This book is the last of four major intellectual histories of Michel Foucault, exploring newly released archival material and covering the French thinker’s entire academic career.
Foucault’s Last Decade was published by Polity in 2016.
Foucault: The Birth of Power was published in 2017. The Early Foucault was published in 2021.
The right of Stuart Elden to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press 111 River Street Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4534-6 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4535-3 (paperback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022937903
Typeset in 10.5 on 12pt Sabon LT Pro by Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
This is the final volume of a Foucault tetralogy, which has taken far longer than planned and become much more extensive. As a result, there is a continuing and overlapping debt to those thanked before.
In particular for this book, I would like to thank Étienne Balibar for memories of ENS seminars and Vincennes; Aner Barzilay for precious information on Nietzsche; ‘Ambulo Ergosum’ for his notes from Vincennes; Didier Eribon for sharing material from his personal archive; Marcelo Hoffman for insights into Foucault’s visits to Brazil and SUNY Buffalo; Susan Juhlin and Göran Lind of the Lütfi Özkök estate for the cover image; Daniele Lorenzini for discussions and sources, especially concerning Tunisia and Buffalo; Luke Ilott for conversations in Paris and sharing some of his own archival notes; and Alison Downham Moore for discussions of Foucault’s early work on sexuality. Colin Gordon and Clare O’Farrell have long provided advice, encouragement and hard-to-find texts. I remain grateful to Daniel Defert and Henri-Paul Fruchaud.
I also thank several other people who encouraged, shared texts or answered questions: All Things Barthes (@AllBarthes), Valentina Antoniol, Keith Ansell-Pearson, Tahmina Ashraf, Margaret Atack, Babette Babich, Elisabetta Basso, David Beer; Kurt Borg; Neil Brenner, Christopher Brooke, Sebastian Budgen, Philippe Chevallier, Jeremy Crampton, Oliver Davis, Hugo da Costa, Chris de Wit, Klaus Dodds, Lisa Downing, Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson, Mike Featherstone, Paul Foss, Patrick ffrench, Stefanos Geroulanos, G.M. Goshgarian, Kélina Gotman, Raffaele Grandoni, Peter Hallward, Bernard E. Harcourt, Denis Hollier, Orazio Irrera, Niki Kasumi Clements, Othmar Keel,
Acknowledgements
Mark Kelly, Anthony King, Colin Koopman, Marie-Louise Krogh, Léopold Lambert, Stephen Legg, Mark LeVine, Alexander Livingston, Nancy Luxon, Jeff Malpas, Sunil Manghani, Andy Merrifield, Colm McAuliffe, Meaghan Morris, Adam David Morton, Dany Nobus, Hidefumi Nishiyama, Stephen A. Noble, David O’Brien, Guillaume Paugam, Melissa Pawelski, Sinan Richards, Parastou Saberi, Philippe Sabot, Alan D. Schrift, Jonathan Schroeder, Michael J. Shapiro, Stephen Shapiro, Christopher Smith, Catherine M. Soussloff, Vicki Squire, Mostyn Taylor Crockett, Federico Testa, Alberto Toscano, Delio Vásquez, Nick Vaughan-Williams, Christopher Watkin, Naomi Waltham-Smith, Matthew Watson, Richard Wilson and David Murakami Wood.
I gratefully acknowledge the British Academy/Leverhulme small grant SRG1819\191434, supported by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, which funded archival visits. Extending the grant period when travel had to be postponed due to the pandemic was much appreciated, as the logistics of archival work were more challenging than I could ever have imagined when I began this research.
For archival material, I thank the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Bibliothèque interuniversitaire Sorbonne; Bibliothèque nationale de France-Richelieu, archives et manuscripts, especially Laurence le Bras; Nathalie Queyroux and David Denéchaud at the Centre d’Archives en Philosophie, Histoire et Édition des Sciences (CAPHÉS), École Normale Supérieure; the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC), Caen; André De Tienne at the Pierce Edition Project, Indiana University; Universitätsarchiv Tübingen and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Jessica Tubis provided some additional scans from the Beinecke when a return visit was not possible; Emma Sarconi enabled a virtual consultation of Jacques Derrida material at the Firestone Library, Princeton University.
I have used several other libraries: Bibliothèque nationale de FranceFrançois Mitterand; Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève; British Library Rare Books room and Newsroom; Carolina Rediviva library, Uppsala University; Collège de France; Senate House Library; Wellcome Library; the Warburg Institute; and University of Warwick. Warwick staff provided hard-to-find material through the document supply service; the Tate Library provided a scan of a text when access was restricted.
During the period of writing, I spoke about Foucault to online audiences at the Columbia Center for Contemporary Thought, Monash University and University of Cambridge. I thank those readers of
Acknowledgements
my Progressive Geographies blog who followed this project through its development. Some resources produced during this research are available at www.progressivegeographies.com/resources/foucault -resources. At Polity Press I am grateful to Stephanie Homer, Ellen MacDonald-Kramer, Pascal Porcheron and John Thompson for their support and enthusiasm for my work, and for understanding the delay to its completion caused by consequences of the pandemic. Bernard E. Harcourt and an anonymous reader made some valuable suggestions on the manuscript. Susan Beer copy- edited the text, Evie Deavall managed the production, and Lisa Scholey compiled the index. And finally, my thanks, as ever, to Susan.
