Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida

IN THE YEARS FOLLOWING THE PUBLICATION OF History of Madness criticism of it by psychiatrists, psychologists, and historians of psychopathology was both aggressive and ambivalent. Michel Foucault was denouncing all the ideals informing their knowledge, shattering the longue durée of Philippe Pinel’s humanitarianism, and declaring war on all varieties of institutional reformism: “This book did not set out to do the history of mad folk alongside that of their counterparts, the reasonable folk, nor the history of reason in its opposition to madness. The goal was to do the history of the incessant, ever-modified division between them…. It was not medicine that defined the border between reason and madness, but since the nineteenth century medical doctors have been charged with surveiling the frontier and standing guard there. They signposted it with the term ‘mental illness.’ Indication equals interdiction.”¹

Henri Ey immediately grasped the message.² An admirable clinician, this theorist of organodynamism was also the last great representative of alienism, the precursor of psychiatry. He laid claim to the tradition of Philippe Pinel, and his experiment at the hospital of Bonneval, which had commenced between the two world wars, was very similar to that of the English Quaker William Tuke, one of the inventors of “moral treatment.” It rested on the idea, originating in the philosophy of the Enlightenment, that there is always a remnant of reason in the madperson that allows a therapeutic relationship. But Ey’s experiment also led to the creation of various residential institutions, including ones at Saint-Alban, Bonneuil, and the chateau of Laborde, that gave madpeople a greater degree of freedom, based on a community lifestyle, an absence of asylum-style restraints, and a Freudian valorization of the living word of the subject.

Inspired by Jacksonian neurology, from which Freud had borrowed certain concepts, the doctrine of organodynamism theorized by Henri Ey during the 1930s challenged the idea of a static organization of functions by emphasizing their hierarchical organization. It saw the psychic functions as dependent upon one another, in descending order. This doctrine ran counter to that of “constitutions” inherited from the German and French traditions. In this respect, the Jacksonian model was to Henri Ey what the Freudian model was to Jacques Lacan.

If Jackson had freed neurology from its mechanistic principles, Freud had abandoned neurology to found his theory of the unconscious and bring a new conception of madness to psychiatry. But according to Ey, it was necessary to align neurology with psychiatry in order to endow the latter with a theory capable of integrating Freudianism. In contrast Jacques Lacan’s program, ever since his thesis of 1932,³ was to renew Freud’s gesture and rethink psychiatric knowledge on the model of the Freudian unconscious. Whereas Henri Ey was attempting, through a phenomenology of consciousness, to maintain the link between neurology and psychiatry, Jacques Lacan rejected both psychogenesis and organogenesis. Against them he proposed the notion of psychogénie, meaning a purely psychic organization of the personality. Both men shared the view that psychoanalysis must not serve as an auxiliary technique for the old psychiatry. In their eyes, Freud’s discovery restored meaning to psychiatry in its rejection of the idea that nosology could be detached from the lived experience of madness, from its word. But they diverged in their attachment to organicism, which Ey included but Lacan excluded.

The conflict had broken out before the war, but it was starkly declared at the colloquy of Bonneval in 1946. At that time Lacan was preaching the necessity for a comprehensive return to Descartes as a way to think the essential causality of madness. In a few lines he offered a commentary on the famous words from book 1 of Descartes’s Meditations, which would later be the bone of contention between Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida: “And how could I deny that these hands and this body belong to me, unless perhaps I put myself in the same class as certain deranged persons whose brains are so troubled and clouded by the black vapors of bile that they constantly assert that they are kings when they are quite destitute, or that they are clad in gold and purple when they are quite naked, or who imagine that they are jugs, or that they have bodies made of glass? Mais quoi! These are madpeople, and I would be no less extravagant if I conducted myself on their example.”⁴

Lacan was implying that the foundation by Descartes of the conditions of modern thought did not exclude the phenomenon of madness. This of course was a way of reaffirming the exclusively psychical character of the actual phenomenon, against Ey and the defenders of the dynamic psychiatry that originated with Philippe Pinel. That did not stop Lacan from declaring himself anti-Cartesian three years later in Zurich, before the assembled members of the International Psychoanalytical Association. He did so there to bolster his critique of the ego psychology then dominant, by emphasizing that the experience of psychoanalysis “is radically opposed to any philosophy issuing from the cogito.”⁵

So on one hand Descartes was revendicated by Lacan for having conceived madness with the cogito. On the other, the cogito was disavowed for having given rise more or less to a non-Freudian psychology of the ego. Although Lacan was not a Foucauldian before Foucault, he was better prepared than the psychiatrists of his generation to accept the theses of History of Madness. Thanks to surrealism he had in fact fully integrated into his own method the idea that madness had its own logic and that it had to be considered apart from the traditional monologue brought to bear on it by psychiatric knowledge under the aegis of Cartesian reason. These were not the views of Ey and his group at L’Évolution Psychiatrique.

From 1961 Henri Ey spent a number of years pondering Foucault’s book, which he qualified as “psychiatricidal.” Yet he saw so clearly that this philosopher turned historian of science and medicine was doing something important that he decided to dedicate an entire meeting of his association to the “ideological conception of the history of madness.” It took place at Toulouse in December 1969. Foucault refused to attend, about which Ey had this to say:

The fact that Foucault’s theses partially overlapped with those of the contemporary antipsychiatry movement made it both complex and hazardous to defend psychiatric knowledge. The antipsychiatry movement had launched its critique of the notion of mental illness and its charge that psychiatry was itself pathogenic in 1959, though the path it followed was quite different from that taken by the author of History of Madness. In England, California, and Italy opposition to psychiatry arose on the terrain of the asylum and political practice, and it occupied a space there much like the space occupied in France by the enlightened dynamism of Henry Ey, by the institutional psychotherapy flowing from the pioneering experiment at the hospital of Saint-Alban (where Georges Canguilhem had been active), and by the Lacanian renewal. The antipsychiatry movement took root in countries where psychoanalysis had been “normalized” into a neo-Freudian dogma and where dynamic psychiatry had evolved into a rigid organicism.

The dissenters were all characterized, moreover, by their commitments to the anticolonial struggle, multiculturalism, and extreme left militancy. Gregory Bateson was an anthropologist and vigorously culturalist; David Cooper was a psychiatrist and had fought against apartheid in South Africa; Franco Basaglia was a member of the Italian Communist Party. As for R. D. Laing, he had become a psychoanalyst after having practiced psychiatry in the British army in India. For these rebels, madness was not an illness at all, but a history: the history of a voyage, of a passage or a situation, with schizophrenia as its most completely realized form, inasmuch as it translated the malaise of social or familial alienation into a delirious response.

Thus the antipsychiatrists shared with Foucault the idea that madness had to be thought of as a history, the archives of which had been repressed through a formidable conspiracy, as alienism evolved into psychiatry and reason evolved into oppression. But whereas the antipsychiatrists intended to be pure practitioners, utilizing the tools of Sartrean philosophy and cultural anthropology to dismantle all institutional norms, Foucault remained a theorist, a philosopher, a militant of intellectuality. He fought for the emergence of a history of madness but did not go to live among madpeople.

