and the work of Foucault as a unique and particular event and as the effect of some specific historical and intellectual processes. The heresy of Foucault is thus unexpectedly preceded by George Lukács' History and Class Consciousness, while at the same time it must be linked with the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty: in both cases there are at stake an “open” history and a dialectics without a possible synthesis. These (...) same elements return in the way Foucault shows the radical historicity of political subjects and of power itself. This story, which is dispelled in the multiplicity of its processes and events, becomes a space for Foucault's political ontology and allows defining him a political philosopher of history. (shrink)

t. 1. De l'antiquité à la Renaissance, ou de la naissance de la philosophie à la naissance de la science (VIe siècle avant notre ère-1400. t. 2. La philosophie pendant la science (XVe, XVIe et XVIIe siècles).

Quand, en 2010, Claude Lefort publie le volume des Œuvres de Merleau-Ponty en collection Quarto, il choisit de placer l’éditorial par lequel Merleau-Ponty inaugure, en 1945, la revue Les Temps Modernes, en tout début de volume. Ce texte, c’est « La guerre a eu lieu », qui ouvre, dans les Œuvres, une première partie, consacrée à « L’intelligence de l’histoire et le jugement politique à l’épreuve des événements ». La seconde partie, consacrée à « L’interrogation philosophique », s’ouvre quant à...