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Notes after Foucault
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2024
Extract
’ . . . the slightest alteration in the relation between man and the signifier . . . changes the whole course of history by modifying the lines which anchor his being.
It is in precisely this way that Freudianism is seen to have founded an intangible but radical revolution. No need to collect witnesses to the fact: everything involving not just the human sciences, but the destiny of man, politics, metaphysics, literature, art, advertising, propaganda, and through these even the economy, everything has been affected.
The original ‘slightest alteration’ underlying Freud’s intangible but radical revolution can be conveniently dated to 1898, when Freud, travelling to Herzegovina, turned to ask a travelling companion whether he had ever seen the famous frescoes of the ‘Four Last Things’ in Orvieto Cathedral, painted by------: the painter’s name would not come; ‘Botticelli’ and ‘Boltraffio’ came to mind instead. Freud’s account of why he had failed to recall the right name, ‘Signorelli’, contains the core of his later theories. ‘Signorelli’ had been replaced through a series of transformations: ‘Signor-’ into ‘Herr’, recalling both Herzegovina-and-Bosnia and an anecdote about attitudes to death and sex in which the sentence ‘Sir (Herr), what is there to be said?’ had been the punch-line. This anecdote had linked to an earlier incident when Freud, while staying at Trafoi in the Tyrol, had heard of a patient’s suicide because of an incurable sexual disorder. Thus, the ‘forgotten’ ‘Signorelli’ produced ‘Herzegovina-and-Bosnia’, ‘Bo-snia’ conflated with ‘-elli’ to produce ‘Bo-ttic-elli’, ‘Herzegovina’, via ‘Herr’, indirectly produced ‘Trafoi’, which conflated with ‘Bo-snia’ to produce ‘Bo-l-traffio’.
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- Copyright © 1941 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
Footnotes
page 251 note 1
This article began as a review of Michel Foucault's Les mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines, Gallimard, 1966; English translation: The Order of Things, Tavistock, 1970.
References
page 251 note 2 Lacan, L'instance de la lettre dans l'inconscient, ou la raison depuis Freud, Ecrits, Editions du Seuil, 1966, p. 527.
page 252 note 1 Cf. Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Standard Edition, Vol. VI, ch. I.
page 253 note 1 Cf. Lacan, Fonction et champ de la parole et du language en psychanalyse; L'instance de la lettre …; Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je, in Ecrits; Le stade du miroir is translated in New Left Review, 51. For the philosophical context and history behind Lacan's de‐centring of the subject, cf. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: an essay on interpretation, tr. D. Savage, Yale U.P. 1970, pp. 42–55.
page 253 note 2 Levi‐Strauss, Mythologiques I: Le Cru et le cuit, 1964, ‘Ouverture’.
page 253 note 3 Lacan, L'instance de la lettre.
page 254 note 1 Levi‐Strauss, Anthropologie structurale, 1958, ch. 11.
page 254 note 2 Histoire de la folie à l'Age Classique, Plon, 1961, tr. R. Howard, Madness and Civilisation, Tavistock, 1967. Cf. also Naissance de la clinique: une archéologie du regard médical, P.U.F.
page 255 note 1 In the late sixteenth century, Paris contained 30,000 ‘beggars’ in a total population of 100,000; by 1650 a large part of this indigent population had been evicted or forced into work, but the 1656 Decree still resulted in the confinement of about 6,000.
page 258 note 1 The closest Foucault comes to summary is in pp. 214–221 (ET, pp. 200–208).
page 258 note 2 Foucault examines his own method in L'Archéologie du savoir, Gallimard, 1970.
page 259 note 1 Les Mots et les choses, p. 14 (ET, p. xxii).
page 259 note 2 Le temps logique et I'assertion de certitude anticipée: un nouveau sophisme, Cahiers d'Art (1945), pp. 32–42.
page 260 note 1 Cf. Louis Althusser, Freud et Lacan, La Nouvelle Critique, December, 1964/January, 1965.
page 260 note 2 Cf. my article in New Blackfriars, February, 1971.
page 261 note 1 The original version of this famous incident is in Century Magazine 23 (November, 1881).
page 261 note 2 MacIntyre, Against the Self‐Images of the Age, Duckworth 1971, chs. 15 and 16.
page 261 note 3 Cf. the connections between Levi‐Strauss's and Marcel Mauss's work.
page 262 note 1 Cf. ‘I'd be quite ready to say: let's drop chapter XIX out of Insight and put it inside theology’, interview in Clergy Review, June 1971, p. 426.
page 262 note 2 Cf. Curran, Christian conversion in the writings of Bernard Lonergan, in Foundations of Theology: papers from the International Lonergan Congress 1970, ed. McShane, Macmillan, 1971.
page 262 note 3 Lonergan, Dimensions of Meaning, Collection, 1967, ch. 16.
page 262 note 4 Cf. C. Davis, Loncrgan and the teaching church, in Foundations of Theology.
page 262 note 5 Eagleton, Faith and revolution, New Blackfriars, April, 1971.
page 262 note 6 The problem of ‘certainty’, of course, was the final pre‐occupation of Wittgenstein, cf. On Certainty, 1969.
page 263 note 1 Van Buren, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel, 1963, ch. II.
page 263 note 2 Dewart, The Foundations of Belief, 1969, Lonergan. The dehellenization of dogma, Theological Studies, June, 1967. Meynell, On dogmas and world‐views, New Blackfriars, October, 1970.
page 263 note 3 The study of ‘Comparative Religion’ can, perhaps, contribute to theology (as distinct from sociology) only if it tackles the ‘epistemic’ differences?
page 263 note 4 Some recent (unpublished) essays by Sebastian Moore are the only English theology I know to be influenced by Lacan.