IN THE LAST ARTICLE HE APPROVED FOR PUBLICATION, TWO months before dying, Michel Foucault expressed his deep respect for Georges Canguilhem, emphasizing the position he had held in the history of philosophy in France:
This man, whose oeuvre was austere, narrowly bounded by choice, and carefully focused on a particular area within the history of science—which is not, in any case, regarded as a spectacular discipline—still found himself involved, to a certain extent, in debates in which he himself was careful never to intervene. But screen out Canguilhem and you will not be able to make much sense of a whole series of discussions among French Marxists; you will fail to grasp the specific factors that make sociologists like Bourdieu, Castel and Passeron so eminent in their field; and you will miss a whole aspect of the theoretical work done by psychoanalysts, particularly the Lacanians. More than that: across the spectrum of intellectual debate that preceded and followed the movement of 1968, it is easy to tell which participants had been formed, at firsthand or remotely, by Canguilhem.1
Foucault added that The Normal and the Pathological was without doubt his most significant book.2 It conveyed, he said, the essence of Canguilhem’s work: reflection on life and death; valorization of the status of “error” and rationality in the history of science; insistence on the notions of continuity and rupture, norm and anomaly; and a thoroughly modern view of the relationship between experimentation and conceptualization in the field of medicine.
Pursuing this theme, Foucault pointed to the fault line separating two main currents of contemporary thought in France: on one hand a philosophy of experience, of sense, and of the subject (the line running from Merleau-Ponty to Sartre), and on the other a philosophy of knowledge, rationality, and conceptuality (Cavaillès, Canguilhem, Koyré). The second of these, apparently more speculative and remote from any form of subjective and political commitment, was the one that had taken part in the struggle against the Nazis. No doubt the author of History of Madness had himself in mind in saluting the courage of a man who had been a hero of the Resistance before becoming Foucault’s own master.3 Was Foucault himself not also an austere historian of science engaged in a political struggle, not against fascism but against more subtle forms of oppression?
In truth, Canguilhem himself had already pointed out this fault line previously, once in 1943, when he defended his thesis on the normal and the pathological while risking his life as a resister; and again in 1976, when he composed a eulogy for his friend Jean Cavaillès, who had been killed by the Nazis: “His mathematical philosophy was not constructed with reference to any Subject that might momentarily and precariously be identified with Jean Cavaillès. This philosophy, from which Jean Cavaillès is radically absent, dictated a form of action that led him, along the narrow paths of logic, to that crossing from which none return. Jean Cavaillès was the logic of the Resistance lived out right up to death. Let the philosophers of existence and of the person do as well the next time around, if they can.”4 Canguilhem was pointing to a logical coherence, grounded in the primacy of the concept, between political commitment and intellectual activity. Foucault, nineteen years later, was emphasizing a caesura between a commitment in the service of liberty and the fact of defending a philosophy of the concept. Yet in 1983 he himself echoed Canguilhem’s idea of logical coherence: “One of the French philosophers who engaged in the Resistance during the war was Cavaillès, a historian of mathematics who worked on the development of its internal structure. No philosopher of political commitment, not Sartre, not Simone de Beauvoir, not Merleau-Ponty, made any effort at all.”5 If such a dialectic is present in the positing of a foundational relation between, on one hand, a philosophy of liberty and the subject, and on the other, a philosophy of concept and structure, that perhaps signifies that these are the two major paradigms that govern, in originary fashion, the relationship between a politics and a philosophy. But one might then maintain that only when the Freudian concept of the unconscious (irreducible as it is to any psychology of the person) is introduced does it become possible to resolve and overcome this contradiction.
Like many of his generation who studied at the École Normale Superieure (ENS), Canguilhem was a pure product of the educational system of the Third Republic. He was born on 4 June 1904 at Castelnaudary into a milieu of petit-bourgeois artisans; his father was the village tailor and his forebears were peasants from the south of France. Throughout his life he retained a local accent that gave his voice a particular resonance, at once blunt and determined. When he was ten he learned how to work the land on the farm his mother had inherited at Orgibet, on the border between the Aude and Ariège regions, land he himself managed during the period between the wars. He was a brilliant pupil in his native city before moving to Paris, where in 1921 he became a khâgneux at a distinguished upper secondary school, the lycée Henri-IV. Traditional student argot gave (and gives) the name khâgneux (= cagneux, or wretches) to students in the humanities division, technically known as the division of higher rhetoric, of the preparatory course (khâgne) for the ENS. The science students for their part got the nickname taupins, which suggests subterranean labor (taupe, literally “mole,” is a term for a mining engineer).6
The dominant figure at the lycée Henri-IV was Émile Chartier, better known under the pseudonym “Alain.” A student of Jules Lagneau, Alain succeeded Henri Bergson, Victor Delbos, and Léon Brunschvicg as a khâgne instructor. He had been a supporter of Dreyfus, and when the war came had volunteered for duty in the front lines, refusing to assume officer rank. Horrified by the mass slaughter of World War One, he had become convinced that philosophy must not stand apart from political thought. Hence he adopted a stance of radical pacifism, allied to a moderate humanism. A remarkable speaker, Alain was able to awaken the critical spirit of the youthful elite of the nation without claiming to impose any system of thought on them. For many years (until 1933) he passed on to them his ideal of a philosophy of action, deliberately Voltairean and grounded in the primacy of freedom, of the moral conscience, and of reason. In 1921 he began publishing Libres Propos with Gallimard. The weekly journal, some twenty pages in length to which many of his students contributed, served as a vehicle for his radicalism, his pacifism, and his hostility to the institutional military.
The young Canguilhem became a devotee of Alain. When he was admitted to the ENS in 1924, thus becoming a normalien, his classmates included Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Nizan, Daniel Lagache, and Raymond Aron. Two years later, tutored by Célestin Bouglé, he took his diploma of higher studies at the Sorbonne for his work on “the theory of order and progress in Auguste Comte.” In 1927 he achieved the agrégation in philosophy, becoming a qualified instructor at the higher secondary and university levels. In the same year he began to publish articles in Libres Propos under the pseudonym C. G. Bernard.
In 1927 Canguilhem, an ardent pacifist, took a leading part in the student protest movement against the established order within the ENS. For the school’s annual revue, he and his friend Sylvain Broussaudier staged a show entitled Le désastre de Langson. In it, the name of the prestigious director of the ENS, Gustave Lanson, the author of a well-known manual of literary history, was linked with a rather inglorious episode of the French conquest of Indochina, the battle of Lang Son in the 1880s. In two numbers, part satire and part prank, the authors heaped scorn on the French army, especially on one article of a law passed by the French parliament the same year that stipulated that in time of war the government should take all necessary measures “ dans l’ordre intellectuel ” to maintain national morale. The most scandalous part came when the actors sang, to the tune of “La Marseillaise,” verses from the Complainte du capitaine Cambusat in which the military instructors of the ENS were severely ridiculed.
