Critical Inquiry
Winter 1995
Volume 21, Number 2
Excerpts from "Georges Canguilhem on Michel Foucault's Histoire de La
folie":
From "Introductory Remarks" by Arnold
Davidson:
"In putting together these three short essays by Georges Canguilhem, I hope to
be able to give some indication of the remarkable intellectual fruitfulness of
the exchanges between Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault. Canguilhem's own
work in the history and philosophy of science, which Foucault always
recognized as an important source for some of his own books, contains a
specific orientation and kind of analysis that has perhaps not yet been
sufficiently exploited in the Anglo-American disciplines of science
studies. More specifically, these essays by Canguilhem allow us to see the
continuing importance of and extraordinary density of Foucault's Histoire
de la folie, which, it is still hard to believe, has never been fully
translated into English..."
From "Report from Mr. Canguilhem on the Manuscript
Filed by Mr. Michel Foucault, Director of the Institut Francais of Hamburg, in
Order to Obtain Permission to Print His Principal Thesis for the Doctor of
Letters" by Georges Canguilhem, translated by Ann Hobart:
"It is thus the significance of the early stages of positivist psychiatry--
before the Freudian revolution-- that is in question in the work of
Mr. Foucault. And via psychiatry, the significance of the advent of positive
psychology is revised. Calling into question the origins and "scientific"
status of psychology will not be the least of the grounds for surprise
provoked by this study.
One can already see what the importance of this work will be. Because
Mr. Foucault never lost sight of the many faces that, from the Renaissance to
our time, madness offers to modern man in the mirrors of the plastic arts, of
literature, and of philosophy, because it sometimes disentangled and sometimes
entangled a multiplicity of vital leads, his thesis is presented
simultaneously as a work of analysis and of synthesis whose rigor does not
always make reading easy but that always rewards intelligent effort..
The originality of this work inheres essentially in its revision at the
superior level of philosophical reflection of a matter until now abandoned by
the philosophers and the historians of psychology to the sole discretion of
those among psychiatrist whom- most often in keeping with fashion or
convention- the history or the prehistory of their "specialty"
interested..."
From "On Histoire de la folie as an Event" by
Georges Canguilhem, translated by Ann Hobart:
"The defense of the thesis brought to light the appearance of a difference and
a fissure in academic knowledge. A history of psychiatry had been less
disconcerting than a history of madness. Although the history of medicine had
never previously had in France the prestige it had long had in Germany, it was
not far from being considered a history with academic status. The jury for
Foucault's thesis obviously could not but include the holder of the chair of
pathological psychology, a doctor of medicine, and, what is more, a
psychoanalyst. In this way, at the moment when the history of psychopathology
could lay claim to academic sanction, one of those whom it most concerned was
able to appear sincerely nonplussed. In Foucault's thesis, it is madness that
is primarily at issue, not mental illness; it is exclusion, internment, and
discipline that is primarily at issue, not asylum, assistance, and care. It is
from a power of relegation and not from a knowledge of identification that
medicopsychological practice proceeds by way of a practice of
internment-assistance. "Isn't it important for our culture that unreason could
only become an object of knowledge to the extent that it had previously been
an object of communication?" Foucault accorded to the madman a truth of being
that did not cancel his freedom to be mad..."
From "Introduction to Penser la folie: Essais
sur Michel Foucault" by Georges Canguilhem, translated by Ann Hobart:
"But if there is a moment in my work as an academic about which I am happy,
even today, to be able to flatter myself, it is to have been the reporter on
the doctoral thesis of Michel Foucault. Allow me to forget for an instant that
it is thirty years later and to resituate myself thirty years ago. I was at
that time rather controversial for not holding in esteem certain schools of
psychology. I was not, however, totally uneducated on the subject...
Since 1961, other works by Foucault-- Naissance de la clinique, Les
Mots et les choses, Histoire de la sexualite -- have in part
eclipsed the initial influence of Histoire de la folie. I admire the
first two. In Le Normal et le pathologique I said how much I had been
moved by the first. I wrote an article on the second for which I had nothing
but praise. But for me, 1961 remains and will remain the year that a truly
great philosopher was discovered... "
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