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

1. Foucault, “La vie, l’expérience, et la science” (1985), in Dits et écrits, 4:263–776. In 1978 Michel Foucault had drafted an earlier version of this article as a preface for the American edition of The Normal and the Pathological; see Dits et écrits, 3:429–42. The second version was initially published posthumously in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 1 (January–March 1985), a special issue dedicated to Georges Canguilhem.

2. Canguilhem, Le normal et le pathologique.

3. Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique.

4. Canguilhem, Vie et mort de Jean Cavaillès, 39.

5. Foucault, Dits et écrits, 4:586. And Granjon, Penser avec Michel Foucault, 28. It is incorrect, as we shall see in the next chapter, to say that Sartre did nothing during the occupation.

6. Throughout this portion of this chapter, I take my sources from Sirinelli, Génération intellectuelle. See also Canguilhem, A Vital Rationalist. I draw as well upon the numerous notes I made from my interviews with Georges Canguilhem. My great thanks to Jean Svalgeski who put all his knowledge at my disposal. Thanks likewise to Fethi Benslama for help and pertinent comments.

7. See Sirinelli, Génération intellectuelle, 327, 343.

8. See “Discours prononcé par Georges Canguilhem à la distribution des prix du lycée de Charleville,” 12 July 1930, and “Documents des Libres propos” (1932), cited by Jean-François Sirinelli, Génération intellectuelle, 595–96.

9. See Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises.

10. See Piquemal, “G. Canguilhem, professeur de terminale,” 63–83.

11. Cabanis, Les profondes années. See also Péquignot, “Georges Canguilhem et la médicine,” 39–51.

12. Edmund Husserl, Méditations cartésiennes (Paris: Vrin, 1986).

13. Edmund Husserl, La crise des sciences européennes et la phénoménologie transcendantale (Paris: Gallimard 1976).

14. On this point, readers may consult Badiou, “Y a-t-il une théorie du sujet chez Georges Canguilhem?” 295–305.

15. See Canguilhem, “Descartes et la technique,” 77–85. And Canguilhem, “Activité technique et création,” 81–86. See further the testimony of Piquemal, “G. Canguilhem, professeur de terminale.”

16. Georges Canguilhem and Camille Planet, Traité de logique et de morale (Marseille: Imprimerie Robert et fils, 1939), cited by Sirinelli, Génération intellectuelle, 598.

17. Canguilhem, Vie et mort de Jean Cavaillès, 18.

18. Statement made to Jean-François Sirinelli; see Sirinelli, Génération intellectuelle, 598. Georges Canguilhem related the same version to me, adding repeatedly, “I did not pass my agrégation in philosophy in order to serve Marshal Pétain.” See also Canguilhem’s interview with François Bing in Actualité (Paris: Institut Synthélabo, 1998), dir. Georges Canguilhem.

19. Henry Ingrand was also a medical doctor.

20. Canguilhem tells François Bing in a humourous tone that he only practiced medicine “for a few weeks in the Maquis in the Auvergne.” The facts are quite different: Canguilhem really was a genuine doctor in the Maquis.

21. In La mort volontaire au Japon (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), Maurice Pinguet distinguishes clearly between heroic suicide (the Japanese generals in 1945)that allows a new society to be born, and fanatical suicide (that of Hitler and his stooges) that aims to abolish history by wiping out its traces and denying both the past and the future.

22. Chauvy, Aubrac.

23. No doubt this concept is universal, for we discover it in many other aristocratic societies, especially among the Japanese.

24. Vernant, La traversée des frontières, 60. Once he has arrived in the kingdom of the dead, Achilles is no longer the same. In the Odyssey, when questioned by Odysseus, he replies that he would prefer to be the lowest of slaves in life rather than Achilles in death (Vernant, La traversée des frontières, 80).

25. See Canguilhem, Vie et mort de Jean Cavaillès, 34.

26. Intervention at the meeting on the theme “être français aujourd’hui,” Le Croquant 23 (Spring–Summer 1998), 13.

27. These words were written by René Char in the heat of action in 1943. See Char, Feuillets d’hypnos.

28. Canguilhem, Le normal et le pathologique, 9.

29. Lacan, De la psychose paranoïaque.

30. K. Goldstein, La structure de l’organisme.

31. Canguilhem, Le normal et le pathologique, 69.

32. Canguilhem, Le normal et le pathologique, 156. See also Canguilhem, “Une pédagogie de la guérison est-elle possible?” 13–26.

33. Canguilhem, Le normal et le pathologique, 87.

34. See Canguilhem, “La monstruosité et le monstrueux.”

35. Canguilhem, Le normal et le pathologique, 156.

36. See Macherey, “De Canguilhem à Canguilhem en passant par Foucault,” 288.

37. Canguilhem, Le normal et le pathologique, 156.

38. See Macherey, “La philosophie de la science de Georges Canguilhem,” 50–74.

39. See Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, 2:204.

40. See Canguilhem, “Ouverture,” 40. This was the opening address, delivered on 23 November 1991, of the ninth colloquy of the Société internationale d’histoire de la psychiatrie et de la psychanalyse. The meeting was dedicated to the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Foucault’s History of Madness, and among the participants was Jacques Derrida. For more on this, see chap. 3.

