CRITICAL ACTUALIZATION AND EXPERIENCE:

A READING OF MICHEL FOUCAULT

Abstract

Taking as a starting point the topics raised by Michel Foucault’s inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1983, this paper aims to elucidate, through the reading of Kant undertaken by the French philosopher, the outline of two procedures established by him: (i) to perform an overall reading of his own intellectual itinerary and, by doing so, to situate himself in the contemporary philosophical panorama; (ii) to sketch issues that are central to his thought such as the correlations between philosophy and the present time, ethics and politics, criticism and history, diagnosis and transformation of the present time. We will analyze and develop these procedures in three stages. The first is the understanding of the philosophical practice as a way of belonging and historical performance of the philosopher in his present time, which implies a constant work of critical updating. In the second stage, we will emphasize the ethical-political edge of this philosophical attitude. Finally, we will develop the notion of critical updating in its imbrication with history in what concerns the present experience of what we are - individually and collectively - and the possibility of opening it up for modifying experiences in the present time, of the present time. To this end, we will touch on two fundamental registers of this opening: the experience of the Prisons Information Group (GIP) and the notion of "experience-book".