Abstract

Reading of Folie et déraison. In 1963, Althusser gave a lecture on Foucault’s Folie et deraison to his seminar on structuralism. His notes, the only written record of his impassioned encounter with this text, suggest that he was particularly interested in the way Foucault defined culture not on the basis of the values it proclaimed, but through that which it rejected and refused. Althusser distinguished Foucault’s analysis from those of Husserl and Nietzsche, both of whom also theorized the necessary acts of repression by which a culture constitues itself. While Husserl demonstrated the forgetting and concealment of origins, and Nietzsche their destruction, Foucault’s work, according to Althusser, opens the possibility of thinking history without the category of origin, even if Foucault did not entirely escape the transendental temptation.