Michel Foucault, Le beau danger: Entretien avec Claude Bonnefoy, édition établie et présentée par Philippe Artières (Paris: Editions EHESS, 2011), ISBN: 978-2-7132-2318-1

In the summer-fall of 1968, Michel Foucault met with literary critic Claude Bonnefoy for a series of conversations (entretiens) that were to make the object of a book for the publisher Belfond.The book never materialized.The tapes too have disappeared.All that remains is a typescript of the very first conversation, presumed to be by Bonnefoy, bearing no correction or addition by Foucault (Beau danger 12).The typescript, preserved in the archives of the Association pour le Centre Michel Foucault, forms the substance of this little book inaugurating the collection Audiographie of the Éditions EHESS.In size and scope, Le beau danger cannot of course rival more ambitious editorial projects like the four-volume collection of Dits et écrits (1995), or the ongoing release since 1997 of Foucault's courses at the Collège de France.But what Le beau danger lacks in heft, it more than makes up for in provocation and poignancy.For one thing-as Philippe Artières, editor and author of a short but helpful introduction, suggests-it rounds out for us the portrait of a "Foucault parlant" (7), whose spoken interventions seem to have always deliberately complicated the image of the author Foucault.Artières goes so far as to characterize this first conversation with Bonnefoy as paradigmatic for the manner in which Foucault tends to "subvert" (14) the set rules of any oral genre in which he nevertheless agrees to participate.In this case, the subversion would have to do with Foucault's effort to relinquish any power or authority (18) associated with his professional activities (as a philosopher, author, teacher, etc.), by practicing-so Artières believes-"an autobiographic discourse" (19).In this sense, Le beau danger would mark the "endangering of Foucault by himself (la mise en danger de Foucault par luimême)" (22).I could not agree more, though I believe that the stakes are even higher.First, let us note that there are at least two-better yet, three-timelines that come to intersect in this small, fragmentary, yet oddly monumental little book.The first one has to do with the moment, in Foucault's career, when these conversations took place, i.e. after the publication of Les mots et les choses (1966) and the completion of his Archéologie du savoir (which appeared in 1969, the same year that his lecture on "Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?" was delivered and published)though it is Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (first published in an abridged form in May 1961) that receives the most attention in this conversation.At this point, Foucault is an established author and proponent of a new method ('archaeology') for the historical and systematic study of the human sciences.The second timeline, already invoked, is ours: thanks to the massive

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