41. See Sirinelli, Génération intellectuelle, 599.

42. Canguilhem, La formation du concept de réflexe aux XVII e et XVIII e siècles.

43. Saint-Sernin, “Georges Canguilhem à la Sorbonne,” 91.

44. The four editions were (1) Essai sur quelques problèmes concernant le normal et le pathologique, Publications de la faculté des lettres de Strasbourg, Fascicule 100 (Clermont-Ferrand: 1943); (2) Essai sur quelques problèmes concernant le normal et le pathologique, with a preface (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1950); (3) Le normal et le pathologique (Paris: PUF, 1966); (4) Le normal et le pathologique, with an addendum (Paris: PUF, 1972).

45. On the heroism of the Musketeers, see chap. 6.

46. Foucault, Naissance de la clinique. This work appeared in the series Galien, then directed by Canguilhem.

47. For a discussion of Foucault’s History of Madness, see chap. 3.

48. Deleuze, Foucault, 102.

49. Canguilhem, Le Normal et le Pathologique, 216. See also Macherey, “De Canguilhem à Canguilhem en passant par Foucault,” 288–89.

50. Sigmund Freud, Au-delà du principe de plaisir (1920; Oeuvres complètes vol. 15 [Paris: PUF, 1996]), 273–339.

51. See especially the article “Vie,” which Canguilhem wrote for the Encylopedia universalis.

52. See Canguilhem “Ouverture,” 41.

53. Canguilhem, “Qu’est-ce que la psychologie?”

54. Canguilhem, “Qu’est-ce que la psychologie?” 381.

55. Whether of the behavioralist [behavioriste] or cognitive-behavioral [cognitivo-comportementale] variety, this psychology always aims to reduce the human subject to the sum of her behaviors and to assess them using putatively “scientific” procedures that are inadequate to their object. See Marie-José del Volgo and Roland Gori, La santé totalitaire: Essai sur la médicalisation de l’existence (Paris: Denoël, 2005). Behavioralism in the narrow sense is a current in psychology that was popular in the United States until 1950. It rests on the idea that human behavior is governed exclusively by the stimulus-response principle. Behavioralism in this narrow sense is thus a variant of behavioralism in the wider sense, for which the French word is comportementalisme. [I have slightly adapted the wording of the author’s note in order to bring out the distinction she makes between behavioralism and comportementalisme, because English uses the word “behavioralism” indifferently for both. WM]

56. Canguilhem, “Qu’est-ce que la psychologie?” 376–77.

57. Les Cahiers pour L’Analyse 2 (March–April 1966).

58. Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, vol. 2.

59. For more on Foucault, see chap. 3.

60. “For me Lacanism remains, for reasons both chronological and professional, a power capable of intruding on philosophy thanks to its alliance with Althusserism. Its achievements have fallen short of its ambitions, which were not, after all, illegitimate in themselves.” Georges Canguilhem, private correspondence with the author, 28 September 1993.

61. For more on Sartre, see chap. 2.

62. Of whom I was one, before I became acquainted with him personally.

63. Canguilhem, “Le cerveau et la pensée,” 11–33.

64. Cognitive psychology (or cognitivism; in French, cognitivisme) is a mythology of the brain resting on the idea of a possible equivalence between the brain and thought, itself grounded in the analogy between the cerebral function and computer technology. An offshoot of this theory known as bevavioral and cognitive therapy consists of a mixture of body drills, techniques of persuasion, and conditioning of the conscience.

65. Canguilhem, “Le cerveau et la pensée,” 24.

66. Johan de Witt, the grand pensionary or chief minister of Holland, was assassinated by Orangist rioters at The Hague in 1672.

67. Canguilhem, “Le cerveau et la pensée,” 32.

68. For a critique of these conceptions, see Catherine Vidal and Dorothée Benoit-Browaeys, Cerveau, sexe et pouvoir, with a preface by Maurice Godelier (Paris: Belin, 2005).

69. Georges Canguilhem, private correspondence with the author, 7 October 1988.

1. Sartre, La nausée.

2. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 100.

3. Cited by Winock, “Sartre s’est-il toujours trompé?” 35.

4. Beauvoir, La force de l’âge, 654.

5. Sartre, “La République du silence,” 11.

6. Cited by Jean Lacouture, De Gaulle, vol. 1, Le rebelle (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 833.

7. Sartre, L’être et le néant. This chapter owes much to the exchanges I had with Michel Favart during the preparation of his film Sartre contre Sartre ou le philosophe de l’autoanalyse.

8. Notably: L’interprétation du rève (1900; Oeuvres complètes vol. 4, Paris: PUF, 2003); Psychopathologie de la vie quotidienne (1901; Paris: Gallimard, 1997); Sur la psychanalyse: Cinq conférences (1910; Paris: Gallimard, 1991); Conférences d’introduction à la psychanalyse (1916–17; Paris: Gallimard, 1999); Métapsychologie (1915; Oeuvres complètes vol. 13, Paris: PUF, 1988); Au-delà du principe de plaisir (1920; Oeuvres complètes vol. 15, Paris: PUF, 1996); Psychologie de masse at analyse du moi (1921; Oeuvres complètes vol. 16, Paris: PUF, 1991); Le moi et le ça (ibid.).

9. Edmund Husserl, La crise des sciences européennes et la phénoménologie transcendantale (Paris: Gallimard 1976).

10. For more on Canguilhem, see chap. 1. See as well Jambet, “Y a-t-il une philosophie française?”

11. Sartre, L’engrenage. See Contat and Rybalka, Les écrits de Sartre. [L’engrenage means “the gears,” but also “the mechanism or process that traps one.” WM]

12. See Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, vol. 2; and Roudinesco and Plon, Dictionnaire de la psychanalyse.