Vexed by these attacks, Gustave Lanson reprimanded the perpetrators of the prank and forwarded a file on them to the war ministry. Accused of revolutionary propaganda, the pacifist normaliens signed a petition the following year against the advanced military training they were compelled to receive. Canguilhem found a way to protest by letting the tripod of a machine gun fall and hit his instructor, thus choosing deliberately to fail as an officer-in-training. This earned him eighteen months of military service with the rank of corporal.7
From 1930 on, pacifism in the manner of Alain gradually became irrelevant. The former khâgne students of the lycée Henri-IV turned to new commitments. The economic crisis and the rise of fascism thrust them into an environment very different from that of their youth. Nevertheless, after being appointed to a teaching post at Charleville, Georges Canguilhem repeatedly demonstrated that he had kept faith with the teaching of Émile Chartier, especially in supporting the “integral pacifism” of Félicien Challaye, a professor at the lycée Condorcet and in declaring himself hostile to all forms of established power, in the name of Socratic citizenship.8 Starting in 1934, though, he realized that Hitler’s rise to power had rendered his former antimilitary revolt pointless. After having taught at Albi, Douai, and Valenciennes, he joined Paul Langevin and Paul Rivet on the Vigilance Committee of antifascist intellectuals, which Alain and Challaye had also joined.9
The nations had gone to war against one another in 1914 in order to safeguard the interests of the ruling classes and the empires, to the detriment of peoples and individuals who held to the Enlightenment ideal of a Europe without national homelands or borders. In the coming war, the forces of tolerance were ranging themselves against those of tyranny, and it was impossible to view the outcome in the same light, given that the nations were about to clash not as such but in the name of liberty against slavery. In this new context, support of pacifism could mean abdication in the face of the destructive power incarnated by Hitler and his allies. The choice of Canguilhem, and those who followed the same trajectory, was thus similar in nature to, and anticipated, their subsequent decision to reject first the Munich pact, and then the handshake between Marshal Pétain and Hitler at Montoire in October 1940.
In October 1936, after a year spent in Béziers, Canguilhem was appointed to Toulouse, and became in turn a professor in charge of a khâgne. Though he now assumed the mantle of his own former master, the new instructor could not have been more different from Alain in the classroom. Classical and severe, he soon adopted the bearing of a cavalry officer, incarnating to the point of ascesis all the virtues of republican schooling. His students at Toulouse were inculcated with a sense of order, logic, and discipline, as their teacher laid down a series of prohibitions in the classroom: no notebooks, no pencils, a refusal even to allow certain expressions to be uttered. The normal method was for the students to take lecture notes, thus fixing the knowledge transmitted in permanent form; Canguilhem preferred them to assemble flexible archives, grouped into thematic dossiers or adaptable modules.
Similarly, in order to exercise the critical faculty of his pupils and train them to develop an intelligent memory, he forced them to write down and submit summaries of what they had heard in class after an hour of attentive listening during which they took no notes. The summaries were neither returned nor commented upon. Canguilhem never advocated the sort of pedagogy that puts student and teacher on the same level, and he never yielded to the temptations of false freedom of speech: his preference was for dictating or mimeographing his courses.10 The man who had challenged authority in the most radical fashion was the same man who, in his classroom, required the greatest submission from his students, as he imparted knowledge to them in a manner seemingly remote from any practice of liberty. José Cabanis wrote: “For me, Canguilhem’s class in the lycée was not the discovery [of] a truth, but of a method, to which I don’t believe I have been unfaithful: a critical reflection that takes nothing for granted, takes its distance, and assesses the concrete evidence, while at the same time it intimately espouses, slips stealthily, to the heart of the matter to know it better: at once embrace, retreat, and vigilance.”11 From his years as a pacifist Canguilhem had thus retained not a love of revolt or opposition, but the very essence of their deep causality: a true spirit of resistance, grounded in the effectiveness of prohibition and authority. Every man ought, in his view, to be a rebel, but every rebellion ought to aim at the creation of an order higher than that of subjective liberty: an order of reason and conceptuality.
During this period Canguilhem decided to undertake the study of medicine. Philosophers who adopted a similar course usually did so because they were interested in psychopathology and the treatment of mental illness—Pierre Janet for example. Their purpose was to develop the field of clinical psychology and thus to transform psychiatric knowledge in a dynamic fashion, even to detach it completely from the medical profession. Canguilhem stood apart, for he never saw himself as belonging to this tradition. As a youth he had been exposed, like all the normaliens of his generation, to the famous presentations of mentally ill patients by Georges Dumas, but these had left him unimpressed.
So by choosing medicine Canguilhem did appear to be turning away from philosophy, but not down a well-trodden path. It may be that he was experiencing a certain disappointment with philosophy, as he himself said. The truth of the matter is no doubt more complex. He was a man of action, born to a rural family and responsive to manual gesticulation and to the work of farming the land, so much so that he took a keen interest in the agricultural crisis under the Nazi and fascist regimes. His choice was a way of confronting a concrete experience, a “terrain,” a discipline that, while not scientific, made it possible to give body and life to conceptual thought. Medicine had been left to its own devices a hundred years previously by philosophy, both because it had no place among the so-called noble sciences like mathematics and physics, and also because of its convergence with biology, likewise the object of philosophical disdain. So it offered the young philosopher the challenge of a new form of rationality.
As Michel Foucault points out, the history of science owed its dignity to the fact that, beginning in the eighteenth century, it had forced the high intellectual tradition to face the question of its own foundation, its rights, its powers, and the conditions of its own practice. And in the first quarter of the twentieth century this interrogation had acquired massive importance in philosophy with the publication of the works of Edmund Husserl.
The German philosopher’s theses began to become known in France starting in the 1920s, especially after February 1929, when he delivered the famous lectures entitled Cartesian Meditations before the French Philosophical Society.12 With Descartes’s cogito as its basis, Husserlian phenomenology affirmed that there is no certain knowledge outside of my existence as a thinking being. Hence the notion of phenomenological reduction, which posits the primacy of the ego and of thought, and goes beyond so-called natural experience to attain a vision of existence as consciousness of the world. The ego thus becomes transcendental and consciousness intentional, since it “aims at” something. Thus the sense of the other is formed in the ego, out of a series of experiences. Transcendental intersubjectivity is then defined as a reality against which the ego of every individual figures in relief.
In 1935, in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology Husserl demonstrated that the quest for this intersubjectivity could preserve the human sciences from inhumanity.13 In other words, transcendental phenomenology, by shielding the ego from scientific formalism, was saving a potential science of man in which the ego could be discovered as a consequence of the living being, or as life itself. Thus, faced with mounting barbarity and its threat to world peace, Husserl appealed to a European philosophical conscience, one responding to a humanity desiring to live in the free construction of its own existence.
Husserl’s oeuvre could in fact be apprehended in two different ways. Read in light of Nietzsche, and subsequently Heidegger, it allowed a critique of the ideal of progress proper to the Enlightenment and a situating of the weakness of being at the heart of the subject, thus yielding a new philosophy of sense and the subject. But in another perspective, albeit one that does not exclude the first, it opened the way to a possible philosophy of knowledge from which any form of ontological or psychological subject would be evacuated.14 The first way was taken by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty; the second, by Alexandre Koyré and Canguilhem. Jacques Lacan, it is worth noting, would choose a middle way between these two orientations, defending both a theory of the subject and a form of rationality dependent on unconscious determination.
