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Through the constitution of an international scientific editorial board, our aim is to join different approaches and disciplinary fields going beyond the narrow national borders of Foucault scholars. Therefore, such a scientific board will contain the “specialists”, who have extensively studied the French thinker, and those scholars who, without a deep philological knowledge of his entire work, have nonetheless proved to be able of mapping the trajectories that its utilizations and practices are still tracing on a global scale. Within this framework, one of our main purposes is to offer our readers, Italians and not, a wider theoretical and political picture in which it is possible to situate the Foucaultian problematizations, trying at the same time to short-circuit the barriers that separate different fields of knowledge which are discursively and institutionally fixed.

From the point of view of our editorial strategy, and beside the “traditional” activity of a journal which aims to explore Foucault’s thought along the described lines, we wish to develop an organic project of translation of several Foucaultian texts that still remain unpublished in Italian. Moreover, we will try to emphasize the vitality that characterizes the study of Foucault’s works through a special section devoted to a discussion, on concepts, themes or problems, among scholars who read Foucault from different perspectives and with different theoretical and political intents. We believe that such a section could represent a precious instrument to bring the debate on Foucault’s work to a wider sharing and a further geographical and disciplinary enlargement of frontiers.

Finally, our parallel web project aims to provide a sort of “resonator” for every event or contribution connected to the interpretation and use of Foucault in the world. The web site intends to inform an interested public about the international conferences, seminars and roundtables which have something to do with Foucault’s thought, as well as about the publication of Foucault texts or of monographs and articles often dedicated to him in several disciplinary fields (this is why we will promote a section specifically devoted to the reviews of the most significant contributions on Foucaultian issues). Moreover, this web site – although linked to an Italian journal – aims to become part of the network still existing in the international circuit of Foucault’s studies, precisely through the publication of the abstracts (in English and French) of the articles that will compose each issue of the journal, thus opening new opportunities of dialogue and international cooperation. Then, we hope to encourage mutual intersections among research groups or scholars that are often very close to each other from the point of view of their interests, but practically limited by the absence of a common ground to interact and confront.

In summary, our project of a journal and a web site aspires to place the study of Michel Foucault in a wider perspective, intensifying its epistemological, ethical and political effects, and to inaugurate the common platform of research we mentioned before. What is at stake in such an enterprise is the will of radically re-thinking the connection between Foucault’s philosophical practice and the emergence of the ensemble of tensions and fractures that “l’actualité” brings in our global present.

Laura Cremonesi, Orazio Irrera, Daniele Lorenzini, Martina Tazzioli