Scènes de la vérité. Michel Foucault et le théâtre

What meaning, value, relevance for philosophical thought and political practice is possible to ascribe to the concept of theatrum philosophicum, of “philosophy-theatre”? The present research explores possible answers to these questions starting from the analysis of Michel Foucault’s works. By focusing on the theatrical concepts, texts, tools and stylistic devices used by Foucault, my aim is to investigate how theatre can contribute to philosophy, when philosophy is not meant to become a systematic project but rather a creative practice. To this end, I examine a series of notions related to the semantic field of theatre, taking into account Foucault’s enterprise as a whole: the tragic and tragedy; the theme of the double; the notion of simulacra; the fictional writing; the “dramatics” and dramaturgies of truth; the political and resistant scenes of the bodies. Through all these research axes, theatre reveals itself as an extremely fruitful device to call into question the traditional Western philosophical discourse. Theatre is a way to rethink the theoretical and practical relevance of Foucault’s philosophy, without reducing it to abstract, universal, and preordained formulas. Drawing a path between theatre and philosophy (or better, an analytical framework that employs theatre to rethink the place and the role of philosophy), and accepting the ambiguities of an indirect and metaphorical use of the theatrical conceptuality, I formulate a clear hypothesis: thanks to its powers of repetition, duplication and public test, theatre is a form of philosophical experience, which emblematically conveys the critical attitude lying at the heart of Foucault’s philosophy. Theatre helps conceive the activity of thinking as a concrete practice of transformation, which changes the forms of relation the self has to her/himself and to others. Theatre is not an esthetical and marginal dimension of Foucault’s works, but rather the fil rouge that connects them as a movement of shifting, displacing and perpetual re-elaboration of our own mode of looking at the world and at our subjectivity. Foucault’s theatrum-philosophicum is a way to rethink philosophy as a political performance.