The Early Foucault. Stuart Elden

to 3pm, on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday in a single week in the summer. The first two papers were on general themes in philosophy; the third was an historical one. These texts were then marked by two examiners, and between 1 in 4 and 1 in 6 students passed – admissibles. If they passed the written part, a couple of weeks later the candidate would then attend an oral exam where they had to speak on a topic chosen by lot from a number of potential themes, followed by another extemporized leçon (a grande and petite leçon) and commentaries on texts in modern and classical languages. For the leçon they were given six hours research time in the Sorbonne library, then had to present a fifty-minute lecture to the jury. The explication de texte required one French, one Latin, and one Greek, the last of which could be replaced by an English or German text. It was the language of the text on the programme, sometimes in translation, which was significant here. For the explication they were given one-hour’s preparation time and had to present for thirty minutes.¹⁷³

The students had some prior knowledge of the thinkers and themes to be studied, with the programme announced the year before, and about half the curriculum changing each year. For 1950, the authors set for the written part were Plato, David Hume, Kant, and Auguste Comte, with a range of specific texts for the oral – ones by Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Leibniz, Descartes, Comte, Jules Lachelier, Psychologie et Métaphysique; Émile Boutroux, L’Idée de loi naturelle; Léon Brunschvicq, Les Ages d’intelligence. For candidates not working with Greek, those texts could be replaced either by the first book of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and the third of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, or Berkeley’s Three Dialogues and the first three books of Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature.¹⁷⁴ For 1951 the main authors were Plotinus, Spinoza, Hume, Comte and Bergson. For the written part, the texts were by Plato, Plotinus, Cicero, Seneca, Spinoza, Descartes and Brunschvicq, along with French translations of Kant and Hegel. For those not taking Greek, there were texts from Kant, Schopenhauer, Berkeley and Hume.¹⁷⁵ Clearly an unsuccessful candidate in one year already had a head start for the next, although the curriculum was still formidable. The written parts in 1950 were on the notion of personality; affective memory; and the positivist spirit of Comte;¹⁷⁶ and in 1951 on experience and theory, perceptual activity and intelligence, and a supposed dialogue between Bergson and Spinoza on the themes of time and eternity.¹⁷⁷

      The topics chosen for the agrégation are significant, leading to the specialized and sustained study of entire bodies of work by students, as well as the publication of studies on the thinkers chosen by academics.¹⁷⁸ These processes, as Schrift has discussed, thereby help to cement and shape a canon.¹⁷⁹ At the ENS, Althusser was the key person preparing students for the examination, and as well as his teaching, he would take students away to the Royaumont abbey just north of Paris in the first half of July for intensive preparations.¹⁸⁰

      The president of the agrégation jury was Canguilhem. This was part of his role as Inspector General of philosophy in the French higher education system 1948–55. This was a period when he did not give his own courses.¹⁸¹ Before this Canguilhem taught at Strasbourg and, while he succeeded Gaston Bachelard at the Sorbonne, he only moved there in November 1955, by which time Foucault was already in Uppsala. This helps to set some of the claims of the relation in context. It is sometimes said that Canguilhem was Foucault’s teacher in the 1950s, supervisor of his doctoral thesis on madness, and that Bachelard’s influence on Foucault comes through him.¹⁸² None of these things are straightforwardly true. There is no evidence that Foucault attended any courses: Canguilhem was not teaching when Foucault was in Paris, and the files at the BNF do not contain any notes.

Bachelard is well known as a philosopher and historian of science, whose work on mathematics and physics set agendas and standards for French studies in epistemology. Cavaillès and Canguilhem were two key figures who followed his lead. Canguilhem’s doctoral thesis on the concept of the reflex was supervised by Bachelard and published in 1955.¹⁸³ The Bachelard–Canguilhem–Foucault lineage has been widely discussed, including by Foucault himself,¹⁸⁴ though there is a danger of reducing all three under the rubric of a ‘historical epistemology’. There are undoubtedly connections, and as Macey has suggested, ‘the notion of the history of a discourse pronouncing upon its validity . . . locates Foucault’s history of psychology firmly within an epistemological tradition within the history of science’ – of which Canguilhem is a key figure.¹⁸⁵ However the causal link has become a critical commonplace. Through Jacqueline Verdeaux, Foucault knew Bachelard in person well before he wrote the History of Madness (see Chapter 4). His interest in Bachelard’s work was not just in the philosophy of science, of which Canguilhem was an obvious continuation, but also his work on the elements and poetics, which connected to a rather different strand of French thought.

      Indeed, while Foucault certainly found Canguilhem’s work of interest, it is not clear how well he knew it, and at what time. In 1978 Foucault notes that Bachelard was not his teacher, but that he read his books, and that much later Canguilhem became a key influence (DE#281 IV, 56; EW III, 255–6). Foucault knew On the Normal and the Pathological in the 1950s, as it is mentioned in a draft of Maladie mentale et personnalité, and there are notes on it filed with materials on psychology and biology from that period.¹⁸⁶ However his more detailed engagement seems to have come later. In 1965 Foucault tells Canguilhem that ten years before, when he began work, he barely knew his books.¹⁸⁷ In addition, the relation was far from one way: Foucault’s History of Madness and Birth of the Clinic were important for the reshaping of On the Normal and Pathological in 1966.¹⁸⁸ The original version had been Canguilhem’s thesis for his doctorate in medicine in 1943, submitted to the University of Strasbourg, which was then in exile in Clermont-Ferrand due to the Nazi occupation. It was reissued in 1950, and then with new material in 1966.¹⁸⁹ This was by far the best known of his books. Foucault references the 1952 collection Knowledge of Life in The Order of Things,¹⁹⁰ and La Formation du concept de réflexe in The Archaeology of Knowledge.¹⁹¹ While many individual essays appeared beforehand, Canguilhem’s two important collections of studies on the history and philosophy of sciences did not appear until 1968 and 1977.¹⁹² The thesis story will be discussed in Chapters 7 and 8.

Though Foucault and Canguilhem met in 1945 for the entrance to the ENS, the first significant encounter was in the early 1950s for the agrégation.¹⁹³ Some traces of Foucault’s practice work are preserved in Althusser’s papers at IMEC. Althusser kept his notes on student practice presentations, with his grades written on top. Foucault scored consistently highly on these, usually between 13 and 15 out of 20, better than most other students whose marks have been preserved. For one on destiny Althusser suggested it was worth 15 or 16; for another on virtue 16 or 17. Another on science mentioned Cavaillès and Trofim Lysenko, and Althusser suggested it was worth 15.¹⁹⁴ But Althusser also cautioned him to take care, not to be too obscure for the jury, to avoid ‘dangerous’ vocabulary, and wordplay. He suggested one text on science and philosophy would score 17–18, or 13–14, depending on whether the jury read it twice or once. The text was ‘too rich’ and some elliptical thoughts risked being seen as ‘ignorance’.¹⁹⁵

      Foucault failed the agrégation in 1950, to general surprise.¹⁹⁶ Candidates could be eliminated at each stage, and it was the first oral examination, on hypotheses in science, which Foucault failed, scoring just 9 out of 20.¹⁹⁷ The sociologist Georges Davy reported that Foucault had tried to display his knowledge rather than answering the question, discussing Parmenides and not Claude Bernard.¹⁹⁸ Among the candidates who beat him were Pierre Aubenque, Jean-Pierre Faye, Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Laplanche.¹⁹⁹ Althusser’s students usually did well, with five each passing in 1950 and 1951, but nonetheless the failures led to rumours of a bias against communists. The agrégation was strongly criticized in the PCF journal La Nouvelle Critique in 1951, in