Santé, le grand fiasco (Document) (French Edition)

Small wonder its readers have been alternatively fascinated, bewildered, frustrated and even enraged by it. Foucault's next book, Naissance de la clinique, published in , was a historical and epistemological study of the foundations of French clinical medicine at the end of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

In , at about the same time that Foucault deleted the first preface of Histoire de la folie, he revised Naissance de la clinique, a revision which consisted of the elimination of some of its 'structuralist' terminology. The word 'discourse' was substituted for 'language' in some places, and phrases such as the 'structured analysis of the signified' were rewritten as 'the analysis of a type of discourse'.

In spite of this, 'language' and 'structure' remain frequently-used words in the text, leading many critics to describe it as Foucault's most 'structuralist' book. Although the history of medicine has not acquired the public appeal that questions relating to madness have acquired in the past twenty years, Naissance de la clinique has become something of a classic in its own right. In a collection on the history of medicine published in , for example, most articles include references to Foucault.

In , Foucault also published a rather obscure book on the even more obscure French surrealist writer Raymond Roussel. An anonymous reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement remarked that the book 'seems addressed to an audience of cognoscenti, which must be exceedingly small in France and can hardly number more than two or three here.

In the period between to , Foucault also published a number of articles of literary criticism, essays on language and prefaces to an assortment of books, and translated texts from German. Much of this work, like Raymond Roussel, is poetic and obscure and not always easy to understand on first reading. In , Foucault published the book that was to become an instant bestseller: Les Mots et les choses.

This was a 'history' of the origins of the human sciences: A tremendous amount has already been written about structuralism, both for and against, and the issue of whether Foucault is or was a structuralist, and what relationship his work bears to this disparate movement is still being discussed. Unfortunately for the English-language critics, the preface to the English translation of Les Mots et la choses put them in somewhat of a quandary, since in this preface Foucault insisted on depriving them of this useful label to fit his work.

As a result, there was a division into two schools of opinion: In the final analysis, perhaps, 'structuralism' is simply a convenient label which describes a diverse series of researches often performed quite independently, bur having a certain number of traits in common. For the sake of simplicity, let us characterise the so-called 'structuralists' as representing the antithesis of the postwar philosophies.

First of all, they espoused a rigorous anti-humanism and anti-'subjectivism'. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan decentred the subject the subject in the unconscious 'la parle'. Louis Althusser renovated Marxist epistemology, declaring that history was 'a process without a subject a process which has no real subject or goal s ' and that Marx was definitely a antihumanist. Roland Barthes declared the death of the author in literary criticism: At the same time the new novelists such as Nathalie Sarrate, Phillipe Sollers and Alain Robbe-Grillet dissolved the subject and the narrative form in literature.

It was also a style of thought which emphasised every form of 'break' and discontinuity. Structural linguistics provided the methodological model, and epistemology, the history of the sciences and the human sciences were the preferred areas of enquiry; and of course the words 'structure' and 'system' appeared everywhere with monotonous regularity. It was a mode of thought which, to use the linguistic terminology of the time, favoured synchrony over diachrony. Anti-historicism was the order of the day, which many mistakenly saw as an attempt to 'kill history'.

This was the intellectual climate in which Foucault's book appeared. As the synthesis of many of these themes and with its provocative and stylish statements on humanism, Marx, the human sciences and epistemes, it created a stir. In the first week after its publication copies were sold and more than 50 were sold in the months that followed. A copy of Les Mots et les choses on the coffee table, as Michel de Certeau commented in , had a certain snob value, even if, like Jean-Luc Godard - who poured scorn on the fashion for this book in his film La Chinoise - the owner had only to read the first chapter.

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The amount of discussion around this book was tremendous as can be seen by glancing at Michael Clark's annotated bibliography of Foucault. It was both extravagantly praised and extravagantly damned. Jean-Paul Sartre in particular, attacked Foucault's views on history, saying that he had replaced 'cinema by the magic lantern, movement by a succession of immobilities', adding that this attack on history was, 'of course', an attack on Marxism. In fact, what Foucault was really trying to do, according to Sartre, was to constitute 'a new ideology, the last rampart that the bourgeoisie can still erect against Marx.

The irony was, as Foucault himself pointed out, that it was not so long ago that Sartre had himself been defined by the Communists as the 'last rampart of bourgeois imperialism'.

