Michel Foucault’s Practical Philosophy

Offers a wholistic approach to Michel Foucault's thought introducing the idea of practical philosophy as an original interpretative framework.

Offers a wholistic approach to Michel Foucault's thought introducing the idea of practical philosophy as an original interpretative framework.

Michel Foucault's thought, Maddalena Cerrato writes, may be understood as practical philosophy. In this perspective, political analysis, philosophy of history, epistemology, and ethics appear as necessarily cast together in a philosophical project that aims to rethink freedom and emancipation from domination of all kinds. The idea of practical philosophy accounts for Foucault's specific approach to the object, as well as to the task of philosophy, and it identifies the perspective that led him to consider the question of subjectivity as the guiding thread of his work. Overall, Cerrato shows the deep consistency underlying Foucault's reflection and the substantial coherence of his philosophical itinerary, setting aside all the conventional interpretations that pivot on the idea that his thought underwent a radical "turn" from the political engagement of the question of power toward an ethical retrieval of the question of subjectivity.

Maddalena Cerrato is Assistant Professor of Critical Theory in the Department of International Affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University.

Maddalena Cerrato is Assistant Professor of Critical Theory in the Department of International Affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University.

"In an insightful way, Cerrato's Michel Foucault's Practical Philosophy proves that if the event of Foucault's thought continues to reverberate today into new critical questions, it is because he practiced philosophy not only as discourse but also as a radical activity interrogating not only what we can know about history but also about ourselves and the truths that set our limits." — James Martell, Professor of French, Lyon College

"In the wake of the translation into English of Michel Foucault's courses at the Collège de France, Maddalena Cerrato's book, Michel Foucault's Practical Philosophy, is an urgent and necessary attempt to read the entirety of Foucault's work, problematizing his contemporary reception. Cerrato not only questions readings that emphasize an ethical turn in the work of the 'Late Foucault,' not to mention the postulation of a neoliberal Foucault, but she inscribes Foucault's thought in the Aristotelian tradition of practical philosophy. From this tradition, Foucault's analyses of the processes of subjectivation, the function of truth, and the configuration of the government of the self and others acquire new traction. In other words, Cerrato elaborates a vivid interpretation of Foucault related to the anarchic and aprincipal dimension of thought, in the line that goes from Aristotle to Martin Heidegger and Reiner Schürmann, which runs counter the normative and oppressive demands that have fueled the Western ontopolitical tradition. In short, we are faced with a book that presents a careful reading of Michel Foucault's oeuvre and of its persistent relevance to critically confront our present." — Sergio Villalobos Ruminott, University of Michigan