Добірка наукової літератури з теми "Foucault, Michel (1926-1984 ; philosophe) – Cinéma"

Ever since I tripped over Tiddles while I was carrying a pile of discs into the studio, I’ve known it was possible to get a laugh out of gramophone records!Max Bygraves In 1978 the music critic Lester Bangs published a typically pugnacious essay with the fighting title, “The Ten Most Ridiculous Albums of the Seventies.” Before deliciously launching into his execution of Uri Geller’s self-titled album or Rick Dees’ The Original Disco Duck, Bangs asserts that because that decade was history’s silliest, it stands to reason “that ridiculous records should become the norm instead of anomalies,” that abominations should be the best of our time (Bangs, 1978). This absurd pretzel logic sounds uncannily like Jacques Derrida’s definition of the “post” condition, since for it to arrive it begins by not arriving (Derrida 1987, 29). Lester is thinking like a poststructuralist. The oddness of the most singularly odd album out in Bangs’ greatest misses of the seventies had nothing to do with how ridiculous it was, but the fact that it even existed at all. (Bangs 1978) The album was entitled The Best of Marcel Marceao. Produced by Michael Viner the album contained four tracks, with two identical on both sides: “Silence,” which is nineteen minutes long and “Applause,” one minute. To underline how extraordinary this gramophone record is, John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing (1959) is cacophonous by comparison. While Bangs agrees with popular opinion that The Best of Marcel Marceao the “ultimate concept album,” he concluded that this is “one of those rare records that never dates” (Bangs, 1978). This tacet album is a good way to start thinking about the Classical Gas project, and the ironic semiotics at work in it (Tofts & Gye 2011). It too is about records that are silent and that never date. First, the album’s cover art, featuring a theatrically posed Marceau, implies the invitation to speak in the absence of speech; or, in our terms, it is asking to be re-written. Secondly, the French mime’s surname is spelled incorrectly, with an “o” rather than “u” as the final letter. As well as the caprice of an actual album by Marcel Marceau, the implicit presence and absence of the letters o and u is appropriately in excess of expectations, weird and unexpected like an early title in the Classical Gas catalogue, Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. (classical-gas.com) Like a zootrope animation, it is impossible not to see the o and u flickering at one at the same time on the cover. In this duplicity it performs the conventional and logical permutation of English grammar. Silence invites difference, variation within a finite lexical set and the opportunity to choose individual items from it. Here is album cover art that speaks of presence and absence, of that which is anticipated and unexpected: a gramophone recoding without sound. In this the Marceau cover is one of Roland Barthes’ mythologies, something larger than life, structured like a language and structured out of language (Barthes 1982). This ambiguity is the perfidious grammar that underwrites Classical Gas. Images, we learned from structuralism, are codified, or rather, are code. Visual remix is a rhetorical gesture of recoding that interferes with the semiotic DNA of an image. The juxtaposition of text and image is interchangeable and requires our imagination of what we are looking at and what it might sound like. This persistent interplay of metaphor and metonymy has enabled us to take more than forty easy listening albums and republish them as mild-mannered recordings from the maverick history of ideas, from Marxism and psychoanalysis, to reception theory, poststructuralism and the writings of critical auteurs. Foucault à gogo, for instance, takes a 1965 James Last dance album and recodes it as the second volume of The History of Sexuality. In saying this, we are mindful of the ambivalence of the very possibility of this connection, to how and when the eureka moment of remix recognition occurs, if at all. Mix and remix are, after Jean Baudrillard, both precession and procession of simulacra (Baudrillard, 1983). The nature of remix is that it is always already elusive and anachronistic. Not everyone can be guaranteed to see the shadow of one text in dialogue with another, like a hi-fi palimpsest. Or another way of saying this, such an epiphany of déjà vu, of having seen this before, may happen after the fact of encounter. This anachrony is central to remix practices, from the films of Quentin Tarrantino and the “séance fictions” of Soda_Jerk, to obscure Flintstones/Goodfellas mashups on YouTube. It is also implicit in critical understandings of an improbable familiarity with the superabundance of cultural archives, the dizzying excess of an infinite record library straight out of Jorge Luis Borges’ ever-expanding imagination. Drifting through the stacks of such a repository over an entire lifetime any title found, for librarian and reader alike, is either original and remix, sometime. Metalanguages that seek to counter this ambivalence are forms of bad faith, like film spoilers Brodie’s Notes. Accordingly, this essay sets out to explain some of the generic conventions of Classical Gas, as a remix project in which an image’s semiotic DNA is rewired and recontextualised. While a fake, it is also completely real (Faith in fakes, as it happens, may well be a forthcoming Umberto Eco title in the series). While these album covers are hyperreal, realistic in excess of being real, the project does take some inspiration from an actual, rather than imaginary archive of album covers. In 2005, Jewish artist Dani Gal happened upon a 1968 LP that documented the events surrounding the Six Day War in Israel in 1967. To his surprise, he found a considerable number of similar LPs to do with significant twentieth century historical events, speeches and political debates. In the artist’s own words, the LPs collected in his Historical Record Archive (2005-ongoing) are in fact silent, since it is only their covers that are exhibited in installations of this work, signifying a potential sound that visitors must try to audition. As Gal has observed, the interactive contract of the work is derived from the audience’s