The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon
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PIERRE RIVIÈRE (1815 – 1840)
For Foucault and his team (Jean-Pierre Peter, Jeanne Favret Saada, Patricia
Moulin, Blandine Barret-Kriegel, Philippe Riot,Alessandro Fontana, and Robert Castel), the Pierre Rivière affair (Rivière being a young Normand who in 1835 violently killed his whole family except for his father and who recounted his act in a memoir) reveals kinds of knowledge and prejudices but also the strategies used by psychiatry in the middle of the nineteenth century in order to have penal justice recognize its importance. Rivière is the very image of the “infamous man,” an individual who is taken for a short time into the administrative machinery and is forced to explain his actions. This crime, Foucault emphasizes, does not make a big stir in the judiciary of this time. Rivière remains an insigniicant and anonymous character. However, his narrative, a poetical work that possesses a profoundly disturbing power, manages, after 150 years, to throw the 1970s psychiatric institution into crisis.
I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother proposes as well an important renovation in the way of writing history. The subjective dimension of the historical work is largely accepted by Foucault, who seeks not to reduce this crime into a sociological, anthropological, or historical logic. What is at issue is to make Rivière’s act unassimilable by making it “stick in our throat like anxiety.”
Jean-François Bert
See Also
Abnormal
Madness
Psychiatry
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Suggested Reading
Foucault, Michel. 1982. I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century, ed. Michel Foucault, trans. Frank Jellinek.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
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RAYMOND ROUSSEL (1877–1933)
Raymond Roussel was a French writer who was inluential in Surrealist circles during his lifetime and was an important inspiration for the nouveau roman movement in the 1950s and 1960s. He wrote plays, poetry, and novels.
His most well-known works are the novels Impressions of Africa (1910) and Locus Solus (1914) and the autobiographical essay How I Wrote Certain of My Books (1935) (Roussel 2001; Roussel 1983; Roussel 1995). Foucault recounts in an interview (EDL) that he irst came across Roussel’s work, completely by accident, in a secondhand bookshop in 1957. As his fascination with Roussel grew, he decided to write an article for the journal Critique, but this quickly grew into a book-length study. The book, published in French with the title Raymond Roussel (1963), was not translated into English until 1983, when it was given the more evocative title Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel (EDL).
We can guess that Foucault’s fascination with Roussel’s work was fed by his own work of the late 1950s and early 1960s. At this time, he was working toward completion of the History of Madness (1961) and was already working on the material that would become The Order of Things (1966). Roussel’s work raises questions both about the positioning of madness in society and about the troubled relation between words and things. Roussel was, famously, a patient of the psychiatrist Pierre Janet, and his work was often interpreted in the light of his mental illness (for example, his death by apparent suicide). And, in the works themselves, the theme of the relation between language and the world of things is constantly explored. Above these concerns, and appealing to another of Foucault’s interests, was the theme of death and, in particular, its relation to language.
Foucault presents Roussel as a writer who is anxiously obsessed with language and who is constantly exploring the intimate connection between language and death. In the last line of his book, Foucault generalizes this experience by saying that what we share with Roussel is this “anguish of the signiied” (EDL, 169). A shared
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anxiety in the face of language is both what allows us to understand Roussel’s works and what allows us (Foucault) to speak of them. And, it is also what contributes to giving Foucault’s own book its labyrinthine opacity, its relentless turning around the question of what Foucault sees as the void that opens up at the heart of language and connects it inexorably with death.
Convolution, repetition, and mirroring were key features of Roussel’s work. A signiicant part of the pleasure of those works comes from the fact that, at one level, they can be approached as a kind of mystery that both resists and invites explanation; in fact, as a mystery that is constantly being explained but in ways that we cannot quite accept as reliable. In Locus Solus (“solitary place”), for example, we are introduced to the extraordinary garden of Martial Canterel. A group of visitors is led by Canterel through a series of marvels that he has assembled (literally) using his incomparable powers of engineering and chemistry. These include a series of vignettes, inside large, glass-fronted refrigerators, in which cadavers that have been temporarily reanimated using two substances invented by Canterel (“resurrectine” and “vitalium”) reenact the most highly charged moments of their lives, before collapsing again into a state of death. Before any explanation is given, the visitors (and the reader) are taken from window to window to observe the curious actions of the inmates of each refrigerated cell. The scenes are described in meticulous but bafling detail; neither we nor the visitors to the garden have any idea of the signiicance of the actions we are witnessing. After the eight scenes, Canterel explains both his discovery of the chemical compounds resurrectine and vitalium and, once again in great detail, describes the context of the moments that we had seen being recreated inside the refrigerated cells. This second description is, then, an explanation of the original description, but it is one that is almost as mysterious and inexplicable as the irst.
