The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon
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existence. Whereas thought leads to deepest interiority, “I speak” distances, disperses, and effaces that existence.
There is an incompatibility between the appearance of language in its being, Foucault writes, and the consciousness of the self in its identity. The being of language only appears for itself in the disappearance of the subject. Access to this relation can be gained only through a form of thought that he dubs “the thought of the outside [la pensée du dehors]” (EEW2, 150). Foucault remarks that it would be necessary, at some point, to deine the fundamental forms and categories of this thought and its sources. It may have had its source in Pseudo-Dionysus and the mystical thinking subsequent to Christianity, but its irst “rending” in modern times is to be found in the writings of Sade. According to Kevin Hart, Foucault perhaps attributes the thought of the outside to Pseudo-Dionysus because the latter has “a vision of the deity as above or beyond what is uniied.” For Pseudo-Dionysus, God is thought of as abiding “beyond the reach of the distinction between unity and multiplicity” (Hart 2004, 140). Foucault adds that the “experience” of the outside was also given voice by Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Artaud, and Bataille (EEW2, 151). But above all others, it is the work of Maurice Blanchot that is the thought itself.
Neither relection nor the vocabulary of iction is adequate to expressing the thought of the outside. For Foucault, this thought is “not relection, but forgetting; not contradiction, but a contestation that effaces; not reconciliation but reiteration [ressassement]” (EEW2, 152). Relexive language, which always leads thought to a dimension of interiority, needs to be directed toward the outside, cast toward the void that undoes it. The space of iction is limited to the experiences of the body, the limits of the will, and the ineffaceable presence of others (EEW2, 153). If the ictitious resides in the impossible verisimilitude of what lies between things and people (ibid.), then the language of iction requires a conversion.
Rather, the “movement of attraction,” what Foucault names “the pure, most naked, experience of the outside” (EEW2, 154), and the withdrawal of the companion in Blanchot’s récits lay bare what precedes all speech, what underlies all silence: the continuous streaming or lowing [ruissellement] of language (EEW2, 166). What language is in its being is a formless murmur or rumbling [rumeur informe] (EEW2, 167). According to Foucault, Blanchot narrates the experience of the anonymity and boundlessness of language – a “site without geography” (EFB, 54). The being of language, language that is spoken by no one, is the effacement of the one who speaks (EEW2, 166). In language, which places “the origin” in contact with death, “every existence [in their shared transparency] receives through the assertion ‘I speak’ the threatening promise of its own disappearance, its future appearance” (EEW2, 168).
After 1965, Foucault’s interest shifts to what he called the “sacralization” and “institutional valorization” of literature (FMFE, 81). His concern, he explains to Roger-Pol Droit, is in how a certain number of discourses have been given a particular
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function and a sacralization and how in Western society literature has operated as a substitute for all other discourses (FMFE, 78). Opposed to “a kind of exaltation of literature as a structure of language that can only be analyzed in itself, starting from itself” (FMFE, 82), an exaltation that estimates writing to be in itself subversive and revolutionary, Foucault’s concern is now about “how a culture had decided to give such a singular and strange position to the writer,” as its voice and spokesperson (FMFE, 83). Nonetheless, he still portrays Blanchot’s general approach as “a desacralization of literature,” crediting Blanchot alongside Klossowski, Bataille, and Nietzsche (FMFE, 83) with allowing him to “break free [se débarasser]” from philosophy (FMFE, 88). Perhaps it is Foucault’s reading of Blanchot that may have contributed to his desire to address “the outside” of social practices and the mechanisms of power in society.
Blanchot himself wrote two assessments of Foucault’s work: an early article in 1961, “L’oubli, la déraison [Forgetting, Unreason],” an appreciation of Foucault’s
Histoire de la folie, which was published in Nouvelle revue française and later appeared in revised form as a chapter in The Ininite Conversation. Also, a slim volume, Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him, containing brief but penetrating analyses of Foucault’s works, which could also serve as a corrective to misreadings of Foucault’s work, was published in 1986 after his untimely passing away.
