The point of departure for Revel's research was the work of
Michel Foucault, to whose study she has devoted a dictionary, several books and many articles, especially around two themes - the relationship between
philosophy of language and literature (developed by Foucault in the 1960s), Foucault's opposition to
idealism, and the transition from biopolitics to subjectivation (developed by Foucault between the late 1970s and the early 1980s). She is linked to the work of the American philosopher
Arnold Davidson, with whom she has in common an attempt to update the ethico-political Foucaldian themes. After the
2005 French riots, she wrote a book about the so-called "banlieues" ('suburbs' in French) criticizing both the clichés that surround their inhabitants and the growth of racism in French society. She analysed the refusal to give any political value to what was happening in the suburbs by deconstructing racist implicit images of public speeches (the roots of it might be the conviction that the one who does not speak the language of political representation is necessarily aphasic, childish or even animal). Since the beginning of 2010, she has been working more generally on the philosophy of history, and especially the way in which a certain practice of philosophy has problematized both its own historical situation and the possibility of intervening in the present. In this context, she develops a work on the philosophical use of archives, especially through teachings and seminars at the
EHESS. More generally, she studied the different representations of history in French thought since the 1950s. It also extends its investigation of some Italian readings of French poststructuralism (Italian opera and post-opera, the thinking of
Giorgio Agamben and
Roberto Esposito). Finally, she develops a series of theses on the political theorizations before and after 1968 and on the necessary recasting of the political concepts of modernity, in the fermenting movement of Italian operaism and more particularly in the analyzes of her husband, the philosopher
Toni Negri. She works in particular on the notion of "common" as an alternative to the public / private dichotomy, and on a political ontology of the present building bridges between
Maurice Merleau-Ponty and
Michel Foucault. ==Bibliography==