Young Foucault: The Lille Manuscripts on Psychopathology, Phenomenology, and Anthropology, 1952–1955

347 Pages·2022·2.984 MB·English

by  Elisabetta Basso

YOUNG FOUCAULT

YOUNG FOUCAULT
THE LILLE MANUSCRIPTS
ON PSYCHOPATHOLOGY,
PHENOMENOLOGY, AND
ANTHROPOLOGY, 1952–1955
ELISABETTA BASSO
TRANSLATED BY
MARIE SATYA MCDONOUGH
FOREWORD BY
BERNARD E. HARCOURT
Columbia University Press New York

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Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Basso, Elisabetta, author.
Title: Young Foucault : the Lille manuscripts on psychopathology,
phenomenology, and anthropology, 1952–1955 / Elisabetta Basso.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2022] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021058068 (print) | LCCN 2021058069 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780231205849 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231205856 (trade paperback) |
ISBN 9780231556194 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Foucault, Michel, 1926–1984. | Foucault, Michel,
1926–1984—Archives. | Foucault, Michel, 1926–1984—Manuscripts. |
Binswanger, Ludwig, 1881–1966—Influence. | Phenomenological
psychology. | Psychology, Pathological. | Philosophical anthropology. |
Psychology and philosophy. | Psychology—History—20th century. |
Philosophy, French—20th century.
Classification: LCC B2430.F724 B385 2022 (print) |
LCC B2430.F724 (ebook) | DDC 194—dc23/eng/20220316
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021058068
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021058069
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent
and durable acid- free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
Cover image: Detail from the photograph of
Michel Foucault by Jean-François Miguel.
Cover design: Chang Jae Lee
To my men, Gualtiero and Ludovico
1
CONTENTS
A Genealogy of Archaeology by Bernard E. Harcourt ix
Introduction: New Avenues for Research 1
1 Archives and Intellectual Networks 15
2 The Binswanger Dossier 81
3 Archaeological Method 137
Conclusion 197
Acknowledgments 207
Notes 211
Bibliography 277
Index 309

A GENEALOGY OF
ARCHAEOLOGY
Bernard E. Harcourt
The mark of true genius is to elaborate an approach to
human inquiry that enters the public imagination and
becomes so widespread, it turns invisible. So natural
and common, so pervasive, so extensive, people absorb it into
their ordinary lives and no longer even recognize that they are
using it. Foucault’s early method, what he called “archaeology,”
is just that. An approach to studying how people come to know
and understand reality, and live and function within it, Fou-
cault’s archaeological method rests on the idea that our experi-
ence of reality is embedded in a deep conceptual and epistemo-
logical coherence that itself becomes invisible. The method has
become so pervasive today that contemporary thinkers deploy a
word cloud of expressions with family resemblances—c onditions
of possibility, constitutive, organizing concepts, afterlives, styles of
reasoning— to communicate in everyday parlance the idea that
Foucault developed under the more technical title of épistémè.
The method has become so extensive, it now encompasses prac-
tically all aspects of human life, from the social and political to
the deeply subjective to the outer limits of sexuality. In the
political realm, Foucault’s method has evolved to reveal the way
in which people are embedded within relations of power they
x (cid:89) A Genealogy of Archaeology
often do not even see, yet that shape how they act and, simulta-
neously, how they unwittingly reproduce those very relations.
In the sexual realm, it has evolved to expose how we came of
age in a time that took for granted the very notion of
“sexuality”— a relatively modern invention, Foucault reminds
us— that both shapes us and our conduct and that we reconsti-
tute with our every sexual act.
Remarkably, Foucault’s archaeological approach is in itself
both a method to study our experience of the world and the very
way that we live and experience reality. It is both an analytic
technique and our way of being. In both contexts, it rests on a
deeply aporetic insight: an impossible combination of inhabit-
ing spaces at the same time that we are shaped and constituted
by them and that we reproduce them. And as both the method
and the way of being become invisible, the paradox is redou-
bled, almost like a double helix fading into infinity. Today we
have so internalized this mystery, due to the wide proliferation
of Foucauldian ideas and writings, that we are almost unable to
understand the mystery even when it is unveiled to us. That is
what happens when a method—a nd a way of being—b ecomes
our truth.
In this brilliant book, Young Foucault, Elisabetta Basso
meticulously disarticulates this aporia and genealogically traces
the birth of Foucault’s archaeological method back to his for-
mative encounter with phenomenology and existential psychia-
try in the early period of 1952– 1955. It is at that time— while
himself deeply immersed in reading Edmund Husserl and
Martin Heidegger, teaching psychology at the University of
Lille and the École normale supérieure in Paris, experimenting
as a psychologist in an electroencephalography laboratory in a
mental hospital and prison, and working through a Marxian
form of materialism— that Foucault explores the method of