13. Louis Althusser was the first in France to call attention to the Soviet denunciation of psychoanalysis. See Althusser, “Freud et Lacan.” For more on Althusser, see chap. 4.

14. Sartre, Questions de méthode, 56.

15. Sartre, Questions de méthode, 56.

16. Sartre, L’être et le néant, 663.

17. Cited by Contat and Rybalka in Les écrits de Sartre, 386.

18. Questions de méthode appeared initially in Les Temps Modernes with the title “Existentialisme et marxisme.”

19. Sartre, L’idiot de la famille.

20. Freud founded the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1910. Notable examples of directors who immigrated to the United States include Vincente Minelli, Elia Kazan, Alfred Hitchcock, and Charlie Chaplin.

21. Hale, Freud and the Americans.

22. Elia Kazan, Splendor in the Grass (1961), with Nathalie Wood (Wilma Dean) and Warren Beatty (Bud Stamper). Charles Chaplin, Limelight (1952), with Chaplin (Calvero), Claire Bloom (Terry), and Geraldine, Michael, and Josephine Chaplin (the children).

23. Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis clos (1945; English title No Exit), and Les mouches.

24. John Huston, Freud: The Secret Passion (1962), with Montgomery Clift (Freud), Susanna York (Cecily Koertner), Larry Parks (Josef Breuer), Susan Kohner (Martha Freud), and Fernand Ledoux (Charcot).

25. John Huston, An Open Book, 295–96; in French, John Huston, 276–77.

26. Sartre, Lettres au castor, 358–60.

27. Sartre, “Entretien avec Kenneth Tynan,” Afrique Action (10 July 1961).

28. Sigmund Freud, La naissance de la psychanalyse (London, 1950; expurgated ed., Paris: PUF, 1956); Josef Breuer, Études sur l’hysterie (Vienna 1895; Paris: PUF, 1956); Ernest Jones, La vie et l’oeuvre de Sigmund Freud, vol. 1 (1953; Paris: PUF, 1958).

29. Anna O.’s real name was Bertha Pappenheim (1860–1938). See Hirschmüller, Josef Breuer.

30. For the exact historical reconstruction of these events, see Ellenberger, Médicines de l’âme, and Hirschmüller, Josef Breuer.

31. On the career of the real Theodor Meynert (1833–92), see Ellenberger, Médicines de l’âme, and Sulloway, Freud.

32. Schneider, Blessures de mémoire.

33. Wilhelm Fliess, Les relations entre le nez et les organes genitaux féminins selon leurs significations biologiques (Vienna, 1897; Paris: Seuil, 1977).

34. Azouri, J’ai réussi là où le paranoïaque échoue.

35. Wilhelm Fliess (1858–1928). On the career of this colorful scientist, see Sulloway, Freud. See also Freud’s complete correspondence with him, not yet available in French: Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904 (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1986). On Bertha Pappenheim, see Hirschmüller, Josef Breuer, and Ellenberger, Histoire de la découverte de l’inconscient.

36. Alexandre Koyré, Études d’histoire de la pensée scientifique (1966; Paris: Gallimard, 1973).

37. Sartre, Le scénario Freud.

38. Sigmund Freud, Sigmund Freud présenté par lui-même (Vienna, 1925; Paris: Gallimard, 1984).

39. Sartre, Les séquestrés d’Altona.

40. John Huston, The Misfits (1961), screenplay by Arthur Miller, with Marilyn Monroe (Roselyn Taber), Clark Gable (Cay Langland), Montgomery Clift (Perce Howland), and Eli Wallach (Guido).

41. Rudolph Loewenstein (1898–1976) was an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst born in Polish Galicia, who established himself first in Paris before leaving for the United States. With Heinz Hartmann and Ernst Kris, he was the main exponent of the ego psychology school.

42. Marilyn Monroe left her estate to her analyst for the purpose of supporting the work of the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic in London.

43. Cited by Marie-Magdeleine Lessana, Marilyn, portrait d’une apparition (Paris: Bayard, 2005), 215. See also D. Spoto, Marilyn: La biographie (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1993); Jean Garabé, “Marilyn Monroe et le président Schreber,” Confrontations psychiatriques 40 (1999).

44. Sartre, Le scénario Freud, 355.

45. See Roudinesco, Pourquoi la psychanalyse?

46. Freud to Fliess, 21 September 1897 (excerpts), in Freud, The Complete Letters, ed. and trans. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, 264–66. On 11 February 1897, continuing a letter begun on 8 February, Freud had posited that certain hysterical migraines originate in the fact that the women had been forced in infancy to perform fellatio on adults in “scenes where the head is held still.” It is the memory of this scene, he explains, that subsequently caused their migraines. And he adds: “Unfortunately, my own father was one of these perverts and is responsible for the hysteria of my brother (all of whose symptoms are identifications) and those of several younger sisters. The frequency of this circumstance often makes me wonder.” Freud to Fliess, 11 February 1897, trans. Masson, The Complete Letters, 230–31. [The author cites the French translation of both letters from Masson, Le Réel escamoté. WM]

47. Freud’s father was Jakob Freud (1815–96).

48. Sartre, Les mots, 11. The eminent psychoanalyst was Jean-Bertrand Pontalis.

49. Sartre, Les mots, 210.

50. Sartre, Le mur.

51. Sartre, “Autoportrait à soixante-dix ans.”

52. Laing and Cooper, Raison et violence.

53. Sartre, “Entretien sur l’anthropologie,” 87–96.

54. Les Temps Modernes (April 1968): 1813.

55. For more on Deleuze’s Anti-Oedipe, see chap. 5.

56. See Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan. The full text of Foucault’s statements can be found in Eribon, Foucault et ses contemporaines, 261–63.