Abbreviations and Archival References
Key texts are referred to by abbreviations. For books translated as a single book the French page number is given first, followed by the English after a slash.
English titles are used for works available in translation; French for untranslated texts or unpublished manuscripts, though a translation of the title is provided the first time mentioned. I have frequently modified existing translations.
Texts by Foucault and others
AK L’Archéologie du savoir, Paris: Gallimard/Tel, 1969; trans. Alan Sheridan as The Archaeology of Knowledge, New York: Pantheon, 1972.
BC1 Naissance de la clinique: Une archéologie du regard médical, Paris: PUF, 1963.
BC2 Naissance de la clinique: Une archéologie du regard médical, Paris: PUF, revised edition, 1972; trans. Alan Sheridan as The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, London: Routledge Classics, 2003 [1973]. Reference will be made to this edition and translation unless a textual issue is at stake.
C Daniel Defert, ‘Chronologie’, DE I, 13–64; trans. Timothy O’Leary in Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary and Jana Sawicki (eds), A Companion to Foucault, Oxford:
Abbreviations and Archival References
Blackwell, 2013, 11–83. Defert’s revised chronology appears in Œuvres.
CH Philippe Artières, Jean-François Bert, Frédéric Gros and Judith Revel (eds), Michel Foucault: Cahier L’Herne, Paris: Éditions de L’Herne, 2011.
CUH Le Corps Utopique, suivi de Les Hétérotopies, Clamecy: Éditions Lignes, 2009.
CW The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Alan D. Schrift, Duncan Large, and Adrian Del Caro, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995–.
D Raymond Aron and Michel Foucault, Dialogue, ed. JeanFrançois Bert, Clamecy: Éditions Lignes, 2007.
DE Dits et écrits 1954–1988, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald, Paris: Gallimard, 4 vols, 1994 – with reference to text number to enable reference to the two editions of this text and bibliographies of English translations.1 Thus ‘DE#7 I, 172–88’ means text 7, in vol. I, pages 172–88.
DL Raymond Roussel, Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1992 [1963]; Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, trans. Charles Ruas, London: Continuum, 2004 [1986].
E Roger-Pol Droit, Michel Foucault, Entretiens, Paris: Odile Jacob, 2004.
EW Essential Works, ed. Paul Rabinow and James Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others, London: Allen Lane, 3 vols, 1997–2000.
FD Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, Paris: Plon, 1961.
HM Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, Paris: Gallimard, 1972 (revised version of FD with new preface and two appendices; reprinted Gallimard/Tel, 1976 with same pagination but without appendices); History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa, London: Routledge, 2006.
1 Richard A. Lynch, ‘Michel Foucault’s Shorter Works in English’, https://michel-fou cault.com/bibliographies/bibliography- of-foucaults-shorter-works-in-english-transl ation/
Abbreviations and Archival References
KSA Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Berlin: de Gruyter, 15 vols, 1980.
LCP Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977.
LMD La Grande Étrangère: À propos de littérature, ed. Philippe Artières, Jean-François Bert, Mathieu Potte-Bonneville and Judith Revel, Paris: Éditions EHESS, 2013; Language, Madness, Desire: On Literature, trans. Robert Bononno, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
LSS ‘Linguistics and Social Sciences’, trans. Jonathan D.S. Schroeder and Chantal Wright, Theory, Culture and Society, forthcoming, DOI: 10.1177/026327642210915
49
LWK Leçons sur la volonté de savoir: Cours au Collège de France, 1970–1971, suivi de Le savoir d’Œdipe, ed. Daniel Defert, Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2011; Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France 1970–1971, trans. Graham Burchell, London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013.
MOP La peinture de Manet, suivi de Michel Foucault, un regard, ed. Maryvonne Saison, Paris: Seuil, 2004; Manet and the Object of Painting, trans. Matthew Barr, London: Tate, 2009.
Œ Œuvres, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, ed. Frédéric Gros, Paris: Gallimard, 2 vols, 2015.
OD L’ordre du discours, Paris: Gallimard, 1971; ‘The Order of Discourse’, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton in Nancy Luxon (ed.), Archives of Infamy: Foucault on State Power in the Lives of Ordinary Citizens, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019, 141–73.
OT Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines, Paris: Gallimard/Tel, 1966; The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London: Routledge, 1970.
PPC Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, London: Routledge, 1990.
PSD ‘Politics and the Study of Discourse’, trans. Colin Gordon, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, 53–72.
Abbreviations and Archival References xiii
RC Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette, London: Routledge, 1999.
SBD Le Beau Danger: Entretien avec Claude Bonnefoy, Paris: EHESS, 2011; Speech Begins after Death: In Conversation with Claude Bonnefoy, trans. Robert Bononno, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
SDS La Sexualité: Cours donné à l’université de ClermontFerrand (1964), suivi de Le Discours de la sexualité: Cours donné à l’université de Vincennes (1969), ed. ClaudeOlivier Doron, Paris: EHESS/Gallimard/Seuil, 2018; Sexuality: The 1964 Clermont-Ferrand and 1969 Vincennes Lectures, trans. Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press, 2021.
SKP Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography, ed. Jeremy W. Crampton and Stuart Elden, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.
SLA ‘Structuralism and Literary Analysis’, trans. Suzanne Taylor and Jonathan Schroeder, Critical Inquiry 45, 2019, 531–44.
