Description
The practice of history is also a subject of reflection in Michel Foucault’s 1975-6 Collège de France lectures, ‘Il faut défendre la société’. They constitute a masterclass in critical historiography by exploring when and why particular stories of the nation come to be told, by whom and to what ends – and how discourses of the nation are transformed with successive regraftings in new conjunctures. In the paper I bring this developed historiographical awareness to bear on two books which also tell stories of the French nation, tending in quite opposite political directions, but which, in differently problematic ways, are lacking such self-consciousness about their own approach: Renaud Camus’s infamously influential anti-immigration tract, with its call to see immigration in terms of conquest, invasion and the replacement of a people, and Catherine Malabou’s extrapolation from Proudhon’s anarchist appraisal of the French Revolution as a non-event in the long history of domination and her call for an anamensis of the repressed memory of domination as part of a political challenge to contemporary technofeudalism. In this way, I demonstrate the analytical power of Foucault’s bellicose genealogy of the imbricated discourses of nation, race and class for critical understanding of Camus’s ethnonationalism, as of Malabou’s anarchism, while also identifying some unexpected convergences.| Period | 30 Jun 2026 |
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| Event title | Annual Conference of the Society for French Studies |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Leicester, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |