La lutte et la vérité : la philosophie, entre histoire des sciences et intervention politique chez Michel Foucault et Louis Althusser
This research project aims to study the encounter, in the context of the 1960s in France, between a tradition of epistemological history of sciences – represented by figures such as Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem – and a period of intensified political struggles that culminates in the series of events of May ’68. Both Louis Althusser’ and Michel Foucault’s works are a testimony of this encounter. If Althusser comes to conceive philosophy, through a theory of its history, as a battlefield or a “class struggle in theory”, Foucault engages himself in the project of a genealogy of various historical forms of truth which, attentive to the matrices of relations of power wherein they emerge and exert themselves, is inseparable from a political action aiming to have them subverted and reconfigured. Despite the differences between the two bodies of work, a common space sketches itself out for philosophy at the crossroads of history, science and politics, at a time where its traditional metaphysical and legislative ambitions begin to fade away.
XXe siècle Louis Althusser Michel Foucault Philosophy Politics Epistemology History of sciences French philosophy 20th century