The Early Foucault. Stuart Elden

his study, was medical and off-limits; the library of his mother was literary and free to use. If the former would dominate Foucault’s interests through the 1950s and early 1960s, in his work on psychology, madness and medicine, with traces throughout his career; the literary would be a theme to which he often returned. It was in their mother’s library, Denys Foucault suggests, that Michel found Honoré de Balzac, Gustav Flaubert, and classical literature. He wrote on these topics, from an afterword to Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony to a lecture on that text and Bouvard and Pécuchet, and one on Balzac’s The Search for the Absolute, both given at SUNY Buffalo in 1970.¹³ His writings in the 1960s for Critique and Tel Quel, on writers including Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, André Breton, Pierre Klossowski, Alain Robbe-Grillet, the Marquis de Sade, and Jules Verne, and of course his book on Raymond Roussel in 1963, all show this enduring literary interest.¹⁴

      In an interview, Foucault’s partner Daniel Defert says a great deal about his working practices. Foucault apparently worked to a very strict schedule, likening it to a factory job (FMT 215–16/214). He would leave his apartment to reach the library at 9am, often by bicycle, and continue working there until 5.30 or 6pm (FMT 216/215, 232/227). The evenings would be spent on ‘his social and political life’, followed by an hour of reading. This rhythm was not broken at weekends, nor on public holidays, and rarely on vacations. Defert’s recollection is largely of later periods in Foucault’s life – they met in 1960, and much of this relates to the period after Foucault’s return to France from Tunisia. But Foucault had got into these habits early. As a student at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) he used its library on the rue d’Ulm, as well as the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève situated between the Sorbonne and the Panthéon in the Latin Quarter. From the early 1950s he became an habitué of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF), then entirely situated on the rue Richelieu near the Louvre and the Palais Royal. This building, with rooms designed by Henri Labrouste, is where the bulk of Foucault’s papers are archived today. Even when based in Uppsala, Warsaw and Hamburg, he would regularly return there on visits to Paris. He resumed working there on a daily basis in the 1960s, apart from while in Tunisia, and this continued until 1979 when he moved to work at the Bibliothèque du Saulchoir.¹⁵ As Eribon suggests, the BNF was ‘no doubt the one place in which Foucault spent the most years of his life’.¹⁶

      While the printed texts and some manuscripts, such as the Clairambault and Joly de Fleury collections, were located in the BNF, Foucault also used other libraries in Paris, including the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris.¹⁷ He also worked with materials at the Archives Nationales, and the Bastille archives and the library of the duc de La Vallière at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal.¹⁸ As Chapter 6 will show, the Carolina Rediviva library at Uppsala University was also important, though not as much as is often said.

While the research was done in the libraries, the writing itself would generally be done at home. Foucault tended to write his books multiple times, in handwritten drafts, which were then developed over time. He would often discard pages and rewrite them anew, rather than cross out material and insert the changes (FMT 225/222, 234–5/229). As the archives show, many of the discarded pages were reused for other purposes, with reading notes or lectures on the reverse, or folded in half to group notes on a theme.¹⁹ Defert says that the table on which Foucault wrote History of Madness in Uppsala is still the one in his apartment (FMT 223/220). But while Foucault would write drafts of most of his future books in Paris, he had a habit of finishing them at the family home in Vendeuvre-du-Poitou, where he spent each summer (FMT 223/220).

Structure of this Study

      Foucault usually referred to History of Madness as his first book. It is where he begins his candidacy presentation for his chair at the Collège de France, written in 1969, for example (DE#71 I, 842–3; EW I, 5–6). Foucault goes on to situate Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge within an overall narrative, and then outlines how his research would develop if he were to be elected to the position. That chronology is well established in the literature, though newly available and forthcoming materials add to it, and the literary is a crucial parallel theme. This period will be discussed in The Archaeology of Foucault. But how Foucault arrived at its putative beginning is a far from straightforward story. While many studies of Foucault begin with the first major book, History of Madness, in 1961, that is where this book ends.

      This book therefore offers an account of the long process that led to that major work. Chapter 1 discusses Foucault’s university studies in Paris, in philosophy and psychology, and particularly analyses his diploma thesis on Hegel under the supervision of Jean Hyppolite. Chapter 2 looks at the beginning of Foucault’s own teaching career in Lille and Paris, using various archival sources, and discusses some unpublished manuscripts which may have developed from teaching materials. Chapter 3 discusses the texts he actually published in this period, which are a fraction of what he wrote. Newly available sources help to resolve long-standing issues about the dating of these texts. In Chapter 4, his work as a co-translator of Binswanger and von Weizsäcker is analysed, showing how Foucault and his colleagues rendered German into French.

All these early publications were completed before Foucault moved to Uppsala in 1955. That move is a break in his career, initiating a period of sustained research for the History of Madness alongside the engagement with new inspirations, notably the philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger and the comparative mythologist and philologist Georges Dumézil. His engagement with Nietzsche and Heidegger is the subject of Chapter 5, along with the intellectual side of his relationship with the modernist composer Jean Barraqué. The research and writing he did in Uppsala and Warsaw on madness is the focus of Chapter 6, which also discusses his teaching and cultural activities. Chapter 7 examines the year he spent in Hamburg when he translated Immanuel Kant’s Anthropology. Chapter 8 looks at the defence, publication and abridgement of the History of Madness, and how Foucault was led by this work to revise his first book. The last pages explore how themes from this period point towards his concerns in the 1960s.

      While this book, therefore, has its focus on how Foucault’s career led to the History of Madness, it shows a number of other paths explored but not ultimately taken. Among other themes, it shows Foucault’s detailed readings of Hegel, the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl and Kant, all of which led to substantial manuscripts, which he chose not to publish. Foucault’s engagement with the Daseinsanalysis movement, while long known, given the introduction to the Binswanger translation, goes much deeper and archival sources help to substantiate its importance. Foucault’s concern with the question of philosophical anthropology is also significant. The encounter with Nietzsche and Heidegger, while long known to be crucial, is here explored anew in the light of new or neglected sources. This book also analyses his profound yet critical interest in psychology – as a student, researcher and teacher. The importance of teachers, including Louis Althusser, Hyppolite, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean Wahl, in his intellectual formation is explored, as is the influence on his later development by people who never taught him, including Georges Canguilhem and Dumézil. The book utilizes archival sources extensively to fill in details of his teaching, writing and plans for abandoned theses. In the years covered here, Foucault was institutionally located in Paris, Lille, Uppsala, Warsaw, Hamburg and Clermont-Ferrand. All of these settings are significant in the story, which has a geography as much as a history. In tracking and mapping it I have found myself retracing some of Foucault’s own steps.