One thread to inding our way through this labyrinth is given to us by Roussel himself in the posthumous text in which he explained how he had written certain of his books. For Foucault, this text demonstrates that Roussel’s work should be read not as a series of lights of the imagination but as a technical experiment that is carried out on language in order to expose both the labyrinth that it constructs for us and the abyss on which it rests. In How I Wrote Certain of My Books, Roussel explains some of the basic techniques on which he built “certain” of his books (principally Locus Solus and Impressions of Africa). One technique, for example, consisted of choosing two almost identical words – for example billard (billiard table) and pillard (plunderer). To these he would add identical words capable of two meanings in order to produce two almost identical sentences with radically different meanings. Hence: “les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard” [the white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table] becomes “les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard” [the white man’s letters on the hordes of the old plunderer]. His task was then to construct a narrative that would begin with the irst sentence and end
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with the second sentence. It was this story, Roussel tells us, that was the basis for his novel Impressions of Africa.
Hence, for Foucault, these inventions are not primarily the product of a rich, surreal imagination. Rather, they are the products of a process that extracts wonders (in a Jules Verne sense) from the limitless fecundity of language itself: “the reader thinks he recognizes the wayward wanderings of the imagination where in fact there is only random language, methodically treated” (EDL, 40). For Foucault, this is the key to the locked doors of Roussel’s work: not so much the mechanics of the process itself, and certainly not the psychopathology of the author, but the sense in which the equal poverty and richness of language is capable of generating a world of crystal clarity and impossible mystery. Underlying all of these experiments is an anxiety about words and their relation to things. Roussel’s work both conveys and instills this anxiety: a “formless anxiety” relating to “the stiling hollowness, the inexorable absence of being ... [the] expanse that Roussel’s narratives cross as if on a tightrope above the void” (EDL, 13, 21). In Roussel, therefore, the effect of the incredibly precise descriptions of the world of things is, paradoxically, to undermine our faith in a direct and faithful relation between words and things.
In 1983, Foucault remarked that, “No one has paid much attention to this book, and I’m glad; it’s my secret affair. You know, he was my love for several summers ...
no one knew it” (EDL, 187). He even goes so far as to say that the Roussel book “doesn’t have a place in the sequence of my books” (ibid.). There is indeed no doubt that the book is very different in tone and content from his more widely read works. However, despite Foucault’s own wish for it to remain secret, today it serves as an important testament to the crucial role that avant-garde literature played in the early formation of his intellectual project.
Timothy O’Leary
See Also
Language
Literature
Gilles Deleuze
Suggested Reading
Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault, trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1994. Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press.
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Roussel, Raymond. 1983. Locus Solus, trans. Rupert Copeland Cuningham. London: John Calder.
1995. How I Wrote Certain of My Books, ed. and trans. Trevor Winkield. Cambridge: Exact Change.
2001. Impressions of Africa, trans. Lindy Foord and Rayner Heppenstall. London: John Calder.
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JEAN - PAUL SAR TRE (1905–1980)
Sartre and Foucault were arguably the leading intellectuals of their respective generations in France during the second half of the twentieth century. Although their names were frequently associated, often in an adversarial
way, their politics and political activism made them colleagues in demonstrations and petitions for causes of the Left in the 1960s and 1970s. Each was sometimes suspected by his critics of harboring anarchist tendencies. On one of the very few occasions when Sartre addressed Foucault’s thought explicitly, he argued apropos the latter’s “archaeological” structures (epistemes) that, whereas history is best conceived as cinema, Foucault offers us a slide show (Sartre 1966, 87). Philosopher of the imaginary, Sartre aptly drew the contrast between their respective philosophies of history with an image, whereas Foucault, master of specialized reason, effectively appealed to the diagram; the Foucauldian diagonal replaced the Sartrean dialectic.
