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Michel Foucault, “Vie: expérience et vie,” in Dits et écrit, IV: 763–776; The English translation is by Robert Hurley as “Life: Experience and Science,” in Essential Works of Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, volume 2, James D. Faubion (ed.) (New York: The New Press, 1998), pp. 465–478. We shall refer to this text with the abbreviation: VES, with reference first to the French, then to the English translation.
Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966); anonymous English translation as The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1970). Hereafter referred to as MC, with reference first to the French, then to the English translation. This project could complete itself it seems, only by a reading of Merleau-Ponty’s “L’Homme et l’aversité,” in Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), pp. 299 and 306; English translation by Richard C. McCleary as Signs (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 235 and 241. For more on this project, see note 36 below.
Michel Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1973); English translation by James Hames as This is Not a Pipe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). Hereafter cited as CP, with reference first to the French, then to the English. We can say that Ceci n’est pas une pipe is roughly contemporaneous with Les Mots et les choses because there was a first version of it in 1968. See Dits et écrits I, 1954–1975 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), pp. 663–678.
Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Paris: Minuit, 1986), p. 89; English translation by Seán Hand as Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 83. One of the unstated theses of my essay is that there is a tacit Bergsonian methodology in Foucault, a methodology that functions by dissociating or differentiating in a mixture. See Henri Bergson, ffff “Introduction à la métaphysique,” in Œuvres (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), p. 1418; English translation by Mabelie L. Andison as “Introduction to Metaphysics,” in The CreativeMind (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1992), p. 186.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945); English translation by Colin Smith, revised by Forrest Williams as Phenomenology of Perception (New Jersey: The Humanities Press, 1981). Hereafter PhP, with reference first to the French, then to the English.
See also Maurice Merleau-Pointy, La Structure du comportement (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942), p. 232; English translation by Alden L. Fisher as The Structure of Behavior (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1983), p. 215. Merleau-Ponty appropriates the idea of a “mélange” from Descartes’s Sixth Meditation. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’Union de l’âme et du corps chezMalebranche, Biran et Bergson (Paris: Vrin, 1978), p. 13; English translation by Paul B. Milan as The Incarnate Subject (Amherst, New York: Humanity Books, 2001), p. 33; also see L’Union, p. 81 (p. 89 of the English translation), for the connection of “mélange” to Bergson.
He also speaks of “une histoire vécu”; see PhP, p. 512/449.
In a remarkable essay, Rudolf Boehm has tracked the ambiguity in the concepts of immanence and transcendence in Husserl. He says that in the Logical Investigations, immanence meant strictly lived-experience, without any transcendent object, and in this regard, immanence was not for Husserl ambiguous. But, then in the Idea of Phenomenology, Husserl (anticipating the concept of the noema) included the intentional object in immanence since he thought it is given in an adequate intuition. From 1907 on (the time of the lectures that make up The Idea of Phenomenology), the Husserlian concept of Erlebnis is ambiguous, a mixture. See Rudolf Boehm, “Les ambiguities des concepts husserliens d’‘immanence’ et de ‘transcendence’,” in Revue philosophique de la France et de l’etranger, vol. 84 (1959): 481–526.
Thomas Busch also cites this passage in “Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Alterity and Dialogue” in Circulating Being: Essays in Late Existentialism (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), p. 83. Busch’s interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of ambiguity and equivocity is based on the idea of dialogue, an idea very different from a battle.
One finds a similar critique of the concept of Erlebnis in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode (Tubingen: Mohr, 19751; English translation by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd revised edition, as Truth andMethod [New York: Continuum, 1989]). Gadamer claims that the concept of Erlebnis consists in the immediacy of self-consciousness and in an immediacy that yields a content (das Erlebte). His critique is that Erlebnis is unity and interiority, whereas life itself is self-diremption. Here he takes his inspiration from Hegel, “the speculative import of the concept of life” (Wahrheit undMethode, p. 237; Truth and Method, pp. 250–51). Thus, because of the idea of self-diremption, Gadamer stresses the idea of judgment, “Urteil,” in German, which literally means “original partitioning.” Nevertheless, despite Gadamer’s emphasis of Ur-teil, we think with Foucault that life is not expressed in a judgment, which still relies on unity or synthesis, but in the infinitive of a verb which can be infinitely divided without unity. It is the expression of the indefinite, a universal singularity. On this idea of the verb, see Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit, 1969), p. 11; English translation by Mark Lester, with Charles Stivale, edited by Constantin V. Boundas as Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 3. See also Foucault’s review of Deleuze’s Logique du sens et Différence et répétition, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” in Dits et écrits I, 1954–1975 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), pp. 950–51; English translation in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory Practice, edited by Donald F. Bouchard (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 173–75. If there is a concept in Foucault, it would be an infinitive, like “représenter,” “classer,” “parler,” “échanger,” or “surveiller et punir,” or finally, “penser.” It is important to recall that Deleuze says that a statement (un énoncé) in Foucault — and a statement is the true equivalent to the concept in Foucault — is a “curve” (un courbe) (Deleuze, Foucault, p. 87; Foucault, p. 80).
All the citations in the next two paragraphs are taken from the section called “l’empirique et le transcendentale” of Chapter Nine of Les Mots et les choses: 329–333/318–322
Michel Foucault, L’Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 310. The other citations come from these final pages of the chapter called “La transcendence du delire,” pp. 309–318.
Foucault, L’Histoire de la folie à lâge classique, p. 240. See also, p. 265.
Foucault, L’Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, p. 239.
Gilies Deleuze, Foucault, p. 119; English, p. 112. See also, Michel Foucault, “Préface à la transgression,” in Dits et ecrits I, 1954–1975 (Paris: Gallimard Quarto, 2001), pp. 261–278, especially p. 266; English translation by Donald F. Bourchard as “Preface to Transgression,” in Essential Works of Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, volume 2, James D. Faubion (ed.) (New York: The New Press, 1998), pp. 69–87, especially p. 74. On this page, Foucault cites Kant’s early essay on negative magnitudes; here, on the basis of how negative numbers function in relation to positive numbers, Kant stresses that real conflict occurs only between two positive forces; see Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy 1755–1770, David Walford (ed.) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 206–241, especially, p. 215.
Michel Foucault, “La Pensée du dehors,” in Dits et écrit, volume I (Paris: Gallimard Quarto, 2001), pp. 546–567; English translation by Brian Massumi as “The Thought from Outside,” in Foucault/Blanchot (New York: Zone Books, 1997), pp. 7–60. For an excellent discussion of this text, see Kas Saghafi, “The ‘Passion for the Outside’: Foucault, Blanchot, and Exteriority,” in International Studies in Philosophy, XXVIII:4, pp. 80–92. At the beginning of the third section, “Reflection, Fiction,” Foucault says that the thought of the outside is not lived-experience.
In Foucault, Deleuze says that “En vérité, une chose hante Foucault, et c’est la pensee, ‘que signifie penser? Qu’appelie-t-on penser?’, la question lancée par Heidegger, reprise par Foucault, flèche par excellence” (p. 124; English translation, p. 116; c’est moi qui souligne). Also in Ceci n’est pas une pipe, Foucault describes la bataille comme “des flèches jetées centre la cible adverse” (CP 30/26).
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Lawlor, L. (2005). A Miniscule Hiatus: Foucault’s Critique of the Concept of Lived-Experience (vécu). In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Logos of Phenomenology and Phenomenology of the Logos. Book One. Analecta Husserliana, vol 88. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3680-9_23
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