And he relied upon the most impetuous works of Bataille and Nietzsche in forcing this “damned part” of Western reason, irreducible to any form of discursive mastery, to emerge into view.⁷ Hence the combat in which he engaged, with and against historians, to give voice to the transgressive archive—meaning to the raw and hallucinatory document, the infamous text, the trace not of the expert, judge, or censor, but of the madman, criminal, and assassin.

The historians of psychiatry condemned Michel Foucault for his Promethean attitude. Quite properly. Not only had he stolen away the object of their desire, he was also threatening to render their position in society otiose. From the time psychiatry had become a domain of knowledge, it had told its own history in terms of the purest hagiography: the glorious deeds and gestures of the masters were in general related by the most respectful pupil, who was guaranteed in advance, when he himself became a master, of seeing his own favorite pupil repeat the eulogy that he himself had pronounced at the moment when he succeeded to his own master. The very opposite of imparting fresh life to a heritage through a farewell, or a ceremony of farewell. Thus there had been forged, in a sphere of pure transmission of power, a pious history in which, from Salpêtrière to Charenton by way of Bicêtre, a legendary gallery of portraits followed one after the other whose only function was to lead back to the illustrious progenitor: Philippe Pinel.

Pinel was a pure myth, and everyone knew that the myth had been invented by Étienne Esquirol during the Restoration solely in order to remake the founding hero into an anti-Jacobin humanitarian and so bury the fact that he had been appointed to the hospital at Bicêtre by a decree of the Montagnard Convention on 11 September 1793. The myth of the unsullied and irreproachable hero had then been handed down from generation to generation in a canonical form that no longer bore any relation to historical reality. But like all myths, it had become truer than reality. It went like this:

In 1961, when Michel Foucault’s book appeared, this pious history had been relegated to the attic, and the community of historians of psychiatry had adopted a modern method in its place, one partly inspired by the work of Canguilhem and partly by the influence of the founders of the Annales school. So they set about studying the history of the conceptual tools proper to psychiatry and to its various nosological constructs. Attempts were even made to show that the story did not begin with Pinel but was part of the gradual, and very long-term, adventure of the laborious emergence of the notion of mental illness.

Madness, it was said, was natural to man, and had been so since time immemorial. Through steady evolution, it had been rescued from the gaze cast on it by magical thought and had become an object of science. The thrust of this was that the apprehension of madness—its comprehension—had gone from obscurantism to progress, from religion to humanism, from nature to culture—and from culturalism to universalism. The emphatic message was that man is a creature of reason, and that, in the end, a modern psychiatrist fully instructed in Freudianism and versed in ethnology, is always preferable to a witch doctor, an illusionist, or an inquisitor. Better, it was said, the justice of magistrates than medieval torture; better the moral treatment of Pinel than the “ship of fools.”

And then, just when the history of psychiatry had made itself presentable by giving up its old cherished hagiography, along came a man, neither a psychiatrist nor a historian, claiming to reduce all the efforts of the specialists in psychopathology to nothing at one stroke by engaging in a pure game of structural displacement. What he was saying in substance was that instead of asserting that the birth of a conceptual arsenal allows us to account for the presence of madness in human nature, I will undertake to show that this arsenal has been constructed upon the retroactive illusion that madness was already a given in nature. From that standpoint, madness is not a fact of nature but one of culture, and its history is that of the cultures that label it and persecute it.

And so medical science takes its turn as one of the historical forms of the relation of madness to reason. Its concepts are inadequate to analyzing this relation, and that is why, if we are to grasp its meaning, we must begin by setting aside those concepts. Georges Canguilhem, who had agreed to act as the rapporteur of Foucault’s thesis, understood right away that this was a radical revision of the psychiatric manner of thinking about madness: “It is thus the significance of the beginnings of positivist psychiatry, before the Freudian revolution, that is studied in Foucault’s work. And through psychiatry, it is the significance of the arrival of positive psychology that finds itself revised. Such a casting into doubt of the ‘scientific’ status of psychology will not be the least of the reasons for the surprise that this study will provoke.”⁹

With these statements Canguilhem once again took to task the false science he so abhorred and that he never ceased to regard as a technology of submission. Psychology was represented on the examining board for the thesis by Daniel Lagache, who felt, with perfect justice, that he was being given rough treatment. For Foucault’s gesture was ruining the work to which he had devoted his university career: the unity of psychology. However he refrained from challenging the young philosopher on theoretical grounds and contented himself with pointing out errors of detail: gaps in information or negligence concerning the conceptual armature of psychoanalysis.

Historians working in the field were not slow to criticize the book, while acknowledging that it had given them food for thought they had not been expecting. Indeed, one could measure the intrusive force of the Foucauldian event of 1961 by the strength of the resistance it aroused. The most positive critics tried to counter the fracas of this structural reversal by listing, at interminable length, all the author’s mistakes. And God knows they found them: wrong dates, errors of interpretation, errors in the selection of documents, ignorance of some important event and exaggerated emphasis on some other that Foucault had chosen to feature, and so on.

Foucault was charged, in short, with having hallucinated a history of madness that did not figure in the archives of the history of psychiatry. And in truth, it did not figure there. For at the heart of this history he had seen something that the historians of psychiatry were unable to see, and in order to force this invisible and unnameable thing out into the open, he had had to invent, taking his cue from Freud, an unrecorded primal scene, the mythical scene of the notorious original and ever-recurrent—and ever-unconditional—division. The division between unreason and madness, the division between the menacing madness of the paintings of Bosch and the tame folly of Erasmus’s discourse, the division between a critical consciousness (in which madness becomes illness) and a tragic consciousness (in which it self-sublimates into creation, as in Goya, Van Gogh, or Antonin Artaud). This series culminated with another, more insidious division that Foucault had to invent, the one internal to the Cartesian cogito: madness, he was saying, is excluded from thought at the very moment at which it ceases to pose a threat to the prerogatives of thought.

So, like the psychiatrists and the psychologists, the historians of psychopathology took the view that this madness, which they had been unable to discern in the archives and which Foucault appeared to have magically exhumed, was in the nature of a brilliant but irresponsible literary construct. In their view, the “madness” he had conjured up like a specter or phantom remained foreign to the reality of the suffering of the “real” patients whom psychiatrists had in their charge and whose sad epic it was the business of historians to relate.

