Samuel Talcott

Cet article répond aux critiques de Latour selon lesquelles Canguilhem, vénérant la science, était incapable d’en écrire l’histoire. Je soutiens, au contraire, que Canguilhem a poursuivi une philosophie critique qui cherche les limites de diverses pratiques, y compris celles des rationalités et idéologies scientifiques. Bien qu’il défende l’efficacité d’une pratique médicale scientifiquement informée, il en identifie également les limites en interprétant les mouvements anti-médicaux comme des réponses aux échecs d’une médecine considérée comme infaillible parce que scientifique. Pour Canguilhem, la pratique médicale doit être comprise en elle-même plutôt que considérée comme une application de connaissances scientifiques. En conséquence, il s’intéresse aux sciences dans leur rapport à la pratique médicale. Pour répondre en détail à l’accusation de Latour, cet article étudie la préoccupation fondamentale de la philosophie critique de Canguilhem. S’il s’agissait d’établir quelque vérité, valeur par excellence de la science selon Canguilhem, alors il semble que la critique serait valable. Mais en considérant attentivement l’histoire de ses projets et de ses réalisations telle que racontée dans son discours de réception de la médaille d’or du CNRS en 1987, cet article soutient au contraire que sa philosophie critique ne vénère pas la science, mais trouve son orientation ailleurs. En accordant une attention particulière à son intérêt constant pour l’erreur, et à sa distinction entre l’erreur intellectuelle et les essais et erreurs de la vie, je soutiens que sa philosophie critique s’intéresse en fin de compte à l’action et à la promotion du courage requis par la vie humaine.

This paper resists the virality of contemporary paranoia by turning to “French epistemology”, a philosophical ethos that embraces uncertainty and complexity by registering the transformative impact of scientific knowledge on thought. Despite its popular uses describing phenomena of communication today, the idea of virality comes from biomedicine. This paper, therefore, investigates the extent to which an epidemiological concept of viral transmission—the disease vector—can comprehend and encourage new possibilities of thought beyond paranoia. Briefly, I attempt to analyze thought as a vector. I pursue this by examining Delaporte’s important, but neglected, study of the 1832 Parisian cholera epidemic. First elucidating his reconstruction of the ways tentative epistemological progress intertwined with and supported projects of working-class and colonial control. My vectorial analysis then considers how his argument infects contemporary readers with doubts that undo the bases of paranoia. I pursue this analysis further via a methodological examination of Delaporte’s study as both carrier of predecessors’ methods and host in which they alter, becoming newly infectious. I conclude by reflecting on this formulation of thought as disease vector and what Delaporte’s singular treatment of the problem of error reveals about an ethos committed to registering the impact of knowledge on thought.

Examining Georges Canguilhem’s enduring attention to the problem of error, from his early writings to Michel Foucault’s first major responses to his work, this pathbreaking book shows that the historian of science was also a centrally important philosopher in postwar France. Samuel Talcott elucidates Canguilhem’s contributions by drawing on previously neglected publications and archival sources to trace the continuity of commitment that led him to alter his early anti-vitalist, pacifist positions in the face of political catastrophe and concrete human problems. Talcott shows how Canguilhem critically appropriated the philosophical work of Alain, Bergson, Bachelard, and many others while developing his own distinct writings on medicine, experimentation, and scientific concepts in an ethical and political endeavor to resist alienation and injustice. And, while suggesting Canguilhem’s sometimes surprising philosophical importance for a range of younger thinkers, the book demonstrates Foucault’s own critical allegiance to Canguilhem’s spirit, techniques, and investigations.

This review of the long-awaited English translation and edition of Pierre Klossowski’s Living Currency starts with a comparison of its historical context and our own in order to consider why this book remains important today. I support this comparison by examining its account of the “moral power” of industrial society to elicit the participation of the very people it exploits in their own exploitation. In short, Klossowski understands that this regime is based upon an affective arrangement that makes us, even those of us who protest against it, into its ever-renewed source. Despite the apparent inescapability of this regime that is us, I suggest that Klossowski’s parodic utopia, in which the body becomes living currency, follows Georges Bataille to offer an ethics of the general economy that might, perhaps, enable us to subvert it and develop new ways of relating to ourselves and others. Careful consideration of the difficulties this translation encounters in a letter Michel Foucault sent to Klossowski, allows me to conclude by questioning how we are to interpret his book and this new edition.

