Hacking Ian - Les Mots et les choses Forty years on, Filozofia Umysłu
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Mots et les choses,
40 years on
1
Les Mots et les choses
, forty years on
Ian Hacking, Collège de France
For Humanities Center, Columbia University, 6
th
October 2005
1 1966
Les Mots et les Choses, une archéologie des sciences
humaines
was an instant success when it was published in April,
1966, sold out in 90 days. Everyone was talking about the
famous final paragraph about the erasure of Man, and a sentence
shocking to Parisian eyes, namely ‘Marxism swam in 19
th
century thought like a fish in the water’.
L’Express
, France’s
simulacrum to
Time
magazine, billed it as the greatest revolution
in philosophy since existentialism [23 May 1966].
For a good sense of one way that Foucault saw his book just
after it was published, look at an interview for
La quinzaine
littéraire
,
16 May 1966. [‘Entretien avec Madeleine Chapsal’
,
Dits et écrits,
2 vol. edn., vol. 1, 541546.] He is a member, he
told the interviewer, of the generation who were not yet 20
during the war. (He himself was 13 when it began and 18 when
France was liberated.) Much as that generation admired Sartre’s
courage and generosity, his passion for life, politics, and
existence, he said, ‘we, we have discovered something else,
another passion: the passion of the concept and for what I call
the “system”.’ [p. 542.]
As far as grand and overstated themes go, we find them in
this interview: ‘Our present task is to liberate ourselves
definitively from humanism, and, in this sense, our work is
political.’ Political? Yes, for in Foucault’s view, ‘all the regimes
of East and West market their evil wares under the flag of
humanism.’ [p. 544.] Remember those were the days when
Mots et les choses,
40 years on
2
Teilhard de Chardin was a big thing, and when Foucault could
praise ‘Althusser and his courageous companions battling
against “chardinomarxism”.’ [p. 544.] But note also his
denunciation of ‘the monolingual narcissism of the French’ for
thinking that they have just discovered a new set of problems,
when in fact the field of research that so engaged young French
intellectuals had emerged in America, England and France just
after the first world war, when ideas were coming in from the
German and Slavicspeaking lands. France has been called the
Hexagon by the French ever since their boundaries became
roughly hexagonal. We have such hexagonal minds, Foucault
continued by saying, that De Gaulle passes among us for an
intellectual.
Forty years. A few months ago in Paris I organized, as an act
of local piety, what turned out to be a very lively
commemoration of a book published sixty years ago, Merleau
Ponty’s
Phenomenology of Perception
. That remains a great
book. Since I own up to having been a fan of JeanPaul Sartre
ever since I first read the man at the age of 18, I may be allowed
to say that the
Phenomenology
is far more interesting philosophy
than anything Sartre wrote. But what an amazing time span is
twenty years. The cultural and conceptual gulf between the
Phenomenology
and
The Order of Things
is total. It was not only
this book that came on the scene. Daniel Defert observes in the
absolutely terrific 90 page
Chronologie
which introduces his
collection of Michel Foucault’s
Dits et écrits
, that ‘1966 is one
of the great vintage years (
grands crus
) of French human
sciences: Lacan, LéviStrauss, Benveniste, Genette, Greimas,
Doubrovsky, Todorov and Barthes published some of their most
important texts.’ [ Vol. 1, p. 37, entry for June 1966.] Some new
generation.
Mots et les choses,
40 years on
3
2 1970
The intended title of
Les Mots et les choses
was
L’Ordre des
choses
, but that could not be used because it had served as the
title of one recent and one less recent book by other authors.
Hence the English translation of 1970,
The Order of Things: An
Archaeology of the Human Sciences
was the right title. It had a
more mixed reception when it was published in 1970 by the
Tavistock Press, than the French book had in 1966. My own
response was unequivocal. I bought my third hardcover copy
within the year. On the flyleaf I wrote,
This is my third copy
after losing 2. Please return; I don’t want to buy a 4
th
@ £4.60 a
time!