Consequently they accused the man Foucault of being neither physician nor psychiatrist nor psychologist, and of never having dealt with real inmates in an asylum, ordinary madpeople, hateful agitated and stupid, or vice versa gentle, docile, controlled, and reasonable. Did a philosopher with so little clinical experience have the right to transform the anonymous madness of real mental patients into this sublime fresco? Did he have the right to transfigure the ordinary inmate of the ordinary asylum into a sublime poet (Artaud) or a painter of genius (Van Gogh)? Foucault, they said, enjoys mocking honest hospital practitioners faced with the enormous chore of restraining patients every day.¹⁰

Another version went like this: why is this elegant philosopher, a doctor’s son, so interested in madness when he did not even choose to follow a career in psychiatry? Why so much violence and rebellion? Why such transgression? Was this individual not perhaps possessed by an experience of deviance that caused him to identify with imaginary madpeople, the better to mark himself off from a corporation he had chosen not to join? It was known that Foucault had contemplated suicide, that he was homosexual, that he had tried psychoanalysis for three weeks, and finally that he had visited the patients at the Saint-Anne hospital and had attended a number of presentations of mental patients for his diploma in psychopathology. The conclusion drawn was that his book was in part the disguised autobiography of a pervert, in part the disguised confession of a mentally ill person afflicted with melancholy.¹¹

Arguments like these allowed the adversaries of Foucault’s thesis to ignore the place that his iconoclastic book held both in its author’s personal itinerary and in the history of the ways of recounting madness. The text had been almost entirely written in the mists of the city of Uppsala and completed “in the great stubborn sunshine of Polish freedom.”¹² And if Foucault did introduce into it that damned part of the lived experience of madness, so often repressed by the discourse of psychopathology, that is doubtless because he had experienced in his own being the principle of division that his book featured: the division between consciousness of the gaze cast upon madness and the absolute withdrawal of any gaze. In other words, in his passage from the mists of Uppsala to the sunshine of Warsaw, the philosopher had reached the core of madness without giving up his stance as a scientist. But prior to making this great voyage he had gone through a sort of intimate and tenebrous storm that had come close to leading him down “the pathways of night.” “A great Husserlian ascesis led me into regions so strange and so unimagined that I do not know if it is possible to breathe here. After having hesitated whether to become a monk, or to turn off down the pathways of night, I decided to force myself to live here. But I am only just starting to draw breath.”¹³

So it is no coincidence that, thirty-four years later, another philosopher recalled this Foucauldian crossing when he came to write the history of his own madness. Louis Althusser wrote: “Even though I was released from psychiatric confinement two years ago, I remain, for the public to whom I am known, one of the disappeared. Neither dead nor alive, still unburied but ‘unemployed’—Foucault’s magnificent word to designate madness: disappeared…. One of the disappeared may startle public opinion by turning up again (as I am now doing) in the broad daylight of life …in the great sunshine of Polish freedom.”¹⁴

At Uppsala, where he got a job as an instructor in French in August 1955 thanks to Georges Dumézil, an archive of impressive bulk was available to Foucault: that deposited at the Carolina Rediviva library by Dr. Erik Waller. Twenty-one thousand documents: letters, manuscripts, rare books, and obscure works, as well as a considerable collection of medical treatises on the maladies of the soul, the treatment of the deranged, the law governing hospitals and charitable institutions. For the period of the French Revolution he could turn to the classics: Doublet and Colombier, Tenon, Brissot, Cabanis, Pinel, the reports of the Committee on Mendicancy, and finally the four volumes of documents edited by Alexandre Tuetey on public assistance in Paris.

But since this collection lacked archives from hospitals and places of incarceration, which would have made it possible to quantify the longue durée of institutional confinement, Foucault’s adversaries were quick to assert that he had dodged giving a true historical account of his topic, because the archives at his disposal, however rich, did not reveal the true truth of the true history of true confinement, which as far as they were concerned was simply a succession of imperceptible small events spread out across several centuries.

What’s the point, they said, of resorting to overwrought rhetorical turns like grande renfermement [great confinement], conjuration [conspiracy], or partage [division, sharing] as ways of describing what came down, in the end, to chronology pure and simple? Another version went: if Foucault focused so much on the twenty-one thousand documents in the Carolina, that’s because they supported the hypotheses born of his own imagination, to which he had decided in advance to cling.

The first to go after him was Stirn Lindroth, who held the chair in history of ideas and science at Uppsala, and with whom Foucault had intended to defend his thesis. Alarmed by the unacademic style of the impetuous young man, Lindroth judged both his writing and his hypotheses to be too far-fetched; he would even make it his boast, many years later, that he had not perceived the novelty of the book.¹⁵

As for the polemic about archival sources orchestrated by the French specialists, it had less to do with the manner in which Foucault had utilized them than it did with the fashion in which the historians of psychopathology were willing or unwilling to see that their world was collapsing around their ears. When History of Madness appeared, they had as yet produced nothing capable of seriously challenging it. Henri Ellenberger’s History of the Discovery of the Unconscious, the first great founding text of psychiatric and psychoanalytic historiography, written from a perspective both positivist and Annalist, was still in gestation and would only appear in English in 1970, nine years after Foucault’s History.

Without having read History of Madness, which he was later to characterize as “obscure,” Ellenberger did share with Foucault the idea that madness was a fact of culture. But he did not perceive the nature/culture divide in the same way as the philosopher did. In his eyes, madness was certainly “natural” to man, but was only perceptible as such through the diversity of its ethnic manifestations. From this perspective it may well have existed from time immemorial, but it had only become comprehensible on the day that man acquired the ability to apprehend it, first through magical thinking and later through rational interpretation.

In 1961 the historians of psychopathology had indeed abandoned the terrain of hagiography, but from the historiographical point of view, the Foucauldian gesture hit them too soon for them to be able to hit back with a constituted body of knowledge and too late for them to be able to invalidate him by denying his pathbreaking status. Thus they were forced to register his existence, consciously or unconsciously, but always at the cost of a negative assessment: the philosopher was a master, agreed, but he was a perverse one; his book might be pathbreaking, but it was also faulty and destructive.

Between 1954 and 1961 Michel Foucault had altered his stance. In his first theoretical work, Mental Illness and Psychology, published in 1954, he showed that the genesis of modern forms of alienation had to be understood on the basis of figures from antiquity: the “energumen” of the Greeks, the mente captus of the Latins, the “demoniac” of the Christians.¹⁶ At that time, therefore, he adopted an evolutionist attitude toward his object of study, madness. This is the stance his detractors would later accuse him of abandoning. He saw the concept of mental illness as the terminal phase of a way of looking at madness that had begun in antiquity and had passed through the medieval notion of “divine possession.” So in 1954 his presupposition was that alienation had been permanent throughout history, whereas in 1961 he relinquished any idea of continuity in favor of a system of divisions based on the exclusion of madness by reason.¹⁷ At the same time he rejected the notion of mental toolkit, which had ended up poisoning the research of the heirs of the Annales school by steering them into the search for an undiscoverable “period mentality”—something more like the idea that every ethnic group has its own psychology than a method for the constructive reinterpretation of the past.¹⁸

This radical shift showed clearly that Foucault was aware that madness could have a history configured differently from the one he was constructing in Uppsala. But he could not think that history at the same time as the other: the object of his research was not the psychological definition of mental illness but the quest for an ontological truth of madness. Hence the imperative need for a revision.

The most telling attack on History of Madness was dealt by Gladys Swain. Sixteen years after its publication, she faulted its author for having taken literally the myth of Pinel’s abolition of the shackles, without trying to find out what lay beneath it. And indeed Foucault had never dwelt on the matter. Although he knew that Pinel had never carried out this gesture, although he was not ignorant of the role the attendant Pussin had played in the gradual freeing of the deranged inmates, although he knew that the encounter between Pinel and Couthon had never taken place, he regarded the myth as true because, in his system of structural divisions, it stood for the foundational act of alienism.

