Yes you are quite right about this. I had not actually looked
at the Miller references when I made the comment about Mental Illness and
Psychology. What is interesting is how, at least in hindsight one can see
a sort of conflation at work [in the two books]. I suggest perhaps by this
that a thread which lies dormant in one work comes more alive in the
other. In the essay
on Binswanger there is this very intense pre-occupation with death. Death
being central to Heidegger all and all philosophical thinking. That thread
is what Miller follows. And I agree with Claire O'Farrel that Miller
perhaps rides too much on that one interpretation of Foucault's work.
Foucault is very interested in Nietzsche of course and in an interview
given close to the time of his own death, he quotes Nietzsche: All of
antiquity seems to me to have been a profound error.' What is the error in
a Greek world wherein death is a daily concern? Nietzsche offers several
perspectives on that question. Foucault's own posture [near the end of his
life]always struck me as Stoic. And that would seem appropriate given his work
in Ancient Greek thought etc. When I referred to the context in which
Miller and others had placed Foucault's work I was not referring only to
the biographical element. I was refering to the intellectual and clinical
context in which Foucault had carried out his studies. The motif of death
and madness reveal themselves in the early Foucault almost one might say
in partitions. The Mental Illness and Psychology works as a more less
final tribute and farewell to what Foucault is repudiating whereas the
Binswanger essay begins to furrow the area in which Foucault will work in
as he prepares to write Madness and Civilization. What is really positive
about the Miller books is not its biographical element, but rather how
Miller uses the biography to write his own discourse about Foucault's work
and life. But to expand the idea of seeing his work in
partitions, what I am suggesting is that Foucault is always riding
double on his own discourses and interpretations, and that perhaps is what
makes his work so exciting [not only that but one of the elements]
in addition to having a sort of authority in the voice[s] one does
not detect in other thinkers. I also think that yes there are recurrences
that one can detect in the later works, but that what makes him great,
what makes his work so vital are the breaks, the changes. The later works
are at another plateau, they provide a calmer vision where the violence
and courage of the earlier works has been harnessed to make a new kind of
work. Foucault was courageous in all senses, and his work kept changing
along the ways of his courage. His courage is a motif of his thought, a
thought which 'dives' and opens out into, just when we least expected it
to do so, another arena to enter, another zone of study. But all this has
been said in a much better way by Deleuze in his book and several
interviews about Michel Foucault.
Once again thanks for that correction about the Binswanger essay.
Best regards, CD.
On Thu, 16 Jul 1998, Ian Robert Douglas wrote:
> > It is interesting that you are reading this. It is as you know a
> >really early work of Foucault's. I think Foucault, in fact, I am quite
> >certain, later repudiated this early work and went so far as to forbid its
> >republication.
>
> It was _Maladie Mentale et Personalite_, rather than the intro to
> Biswanger, that Foucault repudiated. The latter went out of print and was
> generally hard to get, but it was the former that he really disliked. He
> refused all reprinting rights of the first, 1954 edition, and tried
> (unsucessfully) to prevent the translation of the radically revised 1962
> version (_Maladie Mentale et Psychologie_).
>
> best wishes,
>
> _____________________________________________________
> Ian Robert Douglas,
> Visiting Lecturer & Fulbright Fellow
> Watson Institute of International Studies,
> Brown University, Box 1831,
> 130 Hope Street,
> Providence, RI 02912
> USA
>
> tel: 401 863-2420
> fax: 401 863-2192
>
> "Everything is dangerous"
> - Michel Foucault
>
>