Their differences were famously, if hyperbolically, summarized by Foucault in terms of Sartre’s having “closed the parenthesis on the episode in our culture that began with Hegel.” Despite his efforts to integrate contemporary culture in the dialectic, Foucault explains, Sartre typically was unable to abandon everything that comes from analytical reason and that plays a profound role in contemporary culture: “logic, information theory, linguistics, formalism. The Critique of Dialectical Reason,” Foucault continues,“ is the magniicent and pathetic effort of a man of the nineteenth century to think the twentieth century. In this sense, Sartre is the last Hegelian and, I would even say, the last Marxist” (FDE1, 541–542). In what follows, I shall parse these remarks, discussing what is plausible or excessive and indicating what is simply erroneous.
Although the comparison is complex and multifaceted, I shall focus chiely on the model of Foucault’s Anthropological Quadrilateral. In his ambitious yet masterly The Order of Things, Foucault gathers the elements and relations that constitute the grid of intelligibility (the episteme) that sets the conditions and charts the limits for
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what will count as knowledge in what he designates the “modern” period – extending roughly from the late 1700s to the emergence of structuralism in the 1950s. As usual, the argument is spatial in that the relations are mapped both vertically and horizontally, but especially diagonally, through a juncture labeled “Man.” This is not the “homo” of Homo sapiens or the object of Renaissance studia humaniora but the “Man” of the human sciences (les sciences humaines), an invention of the nineteenth century likely destined for disappearance in the latter half of the twentieth. It is within this epistemic box and centered on this humanistic node that Foucault would enclose Sartre – a man of the nineteenth century trying to think the twentieth century.
The plausibility of Foucault’s charge rests heavily on Sartre’s early individualist philosophy of consciousness epitomized in his masterwork, Being and Nothingness, but Foucault's charge depends even more on his commitment to dialectical, as distinct from analytical, reason. Long before Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason,
Sartre had distinguished synthetic from analytic reason and associated the latter with bourgeois thought. Characteristically, this epistemic distinction also bore a political and an ethical signiicance. In Sartre’s view, it was such thinking, for example, that brought us the abstraction that would generously confer on the black, the Jew, the Arab, and the woman the “Rights of Man and of the Citizen” while ignoring what was distinctive about the needs and concerns of each group. Sartre could easily subscribe to Foucault’s claim that “the ‘Enlightenment’, which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines” (EDP, 222). Both (negative) liberties and (social scientiic) disciplines were born of unbridled analytical reason.
If Sartre’s alleged discovery of the power of phenomenology to philosophize about a cocktail glass, in Beauvoir’s story, led him to study Husserl, it was the title of Jean Wahl’s book Toward the Concrete (1932) that sparked Sartre’s enthusiasm as he moved to and beyond phenomenological description toward dialectical comprehension, and from consciousness to lived experience (le vécu). In The Birth of the Clinic,
Foucault had noted that the emerging case-study method served as a counterexample to the still prevalent Aristotelian dogma that there was no science of the singular (see EBC, xiv, a remark echoed in EDP, 191). But Sartre expanded this thesis by insisting that synthetic, dialectical thinking could overcome the inability of analytical reason to understand the singular by locating it in its sociohistorical context. This was the “singular universal” of the Critique and especially of his multivolume existential biography of Gustave Flaubert, The Family Idiot (Sartre 1981–1993).
How then did Sartre escape from the rectangular nineteenth-century prison in which Foucault conined him? I suggest that he slipped past the guards incognito – appearing to be a model prisoner while in fact concealing the recalcitrant Other in his very self. Consider a few examples.
The Dialectic. Amid his growing preference for dialectical reasoning, Sartre reserved an ontological space for analytical reason with its structures, functions, and causal analyses, the very intellectual practices Foucault insisted Sartre could not suffer.
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It is located in the realm of what he calls the “practico-inert.” This term denotes the sedimentation of previous praxes (human actions in their sociohistorical context) and so is ontologically dependent on “free organic praxis.” The latter is the fulcrum of Sartre’s dialectical thinking as it had been the basis of his individualist philosophy of consciousness in Being and Nothingness. In this respect, it might seem that Sartre its well into the modern episteme. But this would misread him as a methodological (and ontological) individualist in his social philosophy, neglecting the crucial role played by “real relations” in his social ontology as elaborated in the Critique.