In thus revendicating the foundational power of myth, he was proceeding in the manner of Sartre, who was contemporaneously reinventing, in complete disregard of archival research, a Freud of his own, truer than the true Freud, tormented by doubt, and shot through with a sort of Nietzschean Sturm und Drang.

Gladys Swain contested this approach, focusing on the origins of the modern asylum in the nineteenth century. She showed that psychiatry was born, not with an act—necessarily mythic—of setting the deranged free, but with the attribution to the alienist of powers formerly exercised by attendants. The myth of the abolition of the shackles thus served to get Pussin out of the way and allow Esquirol to dominate the asylum and nosology in the name of a totemic ancestor turned object of hagiography: Philippe Pinel.¹⁹

This ancestor Swain proposed to historicize, abandoning mythmaking so as to understand who he had really been and what he had accomplished. Foucault of course did not address this question because he refused to situate himself on that terrain. Yet Gladys Swain’s approach owed everything to Foucault’s, for it lay in redirecting toward psychiatric discourse the interrogations that the philosopher had formulated with respect to the language of madness. It was thus against Foucault that she brought into focus a new problematic for the history of psychiatry—that of the genesis of the asylum—but at the cost of being unable clearly to recognize how much her argumentation owed to the Foucauldian gesture.

Three years after the publication of The Subject of Madness, Gladys Swain collaborated with Marcel Gauchet on a book dedicated to “moral treatment” and the genesis of the asylum from Pinel to Esquirol, The Practice of the Human Spirit.²⁰ Foucault’s theses were not explicitly refuted in it, but the authors aimed to demonstrate that the history of modern societies was dictated by a logic of integration resting on the postulate of egalitarianism. In consequence this history could not be understood according to a model of the exclusion of alterity. In the hierarchical and inegalitarian societies that preceded the French classical age, said Swain and Gauchet, the madman was only tolerated because he was regarded either as subhuman (a mindless beast) or as suprahuman (divinely possessed): between the animalesque and the godlike. In modern societies, democratic and egalitarian, a reversal had come about: the madman was no longer regarded as the excluded Other but as the alter ego, that is, as an ill subject.

The two authors were carrying on the work begun by Swain three years earlier: work at once different from Foucault’s, since it portrayed the nineteenth-century asylum as the realization of a democratic utopia, yet perfectly inscribed in the aftermath of History of Madness, since it tended to demonstrate how the madperson had undergone a metamorphosis by the fact of being integrated into the psychiatric institution.

It is indeed the case that Foucault had never sought to depict the asylum as the realization of a democratic utopia. Nor had he ever sought to demonstrate how it was that this utopia contained within itself its own proper failure, meaning the failure of the asylum and of “moral treatment.” Why? Quite simply because this—highly interesting—thesis depended on a continuist obviousness from which he had cut loose in 1960. He had constructed his system of divisions not to counter it but to emphasize how every epoch organizes its utopia, in other words its gaze upon madness. From that perspective, to bring out the recurring alterity of madness in the history of human societies was to throw into sharp relief the utopian aspect of every view of madness.

Far from criticizing Foucault’s work, Gladys Swain and Marcel Gauchet acknowledged his pathbreaking status. Nevertheless, in their preface they accorded greater prominence to The Will to Knowledge,²¹ which came out in 1976, than they did to History of Madness: the former was qualified as a “central” work and the latter as an “indirectly central” one, already relegated to the past. But above all, the two authors preceded the recognition thus accorded Foucault with a formidable assault on Freud’s discoveries, which were exposed to the charge of participating “fully in a logic of totalitarianism.” As for the partisans of a “return to Freud,” they too found themselves stigmatized as Jacobins of 1793, already Bolsheviks without knowing it, and so already Stalinists without being aware of it.

In other words, without ever mentioning the names of Freud or Lacan, Swann and Gauchet calmly informed readers in the 1980s that the so-called Freudian revolution was no more than a totalitarian revival of the Jacobin revolution of sinister memory. Indeed, as far as they were concerned, it was simply the foundational act of the abominable Gulag to come.

These far-fetched views, inspired by those of François Furet concerning the French Revolution,²² disregarded the fact that the teaching and practice of psychoanalysis had always been prohibited by dictatorships, beginning with the one set up by the Nazis, who characterized it as a “Jewish science,” and then by the Stalinists, who made it a “bourgeois science.” The authors, ever vigilant in their critique of the “mistakes” of Foucault, appeared to forget that a number of representatives of this totalitarian discipline had been persecuted, exterminated, and tortured on account of their ideas, sometimes for that matter with the tacit complicity of other psychoanalysts.

But what was a preface of this kind doing anyway in a scholarly work of five hundred pages entirely dedicated to the history of the asylum, with which neither Freud, nor Lacan, nor psychoanalysis, nor even the history of psychoanalysis, had anything to do?

If Swain and Gauchet preferred The Will to Knowledge to History of Madness, that was because in the later book Foucault saluted the critiques of Freudianism advanced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In their Anti-Oedipus of 1972 these two had carried on the tradition of Wilhelm Reich by setting a theory of desiring fluxes, alien to any form of symbolic representation, against a Freudian system they characterized as repressive and “Oedipal.”²³ And as well as Freud, it was the doctrine of Lacan that Deleuze and Guattari were targeting, on account of its drift into dogmaticism and logicality.

In 1961, in History of Madness, Foucault inscribed Freud’s discovery in the internal continuity of the history of psychopathology, though he was always careful to show its status of alterity too. He clearly demonstrated the connection between Freud and Pierre Janet, while continually asserting the obvious radical discontinuity between the two doctrines. In 1976 in The Will to Knowledge he was no longer dealing with the same problem, choosing instead to focus on the internal continuity linking the techniques of confession and avowal to that of psychoanalysis. And in this perspective, the theses of Deleuze and Guattari helped him to formulate his own.

As for psychoanalysis, far from considering it a totalitarian enterprise, Foucault emphasized its remoteness from any such outlook. Freud had broken away from theories of heredity and degeneration and had chosen to emphasize the role of sexuality in reaction to the terrible upsurge of racism that was occurring in his time: “the Law—the law of the alliance, of forbidden consanguinity, of the Father-Sovereign.” In sum, he had convoked the ancient order of power around the question of desire. And Foucault added: “ Thanks to that, psychoanalysis has been—in essence, and with a few exceptions—opposed to fascism in theory and practice.”²⁴

This assessment by Foucault, with which I completely concur, was meant to apply to the discipline itself. For it is the disciplinary essence of psychoanalysis that is incompatible with fascist dictatorship and all the forms of discrimination associated with it: racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia. The behavior of certain representatives of psychoanalysis who, in certain precise historical circumstances, willingly collaborated with regimes that were aiming to eradicate it, is another matter.²⁵

By referring to The Will to Knowledge rather than to History of Madness, Swain and Gauchet were able to cite Foucault as if he were an anti-Freudian, sweeping aside his inaugural work and propping up a positivist doctrine in its place. Only this, it was claimed, would henceforth have the power to account seriously not just for madness, but for the “subject” of madness: the alienated individual of democratic societies. For that matter, their virulent attack on putatively “totalitarian” psychoanalysis was also aimed at the Lacanian reading of the work of Freud, inasmuch as Lacan, like Foucault, and for fifty years, had been engaged in deep reflection of the nature of madness. And at a time when his doctrine was being made to look ridiculous by the sectarian behavior of a number of his partisans, the best way to damage Lacan was to pass the extravagant master off as a vicious Stalinist brute, in other words (the supreme insult for these two authors) as a Jacobin of 1793.

