by Peter Watson
The French Connection, William Friedkin’s 1971 film about the Mafia and drug running into America, wasn’t really about France (some of the villains are French-speaking Canadians), but the film’s title did catch on as a description of something that was notable in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and epistemology just as much as in historiography, anthropology, and music. This was a marked divergence between French thought and Anglo-Saxon thought that proved fruitful and controversial in equal measure. In the United States, Britain, and the rest of the English-speaking world, the Darwinian metanarrative was in the ascendant. But in France in particular the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s also saw a resurgence of the other two great nineteenth-century metanarratives: Freudianism and Marxism. It was not always easy to distinguish between these theories, for several authors embraced both, and some – generally French but also German – wrote in such a difficult and paradoxical style that, especially after translation, their language was extremely dense and often obscure. In the sections that follow, I have relied on the accessible commentaries quoted, in addition to the works themselves, in an effort to circumvent their obscurity. These French thinkers do represent a definite trend.
Jacques Lacan was a psychoanalyst in the Freudian tradition, who developed in highly idiosyncratic ways. Born in 1901 in Paris, in the 1930s Lacan attended Alexandre Kojève’s seminars on Hegel and Heidegger, along with Raymond Aron, Jean-Paul Sartre, André Breton, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Raymond Queneau (see chapter 23). Psychoanalysis was not taken up as quickly in France as in the US, and so it wasn’t until Lacan began giving his public seminars in 1953, which lasted for twenty-six years, that psychoanalysis in France was taken seriously. His seminars were intellectually fashionable, with 800 people crammed into a room designed for 650, with many prominent intellectuals and writers in the audience. Although the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser thought enough of Lacan to invite him in 1963 to transfer his seminar to the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Lacan was forced to resign from the Société Psychoanalytique de Paris (SPP) and was expelled from the International Psychoanalytic Association, because of his ‘eclectic’ methods. After May 1968, the Department of Psychoanalysis at Vincennes (part of Paris University) was reorganised as Le Champ Freudien with Lacan as scientific director. Here was the mix of Freudianism and Marxism in action.18
Lacan’s first book, Ecrits (Writings), published in 1966, contained major revisions of Freudianism, including the idea that there is no such thing as the ego.19 But the aspect of Lacan’s theory that was to provoke widespread attention, and lead on from Ludwig Wittgenstein and R. D. Laing, was his attention to language.20 Like Laing, Lacan believed that going mad was a rational response to an intolerable situation; like Wittgenstein, he believed that words are imprecise, meaning both more and less than they appear to mean to either the speaker or the hearer, and that it was the job of the psychoanalyst to understand this question of meaning, as revealed through language, in the light of the unconscious. Lacan did not offer a cure, as such; for him psychoanalysis was a technique for listening to, and questioning, ‘desire.’ In essence, the language revealed in psychoanalytic sessions was the language of the unconscious uncovering, ‘in tortured form,’ desire. The unconscious, says Lacan, is not a private region inside us. It is instead the underlying and unknown pattern of our relations with one another, as mediated by language. Influenced by surrealism, and by the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, Lacan became fascinated by the devices of language. For him there are ‘four modes of discourse’ – those of the master, the university, the hysteric, and the psychoanalyst, though they are rarely seen in pure form, the categories existing only for the purpose of analysis. A final important concept of Lacan was that there is no such thing as the whole truth, and it is pointless waiting until that point has been reached. Lacan liked to say that the patient terminates his psychoanalytic treatment when he realises that it can go on for ever. This is the use of language in the achievement of meaning: language brings home to the patient the true nature – the true meaning – of his situation. This is one reason, say Lacan’s followers, why his own writing style is so dense and, as we would normally describe it, obscure. The reader has to ‘recover’ his own meaning from the words, just as a poet does in composing a poem (though presumably a poet’s recovered meanings are more generally accessible than the patient’s).21 This is of course an oversimplification of Lacan’s theories. Toward the end of his life he even introduced mathematical symbols into his work, though this does not seem to have made his ideas much clearer for most people, and certainly not for his considerable number of critics, who believe Lacan to have been eccentric, confused, and very wrong. Not least among the criticisms is that despite a long career in Paris, in which he made repeated attempts to synthesise Freud with Hegel, Spinoza, Heidegger, and the existentialism of Sartre, he nevertheless ignored the most elementary developments in biology and medicine. Lacan’s enduring legacy, if there is one, was to be one of the founding fathers of ‘deconstruction,’ the idea that there is no intrinsic meaning in language, that the speaker means more and less than he or she knows, and that the listener/hearer must play his or her part. This is why his ideas lived on for a time not just in psychology but in philosophy, linguistics, literary criticism, and even in film and politics.
