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Repetition
(2019)
This article explores the creative value of the notion of 'repetition' in Michel Foucault's texts from the 1960s and early 1970s. Re-enacting Gilles Deleuze's philosophy, Foucault implicitly refers to the Freudian repetition mechanisms in order to distort and reverse them. Foucault's repetition is de-psychologized, affectively de-individualizing, and temporally erratic, using the power of a senseless repetition to create new possibilities for the future.
The aim of this essay is to provide an analysis of Foucault's use of the notion of revolution in the reports he wrote for "Il Corriere della Sera" during his two trips to Iran in September and November 1978. Foucault critically frames the historical and philosophical concept of revolution, in order to oppose it to the spreading revolts against the Shah, which embody the simple and negative opening of the possibility of a transformation in history. Yet is it possible to reactivate the notion of revolution in a nonrestrictive sense in order to think about the role and the possibility of political revolts and freedom today?
The essay engages with a screenplay by Michel Foucault, written in 1970 for a film, not realized during Foucault's lifetime, about Pablo Picasso's "Las Meninas", a series of 58 paintings that the artist made in 1957, taking up, updating, reinterpreting the famous painting with the same title by Diego Velázquez (1656). This screenplay is at the same time an example of critical reflection on reenactment in art history and itself a reenactment practice of sorts: the filmic repetition of an artistic repetition. It invites a reflection on the role of repetition as a critical operation: how doubles, reenacted images, and 'countermimesis' can become creative gestures and opening movements of transformation through plays of refraction, duplication, and multiplication of the realities and subjectivities at stake in them.
The reactivation of time
(2022)
Reappropriating, restaging, revisioning, remediating: at the crossroad of the new millennium, reenactment has undoubtedly emerged as a key issue in the field of artistic production, in theoretical discourse, and in the socio-political sphere. Taking an ever larger distance from notions of historical revival and 'Living History', current reenactments call into question whether the present can unpack, embody, or disentangle the past. Accordingly, to reenact is to experience the past by reactivating either a particular cultural heritage or unexplored utopias. If to reenact means not to restore but to challenge the past, history is thus turned into a possible and perpetual becoming, a site for invention and renewal.