This attempted abolition showed clearly that, twenty years after its publication, History of Madness was still poisoning the spirit of all who were promoting a new history of psychopathology by claiming to be more democratic than Foucault—to whom suspicion always clung of excessive sympathy for the shipwrecked ones of the night and an ambition to be the dark originator of a colossal philosophy of rebellion that might undermine the ideals of a psychology in the service of the norm.

In short, Swain and Gauchet demonized Freud’s discoveries so as to deny History of Madness its historical impact and supply the artisans of psychopathological thought with a tool they could use in its place. But there is no getting round it: This attempt to eradicate Foucauldian and Freudian thought has been a complete failure. In France and everywhere else.

And it may well be that the specter of defeat now facing the detractors of Foucault’s thought is the consequence of their belief in a purely organicist conception of madness, a conception dominated by psychopharmacology and behavioralism, with no connection any more to Pinel, or to nosology, or to madness, or to any utopia—only to a complete absence of thought. From this perspective, the book by Swain and Gauchet was just the inaugural phase of this absence of thought. All the more so in that by assigning a unique function to the asylum—that of being linked to a democratic utopia—the two authors register its gradual disappearance, and thus its slowly programmed end.

The only thing left for them to do, in order to think this end and the end of all thought, was to revive the merits of empirical pluralism—which Gladys Swain did in 1987, in designating a single possible line of conduct for psychiatry, the most conformist one imaginable: the medicalization of existence on one hand, the taking of the psychological subject into society’s charge on the other.²⁶

At the same moment, two representatives of a philosophy of submission, Alain Renaut and Luc Ferry, who posed as the slayers of a putative “1968 thought” invented by terrorist thinkers hostile to the France of the Enlightenment, were also busy casting History of Madness, explicitly this time, into the hell of a new totalitarianism, no longer Jacobin but Nietzschean-Heideggerian.²⁷ Their book, which enjoyed much success under the title 1968 Thought, made no attempt to state in what respect Foucault really was a Nietzschean, nor what he might have derived from his reading of the works of Heidegger. Far from it! The term “1968 thought” was simply utilized as a set phrase to signify that Foucault had moved—along with other Freudian, Nietzschean, or Heideggerian bit players like Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Pierre Bourdieu—from one totalitarianism to another: from Bolshevik Jacobinism to Nazism.

Bolstering their case with reference to the five hundred pages of Swain and Gauchet’s Practice of the Human Spirit, which, the reader will recall, deals exclusively, except for the preface, with the scholarly study of the asylum in the nineteenth century, the two philosophers accused Foucault of being both obscurantist and antidemocratic. Obscurantist because he preferred the “ship of fools” (called “inegalitarian”) to the chemical straitjacket (called “egalitarian”). Antidemocratic because he chose not to see that the modern asylum responded not so much to a logic of exclusion as to a democratic utopia, that is to say, a project to integrate madness through “moral treatment” that contained the seed of its own failure.

So in 1986, twenty-five years after the publication of History of Madness and two years after Foucault’s death, he was being accused of a crime he had not committed by imputing to him a project that was never his. Claiming that his system of divisions was just the result of a “Nietzschean-Heideggerian” preference that elevated the age of medieval witchcraft and magic above the age of Tocqueville and the straitjacket, they decked him out in the extravagant cassock of a nihilist prophet on a mission to wreck the two great pillars of our modern societies: science and democracy.

It is quite true that Foucault took sides in the combats inspired by his book and the antipsychiatry movement, supporting the various alternative networks hostile to psychiatric power, especially the biopower of the experts who were poisoning democratic society. But that did not mean that he acquiesced when his theses were reduced to simplistic slogans. Over the course of the struggles in which he engaged, he showed himself to be a man of dialogue, always preferring debate to spontaneous acts of rebellion. When it came to psychiatry, he readily took a reformist line. No doubt this was his way of taking a playful distance from his own prose, which did indeed vibrate with real insurrectional violence.

It is because they have overlooked the harm done by this biopower, and carried along by Gauchet’s ideas, have yoked themselves to the principles of that police-headquarters psychology denounced by Canguilhem, that certain sociologists, philosophers, psychoanalysts, and psychiatrists have today made themselves into servants of an ideology of assessment. When they maintain, for example, that the probing of the subject through cerebral imaging might finally bring a solution to all of mankind’s metaphysical interrogations,²⁸ or when they suggest that any truly scientific historiography must rid itself of any form of “heroic” representation, one inevitably recalls Michel Foucault denouncing “the indignity of power, from infamous sovereignty down to ridiculous authority.”²⁹

It has to be said: Anglophone scholarship, in the person of Jan Goldstein, produced the real history of French psychiatry in the nineteenth century, which those who were blaming Foucault for being unable to initiate had dreamed of turning out themselves. Impressed by the inept accusations of Gauchet, Ferry, and Renaut, and permanently terrified at the thought that the philosopher himself might direct one of his caustic imprecations their way, the French upholders of this sociopsychology of measurable subjectivity produced nothing of interest in this respect, whereas Foucault’s oeuvre has spread throughout the world, continuing to stimulate new interpretations of madness, the body, sex, desire, and power.³⁰

Focusing on the birth and evolution of psychiatry in France from the end of the eighteenth century down to the dawn of the twentieth (from Pinel to Charcot), Goldstein kept aloof in 1987 from the disputes occasioned in France by the publication of Foucault’s master work.³¹

Neither letting herself be overwhelmed by it nor wasting time sifting it for “mistakes,” Jan Goldstein frankly acknowledged once and for all the importance of History of Madness for the area of her own research. Foucault had reversed the gaze directed at madness, raised questions about the incarceration of madpeople, and identified a division between reason and unreason at the core of human subjectivity and Western society.

Starting with that, she accomplished the tour de force of writing a total history of psychiatry over the course of a century: its salient theoretical issues, its concepts, its professionalization, its clinical classifications, its social and political actors (doctors, intellectuals, patients, criminals). Overall, an engrossing narrative, with the scenery of Balzac’s novels in the background: the Revolution, the empire, the restoration, the July monarchy. Goldstein showed how a medicine of the psyche was able to impose itself as an interpretive framework for human behavior, then generalize itself over all Western societies.

