Today it seems to be an urgent and necessary task to return to the texts by Michel de Certeau (1925-86). Not because Michel Foucault said of him that he was ‘the best, the brightest of [his] generation’, but for reasons to do with our present thinking.
Indeed, when we consider the social and political disarray of the moment, we are forced to recognize how hard it is, in periods of crisis, to clarify the changes taking place. That implies the emancipation of thought, a process that consists of an inventive interrogation of knowledge and a rigorous elaboration of understanding. This process is one that would not be subject to the dominant ideological models. In addition, thinking of the way clarification and emancipation are intertwined in the most successful intellectual constructions, some of us remember Certeau's work, whose central aim is to clarify the fundamental but stealthy transformations that abruptly emerge into the light of day and undermine the most tenacious assumptions.