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Critical Inquiry
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Introduction to Penser la folie: Essais sur Michel
Foucault
Georges Canguilhem
Why have I agreed to be the first to say a few words on a work published
thirty years ago? It is because, as the third reader of Michel Foucault's
manuscript, I delight in having helped to make it famous. To be more
precise: third reader after Georges Dumezil and Jean Hyppolite, in an
institutional space where the manuscript could pretend to be taken for a
doctoral thesis. I make this qualification out of respect for Maurice Blan-
chot, who claims to have been made aware of it first through the media-
tion of Roger Caillois. It has happened, in the course of my career as
teacher, that I have been taken as capable and culpable of self-satisfaction.
Naturally I am no judge of these judgments. But if there is a moment in
my work as academic about which I am happy, even today, to be able to
flatter myself, it is to have been the reporter on the doctoral thesis of
Michel Foucault. Allow me to forget for an instant that it is thirty years
later and to resituate myself thirty years ago. I was at that time rather
controversial for not holding in high esteem certain schools of psychol-
ogy. I was not, however, totally uneducated on the subject. In 1925-26,
when a classmate of Daniel Lagache at the Ecole Normale, I attended
with him some courses and lectures by Georges Dumas. Later, when a
colleague of Lagache at the Facult6 des Lettres at Strasbourg, removed
at that time to Clermont-Ferrand, I attended a number of his lectures. If
my doctoral thesis in medicine, in 1943, principally concerned problems
287
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288 Georges Canguilhem Introduction to Penser la folie
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Critical Inquiry Winter 1995 289
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