In an intellectual autobiography, Alessandro Fontana, historian, philosopher, smuggler between Italy and France, recounts how he freely traveled the “ vast avenues of European knowledge “.
It is a beautiful tribute that Jean-Louis Fournel and Xavier Tabet pay to Alessandro Fontana, who died in 2013 and who was their master and then their colleague, by publishing this beautiful and singular work. It also allows us to highlight the work of Publications de la Sorbonne which, through the collection “ Itineraries », strive to read the ego-stories of teacher-researchers produced within the academic framework of accreditation files (HDR), but which are often wonderful feedback on a journey, meetings, ways of working. The editors have, in a second part, added a set of hitherto scattered articles from this “ historian-philosopher », which shows both the breadth of his field of research and its consistency.
From Machiavelli to Foucault
Alessandro Fontana (1939-2013) is one of these little-known intellectual figures, because the reception of their work has remained confined to their field of research, the history of European thought. This book is therefore an invitation to meet this “ character » — Fontana was certainly one, behind his “ staid style of Italian universities » (p. 81) — but also to very fruitful studies on Italian thought.
As his trajectory progresses, Fontana opens doors to philosophical and literary works that we know little about in France: the strength of this historian’s work is to give them a perspective on France, where he is based. from the 1960s ; he becomes a smuggler from Italy to France, and vice versa. From him, professor at the École Normale Supérieure of Fontenay-Saint-Cloud (then Lyon), important work on the work of Machiavelli developed, led mainly by Jean-Claude Zancarini and Jean-Louis Fournel. He was also one of the main actors in the reception in Italy of Michel Foucault, the co-editor of the only book published abroad by the philosopher, Micro-physics of power.
But the interest of the book lies elsewhere. Fontana draws the portrait of a great scholar at work ; he only delivers rare personal elements – a somewhat unhealthy adolescence, furtive and disorderly readings, prolonged late into the night – but an intellectual autobiography of extraordinary quality which is invented over the years.
“ I thus practiced a sort of professional amateurism until the day when, around my forties, after a series of experiments that I had the opportunity and the leisure to carry out in my somewhat erratic research, I ended up understanding me too the sense of what I had done, of what I was doing, and of what all my investigations revolved around, carried out in crisscrossing lengths and breadths, with interruptions, failures and restarts, the vast avenues, as they say, of European knowledge. » (p. 29)
Fontana expresses this awareness in his text by starting by asking the question of the master and the type of knowledge that the master produces. And to emphasize that the entire Western intellectual tradition was transmitted through this system from master to disciple. “ For the master, the question always takes precedence over the answer, the approach over the results, the opening of new areas over old ones. » (p. 35).
Happy poaching
For the generation of intellectuals born just before the war, the question is indeed essential. The historian responds by using “ We » and historicizes this filiation: “ No one taught us the “profession”, we went through philosophy in disorder, as necessities went, practiced literature according to the obligations of teaching, for those who practiced it, learned history on the job (… ) “. They indulged in a sort of happy poaching, and Fontana added not without joy: “ Superbly disdaining fence lines, property titles, posted prohibitions… » (p. 38).
Thus it was literature and, first of all, Proust which brought him face to face during his years of training with “ our responsibilities “, while Research became “ a breviary of education, the opening onto a true aesthetic of existence “. His thesis was the moment of choice for France: he enrolled in Padua, with the subject of the use of ancient myth in contemporary French literature, but arrived in Paris after a stay in Montpellier where he witnessed the arrival of repatriated from Algeria. Fontana changes the subject under the influence of Lévi-Strauss, who “ had on me the effect of the revelation on the road to Damascus » (p. 56). He decides to carry out a thesis entitled Myth and culture. May 68 arrives and here is the literature researcher caught in History.
In the atmosphere “ cosmopolitan of the City », he learned about activism around the Althusserians and met a number of researchers of all kinds. His Italian master, Ruggiero Romano, decided that he was more of a historian than a philosopher and sent him toEHESSwith François Furet and Alphonse Dupront. It was the first who introduced him into historical research circles with Le Roy Ladurie, Daniel Roche, Mona Ozouf. Here he is launched into a collective enterprise of “ historical semantics », and Fontana to undertake, at the beginning of the 1970s, the study of the catalog of titles of the French bookstore in XVIIIe century. The historian limits himself to the analysis of the semantic field of “ method “.
Following this work and at the invitation, this time, of his Italian master, he embarked on a study of scene and highlights “ a speech of order ” Who, “ through the mechanism of censorship, excludes everything it cannot say, desire, death, violence, objects which would reappear, displaced, masked and disguised, on the surface of the stage, in its triple form » (p. 69).
Golden Age
Fontana became Foucauldian without knowing it and, almost naturally, he joined the professor’s seminar at the Collège de France with this common question: “ What is truth like knowing ? » After Proust and Freud, Fontana enters into the thought of Foucault, without ever making him a master, but as if taken by the magnetism that the author of The birth of the clinic (which he translated into Italian in 1969).
The meeting takes place with others, around the young parricide “ with red eyes », Pierre Rivière.
“ Never has the distance seemed so short to us between archives, libraries and places of the “social” where, in a whole network of connections and reciprocal reinforcements, oppressions, dominations apply daily to the body and the soul individuals » (p. 80).
Moment of golden age, undeniably, in the eyes of the researcher who wrote this text in 1994, also a moment of reassurance and new intellectual perspectives, also a founding moment in his teaching – he will subsequently always seek to maintain his seminar in this same spirit.
Fontana took courses at the Collège de France (of which he became co-editor in the 1990s, in the collection Hautes Études/Seuil/Gallimard/EHESS), but he also follows Foucault to the Library, this other place of knowledge. In the middle of the books, the historian throws out “ experiences » and “ manipulations “. Among them, a major project on secrecy: “ The birth of practices of secrecy and of these techniques of simulation and dissimulation of which the first theorists were, precisely, Machiavelli and Guicciardini “.
Research as a stumble
In the journey of this great scholar of XXe century, this investigation, still carried out “ in crab ”, is essential. In 1994, in this text, it was reformulated very clearly ; it was not during the long years of work. This too is one of the great lessons of the book: research is not carried out on major research programs, but in a permanent stumble, in a constant step aside, sometimes chosen, sometimes imposed.
At “ secret “, he opposes the “ enigma » and distinguishes two types of rationality. Hence a vast question about the history of European societies and the play of three functions: that of law, war and government. Fontana chooses, as the domain of application for this hypothesis, that of regimes and forms of representation.
But literature always, as he writes in the last part of his text, comes back to haunt his work as a historian. It is she that he teaches to his studentsENS for many years. Also the second part of the work, as a reflection of this essay on intellectual ego-history, offers a series of studies, sometimes brief but stimulating, on Fontana’s library (notably Rousseau’s companion autobiographers, vice leopardian of absence or even virtue in Machiavelli or a very enlightening article on Michel Foucault).
“ You have to read everything », said Foucault. Fontana read a lot during his life, trying with elegant and precise language not to confine the study of texts to formal questions, but to promote a history of discourses. In this obstinacy and in the writing of this obstinacy, the reader feels an emotion which is no longer just intellectual: an individual reveals himself, “ me, Alessandro Fontana “.