LGS Blog
Philosophical Screens: L’exercice de l’État – April 25, BFI Southbank
Philosophical Screens
Wed 25 Apr 18:30 at BFI Southbank (NFT3)
Matthieu Potte-Bonneville on L’exercice de l’État (The Minister) (France 2011. Dir Pierre Schöller. With Olivier Gourmet, Michel Blanc, Zabou Breitman. 115min. EST)
Philosophical Screens is a new series, running twice per semester, that invites audiences to explore dialogues between philosophy and film, through an evening of rich contextualisation and discussion. It is presented in partnership with the London Graduate School and the Collège International de Philosophie. Each screening has an extended introduction and post-screening discussion. John Mullarkey (London) and Céline Surprenant (Paris) are the two local co-ordinators of Philosophical Screens.
For this first event, we welcome Matthieu Potte-Bonneville, a specialist on the thought of Michel Foucault at the Lycée Jean Jaurès in Montreuil, and editor of the journal Vacarme, to reflect on Pierre Schöller’s portrait of a government minister.
L’exercice de l’État (France 2011)
French Minister for Transport, Bertrand Saint-Jean, is woken in the middle of the night by his personal private secretary: a bus has crashed into a ravine, initiating a dark odyssey through a treacherous world for the State official. In staging one man’s effort to occupy the complex spaces of power – between conviction and compromise; command and obedience – Schöller invites us to reflect on one of Michel Foucault’s preoccupations: the minister – a figure half-way between state administrator and religious.
Mathieu Potte-Bonneville is a French philosopher, lecturer and academic researcher at the Ecole Normale Supérieure at Lyon; he’s also the president of the collegiate assembly of the International College of Philosophy, in Paris (http://www.ciph.org), and editor in chief of Rue Descartes (review of the CIPh). A specialist in the work of Michel Foucault Foucault, he has, inter alia, published Michel Foucault, L’inquiétude de l’histoire (Presses Universitaires de France, 2004) and D’après Foucault: gestes, luttes, programmes (with Philippe Artières, Points, 2012). He is also member of the editorial board of the Vacarme/french review (http://www.vacarme.org/)
His current work focuses on the political meaning of concepts such as ‘uses’ and ‘users’, and on the way that they redefine the political field today
Tickets prices and booking here
http://www.bfi.org.uk/whatson/bfi_southbank/visitor_information/ticket_prices