ROBERT STEUCKERS

Dominique became interested in history for several reasons. As I explain in my book (A la rencontre d'un cœur rebelle), Dominique had three lives, a first one in which he was a political activist, a second more meditative one that I call the recourse to the forests, and a third in which he became the historian that we know. The study of history, I think, took on its full importance when he gave up politics, at the end of his first life. He experienced his retirement from politics as a small death.

I am often asked where I stand on what the American academic world calls 'French Theory'. It may seem ambiguous. In any case, it does not correspond to the position adopted by the personalities whom the labelling maniacs unwillingly place at my side. François Bousquet, a neo-right-wing or rather neo-neo-right-wing theorist, recently wrote a pamphlet against the contemporary ideological effects of the ideology that Michel Foucault sought to promote through his many happenings and farces that challenged the established order, through his openness to all kinds of marginality, especially the most outlandish.