Among psychiatrists, none was so political and influential as Michel Foucault. His career was as interesting as his ideas. Born in Poitiers, in October 1926, Paul-Michel Foucault trained at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. One of les grandes écoles, the ENS was especially grand, all-resident, its graduates known as normaliens, supplying universities with teachers. There Foucault came under the friendship, protection, and patronage of Louis Althusser, a slender man with ‘a fragile, almost melancholy beauty.’ Far from well, often in analysis and even electroshock treatment, Althusser had a huge reputation as a grand theorist.22 Foucault failed his early exams – to general consternation – but after he developed an interest in psychiatry, especially in the early years of the profession and its growth, his career blossomed. The success of his books brought him into touch with very many of the luminaries of French intellectual culture: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Ferdinand Braudel, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jacques Derrida, and Emmanuel le Roy Ladurie. Following the events of 1968, he was elected to the chair in philosophy at the new University of Vincennes.23 The University of Vincennes, officially known as the Vincennes Experimental University Centre, ‘was the offspring of May 1968 and Edgar Faure,’ the French minister for education. ‘It was resolutely interdisciplinary, introduced novel courses on cinema, semiotics and psychoanalysis, and was the first French university to open its doors to candidates who did not have the baccalauréat.’ ‘It therefore succeeded in attracting (for a time) many wage earners and people outside the normal university recruitment pool.’ ‘The atmosphere … was like a noisy beehive.’24 This aspect of Foucault’s career, plus his well-publicised use of drugs, his involvement with the anti-Vietnam protests, his part in the campaign for prison reform, and his role in the gay liberation movement, show him as a typical central figure in the counter-culture. Yet at the same time, in April 1970 Foucault was elected to the Collège de France, a major plank in the French establishment, to a chair in the History of Systems of Thought, specially created around him. This reflected the very substantial body of work Foucault had amassed by that stage.25
Foucault shared with Lacan and Laing the belief that mental illness was a social construct – it was what psychiatrists, psychologists, and doctors said it was, rather than an entity in itself. In particular, he argued that modern societies control and discipline their popularions by delegating to the practitioners of the human sciences the authority to make these decisions.26 These sciences of man, he said, ‘have subverted the classical order of political rule based on sovereignty and rights and replaced them with a new regime of power exercised through the stipulation of norms for human behavior’. As Mark Philp has put it, we now know, or th
ink we know, what ‘the normal child’ is, what ‘a stable mind’ is, a ‘good citizen,’ or the ‘perfect wife.’ In describing normality, these sciences and their practitioners define deviation. These laws – ‘the laws of speech, of economic rationality, of social behavior’ – define who we are. For Foucault, this idea, of ‘man as a universal category, containing within it a “law of being,” is … an invention of the Enlightenment’ and both mistaken and unstable. The aim of his books was to aid the destruction of this idea and to argue that there is no ‘single, cohesive human condition.’ Foucault’s work hung together with a rare consistency. His most important books examine the history of institutions: Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1964); The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969); The Order of Things : An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1971); The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1972); Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975); The History of Sexuality (1976).
But Foucault was not just writing a history, of psychiatry, penology, economics, biology, or philology, as the case may be. He was seeking to show how the way knowledge is organised reflects the power structures within a society and how the definition of the normal man, or mind, or body, is as much a political construct as one that reflects ‘the truth.’27 ‘We are subject to the production of truth through power,’ Foucault wrote. It is the human sciences, he says, that have given us the conception of a society as an organism ‘which legitimately regulates its population and seeks out signs of disease, disturbance and deviation so that they can be treated and returned to normal functioning under the watchful eye of one or other policing systems.’ Again, as Philp has emphasised, these are revealingly known as ‘disciplines.’ Foucault calls his books ‘archaeologies’ rather than histories because, as Lacan saw meaning as a ‘recovering activity,’ Foucault saw his work too as an excavation that not only describes the processes of the past but goes beyond, to recreate ‘buried’ knowledge. There was something of l’homme revolté about Foucault; he believed that man could only exist if he showed a ‘recalcitrance’ towards the normative pressures of the human sciences, and that there is no coherent or constant human ‘condition’ or ‘nature,’ no rational course to history, no ‘gradual triumph of human rationality over nature.’ There is struggle, but it is ‘patternless.’ His final argument in this vein was to show that bourgeois, humanistic man had ‘passed.’ Liberal humanism, he said, was shown up as a sham, disintegrating as it revealed itself as an instrument of class power and the socially privileged.28 The individual subject, with a conscience and reason, is out-of-date in the modern state, intellectually, morally, and psychologically deconstructed.
Foucault’s last important book was an investigation of the history of sexuality, in which he argued that but for rape and sex with children, there should be no restraint on behavior. This was entirely in line with the rest of his oeuvre, but for him it had the unfortunate consequence that the development of gay bars and bathhouses, of which he positively approved (he adored California and went there a lot), were probably responsible for the fact that he died, in June 1984, of an AIDS-related illness.