57. Foucalt, Dits et écrits, vol. 1, 514.

58. Lacan, “Le temps logique et l’assertion de certitude anticipée.”

1. Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, introduction. Foucault defended his main thesis on 20 May 1961 before an examining board composed of Henri Gouthier (president), Georges Canguilhem (first rapporteur) and Daniel Lagache (second rapporteur). On the same day he defended his subordinate thesis on Kant, with Jean Hyppolite and Maurice de Gandillac as rapporteurs. When offered to Gallimard, the work was turned down by Brice Parain, despite the favorable opinion of Roger Caillois. Instead it was published in the autumn by Plon, at the instance of Philippe Ariès and with the title Folie et déraison, histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. This first edition, now out of print, comprised a short preface, which Michel Foucault cut from the 1972 edition. See Foucalt, Dits et écrits, 1:159–67. Foucault also changed the title at that time. The 1972 Gallimard edition—the one referenced throughout this book—comprises a new preface in which Foucault explains why he has chosen not to update his book to take into account current events: he had at first intended to add a discussion of the antipsychiatry movement, but had then decided not to. The 1972 edition also includes an appendix containing two important texts: a response to Henri Gouhier and another to Jacques Derrida.

2. Henri Ey (1900–1977), French psychiatrist. He was editor in chief of the journal L’évolution psychiatrique and the inventor of an approach to mental illness labeled organo-dynamique. It was based on the work of the English neurologist John Hughlings Jackson (1835–1911), who regarded the psychical functions not as something static, but rather as dependent upon one another, in descending order.

3. Lacan, De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité.

4. [The author has cited this famous passage from Descartes without a note, which her French readers would not have required. It is found in Méditations 1.4. She uses the standard French translation of de Luynes (1647; Descartes wrote the work in Latin). The English translation in the text is mine. Mais quoi! is an untranslatable interjection expressing remonstration. WM]

5. Lacan, “Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je,” 93–101.

6. L’Évolution Psychiatrique, vol.1, no. 2, 226.

7. See Surya, Georges Bataille.

8. This pious history is best illustrated in René Semelaigne, Les pionniers, from which these lines are taken.

9. “Rapport de Georges Canguilhem du 19 avril 1960” in Eribon, Michel Foucault. See as well Canguilhem, “Sur l’Histoire de la folie en tant que événement;” Canguilhem, Présentation; Canguilhem, “Mort de l’homme ou épuisement du cogito?”

10. All these points of view were expressed during the colloquy in Toulouse by, among others, Georges Daumezon, Henri Sztulman, Antoine Porot, Eugène Minkowski, and Julien Rouart. See further Castel, “Les aventures de la pratique.”

11. During the ninth colloquy of the Société internationale d’histoire de la psychiatrie et de la psychanalyse on 23 November 1991, which I organized, Claude Quétel delivered a harangue for the prosecution against Foucault in the presence of all the other participants: Georges Canguilhem, Jacques Derrida, Arlette Farge, Jacques Postel, François Bing, René Major, Agostino Pirella, Pierre Macherey. See Penser la folie.

12. Though he had to leave Warsaw in a hurry because of a liaison in which he engaged with a young man who was a police informer, Foucault had been happy there in 1958–59 in his role as cultural adviser. See Eribon, Michel Foucault et ses contemporaines, 112.

13. Michel Foucault, letter to Jacqueline Verdeaux, 19 August 1954, cited by Eribon, Michel Foucault et ses contemporaines, 116. Foucault used to amuse his friends by saying that he would one day hold a “chair in madness” at the Collège de France (105).

14. Althusser, L’avenir dure longtemps. This work is discussed at length in chap. 4

15. Eribon, Michel Foucault et ses contemporaines, 121–22.

16. Foucault, Maladie mentale et psychologie.

17. Pierre Macherey was the first to point out that Foucault had not only changed his conception of madness between 1954 and 1961, but had also changed the text of his 1954 study of mental illness to make it conform to his new conception when it was republished in 1962. See Macherey, “Aux sources de l’Histoire de la folie.

18. In an article full of praise, Roland Barthes did nevertheless locate History of Madness in the Annales tradition, claiming that Lucien Febvre would have liked this “audacious book which renders to history a fragment of nature, and transforms what until now we took for a medical fact into a fact of civilization.” Barthes, “De part et d’autre,” 168.

19. Swain, Le sujet de la folie, prefaced by Marcel Gauchet, “De Pinel à Freud.” The first to focus on deconstructing the myth of abolition was in fact Jacques Postel, whose seminar Gladys Swain had attended. See Postel, Genèse de la psychiatrie.

20. Gauchet and Swain, La pratique de l’esprit humain.

21. Foucault, La volonté de savoir.

22. See Furet, Le passé d’une illusion. In this book, farced with errors and hasty judgments, Foucault and Althusser are treated with contempt and ignorance, and laid under suspicion of having qualified the bourgeois order as “totalitarian.” As for their “heirs,” with whom the author is unacquainted, they are quite simply insulted: “The former 1968ers quickly made their peace with the market, advertising, and the consumer society, in which they often swim like fish in water, as if they had only denounced its faults so as to adapt to it better. But they are determined to preserve the intellectual benefits of the idea of revolution while establishing themselves socially. In their favorite authors, Marcuse, Foucault and Althusser, totalitarianism is an exclusive feature of the bourgeois order. You would search their works in vain for a critical analysis of ‘real socialism’ in the twentieth century” (563). I note that Foucault did not express a negative opinion of Furet’s book Penser la révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1978). On the shifts in Furet’s interpretation of the French Revolution, see Olivier Bétourne and Aglaia I. Hartig, Penser l’histoire de la Révolution: Deux siècles de passion française (Paris: La Découverte, 1989).

23. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrenie, vol. 1, L’anti-Oedipe (Paris: Minuit, 1972). For more on this, see chap. 5.

24. Foucault, La volonté de savoir, 198.

25. On this question, see Major, De l’éléction, and Roudinesco and Plon, Dictionnaire de la psychanalyse.

26. Swain, “Chimie, cerveau, esprit: Paradoxes épistémologiques des psycho-tropes en médecine mentale,” preceded by “À la recherche d’une autre histoire de la folie” (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 263–79. In his introduction to this collection of Gladys Swain’s writings, Marcel Gauchet cites with approval the “dazzling merit” and “oracular obscurity” of Lacan, while blaming Deleuze and Guattari for what he too calls their “Nietzschean-Heideggerianism.”

27. Ferry and Renaut, La pensée 68. For comment on this book, see Derrida and Roudinesco, De quoi demain.

28. A notable example is Alain Ehrenburg; see “Les guerres du sujet” and “Le sujet cérébral,” Esprit (November 2004): 84–85. And in the same issue, Pierre-Henri Castel, “Psychothérapies: Quelle évaluation?”

29. Foucault, Les anormaux, 13. Foucault is speaking here of experts in criminology.

30. Among historians, Michelle Perrot is the author of one of the finest analyses of Foucault’s texts on the penal system and the punishment meted out to delinquents and the marginalized; see Perrot, Les ombres de l’histoire: Crime et châtiment au XIX e siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 2001). See as well Paul Veyne, “Foucault révolutionne l’histoire,” in Comment on écrit l’histoire (Paris: Seuil, 1978) On the considerable impact of Foucault’s work on the study of sexuality, see Eribon, Michel Foucault et ses contemporaines.

31. J. Goldstein, Console and Classify.

32. The word psychiatrie appeared in 1802, taking the place of alienisme.

33. For more on article 64 of the penal code, see chap. 4.

34. Louis Althusser was judged “not responsible” for the murder of his wife by virtue of article 64 of the penal code. It was in order to assume this responsibility that he wrote his autobiography. For more on this, see chap. 4.

35. See Michel Foucault, “À quoi rêvent les Iraniens?” in Dits et écrits, 3:688–94. Accused first by Pierre Debray-Ritzen, an adept of the New Right and a great adversary of Freudianism, then by Pierre and Claude Broyelle, one-time admirers of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Foucault replied in the newspaper Le Monde for 11–12 May 1979: “An astonishing superimposition, it was able to bring about, in the middle of the twentieth century, a movement strong enough to overturn a regime seemingly among the best-armed, while being close to old dreams that the Occident knew in the past, when men attempted to inscribe the figures of spirituality on the ground of politics…. My theoretical morality is antistrategic: to be respectful when a singularity occurs, but intransigent as soon as power infringes on the universal” (Dits et écrits, 3:793–94). See, too, Foucault’s interview with Pierre Blanchet and Claire Brière (Dits et écrits, 3:743–55); and Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution.

36. On this, see the excellent work of Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault.

37. [In English in the original; glossed in the note as sexualité sans risque. WM]

38. See Mirko D. Grmek, Histoire du sida: Début et origine d’une pandémie actuelle (Paris: Payot, 1989).

39. Eribon, Michel Foucault, 348.

40. Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault. The book was a best seller in the United States.

41. I have denounced conditioning therapies grounded in the violation of conscience in Pourquoi la psychanalyse?

42. Guibert, “Les secrets d’un homme,” and À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie.

43. It was from the same perspective that Foucault’s numerous “errors” concerning the case of Pierre Rivière were cataloged. See Foucault, Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma soeur et mon frère. Once again, this was less about criticizing debatable methods and interpretations than it was about accusing the philosopher and his team of justifying the crime: “They are unwilling and unable to follow the reversal of power they sketch to its conclusion, in other words justification of the crime. They take up a stance of submissive admiration that renders the memory of Pierre Rivière taboo, almost ineffable.” Philippe Lejeune, “Lire Pierre Rivière,” Le Débat 66 (October 1991), 95.

44. Included in Derrida, L’écriture et la différence.

45. Dosse, Histoire du structuralisme.

46. Eribon, Michel Foucault, 147.

47. On the manner in which Derrida paid homage to Foucault after his death, see chap. 6.

48. Foucault, Les mots et les choses. The title of the published English translation is The Order of Things.

49. As Gilles Deleuze revealed in Foucault, 11.

50. Sartre, L’existentialisme est un humanisme.

51. Les Temps Modernes (November 1946–July 1947).

52. This is how Ian Kershaw defined the Führerprinzip in his monumental work Hitler, 2 vols. (New York: Norton, 1999); in French, Hitler (Paris: Flammarion, 2004).