TNP Ceci n’est pas une pipe, Paris: Fata Morgana, 1973; This is Not a Pipe, trans. and ed. James Harkness, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
Archival material
BEIN Michel Foucault Library of Presentation Copies, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
BNF Fonds Michel Foucault, Archives et Manuscrits, Bibliothèque Nationale de France
CAPHÉS Fonds Georges Canguilhem, Centre d’Archives en Philosophie, Histoire et Édition des Sciences, École Normale Supérieure
IMEC Fonds Centre Michel Foucault, Fonds Louis Althusser, and Fonds Jacques Derrida, l’Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, l’abbaye d’Ardenne, Caen
RBD1 Library of Jacques Derrida, Rare Book Division, Department of Special Collections, Firestone Library, Princeton University
xiv Abbreviations and Archival References
Note
Unpaginated manuscripts have a page number in brackets, with ‘r’ recto and ‘v’ verso used when needed. Given the nature of the materials, these are correct to the time consulted – material can be moved, reversed or misplaced. Foucault’s notebooks were often used in two ways, writing from the start or upside down from the back. For these ‘r’ and ‘v’ are used before the page number.
Introduction
On 5 February 1960, in Hamburg, Foucault completed and dated the preface to the History of Madness, the last part of the text to be written. This book, his primary thesis for the doctorat ès lettres, was published and examined in May 1961.1 On 30 November 1969 the Collège de France chair in the History of Systems of Thought was created. It was a post specifically intended for him, and he was formally elected to it on 12 April 1970, giving his inaugural lecture on 2 December.2
In the 1960s, Foucault went from being a doctoral candidate to election to one of France’s most prestigious institutions at the age of just forty-three. Although a doctorat ès lettres was a substantially more demanding qualification than a modern PhD, requiring a secondary thesis as well – a translation and introduction of Kant’s Anthropology – this was still a remarkable achievement.
Before 1961 Foucault had published little: a short book he would later disown, an introduction to a translation by Ludwig Binswanger, a co-translation of a book by Viktor von Weizsäcker, two book chapters and a short book review. He would later describe these as ‘bread and butter works’.3 He wrote much more than he published in this early period, something which would be true for his entire career.
The process of moving from student to author of the History of Madness is the focus of my book The Early Foucault. The Collège de France period, from 1970 until his death in 1984, is treated in Foucault: The Birth of Power and Foucault’s Last Decade. 4 The present book treats the missing years of the 1960s and completes this intellectual history of Foucault’s entire career.
After History of Madness, Foucault published four other books in the 1960s. Three are usually seen as integral to his overall chronology: Birth of the Clinic in 1963, Les Mots et les choses in 1966, translated as The Order of Things, and The Archaeology of Knowledge in 1969. However, Foucault also published the literary study Raymond Roussel in 1963, translated as Death and the Labyrinth, which gives insights into a parallel and connected research trajectory. Several articles on literature appeared over the course of the decade in journals including Critique, La Nouvelle Revue française, and Tel Quel, along with several other pieces on a range of themes. He also wrote on painting, including a text on René Magritte, which was developed into a short book in 1973. Many, but not all, of these shorter pieces are compiled in Dits et écrits, and some are translated in Essential Works and other collections. Since Foucault’s death other pieces from this period have been published, including several other texts on literature and some important works on painting, especially on Édouard Manet and Pablo Picasso.
After leaving Hamburg, through the 1960s Foucault taught at the Universities of Clermont-Ferrand, Tunis and Vincennes-Paris VIII. While he lived in Paris for most of this time, except for the two years in Tunisia, he was increasingly invited to speak elsewhere, including the first of five lecture visits to Brazil. Like The Early Foucault, then, the story told here has a geography as much as a history. A volume of his lectures on sexuality from Clermont-Ferrand in 1964 and Vincennes in 1969 was published in late 2018 and translated in 2021 (SDS), and three volumes of material from the 1950s have recently been published.5 At least three other volumes of materials from the 1960s will be published over the next several years, including courses and manuscripts on knowledge, philosophical discourse, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Some of these materials are clearly preparatory to well-known publications; others develop themes he only touched on elsewhere; or in the case of the material on sexuality, outline a distinct approach to a familiar topic.
These course manuscripts and other materials are drawn from the archives of Foucault’s papers held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.6 The archive includes Foucault’s extensive reading and working notes in preparation for his books, articles, lectures and abandoned projects, as well as drafts of The Archaeology of Knowledge. The courses and other materials enrich our understanding of Foucault’s work in the 1960s, just as the Collège de France courses have the 1970s and 1980s. There are also annotated copies of books by Foucault and others in archives. Like my previous books on Foucault for Polity, this book utilizes all these published and unpub-
lished sources in an integrated account of his intellectual concerns and development.
Compared to the earliest period of Foucault’s career, there is a lot of good secondary work on the 1960s. These include the classic studies by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, and James Bernauer, the best single-volume introduction by Clare O’Farrell, and works with a focus on the 1960s by Gary Gutting and David Webb.7 The biographies, especially Didier Eribon’s revised third edition and by David Macey, remain invaluable, as does Eribon’s Michel Foucault et ses contemporaines. 8 However, these and other earlier works do not make use of the newly available archives, which shed considerable light on this period. Some more recent studies, mainly in French, help to elucidate this material, especially on theatre, literature and art (see Chapters 2 and 3). The work of Philippe Sabot on The Order of Things and Martin Rueff on The Archaeology of Knowledge is extremely useful (see Chapters 4 and 7).