To console and to classify: The two verbs of her title referred to the two major functions of psychiatric knowledge, poised between religion and science. The alienist of the late eighteenth century was at first the successor of the priest, and his role was indeed to console the patient. Support and compassion were his main virtues. Once secularized, mental illness was no longer linked to demonic possession. The madman escaped the exorcists, and it was the doctor turned psychiatrist who provided him with care and received the avowal of his suffering.

But the psychiatrist had equally to combat religious obscurantism. A man of the Enlightenment, he defended the values of science. Thus he had to be capable, not simply of classifying illnesses, but of classifying the mental universe of the subject, in other words of inventing classifications able to convey the new order of the world and give effect to the new desire to integrate the madman into the juridical space created by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

The book opens in 1778 with the creation of the Société Royale de Médecine, of which the permanent secretary was the celebrated Félix Vicq d’Azir, the author in 1790 of a New Plan for the Constitution of Medicine in France. The ideas of Cabanis and the group known as the Ideologues inspired Vicq d’Azir to combine medicine with the new science of man: anthropology. Politically his goal was to break with the feudal system of corporations and create a state medical system.

The new medical art, the triumph of which was assured by the Revolution and the empire, was linked to a materialist theory, psychophysiology, which opposed the ancient spiritual conception of the soul’s divine essence preached by religion. For scientific medicine, man was a totality formed of a body and a psyche, but this psyche was purely a manifestation of physiology.

In 1792 the former university faculties were abolished and the medical profession was defined as a liberal art. In 1803 François Antoine Fourcroy, a pupil of Vicq d’Azir, spearheaded the creation of state medical schools charged with controlling what was taught. The new profession had the privilege of self-regulation, however, and this was the defining feature of the notion of “liberal profession” as we know it today. Borrowed from Adam Smith, it assumed the existence of a clear separation between the sphere in which the state was competent and the exercise of freedoms. All who did not fit into this new order could be regarded as charlatans and penalized for practicing medicine illegally.

Psychiatry came into being within this context, as a medical specialty.³² Philippe Pinel became the organizer of this new outlook on madness, which joined the art of consoling and the faculty of classifying. Consolation as conceived by Pinel was “moral treatment,” a mixture of physical care and techniques of gentle restraint and persuasion grounded in the idea that the madman could be cured because a remnant of reason still existed inside him. The key work of classification was Pinel’s Medico-Philosophical Treatise on Mental Alienation, or Mania, published in 1800.

This work defined the categories of mental illness that were to serve as the framework of psychiatric knowledge for a century. As on every occasion of clinical refoundation, a new term was employed to indicate the essence of madness: manie [mania]. The Pinelian madman was above all a maniac, afflicted with furor and acute delirium, a man right out of the trauma of the Revolution.

After describing the birth of Pinelian psychiatry, Jan Goldstein analyzes the theoretical and political debates that took place during the Restoration and the July monarchy. These led to the passing of the law of 1838, allowing state asylums to be created—with psychiatric hospitals gradually being built throughout France—and the status of the deranged individual, within a bourgeois society devoted to commerce and the protection of the family ideal, to be defined.

Once again a key term served to focus discussion about the nature of madness: now it was monomanie [monomania] instead of manie. Coined in 1810 by Étienne Esquirol, the founder of the asylum and himself a pupil of Pinel, this category became the paradigm of madness until around 1850. The term “monomania” designated the obsession, the fixed idea that could fasten on a healthy mind. Above all, though, it betrayed the change of mentality that had occurred at the heart of a society built on regicide. The monomania attributed to the Esquirolian madman was simply the pathological version of the “normal” ambition proper to postrevolutionary society, a society where every individual now had the right and the means to set himself up as a king or an emperor—the king of perfumery, the king of finance, the emperor of crime, and so on—a society right out of Balzac’s Comedie humaine, with its Vautrins, its Nuncingens, its César Birotteaus.

The notion of monomania was at stake in another battle, this one between jurists and alienists. As psychiatric knowledge built up its own stable institutional structure, it attempted to extend the notion of madness to all criminal acts. Hence Esquirol’s creation in 1825 of the expression manie homicide [homicidal mania] to define a form of murderous madness without delirium. The aim, in conformity with article 64 of the penal code, introduced in 1810, was to save criminals from the guillotine in order to cure them.³³

Esquirol and his pupils waged a fight against the death penalty, which contributed to the birth of medicolegal psychiatry. But this dispute among specialists also had a scientific aspect. It revealed what a battering the psychophysiological model originating in the Enlightenment took in the psychiatric knowledge of the first half of the nineteenth century. Two schools of thought, both hostile to ultra-Catholicism, clashed between 1810 and 1838: that of the physiologists and that of the doctrinaires. The first maintained a psychophysiological stance, and thus a monist conception of the unity of mental life as dominated by the physical organization. Represented by Broussais, Gall, Esquirol, and Auguste Comte, this school presented itself as progressive and atheist. The second, spiritualist and psychological, was more conservative and aimed to restore the double authority of the state and religion, while favoring economic liberalism. Personified in Théodore Jouffroy and Victor Cousin, it was inspired by German philosophy—Kant and Hegel—in affirming that the mind is an autonomous reality independent of the physical world and requiring to be explored from within, by introspection.

After repeated clashes, the two schools ended by adopting a middling position that resulted in the passing of the law of 1838. To the great satisfaction of the physiological psychiatrists, the madperson thus escaped the judicial system; while the doctrinaires could take pride in the fact that the creation of state asylums made it possible to combat social disorder and to correct what primary schooling, instituted in 1833, did not succeed in preventing.

Stripped of the ordinary rights of the citizen, the Esquirolian madman of 1838 bore no resemblance to the aliéné of Pinel’s era. Separated now from his family, isolated and locked up for life, he was subjected to the control of a secularized psychiatric power. To intern and isolate: these were now the two visages of consolation and classification. The reign of this new mental medicine began with the death of Esquirol and lasted until around 1960, when the asylum age drew to a close as pharmaceuticals came into general use, replacing the tangible straitjacket with a chemical one.

As for Jean-Martin Charcot, the heir of the physiologists, he incorporated hysteria into psychiatric knowledge and made this neurosis, this “semimadness,” into the paradigm of a new fin-de-siècle illness destined to invade the bodies of women and sow unease in masculine identity. Out of the encounter between Charcot and Freud came psychoanalysis, the new interpretive model of behavior for the twentieth century.

In studying the origins of a model of psychiatric knowledge that entered its terminal phase just as Foucault was beginning to tread the pathways of night, and seven years after Louis Althusser had experienced its last manifestations,³⁴ Jan Goldstein offered some thoughts on the future. Indeed the parallelism with the past is striking: The querelles of the nineteenth century are recurring today in the fierce debates between those who support genetic causality and psychopharmacology on one side, and the partisans of psychical causality on the other, in a context no longer dominated by monomania or hysteria, but rather by depression—the ultimate form of the malaise of Western culture at the dawn of the new millennium.