53. This history is very well known today, but it continues to provoke various interpretations. See Dominique Janicaud, Heidegger en France, 2 vols. (Paris: Albin Michel, 2001). Emmanuel Faye alone, in a work that does in fact contain new, undeniable, and crushing information about Heidegger’s Nazism, reduces his thought to a Nazi ideology. Faye goes so far as to assert that it ought no longer to be taught as philosophy, and that the deconstructionists and other antihumanists—from Foucault to Althusser, by way of Derrida and the American university professors who adhere to this school—are no more than adepts of Heideggerian Destruktion. See Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: L’introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005), 514–15. On the relations between Jean Beaufret, Heidegger, and Lacan, see Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan.

54. Martin Heidegger, Lettre sur l’humanisme (Paris: Aubier, 1957).

55. Lévi-Strauss quoted in Eribon, De près ou de loin, 225–26.

56. I return to the idea of everyday, nondescript fascism in chap. 5.

57. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Boston: Little Brown, 1973); in French, L’imagination dialectique: Histoire de l’école de Frankfurt, 1923–1950 (Paris: PUF, 1977).

58. Foucault, Les mots et les choses, 15.

59. Foucault, Les mots et les choses, 398.

60. Canguilhem, “Mort de l’homme ou épuisement du cogito.”

1. Althusser, L’avenir dure longtemps. The title of the published English translation is The Future Lasts Forever.

2. Hélène Rytmann (1910–80) is also known as Hélène Legotien and Hélène Legotien-Rytmann because “Legotien” had been her cover name in the Resistance and she continued to use it. She was buried in the cemetery of Bagneux in the section reserved for Jews.

3. Article 64 stipulated that “there is neither crime nor delict when the person suspected was in a state of dementia at the time of the deed.” By the law of 22 July 1992, article 64 was replaced by article 122, which stipulates: “The person who was afflicted at the moment of the deed with a psychical or neuropsychical disturbance that altered his discernment or hampered his control of his actions is not penally responsible. The person who was afflicted at the moment of the deed with a psychical or neuropsychical disturbance that altered his discernment or hampered his control of his actions remains punishable: nevertheless, the court takes this factor into account when it determines the length of the sentence and decides under what conditions it shall be served.”

4. Sarraute, “Petite faim.”

5. Althusser, L’avenir dure longtemps, 19. “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.”

6. Althusser, L’avenir dure longtemps, 18.

7. I refer essentially to the coverage in Le Monde, Libération, Le Matin, and Le Nouvel Observateur.

8. Cited by Robert Maggiori, Libération, 18 November 1980.

9. Jamet, “Le crime du philosophe Althusser.”

10. Jean Bousquet was the director of the École Normale Supérieure at this time.

11. Pierre-André Taguieff takes the prize for the greatest contemporary detestation of Louis Althusser. In a work claiming to denounce anti-Semitic hatred—and that is no more than a tissue of police-style imprecations against those who do not think like him—he endorses the view that the philosopher got special treatment after having premeditated a killing and taught his students to view crime positively, as akin to revolution. He goes on to characterize those in the philosopher’s circle, and all the rebels of May 1968, as “islamo-communists,” meaning Stalinist terrorists tainted with anti-Semitism: “Balibar was, after all, one of the inner circle of his master and friend Althusser, who, it should be recalled—despite attempts to hush the matter up—was interned after having assassinated his companion ‘in a moment of madness’ (as it was called).” Careful to exempt Althusser from anti-Semitism, Taguieff still manages to hint, through a denial, that he had suspected him of having killed Hélène because she was Jewish: “The Jewish origin of the victim seems not to have constituted a determining factor in the murder. The essential point lies elsewhere: in the postulate that killers are always excusable, or pardonable, if they have presented themselves as ‘revolutionaries’ or partisans of the ‘good cause.’” Taguieff, Prêcheurs de haine, 317–18.

12. See Balibar, Écrits pour Althusser, 119–23.

13. See Althusser, “Sur la Révolution culturelle.” This article was published by Althusser anonymously. Contrary to what has since been stated, this text, which displays great political naïveté in light of the crimes committed by the Red Guards, does not include any call for the massacre of the “enemies” of the working class, or any “racist” conception of the notion of class struggle. Althusser wrote: “In no case, even against the enemy of the bourgeois class (crimes being punished by the law), ought one to resort to ‘blows’ and violence, but always to reasoning and persuasion.” See Marty, Louis Althusser, 141–45.

14. In La pensée 68, Ferry and Renaut state that they preferred not to devote a chapter to the oeuvre of Louis Althusser, on the grounds that “it is in the work of Bourdieu that the French Marxism of the 1960s continues to hold a place in the intellectual field. Althusserism, even in Althusser’s disciples, seems very dated, and irresistibly calls to mind a recent but outmoded past, like the music of the Beatles or Godard’s early films” (240). As for Furet, in Le Passé d’une illusion, he accuses Foucault and Althusser of having depicted bourgeois society as a totalitarian system.

15. Althusser, L’avenir dure longtemps, 152.

16. Moulier-Boutang, Louis Althusser, 147ff.

17. Althusser, Lettres à Franca, 215.

18. I have related this episode in Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, vol. 2.

19. Althusser, Journal de captivité.

20. Althusser, L’avenir dure longtemps, 102.

21. Althusser, Pour Marx; Althusser, Balibar, Establet, Macherey, and Rancière, Lire “Le Capital.”

22. Althusser, Pour Marx, 19.

23. Derrida, Chaque fois unique, 149.

24. Karl Marx, Les manuscrits économico-philosophiques de 1844 in Écrits de jeunesse, presentation by Kostas Papaioanu (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1956); Thèses sur Feuerbach (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1956). Althusser, Écrits philosophiques et politiques.