Structure
In previous books on Foucault in this series, I have generally followed a chronological approach, though with some thematic treatment. Here, the process is more thematic than those earlier studies, though it still attempts to provide a recognition of chronology within and between those themes. In his work on sexuality, for example, Foucault indicates the importance of synchronic and diachronic approaches taken together (SDS 5–8).
The first chapter discusses the 1963 book Birth of the Clinic, along with Foucault’s occasional writings on madness, witchcraft and confession from the 1960s. Some were published in his lifetime; others have become available more recently. It also discusses the important readings of History of Madness by Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser.
Chapter 2 discusses Raymond Roussel and the other pieces Foucault wrote on literature in the 1960s. This chapter also discusses his contribution to Georges Bataille’s Œuvres complètes, and the editorial role he took on at Critique following Bataille’s death. Continuing the theme of art, Chapter 3 discusses Foucault’s writings on painting from this period, including the well-known discussions of Diego Velázquez and René Magritte. It also discusses his longstanding interest in Manet, on whom he planned to write a book and gave several lectures. The archive also includes pieces on Picasso and Andy Warhol.
In 1966 Foucault published The Order of Things, which became a surprise bestseller. Chapter 4 discusses the book along with the 1965 São Paulo lecture course which previewed many of its themes using a draft version of the book manuscript. It also discusses the important reception of the book, including Foucault’s relation to Sartre and structuralism.
Foucault’s interest in sexuality long precedes his History of Sexuality. This is made clear by the two courses discussed in Chapter 5, which were valuable preparatory work for the History of Sexuality, but equally show some different directions of research. The ClermontFerrand course shows Foucault’s continuing preoccupation with psychology, which he was also teaching, while the Vincennes course has a discussion of biology and its theories of sexuality.
Through the 1960s Foucault also gave a sequence of papers on linguistics, language and structuralism, including his famous lecture ‘What is an Author?’ These are discussed in Chapter 6. The Archaeology of Knowledge was published in March 1969 and, while some earlier publications give a sense of its development, unusually for a book by Foucault there is a complete early draft in the archive, as well as substantial fragments of another version. Chapters 7 and 8 use these to situate the published text, and discuss his time in Tunisia.
As well as the sexuality course, the other lecture material from Vincennes concerns Nietzsche. Parts of Foucault’s manuscript survive, along with notes from one of his students. The course anticipates many familiar themes and reveals some other crucial aspects of Foucault’s interest in Nietzsche. It is discussed in Chapter 9, along with Foucault’s talk to the 1964 Royaumont conference and his role in co-editing the French translation of Nietzsche’s works with Gilles Deleuze.
In the Coda the pivotal year of 1970 is examined, especially the lectures given in Buffalo and Japan. Foucault’s work in this decade is summarized, particularly in terms of how this anticipates his later work on power and truth. Although the book follows The Early Foucault chronologically and leads to Foucault: The Birth of Power and Foucault’s Last Decade, it is also a standalone study of Foucault’s so-called ‘archaeological’ period. It, however, continues my attempt to disrupt simple periodizations of Foucault’s work by showing continuities and shared concerns from early to later writings. In particular, the rather abrupt changes that might appear from Foucault’s major works alone are more gradual if the entirety of his work is taken into account. The posthumous publications and archival materials help substantially in demonstrating this.
1
Madness and Medicine
History of Madness was reviewed in Annales, Critique, Mercure de France, Le Monde, La Nouvelle Revue française, Les Temps modernes, and The Times Literary Supplement. 1 Foucault was also interviewed in Le Monde (DE#5 I, 167–9; FL 7–9). Foucault’s retrospective claims about the lack of attention are therefore unjustified (DE#174 III, 88).2 He suggested the reception was not what he expected: ‘Like in a cartoon, I typed while waiting for the explosion, and the explosion did not come! . . . My dream would be to be as explosive as a bomb and as pretty as a firework’ (E 100). He retrospectively claims the book was addressed to political audiences, but was largely received as literary, with Maurice Blanchot and Roland Barthes being two of the key initial readers (E 101).
However, Foucault’s next book, Birth of the Clinic, really did receive little attention. There was a review in History of Science in 1964 by the director of the Wellcome Institute, and one by François Dagognet in Critique in 1965.3 Dagognet followed this with a brief note in the professional journal Le Concours médical in 1966, discussing this book in relation to History of Madness. 4 But Foucault was not interviewed about his book when published, though it was discussed in later interviews. This contrasts with the immediate interest from The Order of Things to the History of Sexuality. Even Raymond Roussel had reviews and some media attention (see Chapter 2).