This paper questions the widespread assumption that education can and should mold students to socially desirable ends. It proceeds by sketching an important part of the intellectual history informing Foucault’s genealogy of this assumption’s emergence in a disciplinary society. This history involves Georges Canguilhem, Foucault’s elective master. And in the relation between the writings of master and student, we find a different exemplification of education, namely, as a thoroughly dialogical and philosophical activity undertaken for the sake of freedom. Examining this historical relation also: 1) establishes Canguilhem’s international importance as a philosopher because of his role in the 1953 UNESCO report on The Teaching of Philosophy; 2) helps clarify Foucault’s understanding of philosophical activity as problematization and his understanding of normativity; 3) helps think about education and the history of philosophy without looking for master theorists, but rather philosophical schools.

This paper questions the widespread assumption that education can and should mold students to socially desirable ends. It proceeds by sketching an important part of the intellectual history informing Foucault’s genealogy of this assumption’s emergence in a disciplinary society. This history involves Georges Canguilhem, Foucault’s elective master. And in the relation between the writings of master and student, we find a different exemplification of education, namely, as a thoroughly dialogical and philosophical activity undertaken for the sake of freedom. Examining this historical relation also: 1) establishes Canguilhem’s international importance as a philosopher because of his role in the 1953 UNESCO report on The Teaching of Philosophy; 2) helps clarify Foucault’s understanding of philosophical activity as problematization and his understanding of normativity; 3) helps think about education and the history of philosophy without looking for master theorists, but rather philosophical schools.

This paper considers the theoretical circumstances that urged Michel Foucault to analyse modern societies in terms of biopower. Georges Canguilhem’s account of the relations between science and the living forms an essential starting point for Foucault’s own later explorations, though the challenges posed by the molecular revolution in biology and François Jacob’s history of it allowed Foucault to extend and transform Canguilhem’s philosophy of error. Using archival research into his 1955–1956 course on “Science and Error,” I show that, for Canguilhem, it is inauthentic to treat a living being as an error, even if living things are capable of making errors in the domain of knowledge. The emergent molecular biology in the 1960s posed a grave challenge, however, since it suggested that individuals could indeed be errors of genetic reproduction. The paper discusses how Canguilhem and Foucault each responded to this by examining, among other texts, their respective reviews of Jacob’s The Logic of the Living. For Canguilhem this was an opportunity to reaffirm the creativity of life in the living individual, which is not a thing to be evaluated, but the source of values. For Foucault, drawing on Jacob’s work, this was the opportunity to develop a transformed account of valuation by posing biopower as the DNA of society. Despite their disagreements, the paper examines these three authors as different iterations of a historical epistemology attuned to errancy, error, and experimentation.

There is still a question about what it means to say that Georges Canguilhem was a philosopher of error. This paper, unlike other work on the topic, investigates archival sources and early texts, up to and including the publication of theEssay on Some Problems Concerning the Normal and the Pathologicalin 1943, in order to reveal Canguilhem’s early thoughts on error and to formulate the basic philosophical problem therein, as he understood it. This work reveals a partial transformation of his thinking as he seeks to develop this question through the study of concrete human problems.La question demeure de savoir en quel sens Georges Canguilhem peut être considéré comme un penseur de l’erreur. Cet article, par contraste avec d’autres textes sur le même sujet, s’intéresse aux documents d’archives et à des écrits de jeunesse, jusqu’à l’Essai sur quelques problèmes concernant le normal et le pathologiquede 1943, en vue de mieux comprendre la première pensée de Canguilhem sur l’erreur et de formuler le problème philosophique fondamental auquel elle est associée. Ce travail montre qu’il y a eu une transformation partielle de sa pensée alors qu’il entreprend de répondre à cette question par le biais d’une étude des problèmes humains concrets.