Christopher O'Neill

According to biographer Benoît Peeters, Jacques Derrida was known to refer to the philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem as his “philosophical superego”. Drawing upon archival material and their respective work on the philosophy of education and of the living, we examine the deeply entwined philosophical and institutional trajectories of these two philosophers - from Derrida’s time in Canguilhem’s seminar room in the 1950s, through to Canguilhem’s late writing in the 1990s. While Canguilhem was profoundly critical of Derrida’s attention to writing as a philosophical problematic, and of his proposals for counter-programming the university, they shared a congruent commitment to the survival of the teaching of philosophy amidst upheavals within the French academy, science, and society. NB: This is the Author’s Original Manuscript (AOM) of a journal article which will be published by Taylor and Francis in Angelaki as: O’Neill C & Marian J (2026) Canguilhem as Derrida’s “Philosophical Superego”: Vitalism, Writing, and the Survival of Philosophy, Angelaki, Vol 31, No 6.| There are revisions between this and the final version of the article, including to the paper’s title.

***NOTE: An open access copy of Foucault's 'Message or Noise?', which this article discusses, was published in Volume 39(1) of the journal Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy*** “Message or Noise?” is a short but highly suggestive essay, in which Michel Foucault takes up the question of medical thought and practice through the frame of information-theory – one of the few occasions throughout his enormous oeuvre in which he directly engages with the question of the computational. Despite being included as text 44 of the Dits et Écrits, the piece has not before been translated into English, and has led a somewhat subterranean life within Foucault’s reception. Amidst a renewed interest in the impact of cybernetics and information theory on French structuralist and post-structuralist thought, and indeed within something of a neocybernetic turn in critical theory tout court, the significance of the piece comes into focus – even if Foucault’s analysis is perhaps conducted in an ambiguous or somewhat ironic frame. Here I establish the context of its publication, reception, and place in contemporary debates surrounding information theory in the French academy, especially in relation to the more anxious critique of information theory offered by Foucault’s mentor Georges Canguilhem. I also consider the significance of new archival resources which show Foucault was an attentive reader of developments in information theory and cybernetics from even very early in his career, and suggest some potential future research paths regarding Foucault and information theory towards which “Message or Noise?” gestures.

While the Quantified Self has often been described as a contemporary iteration of Taylorism, this article argues that a more accurate comparison is to be made with what Anson Rabinbach has termed the “European Science of Work.” The European Science of Work sought to modify Taylor’s rigid and schematic understanding of the laboring body through the incorporation of insights drawn from the rich European tradition of physiological studies. This “softening” of Taylorist methods had the effect of producing a greater “isorhythmia” or synchronicity between the bodily rhythms of workers and those of the mode of production itself and was embraced by employers as a way to dampen worker militancy. Through a discursive analysis of the promotion of sensor analytics by management consultants VoloMetrix and Humanyze, I argue that the contemporary quantification of the workplace represents a similar project of “soft domination,” as the intimate, bottom-up mode of surveillance it fosters seeks to more closely mold workers’ physiological and social rhythms to the structure of the workplace and the working day.

Here I consider Georges Canguilhem's remarkable essay ‘On Science and Counter-Science’ (1971) as a reflection on both the life and the philosophy of his departed friend Jean Hyppolite. I begin by suggesting that Canguilhem's essay takes up and critiques Hyppolite's critique of empirical reason in Logic and Existence (1953). Drawing upon materials from the Canguilhem archives, I then demonstrate that Canguilhem composed the 1971 essay by returning to and drawing from a seminar he gave in 1955–56 on ‘Science and Error’. I consider the significance of this ‘return’ as a kind of memento mori. In ‘On Science and Counter-Science’ Canguilhem pursues a vivid account of the significance of error within (scientific) reason, as caught between the twin poles of Cartesian correction and Nietzschean affirmation. In his refusal to choose between these poles, Canguilhem affirms the restless vital quality of the trace of the concept, which destabilises the perfection of death and the absolute.