Foucault described Birth of the Clinic as the ‘outtakes’ from History of Madness (C 24/27), and his preparatory reading notes show a strong continuity of concerns, with material from Uppsala in the mid to late 1950s reorganized for this book.5 If History of
Madness can perhaps be understood in relation to his sexuality, here the biographical connection is Foucault’s troubled relationship with his father, a surgeon who died in September 1959. After defending his theses, Foucault did much of the writing for the book in summer 1961 and completed it on 27 November.6 In a seminar in late 1962, Althusser describes it as Histoire de la médicine clinique, which may have been its initial title, as Defert reports Foucault gave Althusser the manuscript to read in September 1962 (C 24/28).7
‘This book is about space, language, and death, it is about the gaze’ (BC2 5/ix). After this opening line, Foucault immediately contrasts two ways of practising medicine. In the mid eighteenth century Pierre Pomme gave long baths to a hysteric and watched as internal tissues were passed through the body. In the nineteenth century, AntoineLaurent-Jessé Bayle described ‘the encephalic lesions of general paralysis’. Foucault suggests Bayle’s approach is recognizably that of physicians today, even with many changes of detail, but Pomme’s is entirely alien, ‘the language of fantasy’. Yet less than a hundred years separate the two approaches (BC2 5–6/ix–x).
Faced with this apparent discontinuity, Foucault sets out to explore how medicine moved from one approach to the other, with the parallel development of the institution, the clinical hospital, and the practice of clinical medicine – the two senses of the French word la clinique. This shift, and especially the role played by the medical gaze, is explored, with Foucault interested in its development and its conditions of possibility. As he says in the first edition: ‘It is a structural study that attempts to decipher in the depth of the historical the conditions of its own history’ (BC1 xv). History of Madness described its project as not a history of the language of psychiatry, but to restore how psychiatry cancelled the voice of madness, to write ‘rather the archaeology of that silence’ (FD1 i–ii; DE#4 I, 159–60; HM –/xxviii). The term reappears here in the subtitle An Archaeology of the Medical Gaze [regard], but not anywhere else in the book.
In the eighteenth century the focus on the disease and its situation within a family of species of diseases means there needs to be a process of abstraction, of removal of extraneous and misleading details – the patient’s age, sex, personal history. Foucault examines the shift from the disease being situated within a nosology, a classification, to being situated in a body – ‘an anatomical atlas’ (BC2 19/1). But this situation is ‘neither the first nor the most fundamental’ way of spatializing disease. The model that appears today as the norm is a ‘historical, temporary datum’ (BC2 19/1–2). The earlier model saw bodily organs as ‘the concrete supports of the disease; they never constitute its indispensable conditions’ (BC2 29/10). The situation
of the disease in the family and its location in a body are the first and second forms of spatialization, with the third form being ‘all the gestures by which, in a given society, a disease is circumscribed, medically invested, isolated, divided up into closed, privileged regions, or distributed through cure centres, arranged in the most favourable way’ (BC2 36/17).
Before the French Revolution the ordered garden of species always risked being disrupted by the hospital and its unruly arrangements. After the Revolution there are several changes. The abstracting medical gaze is one, but this goes alongside a reorganization of the clinical space, and a recognition of the three-dimensional space of the organ rather than the two dimensions of the tissue, with the situation of the disease in the body seen as essential rather than an inconvenience. The physician’s question is no longer ‘what is the matter with you?’ but ‘where does it hurt?’ (BC2 17/xxi). While the observation of the doctor is important, this is obscured by the living body. As Foucault indicates, Xavier Bichat’s injunction to ‘open up a few corpses’ becomes a key part of medical training and research, allowing a privileged access to the disease. Crucially, Foucault claims ‘the great break [coupure] in the history of Western medicine dates precisely from the moment clinical experience became the anatomo-clinical gaze’ (BC2 205/179). Or as he puts it more poetically: ‘The living night is dissipated in the brightness of death’ (BC2 206/180).
From these different trends, Foucault indicates a precise date: ‘Since 1816, the doctor’s eye has been able to confront a sick organism. The historical and concrete a priori of the modern medical gaze was finally constituted’ (BC2 237/237). Although Foucault mentions the concrete a priori elsewhere in the book his readers would have to wait for later clarifications of what he meant by an historical a priori, a seemingly contradictory idea.8
In the Conclusion, Foucault suggests his book is, alongside other works, ‘an attempt to apply a method in the confused, so little and badly structured, domain of the history of ideas’. This period of about half a century marks ‘an ineradicable chronological threshold [seuil]’ (BC2 269/241). Returning to the three terms of the book’s opening line, he suggests he has focused on how ‘this structure, in which space, language, and death are articulated – what is known, in fact, as the anatomo-clinical method – constitutes the historical conditions of a medicine that is given and accepted as positive’ (BC2 270–1/243).
Foucault also begins to anticipate the project of The Order of Things, talking of medicine’s role in the conceptualization of Western man, in ‘the constitution of the sciences of man’ and its relation to finitude and anthropology (BC2 271/243–4). He also relates this to
some of the literary figures he had discussed in the final chapter of History of Madness – Friedrich Hölderlin’s Empedocles, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and Rainer Maria Rilke (BC1 199; BC2 –/243, 273/245).9 And he closes with a point which will also be developed in The Order of Things: ‘European culture, in the last years of the eighteenth century, outlined a structure that has not yet been unravelled, we are only just beginning to disentangle a few of the threads’ (BC2 274/246).
