CRMEP Public Lectures, Autumn 2026, 5: Éric Alliez, ‘Michel Foucault, or, What Happened?’

This lecture will reexamine the Foucaldian hypothesis of civil war as a ‘matrix of power’, from its Nietzschean-Marxist construction and its affirmation as a strategy in ‘the element of political struggle around power, against it ” (The Punitive Society), all the way to its critique in the form of a crash test (Society Must Be Defended) and its definitive abandonment in the studies on (neo-)liberal governmentality (The Birth of Biopolitics) and their shift toward the analysis of subjectivation (The Care of the Self). In a curious trans-historical combination, these analyses mobilize the themes of an ‘ontology of the present’ and of ‘actuality’. We will revisit them from the divergent perspective of our present today.