Although the reference to Husserl’s oeuvre is present in all Canguilhem’s thinking, it was not through it that he made his mark on the history of science on the eve of World War Two. In preference to this royal road, he chose the paths of medicine on one hand and technology on the other. As a participant in the tricentennial commemoration of Descartes’s Discourse on Method, he gave a paper in 1937 that bore witness to this evolution, as did the course he gave the following year. He showed that the sciences always arise within a setting in which a transformation of technologies has preceded them. Thus the scientist intervenes merely to make explicit, purify, or clarify a knowledge empirical in origin. As for conceptualization, it draws its capacity to emerge from reflective thinking that concentrates less on observing technological success than on reviewing the attempts that, for unknown reasons, failed.15
In 1939, foreseeing the storm that was about to batter Europe, Canguilhem cowrote a work with his comrade Camille Planet in which he took leave for good of the pacifist ideals of his youth: “As for the position of those who value peace above all else, whatever its generosity of inspiration and whatever the soundness of the arguments it advances, it does suffer from this defect: that which it calls peace remains a purely verbal negation of war. In other words, pacifism appears not to recognize that what has been called peace up to now is not the non-existence or annulment of international conflicts, but one form of such conflicts, of which war is only another form.”16 In the last lines of this work, Canguilhem invited the reader to make a clear choice. War, he was saying in essence, is a clash between two types of society, and one must be able to choose which side one is on, like Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
In September 1940, just as the new academic year was starting, Canguilhem made his choice. In his eyes, as he was to write later, the military defeat of France was an unacceptable humiliation: “You would need to believe that you were intimately familiar with the paths and purposes of Providence to see this as a promise of moral renewal. And you would need to be greedy indeed for power to see this as the occasion for political regeneration or social revolution.”17 Since he refused to obey Marshal Pétain, Canguilhem decided to resign from the French university system for “personal reasons.” To Robert Deltheil, rector of the Academy of Toulouse, he declared: “I did not pass my agrégation in philosophy in order to teach Work, Family, and Homeland.”18
His wife, Simone, who kept her job as a teacher and her salary, supported him and their three young children while her husband devoted himself to the study of medicine. Meanwhile Jean-Pierre Vernant, the future hero of the communist Resistance under the cover name “Colonel Berthier,” took his place in the khâgne in Toulouse. Canguilhem’s retirement was brief. In February 1941 Jean Cavaillès, a lecturer in logic and philosophy at the University of Strasbourg, which had been relocated to Clermont-Ferrand, was named to the Sorbonne, and he succeeded in convincing his friend to take his place. At the same time he invited Canguilhem to join the Resistance movement that was being organized in the Auvergne region. So Canguilhem returned to teaching, while participating, along with Émmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie, in the activities of the Libération movement (later to become Libération-Sud).
In the Maquis Canguilhem’s cover name was Lafont. He worked closely with Henry Ingrand, one of the leaders of the Resistance in the Auvergne.19 At the same time, he was pursuing his work as a university instructor and researcher. In 1941–42 he discovered the work of Kurt Goldstein while auditing a course given by his friend Daniel Lagache. In July 1943, having accomplished a considerable quantity of research despite the difficulties of wartime, he defended his doctoral thesis in medicine before a board headed by Alfred Schwarz, a professor of pharmacology and experimental medicine, on the topic of the normal and the pathological. He had already given a course on this topic, which he had studied with members of the Strasbourg faculty, especially the physiologist Charles Kayser and the histologist Marc Klein.
Nothing in this magisterial text allowed the reader the slightest glimpse of the author’s alter ego as Lafont. The gap between the brilliant hypotheses of the philosopher and the external context, which is completely absent from his reasoned prose, was so wide that it is still hard to believe, even today, that a thesis of this kind could have been defended in wartime, and at a moment when, with the collapse of the Axis powers in Africa and the Allied landing in Italy, the defeat of fascism in Europe was on the horizon. And yet the intellectual inquiry of the philosopher was not alien to the activities of the Maquisard. It should be noted that Canguilhem was never, like Cavaillès, a military combatant, prepared to use small arms to inflict deadly force. From his days as a pacifist he had retained a distaste for physical violence; no doubt he had become a pacifist on account of the repulsion he felt for the furious impetus of war.
The fact is that his role in the Maquis was essentially humanitarian: he practiced clandestine medicine, at the risk of his life.20 Indeed, this was the only period of his existence during which he worked as a physician and surgeon. In other words, he was a medical doctor exclusively during the war, and because of the war: an emergency doctor treating wounds and severe injuries, a doctor amid sudden and immediate realities, amid the rush and the trauma of events. He never practiced medicine again afterward, and he declined to register with the ordre des médecins, the organization of medical professionals.
From this perspective, medicine and the Resistance were entirely coinvolved in the itinerary that led to his brilliant destiny as the man who endowed the concept of normality with new meaning. If commencing the study of medicine allowed the philosopher Canguilhem to become Lafont, that was because the Resistance, as a singular form of rebellion, functioned for him as the paradigm of a discontinuity in the order of normativity, that is to say, as the moment of the adoption of a new norm, issuing from life. Here one inevitably thinks of Nietzsche’s affirmation that only adhesion to the force of the present gives one the right to interrogate the past, so as to better understand the future. It is impossible to overemphasize that the simultaneous lived experience of two modalities of a philosophy of action—the act of resistance, the act of caregiving—inspired Canguilhem’s thinking about the nature of normality.
What was normality in June 1940? Was it submission to an order accepted by almost an entire people and incarnated by a man declaring that he was making a gift of his own person to France? Or was it, on the contrary, the choice of another norm, a radical break with the appearance of normality offering few prospects, in the short term, of anything other than exile or death? Where exactly did the norm lie in that decisive moment? In London? In the Maquis? At Vichy?
Canguilhem’s response to this question, in company with a few other intellectuals, helped to save France not just from slavery and military defeat but even more from dishonor and humiliation. Some paid for it with their lives—Marc Bloch, Albert Lautmann, Boris Vildé, Georges Politzer—while others survived to bear witness: Jean-Pierre Vernant, Lucie and Raymond Aubrac. Canguilhem shared their luck. And throughout his life he made a point of reminding younger generations of those who had sacrificed their future in the cause of liberty. He was always able to find the words to say that no norm arising out of life, or better still no norm that included death in the process of life, could ever justify preferring Pétain to de Gaulle, fascism to antifascism, Pierre Laval to Jean Moulin. A hero becomes a hero and dies so that life may continue, because he has understood this message, through which death always demands a reckoning from life. And in this sense too, a hero is distinct from a fanatic or a terrorist.21 At a time like the one we are living through now, when it is fashionable to travesty the heroes of the Resistance and depict them as morally deficient or even abject—I am thinking especially of the attacks on Jean Moulin and Raymond Aubrac22—it is worth remembering that no challenge to hagiography or legend can justify abolishing the very essence of heroism.