The book appeared in the Galien series edited by Georges Canguilhem with Presses Universitaires de France in April 1963. Canguilhem recalled he did not commission the book but was given an already finished text.10 In June 1965 Foucault told Canguilhem his work was indebted to his analyses, and what he called his ‘epistemological eidetics’. He added, ‘the Clinique and what follows it derive from this and, perhaps, are completely contained within it. Someday I will have to come to grips with exactly what this relationship is.’11
In this text, just as in History of Madness, Foucault explores how disciplines and practices work together. It was only really The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge which focused on knowledge alone. The supposed shift to practices in the early 1970s is in important ways a return to earlier approaches, albeit with a more sophisticated analysis and vocabulary around power. He returned to the topic of medicine in Collège de France lectures, seminars and a short course in Rio in 1974. Foucault also explored medicine in some collaborative projects at Félix Guattari’s CERFI institute. These were often more explicitly political and institutional analyses, with a greater focus on public health outside of the clinical setting. Already a theme in Birth of the Clinic, it was now linked more directly to his later work on population and governmentality.12 This academic research was partnered by his role in the Groupe Information Santé (GIS) and its campaigns around industrial accidents, health of immigrant workers and abortion rights.13
In 1972 Birth of the Clinic was revised and republished. There are many changes, ranging from changed words, rewritten sentences to deleted, inserted or replacement paragraphs. Although Bernauer and François Delaporte have outlined some of these, neither is comprehensive.14 The changes are too extensive for a detailed analysis here, but they are significant in three registers.
One is that most of the structural language is removed. The first edition, as quoted above, described the book as ‘a structural study that attempts to decipher in the depth of the historical the conditions of its own history’ (BC1 xv). In the second edition, this is changed to ‘it is a study that attempts to decipher in the depth of discourse the conditions of its history’ (BC2 18/–; see –/xxii). Equally, undertaking
‘a structural analysis of a signified – that of medical experience’ (BC1 xiv) is replaced with ‘the analysis of a type of discourse’ (BC2 16/ xx). A passage about ‘a profound structural change’ (BC1 51) is rewritten with a set of claims about shifts in knowledge and related practice (BC2 80–1/60). Foucault also changes one claim about what is made ‘structurally possible’ to ‘historically possible’ (BC1 2; BC2 20/2). There are many other instances of removing this language. But even though structural language is largely removed, the findings the analysis enabled remain intact.
Foucault, nonetheless, does make some changes based on his subsequent work. A comment at the end of one chapter on the relation between medicine and biology, for example, is expanded in relation to the work of The Order of Things, clarifying the importance of the ‘science of man’ (BC1 36; BC2 62/41). Another discussion of natural history and its relation to medicine replaces a more general point about Renaissance art and science (BC1 88; BC2 128–30/108–9). In the margins of his own copy, Foucault indicated a wish to reverse one contrast of connaissance and savoir to bring the book better into line with his later usage, though this change was not made.15 In a later, rewritten, passage he does use the distinction in a way consistent with his later work, and also removes some of the more phenomenological language of the original, concerning perception, auscultation and the medical gaze (BC1 138–40; BC2 191–3/167–9).
The other register of changes is political. Foucault does not rework the text with the language of power relations, already important in his lectures of 1972.16 There was already a political context to many of the claims in the original text, and the centrality of the Revolution is perhaps overlooked in some discussions of his analysis. But he does tease out a few points more explicitly. For example, in 1963, Foucault suggests the tertiary spatialization is the place of ‘diverse dialectics’, which he lists as ‘heterogeneous figures, chronological dislocations [décalages], demands and utopias, the conciliation dream of incompatibles’ (BC1 15). In 1972 this takes a political slant: ‘heterogeneous institutions, chronological dislocations, political struggles, demands and utopias, economic constraints, and social confrontations’ (BC2 36–7/17). Immediately after this passage, the first edition talks of an ‘entire corpus of practices, often without discursive unity’, which relate the first and second form of spatialization to social space (BC1 15). In the second edition, this phrase is replaced with ‘an entire corpus of medical practices and institutions’ (BC2 37/17). There is a little more on the medical police in the second edition (BC1 20; BC2 55/35).
The English translation is a peculiar hybrid of the two editions. Most of the second edition’s rewritten paragraphs are used; but many
changes to structural language and other smaller points are missed. It appears the translation was begun following the first edition, and then cursorily checked to the second. Worst of all, it sometimes switches between editions mid paragraph or even in a sentence. The translation is therefore frequently confused and presents sentences which do not reflect what Foucault wrote in either 1963 or 1972. With the description of the work, quoted above, the English merges the two editions: ‘It is a structural study that sets out to disentangle the conditions of its history from the density of discourse’ (BC2 –/xxii). The translation also conflates the first edition’s ‘structural analysis’ (BC1 xiii) with the second’s ‘analysis of discourse’ (BC2 15/–) to produce a ‘structural analysis of discourse’ (BC2 –/xvii). Although Foucault did use the term discours in the first edition, this was generally in an unstressed way to mean language or speech. Foucault did not relate a structural method to one concerned with discourse: they describe different moments of his historical approach. That development is further explored in subsequent chapters, but Birth of the Clinic is one of Foucault’s books most in need of a revised, critical translation.