instinct to “try to imagine the sounds” even though they cannot listen to them (Gal 2011, 182). Classical Gas deliberately plays with this potential yearning that Gal astutely instils in his viewer and aspiring auditor. While they can never be listened to, they can entice, after Gilles Deleuze, a “virtual co-existence” of imaginary sound that manifests itself as a contract between viewer and LP (Deleuze 1991, 63). The writer Jeffrey Sconce condensed this embrace of the virtual as something plausibly real when he pithily observed of the Classical Gas project that it is “the thrift-bin in my fantasy world. I want to play S/Z at 78 rpm” (Sconce 2011). In terms of Sconce’s spectral media interests the LPs are haunted by the trace of potential “other” sounds that have taken possession of and appropriated the covers for another use (Sconce 2000).Mimetic While most albums are elusive and metaphoric (such as Freud’s Totem and Taboo, or Luce Irigaray’s Ethics of Sexual Difference), some titles do make a concession to a tantalizing, mimetic literalness (such as Das Institut fur Sozialforschung). They display a trace of the haunting subject in terms of a tantalizing echo of fact or suggestion of verifiable biography. The motivation here is the recognition of a potential similarity, since most Classical Gas titles work by contrast. As with Roland Barthes’ analysis of the erotics of the fashion system, so with Gilles Deleuze’s Coldness and Cruelty: it is “where the garment gapes” that the tease begins. (Barthes 1994, 9) Or, in this instance, where the cigarette smokes. (classical-gas.com) A casual Max Bygraves, paused in mid-thought, looks askance while lighting up. Despite the temptation to read even more into this, a smoking related illness did not contribute to Bygraves’ death in 2012. However, dying of Alzheimer’s disease, his dementia is suggestive of the album’s intrinsic capacity to be a palimpsest of the co-presence of different memories, of confused identities, obscure realities that are virtual and real. Beginning with the album cover itself, it has to become an LP (Deleuze 1991, 63). First, it is a cardboard, planar sleeve measuring 310mm squared, that can be imprinted with a myriad of different images. Secondly, it is conventionally identified in terms of a title, such as Organ Highlights or Classics Up to Date. Thirdly it is inscribed by genre, which may be song, drama, spoken word, or novelty albums of industrial or instrumental sounds, such as Memories of Steam and Accelerated Accordians. A case in point is John Woodhouse And His Magic Accordion from 1969. (classical-gas.com) All aspects of its generic attributes as benign and wholesome accordion tunes are warped and re-interpreted in Classical Gas. Springtime for Kittler appeared not long after the death of its eponymous philosopher in 2011. Directed by Richard D. James, also known as Aphex Twin, it is a homage album to Friedrich Kittler by the PostProducers, a fictitious remix collective inspired by Mel Brooks whose personnel include Mark Amerika and Darren Tofts. The single from this album, yet to be released, is a paean to Kittler’s last words, “Alle Apparate auschalten.” Foucault à gogo (vol. 2), the first album remixed for this series, is also typical of this archaeological approach to the found object. (classical-gas.com) The erasure and replacement of pre-existing text in a similar font re-writes an iconic image of wooing that is indicative of romantic album covers of this period. This album is reflective of the overall project in that the actual James Last album (1968) preceded the publication of the Foucault text (1976) that haunts it. This is suggestive of how coding and recoding are in the eye of the beholder and the specific time in which the remixed album is encountered. It doesn’t take James Last, Michel Foucault or Theodor Holm Nelson to tell you that there is no such thing as a collective memory with linear recall. As the record producer Milt Gabler observes in the liner notes to this album, “whatever the title with this artist, the tune remains the same, that distinct and unique Foucault à gogo.” “This artist” in this instance is Last or Foucault, as well as Last and Foucault. Similarly Milt Gabler is an actual author of liner notes (though not on the James Last album) whose words from another album, another context and another time, are appropriated and deftly re-written with Last’s Hammond à gogo volume 2 and The History of Sexuality in mind as a palimpsest (this approach to sampling liner notes and re-writing them as if they speak for the new album is a trope at work in all the titles in the series). And after all is said and done with the real or remixed title, both artists, after Umberto Eco, will have spoken once more of love (Eco 1985, 68). Ambivalence Foucault à gogo is suggestive of the semiotic rewiring that underwrites Classical Gas as a whole. What is at stake in this is something that poststructuralism learned from its predecessor. Taking the tenuous conventionality of Ferdinand de Saussure’s signifier and signified as a starting point, Lacan, Derrida and others embraced the freedom of this arbitrariness as the convention or social contract that brings together a thing and a word that denotes it. This insight of liberation, or what Hélène Cixous and others, after Jacques Lacan, called jouissance (Lacan 1992), meant that texts were bristling with ambiguity and ambivalence, free play, promiscuity and, with a nod to Mikhail Bakhtin, carnival (Bakhtin 1984). A picture of a pipe was, after Foucault after Magritte, not a pipe (Foucault 1983). This po-faced sophistry is expressed in René Magritte’s “Treachery of Images” of 1948, which screamed out that the word pipe could mean anything. Foucault’s reprise of Magritte in “This is Not a Pipe” also speaks of Classical Gas’ embrace of the elasticity of sign and signifier, his “plastic elements” an inadvertent suggestion of vinyl (Foucault 1983, 53). (classical-gas.com) This uncanny association of structuralism and remixed vinyl LPs is intimated in Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale. Its original cover art is straight out of a structuralist text-book, with its paired icons and words of love, rain, honey, rose, etc. But this text as performed by Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians in New York in 1956 is no less plausible than Saussure’s lectures in Geneva in 1906. Cultural memory and cultural amnesia are one and the same thing. Out of all of the Classical Gas catalogue, this album is arguably the most suggestive of what Jeffrey Sconce would call “haunting” (Sconce, 2000), an ambivalent mixing of the “memory and desire” that T.S. Eliot wrote of in the allusive pages of The Waste Land (Eliot 1975, 27). Here we encounter the memory of a bookish study of signs from the early twentieth century and the desire for its vinyl equivalent on World Record Club in the 1960s. Memory and desire, either or, or both. This ambivalence was deftly articulated by Roland Barthes in his last book, Camera Lucida, as a kind of spectral haunting, a vision or act of double seeing in the perception of the photographic image. This flickering of perception is never static, predictable or repeatable. It is a way of seeing contingent upon who is doing the looking and when. Barthes famously conceptualised this interplay in perception of an between the conventions that culture has mandated, its studium, and the unexpected, idiosyncratic double vision that is unique to the observer, its punctum (Barthes 1982, 26-27). Accordingly, the Cours de linguistique générale is a record by Saussure as well as the posthumous publication in Paris and Lausanne of notes from his lectures in 1916. (Barthes 1982, 51) With the caption “Idiot children in an institution, New Jersey, 1924,” American photographer Lewis Hine’s anthropological study declares that this is a clinical image of pathological notions of monstrosity and aberration at the time. Barthes though, writing in a post-1968 Paris, only sees an outrageous Danton collar and a banal finger bandage (Barthes 1982, 51). With the radical, protestant cries of the fallout of the Paris riots in mind, as well as a nod to music writer Greil Marcus (1989), it is tempting to see Hine’s image as the warped cover of a Dead Kennedys album, perhaps Plastic Surgery Disasters. In terms of the Classical Gas approach to recoding, though, this would be far too predictable; for a start there is neither a pipe, a tan cardigan nor a chenille scarf to be seen. A more heart-warming, suitable title might be Ray Conniff’s 1965 Christmas Album: Here We Come A-Caroling. Irony (secretprehistory.net) Like our Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices project (Tofts & Gye), Classical Gas approaches the idea of recoding and remixing with a relentless irony. The kind of records we collect and the covers which we use for this project are what you would expect to find in the hutch of an old gramophone player, rather than “what’s hot” in iTunes. The process of recoding the album covers seeks to realign expectations of what is being looked at, such that it becomes difficult to see it in any other way. In this an album’s recoded signification implies the recognition of the already seen, of album covers like this, that signal something other than what we are seeing; colours, fonts etc., belonging to a historical period, to its genres and its demographic. One of the more bucolic and duplicitous forms of rhetoric, irony wants it both ways, to be totally lounge and theoretically too-cool-for school, as in Rencontre Terrestre by Hélène Cixous and Frédéric-Yves Jeannet. (classical-gas.com) This image persuades through the subtle alteration of typography that it belongs to a style, a period and a vibe that would seem to be at odds with the title and content of the album, but as a totality of image and text is entirely plausible. The same is true of Roland Barthes’ S/Z. The radical semiologist invites us into his comfortable sitting room for a cup of coffee. A traditional Times font reinforces the image of Barthes as an avuncular, Sunday afternoon story-teller or crooner, more Alistair Cooke/Perry Como than French Marxist. (classical-gas.com) In some instances, like Histoire de Tel Quel, there is no text at all on the cover and the image has to do its signifying work iconographically. (classical-gas.com) Here a sixties collage of French-ness on the original Victor Sylvester album from 1963 precedes and anticipates the re-written album it has been waiting for. That said, the original title In France is rather bland compared to Histoire de Tel Quel. A chic blond, the Eiffel Tower and intellectual obscurity vamp synaesthetically, conjuring the smell of Gauloises, espresso and agitated discussions of Communism on the Boulevard St. Germain. With Marcel Marceao with an “o” in mind, this example of a cover without text ironically demonstrates how Classical Gas, like The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices, is ostensibly a writing project. Just as the images are taken hostage from other contexts, text from the liner notes is sampled from other records and re-written in an act of ghost-writing to complete the remixed album. Without the liner notes, Classical Gas would make a capable Photoshop project, but lacks any force as critical remix. The redesigned and re-titled covers certainly re-code the album, transform it into something else; something else that obviously or obliquely reflects the theme, ideas or content of the title, whether it’s Louis Althusser’s Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon or Luce Irigaray’s An Ethics of Sexual Difference. If you don’t hear the ruggedness of Leslie Fiedler’s essays in No! In Thunder then the writing hasn’t worked. The liner notes are the albums’ conscience, the rubric that speaks the tunes, the words and elusive ideas that are implied but can never be heard. The Histoire de Tel Quel notes illustrate this suggestiveness: You may well think as is. Philippe Forest doesn’t, not in this Éditions du Seuil classic. The titles included on this recording have been chosen with a dual purpose: for those who wish to think and those who wish to listen. What Forest captures in this album is distinctive, fresh and daring. For what country has said it like it is, has produced more robustesse than France? Here is some of that country’s most famous talent swinging from silk stockings, the can-can, to amour, presented with the full spectrum of stereo sound. (classical-gas.com) The writing accurately imitates the inflection and rhythm of liner notes of the period, so on the one hand it sounds plausibly like