In a university lecture hall, Fanny de Chaillé turns the philosopher's words into a gestural and vocal score for the actor Guillaume Bailliart.

Foucault then departs from the rules of the inaugural lesson: rather than flaunting his knowledge, he shares his fear of expressing himself, at the moment when his word becomes that of a great institution. What authorises the words he utters? How does the discourse escape the speaker to be delimited, led, ordered by society?

For society organises all sorts of limitations to frame it: the distinction between true and false, between reason and madness, inscription within an academic discipline, modes of access to and exclusion from knowledge... Thus he shows the extent to which speaking is an activity that harbours powers and dangers, a site of struggles, victories, wounds, domination, servitude... Of this first famous lesson, no recording remains, only a subsequent rewriting.

Fanny de Chaillé explores the emptiness of this missing orality - this life inscribed behind the archive so dear to the "archaeologist of knowledge" that was Foucault. She disrupts the discourse to make it, once again, a living word, an event in the present. She gives substance to thought by approaching the text as a score: a discourse in motion, as Foucault called for ideas to be shared, which open and circulate without constraint. And so the great jubilation imbued with humility that belonged to him – that of thinking joyfully, with pleasure and enthusiasm – comes to life again.