Madness beyond the History of Madness
In the 1960s Foucault also developed themes from the History of Madness, including talks on the themes of ‘Folie et civilisation’ and ‘Folie et société’.17 Some projects were never completed. The planned sequel to the History of Madness, which was to look at psychiatric expertise in criminal cases, was never written (see C 25/29), but Foucault would return to its themes in lectures and seminars in the mid 1970s. In October 1982 Foucault said History of Madness ‘was intended to be a first volume. I like to write first volumes, and I hate to write second ones.’18 Foucault also agreed to write a book on Bastille prisoners in 1964 for Pierre Nora’s Archives series.19 Early volumes of the series advertise it as forthcoming: Les Fous: Michel Foucault raconte, du XVIIe au XIXe siècles, de la Bastille à Sainte-Anne, le voyage au bout de la nuit. 20 In 1982, this promise was finally fulfilled in collaboration with Arlette Farge.21 Eribon reports two other book contracts signed, a ‘History of Hysteria’ for a series edited by Fernand Braudel, another on ‘The Idea of Decadence’.22 Neither was written.
Defert reports that on 31 May 1961 Foucault began ‘a series of radio broadcasts on France-Culture, on “History of Madness and Literature”, which will continue until 1963’ (C 24/26). It is not clear what became of the 1961 radio broadcasts, but five broadcasts from January to February 1963 have been preserved. Broadcast on the
show The Use of Speech, produced by Jean Doat, collectively the talks were entitled ‘The Languages of Madness’. Foucault draws upon the History of Madness, and other writings of the early 1960s, but now presents this research to a much wider audience. The broadcasts included parts spoken by Foucault, along with texts read by actors to illustrate his arguments. The second and fifth of the broadcasts have been published; the other three are currently only available as audio recordings online.23
In the first broadcast, Foucault draws a contrast between the medieval ‘fêtes des fous’, carnivals found across Europe, represented in the writing of François Rabelais, and the shift to theatre and its representation of madness in the Classical age. Foucault had attended a modern parallel to such a fête in 1954 in Münsterlingen, as a guest of Roland Kuhn.24 He clarifies his point in the second broadcast, where making use of the Nietzschean distinction he suggests Doat saw theatre as Dionysian, whereas he saw it as Apollonian (LMD 29/8). In the second broadcast he juxtaposes literary texts including King Lear, Don Quixote and Rameau’s Nephew with the great confinement of the seventeenth century. He presents lists of the reasons for those arrested in the early eighteenth century, and the report of the doctor at Charenton asylum on the case of Sade. He also highlights the correspondence between Artaud and a literary editor (LMD 27–50/7–24).
The third episode takes examples he had explored in his work on psychology, including François Leuret’s use of cold showers (see DE#16 I, 270–1). He draws on texts by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and August Strindberg to explore the persecution of the mad, and presents part of Binswanger’s case study of Suzanne Urban, which Jacqueline Verdeaux had translated a few years before, initially with Foucault’s involvement.25 As he told the listeners in the fifth and final broadcast his overall purpose was to show that ‘language and madness are linked, they are part of a tangled and inextricable fabric from which there can ultimately be no separation’ (LMD 51/25). This broadcast uses more contemporary work by Michel Leiris, Jean-Pierre Brisset and Jean Tardieu, linking this work to his literary writing of this period (LMD 51–70/25–39; see Chapter 2). He also anticipates a future project, suggesting that ‘literature and madness today have a common horizon, a kind of common trunk, which is that of signs’ (LMD 69/38). As Chapter 4 will discuss, Foucault began work for what became The Order of Things thinking its focus was signs.
The fourth broadcast had the title ‘the body and its doubles’, and invoked Dostoyevsky’s The Double, Guy de Maupassant and Thomas Mann. Foucault touches on themes around witchcraft and possession, which are developed in some important writings from this
period. This work is particularly intriguing given History of Madness promised a study on ‘the experience of the demonic and its waning’ (HF 39 n. 1/597 n. 83). The archive has a text entitled ‘Chapter I: The demonic and the imaginary’.26 It is a typescript with some handwritten notes and corrections, which suggests it is a late version. It begins with a phrase from René Char’s Fastes: ‘We were not credulous, we were surrounded.’27 Although unpublished, it does relate to pieces which Foucault published in the 1960s.
