Foucault’s uses

Philippe Artières and Mathieu Potte-Bonneville offer us, with According to Foucaultan exciting literary and political exercise. The back cover indicates about the authors: historian for the first and philosopher for the second. But reading the book denies these easy shares. We slide from one chapter to another without rupture (without finding: a purely factual chapter to which a purely conceptual chapter would succeed). We thus find a great homogeneity of style, as if their repeated reading had printed an almost identifiable curvature, and which would be the trace in writing (I mean a classic style, devoid of jargon and talkative effects, with sometimes calculated jolts, a certain austerity too). Above all, each time, it is a question of problematizing a practice of thought: to speak, to teach, write, edit, laugh … This attention paid to “ gesture Is essential. In 1984, in his last year of courses at the Collège de France, Foucault distinguished, about cynics, “ doctrine traditionality ” And “ Tradition of existence ». The first demands from his faithful that one tries to restore, against the oblivion that threatens, the original and vibrant identity of a lost truth. The second requires imitation, or rather the living recovery of a posture, a gesture, attitudes. This is how Philippe Artières and Mathieu Potte-Bonneville continue, about Foucault, not to reveal what would be the true truth of a work whose essential message would risk being lost, but to wonder what would be to be measured by a political and intellectual challenge. Not therefore: have we understood ?, But: are we up to ?

So it is not, with According to Foucaultas we understand from the title, a book (one more) on Foucault, but according to him. Moreover, the chapters of which the book is composed are in the literal sense of interventions. This means that at the start these texts were pronounced, built up addresses, in Paris or elsewhere (Italy, Brazil, Chile …).

And each time, on a specific point of the work, it is a question of asserting a political power, of waking up possibilities of struggle, of designating challenges of power. Even if this book seems to be built as a collection of communications, it is not reduced to it. First of all of the symphonic organization of the book in three movements: gestures ; struggles ; Programs.

This book, it seems to me, wonderfully illustrates the content of the lessons pronounced by Foucault at the Collège de France in 1983. We understand how Foucault is not a political philosopher, but a political thinker. The difference is size, and we understand it on each page of this book. Political philosophy consists in the deployment of a rationality: it is a question of unfolding on the state, collectives or actions, their rational logic, or to expose their unchanging essence beyond the diversity of historical incarnations. Foucault, however, exposed in 1983 the idea that philosophy does not have to absorb politics, to deduce a reality which would be in conformity with its essence, but to build its own reality in a constant relationship to politics. It is this relationship of combative exteriority, of vibrant correlation that is found in the book. Each time (about law, control, revolution), it is a question of wondering, not what they are, but what thought can their oppose as a truth game. This is how this book about de Foucault, from Of him can claim non -blind fidelity (it is not a question of repeating a lesson, but of reactivating a gesture). Philippe Artières and Mathieu Potte-Bonneville would be active heirs. Important book therefore, less exactly in terms of knowledge content (even if it testifies to great qualities of understanding the work), than in terms of style: testimony of intellectual experiences, drawn from possibilities of resistance … We find everywhere this understanding by Foucault of philosophy as a practice: self -practical and construction of qualified relationships to others. If thought is an exercise, Philippe Artières and Mathieu Potte-Bonneville offer a series of “ testing », That is to say at the bottom of Foucault’s testing to the edge of our present.