It is Homer’s Iliad that gives us the most compelling definition of heroism, at the moment when each of the protagonists of the future tragedy of war is confronted with his destiny. And as readers know, only Achilles shows himself capable of incarnating the absolute ideal of “a beautiful death and a short life” that lies at the origin of the Greek concept of heroism.23 For Achilles, the man of short life and glorious death, is not just the only one who always leads in combat, never hesitating for an instant to put his life on the line; he is also the one who, in making this choice, has already renounced, in advance and unconditionally, the ordinary honor of earthly sovereignty for the sake of the heroic honor of immortality. He prefers to lose his life so as to become a legend rather than garner the rewards of victory some day when peace has returned. Achilles thus resolves, as Jean-Pierre Vernant explains, one of the great enigmas of the human condition: “To find in death the means to overcome it, to conquer death through death itself, in giving it the meaning it does not have, of which it is absolutely bare.”24
Canguilhem was of course sufficiently acquainted with Greek literature not to be unfamiliar with the lesson of the Iliad. But he was fascinated by the decision to take concrete action, which, in an intellectual, characterizes the choice of a heroic destiny. He often pondered the problem of the moment at which a thinker engaged in intellectual work can make a commitment to action that may cost him the sacrifice, not just of his life in order to vanquish death but also the future of the work that he bears inside him. Heroism in this case assumes the courage to choose the beautiful death and the short life, but it is more than just that.
What would the oeuvre of Marc Bloch and Jean Cavaillès have been if they had not fallen in action? And vice versa, what would have been Georges Canguilhem’s place in French philosophy if he had met death in the Maquis before he had drafted a single line of the works that lay ahead? When one thinks of Boris Vildé, torn from life before he could fulfill his destiny as an ethnologist, one can’t help posing this question. And Canguilhem did pose it. I can testify to that.
Heroism, he used to say, is a manner of conceiving of action under the category of a universal, from which the psychological subject in any form is excluded. Once the decision is made, once the encounter between the history of an individual and the history of the world has come about, things proceed as if every step ahead, every gesture, were imposed from outside, with no direction or premeditation. “Action is always the offspring of rigor before it is the sister of dream.”25 The force of this definition, which, with Canguilhem, is valid essentially for an intellectual, lies in the fact that it relates every heroic act to the almost unconscious, but deliberately chosen, rigor of the act itself.
Of course a man can always invoke his past, his “roots,” his particular history as the cause of his decision, as Jean-Pierre Vernant did: “In 1940, at the moment of defeat, it was my own roots that I felt, so deeply that I said to myself that living with this German and Nazi occupation was out of the question. And yet, when the war in Algeria arose, the same fellow, the same Frenchman, with the same feeling of fidelity to his own identity, took the view that the Algerians had the right to be independent, and that in terms of my own particularist nationalist tradition, I couldn’t not acknowledge the same rights in others that I had defended myself when the Germans were in my country.”26 This example shows, however, that the act of resisting, which engages the essence of heroism, depends on something quite different from attachment to a landscape, its traditions, its gastronomy, or the beauty of its countryside. If, for the same reasons, the same man can wish to save France from the shame imposed by Nazism and Algeria from the colonial servitude imposed by France, it is because the decision to act operates in the name of a universal—or more exactly, in the name of a shedding of the ego and an access to the truth of the self—which goes far beyond the reference to particularism. Taking action then depends on the proper identity of a man (and thus of the human in general) and on his capacity to fuse with action itself, in the present instant: “If I get out of this,” wrote René Char, “I know that I will have to break with the aroma of these essential years, reject (not repress) my treasure silently, far from me.”27
Consequently it matters little whether the hero is a simple soldier landing at dawn on a beach in Normandy, or a philosopher, a mathematician, and Spinozist, capable of grasping that will and understanding are one and the same thing. It matters little whether he is a militant or a civil servant refusing to talk under torture, or a secret agent, donning many masks. In short, little importance attaches to the prior or future being of the hero, his “psychological case,” his social origin, or what he tells himself are the reasons for his choice. The only thing that counts in heroism is the destiny chosen—that of Achilles—that commands the instantaneous rigor of the act and guides it to its incandescence. For action then becomes a work. Rimbaud said that spiritual combat is just as brutal as physical battle between men.
No doubt Canguilhem would have composed his inaugural book—The Normal and the Pathological—in the same way if the historical circumstances had been different. No doubt he would have found the same wording and the same concepts in peacetime. But had that been the case, would this major work have achieved the greatness it did? Would it have occupied the same place in the eyes of a whole generation of philosophers and intellectuals? Would it have permitted all those who were later to cite it to understand that the reversal of the notion of “the norm” carried out by the author was as much a way of disengaging from any psychology of the subject as it was of creating a new philosophy of heroism grounded in the rigor of a conceptual analysis?
The definition of normality and pathology furnished by Canguilhem in the preface of the book is well known: “Pathological phenomena are identical to normal phenomena, except for quantitative variations.”28 It was identical to that advanced by Lacan in 1932 in his thesis in medicine on paranoid psychosis.29 In both cases it was a question, for biological as for psychical and mental questions, of embracing in a single essence, defining their dissonance, the states of mind [affections] called normal and the ones labeled pathological. In this conception, psychosis (as mental disturbance) and illness (as organic disturbance) are no longer comparable to fixed constitutions, but reactions of the body or the personality to a life situation.
In thinking this problematic, Lacan had relied on the philosophy of Spinoza. Canguilhem, ten years later, was inspired by Kurt Goldstein’s work The Structure of the Organism, published in Germany in 1934.30 Canguilhem did pay tribute, though, to French psychiatric knowledge, especially to Charles Blondel, Eugène Minkowski, and Daniel Lagache, who themselves had helped to “define the general essence of the morbid or abnormal psychical fact and its relation to the normal.”31
A psychiatrist and neurologist formed on the battlefields of the great slaughter of 1914–1918, Goldstein had treated victims of brain injury and had observed that the establishment of new norms of life entailed a reduction of the level of their activity in a new but “narrower” setting. This narrowing, in patients suffering from brain injury, resulted from their inability to respond to the requirements of a norm prior to their present state. Narrowing, not regression: the originality of the illness, according to Goldstein, was actually that it did not lead to any reversibility of life. The patients’s new state of health is never the same as the former one. As Canguilhem put it, “No recovery is ever a return to biological innocence. To recover is to establish new norms of living for oneself that are occasionally superior to the old ones.”32
It is well known that the circumstances of wartime reverse the habitual norms of peacetime and make it possible to understand the relation between norm and pathology differently. Like war, illness is an upheaval, an imperiling of existence through which the organism reacts in a catastrophic manner in a setting proper to it. And amid the urgency of war, there is always a doctor ready to supply the patient with devoted care and, as circumstances dictate, to conceive a new theory of the norm. But there are numerous other situations in which the world’s violence may cause a new outlook on the normal and the pathological to emerge in the consciousness of a clinician or a scientist, at the risk of his life. In this respect, there is perhaps not all that much difference between an Ambroise Paré, an Ignace Semmelweis, and a Xavier Bichat.
From his war experience Goldstein came to the view that any theory had to be based on a “clinic” issuing from direct observation of the patient (the notion of “individual being”), the only way to construct a phenomenological conception of the organism comprising the relation of the latter to a setting, an environment, a subject.
