Papers by Florence Caeymaex
Philosophie française contemporaine, Jan 27, 2016
Science, Politics, and Ontology of Life-Philosophy
Translated from the French by Edward F. McGushin 1 ere is good reason to consider Henri Bergson, ... more Translated from the French by Edward F. McGushin 1 ere is good reason to consider Henri Bergson, alongside Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Simmel, as one of the major gures in the eld of "philosophy of life. " Bergson o en evoked his very early interest in theories of evolution. 2 As early as 1896, Matter and Memory-his book on the relation between the body and the soul-put in play the central role of the brain as the organ of "attention to life" in the activity of the mind, sketching a conception of the living body (corps vivant), i.e. of the body as a "center of action. " But it is with the appearance of Creative Evolution-the work which established the national and international fame of Bergson from 1907 on (Azouvi 2007 , 131)-that Bergsonism is de nitively tied to the notion, or more exactly the image , of the "vital impetus" (l ' élan vital). In both the mental and physical sense, it is the thematic of life that asserts itself as essential for all of Bergson's re ections. And it is to the evolution of life that this philosophy returns in 1932 in order to think through the problem of distinctively human sociability, that is to say, moral and religious phenomena. In many respects, Bergson's philosophy is an attempt to renew metaphysics starting from biological science, which took o in the 19th century, and to found, on new bases, the alliance between science and philosophy that Descartes realized with mathematics. Just as Descartes had taken "mathematics as model and support, " 3 Bergson became a student of the life sciences, broadly understood (biological, psychological, sociological). He was not just looking for a modelthat of an empirical and experimental knowledge (connaissance)-but he also had the aim of elaborating a properly metaphysical signi cation of the notion of life, born of a philosophical intuition conceived as a direct vision of the real.
Daimon Revista De Filosofia, 1998
Le moment du vivant (dir. Arnaud François, Frédéric Worms), Presses Universitaires de France, 2016
In this essay, we first consider Foucault’s biopolitics a hypothesis rather than a theory, meanin... more In this essay, we first consider Foucault’s biopolitics a hypothesis rather than a theory, meaning it is in the first place a heuristic tool, inviting us to inquire into historical changes and into today’s features of governmentality as well as of biomedicine or other techno-scientific apparatuses involving life in a way or another, whether human or not. But we believe its relevance goes far beyond a demand for empirically grounded descriptions: it is intrinsically an act of politicisation within the biopowers, and an act of theoretical re-problematisation of politics as well, that both need an ethnographic approach attuned to the actual forms taken by power relationships. Taking Latour’s and Foucault’s respective approaches and shifting from the power-knowledge apparatuses theory (The Will to Know) to a new theory of action and of discourse (Politics of nature, Reassembling the social), we sketch the outlines of what politics can mean at the time when government is not only exerted...
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Papers by Florence Caeymaex