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Introduction to "Penser la folie: Essais sur Michel Foucault" Author(s): Georges Canguilhem and Ann Hobart Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Winter, 1995), pp. 287-289Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343923Accessed: 26-02-2015 15:50 UTC

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Introduction to Penser la folie: Essais sur Michel Foucault

Georges Canguilhem

Translated by Ann Hobart

Why have I agreed to be the first to say a few words on a work published thirty years ago? It is because, as the third reader of Michel Foucault's manuscript, I delight in having helped to make it famous. To be more precise: third reader after Georges Dumezil and Jean Hyppolite, in an institutional space where the manuscript could pretend to be taken for a doctoral thesis. I make this qualification out of respect for Maurice Blan- chot, who claims to have been made aware of it first through the media- tion of Roger Caillois. It has happened, in the course of my career as teacher, that I have been taken as capable and culpable of self-satisfaction. Naturally I am no judge of these judgments. But if there is a moment in my work as academic about which I am happy, even today, to be able to flatter myself, it is to have been the reporter on the doctoral thesis of Michel Foucault. Allow me to forget for an instant that it is thirty years later and to resituate myself thirty years ago. I was at that time rather controversial for not holding in high esteem certain schools of psychol- ogy. I was not, however, totally uneducated on the subject. In 1925-26, when a classmate of Daniel Lagache at the Ecole Normale, I attended with him some courses and lectures by Georges Dumas. Later, when a colleague of Lagache at the Facult6 des Lettres at Strasbourg, removed at that time to Clermont-Ferrand, I attended a number of his lectures. If my doctoral thesis in medicine, in 1943, principally concerned problems

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.-TRANS.

Critical Inquiry 21 (Winter 1995) ? IDITIONS GALILEE, 1992. English translation ? 1995 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/95/2102- 0003$01.00. All rights reserved.

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288 Georges Canguilhem Introduction to Penser la folie

of physiology, to interrogate the normal and the pathological invited ref- erence to such authors as Karl Jaspers, Eugene Minkowski, and Henri Ey as well. In the summer of 1944, when doctor to the maquis of Auvergne, I hid and cared for their wounded for several weeks in the psychiatric hos- pital at Saint-Alban in Lozere and in the surrounding areas. I had known previously, at Toulouse, the director of the hospital, Lucien Bonnaf6. He welcomed into his home the doctor Frangois Tosquelles; the position he has since held in the debates on institutional psychotherapy is well known. I witnessed some of their work. We debated a good deal. The memory of their cordiality is still alive in me.

Here, no doubt, are some of the reasons for the trust my friend Jean Hyppolite saw fit to put in me when he advised Michel Foucault to come to present his work to me. I never concealed that I was immediately won over. I learned to know, better than I had ever done before, another figure of the abnormal than organic pathology. And Foucault obliged me to recognize the historical existence of a medical power that was equivocal.

On the misinterpretations and deviant usages that Foucault's thesis on power has incited, there is a closely argued study by Robert Castel, entitled "Les Aventures de la pratique," published in a special issue of the journal Le Dibat in 1986, after Foucault's death.' For my part, I be- lieve that it is at the end of Histoire de la folie that one learns when and how psychiatry ceases to be in reality, under cover of philanthropy, a po- licing of madmen. It is with and through Freud. Foucault said of him: "Freud demystified all the other structures of asylums. ... He transferred to himself... all the powers that had been dispersed throughout the collective existence of the asylum."2 And fifteen years later, in La Volonte de savoir, Freud and psychoanalysis are praised once again for having, in rejecting the neuropsychiatry of degeneracy, broken with "the mecha- nisms of power" that pretended to control and manage the daily practice of sexuality. This stand immediately follows the pages in which Foucault has described the ways and means of what he has called "biopower."3 A quick reminder of these pages does not seem to me superfluous at a time when the French are discovering in their own country what biopower is capable of.

But a question remains for which my reading of Foucault does not

1. See Robert Castel, "Les Aventures de la pratique," Le Dibat, no. 41 (Sept.-Nov. 1986): 41-51.

2. Michel Foucault, Folie et diraison: Histoire de la folie a l'dge classique (Paris, 1961), p. 611. A much-abridged version of Histoire de lafolie was published in 1964 and was translated into English by Richard Howard under the title Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York, 1965), pp. 277-78.