From the viewpoint both of psychiatry and of neurology, the question was thus the same: it was necessary to think the normal and the pathological together, in order to reestablish the primacy of a subjectivity, meaning an existence reacting to a setting. For Goldstein, as for Canguilhem, the subject is internal to the living being, in Minkowski it is existential—and for Lacan it would be determined by a language.
In the first part of The Normal and the Pathological Canguilhem shows that two conceptions of illness are grounded in the idea that the pathological state is only a quantitative modification of the normal state. The modern one, issuing from the work of Pasteur, assimilates the illness to an external agent (microbe or virus) foreign to the body. The other, in the Hippocratic tradition, maintains that the illness intervenes to upset the equilibrium of the humors. On this view the agent is no longer external but internal to the body whose natural harmony it disturbs. The first conception gives rise to an ontological medicine; the second, to a dynamic medicine.
The opposition between these two currents is exemplified in the renowned debate between Auguste Comte and Claude Bernard. Comte took from François Broussais the principle that illness is either a defect, or an excess, of irritation of the various tissues, and he used the pathological as a basis from which to explore the normal. Claude Bernard, seeing the pathological state as an alteration of the normal state, began with the latter to explain the former.
Canguilhem’s critical examination of these two positions, which signify the birth of modern scientific medicine, leads him to conclude that Claude Bernard adoped too physiological a view of illness. If physiology is capable of identifying an illness, it is to the clinic that physiological science owes this perceptive capacity. In other words, although physiology may underpin the medical discipline scientifically, only the clinic has the capacity to bring physiology into direct contact with existing individuals. This is why, having focused on the concepts of a philosopher (Comte), then of a scientist (Claude Bernard), Canguilhem studies the art of the clinic as practiced by someone with practical experience, the physician René Leriche.
A direct descendant of Claude Bernard, Leriche sees a continuity between the physiological state (the state of health) and the pathological state. But he considers that physiology is insufficient to explain illness, and that it is illness itself that sheds light on physiology. Leriche thus privileges a dynamic medicine into which the patient’s point of view has to be introduced, with her suffering and pain. “Health,” Leriche writes, “ is the silence of the organs…. Illness is that which hinders humans in the normal exercise of their lives …and above all, that which makes them suffer.”
Canguilhem, after expressing his agreement with Leriche’s view, asks in the second part of his book whether there exists a science of the normal and the pathological. It is at this point in his reasoning that he adopts Goldstein’s theses, so as to present the patient’s point of view as the only one competent to judge normality, and in order to demonstrate that physiology is “the science of the stabilized traits of life” [la science des allures stabilisées de la vie]. I note that this superb definition takes its distance from the traditional one of physiology as “the science of the functions of the human body in a state of health.”
Canguilhem then distinguishes between anomaly, illness, and pathology. Anomaly is defined in space and without reference to the patient: it breaks out in a “spatial multiplicity.” Illness is situated in time and always presupposes the existence of a conscious subject revealing his pain in his interaction with the doctor. It is a property of illness to “break out in chronological succession.” But even when it goes from the critical or acute stages to the chronic stage, it leaves its imprint on the body or the consciousness of the patient, like a “once in the past” for which he retains a nostalgia: “Thus one is ill not just with respect to others, but in relation to oneself.”33 As for pathology, it pertains to biology and not to physiology.
In order to explore these definitions fully, Canguilhem undertakes a semantic study of the terms “anomaly,” “abnormality,” and “normality.” “Anomaly” is a substantive for which there is no corresponding adjective in French, and which designates an unusual biological fact unrelated to an abnormality, an illness, or a pathology, but which is linked to a vital normativity, meaning to the manner in which life produces its own norms. An anomaly is thus the equivalent of a monstrosity, an infirmity, or an irregularity in the order of biology. It is constitutional or congenital: cyclopia, hermaphrodism, harelip, and so on.34
Pathology on the contrary implies a pathos, that is to say, a direct and concrete feeling of suffering and powerlessness. It is thus the sign of an abnormality, on condition that abnormality is defined by relative statistical frequency. The abnormal is just as normal as the normal, since both realities depend on the organization of the living being. Uninterrupted perfect health, for example, is seen as an abnormal fact: “The pathological state cannot be called normal without committing an absurdity, inasmuch as it expresses a relation to the normativity of life. But normal in this sense cannot be equated to the physiologically normal without committing an absurdity either, for different norms are in question here. The abnormal is not such through the absence of normality. There is no life without norms of life, and the morbid state is always a certain way of living.”35
Far from abandoning the terrain of physiology for the subject’s straightforward lived experience of illness, Canguilhem locates the clinic in a region close to, or beyond, the limits of consciousness.36 So the only reason there is a science of pathology is that life itself introduces into human consciousness the categories of life and health. In other words the norm, far from being external to the living being, is produced by the very movement of life. There is, in consequence, no “biological science of the normal. There is a science of the situations and conditions called normal. This science is physiology.”37 So physiology is indeed “the science of the stabilized traits of life,” and it is indeed physiology that, in origin, grounds the discipline of medicine, but only the clinic gives validity to the concept of pathology. From this the status of modern medicine follows: while not itself a science, it makes use of the results of all the sciences in the service of the norms of life. However, if it can only exist because humans feel unwell, it is also thanks to its existence that these same humans are able to know in what respect [en quoi] and with what [de quoi] they are ill.
Canguilhem winds up his demonstration with a declaration that gains in prophetic force from the fact that when he wrote, the laboratory did not yet dominate clinical knowledge. He emphasizes that no laboratory experiment (no physiology) will ever have diagnostic value if its goal is to supplant clinical observation. Never was this magisterial declaration more pertinent than it is today! Only a revalorization of the clinical art, based on listening to and observing the patient, can guarantee the practioner of modern medicine a true status and keep him from becoming a valet to the laboratory and pharmacology. For it is certain that both a correct reading of laboratory test results and the capacity to prescribe the right (and thus effective) therapy are dependent on the diagnostic art.
Canguilhem continued to act as the doctor to the Maquis in the Auvergne even after he had defended his thesis, a thesis that was destined to have so much impact on the philosophical generation of the 1960s, on the students of Jacques Lacan and the students of Louis Althusser,38 on Foucault, on clinicians of every sort, and on historians of science. Early in 1944 he set up a field hospital at Maurines, and during the summer he spent several weeks at the hospital of Saint-Alban, where he concealed and tended to the wounded. The first experiment in institutional psychotherapy was taking place there, in a spirit of antifascism and under the guidance of François Tosquelles and Lucien Bonnafé. At Saint-Alban members of the Resistance, mentally ill individuals, poets and therapists, nurse-attendants, and psychiatrists,39 all mixed freely: “I took part in some of their work. We engaged in much discussion. I well remember their cordiality.”40
Canguilhem took part subsequently in the battle of Mont-Mouchet, during the course of which the Resistance forces in the Auvergne joined up with the Army of Liberation. He then returned to the Haute-Loire, where his family was, and subsequently went back to Clermont-Ferrand. From there he was sent to Vichy to represent Ingrand, who had just been named commissioner of the republic. At this time he undertook “certain delicate and still dangerous tasks,” the nature of which he never specified.41 On 12 September 1944 Canguilhem received the Croix de Guerre directly from the minister of war of the time. Did he perhaps recall, at that moment, the reprimand he had received seventeen years earlier, from a previous holder of the office of minister of war?
