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

203 Pages·2008·9.55 MB·English

by  Elisabeth Roudinesco

Elisabeth ROUDINESCO
TRANSLATED BY William McCUAIG
PHILOSOPHY IN TURBULENT TIMES
CANGUILHEM, SARTRE,
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS New Yor.

Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
Copyright © 2005 Librarie Arthème Fayard
Copyright © 2008 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Roudinesco, Elisabeth, 1944-
[Philosophes dans la tourmente. English]
Philosophy in turbulent times: Canguilhem,
Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze,
Derrida / Elisabeth Roudinesco; translated by
William McCuaig.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
ISBN 978-0-231-14300-4 (cloth: alk.
paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-51885-7 (e-book)
1. Philosophy—France—History—20th
century. 2. Philosophy, French—20th
century. 3. Philosophers—France—History—
20th century. I. Tide.
B2421.R6813 2008
194—dC22
2008021953
e
Columbia University Press books are printed on
permanent and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
c 10 987654321
References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were
accurate at the time of writing. Neither the
author nor Columbia University Press is
responsible for URLs that may have expired or
changed since the manuscript was prepared.
To Christian Jambet

CONTENTS
Introduction: In Defense of Critical Thought ix
Notes on the Text xv
i. George Canguilhem: A Philosphy of Heroism i
2. Jean-Paul Sartre: Psychoanalysis on the Shadowy Banks of the Danube 33
3. Michel Foucault : Readings of History of Madness 65
4. Louis Althusser: The Murder Scene 97
5. Gilles Deleuze: Anti-Oedipal Variations 133
6. Jacques Derrida: The Moment of Death 143
Notes 155
Select Bibliography 177

INTRODUCTION
{in Defense of Critical Thought}
W
E ARE CERTAINLY LIVING IN STRANGE TIMES.
The commemoration of great events, great men, great intellec
tual achievements, and great virtues never stops; we've had the year of
Rimbaud, the year of Victor Hugo, the year of Jules Verne. And yet,
never have revisionist attacks on the foundations of every discipline,
every doctrine, every emancipatory adventure enjoyed such prestige.
Feminism, socialism, and psychoanalysis are violendy rejected, and
Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche are pronounced dead, along with every kind
of critique of the norm. All we are entitled to do, it would seem, is to
take stock and draw up assessments, as though the distance that every
intellectual enterprise requires amounted to no more than a vast ledger
full of entries for things and people—or rather people who have become
things.
I am not thinking just of Holocaust denial, which has been outlawed
among professional historians, although its influence persists in semi-
secrecy. Instead what I have in mind are those ordinary litde revision
isms that tend, for example, to put Vichy and the Resistance on the same
IX
footing, because of the "necessity" to relativize heroism, and the drive
to oppugn the idea of rebellion. Another example is the clever reinter-
pretation of textual evidence to make Salvador Allende into a racist, an
anti-Semite, and a eugenicist, for the purpose of denigrating the putative
founding myths of socialism around the world.1
As for philosophy, while its place in the educational curriculum of
the schools and universities is threatened by all those who judge it use
less, outmoded, too Greek or too German, and impossible to put a price
on or fit into a scientistic pigeonhole (in sum, too subversive), the drive
to "philosophize" or "learn to think for oneself" is expanding outside
the institutions of the state, embracing Plato, Socrates, the pre-Socratic
materialists, the Latins, the moderns, the postmoderns, the old and new
moderns, the new or old reactionaries. There is a gap between the aca
demicism that is returning in force to official schooling and the massive
demand for "living" teaching outside the universities, and this gap con
tinues to grow wider in a world haunted by fear of the loss of identity,
boundaries, and national particularism.
Feature stories in our periodicals and newspapers almost all convey a
catastrophic outlook: the end of history, the end of ideology, the end of
towering individuals, the end of thought, the end of mankind, the end
of everything. Jean-Paul Sartre—for or against? Raymond Aron—for
or against? Would it suit you better to be in the right with the former
as against the latter, or vice versa? Should we take a blowtorch to May
1968 and its ideas, its thinkers, and their writings, seen now as incompre
hensible, elitist, dangerous, and antidemocratic? Have the protagonists
of that revolution in behavior and mentality all become litde bourgeois
capitalist pleasure seekers without faith or principles, or haven't they?
Everywhere the same questions, and everywhere the same answers,
all claiming to bear witness to a new malaise of civilization. The father
has vanished, but why not the mother? Isn't the mother really just a fa
ther, in the end, and the father a mother? Why do young people not
think anything? Why are children so unbearable? Is it because of Fran
çoise Dolto, or television, or pornography, or comic books? And leading
thinkers—what has become of them? Are they dead, or gestating, or
hibernating? Or are they on the road to extinction?
X INTRODUCTION
And women: are they capable of supervising male workers on the
same basis as men are? Of thinking like men, of being philosophers?
Do they have the same brain, the same neurons, the same emotions, the
same criminal instincts? Was Christ the lover of Mary Magdalene, and if
so, does that mean that the Christian religion is sexually split between a
hidden feminine pole and a dominant masculine one?
Has France become decadent? Are you for Spinoza, Darwin, Gali
leo, or against? Are you partial to the United States? Wasn't Heidegger
a Nazi? Was Michel Foucault the precursor of Bin Laden, Gilles De-
leuze a* drug addict, Jacques Derrida a deconstructed guru? Was Napo
leon really so different from Hitler? State the similarities, proffer your
thoughts, assess your knowledge, speak for yourself.
Whom do you prefer; who are the puniest figures, the greatest ones,
the most mediocre, the biggest charlatans, the most criminal? Classify,
rank, calculate, measure, put a price on, normalize: this is the abso
lute nadir of contemporary interrogation, endlessly imposing itself in
the name of a bogus modernity that undermines every form of critical
intelligence grounded in the analysis of the complexity of things and
persons.
Never has sexuality been so untrammeled, and never has science pro
gressed so far in the exploration of the body and the brain. Yet never
has psychological suffering been more intense: solitude, use of mind-
altering drugs, boredom, fatigue, dieting, obesity, the medicalization of
every second of existence. The freedom of the self, so necessary, and
won at the cost of so much struggle during the twentieth century, seems
to have turned back into a demand for puritanical restraint. As for social
suffering, it is increasingly harder to bear because it seems to be con
stantly on the rise, against a background of youth unemployment and
tragic factory closings.
Set free from the shackles of morality, sex is experienced not as the
correlate of desire, but as performance, as gymnastics, as hygiene for
the organs that can only lead to deathly lassitude. How does one climax,
and bring one's partner to climax. What is the ideal size of the vagina,
the correct length of the penis? How often? How many partners in a
lifetime, in a week, in a single day, minute by minute? Never has the
IN DEFENSE OF CRITICAL THOUGHT XI