3. Foucault, La Volonte'de savoir vol. 1 of Histoire de la sexualiti (Paris, 1976), p. 185; trans. Robert Hurley, under the title The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York, 1978), p. 140.

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Critical Inquiry Winter 1995 289

yet permit me to sketch the beginning of a response. I cannot believe that he was seduced by psychoanalysis, even as he celebrated the rupture that Freud's work represented. Could the victory that the analysand, listened to by the analyst, wins over censure seem to him to be pure of all resem- blance to confession? Is the refusal of any attempt at corrective recupera- tion, which is the self-justification of psychoanalysis, always totally transparent? If the recognition of sexuality is to be credited to psycho- analysis, is this the same for Foucault as the recognition of the uncon- scious?

Thirty years afterwards, would Foucault maintain what he said of Freud, that he had "expanded the miracle-working powers" of the medi- cal practitioner?4 I have not found the elements of a response to these questions in the work of Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault, un parcours philosophique,5 nor in Jacques-Alain Miller's important presentation on Foucault and psychoanalysis during the 1988 interna- tional conference "Michel Foucault, philosophe."6 Perhaps the lectures at the College de France in 1973-74 on "Le Pouvoir psychiatrique," which dealt extensively with antipsychiatry, would supply some new informa- tion concerning his opinion of psychoanalysis.7

It has been thirty years! Since 1961, other works by Foucault-Nais- sance de la clinique, Les Mots et les choses, Histoire de la sexualit~-have in part eclipsed the initial influence of Histoire de la folie. I admire the first two. In Le Normal et le pathologique, I said how much I had been moved by the first.8 I wrote an article on behalf of the second for which I had nothing but praise. But for me, 1961 remains and will remain the year that a truly great philosopher was discovered. I had already known at least two, who had been my classmates: Raymond Aron and Jean-Paul Sartre. They did not get along with one another. Nor did they get along with Michel Fou- cault. One day, however, all three were seen united. That was to sustain, against death, an undertaking without limits.

4. Foucault, Folie et diraison, p. 611; Madness and Civilization, p. 277. 5. See Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and

Hermeneutics (Chicago, 1983); trans. Fabienne Durand-Bogaert, under the title Michel Fou- cault, un parcours philosophique: Au-deld de l'objectivite et de la subjectiviti (Paris, 1984).

6. See Jacques-Alain Miller, "Michel Foucault et la psychanalyse," in Michel Foucault, philosophe: Rencontre internationale, Paris 9, 10, 11 janvier 1988 (Paris, 1989), pp. 77-84.

7. See Foucault, Risumi des cours 1970-1982 (Paris, 1989). 8. See Georges Canguilhem, Essai sur quelques problemes concernant le normal et le patholog-

ique (Strasbourg, 1943); trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett, under the title On the Normal and the Pathological, ed. Robert S. Cohen (Boston, 1978).

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Article Contentsp. 287p. 288p. 289

Issue Table of ContentsCritical Inquiry, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Winter, 1995), pp. 275-527Front MatterGeorges Canguilhem on Michel Foucault's "Histoire de la folie"Introductory Remarks [pp. 275-276]Report from Mr. Canguilhem on the Manuscript Filed by Mr. Michel Foucault, Director of the Institut Franais of Hamburg, in Order to Obtain Permission to Print His Principal Thesis for the Doctor of Letters [pp. 277-281]On "Histoire de la folie" as an Event [pp. 282-286]Introduction to "Penser la folie: Essais sur Michel Foucault" [pp. 287-289]

Madness, the Absence of Work [pp. 290-298]Agenda for Radical History [pp. 299-304]Christopher Caudwell [pp. 305-353]Philosophy from an Antiphilosopher: Paul Valry [pp. 354-381]Feminist Heterosexuality and Its Politically Incorrect Pleasures [pp. 382-410]These Are the Times We Have to Live in: An Interview with Roberto Fernndez Retamar [pp. 411-433]Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on Display [pp. 434-467]Kafka 007 [pp. 468-495]Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins [pp. 496-522]Books of Critical Interest [pp. 523-527]Back Matter