Like all bold thinkers—especially the ones who never gave in to normalization—Foucault was hated. As much as Sartre and Derrida, as much as Althusser and Deleuze. In France he was accused of being nihilistic, antidemocratic, and Heideggerian, in other words of having been a Nazi, since Heidegger had been one. Later he was rebuked for having supported the regime of the ayatollahs because he had been fascinated, in the streets of Teheran, by the uprising of a people who were revolting against their monarch in the name of a saint and because he had tried to understand the spiritual significance of a new kind of revolution,³⁵ and the unconditional support that one ought, or ought not, to give to the singularity of such an uprising.

In the United States, where his work was studied in many universities,³⁶ Foucault was often seen as a spell-binding destroyer of civilized morality. Not only had he undertaken to defend homosexuals at a time when they were still considered perverts and were punished by the law, but he had discovered a new experience of sexuality in the bars and saunas of California. The practice of S and M, he was saying in essence, is a creation and thus a subculture, a new way of utilizing the body as a source of pleasure. And he would include drugs in that, as long as their consumption did not result in alienation.

Since Foucault had taken not only to uttering such opinions, seen as subversive, but to wearing black leather jackets, it was not long before he was being regarded as mentally ill. Later he was portrayed retroactively as some sort of murderer because he had never practiced safe sex.³⁷ His accusers neglected to note that while there was general awareness of AIDS as a disease between 1981 and 1984, the degree of risk it entailed and its modes of transmission had not yet been clearly established.³⁸ There were many in the homosexual community, the one most affected, who still denied its existence. Foucault only realized at a very late stage that he had been contaminated, as we now know. “I think I’ve caught AIDS,” he said to Georges Dumézil a few months before his death.³⁹

Nine years later, the author of History of Madness was transformed by James Miller, a professor at the New School for Social Research in New York, into a “pathological case.” In his book The Passion of Michel Foucault,⁴⁰ Miller resorted to the psychobiographic method inspired by the new conditioning therapies—themselves grounded in the violation of conscience—in order to reconstruct what he took to be the mental universe of the philosopher and to appraise in minute detail the demons that supposedly haunted his psyche.⁴¹ Convinced that Foucault had deliberately contracted AIDS so as to fulfill his death wish, Miller concluded that the entire Foucauldian oeuvre was pervaded by a mystique of suicide, the origin of which went back, according to him, to three so-called traumatic memories recorded by the writer Hervé Guibert as the philosopher lay dying in the hospital of La Salpêtrière.⁴²

The first of the “terrible dioramas” reported by Guibert showed the philosopher in childhood being taken by his father, who was a surgeon, into an operating room in the hospital in Poitiers where a man was having a limb amputated. In the second of these confidences, Foucault recalled the famous séquestrée de Poitiers, a woman discovered in 1901 to have been locked up by her family for many years, and emphasized how, upon seeing the inner courtyard where she had been confined, he had as a child felt a terror that later gave him a taste for tabloid sensationalism. Finally, the last of the memories reported by Guibert had to do with the presence at Foucault’s high school during the German occupation of a number of students from Paris: they were more gifted than him and this made him feel threatened. He had cursed and hated them, and then seen them disappear into the maw of the final solution.

According to Miller, Foucault’s father so humiliated him by forcing him to watch an amputation that Foucault lost his virility and remained fascinated all his life by the opening up of cadavers and the sight of torture. Likewise the sight of the mattress on which the sequestered woman of Poitiers had lain had given him a taste for enclosed spaces, labyrinths, and incarceration. As for his feelings of jealousy toward the Jewish students exterminated by the Nazis, it lay, according to Miller, at the root of Foucault’s conviction that fascism had to be opposed, not just as a historical phenomenon, but as the power that determines, without our knowing it, our most routine actions. In any case, these three repressed traumatic experiences guided Foucault, on Miller’s showing, down the tortuous pathways of a death cult—the sole explanation of his suicidal passion and his “desire” to contract AIDS.

One is left speechless at the stupidity of this putatively Freudian interpretation of the work and life of Michel Foucault, resting on nothing but extravagant hypotheses and reaching the most banal conclusion possible: Every book originates in the lived experience of its author.

A Nazi, a nihilist, an antidemocrat, and an Islamist for his French detractors; a great sadomasochistic contaminator and pathological case for certain of his American commentators (haunted to the point of delirium by their own personal sexual obsessions), the author of History of Madness had become, ten years after his death, one of the most widely read and admired French philosophers throughout the world, including in France itself, but at the cost of being considered also as the most infamous and perverse thinker of the second half of the century.⁴³

The critique of History of Madness advanced by Jacques Derrida took the Foucauldian reversal as its point of departure. But Derrida was not interested in listing Foucault’s “mistakes” or accusing him of nihilism. Not only did he defend the critical character of Foucault’s discourse, he asserted the necessity for any critical discourse to acknowledge its debt to the object critiqued and emphasized that the conscience of the disciple, when it engages in dialogue with that of the master, is always an unhappy conscience. Derrida did not wait long to speak his piece, doing so in a lecture on the theme “cogito and history of madness” given on 3 March 1963 at the Collège de Philosophie.⁴⁴

His polemic bore on the status of the Cartesian cogito with respect to the history of madness. Foucault made a distinction in Descartes between the exercise of madness and the activity of dreaming. He emphasized that Descartes had excluded madness from the cogito, and that this decree of exclusion in a sense heralded the political decision to carry out the grande renfermement (1656). On the contrary—and still according to Foucault—dreaming in the Cartesian sense was one of the virtualities of the subject; it was the influence of the malin genie [evil genius] that caused its sensible images to become deceptive.

Just as Henri Gouhier had refused to see the famous phrase from the Meditations, “ Mais quoi! ce sont des fous,” as an expression of ostracism against madness, Derrida likewise refused Foucault the right to perform an act of confinement on the cogito.

Where Foucault represented Descartes as saying “man may well be mad if the cogito is not,” Derrida replied that, with the act of the cogito, thought no longer needed to fear madness, because “the cogito holds good even if I am mad.” Consequently, in Descartes, madness is included in the cogito, said Derrida, and its fissure is internal to reason. As for the evil genius, the hypothesis was only discarded by Descartes—still according to Derrida—the better to highlight the fact that the cogito would remain true, even if “craziness” [affolement] prevailed everywhere. So Derrida was accusing Foucault of constituting an event as structure: the ostracism against madness began not with the cogito but with the victory of Socrates over the pre-Socratics. In order to think the history of madness outside the bounds of a structural totality always threatening to turn totalitarian, it was necessary to show that the division between reason and madness existed in the history of philosophy as an original presence amply overspilling the system in which Foucault had inscribed it.

Derrida was not therefore taking aim at Foucault’s construction of a domain of madness absent from the archives but at an interpretation he deemed too restrictive, because too structural, of the system of divisions. This was the first stage of a critique internal to the history of French structuralism.⁴⁵ With it Derrida was proposing, as Deleuze was to do along other lines, to deconstruct the overly dogmatic utilization of the data of Saussurian linguistics in the so-called human sciences. In terms of historiography, Derrida was tending toward the thesis later associated with Ellenberger: madness exists prior to the gesture of the French classic age, constituting it as the Other of reason. For Derrida the exclusion is prior to the cogito and goes back to Socrates; for Ellenberger madness is a fact of culture.

