Université Paris 8, Vincennes – St-Denis
Challenging the history of our present: Michel Foucault and the actualité of philosophy
Today, the recent publication of some previously unpublished texts has shown us that this essential relationship between philosophy and the present has long been at the heart of his thought and has ever since guided – sometimes silently – his historical and genealogical research. One of the consequences of this is that we are now forced to acknowledge that, for Foucault, this relationship of philosophy with the present has been the object of a re-elaboration that has inflected in different ways both the objects he has questioned and the method he has forged to approach them. This encourages us, then, to take up this series of key notions (“ontology of the present”, or of “present reality” (actualité), “ontology of modernity” or “ontology of ourselves”) to try, if you like, to make a genealogy of them, and perhaps grasp differently some less apparent but quite decisive aspects of these terms.