What if Foucault, after being interested in “infamous men”, had looked into the history of ecological marginalities, tracking down hermits, noble savages and other forest men? Philippe Artières forges a counter-factual fiction with real archives.
In the conclusion of The Anthropocene eventJean-Baptiste Fressoz and Christophe Bonneuil called for the writing of counter-narratives, alternative histories of modernity, in order to show that ecological concern had taken shape from the beginnings of industrial society and that it was possible to exhume from the past critical approaches and possibilities of existence that are still capable of inspiring us today. It is precisely to such a counter-history of XIXe and XXe century that Philippe Artières’ latest book focuses on, The wild file.
His project is twofold. On the one hand, it is about reflecting on the fictional dimension of history by staging the historian himself throughout the work. On the other hand, it is about writing the history of a few forgotten lives that had managed to invent another relationship with the environment and had managed to problematize the relationship with nature that our societies have built. Methodological reflection on the place of fiction in history and the uncovering of the lives of a few marginal people from the past are intertwined in this book, which seeks to link the interest that Michel Foucault had given to the lives of infamous men and ethical practices with the contemporary issue of the ecological crisis.
Fiction in History
Philippe Artières himself places his project in “counter-factual history” (p. 155). But he does so in an unprecedented way, since it involves staging his own work as a historian within a completely unique system. The book opens with a small event that occurs when Philippe Artières leaves to join the Villa Medici in Rome, where he was a resident in 2011 and 2012. As he leaves, Daniel Defert gives him an unpublished file that Michel Foucault is said to have put together in the 1970s. This file, entitled “Wild Lives,” was clearly never used by Foucault, and Philippe Artières devotes his work to meticulously presenting, piece by piece, the archival documents it contains: a series of texts on the lives of several “infamous men” of the XIXe and XXe centuries, whose specificity is to have been hermits or “noble savages”, to have rejected civilization to take refuge in forests, in remote and isolated spaces. However, we learn at the end of the book that Foucault himself never put together this file, and that Daniel Defert never gave it to Philippe Artières.
All this was fiction, and the historical exploitation of the archives is captured in a completely striking fictional character that aims to question the very practice of the historian. Each document existed, each archive is real, but their gathering in the same file, their unity, the links that are drawn between the texts, result from the fictional device put in place by Philippe Artières himself. The meaning that is born from the very bringing together of the materials, which emerges in the constellation that constitutes the dialogue of the different sources, is based on the authority of Michel Foucault’s work before collapsing this figure of authority in the last pages. We will particularly appreciate here the distancing, on the part of a Foucauldian himself, from the tutelary figure of Foucault. By disappointing his reader, Philippe Artières makes him aware of the credit he spontaneously gives to the great philosopher and his historical studies, he confronts him with the tendency he sometimes has to sanctify the great author and thereby prevent himself, sometimes, from putting his concepts and certainties back to work with regard to the new issues that the present imposes on us and that Foucault had not thematized – in this case the ecological crisis.
Through this literary and rhetorical process by which the author deceives his reader, it is the very pact of a scientific writing of history that is broken, the lie intruding into the heart of a historical discourse presenting itself as truthful. At the heart of the writing of history, an ineradicable part of fiction emerges. This necessarily intervenes, not in the creation of the materials studied, all true, but in the choice of the selected documents and in the way of making them resonate together, of ordering them, of presenting them. The Wild File thus arrives at the idea of a maximum proximity between fiction and truth, the latter being lodged in the authenticity of the materials, the former in the way of giving them meaning in the light of current events. It becomes possible to speak of an “archival fiction” (p. 156) which does not abolish the value of the historian’s discourse, but which, at the same time, reminds him of his role in the present, reminds him that he is in the process of inventing a discourse according to the issues that are contemporary to him.
“Archives generate forms of fiction of the present. To inherit is necessarily to invent” (p. 154). This way of referring the historian to the fictional and literary processes of his practice in order to anchor him in the problems of his time is not without echoes with the work of Hayden White in Tropics of Discourse or with that of Jacques Rancière in The names of historywho each emphasized the fact that history was a writing practice and that it involved a rhetoric that prevented it from sticking to the level of truth alone, in the manner of mathematics or the natural sciences. Michel Foucault himself claimed to have written only fictions to recall the constructed nature of the historiographical text. Philippe Artières follows in the wake of these reflections that problematize the link between historical discourse and the discourse of truth, but he does so by moving them to the terrain, current if ever there was one, of political ecology.
A genealogy of ecological ethics
The strength of the work is to bring into dialogue Foucault’s interest in the lives of infamous men and the techniques of the self with the ecological question. Philippe Artières thus exhumes from the past “wild lives”, existences which, at XIXe and to XXe centuries, have abandoned the urban lifestyle to live on the margins of society. Through these ecological marginalities, a new relationship with oneself is invented, which is also a new relationship with the world and with nature, with others and with the environment. Here, the search for forgotten existences of the past and the theme, dear to the late Foucault, of concern for oneself and the aestheticization of existence are combined. Thus, regarding an article from 1865 devoted to the “transfuge of the Var”, P. Artières writes:
Laurent had gone to live in the Maures forest of his own free will. He had chosen the wild state. It was therefore a form of voluntary asceticism. This theme appears precisely in the two volumes of The History of Sexuality published in 1984, but it dealt with the exercises of the self of Antiquity. They then participated in the production of an aesthetics of existence. I was not aware of such an interest in Foucault for equivalent practices in the modern or contemporary period. (p. 36)
The current ecological problem therefore shifts Foucault’s analyses to the light of our “political actuality” (p. 147). Philippe Artières refers in particular to the Zones to Defend (ZAD) and autonomous movements (p. 151-152), including The Wild File proposes in some way the outline of a genealogy. The challenge is to put Foucault’s concepts and methods back to work on a terrain where we did not expect it, that of the relationship to nature. And this with the aim of proposing a “resistance to the contemporary world”, in order “not to be complicit in the great collapse” (p. 147).
Writing the history of ecological marginalities and searching in the past for attempts to define an ethic in which the relationship to oneself, the relationship to others and the relationship to nature are inseparably involved is therefore, for Philippe Artières, actively campaigning in the present. Not in the sense that these few hermits unearthed from the past should serve as our model and ideal “noble savages”, but in the sense that they problematize our current events, where they question our daily practices and our social organization as a whole. It is the unprecedented possibility of inventing other modes of existence that is at stake in this genealogy, and not the desire to return to some state of nature that certain forgotten existences would have managed to find.
It is so little a question of presenting these wild lives as models that Philippe Artières is actually interested in the power relations in which these existences were taken and confined in their time. From a questioning that is also Foucauldian, the emphasis is placed on the medicalization and psychiatrization of these ecological marginalities. It is thus “the pathologization of a way of life” (p. 89) that is traced from the XIXe century, when doctors and psychiatrists began to question the pathological disorders of these forest outcasts. XXe century, this pathologization is even coupled with a criminalization of these existences, which goes hand in hand with certain terrorist and violent tendencies of radical ecology, from which Philippe Artières distances himself. This way in which power relations and practices of freedom are intertwined reminds us that it is resistance that is at stake, today, in the ecological problem.
The Wild File thus offers a remarkable updating of the most fundamental perspectives of Michel Foucault’s work. Its fragmentary aspect, as well as the fictional staging that frames his discourse in order to remind the historian of the problems of the present, indicate that this is a task to be continued and a program to be carried out: that of a genealogy of political ecology. It is to the continuation of this program that Philippe Artières invites us in this stimulating book, marked by urgency.