Time versus History

Within what is too commonly, too uniformly called ‘French poststructuralism’, different strands or groupings can be discerned according to their reliance on notions of time or of history. In particular, the seemingly shared concepts of becoming and of the event unfold quite differently within a register of time or, on the contrary, as the ground of a conception of historicity. How, furthermore, does the relationship of these categories to subjectivity change from one case to the other? The talk will seek to identify a principle of radical opposition that accounts for fundamental rifts and at the same time redefines the ways of referring (or not referring) to the political field.

Judith Revel is professor of contemporary philosophy at the Université Paris Nanterre and also teaches at the École Normale Supérieure. A specialist in contemporary French thought, and in particular of Michel Foucault, her work deals with philosophy after 1945 and with how, at the crossroads of political reflection, historiography, and aesthetics, a certain practice of philosophy has sought to problematize both its own historical situation and the possibility of intervening in the present. She is academic co-director of two collective research projects: ‘Discipliner l’archive?’ (2016-2018, LABEX ‘Les passés dans le present’) and ‘Genre des archives et archives du genre’ (2016-2018, COMUE Université Paris Lumière). She has recently published Michel Foucault: Une pensée du discontinu (2010), Foucault avec Merleau-Ponty: Ontologie politique, présentisme et histoire (2015), and co-authored the Dictionnaire politique à l’usage des gouvernés (2012).