Monday, April 25, 2011
Monday, April 4, 2011
Michel Foucault: The Heart Laid Bare- James Miller
In August 1953, Michel Foucault left Paris for a vacation in Italy. The preceding months had been full of ferment. Inspired by Waiting for Godot, he had returned to his work with renewed zeal. He had embarked on a detailed study of the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, a Freudian and a follower of Martin Heidegger. He was in the midst of a love affair with the composer Jean Barraqué. As never before, he was immersed in the world of the Parisian avant-garde.
It was the era of the nouveau roman, the heyday of the theater of the absurd, a time of exuberant experimentation in music. But it was not a novel or a play or a piece of music that captured Foucault’s imagination: it was, rather, an eighty-year-old collection of essays—Friedrich Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations.
Years later, Maurice Pinguet, a friend and fellow normalien who visited Italy with Foucault that summer, recalled watching the philosopher “reading in the sun, on the beach of Civita-vecchia,” lost in the pages of Nietzsche’s book. The avidity of Foucault’s interest shocked Pinguet: “I would have found it more consistent with my idea of a philosopher if he had been deciphering Hegel or Husserl: without barbed concepts, no philosophy.” As Pinguet recalls, “We scarcely had time to read, preoccupied as we were by everything there was to see every step of the way. But from time to time, during a half hour of rest on the beach or on the terrace of a café, I would see him open the book, a bilingual edition, and continue his reading.”
Pinguet dates the end of his friend’s intellectual apprentice-ship from this encounter with Nietzsche—and so, in more than one interview, did Foucault. “As it happened,” he recalled thirty years later, “I had read Nietzsche in 1953.” Of course, like any good normalien, he had read Nietzsche years before. But that summer, familiar ideas suddenly looked and felt new, and read-ing Nietzsche this time produced, as Foucault recalled, a “philo-sophical shock.”
In his preface to Madness and Civilization in 1961, he summarized his projected lifework in terms that suggest the profundity of Nietzsche’s effect on him in these formative years. His goal, he declared, would be “to confront the dialectics of history with the unchanging structure of the tragic.” This, he explained, would require a multifaceted inquiry, into madness, of course, but also, in future books, into dreams and “sexual prohibitions” and “the happy world of desire.” But all of these inquiries, he stressed, would be conducted “sous le soleil de la grande recherche nietzschéenne,” in the light of the great Nietzschean quest—“to become what one is.” “How did I become what I am, and why do I suffer so from being what I am?” Nietzsche asks in the Untimely Meditations, summing up the character—and stakes—of this hermetic recherche. The man who seriously pursues such questions, Nietzsche insists, “tortures himself” and “observes that nobody else tortures himself in the same way.”
Foucault’s own effort to answer Nietzsche’s questions began in earnest with his enquiry into the psychology of Ludwig Binswanger. In 1953, Binswanger was in the twilight of his career. Foucault had come to his work through Jacqueline Verdeaux, a young protégé of Jacques Lacan studying at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne. In 1952, she had embarked on the first translation of Binswanger’s writing into French. Since Foucault could explain the psychiatrist’s philosophical terminology, she requested his help on the translation. In the following months, the two of them went together not only to talk with Binswanger directly about his work, but also to consult with Gaston Bachelard, whose studies of reverie had been an important influence on the Swiss psychiatrist.
Foucault approached Binswanger’s work with characteristic thoroughness. Daniel Defert reports that Foucault’s library contained carefully annotated copies of all of Binswanger’s major articles and books, from Changes in Understanding and Interpretation of the Dream From the Greeks to the Present (1928) to The Basic Forms and Knowledge of Human ‘Dasein’ (1942) and Binswanger’s most famous clinical paper, “The Case of Ellen West.” Published in 1944, this essay offers a stunning account of a suicidal patient, one whose agonizing fate—much like Foucault’s own—was to struggle with the wish to die. (Foucault had been briefly hospitalized in the late 1940s after making several attempts to take his own life.)
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