So evidently my copies were being loaned around. The
book enabled me to do philosophy in what was, for me, a new
way. This does not mean that I quit doing philosophy in old
ways, but that I started also to do something different.
The
Archaeology of Knowledge
came out in English in 1972, and I
wrote it up immediately in the weekly
Cambridge Review
– so
hastily that I, the editors, and the printers all left out the ‘
a
’ in
the middle of ‘Archaeology’, thereby making it look like a
French word that had lost its accent.
In the early seventies, I gave as lectures what was to be
published as,
Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?
There
are some signs there, but not too many, of having read Foucault.
In the spring of 1974 I gave a course of lectures about some of
Foucault’s work. A colleague is reported to have told a visitor,
‘if you wonder why the bookshops have copies of Foucault in
their front windows, it is all Hacking’s fault’. That spring, or the
previous autumn, I gave lectures on what was to become
The
Emergence of Probability
, published in 1975. If you were
unkind, you might call that book
The Order of Things,
the
Mots et les choses,
40 years on
4
footnote
. But it is a footnote only to some early parts of
Les Mots
et les choses
, Foucault’s discussion of the radical transition from
the Renaissance doctrine of similitudes to the formal structures
of representation.
Representation, Foucault taught, is characteristic of what in
English we call, or used to call, the Age of Reason, and what he
called for his French readers, the Classical age, namely the
Cartesian era when French thought and the French language
became world thought and a world language.
Emergence
said
nothing relevant to the second great mutation described by
Foucault, the transition from representation to history. Maybe
Foucault himself had begun with the conception that I got from
the book, for he said he was writing ‘his book about signs’. That
is according to Daniel Defert, [
D&é
, I, p. 34], who says that the
first composition of the book about signs was finished in Tunisia
over Christmas 1964. But in a letter of 13 February, 1965,
Foucault realized that his book had changed: ‘I’ve not been
talking about signs but about order’.
I myself did not even want to think about what most
impressed people about his book, namely its final marvellous
paragraph announcing the incipient erasure of Man as an object
of knowledge or a topic of discourse. I did not want to think
about it because it seemed to me to be a mistake.
My talk today should perhaps be called not, ‘
Les Mots et les
choses
, forty years on’, but ‘
The Order of Things,
thirtyfive
years later’. Today, 35 years after I read the book and reacted
negatively to the endofMan thesis, I shall try to say what the
mistake was. It is not a very exciting mistake, and I am sure
others have pointed to the problem long ago. But first I would
like to say a little about the preceding, lesser, blockbuster, the
book on madness. My last personal remark in this overly
Mots et les choses,
40 years on
5
personal introduction is that I was given the English
abridgement,
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in
the Age of Reason
, while I was working in Uganda, probably
early 1968, but maybe late 1967, the year in which it was first
published in London by the Tavistock Press. I was bowled over
by it, and thus was primed for the larger blockbuster,
archaeology in full spate. By the way, the Tavistock Press, which
I have now mentioned twice, was the publishing arm of
Tavistock House, a venerable London institution for
psychotherapy, hospitable to new ideas, and which was then a
base for the antipsychiatry movement.
I had intended to talk today in some detail about the structure
of the last few chapters of
The Order of Things
, but gradually my
plan changed. I shall say more about the earlier big book about
madness, published in 1961.
3 The timing of
Folie et Déraison
The big book, as I shall continue to call it, was published in
1961. The French wars of the 1950s in Vietnam and Algeria had
been lost, and the Republic had put them behind it. The sixties
were the most fertile decade of French intellectual life in the
twentieth century. In addition to the list of names cited by
Defert, we recall that during that decade Gilles Deleuze
published seven of his books, and Jacques Derrida established
himself. Foucault’s work on madness was one of the first
flowerings of this unique decade.
1961 also marks the critical rethinking of madness in the
English speaking world. There was the polemical assault on
psychiatry by Thomas Szasz,
The Myth of Mental Illness.
Erving
Goffman, one of the greatest of sociologists, published
Asylums
,
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