a toe-tapping dance album. On the other, and at the same time, it gestures knowingly to the written texts upon which it is based, invoking its rigours as a philosophical text. The dithering suggestiveness of both – is it music or text – is like a scrambled moving image always coming into focus, never quite resolving into one or the other. But either is plausible. The Tel Quel theorists were interested in popular culture like the can-can, they were fascinated with the topic of love and if instead of books they produced albums, their thinking would be auditioned in full stereo sound. With irony in mind, then, it’s hardly surprising to know that the implicit title of the project, that is neither seen nor heard but always imminent, is Classical Gasbags. (classical-gas.com) Liner notes elaborate and complete an implicit narrative in the title and image, making something compellingly realistic that is a composite of reality and fabulation. Consider Adrian Martin’s Surrealism (A Quite Special Frivolity): France is the undeniable capital of today’s contemporary sound. For Adrian Martin, this is home ground. His French soul glows and expands in the lovely Mediterranean warmth of this old favourite, released for the first time on Project 3 Total Sound Stereo. But don’t be deceived by the tonal and melodic caprices that carry you along in flutter-free sound. As Martin hits his groove, there will be revolution by night. Watch out for new Adrian Martin releases soon, including La nuit expérimentale and, his first title in English in many years, One more Bullet in the Head (produced by Bucky Pizzarelli). (classical-gas.com) Referring to Martin’s famous essay of the same name, these notes allusively skirt around his actual biography (he regularly spends time in France), his professional writing on surrealism (“revolution by night” was the sub-title of a catalogue for the Surrealism exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1993 to which he contributed an essay) (Martin 1993), as well as “One more bullet in the head,” the rejected title of an essay that was published in World Art magazine in New York in the mid-1990s. While the cover evokes the cool vibe of nouvelle vague Paris, it is actually from a 1968 album, Roma Oggi by the American guitarist Tony Mottola (a real person who actually sounds like a fictional character from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time in America, a film on which Martin has written a book for the British Film Institute). Plausibility, in terms of Martin’s Surrealism album, has to be as compellingly real as the sincerity of Sandy Scott’s Here’s Sandy. And it should be no surprise to see the cover art of Scott’s album return as Georges Bataille’s Erotism. Gramophone The history of the gramophone represents the technological desire to write sound. In this the gramophone record is a ligature of sound and text, a form of phonographic writing. With this history in mind it’s hardly surprising that theorists such as Derrida and Kittler included the gramophone under the conceptual framework of a general grammatology (Derrida 1992, 253 & Kittler 1997, 28). (classical-gas.com) Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology is the avatar of Classical Gas in its re-writing of a previous writing. Re-inscribing the picaresque Pal Joey soundtrack as a foundation text of post-structuralism is appropriate in terms of the gramme or literate principle of Western metaphysics as well as the echolalia of remix. As Derrida observes in Of Grammatology, history and knowledge “have always been determined (and not only etymologically or philosophically) as detours for the purpose of the reappropriation of presence” (Derrida 1976, 10). A gas way to finish, you might say. But in retrospect the ur-text that drives the poetics of Classical Gas is not Of Grammatology but the errant Marcel Marceau album described previously. Far from being an oddity, an aberration or a “novelty” album, it is a classic gramophone recording, the quintessential writing of an absent speech, offbeat and untimely. References Bahktin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Bangs, Lester. “The Ten Most Ridiculous Albums of the Seventies”. Phonograph Record Magazine, March, 1978. Reproduced at http://rateyourmusic.com/list/dacapo/the_ten_most_ridiculous_records_of_the_seventies__by_lester_bangs. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Flamingo, 1982. ---. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Granada, 1982. ---. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext[e], 1983. Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books, 2000. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. ---. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987. ---. “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,” in Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1992. Eco, Umberto. Reflections on The Name of the Rose. Trans. William Weaver. London: Secker & Warburg, 1985. Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land and Other Poems. London: Faber & Faber, 1975. Foucault, Michel. This Is Not a Pipe. Trans. James Harkness. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. ---. The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality Volume 2. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1985. Gal, Dani. Interview with Jens Hoffmann, Istanbul Biennale Companion. Istanbul Foundation for Culture and the Arts, 2011. Kittler, Friedrich. “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,” in Literature, Media, Information Systems. Ed. John Johnston. Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 1997. Lacan, Jacques. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960): The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge, 1992. Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. London: Secker & Warburg, 1989. Martin, Adrian. “The Artificial Night: Surrealism and Cinema,” in Surrealism: Revolution by Night. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 1993. Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. ---. Online communication with authors, June 2011. Tofts, Darren and Lisa Gye. The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices. 2010-ongoing. http://www.secretprehistory.net/. ---. Classical Gas. 2011-ongoing. http://www.classical-gas.com/.