One of the correctives Blanchot issues is of the prevalent interpretations of the notion of the subject in Foucault’s work: “The subject does not disappear; rather its excessively determined unity is put in question” (EFB, 76). What is of signiicance is “its disappearance (that is, the new manner of being which disappearance is), or rather its dispersal, which does not annihilate it but offers us, out of it, no more than a plurality of positions and a discontinuity of functions (and here we reencounter the system of discontinuities ... )” (EFB, 76–77). Another corrective concerns the interpretation of madness. What particularly catches Foucault’s attention in his writings on madness, Blanchot explains, is “the act of exclusion” and not what is excluded (EFB, 65). In examining the power of exclusion that divides society into the reasonable and the unreasonable (EFB, 65), Foucault tackles problems that have always belonged to philosophy (reason and unreason), but he treats them from the angle of history and sociology (EFB, 66). According to Blanchot, Foucault is not calling into question reason itself but rather “the danger of certain rationalities or rationalizations,” in the same way that he is not interested in the concept of power in general but rather in relations of power, their formation, speciicity, and activation (EFB, 90).
Blanchot’s brief essay on Foucault not only alludes to the perceptive manner in which each thinker interpreted the other’s writings but also demonstrates how much their readers could learn from reading them together.
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See Also
Literature
Outside
Georges Bataille
Suggested Reading
Blanchot, Maurice. 1987. “Michel Foucault, as I Imagine Him,” in Foucault/Blanchot. Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside, by Michel Foucault, and Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him, by Maurice Blanchot, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and Brian Massumi. New York: Zone Books, pp. 61–109.
1992. The Ininite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1998. “The Thought of the Outside,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. James D. Faubion. New York: The New Press, pp. 147–169.
Hart, Kevin. 2004. The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
98
HENRI DE BOULAINVILLIERS (1658–1722)
Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658–1722), who preferred to be known as
Boulainvilliers, is perhaps best remembered today as an early opponent of Spinoza’s philosophy. In the period immediately after his death (many of his works were published posthumously), he was best known for advocating the inter-
ests of the French nobility against absolute monarchy, and it is for that reason that Foucault devoted three lectures of the course “Society Must Be Defended” (SMD) to him in February and March 1976. Current interest in Foucault’s discussion of Boulainvilliers tends to focus on the fact that Boulainvilliers used terms like race and blood in his account, thereby suggesting that he could be considered an early theorist of racial differences.
Some of Foucault’s readers, particularly in the English-speaking world, seem to have been unaware that Boulainvilliers had long played a role in French discussions of the history of race thinking. Augustin Thierry, to whom Foucault also refers extensively in SMD, had already argued in 1820 as a young man of twenty-ive that Boulainvilliers had shown that the nobility were the representatives of the conquerors of Gaul and that it was on that basis that they could call the land of Gaul their own (Thierry 1845, 89). This was suggested to him by such passages as the follow-
ing: “It is certain that since the conquest the original French have been the true nobles and are the only ones who could be, whereas the prospects ( fortune) of the
Gauls were restricted by the will of the conqueror” (Boulainvilliers 1727, I:39). The widespread, but largely unsubstantiated, view that Boulainvilliers was “one of the real ancestors of racism” (Poliakov 1975, 126) received support from a monograph by André Devyer (Devyer 1973, 353–390) just a few years before Foucault delivered his lectures. The recognition that a large portion of Foucault’s discussion of Boulainvilliers is not original to him but was a report of the genealogy constructed
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by the young Augustin Thierry, although later revised by him, accounts for the shift in the reception of Foucault (Venturino 2003 contrasts with his less critical discussion in Venturino 1993). Boulainvilliers was a spokesperson of the nobility, but Thierry reinterpreted him so that he could be understood as a historian of racial conlict, and this is how Foucault presented him: as a theorist of race war (which as an explanatory device held sway until it was replaced by the class war in the middle of the nineteenth century) (ECF-SMD, 60, 80).
In contrast to Foucault, the weight of current scholarly opinion has returned to the earlier view that because Boulainvilliers did not have an idea of biological inheritance and because he was primarily a defender of the aristocracy, he is better understood as a theorist of class than of race (Simar 1922, 24). That this is the better reading is conirmed by the fact that Boulainvilliers was following earlier usage in understanding race as a synonym for rang or rank (Boulainvilliers 1727, III:204). On that basis, he argued that a noble birth is the most common means to attain virtue (Boulainvilliers 1732, 7–8). He associated noble birth with “a tradition of virtue, glory, honor, sentiments for dignity and goods, which is perpetuated in a lengthy continuation of races” (Boulainvilliers quoted in Devyer 1973, 548). But, in spite of the advantages that accrued to the nobility, race was not destiny. Virtues were rendered hereditary by education (Boulainvilliers 1975, 135).