On 27–30 May 1962 Foucault took part in a colloquium at the Abbaye de Royaumont on witchcraft, organized by the medievalist Jacques le Goff. Situated about thirty miles north of Paris, in Asnièressur-Oise, Royaumont was where Althusser used to take his students for intensive preparations just before the agrégation. This colloquium was eventually published in 1968. Foucault’s paper was entitled ‘Religious Deviations and Medical Knowledge’, and it was followed by a discussion.28 If Foucault discussed other papers, his contributions are not included in the proceedings. Foucault also wrote a piece on the relation between doctors, judges and figures of religious authority and witches and the possessed, which was published in 1969.29
In these pieces Foucault indicates how witches and the possessed were excluded, a marginalization which relates to his treatment elsewhere of the mad, the sexually transgressive or the criminal. In the modern understanding, this is the distinction between ‘the normal and the pathological’, but Foucault contends that something else is at play in the pre-modern era (DE#52 I, 624, 631; RC 50, 55). He challenges the simple narrative of the ‘triumph of medicine over superstition’.30 Much of the analysis looks at the question of truth and falsehood, distinguishing the deception of the devil from the illusion of those possessed.31 There are links to his discussion of Descartes’ three sources of doubt – dream, deception, madness – in History of Madness (HM 56–9/44–7), here suggesting the ‘last years of the Renaissance were truly the age of the evil demon’.32
Here and elsewhere Foucault challenges the thesis that the demonically possessed or those designated as witches or sorcerers were what we would now call mad, a claim he says is common but exemplified by Gregory Zilboorg (HM 74 n. 1/606 n. 66).33 He suggests it was the Classical age that would gradually equate these experiences as part of the general category of unreason.34 Later he would discuss this thesis in relation to Thomas Szasz’s The Manufacture of Madness. 35 Foucault occasionally returned to the theme of witchcraft in interviews (DE#85 II, 172–3), and in lectures on sexuality. 36 Foucault may have elaborated further had he written the volume on women promised in the first volume of the History of Sexuality. 37
In 2004, Silvia Federici forcefully challenged Foucault’s claim that Catholic confession was crucial to the injunction to speak about sex, locating it in contrast in the ‘torture chambers of the witchhunt’.38 But she references Madness and Civilization rather than the full History of Madness, and does not mention Foucault’s work on witchcraft, even claiming ‘the omission of the witch-hunt and the discourse of demonology’ is the key absence from ‘his analysis of the disciplining of the body’.39 Taking account of the writings on this subject he published in his lifetime would have been a potentially useful supplement to her own important analysis, even if Foucault intended something more ambitious.40 Robert Mandrou, who had attended the Royaumont conference, and reviewed History of Madness in Annales, would develop the most sustained analysis of witchcraft in France.41
Althusser’s Reading
Foucault sent a copy of Folie et déraison to Althusser, in which he wrote: ‘For Althusser, who was and remains the master, the first, a token of recognition and admiration.’42 Althusser heavily marked up this copy with pen in three colours (light blue, dark blue and rosepink), with underlining, marginalia, turned-over pages, slips of paper, ENS notecards, and a clipping of Foucault’s 1961 Le Monde interview. He clearly read and reread the book actively, but it took him a year to do so. He vividly describes the experience in a September 1962 letter to Franca Madonia, his Italian translator and lover:
I am in the midst of reading, if one can call it reading, quickly and deeply, reacting to each sign at each instant, taking notes so that no idea escapes me – the devils [garces] often move more quickly than my pen! – a capital book. Capital because it has caused a great stir, capital because it interests me to the greatest possible extent for theoretical reasons, capital because it is it written by one of my former students (I am not here for nothing I must tell you!), capital because I am without doubt (for this last reason and also for others connected to themes running through my head), just about the only person to have the ability to write something meaningful and important about it.43
A few days later he continues: ‘amazing, astonishing, awesome, a tangle and yet well-lit, full of vistas and flashes, traces of night and flashes of dawn, a twilight book like Nietzsche yet as luminous as an equation’.44 It was at this time Foucault shared the manuscript of Naissance de la clinique with Althusser (C 24/28). By early October Althusser indicated he had ‘a thousand things in mind concerning
Foucault’s book which I will develop in a gigantic course where I will take up a number of themes that are (currently) essential to me’.45
This course was Althusser’s 1962–3 seminar on structuralism at the ENS. This was one in a series of significant seminars run by Althusser. In 1961–2 he ran a seminar on the young Marx; in 1963–4 on Jacques Lacan and psychoanalysis; and in 1964–5 on Marx’s Capital. 46 The last of these was by far the most famous, leading to the Reading Capital collaborative volume.47 Two sessions from the 1963–4 seminar were published posthumously.48
Étienne Balibar attended the 1962–3 seminar and took notes.49 In the first term, the presentations were on ‘origin of history’ with papers on Nietzsche, Husserl and Foucault; and then on ‘archaeology of a science’, with presentations on classical philosophy, Gaston Bachelard, Canguilhem and Foucault. Pierre Macherey’s presentation on Canguilhem was developed into an article with an introduction by Althusser.50 After the Christmas break, they planned to continue with sessions on the ‘Prehistory of Structuralism’, and then sessions on structural linguistics, Georges Dumézil, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, mathematical formalism and ‘structuralism and ideological history according to Foucault’. It is not clear the second term took place as planned. Many of the presentations were by students, including Balibar on ‘structure of matter and organism’, and Jacques Rancière and Michel Pêcheux on Lacan. Balibar’s document indicates JeanLouis Chédin presented on Dumézil, though Yves Duroux recalls he did.51 Duroux says reviewing ‘potential ancestors of structuralism’ was in order to show that something might connect contemporary thought, ‘to demonstrate that the label might really mean something’. Though Foucault was cautious about the label structuralist, Duroux stresses the language found in the preface to Birth of the Clinic. 52 Althusser was due to lead four of the sessions, including all three on Foucault (20 November 1962, 18 December 1962 and 9 April 1963), and one of the sessions on the prehistory of structuralism, looking at ‘from Montesquieu to Dilthey’ (9 January 1963). Two at least took place, with the most detailed notes from Balibar under the title ‘Foucault et la problématique des origines’. Althusser was particularly interested in how the History of Madness’s preface frames its objective in philosophical terms, not just with the question of the origin of madness, but the idea of an origin as a philosophical problem. Foucault is concerned with discovery, the ‘conditions of concrete possibility’ of ‘current discourse’.53 It is a book ‘in truth about reason, as well as madness’, a book Althusser describes as a genealogy on Nietzsche’s model.54 He develops this point in another text from 1963:
