Maîtresse de conférences en philosophie à la faculté LLSH at Université Paris-Est Créteil
New archives, new genealogies. Is the “Foucauldian Enlightenment” still relevant today?
Classified as a “national treasure” in 2012, the Michel Foucault archives deposited by Daniel Defert at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 2013 (NAF 28730), with their 110 or so boxes of manuscripts and unpublished documents, have not ceased since then to nourish new editorial projects and multiple research paths. They have contributed to a major renewal in the way philosophy is done on, with and after Foucault. Drawing on a series of texts from these archives, I would like to address a question that is “vertical” to Foucauldian thought: that of its relationship with the legacy of the Enlightenment, which the archives allow us to question and trouble with another genealogy, that of “Foucault’s Nietzscheanism” and its aesthetics of light as an experience of a blinding, unbearable, tragic truth (the truth of Nietzsche’s Dionysus, of Manet’ paintings, of Cynic parrhesia). Can we slip from an aesthetics of radical light to the aesthetics of (radical) Enlightenment? What remains of the Enlightenment in Foucauldian philosophy as an attitude and an experience towards truth, as a practice of freedom? And what of this “courage of truth” today?
Arianna Sforzini is Maîtresse de conférences en philosophie the the Université Paris-Est Créteil. Previously a post-doctoral researcher in Aesthetics at the University of Fribourg (2020/2022), she also taught philosophy at Sciences po – Paris and is a member of the Association pour le Centre Michel Foucault. She has been an Associated Researcher to the Bibliothèque nationale de France (2016-2019), a Post-doctoral Fellow for the ANR project “Foucault Fiches de Lecture / Foucault’s Reading Notes” (CNRS – ENS Lyon, 2018-2020) and a Post-graduate Fellow at ICI Berlin – Institute for Cultural Inquiry (2016-2017). She is the author of many articles and essays on Foucault’s thought and contemporary continental philosophy, particularly in its relation to the arts and the performances of bodies. She published two monographs : Les scènes de la vérité. Michel Foucault et le théâtre (Lormont : Le bord de l’eau, 2017) et Michel Foucault. Une pensée du corps (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014), and she coedited: Foucault(s) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2017), Un demi-siècle d’Histoire de la folie (Paris: Kimé, 2013), Michel Foucault: éthique et vérité (1980-1984) (Paris: Vrin, 2013).