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Mots et les choses, 40 years on

Les Mots et les choses , forty years on

Ian Hacking, Collège de France

For Humanities Center, Columbia University, 6 th October 2005

1 1966

Les Mots et les Choses, une archéologie des sciences

humaines was an instant success when it was published in April,

1966, sold out in 90 days. Everyone was talking about the

famous final paragraph about the erasure of Man, and a sentence

shocking to Parisian eyes, namely ‘Marxism swam in 19 th

century thought like a fish in the water’. L’Express , France’s

simulacrum to Time magazine, billed it as the greatest revolution

in philosophy since existentialism [23 May 1966].

For a good sense of one way that Foucault saw his book just

after it was published, look at an interview for La quinzaine

littéraire , 16 May 1966. [‘Entretien avec Madeleine Chapsal’ ,

Dits et écrits, 2 vol. edn., vol. 1, 541546.] He is a member, he

told the interviewer, of the generation who were not yet 20

during the war. (He himself was 13 when it began and 18 when

France was liberated.) Much as that generation admired Sartre’s

courage and generosity, his passion for life, politics, and

existence, he said, ‘we, we have discovered something else,

another passion: the passion of the concept and for what I call

the “system”.’ [p. 542.]

As far as grand and overstated themes go, we find them in

this interview: ‘Our present task is to liberate ourselves

definitively from humanism, and, in this sense, our work is

political.’ Political? Yes, for in Foucault’s view, ‘all the regimes

of East and West market their evil wares under the flag of

humanism.’ [p. 544.] Remember those were the days when

Mots et les choses, 40 years on

Teilhard de Chardin was a big thing, and when Foucault could

praise ‘Althusser and his courageous companions battling

against “chardinomarxism”.’ [p. 544.] But note also his

denunciation of ‘the monolingual narcissism of the French’ for

thinking that they have just discovered a new set of problems,

when in fact the field of research that so engaged young French

intellectuals had emerged in America, England and France just

after the first world war, when ideas were coming in from the

German and Slavicspeaking lands. France has been called the

Hexagon by the French ever since their boundaries became

roughly hexagonal. We have such hexagonal minds, Foucault

continued by saying, that De Gaulle passes among us for an

intellectual.

Forty years. A few months ago in Paris I organized, as an act

of local piety, what turned out to be a very lively

commemoration of a book published sixty years ago, Merleau

Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception . That remains a great

book. Since I own up to having been a fan of JeanPaul Sartre

ever since I first read the man at the age of 18, I may be allowed

to say that the Phenomenology is far more interesting philosophy

than anything Sartre wrote. But what an amazing time span is

twenty years. The cultural and conceptual gulf between the

Phenomenology and The Order of Things is total. It was not only

this book that came on the scene. Daniel Defert observes in the

absolutely terrific 90 page Chronologie which introduces his

collection of Michel Foucault’s Dits et écrits , that ‘1966 is one

of the great vintage years ( grands crus ) of French human

sciences: Lacan, LéviStrauss, Benveniste, Genette, Greimas,

Doubrovsky, Todorov and Barthes published some of their most

important texts.’ [ Vol. 1, p. 37, entry for June 1966.] Some new

generation.

Mots et les choses, 40 years on

2 1970

The intended title of Les Mots et les choses was L’Ordre des

choses , but that could not be used because it had served as the

title of one recent and one less recent book by other authors.

Hence the English translation of 1970, The Order of Things: An

Archaeology of the Human Sciences was the right title. It had a

more mixed reception when it was published in 1970 by the

Tavistock Press, than the French book had in 1966. My own

response was unequivocal. I bought my third hardcover copy

within the year. On the flyleaf I wrote, This is my third copy

after losing 2. Please return; I don’t want to buy a 4 th @ £4.60 a

time! So evidently my copies were being loaned around. The

book enabled me to do philosophy in what was, for me, a new

way. This does not mean that I quit doing philosophy in old

ways, but that I started also to do something different. The

Archaeology of Knowledge came out in English in 1972, and I

wrote it up immediately in the weekly Cambridge Review – so

hastily that I, the editors, and the printers all left out the ‘ a ’ in

the middle of ‘Archaeology’, thereby making it look like a

French word that had lost its accent.

In the early seventies, I gave as lectures what was to be

published as, Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? There

are some signs there, but not too many, of having read Foucault.

In the spring of 1974 I gave a course of lectures about some of

Foucault’s work. A colleague is reported to have told a visitor,

‘if you wonder why the bookshops have copies of Foucault in

their front windows, it is all Hacking’s fault’. That spring, or the

previous autumn, I gave lectures on what was to become The

Emergence of Probability , published in 1975. If you were

unkind, you might call that book The Order of Things, the

Mots et les choses, 40 years on

footnote . But it is a footnote only to some early parts of Les Mots

et les choses , Foucault’s discussion of the radical transition from

the Renaissance doctrine of similitudes to the formal structures

of representation.

Representation, Foucault taught, is characteristic of what in

English we call, or used to call, the Age of Reason, and what he

called for his French readers, the Classical age, namely the

Cartesian era when French thought and the French language

became world thought and a world language. Emergence said

nothing relevant to the second great mutation described by

Foucault, the transition from representation to history. Maybe

Foucault himself had begun with the conception that I got from

the book, for he said he was writing ‘his book about signs’. That

is according to Daniel Defert, [ D&é , I, p. 34], who says that the

first composition of the book about signs was finished in Tunisia

over Christmas 1964. But in a letter of 13 February, 1965,

Foucault realized that his book had changed: ‘I’ve not been

talking about signs but about order’.

I myself did not even want to think about what most

impressed people about his book, namely its final marvellous

paragraph announcing the incipient erasure of Man as an object

of knowledge or a topic of discourse. I did not want to think

about it because it seemed to me to be a mistake.

My talk today should perhaps be called not, ‘ Les Mots et les

choses , forty years on’, but ‘ The Order of Things, thirtyfive

years later’. Today, 35 years after I read the book and reacted

negatively to the endofMan thesis, I shall try to say what the

mistake was. It is not a very exciting mistake, and I am sure

others have pointed to the problem long ago. But first I would

like to say a little about the preceding, lesser, blockbuster, the

book on madness. My last personal remark in this overly

Mots et les choses, 40 years on

personal introduction is that I was given the English

abridgement, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in

the Age of Reason , while I was working in Uganda, probably

early 1968, but maybe late 1967, the year in which it was first

published in London by the Tavistock Press. I was bowled over

by it, and thus was primed for the larger blockbuster,

archaeology in full spate. By the way, the Tavistock Press, which

I have now mentioned twice, was the publishing arm of

Tavistock House, a venerable London institution for

psychotherapy, hospitable to new ideas, and which was then a

base for the antipsychiatry movement.

I had intended to talk today in some detail about the structure

of the last few chapters of The Order of Things , but gradually my

plan changed. I shall say more about the earlier big book about

madness, published in 1961.

3 The timing of Folie et Déraison

The big book, as I shall continue to call it, was published in

1961. The French wars of the 1950s in Vietnam and Algeria had

been lost, and the Republic had put them behind it. The sixties

were the most fertile decade of French intellectual life in the

twentieth century. In addition to the list of names cited by

Defert, we recall that during that decade Gilles Deleuze

published seven of his books, and Jacques Derrida established

himself. Foucault’s work on madness was one of the first

flowerings of this unique decade.

1961 also marks the critical rethinking of madness in the

English speaking world. There was the polemical assault on

psychiatry by Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness. Erving

Goffman, one of the greatest of sociologists, published Asylums ,

Hacking Ian - Les Mots et les choses Forty years on.pdf

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