After the liberation he returned to his teaching duties at the University of Strasbourg. From 1948 to 1955 he held the post of inspector general of philosophy in the Ministry of National Education. In 1955 he defended his doctoral thesis in philosophy, on the formation of the concept of reflex,42 before succeeding Gaston Bachelard at the Sorbonne as director of the Institute of the History of Science and Technology of the University of Paris. Known to his students and close collaborators as “le Cang,” he kept this post until 1971 and was thus able to exercise considerable influence on philosophy students, both through his courses and his books—and in his role as president of the jury of the agrégation.
Bertrand Saint-Sernin, one of his students, has left an unforgettable portrait of him:
He was admired, feared, imitated, loved, but also courted and criticized. He had more social power than his personal ethic warranted, and less immediate influence than he would have had if he had not sometimes constrained his own genius, for mysterious reasons. He judged himself unworthy, as I see it, of the grace that is the life of the mind, and rejected what others took to be the plain fact of his own greatness, because of an unfounded but ineradicable humility. Yet when he was analyzing an author, or when he was helping a student or a researcher to figure out where his interests and talents really lay, something he did with unflagging courteousness, he manifested a flair at once vital and spiritual.43
Canguilhem’s principal work, written while the war was raging, had four successive editions.44 The first, published at Clermont-Ferrand in 1943, bore the title Essay on Some Problems Regarding the Normal and the Pathological. This version was republished with a new preface in 1950. Only in 1966 did Canguilhem make major alterations to the text, giving it the simpler title The Normal and the Pathological and adding a note to the reader and a new chapter, both of which were written between 1963 and 1966. The new chapter was organized into three parts (“From the Social to the Vital,” “On organic Norms in Man,” and “A New Concept in Pathology: Error”). As for the note to the reader, its title, “Twenty Years Later,” referred to a heroic, indeed Homeric, epic.45 Canguilhem added greater nuance to some of his assessments of Claude Bernard, in whom he now detected a concern for the clinic that had escaped him in 1943. Correspondingly, he cast a slightly colder glance at Leriche. For the last edition, which appeared in 1972, Canguilhem took care to add an appendix entitled “Detailed Rectifications and Some Complementary Notes.” In sum, he continually modified his inaugural work over the course of thirty years. It was as though, at each turning point, he felt impelled to bring it into line with the ethic of reversal of the norm that had marked its origin so strongly.
The boldest alterations, however, the ones made in 1966, can be attributed to Canguilhem’s reading of Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic.46 Foucault and Canguilhem had met in 1960. At that time Foucault had asked Canguilhem to act as rapporteur for a thesis in philosophy that was destined to attract a great deal of attention: Madness and Unreason: A History of Madness in the Classic Age.47 Canguilhem understood right away that Foucault had launched a radical revision of the psychiatric mode of thinking about madness and that he was proposing a new way of defining the norm as a historical construct, linked to social normativity and arising out of a tenebrous division between reason and unreason. Canguilhem saw straightaway that it was his reading of the works of Freud that had enabled Foucault to perceive when and how psychiatry had cut loose from its moorings in philanthropy and transformed itself into a policing of the mad. What Foucault had taken from Freud was not his conception of the norm, but a new way of looking at the structure of the asylum.
In Birth of the Clinic, Foucault went further in the same direction, attributing a historical origin to the constitution of modern medicine. For him, modern medicine was born out of the institution of a “medical gaze” constructed as a norm and structured around three nodes. At one of them Foucault situated the patient, likened to an object being looked at, or “object of the gaze.” At another node he placed the doctor, who alone was capable of being a “subject of the gaze.” The third element was the institution charged with legitimating socially the relation between the gazing subject and the object gazed upon. For Canguilhem’s concept of a norm produced by life, Foucault therefore substituted the idea of a norm constructed by the social order and itself the bearer of normalization. In other words, he set a social normativity against a biological normativity, an archaeology against a phenomenology.
The finest pages of his book were devoted to Xavier Bichat, the surgeon known for the dissection of cadavers, who had invented a new conception of the relation between life and death in the midst of the revolutionary upheaval. In dissecting the bodies that were at his disposal on the field of battle, or that he dug up in cemeteries, Bichat had of course believed that he was rediscovering an anatomical-pathological clinic already known. But in carrying out this procedure, he was actually replacing the static cartography of the old order of things with a new principle that purged medical knowledge of its former metaphysics. He was transforming the classical conception of death by depriving the theologians of the divine privilege of belonging. For if life is the ensemble of functions that resist death, that means that God is dispossessed of his right of life and death over the human and animal worlds. Death no longer belongs to him, and it is no longer upon him—neither upon heaven nor upon hell—that the passage from life to death depends, but upon a double process, physiological and pathological, proper to living organisms. Death is thus inscribed in the history of life, as illness is inscribed in the existence of every subject—a symptom, as it were, of death’s advance into life. Death, the progressive phenomenon of the slow degradation of bodies, has man in its grip from the moment of his birth, and inhabits him throughout his life, down to the final passage. Gilles Deleuze wrote: “When Foucault analyzes the theses of Bichat, the very tone tells us with sufficient clarity that we are dealing with something other than an epistemological analysis. It is a question of conceiving death, and few men as much as Foucault died in the manner that he conceived death. This power of life that belonged to Foucault, Foucault always thought it and lived it as a multiple death, in the manner of Bichat.”48
In the period from 1963 to 1966 Canguilhem took on board the Foucauldian substitution of a social normativity for biological normativity, not to disown his thesis of 1943 but to give it a rigor that it would doubtless never have attained without the challenge launched by Foucault—a challenge that Foucault himself had grasped when he was struck by the gesture of Bichat.
While not surrendering the view that the norm has its genesis in the vital forces, Canguilhem now maintained that it could not constitute itself outside the contemplation of its own negativity. Hence the idea that the threat of illness would, for the normal man, be the putting of his health to the test and one of the constituents of human health in general. In sum, Canguilhem sketched the contours of a science of the normal in which the priority of the infraction over regularity, of pathology over normality would have their place alongside the integration in the living being of the dialectic between norm and pathology.
Renouncing in part the vitalist ideals of his youth, as the patient renounces the euphoria of his former state, he assigned man a paradoxical status, that of being in some sense permanently afflicted with “the illness of the normal man.” This was his term for “the disturbance that springs from the persistence of the normal state, from the incorruptible uniformity of the normal, the illness that arises from the privation of illness, from an existence almost incompatible with illness…. [And he concluded:] It needs, not the first sign of illness but the casting of the shadow of illness, for the normal man to believe and tell himself that that is what he is.”49
In Canguilhem’s revision we can detect both the “cast shadow” of the work of Foucault and a reading of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle,50 a book to which the philosopher continually referred in his subsequent work on the knowledge of life.51 Canguilhem’s Freud was different from Foucault’s, no doubt—a more biological Freud, not a destroyer of norms, but the theoretician of the death wish.