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This did not prevent a host of critics especially Marxist critics from rushing forward to repeat Sartre's remarks in order to give the weight of authority to their own arguments. Finally, in a masterful summing up of Foucault's crimes one critic indignantly remarked that not only did Foucault 'totally reject Marxism' but also 'proclaim[ed] the death of man and the end of history. In fact, three distinct groups of French writing on Foucault began to emerge in the late s after the success of Les Mots et les choses.

The second group of writings consisted of violently polemical reactions to Foucault's work: The third group was made up of the writings of those 'secondary' intellectuals, including journalists, who enthusiastically seize upon and follow whatever the latest Parisian fashion happens to be. This last group included what could only be described as intellectual 'gossip columnists' who keep the reader up to date with all the latest fads and scandals amongst the Parisian intelligentsia.

In all three groups, writers used Foucault as a starting point for their own discussion and reflections, in such a way that it is difficult to know where Foucault ends and the commentary begins. This practice of using other writers' work as a forum for one's own opinions is a common one in French writing, as opposed to the usual Anglo-Saxon practice of a 'neutral' exposition followed by the author's comments.

There are numerous and complex reasons for this state of affairs. Some of them relate to the smallness of the Parisian intellectual 'village' and the role of the media in diffusing their works. The Parisian intellectual is expected to have read the most recent works of his colleagues in his own field as well as in other fields. And since everybody knows everybody else in the Parisian intellectual milieu, this is good public relations if nothing else.

The newspapers, journals, radio and television provide a forum for discussion of these works as well as diffusing information about the latest publications and fashions which they also help to create. The tendency is to carve out one's own domain in reference to all this. Hence the wealth of what appears to the English-speaking reader to be obscure allusions and excessive polemicising in French intellectual work.

Not only does the writer assume his readers are aware of what he is talking about, but he may not wish to offend an opponent he will be seeing on the Parisian circuit by naming him too directly. In addition, he wants to make sure his own individual position is quite clearly distinguished even if infinitely from the rest of the field. This system has its drawbacks, mainly the creation of intellectual 'tyrannies'.

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu also comments at length on the terrorism of fashion in Paris which reduces people who do not conform in the eyes of their judges to the right way of being and doing things, 'to ridicule, indignity, shame and silence'. The dogmatic hold of Stalinism in the s is perhaps an extreme example of this kind of intellectual tyranny. Similarly, older systems are condemned to oblivion by the philosophy of the moment: To entirely renew the basic themes of thought, to be the author of an intellectual revolution these are fundamental philosophical necessities, at least in the presentation.

No philosopher could present himself as a candidate for historical existence simply as a continuer. Another consequence of the close involvement of the media with the intelligentsia, as well as of the celebrity status of intellectuals much envied by their Anglo-Saxon counterparts is the frequency with which intellectuals are interviewed in the written, spoken and visual media. In particular, the written interview is a form far more commonly found in France than in English-speaking countries.

These interviews also provide a forum for public discussion between the author and his readers. In the months that followed the publication of Les Mots et les choses, Foucault was interviewed in several magazines and journals. As in subsequent interviews, he explained quite clearly what could only be read between the lines in his books.

Foucault also used interviews to state his current position: This book set out a historiographical methodology which claimed to do away with some of the disadvantages of the traditional discipline of the history of ideas. It did not entirely explain what had been done in previous books, although it had much to say on what Foucault was not doing and what he thought he ought to have done. Other critics found it excessively arid and difficult to read. However, for those who appreciate intricate formal geometric structures in thought and method, it is a compelling book.

It offers many useful methodological hints to the historian who wants to avoid historicism, and has in fact been extensively used to this end. Nonetheless the rarefied abstraction of this work did not lend itself to a place on the bestseller lists. It introduced the concepts of 'truth' and 'power' which he was to develop and discuss at length in his work until At the same time his analysis of theses notions during this period created an exponential growth industry in the secondary literature, particularly in America.

The beginnings of this industry can be seen in the early s, when a small but growing number of English-speaking critics and intellectuals began to become aware of Foucault's work. English-language writing on Foucault at this time and in the s was fairly evenly divided between a popular journalism, aimed at explaining a 'French phenomenon', and serious essays in specialised reviews.

