The Actualité of Philosophy and its History: Michel Foucault’s Legacy on a Philosophy of the Present

Abstract

From the late 1970s, and particularly in the last years of his life, Michel Foucault repeatedly returned to the status of philosophical reflection as an ontology of the present, of actualité, or an ontology of ourselves. However, the impact of these famous theoretical syntagms around a philosophy of the present or of actualité – one of Foucault's most precious legacies 40 years after his death – is not fully intelligible without considering that they were already at the heart of Foucault's reflections on the status of philosophy from the mid-1960s onwards. Today, with the recent publication of the essay Le Discours philosophique, we can better understand how the concept of actualité shaped, within an archaeological framework of analysis, the highly complex elaboration of the status of philosophy as a discourse aimed at providing a diagnosis of our actualité. The theoretical density of this latter term reveals a rich panorama of philosophical references (sometimes explicit, sometimes more implicit) that are essential for grasping both the historical-conceptual stakes of this term and the way in which it is, for the first time, inscribed at the heart of the status of philosophy, giving rise also to the very possibility of making it an object of historicization that at the time was still only archaeological. The aim of this contribution is to show how Le Discours philosophique broadens our understanding of what Foucault would later take up in a wider horizon of analysis, in which actualité would mark a renewed space of historical analysis of the contingent relationship between philosophy and its present, by redefining philosophical reflection as a practico-reflexive mode that Foucault will designate as “attitude” (and “critical attitude”).