From psychiatry to psychology: Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist, was not only interested in child development and the systematic growth of intelligent behavior. Later in life, his interests widened, and using the ideas of Foucault and Lacan, he became a leading advocate of a mode of thought known as structuralism. Piaget’s arguments also drew on the work of Noam Chomsky, but structuralism was really a concept developed in continental, and especially francophone, Europe, largely in ignorance of more empirical findings in the Anglo-Saxon, English-speaking world. This is one reason why many people outside France do not find it easy to say what structuralism is. Piaget’s Structuralism (1971) was one of the clearer expositions.29 Just as Foucault used the word archaeology; rather than history, to imply that he was uncovering something – structures – that already existed, so Piaget implied that there are ‘mental structures’ that exist midway between genes and behavior. One of his starting points, for example, is that ‘algebra is not “contained” in the behavior of bacteria or viruses’ and – by implication, because they are relatively similar – in genes.30 The capacity to act in a mathematical way, either as a bacterium (in dividing), or in the human, by adding and subtracting, is according to Piaget only partially inherited. Part of the ability arises from mental structures built up as the organism develops and encounters the world. For Piaget the organisation of grammar was a perfect example of a mental structure, in that it was partly inherited and partly ‘achieved,’ in the sense that Lacan thought patients achieved meaning in analysis.
‘If asked to “locate” these structures,’ Piaget writes, ‘we would assign them a place somewhere midway between the nervous system and conscious behavior’ (wherever that might be).31 To add to the confusion, Piaget does not claim that these structures actually exist physically in the organism; structures are theoretic, deductive, a process. In his book he ranges widely, from the mathematical ideas of Ludwig von Bertalanffy, to the economics of Keynes, to Freud, to the sociology of Talcott Parsons. His main concern, however, is with mental structures, some of which, he believes, are formed unconsciously and which it is the job of the psychologist to uncover. Piaget’s aim, in drawing attention to these mental structures, was to show that human experience could not be understood either through the study of observable behavior or through physiological processes, that ‘something else’ was needed.32 Piaget, more than most of his continental counterparts, was aware of the contemporary advances being made in evolutionary biology and psychology: no one could accuse him of not doing the work. But his writings were still highly abstract and left a lot to be desired in the minds of his Anglo-Saxon critics.33 So Piaget regarded the perfect life as an achieved structure, within biological limits but creatively individual also. The mind develops or matures, and the process cannot be hurried. One’s understanding of life, as one grows up, is mediated by a knowledge of mathematics and language – two essentially logical systems of thought – which help us handle the world, and in turn help organise that world. For Piaget, the extent to which we develop our own mental constructs, and the success with which they match the world, affects our happiness and adjustment. The unconscious may be seen as essentially a disturbance in the system that it is the job of the psychoanalyst to resolve.
After the success of structuralism, it was no doubt inevitable that there should be a backlash. Jacques Derrida, the man who mounted that attack, was Algerian and Jewish. In 1962, at independence, the Jews in Algeria left en masse: France suddenly had the largest Jewish population on the continent, west of Russia.
Derrida began with a specific attack on a specific body of work. In France in the 1960s, Claude Lévi-Strauss was not merely an anthropologist – he had the status of a philosopher, a guru, someone whose structuralist views had extended well beyond anthropology to embrace psychology, philosophy, history, literary criticism, and even architecture.34 We also have Lévi-Strauss to thank for the new term ‘human sciences,’ sciences of the human, which he claimed had left behind the ‘metaphysical preoccupations of traditional philosophy’ and were offering a more reliable perspective on the human condition. As a result, the traditional role of philosophy as ‘the privileged point of synthesis of human knowledge’ seemed increasingly vitiated: ‘The human sciences had no need of this kind of philosophy and could think for themselves.’35 Among the people to come under attack were Jean-Paul Sartre and the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Lévi-Strauss belittled the ‘subjectivist bias’ of existentialism, arguing that a philosophy based on personal experience ‘can never tell us anything essential either about society or humanity.’ Being an anthropologist, he also attacked the ethnocentric nature of much European thought, saying it was too culture-bound to be truly universal.
Derrida took Lévi-Strauss to task – for being imprisoned within his own viewpoint in a much more fundamental way. In Tri
stes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss’s autobiographical account of how and why he chose anthropology and his early fieldwork in Brazil, he had explored the link between writing and secret knowledge in primitive tribes like the Nambikwara.36 This led Lévi-Strauss to the generalisation that ‘for thousands of years,’ writing had been the privilege of a powerful elite, associated with caste and class differentiation, that ‘its primary function’ was to ‘enslave and subordinate.’ Between the invention of writing and the advent of science, Lévi-Strauss said, there was ‘no accretion of knowledge, just fluctuations up and down.’37