These critics could be divided into camps for and against. Those against were usually advocating sound Anglo-Saxon empiricism against airy French nonsense, whereas those in favour often as not completely misunderstood the content and context of Foucault's ideas and praised them for quite the wrong reasons, although there were, of course, exceptions to this general rule. But for most, whether for and against, Foucault's works taken out of context and judged by the standards of a different intellectual tradition were mysterious and bizarre objects indeed.

During the early s, Foucault went into the temporary alliance with the Maoists, adopting a rather extreme form of 'revolutionary' rhetoric in some interviews and articles. The best known of the committees in which Foucault participated as a founding member was the famous Groupe d'Information sur les prisons, whose aim was to provide the forum for prisoners to speak and act at a time of great unrest in the prisons. According to some, Foucault and the GIP played a major role in engineering the prison riots at Toul in Also in , a discussion between Foucault and Deleuze on intellectuals and power, which has since attracted much comment, was published.

Foucault also produced two small books on the artists Magritte and Fromanger The former is a most amusing text, although it is difficult to judge whether this is intentional or not. A film was made of this book in which Foucault played a small part as a judge. Attendance at these lectures which dealt with power and prisons, was de rigueur amongst a certain 'intellectual-mondain' set, and they became quite an event.

A journalist offers a colourful, but fairly accurate description of the atmosphere at these courses: As for a Gala performance, there was a crush outside the doors some two hours in advance. Inside emissaries reserved places and it was a fight to the death to find a perch on the edge of a quarter of a folding seat. Women from the most exclusive neighbourhoods of Paris came decked out in their best designer clothes.

And on stage, right in the middle of an interminable waxed desk, his uneven skull shining under the subdued lighting, surrounded by a thousand microphones, antennae attached to as many tape recorders, and with a flock of ecstatic young men wrapped around his feet, Foucault spoke. In , Foucault published Surveiller et punir, a history of the prison and punishment and the growth of the 'disciplinary society' covering the period from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century.

In this book, the notions of 'power' and 'discipline came to occupy a central position in Foucault's thought. It was a book that immediately created great interest amongst criminologists, an interest that quickly spread to sociologists and historians. In this methodological introduction to a proposed six-volume study, Foucault argued that far from repressing sexuality, Western culture has done nothing but produce endless discourses on sexuality since the nineteenth century.

The critical reception of this book was less enthusiastic than for Surveiller et punir, as not only was it slight in volume and in empirical content, but lacked on the whole those brilliant and unusual insights that distinguished his earlier books. In , France and the world suddenly became aware of the 'new philosophers'.

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Time magazine gave them front-page coverage with the slogan 'Marx is dead', and in Russia the literary journal Litteraturnaia Gazieta condemned this 'lost generation of '. Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan were the 'maitres penser' or the 'gurus' of this new movement. Maurice Clavel, dubbed the 'uncle of the new philosophers', in prophetic tones heralded Foucault as the 'new Kant', and based his somewhat apocalyptic Christian philosophy on Foucault's formulation on the 'death of man'.

Clavel's books especially Ce que je crois were immensely popular and introduced Foucault to an audience who might not otherwise have become familiar with his ideas. In these books Clavel displayed a seemingly endless capacity for repetition and self-quotation as well as 'prophetic' exaggeration. When he died in , Foucault, a friend with whom he had engaged in many militant activities since the s, wrote an obituary in Le Nouvel Observateur.

The younger 'new philosophers', the ex-Maoists Andre Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Levy, adapted Foucault's theories on power to fit their pessimistic conceptions of a modern all-powerful repressive Gulag-State. Their work stirred up a tremendous amount of controversy and was almost universally condemned by the intellectual establishment, who claimed that it did not even satisfy the minimum standards of intellectual scholarship and led to a right-wing if not 'fascist' politics.

At about the same time , the Anglo-Saxon intellectual world began to take more notice of the work of Foucault. These books appeared at a time when a number of problems had become apparent in American prisons and when an interest in margins and relations of power within bureaucratic societies obsessed many people. Two more groups of writings on Foucault came into evidence in English-speaking criticism. The first was ardently francophile: For this school, Foucault could do no wrong, and every word that flowed from his pen was treated as though from an oracle. Pas facile, mais il le faut.

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