Sur les hétérotopies de Michel Foucault

It has become more and more difficult to enumerate the uses of the notion of heterotopia in academic as well as in the artistic fields and the activist communities. As a result, this article aims to give a renewed perspective on the stakes of the notion of heterotopia introduced by Michel Foucault in 1966. The fluctuations of the concept, and the need to specify it, force us to examine its genealogy. Our work will then consist in historicizing this notion by a chronological reading of its deployment in Foucault's work. In the course of this investigation, we will explore the commentators' repetitions in order to expose heterotopia to its potential critical and emancipatory implications. We are indeed convinced that it is most irrelevant to study the corpus of heterotopias without immediately, and at the same time, explore the way in which users have grasped this notion and, doing so, shaped it.