Nevertheless, the fact that Foucault’s account is at very least problematic in strictly historical terms does not mean that it does not succeed in all respects. It was also Foucault’s intention to write the genealogy of a certain discourse that appealed to history rather than to irst principles. By the end of the nineteenth century this in France was largely a right-wing discourse (ECF-SMD, 135). When at the very end of “Society Must Be Defended” Foucault referred to the racism among socialists of the Dreyfus era, many in his audience would have known that the dominant right-wing racists of the period, Gaston Méry and Edouard Drumont, drew on the rivalry between the Gauls and the Latins and in so doing belonged to the tradition of Boulainvilliers.
Foucault’s account of Boulainvilliers still has another level. Notwithstanding the association Foucault sketches between Boulainvilliers and the French rightwing, some commentators have recognized that Foucault presented Boulainvilliers as to some degree a forerunner not only of his own genealogical method and of the theme of power as relational (Marks 2008, 88 and 92), but also of his own view that politics is the continuation of war by other means.
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See Also
Abnormal
Body
Race (and Racism)
Suggested Reading
Boulainvilliers, Henri de. 1727. Histoire de l’ancien gouvernement de la France. 3 volumes. The
Hague: Aux depens de la Compagnie.
1732. Essais sur la noblesse de France. Amsterdam: N.p.
1975. Œuvres Philosophiques, volume 2, ed. Renee Simon. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Devyer, André. 1973. Le sang épuré. Brussels: Editions de Université de Bruxelles.
Ellis, Harold A. 1988. Boulainvilliers and the French Monarchy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Furet, François. 1984. “Two Historical Legitimations of Eighteenth-Century French Society: Mably and Boulainvilliers,” in The Workshop of History, trans. J. Mandelbaum. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, pp. 125–139.
Marks, John. 2008. “Michel Foucault: Bio-politics and Biology,” in Foucault in an Age of Terror: Essays on Biopolitics and the Defence of Society, ed. Stephen Morton and Stephen Bygrave.
London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 88–105.
Poliakov, Leon. 1975. The History of Anti-Semitism, volume 3, trans. Miriam Kochan. New York:
The Vanguard Press.
Simar, Theophile. 1922. Études critique sur la formation de la doctrine des races. Brussels: Maurice Lamertin.
Thierry, Augustin. 1845. “On the Antipathy of Race which Divides the French Nation,” in Historical Essays. Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, pp. 89–91.
Venturino, Diego. 1993. “A la politique comme à la guerre? A propos des cours de Michel Foucault au Collège de France,” Storia della Storiograia 23:135–152.
2003. “Race et historie. Le paradigme nobiliaire de la distinction socieal au debut du XVIIIe siecle, in L’idée de ‘race’ dans les sciences humaines et la litterature (XVIIIe–XIXe siecles),” ed. Sarga Moussa. Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 19–38.