Foucault was present in the hall when Derrida delivered his lecture on 3 March 1963. He kept silent. When Derrida’s Writing and Difference, which includes the lecture, was published, he even sent Derrida a warmly worded letter. The dispute broke out subsequently, with Foucault composing a two-part reply to Derrida, which he included in the 1972 edition of History of Madness. “Sorry to get back to you so late,” he said to Derrida in his dedication. The first part consisted of a long philosophical discussion of the status of the cogito, the second was a terrible ad hominem attack on Derrida’s whole approach, reduced by Foucault to “textualization” and “small-time pedagogy.”

The two men did not meet for nine years. In 1981, when Derrida was giving a seminar in Prague with dissident intellectuals, he was arrested and accused of drug trafficking. From Paris, Foucault was quick to support him and launch an appeal in his favor on the radio.⁴⁶ In the tempest of this struggle for freedom, the philosopher of the pathways of night was reconciled with the philosopher of deconstruction at just the time when History of Madness was being stigmatized by its detractors as a monument of antidemocracy.⁴⁷

I never met Michel Foucault, whose work I discovered upon reading Words and Things in the summer of 1966.⁴⁸ This dazzling book, written with knife-edged incisiveness in the manner of a great novel of initiation, posed an essential question to the generation to which I belonged, the post-Sartrean generation if you like: How were we to move on from the philosophy of commitment without reverting to the monotony of phantasmal life or of just managing the business of living?

Compared to Mein Kampf by an unhinged psychoanalyst,⁴⁹ then violently criticized by those who blamed Foucault for undermining the rights of man and for not being “democratic” enough, this work reopened the great question of humanism posed by Sartre after the liberation, in his controversy with Heidegger.

On 28 October 1945 Sartre gave his famous public lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism,”⁵⁰ in which he popularized his theory of freedom grounded in theses laid down in Being and Nothingness. After this flourish he opened the columns of Les Temps Modernes to a debate on Heidegger’s engagement with Nazism.⁵¹ The question addressed by all the participants was this: Was Heidegger’s stance imputable to fleeting error, or was it the logical outcome of a philosophical orientation that, in promoting the reconnection of man with his own roots, had ended by finding in Nazism the doctrine of salvation that matched the criteria it had set? Some maintained that Heidegger’s commitment was no more than an accident that did not impinge on the essential portion of his work as a philosopher, while others asserted on the contrary that this commitment had its roots in a ground identical to that from which Nazism had sprung.

Heidegger, it is well known, had been one of the great promoters, especially within the universities, of “working toward the Führer.”⁵² After World War Two his strongest supporter had been the French philosopher Jean Beaufret, a former member of the Resistance against the Nazi occupation, and this had enabled him to conceal the extent of his support of Nazism. Thanks to Beaufret, the fact that the question of Heidegger’s engagement was still an unresolved issue was forgotten in France for many years. For it is in fact impossible to deny the extent of the attachment of Heidegger’s philosophy to Nazism; just as it is impossible to reduce his thought to the simple dimensions of a handbook for SS officers.⁵³

It remains the case that in his Letter on Humanism Heidegger had portrayed every form of humanism—and existentialism in particular—as a new metaphysics for a modern mankind submerged in the lethargy of an existence conditioned by technology and the illusions of progress.⁵⁴

The antihumanism of which Foucault (and for that matter Louis Althusser) was accused was different in kind, even if the polemic centered on him in France was a continuation of the debate that had begun with the querelle between Sartre and Heidegger. If the most advanced civilization in Europe, so the argument ran, was capable of putting into operation at Auschwitz hitherto unequalled powers of destruction and self-destruction, that meant that inhumanity—the death wish, in other words—lay at the heart of the human and not outside it, in the depths of some improbable animality.

Consequently the humanist discourse bore within itself the seeds of a possible annihilation of its own values. In the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss: “In seeing mankind apart from the rest of creation, in a different perspective, western humanism deprived it of a protective glacis. When man knows no further limit to his power, he goes on to destroy himself. Consider the death camps, and, on a different plane, but with tragic consequences this time for the whole of humanity, pollution.”⁵⁵

For Foucault, as for Derrida and Deleuze, it was imperative to continually question such ideals as the rights of man, humanism, and democracy, so as to uncover, at the very core of that which presents itself as the most refined expression of Western culture, the traces of a dark force—or sometimes just the traces of that little everyday, nondescript fascism—that never ceases to threaten their fragile equilibrium.⁵⁶

In Words and Things Foucault deployed a dazzling erudition. As for his central thesis, it supplied a way to think the question of human destiny in a world in which mankind has become, thanks to progress in the life sciences, both an object of knowledge and the murderer of itself. With this critique of humanism Foucault revived the stance of the Frankfurt school against Heidegger’s thought: the invention of a form of critical thought capable not only of analyzing the mechanisms of power at work in industrial societies but also of generating ways of resisting the biologization of the mind, without succumbing either to resignation or to a simplistic humanism grounded in good conscience and rationality.

Like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who had also posed questions regarding the limits of reason, but with different gestures, Foucault sought to trouble the order of the world, to force its obscure part, its disorder, its heterogeneity to well up out of the apparent sovereignty of order.⁵⁷ He took part resolutely in the conceptual adventure, making the conceptuality proper to the human sciences an object of passion upon which an entire generation, formed in the secularized and republican university system, was invited to reflect in critical fashion. In modeling themselves upon the life sciences, he said, the human sciences risked reducing man to an object and perhaps destroying him. From this perspective, Words and Things was the logical successor to History of Madness: “The history of madness would be the history of the Other, of that which is both internal and foreign to a culture, and thus to be excluded (to counter the internal threat), but by confining it (to reduce its alterity). The history of the order of things would be the history of the Same—of that which, for a culture, is both dispersed and kindred, and so to be distinguished by marks and gathered into identities.”⁵⁸

From this perspective, Foucault accorded a privileged status to psychoanalysis, linguistics, and ethnology: they dissolved the notion of man, he said, without pretending to reconstitute man as an observable positivistic datum. This was the deep meaning of the last lines of the work, which were understood, notably by Sartre but by many others too, as a reactionary manifesto hostile to any form of humanism and existential commitment: “So one can wager that man would be wiped away, like a face in the sand at the edge of the sea.”⁵⁹

Against Sartre, whom he forgave neither his attitude during the occupation nor his philosophy of the subject, Georges Canguilhem undertook to defend Foucault vigorously then, recalling, as he so often did, that Jean Cavaillès had “refused in advance, by participating in the history he lived out tragically right up to death, the argument of those who try to discredit structuralism by claiming it can only engender, among other misdeeds, passivity in the face of the fait accompli.”⁶⁰

The homage thus offered to the philosopher of the pathways of night, by the former Resistance fighter who had become France ’s great master of the history of science, signified clearly that Foucault’s passionate commitment to conceptuality was one of the most fecund ways for the intellectual generation of the 1960s to reacquire the taste for heroism in thought.