It is hard not to see this dialogue between the two men—one attached to a vitalist conception of the phenomena of life and death, the other haunted by a tenebrous cleavage between deathly tyranny and its impossible transgression—as one of the high points of French philosophy in the postwar period. And one of the most unusual, for it is rare to observe such an inversion of filiation, with the master adapting his theory in light of the work of the person who has chosen to become his pupil. Canguilhem put it this way in 1991:
Thirty years already. Since 1961 other books by Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, Words and Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, A History of Sexuality, have to some degree eclipsed the initial influence of the History of Madness. I admire the first two. I have stated in The Normal and the Pathological how much I was moved by the first. For the second I wrote an article that has earned me nothing but approbation. But for me, 1961 remains, and will remain, the year in which a truly great philosopher revealed himself. I already knew at least two, who had been my schoolmates, Raymond Aron and Jean-Paul Sartre. They could be fierce toward one another, and they could be fierce toward Michel Foucault. It did happen, though, that all three were seen together one day: it was to support an enterprise without frontiers, against death.52
The composition of Canguilhem’s thesis on the normal and the pathological had been carried out at the same time as he was participating in the great struggle of the Resistance. Now it is interesting to note that the whole body of his oeuvre bears the trace of this initial encounter between a philosophy of concepts and a philosophy of commitment. A paradoxical and unexpected trace: for if Canguilhem was never the theorist of a philosophy of subjective commitment, he remained, throughout his life and in the manner of Spinoza, a philosopher of rebellion—conceptual rebellion. That is why he regarded psychology, to the extent that it is the discipline of behavior, adaptation, and conditioning, as a school of submission and of the suppression of liberty. For just as he had always rejected the thought of Taine and that of adepts of theories about native soil, race, and environment, he likewise abhorred any approach to mankind that aimed to reduce the spirit to a thing, the psyche to physiological determinism, thought to a reflex; in sum, the human being to an insect.
This is the background to the famous lecture he delivered on 18 December 1956 before the College of Philosophy, in which he tore into psychology in the most scathing manner, denouncing it as a “philosophy without rigor,” because eclectic while posing as objective; as an “undemanding ethics,” assembling experiments without critical judgment; and finally as a “medicine with no control,” basing its hypotheses on the observation of illnesses that it never succeeded in rendering intelligible: illnesses of the nerves.53
After this initial onslaught, Canguilhem showed that the discipline’s absence of identity corresponded to an absence of object. And the proof of this lack lay, as far as he was concerned, in the fact that psychology was endlessly hunting for its own impossible unity, that is to say, for an unfindable synthesis among its supposed fields of investigation: experimental psychology, psychoanalysis, clinical psychology, social psychology, and ethnology. As a substitute for this evanescent unity, what one found, according to Canguilhem, was a pact of peaceful coexistence among professionals in constant opposition: masters of submission. A “thing” without essence and without object, psychology thus came down in his eyes to nothing more than a technology at the service of a corporation, itself under the sway of judges, censors, and educators whose function was the instrumentalization of man by man.
Canguilhem did not stop at this congeries of negative definitions. He appealed to history to ground his line of reasoning, and the result was a second death sentence for psychology. Whatever the system of thought upon which it relies in order to ensure its own survival, he explained, it always remains imitative, or is supplanted by another model of intelligibility, or else drowns in its own morass.
When it poses as a science of nature it remains dependent, and has done ever since antiquity, on physiology on one hand and medicine on the other. Thus it is that, as physiology, it was capable of being integrated into the Aristotelian system, in which the soul is treated as the form of the living body and not as a substance separate from matter. As medicine, on the contrary, it was rendered null in the doctrine of Galen, who made the brain the seat of the soul. Thus it has never had a place, since it tried to be the science of two drifting objects.
And when psychology did finally believe that its hour had come, when it posed as the science of subjectivity after the decline of Aristotelian physics, all it did was to take yet another stride toward its own ruin. One moment it fancied itself the physics of the external senses in search of an experimental description of sensation—and all it could do was to imitate mechanistic physics. The next it presented itself as the science of the internal sense, and quickly shrank to being a pedagogy of learning. And in a third phase it constructed itself as a science of the intimate, but then found itself overshadowed on one hand by psychiatry, a branch of medicine, and on the other by psychoanalysis, the only discipline capable of rethinking the principle of consciousness as a function of the notion of the unconscious.
Psychology still had the possibility of constituting itself as a science of behavior and reactions. But this route too, according to Canguilhem, is almost certainly leading to an impasse. Because psychology then leans on biology for support, at the risk of making itself into “the instrument of an ambition to treat man as an instrument.” And it drowns in test protocols, assessments, and selection procedures.
Having reduced psychology to a doubly instrumental project, Canguilhem proferred an image that soon became famous because of its very ambiguity, and that generations of psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts would comment on: “When you leave the Sorbonne by the rue Saint-Jacques, you can turn uphill or down. If you head uphill, you approach the Pantheon, which is the resting place of various great men; if you head downhill, you are inevitably on your way to police headquarters.”54 What the philosopher meant was, psychology was always condemned to try in vain to liken itself to a philosophy of heroism, while ceaselessly putting into operation a technology of submission.
So why was Canguilhem so eager, in 1956, to denounce this false science, which as far as he was concerned had neither object nor identity? Why such violence? Was psychology really such a threatening presence in the postwar French university system that one of the greatest philosophers of the century felt compelled to display such detestation of it?
What Canguilhem was really attacking in 1956 was the project of his former schoolmate and friend at the ENS, Daniel Lagache, who was attempting both to unify the various branches of psychology and to introduce the teaching of the psychoanalytic clinic into the discipline. In this “unitary” program Canguilhem perceived a danger taking shape—that of the subjection of the noble disciplines (medicine, biology, physiology, philosophy, literature, etc.) to a model of instrumentalization of the spirit and the psyche, which might in the long term transform the teachers and professors of the French republic into psycho-pedagogues more concerned with aiding students in distress than with forming elites in the service of an ideal of liberty. In Canguilhem’s view this model also threatened, given the formidable expansion of the study of psychology in the democratic countries, to contaminate the whole of the social edifice, to the point where the business of managing interpersonal relationships would supplant all forms of political and intellectual commitment.