99
GEORGES CANGUILHEM (1904–1995)
The name Georges Canguilhem evokes a philosophical dignity for Foucault because of his intellectual importance in postwar France and the continuing relevance of his methods and subject matter. It is Canguilhem who, in elaborating on the French tradition in the history of science, best posed the question of Enlightenment to the generations coming of age after the war. Raised the son of a tailor in a family with peasant roots, Canguilhem’s early success at school led him to Paris for lycée and on to the École Normale Supérieure. After studies in philosophy, Canguilhem taught at a number of lycées before being posted to Toulouse, where he undertook medical studies in order to continue his philosophical education by studying concrete human problems (Canguilhem 1991, 34). With the German occupation and rise of the Vichy regime, Canguilhem quit his post, objecting to the use of philosophy as an instrument for furthering state morality. Continuing his medical studies, he was appointed to replace Jean Cavaillès at the University of Strasbourg and also became active in the Resistance around this time. Although a paciist associated with “Alain” (the pseudonym for Émile-Auguste Chartier) well into the 1930s, Canguilhem came to believe that armed resistance was necessary. He inished his studies in medicine during this period with the thesis that would establish his reputation after the war, A Sketch of Some Problems Concerning the Normal and the Pathological
(Canguilhem 1991). After the war, Canguilhem gained a reputation for his severity as general inspector of philosophy and jury member for the agrégation, eventually defending his thesis in philosophy, La formation du concept de rélexe, under Gaston Bachelard, whom he would replace as director of the Institut d’histoire des sciences et des techniques at the University of Paris in 1955 (Lecourt 2008, 56). Canguilhem became well known for his 1955–1956 inaugural course on “Science and Error,” which inquired into the status of error in the sciences in order to better understand its place in human life. In 1956, he also famously criticized the scientiic pretensions
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of psychology, arguing that as long as psychology remained ungrounded in philosophy, in a concrete account of the human being, it is an instrument without an end, open to use by industry and the state for the control of employees and citizens. This is the Canguilhem that Foucault would elect as his bon maître.
Canguilhem was director of Foucault’s thesis, publisher of The Birth of the Clinic, and a staunch supporter in the face of existentialist critics (Macey 1993). But consider also Foucault’s personal profession of his debt to Canguilhem in 1965:
When I began to work ten years ago, I did not know you – not your books. But what I have done since, I certainly would not have done it if I had not read you. [My work] carries the imprint of your mark. I can’t tell you very well how, neither in which precise places, nor in which points of “method”; but you should know that even, that above all my “counter-positions” ... are only possible beginning from what you have done, from this layer of analysis that you introduced, from this “eidetic epistemology” that you have invented. (Eribon 1991, 103)
Instead of Canguilhem’s emphasis on the role of vitalism in the history of the life sciences, for example, Foucault argued that a mortalism made the life sciences possible (EBC, 145). Yet, despite this and other “counter-positions,” Canguilhem’s manner of doing the history of sciences was the starting point for Foucault’s own archaeological works. In 1978, Foucault repeated this claim in his introduction to the English-language translation of the expanded edition of Canguilhem’s medical thesis, Le Normal et le pathologique (1966), while also extending it to other postwar French intellectuals as well as his own genealogical works (Canguilhem 1991). Canguilhem became the essential philosopher for those who would rethink the subject (Canguilhem 1991). Foucault updated this “Introduction” in 1984 – it is the last text he would sign – though it appeared in early 1985, now entitled “Life: Experience and Science” (EEW2, 465–478). Although Foucault was not able to prepare a new essay as he had wanted, he did make a number of changes, suggesting a reevaluation of both his own and Canguilhem’s work, for the last version of the essay highlights the “philosophical dignity” of Canguilhem’s work in the history of the sciences. And although there is less discussion of vitalism, more emphasis is placed on the philosophical endeavor to root scientiic concepts in the activity of the living through the problem of error. As Canguilhem himself later says, his work had attempted to correct a long tradition in the history of medicine that viewed truth as the successive denunciation of previous error by reminding it that error is proper to living things themselves before being the object of the scientist. He states, “[t]o ight against illness is to attempt to help life recover from some error” (my translation from Canguilhem’s 1987 acceptance speech for the gold medal from the Centre National de Recherche Scientiique, text from Fonds Georges Canguilhem,
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Paris). As Foucault inds, Canguilhem’s philosophical value comes from his attempt to rethink the relation between the subject, life, and knowledge on the basis of the problem of error (EEW2, 477). And this relation is one of the major problems for modern thought.
