The Practical Turn: French Philosophy and Self-Writing

The Althusser Case

Abstract

This text takes a stand in face of the catastrophic event that the pandemic has meant and proposes a change in the form of academic writing. On the one hand that it recognizes the fragility of life and on the other the intellectual honesty when accounting for the traditions that constitute us, without claiming an absolute mastery of any knowledge but trying to show the materiality of the journeys traveled: thesis formulation, discursive register changes, conceptual inventions or new nominations. I argue that “self-writing” allows us to include these complex movements traversed by personal experiences, conjunctural overdeterminations, and at the same time of their conceptual and theoretical elaborations. To support this thesis which I inscribe in what I call a practical turn, I first make an introduction that advances the necessary changes in the way of practicing philosophy; then I make a brief review of the tradition in which it is inscribed, emphasizing its practical dimension, and especially writing as a practice of the self; and finally, I consider a singular case of this modality of philosophical writing.