Being just with Foucault: From the Genealogy of Modernity to the Geohistory of the Anthropocene

To be fair to Foucault, we must try to understand the meaning of his work , not to pretend that he said something different from what he said, either to turn him into an easily refutable "straw man" or to extol him as a source of unappealable authority with which to endorse our own ideas, however alien they may be to his. At the same time, if we do not want to fall into mere "commentary", we have to maintain a critical dialogue with his work, making explicit our agreements and disagreements, using what we find valuable, developing what we find insufficiently elaborated and questioning what we find wrong. This difficult ethical and intellectual balance is the one I have tried to maintain with Foucault's work during the four decades of my intellectual career. In this article I will give an account of this critical dialogue, following a chronological and thematic path. I will point out the most important contributions of Foucault's work and how I have used them in my own work of socio-historical research and ethical-political reflection, but also the most relevant limitations of his "toolbox" and how I have tried to problematize them.