Le présent travail se propose de mettre en regard les écrits du critique de cinéma Serge Daney et les Histoire(s) du cinéma de Jean-Luc Godard, qui constituent le corpus de la thèse. Nous interpréterons les critiques de Daney et les montages de Godard comme des critiques au sens de Maurice Blanchot et comme des commentaires au sens de Michel Foucault. En tant que tels, ils aboutissent à un supplément de signification (un « supplément du cinéma ») au sens de Jacques Derrida. Chez Blanchot, la critique achève l’œuvre (dans notre cas : le film) grâce à l’interprétation. Chez Derrida, le supplément signifie un manque de signification dans le mouvement de l’écriture, ce qui nous permet de suggérer que le cinéma est, au-delà du film lui-même, un agencement de significations en constante évolution et dont le dernier sens reste toujours à venir. À la suite de Michel Foucault, nous envisageons cet agencement comme un référent épistémologique concret, un grand texte primaire sans cesse répété par un commentaire qui préserve le caractère inépuisable de ses significations. Ainsi, nous interprétons les œuvres de Daney et de Godard à l’aune du post-cinéma. À l’heure où le cinéma ne cesse d’investir de nouveaux espaces et de nouveaux supports, il devient difficile de le définir. Contrairement à ceux qui l’appréhendent à partir de son dispositif, de ses lieux et de ses supports, nous le concevons comme un grand texte primaire à interpréter et à compléter. En tant que commentateurs, Daney et Godard enrichissent ce texte – le cinéma – de nouvelles significations. Ils perpétuent ainsi la nécessité d’en produire sans cesse de nouvelles exégèses et assoient son autorité
This thesis deals with the works of film critic Serge Daney and Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema, which I will interpret on the basis of Maurice Blanchot’s notion of “critique”, Jacques Derrida’s notion of “supplément” and Michel Foucault’s concept of “commentaire”. I will argue that Daney’s texts and Godard’s montages function as criticism and commentaries that perpetuate a “supplement of cinema”. While Blanchot's criticism “completes” the work of art (in this case the film) by interpreting it, Derrida's supplement signifies a lack of meaning in the act of writing, Foucault's notion of commentary allows to go beyond the dimension of the singular work and to refer to cinema as a concrete epistemological object, a primary text ("the cinema"). According to Foucault the commentary repeats a primary text while preserving its inexhaustible potential of meaning. Based on this thought, I will approach Daney’s and Godard's works from a post-cinema perspective. In the digital age in which cinema has undergone various transformations, the meaning of the concept of “cinema” is constantly being re-evaluated. Unlike a general understanding of cinema as apparatus, place or specific medium, I conceive cinema as a text that constantly needs to be interpreted and supplemented

L'objectif était de comprendre à partir de l'une des phrases de Michel Foucault : « Je n'accepte pas ce mot, dialectique. Non et non ! Il faut que les choses soient bien claires. Dès que l'on prononce le mot "dialectique" on commence à accepter, même si on ne le dit pas, le schéma hégélien de la thèse et de l'antithèse, et avec lui une forme de logique qui me paraît inadéquate, si l'on veut donner de ces problèmes une description vraiment concrète. », les mouvements dus aux déterminations de la pensée qui iraient du plan d'immanence du "penser" vers les modes de conceptualisation. De nombreux philosophes ont attribué à Foucault différentes périodes d'évolution de sa pensée. J'ai donc commencé mon étude en présupposant que Foucault a travaillé tout au long de sa vie autour du même plan d'immanence et qu'il a tenté sans cesse de le signifier à partir de la connaissance de différentes disciplines dans les modes socio-historiques. Et j'ai tenté de comprendre ce mouvement, qui va du plan d'immanence à une conceptualisation de sa pensée construite autour de la tradition critique. Foucault veut démontrer que la philosophie a construit le sujet et a bâti un édifice de la conscience humaine. La dialectique s'est présentée comme le point central de cet édifice. Comment comprendre la présence du concept en sachant que celui-ci est avant tout le résultat des imbrications des modes de construction du sujet dans l'état socio-historique dans lequel il est plongé ?
The objective was to understand from the sentence of Michel Foucault: "Je n'accepte pas ce mot, dialectique. Non et non ! Il faut que les choses soient bien claires. Dès que l'on prononce le mot "dialectique" on commence à accepter, même si on ne le dit pas, le schéma hégélien de la thèse et de l'antithèse, et avec lui une forme de logique qui me paraît inadéquate, si l'on veut donner de ces problèmes une description vraiment concrète. ", the movement coming from the thought determinations which would go from the plan of immanence towards the modes of conceptualization. Many philosophers allotted to Foucault various periods of evolution of his thinking. I started my study by presupposing that Foucault worked throughout his life around the same level of immanence and that he continuously tried to explain it starting from the knowledge of various socio-history disciplines. And I tried to understand this movement which goes from the level of immanence to a conceptualization of his thinking built around the critical tradition. Foucault wants to proof that philosophy constructed the subject and a system of the human conscience. The dialectics presents itself as the central point of this system. How to understand the presence of the concept by knowing that above all it is the result of the overlapping connection of subject in the socio-history thinking?

