Michel Foucault, Sociology and History

A conversation with Julia Varela and Fernando Álvarez-Uría

Abstract

This interview with Julia Varela and Fernando Álvarez Uría reveals the vocation and the self-demand that the experience of thinking within the social sciences entails for them: to question the naturalisation of social space, not to renounce their roots and at the same time to improve people's reality. Through their professional training in French critical sociology, heir to the Durkheimian tradition, they describe an intellectual climate, that of Paris in the 1970s, which is both close and strange to us: the profound changes in the forms of teaching and learning, the powerful university socialisation in the para-academic life of the city or the somewhat self-managed curricular trajectory. This is how they became acquainted with the works of the post-structuralist period and began to develop their first research, with a special emphasis on institutional critique that denounced the link between the psychiatric sphere and social control, as well as the fundamental elements of the constitution of subjectivity such as education. As is obvious, the subject matter of his studies has expanded over time to encompass areas such as historical sociology, anthropology, sociology of knowledge, literary analysis and others. Both cause and consequence of this process has been his commitment to the dissemination of the work of Foucault and his disciples, especially through the publishing house La Piqueta, but also a life dedicated to teaching, research and intellectual creation and dissemination, characterised by rigour and a strong critical sense.