Still aiming for a genealogy of modern government, this year's lecture attempted a history - itself experimental - of medieval experimentation, i.e. of the social capacity to invent the political. It continued and formalized the two previous years (2016-2017 and 2017-2018) of seminar on the communal experience, two years organized as a diptych, the first part of which was general and historiographical, and the second, entitled " la vie civique ", was devoted to the Italian communal city, considered as an accentuation and not as an exception in the general movement of the European communal experience. Yet every historical accentuation is also a form of anticipation - and we can indeed anticipate the fact that this year's lecture will continue, in 2019-2020, with a focus on the case of communal and post-communal Italy (as was the case with the two-year lecture on political fictions).
The ambition is to risk a general theory, not of the medieval system of powers, but of its political inventiveness - and this precisely on the basis of the conditions of its contemporary re-actualization. In other words, the aim is not so much to chronicle institutional constructions as to map the situations in which politics emerges - where it is not necessarily expected, where it is not loudly expressed. Seeking regularities rather than rules, defending a style of inquiry rather than a method, we propose here to ask whether a generative grammar of the possibilities of politics in the Middle Ages is conceivable.