Mon travail concerne l'éthique de Michel Foucault. Un texte des "marginalia" de Foucault a été déterminant pour mon projet. Il s'agit d'une interview accordée par Foucault a un étudiant de Berkeley (1980). Invité à se prononcer sur son prétendu nihilisme, Foucault répond indigne qu’il est plutôt un moraliste: "dans un sens, je suis un moraliste, dans la mesure où je crois que l'une des taches, un des sens de l'existence humaine -et c'est en quoi consiste la liberté de l'homme - c'est de ne jamais rien accepter comme définitif, intouchable, évident, immobile. Rien du réel ne doit nous faire une loi définitive et inhumaine". Plus loin Foucault continue: ""les trois éléments de ma morale, je les cite: (1) c'est le refus d'accepter comme allant de soi ce qui nous est proposé; (2) nécessité d'analyser et de savoir, car rien de ce que nous avons à faire ne peut être fait sans réflexion; (3) principe d'innovation: chercher dans notre réflexion ce qui n'a jamais été pensé ou imaginé. Les trois éléments de la morale de Foucault constituent le trois premiers chapitres de ma thèse. Pour le refus des évidences il faut considérer le rejet radical du discours de la méthode. Mon deuxième chapitre a pour titre une tache philosophique. C'est le deuxième élément de la morale de Foucault. Le troisième chapitre a pour titre la problématisation mon approche consiste à étudier l'histoire de la folie comme une confrontation entre le sujet qui sait la folie et l'objet, le fou
My thesis shout Michel Foucault is mostly concerned by Foucault’s thought between "madness and civilization" (1960) and "history of sexuality" (1984). If one considers the thesis bibliography, it's possible to understand that Foucault’s work considered by me as more important of his thought is not always proposed by Foucault’s books; many articles and interviews elucidate the aims and trajectory of Foucault. This is the reason why they play an important role in the thesis. During one of his stays in Berkeley (October 1980), Foucault explain the themes of his ethics: "I am a moralist, insofar as a believe that one of the tasks, one of the meanings of human existence - the source of human freedom - is never to accept anything as definitiven untouchable, obvious or immobile" (history of the present, spring 1980). In this interview conducted by m. Bess, Foucault exposes the three elements of his moral thought. They are: "(1) the refusal to accept as self-evident the things that are proposed to us" - it concerns the first chapter of my thesis(l'experience fondamentale); "(2)the need to analyses and to know, since we can accomplishe nothing without reflexion and understanding thus the principle of curiosity" - it concerns la problematisation

Ce travail de thèse propose l’examen d’une éthique du sujet, selon Michel Foucault, comme voie possible permettant de se libérer des relations savoir-pouvoir et de ses effets de subjectivation. Mais la liberté ne peut pas être identifiée à une simple libération d’un pouvoir extérieur, elle est dans sa forme ultime, un choix volontaire, une action de soi sur soi qui a pour projet de forger soi-même sa propre subjectivité, en ayant recours à ses propres techniques. Il s’agit d’un « devenir sujet », c'est-à-dire d’avoir la capacité d’agir, de se produire, de se transformer en sujet d’action politique et sociale. L’objectif est de montrer la valeur et l’importance d’une approche éthique pour l’homme d’aujourd’hui : l’interrogation concerne le sujet et sa capacité d’être l’agent et le maître de son existence
This thesis proposes, following Michel Foucault’s work, an enquiry into the ethics of the subject as a possible way to free oneself from knowledge-power relations and the effects of subjectivation. Freedom cannot, however, be identified with a simple emancipation from an external power; it is, in its ultimate form, a voluntary choice, a self-action that carries the project of forging its own subjectivity, with the use of its own techniques. It’s a “becoming-subject”, namely, having the ability to act, to produce, and to transform itself into a political and social subject. The aim of this thesis is to show the value and importance of an ethical approach for the present time, the issue at hand being the subject and its ability to be the agent and the master of its existence

Depuis son apparition au monde, l'homme a toujours placé les dieux au centre de son existence. C'est auprès des dieux qu'il trouvait un juste équilibre entre la gestion de ses craintes existentielles et sa volonté permanente de comprendre les mécanismes de l'univers. Mais, ce théocentrisme va être ébranlé car l'histoire de l'humanité est profondément marquée par la destitution des dieux au profit de l'homme, c'est l'avènement de l'anthropocentrisme, attitude qui place l'homme au centre de tout. Et plus-tard, cet anthropocentrisme philosophique donnera naissance à ce que l'on appelle aujourd'hui l'humanisme, qui se manifeste lui aussi par un profond amour et un respect inconditionnel pour tout ce qui se rapporte à la dignité humaine en général. Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804) est l'une des plus grandes figures incontournables de ce courant humaniste, il va sublimer au plus haut point la nature humaine. En effet, grâce à un usage rigoureux et méthodique de la raison (pure et pratique), l'humanisme rationaliste de Kant a l'ambition de faire de l'homme un être absolument libre et autonome, vertueux, créateur et possesseur du savoir (ou de la vérité), architecte de l'évolution des sociétés. En somme, on a l'impression qu'il entreprend toujours tout dans l'intérêt de l'humanité. Cependant, Michel Foucault (1926-1984) va entreprendre une déconstruction radicale du sujet kantien malgré les nobles capacités qu'on lui accorde. En réalité, Foucault va critiquer l'humanisme kantien dans son ensemble à cause de l'importance qu'il accorde à l'homme. Ainsi, pour le bien de tous, le philosophe français pense que "la mort de l'homme" devient une exigence absolue. Cette attitude hostile nous amène à nous interroger sérieusement sur les fondements véritables de l'humanisme. En effet, en quoi l'homme représente-t-il un danger ? Doit-on admettre que l'humanisme ne nous est plus utile aujourd'hui ? Et si nous nous détournons de l'homme, alors vers quoi faut-il se tourner ? A ce stade, il devient alors impératif de procéder à une analyse de la démarche zététique de Foucault afin de comprendre ses réelles intentions. Mais surtout, cette confrontation théorique qu'il entreprend avec Kant nous permettra de mener des réflexions autour des enjeux contemporains de l'humanisme à l'ère de la postmodernité