25. Althusser, L’avenir dure longtemps, p. III.

26. Althusser, L’avenir dure longtemps, p. III. I can testify that Louis Althusser always gave the same version of what had happened.

27. Sollers, Femmes. In this novel Althusser is called Lutz.

28. Sollers, Femmes, 106–7.

29. Sollers, Femmes, 111.

30. Jean Guitton, “Entretien avec Pierre Boncenne,” Lire 121 (October 1985): 126.

31. Régis Debray, Les masques (Paris: Gallimard, 1988).

32. The philosopher had thought of calling his testimony Brève histoire d’un meurtrier (Brief History of a Murderer) or D’une nuit l’aube (Of a Night the Dawn).

33. Althusser, L’avenir dure longtemps, 273. André Malraux, Antimémoires (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), 1:155. Éric Marty gives an interpretation of this title that differs from mine. See Marty, Louis Althusser, 43.

34. Althusser, L’avenir dure longtemps, 11–12.

35. Louis Althusser was known to have unusual physical strength.

36. “An early-morning massage transforming itself, without his realizing it into a strangulation, without the victim being there other than silently (as if dead), then dead for real. Without the passage from life to death being assignable. Without the consciousness present here in the writing being describable as conscious.” (Moulier-Boutang, Louis Althusser, 38.) The murder took place in a room that was not normally occupied either by Louis or by his companion. No one knows the reason why Hélène had chosen to sleep there on that night.

37. Althusser, L’avenir dure longtemps, 243.

38. In 1953 Jacques Lacan for his part had asked his brother Marc-François to arrange a meeting for him with the pope, so that he could expound his doctrine to him. In the same period he had sought a meeting with Maurice Thorez. He did indeed believe, and with good reason, that the Catholic church on one hand and the French Communist Party on the other, were the two major institutions susceptible of incorporating the Freudian doctrine. I have recounted this episode in Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, vol. 2. See as well Jean Guitton, Un siècle, une vie (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1988), 156.

39. Althusser, L’avenir dure longtemps, 245. We know today that Louis Althusser did not limit himself to taking the antipsychotic medication his psychiatrists prescribed for him. He also resorted, like Hélène, to constant self-medication, swallowing drugs of every sort without, for that matter, giving up the consumption of alcohol.

40. Althusser, L’avenir dure longtemps, 163.

41. Althusser, L’avenir dure longtemps, 137.

42. Moulier-Boutang, Louis Althusser, 344–444.

43. Althusser, L’avenir dure longtemps, 109 and 116.

44. Althusser, L’avenir dure longtemps, 154.

45. See Michel de Certeau, La fable mystique (Paris: Gallimard, 1982). Christian Jambet, La grande résurrection d’Alamût: Les formes de la liberté dans le shî’isme ismaélien (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1990). It was Certeau who first remarked to me in 1969 that Althusser’s destiny resembled that of the great mystics of Christianity and that his oeuvre bore traces of this.

46. This was the case of Claire Z., for example, with whom he had a long relationship before meeting Franca Madonia when he was forty-two.

47. Althusser, Lettres à Franca, 14.

48. On the relations between Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan, see Althusser, Écrits sur la psychanalyse, and Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, 383–403.

49. Georgette Althusser (1921–91), whose married name was Boddaert; in 1957 she sank into a serious depression after the birth of her son, François, who was raised by his grandparents and is today his uncle’s heir and controller of his literary estate. Thanks to him the philosopher’s papers were deposited and made available for consultation at the IMEC (Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine).

50. Cited by Moulier-Boutang, Louis Althusser, 75–76. This text, obtained by Fernando Navarro in 1984, was published in Spanish in 1990. Althusser had refused to have it appear in print while he was alive.

51. Louis Althusser, letter of 18 July 1966, in Althusser, Écrits sur la psychanalyse.

52. Althusser, Lettres à Franca, 771.

53. Althusser, Lettres à Franca, 806. Franca met Louis Althusser once more, at Bologna in 1980. She died in Paris from the effects of cirrhosis of the liver caused by hepatitis C, without having been able to visit him after he was interned in the Saint-Anne hospital following the murder of Hélène.

54. Daniel Paul Schreber, Mémoires d’un névropathe (Leipzig 1903; Paris: Seuil, 1975). Sigmund Freud, “Remarques psychanalytiques sur l’autobiographie d’un cas de paranoïa” (1911) in Cinq psychanalyses (Paris: PUF, 1954), 263–321.

55. Daniel Sibony, Libération, 22 June 1992, reprinted in Sibony, Le peuple psy (Paris: Balland, 1993).

56. Lemoine-Luccioni, L’histoire à l’envers, 8.

57. Bénézech and Lacoste, “L’uxoricide de Louis Althusser selon son récit autobiographique.”

58. Green, “Analyse d’une vie tourmentée,” 31.

59. Green, “Analyse d’une vie tourmentée,” 31.

60. Allouch, Louis Althusser, 51.

61. Louis du néant, by Gérard Pommier, recounts the melancholic itinerary of the philosopher. It is largely based on the work of Yann Moulier-Boutang and adds nothing new to Althusser’s autobiography.

62. In his first autobiography, Les faits (1976), Althusser had already adopted this pose. Éric Marty takes it at face value and makes Althusser into a real impostor, responsible “for a million dead” (the Chinese executed during the Cultural Revolution). See Marty, Louis Althusser, 141.