For this reason he displayed a special virulence toward behavioral psychology,55 fearing, not without reason, that it would succeed in imposing its sovereignty on the other branches of psychology by reason of the scientistic claims it was advancing, despite the courageous struggle that clinical psychologists were then waging. He wrote:
What in my view characterizes this behavioral psychology in comparison to other branches of psychological study is its constitutional incapacity to grasp and exhibit clearly its own founding project. The founding projects of some of the earlier branches of psychology could at least be seen as running directly counter to philosophy. But in this case, with any relation whatsoever to philosophical theory being refused at the outset, the question arises of where such a form of psychological research could draw its sense from? By consenting to follow the pattern of biology and become an objective science of aptitudes, reactions, and behavior, this psychology and these psychologists are completely forgetting to situate their specific behavior in relation to historical circumstances, and to the social milieux in which they are led to offer their methods or techniques, and get their services accepted.56
Canguilhem’s 1956 lecture could be read as a lethal assault on psychology as a discipline aiming to achieve an impossible “unity” and as a warning about the dangers of behavioralism. Ten years later, though, it became a weapon in a new war for which its author had not originally destined it. Nevertheless, when the editors of the journal Les Cahiers pour l’Analyse, published by the epistemology circle of the ENS, asked to republish it, he gave them his permission.57
At this time, under the influence of Louis Althusser, the students of the rue d’Ulm were strong adherents both of a new reading of the oeuvre of Marx and a return to the oeuvre of Freud on the basis of Lacan’s teaching.58 The task at this point, as far as they were concerned, was to create a theoretical front against spiritual idealism and putatively scientific ideologies, and to set against them a true science of revolution based on a triple alliance of Saussurean linguistics, Althusserian Marxism, and Lacanian Freudianism. From this perspective, psychology in all of its ramifications was regarded as a false science in the service of an ideology of servitude and incarceration. And so Canguilhem’s 1956 lecture could be seen in a new light as the most ferocious analysis ever produced against the essence of disciplinary power, worthy to be ranked with Foucault’s critique of psychiatry.59
Canguilhem certainly never shared directly in the ardor of the Althusser-Lacan generation of the rue d’Ulm, as he told me himself more than once. Yet this revolt against psychology, and more precisely against its most instrumentalist branch, behavioralism, did not displease him. He had conceived his lecture as a polemical assault in the first place, and now he had the satisfaction—he who was neither a Marxist nor a Lacanian—of seeing his message bear fruit. For despite the differences between the original text of 1956 and the one presented to the public in 1966, there was indeed a continuity of approach between them: They both advanced a conception of the history of science radically opposed to any reduction of the human to evaluative or mechanistic interpretations of any sort. And it must be added that the man who had refused, in June 1940, to serve Marshal Pétain was not insensible to a certain idea of revolutionary heroism of the kind that marked this whole younger generation, even if he himself never thought for a moment that it was desirable to elaborate any sort of “science” of history, or of subjectivity, on the model of dialectical materialism or the logic of the signifier.
Canguilhem was always hostile to dogmatism and group-think. And he saw too clearly the impasses to which Althusserian Marxism in combination with Lacanian logicism was leading not to adopt a certain reserve vis-à-vis those who nevertheless were citing his own thought.60 This did not keep him from being a great reader of Freud’s work, quite the contrary; nor did it keep him from grasping, like Sartre at the same period,61 how thoroughly Freud the man was a scientist who conformed to his own outlook on the history of science: a scientist divided between error and truth, a scientist capable of constructing a rational method that was not a science, the object of which could never be encompassed by the discourse of science.
On this point, we might wonder why Canguilhem never devoted even a short article to Freud or to psychoanalysis. No doubt he preferred to address this topic allusively, the better to distance himself from the jargon of the psychoanalytic schools. Perhaps he thought that as it spread, Freudian discourse had come to resemble psychology in its pretensions to scientific status, in its ambition to dictate terms to the other domains of knowledge.
Be that as it may, Canguilhem never softened his stance toward the so-called science of behaviors and assessments. And in 1980, in the great amphitheater of the Sorbonne before an audience of thousands of enthusiastic listeners,62 that he gave a lecture on the brain and thought in which, adopting a strategy of defending Freud’s discoveries in veiled terms, he revived the combat of 1956.63 Paying homage to Foucault, he was not content now to designate psychology as a philosophy without rigor, an ethics without exigency, and a medicine without control: he portrayed it as a barbarity of the modern age, which had become all the more formidable in that it was now claiming to rely on biology and technical progress in cerebral imaging in order to portray thought as no more than a secretion of the brain.
Though without uttering the word “cognitivism,”64 which only came into widespread use in France in 1981, Canguilhem attacked the belief underlying the cognitive ideal: the pretension to found a science of the spirit on the idea that mental states can be correlated with brain states. With jubilation he denounced all those who, from Piaget to Chomsky, had dreamed of making thought an empty space, to the point of imagining that a machine might be capable of writing À la recherche du temps perdu: “I will gladly refrain from addressing a question that logically ought to lead us to wonder about the possibility of one day seeing, in a bookshop window, The Autobiography of a Computer, if not its Autocritique.”65
If the attack was just as blunt as in 1956, it was much more political this time, focusing exclusively on psychology’s power of technological oppression. In other words, far from picking a quarrel with clinical psychologists—that is, with the heirs of Daniel Lagache, whose malaise he clearly perceived—Canguilhem directed his fire not at psychology in general but at the branch of it with the pretension to arrive at pure organogenesis by means of a science of the spirit. And he then appealed to Janet, the better to defend Freud.
Citing a text by the French psychologist on the need to keep psychology, as a human science, from being subsumed into a mythology of the brain, he noted that the antipsychiatrists were not wrong to emphasize the shortcomings of a psychopharmacology that thought it could eradicate madness by acting exclusively on the brain. Only Freud, he added, had been able to free himself from illusory typologies and localizations, and thus give meaning to a topographic model of the psyche.
And taking a stance even more radical than he had done in the past, Canguilhem resolutely warned future generations about “the permanent calamity” of a psychology that was now attempting to increase the output of the thinking process without worrying about the meaning of its power. Recalling that, after the assassination of Johan de Witt,66 Spinoza had left the shelter of his lodgings in order to denounce the perpetrators as ultimi barbarorum, the Canguilhem of the 1980s called upon his audience to remember the Canguilhem of June 1940 and the heroic death of Cavaillès. He thus donned the mantle of the founder of a philosophy without the subject, sounding a summons to all men of good will, in the name of the unity of philosophy, in which Cartesians and Spinozists would be united—that is, partisans and adversaries of the philosophy of consciousness, or partisans and adversaries of the philosophy of concepts and the philosophy of commitment—against what might well be called the most liberticide branch of psychology: “At first glance, one might think that Spinoza made a mistake, the mistake of thinking that the barbarians whom he denounced publicly were the last. But he knew Latin, and his meaning was: the most recent, the latest to appear. Thus philosophers of today, whatever their line of research, Spinozist or Cartesian, can be certain that they will not lack occasions or reasons to go out, at their own risk, in a gesture of commitment controlled by their brains, and write on walls, ramparts, or fences: ultimi barbarorum.”67
Knowing that the current exponents of this barbarity are now invoking biological, neuronal, or cerebral reasons to “explain” the supposedly innate differences between the sexes and the races, thus reinventing discriminations we had thought were gone for good, we can only conclude that Canguilhem’s injunctions are more than ever worth heeding.68 Actually, there is nothing more modern than this philosophy of heroism, which was able to unite, at the same time and in a single movement, the loftiest conceptual thought with the most robust political commitment.
Georges Canguilhem disliked talking about either his period as a follower of Alain, his time in the Resistance, or himself, but he always praised the combat of those who reminded him of the spirit of the Resistance. When in 1988 I proposed, as others had already done, writing a book about his career, using the account he had published of Cavaillès as a model, he wrote back as follows: “I continue to think that it is not up to me to comment on what I may have said, written, or done. I continue to think that certain of my old comrades, whose memory I still cherish, might have done better at times not to ‘present’ themselves, and to let their works alone do the talking. I dislike ‘colloquies in honor of ’ and television interviews. I dislike it when people act as their own expounders.”69