Maddalena Cerrato, Michel Foucault’s Practical Philosophy. A Critique of Subjectivation Processes, SUNY Series in Contemporary French Thought, De Gruyter Brill, 2025
Interview with author on New Books site, 2 September 2025
About this book
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.
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