63. Althusser, L’avenir dure longtemps, 211.

64. The decision was taken by Georges Marchais during the twenty-second congress of the Parti Communiste Français in February 1976. The dictatorship of the proletariat can be defined as “the ensemble of temporary political measures that the proletariat must take in order to prevail during the revolutionary crisis, and so resolve it.” It is part of an exceptional situation and has a practical purpose. See Georges Labica and Gérard Bensussan, Dictionnaire critique du marxisme (Paris: PUF, 1982) and Étienne Balibar, Sur la dictature du prolétariat (Paris: Maspero, 1976).

65. Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 12.

66. Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 141.

1. Foucault, Dits et écrits, 2:75. Deleuze, Différence et répétition; Deleuze, Logique du sens.

2. Gilles Deleuze taught philosophy for forty years. See L’abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, an eight-hour film with Claire Parnet, made by Pierre-André Boutang (Éditions Montparnasse).

3. Deleuze and Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrenie, vol. 1, L’anti-Oedipe, and vol. 2, Mille plateaux. Minuit published an augmented edition of L’anti-Oedipe in 1992, and republished both volumes of Capitalisme et schizophrenie in 2004.

4. Deleuze, Pourparlers.

5. Deleuze, Pourparlers, 15.

6. Derrida, Chaque fois unique, 236.

7. Bernard-Henri Lévy, La barbarie à visage humain (Paris: Grasset, 1977).

8. Gilles Deleuze, “Le Juif riche” (18 February 1977), in Deux régimes de fous, 122–26. The film was L’ombre des anges, directed by Daniel Schmid from a screenplay by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Following the ban, a group of fifty personalities signed a petition “standing up against the irresponsibility that consists in not analyzing the structure of a film” and “against the acts of violence that prohibit a film from being seen.”

9. Deleuze, L’abécédaire; and “Huit ans après: Entretien avec Catherine Clément” in Deux régimes de fous, 165.

10. Deleuze, “Il a été mon maître,” in L’île déserte et autres textes, 113.

11. Eribon, Sur cet instant fragile, 186–87. See as well Didier Eribon, Réflexions sur la question gay (Paris: Fayard, 1999), and Une morale minoritaire: Variations sur un thème de Jean Genet (Paris: Fayard, 2001).

12. See Jean-Claude Milner, La politique des choses (Paris: Navarin, 2005).

13. Deleuze and Guattari, Mille plateaux; “Huit ans après: Entretien avec Catherine Clément,” in Deux régimes de fous, 162–66.

14. Deleuze, Logique du sens, 306.

15. Patrice Maniglier and David Rabouin, “Quelle politique?” Magazine Littéraire 406 (February 2002): 53. The stance of Toni Negri and Michael Hardt belongs in this tradition; see their book Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); in French, Empire (Paris: Exils, 2001).

16. See Streicher, “À propos de Différence et répétition.”

17. Guattari, Écrits pour L’anti-Oedipe.

18. On the necessity of rediscovering the tragic character of the Freudian Oedipus in order to “depsycholgize” it, see Roudinesco, La famille en désordre.

19. It is in Pourparlers that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari discuss L’anti-Oedipe and Mille plateaux most fully, especially in their interviews with Robert Maggiori and Didier Eribon.

20. “Yes, Deleuze was our great physicist, he contemplated the fire of the stars for us, sounded chaos, took the measure of organic life…. He was the one who could not bear the idea that ‘great Pan is dead.’” Badiou, Deleuze (Paris: Hachette, 1997), 150.

21. Foucault, “Préface à l’édition américaine de L’anti-Oedipe,” Dits et écrits, 3:134.

1. Derrida, Chaque fois unique. The book comprises Derrida’s farewells to Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Max Loreau, Jean-Marie-Benoist, Louis Althusser, Edmond Jabès, Joseph N. Riddel, Michel Servière, Louis Marin, Sarah Kofman, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Lévinas, Jean-François Lyotard, Gérard Granel, and Maurice Blanchot. See as well, on the death of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Derrida, Béliers.

2. See Derrida and Roudinesco, De quoi demain.

3. Derrida, Béliers, 20.

4. Élisabeth Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud (1988; Paris, Payot, 1991).

5. Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Binswanger, Correspondance, 1908–1938 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1995).

6. This is the reason Jocasta kills herself before the self-mutilation of Oedipus in Sophocles’ play.

7. See Michel Vovelle, La mort et l’Occident (1983; Paris: Gallimard, 2000).

8. Derrida, Chaque fois unique, 252.

9. Derrida, Chaque fois unique, 137.

10. Simone de Beauvoir, La cérémonie des adieux (Paris: Gallimard, 1981).

11. Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Victor Hugo.

12. Excellent short biobibliographies prepared by Kas Saghafi have been added to Chaque fois unique. They shed historical light on the farewells.

13. Derrida, Chaque fois unique, 236.

14. Martin Heidegger, Auto-affirmation de l’université allemande, German text with French translation by Gérard Granel (Toulouse: TER, 1982).

15. See La Liberté de l’Esprit: Visages de la Résistance 16 (autumn 1987).

16. On this matter, see Derrida, Mémoires pour Paul de Man.

17. Maurice Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur (Paris: Gallimard, 1941); Aminadab (Paris: Gallimard, 1942); L’instant de ma mort (1994; Paris: Gallimard, 2002).

18. Derrida, Résistances de la psychanalyse. The lecture “Pour l’amour de Lacan,” from which these lines are quoted, was delivered in May 1990 at the colloquy “Lacan avec les philosophes” organized by René Major, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Patrick Guyomard in the setting of the Collège Internationale de Philosophie.