One needs to take things with philosophy: Michel Foucault and the infinity of the task

Abstract

This text is developed from a small collection of fragments of Michel Foucault’s work, and texts about his person and his thought. Amid Foucault’s public speaking, in the voice of his own books, peripheral texts, courses and interviews, and before Michel’s image, as described by his friends and some of those who knew him and wrote about him, we praise philosophy as a way of life, or simply as a starting point for other, more ethical, freer, more beautiful and truer ways of living, of being alone with another, of relating to oneself and to the world. With an educator’s interested look on Michel Foucault's intellectual path and affective landscape, the philosophical activity is presumed, in the light of a certain curvature in the notion of parrhesia, as a line of strength and as a fundamental trace through which one wishes to rehearse a writing based on suspicion, certainly insoluble, of the crucial character between word and act, theory and practice, truth and life.