Since his appearance in the world, man has always put the gods at the center of his existence. It was with the gods that he found the right stability between managing his existential fears and his constant desire to understand the laws of the universe. But, this theocentrism will be broken because the history of humanity is deeply marked by the destitution of the gods for the benefit of man, it is the advent of anthropocentrism, an attitude that puts man at the center of all. And later, this philosophical anthropocentrism will give birth to what is today called humanism, which also manifests itself in a deep love and unconditional respect for all that relates to human dignity in general. Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804) is one of the greatest essential figures of this humanist current, he will sublimate human nature at its peak. Indeed, with a rigorous and methodical use of reason (pure and practical), Kant's rationalist humanism has the ambition to make man an absolutely free and autonomous being, virtuous, creator and possessor of knowledge (or of truth), architect of the evolution of societies. Ultimately, one gets the impression that he always does everything in the interests of humanity. However, Michel Foucault (1926-1984) will undertake a radical deconstruction of the Kantian subject despite the great capacities that he has. In fact, Foucault will criticize Kantian humanism as a whole because of the importance he gives to man. Thus, for the good of all, the French philosopher believes that "the death of man" becomes an absolute requirement. This hostile attitude leads us to seriously question the true foundations of humanism. Indeed, why is man a danger? Should we admit that humanism is no longer useful to us today? And if the man is no longer important, what should he be replaced by? At this stage, it becomes imperative to proceed to an analysis of Foucault's zetetic approach in order to understand his real intentions. Essentially, this theoretical confrontation that he undertakes with Kant will allow us to reflect on the contemporary issues of humanism in the era of postmodernity

Michel Foucault est très souvent perçu comme celui qui vise à déconstruire l'idée de la subjectivité. Dans notre analyse nous essayons de montrer le contraire. Foucault procède soigneusement afin de reconstruire le concept du sujet et penser les limites aussi bien que les possibilités de sa liberté. Nous analysons dans cette perspective les deux notions clefs de Foucault - l'actualité et la généalogie. Nous introduisons aussi une notion importée de Spinoza celle de conatus conçu comme une volonté permanente de l'auto-constitution du sujet par le sujet. A travers ces trois concepts nous démontrons l'émergence des stratégies politiques émancipatrices. L'argumentation développée dans le mémoire nous emmène à la conclusion que Michel Foucault loin d'être un nouveau conservateur ouvre la voie pour le nouveau progressisme, un progressisme sceptique mais mature
Michel Foucault is often perceived as the one willing to deconstruct the very idea of the subject. In my analysis I attempt to show the contrary. Foucault's cautious work aims at the reconstruction of the concept of the subject in order to think it through both it its limitations and the possibilities to realiza its freedom. In that perspective I account for two key notions that Foucault works out : the one of the actuality abd the one of the genealogy. I introduce in Foucault theoretical structure the spinozian concept of conatus understood, as permanent will of the self-constitution of a subject by the subject. These three notions together let me account for political strategies of emancipation in the Foucaultian sense. The main argument developed in my dissertation leads to the conclusion that Michel Foucault far from being a new conservatism offers as a matter of the new visions of progressivism, a skeptical one perhaps but genuinely mature

L’oeuvre de Foucault, des années 1970 jusqu’à sa disparition en 1984, fut marquée par une critique du «complexe d’Oedipe», concept essentiel à Freud. La radicalité des critiques foucaldiennes aurait impliqué, d’une part, un certain éloignement des psychanalystes de ses travaux et, d’autre part, que ses lecteurs prennent une certaine distance de la lettre freudienne. Un détail fondamental à la compréhension de cette difficile interlocution: les références du philosophe au «complexe d’Oedipe» furent toujours formulées sans qu’il ne présente à ses lecteurs aucune citation de Freud. De l’intérieur de son propre texte, qui se rapporte systématiquement à l’oeuvre du psychanalyste, Foucault convoqua, à chaque fois, son interlocuteur sans jamais lui donner la parole. Quelle lecture de Freud aurait-il engagé? Comment put-il autant écrire sur le «complexe d’Oedipe» sans jamais citer Freud? Afin de dégager les modalités, les aspects, les formes de cette opération de lecture effacée, on abordera les principales références foucaldiennes au «complexe d’OEdipe» et leur logique négative
Foucault's work, from the 1970s until his death in 1984, was marked by a critique of the "Oedipus complex", a concept essential to Freud. The radicalism of Foucault's critics would have implied, on the one hand, a certain distance from the psychoanalysts of his works and, on the other hand, that his readers take a certain distance from the Freudian letter. A fundamental detail to the understanding of this difficult interlocution: the references of the philosopher to the "Oedipus complex" were always formulated without presenting to his readers any quote from Freud. From within his own text, which systematically refers to the work of the psychoanalyst, Foucault summoned each time his interlocutor without ever giving him the floor. What reading of Freud would he have done? How could he write so much on the "Oedipus complex" without ever mentioning Freud? In order to identify the modalities, the aspects, the forms of this erased reading operation, we will approach the main Foucaldian references to the "Oedipus complex" and their negative logic

Cette recherche doctorale se propose d’interroger la valeur généalogique que Michel Foucault attribue au christianisme en se focalisant sur la problématique de la subjectivité et notamment sur la forme de vie comme enjeu de la constitution de la subjectivité. Pour ce faire elle est structurée sur la base des trois domaines généalogiques ou axes constitutifs des « foyers d’expérience » tels que Foucault lui-même les conçoit dans ses dernières recherches. Ainsi la première partie de ce travail est consacrée au problème de la vérité, notamment en ce qui concerne les formes de véridiction ; la seconde partie se concentre sur l’analyse du pouvoir ou plus précisément sur les techniques gouvernementales ; et finalement, la troisième partie se focalise sur les formes de subjectivation ou les pratiques de soi. La description et l’analyse de ces trois axes à la lumière du corpus foucaldien actuellement publié ainsi que des textes inédits comme Les aveux de la chair permettra d’envisager les réponses à deux questions centrales liées au diagnostic du présent qui traverse toute l’entreprise philosophique foucaldienne : quelle est le rôle historique du christianisme dans la configuration des formes actuelles d’assujettissement ? Peut-on trouver à l’intérieur du christianisme des phénomènes qui nous permettent de résister à ces formes d’assujettissement ?