Emerging in the late eighteenth century, the question of Enlightenment sought to know the moment when the West had irst asserted the autonomy of its own rationality and the status of the present in relation to this moment (EEW2, 467). The traditional focus on reason’s universality opened onto other inquiries, ones in which philosophers would study reason’s history and geography in order grasp it in its vitality – its historical birth and life, its present crises and maladies. These concerns became especially relevant after 1945, since the history of European colonialism, the new powers of science and technology, and the violent legacy of modern revolutions had brought forth so many questions about the extent to which rationality is an instrument of liberation or domination, enlightenment or despotism (EEW2, 470). Today the question of Enlightenment seeks to examine “a reason whose structural autonomy carries the history of dogmatisms and despotisms along with it – a reason, therefore, that has a liberating effect only provided it manages to liberate itself” (EEW2, 469). By studying the history of scientiic rationalities as aspects of culture, Canguilhem gives the historian the task of posing their meaning for the subject. And the examination of their critical rectiications in the search for truth suggests that the search for truth is a power by which the subject is itself called into question (Canguilhem 2002, 20–23). And this provokes Foucault to ask: “How is it that the human subject took itself as a possible object of knowledge? Through what forms of rationality and historical conditions? And, inally, at what price? That is my question: At what price can subjects speak the truth about themselves?” (EEW2, 444). Canguilhem’s work is essential because it formulates the question of Enlightenment for postwar France.
Whereas Foucault identiies different national traditions according to which this question was taken up, Canguilhem’s version is the culmination of a French tradition in the history of science (EEW2, 470–471). Here the question was taken up in the nineteenth century by positivists, beginning with Saint-Simon and Comte, who considered himself Kant’s successor (Gutting 2005, 90). For Comte, the emergence of positive sciences out of religious and metaphysical consciousness marks the beginning of man’s maturity, his break with previous consciousness and emergence as a rational, self-aware being. The development of a positive social science would be useful for identifying areas of life in which immaturity lingered and excluding its errors once and for all (Comte 1853). Moreover, a positivist history of science would be a means of excluding error from future possible scientiic endeavors. Historical epistemology (Lecourt 2008, 51–52) grows out of this by means of a critical relection on positivist theses by the likes of Bachelard or Koyré, yet for Foucault it is only Canguilhem’s work that brings the subject into question. Although the appearance
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of Husserlian phenomenology on the Parisian scene in 1929 may have played an important role in shaping French philosophy in the decades to come, by connecting Canguilhem to historical epistemology, Foucault suggests that his work is a response to problems that had been developing in France since the nineteenth century. Moreover, Canguilhem breaks with the traditional focus on mathematics or physics, visible in Bachelard, Koyré, or Cavaillès, since this allows the history of science to be done without real concern for the subject who knows. Doing the history of such disciplines allows the historian to sidestep the question of the relation between history and philosophy under the assumption that the universal develops according to its own logic once it has broken with experience. And such work thereby occludes concern about the geography and history of diverse scientiic rationalities and their meaning for the subject. By focusing on intermediate sciences, like physiology, anatomy, and biology, Canguilhem begins to transform what it means to philosophize on the basis of a critique of French history of science, but with implications that go far beyond its domain.
Canguilhem reworks the French history of science regarding its methods and its objects (EEW2, 470–473). The discontinuity of a scientiic rationality over time, a theme as old as the history of science, is no longer asserted as a static fact of history as in Koyré, nor is a radical break with the experiential world supposed as a condition of a science’s appearance as in Bachelard. Instead, discontinuity is a part of Canguilhem’s analyses because science produces discontinuities within itself. Sciences are truthful discourses, “that rectify and correct themselves, and that carry out a whole labor of self-development governed by the task of ‘truth-telling’ [dire vrai]” (EEW2, 471). The history of a science is the account of normative ruptures instituted in the search for norms giving better access to truth. The sciences are not instructive insofar as they break with experience but insofar as they have been able to rectify their own procedures and correct their own errors. Therefore, writing the history of science becomes a recurring task, since successive transformations in the norms for speaking true [dire vrai] entail the reshaping of this very history (EEW2, 472). But scientists as such are not the legitimate historians of their disciplines, since they are oriented by the object of science, an unchanging being, rather than science as it exists, a becoming oriented by the value of truth. Furthermore, since the historian investigates the process by which truth is sought, a recounting of diverse theories or paradigms of knowledge is excluded as a proper object for the historian, since these give a picture of what was known but not the process by which the true is distinguished from the false. This is an “indispensable theoretical relection” formed from within the history of science since it frees this work from the obligation of repeating what contemporary science regards as true or false, proposing instead to study the extent to which a particular scientiic rationality has been and is able to free itself from its own norms, its own truths (EEW2, 473). The historian of science studies the normativity of veridical discourses.