For a (non-realist) reading of Michel Foucault

Abstract

The status of realism in Foucault, despite being insistently elaborated, remains elliptical - in part thanks to its association with a set of propositions we could call fictionalist. By reading the texts where Foucault addresses the interarticulation of fiction, universalism and facticity, the article proposes a non-realist reading of his work, which is marked by the refusal not of the real as an object, but of its ontological evidence. Initially, it presents the insufficiencies of the interpretations that demand an ontology, such as Paul Veyne's, as well as of those that replace it with the exceptionality of creation, such as Michel de Certeau's, and the most promising approach to the reading proposed by Giorgio Agambem.. Next, it examines in detail the question of literature as a methodological paradigm, especially in Foucault's references to the work of René Char. Finally, it shows in which sense the enunciation of archeogenealogy's discourse is closer to Fichte's (non)realism - in its unlikely encounter with Blanchot - than to Hegelian dialectics.