This dissertation investigates the genealogical value that Michel Foucault assigns to Christianity focusing on the configuration of subjectivity, particularly on the way of life as a main domain in which subjectivity is constituted. More precisely, the dissertation is structured by following the three genealogical domains or constitutive areas of “focal points of experience” in Foucault’s last works. The first part tackles the problem of truth, in particular for what concerns the forms of veridiction; the second part focuses on the analysis of the forms of power, or more exactly, the techniques of governmentality; the last part approaches the forms of subjectivation or the practices of self. Based on available Foucauldian corpus and unpublished material –especially the Confessions of the Flesh (Les aveux de la chair) – the description and analysis of these three domains aim to answer two fundamental questions related to the Foucauldian diagnosis of the present: What is the historical role of Christianity in the configuration of the current forms of subjection? Are there any Christian phenomena according to which we could resist to those forms of subjection?

Mon éthique publique d’inspiration humaine et souveraine résulte de la double implication du sujet politique et de l’État souverain dans la production des valeurs à vocation collective. Le sujet politique apparaît comme porteur d’une parole inspirée de sa fondamentalité, des besoins de sa vie et de sa condition humaine. La dimension humaine s’analyse tout aussi par l’inviolabilité de la personne de Rawls et de ses droits humains prioritaires exprimant un ensemble de préoccupations de l’homme comme être digne de respect. De surcroît, la biopolitique foucaldienne propose une gestion étatique de l’homme comme être biologique et en tenant compte de sa nature humaine. Le dynamisme du sujet n’a pas su affaiblir les dévouements étatiques vers le maximum d’être, le rayonnement croissant et la pérennité de la domination souveraine. L’éthique publique constitue un espace de justification et de légitimation de la décision publique et des comportements en général. Cela permettra de favoriser le bien-être collectif surtout lorsque l’engagement du sujet rend possible la véridiction nécessaire. John Rawls par l’équité et la justice apporte des valeurs qui permettent de faire de ce bien-vivre de l’homme une priorité de la société bien ordonnée par l’exclusion de toute attitude utilitariste. Car, une société à démocratie constitutionnelle propose un système de valeurs préalablement accepté imposant le respect absolu de la personne, d’où l’idée de la répartition équitable des biens (les libertés fondamentales, la répartition de la richesse au profit des désavantagés et des valeurs politiques qui fondent une entente durable). Même si dans la réalité politique et juridique, la constance de la lutte justifie bien souvent ce qui fait la portée effective de ces valeurs
My public ethics as a reflection between humanity and sovereignty shows a double contribution of the political subject and the state in the production of the values that we need collectively. The political subject brings a word or a speech inspired by the human fundamental needs and the human conditional of life. The human point of view discussed inside this work is also understood by the rawlsian inviolability of the person and the human rights as priority which express a lot of preoccupations toward mankind as dignified creatures. Moreover, the foucaldian biopolitics suggests a system of state control of the mankind as a biological being and also taking care of their human nature. The dynamism of the political subject is not able to weaken the state encouragement to increase the power, his enlightenment and his influence, and his perpetuity. The public ethics set up a space of justification and legitimization of the public decisions and the behavior of every body. That will be in the advantage of the well-being of the community collectively and the comfort of everybody specially when the commitment of the political subject brings him to tell the truth about himself, his life and the condition of life. John Rawls by his equity and his justice system provides values giving man and woman access to comfort and well-being in his well organized society against all sense of utilitarianism. Because, a society with constitutional democracy provides a system of values previously accepted for the absolute respect of the person, from which perceiving the equitable distribution of property (fundamental liberties, the distribution of the resources and the country’s wealth on the profit of desadvantaged and poor people, and values aiming for durable political consensus). Even though, the political and legal reality, the constancy of the fight justify mostly the effectiveness of those values