Does that then make him a holist? Even a “structuralist? Not at all. A simple either/or that divides social ontology into holism and individualism overlooks Sartre’s explicit appeal to a dialectical nominalism, which argues for a “synthetic enrichment” of organic praxes as “mediated” by properly social (interpersonal) relations such as group membership and by practices and processes such as racism or colonialism. So important is the concept of mediation to Sartre’s social ontology that Althusser could call him “[t]he philosopher of mediation par excellence.” Sartre occasionally called his version a dialectic “with holes.” These holes (trous) denote organic praxes that are ontologically free (“other-than themselves, nonself-coincidental”). This counters Foucault’s claim that the covert telos of Hegelian dialectic is identity, not difference. Whether applicable to the Hegelian dialectic or not, identity is deinitely not the goal of the Sartrean. This very “inner distance” marks the Sartrean “self” as ontologically free precisely because man is “not a self but a presence-to-self” (Sartre 1956, 440). Though Sartrean praxis totalizes, it resolutely withstands complete totalization by an Other. The otherness that Hegel’s phenomenology is commonly seen striving to overcome in its pursuit of identity is disvalued as a “futile passion” by Sartre in contrast with the anguish of good faith efforts to resist this temptation toward conscious identity. Even the group-in-fusion of the Critique is ontologically a revolving set of relations in which each member is both mediated and mediating in the practical “sameness” of common concern but never in the ontological identity of a collective subject. The inner distance, the gap that conditions individual freedom, tames group unity as well, making betrayal a constant threat to the group just as bad faith stalks the individual.
Indeed, it seems that Foucault had already eyed issures in the walls of this anthropological prison when he designated the two opposing angles of his spatial model “formalization” and “interpretation” (roughly, structuralism and hermeneutics), insisting that they “have become the two great forms of analysis of our time. In fact, we know no others” (EOT, 299). Toward the end of the book, he describes three “counter-sciences” that might presage the path that the future may hold for us, namely a kind of “structuralist” linguistics, psychoanalysis, and ethnology that was beginning to marginalize existential humanism even as he wrote. The “structuralist” character of these sciences that counter the human sciences consists in their search for “the totality of formal structures” (EOT, 380) that unconsciously condition those
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respective pursuits called psychoanalysis and ethnology. Foucault does not foresee the end of the social sciences as such, merely the likely erasure of their manlike face. It is at their “right angle” where the chain of signiication crosses the plane of the social that they come into play, for “just as the linear structure of language always produces a possible choice between several words or several phonemes at any given moment,” so “the unique experience of the individual inds a certain number of possible choices (and of excluded possibilities) in the system of the society” at the point at which the social structures encounter a certain number of possible individuals (and others who are not)” (EOT, 380, emphasis added). This calls for and receives a kind of master counterscience, namely linguistics as a “pure” theory of language; that is, one that makes no mention of man. It seems that the nodal point in this alternative model is a function, not an agent. And its “choices” are limited, if not reduced to one – a situation that Sartre rejected in Being and Nothingness as freedom-obliterat- ing determinism. Yet the later Foucault seemed to echo Sartre’s view when he commented that “where the determining factors are exhaustive, there is no relation of power: slavery is not a power relationship when a man is in chains” (EEW3, 342), a remark Sartre anticipated.
The Free Agent. The ambiguity of “free agency” challenges both Sartre and
Foucault at this point. Foucault will face it, though not face it down, with his concept of power as “action on the action of others” that presumes freedom of resistance on the part of the other lest it harden into brute force (see EEW3, 221; EPPC, 83). Sartre, for his part, will gradually acknowledge the historical dimension of “situation” when he admits: “it is history which shows some the exits and makes others cool their heels before closed doors” (Sartre 1968, 80). Perhaps what Foucault disparages as “the neurosis of dialectics” is just the kind of necessary antidote that either cures or destroys freedom according to the amount administered. As Merleau-Ponty posed the problem in 1945, the question is to know what part freedom plays in this new existentialist philosophy and whether we can allow it something without giving it everything (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 77).
Whether these antisciences are the glimmer on the horizon that promises the dawning of a new age or rather the twilight of a fading era, Foucault is careful not to judge. As with so many such crossroads in his thought, he leaves us with the possibility that opens for us the freedom to “think” contrary to our received certitudes. The kaleidoscope has been turned ever so slightly, the mechanism is found to be one cog out of alignment, and the rest is up to us.
Or is it? That is Sartre’s abiding conviction, from his early writings through his vintage existentialist mantra that you can always make something out of what you’ve been made into. The “always make something” denotes his existentialist freedom; the “what you’ve been made into” designates the “objective possibility” (or impossibility) that dawned on him as his concept of abstract freedom thickened with the aid of historical materialism. Toward the end of his life, Sartre reafirmed the humanist