Alain Beaulieu

This article aims at understanding the North-American reception of Foucault’s Folie et déraison. After showing how American conceptions of social control facilitated the integration of Foucauldian thinking in North-American academia, I examine the ways by which the advocates of anti-psychiatry and the historians of psychiatry read Folie et déraison, which became emblematic for French Theory. I then present various Anglo-American critiques of Folie et déraison and defend the persistence of a “Foucauldian spirit” against the sci-entifization of psychiatry. All this allows for an assessment of the legacy of Folie et déraison in the North American debates.

The shift in Foucault’s work from genealogy to ethics finds consensus among Foucault scholars. However, the motivations behind this transition remain either misunderstood or understudied in large part. Foucault’s recently published or soon-to-be translated 1977/—9 lectures (published as Security, Territory, Population and as The Birth of Biopolitics) offer new elements for understanding this dense and uncharted period along Foucault’s itinerary. In this article, the author argues that Foucault’s interpretation of the liberal tradition, which is at the core of the 1977—9 lectures, must be examined in combination with Foucault’s other major interests in the late 1970s, namely the Iranian Revolution and Kant. The discovery of spirituality (Iran), the valorization of an autonomous subject (Kant) and the call for a tolerant environment towards minority practices (liberalism) pave the way for the later Foucault’s ethics, which are grounded in spiritual exercises and means of liberating the subject.

L'œuvre de Deleuze contient encore beaucoup de mystères. L'unité de la philosophie deleuzienne est-elle à chercher du côté d'une ontologie? Constitue-t-elle une ardente défense de l'immanence radicale? S'agit-il plutôt d'une philosophie du virtuel? Le consensus fait défaut autour de cette œuvre polymorphe. K. Ansell Pearson prend ici le parti de placer l'entreprise deleuzienne sous la bannière du vitalisme. Cet aspect de l'œuvre deleuzienne avait bien sûr déjà été remarqué. De manière explicite, Deleuze condamne lui-même l'idéalisme au nom des forces de la vie. L'auteur ne nous apprend donc rien de neuf en assimilant le deleuzisme à la dernière des grandes pensées vitalistes. Là où il innove, c'est en donnant une consistance à l'ensemble des concepts biophilosophiques du système deleuzien. Des notions insuffisamment problématisées par les interprètes qui se contentent le plus souvent de reproduire la langue deleuzienne sans en penser la cohérence d'ensemble. C'est ainsi que les notions de devenir-animal, de vie anorganique et de corps sans organes trouvent un sens à travers l'idée avancée par l'auteur d'une «vie germinale».

The Deleuzean literature paid relatively little attention to the relationships between Deleuze and cosmology. Yet, Deleuze remains one of the few key contemporary philosophers who stayed connect- ed to the cosmological tradition. The expression of this interest and the contribution to this domain can be found, for example, in his borrowing of James Joyce’s neologism “chaosmos,” admiration for Whitehead’s essay on cosmology, or, following Artaud and Blanchot, in his appeal for an outside of any exteriority. This paper discusses Deleuze’s original cosmological way of thinking and delineates Deleuze’s own cosmological affectivity.

There was a wide range of in memoriam and homages published in the years following Deleuze's suicide. However, none of them succeeded in grasping ‘the evential’ aspect of his death. This paper identifies a series of errors in the literature on Deleuze's death. It also suggests a way to overcome them by considering a singular encounter between Alice's passage through the looking glass and Deleuze's defenestration, which both took place on 4 November. We will show how a new conception of death as event comes out of this unseen connection.

The Politics of Gilles Deleuze and the Random Materialism of the Late Althusser A cursory reading of the writings of the late Althusser in which the philosopher attempts to devise a « random materialism » might lead us to regard them as the matrix from which a number of post-structuralist conceptions of politics, including that of Gilles Deleuze, have sprung. Our intention in the present article is to demonstrate the partial nature of such a filiation. To do so, the article focuses on the relationship between the late Althusser and the Deleuzean conception of politics. It will thus examine the refusal, common to both philosophers, to elaborate a totalising theory of the political and their concomitant invocation of a principle of contingency. Such an affinity should not however disguise the differences between Althusser and Deleuze with regard to the manner in which the actualisation of such a programme is to be envisaged.