[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.J.-A.MILLER: I can see you are looking for the devices that will enable you to erase the break that is located with Freud.You recall how at the time when Althusser was proclaiming the Marxian break, you were already there with your eraser.And now Freud is going to go the same way, at any rate I think that's your objective, no doubt within a complex strategy, as you would say.Do you really think you can erase the break between Tertullian and Freud?FOUCAULT: I'll say this, that for me the whole business of breaks and non-breaks is always at once a point of departure and a very relative thing.In The Order of Things, I took as my starting-point some very manifest differences, the trans-formations of the empirical sciences around the end of the eighteenth century.It calls for a degree of ignorance (which I know isn't yours) to fail to see that a treatise of medicine written in 1780 and a treatise of pathological anatomy written in 1820 belong to two different worlds.My problem was to ascertain the sets of transformations in the regime of discourses necessary and sufficient for people to use these words rather than those, a particular type of discourse rather than some other type, for people to be able to look at things from such and such an angle and not some other one.In the present case, for reasons which are conjunctural, since everyone is putting the stress on breaks, I'm saying, let's try to shift the scenery and take as our starting point something else which is just as manifest as the 'break', provided one changes the reference points.One then finds this formidable mechanism emerging—the machinery of the confession, within which in fact psychoanalysis and Freud figure as episodes.((212))J.-A.MILLER: You're constructing a machine which swallows an enormous amount at a time.FOUCAULT: An enormous amount at a time, and then I'll try and establish what the transformations are.J.-A.MILLER: Making sure, of course, that the principal transformation doesn't come with Freud.You'll show, for example, that the focussing of sexuality on the family began prior to Freud, or that—.FOUCAULT: —It seems to me that the mere fact that I've adopted this course undoubtedly excludes for me the possibility of Freud figuring as the radical break, on the basis of which everything else has to be re-thought.I may well attempt to show how around the eighteenth century there is installed, for economic reasons, historical reasons, and so forth, a general apparatus in which Freud will come to have his place.And no doubt I'll show how Freud turned the theory of degeneracy inside out, like a glove—which isn't the usual way of situating the Freudian break as an event in terms of scientificity.J.-A.MILLER: Yes, you like to accentuate the artificial character of your procedure.Your results depend on the choice of reference points, and the choice of reference points depends on the conjuncture.It's all a matter of appearances, is that what you're telling us?FOUCAULT: Not a delusive appearance, but a fabrication.J.-A.MILLER: Right, and so it's motivated by what you want, your hopes, your.FOUCAULT: Correct, and that's where the polemical or political objective comes in.But as you know, I never go in for polemics, and I'm a good distance away from politics.J.-A.MILLER: And what effects do you hope to produce regarding psychoanalysis?FOUCAULT: Well, I would say that in the usual histories one reads that sexuality was ignored by medicine, and above all by psychiatry, and that at last Freud discovered the sexual aetiology of neuroses.Now everyone knows that that isn't true, that the problem of sexuality was massively and manifestly inscribed in the medicine and psychiatry of the nineteenth century, and that basically Freud was only taking literally what he heard Charcot say one evening: it is indeed all a question of sexuality.The strength of psychoanalysis((213))consists in its having opened out on to something quite different, namely the logic of the unconscious.And there sexuality is no longer what it was at the outset.J.-A.MILLER: Certainly.When you say psychoanalysis there, one could say Lacan, couldn't one?FOUCAULT: I would say Freud and Lacan.In other words, the important part is not the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality but The Interpretation of Dreams.J.-A.MILLER: Not the theory of development, but the logic of the signifier.FOUCAULT: Not the theory of development, nor the sexual secret behind the neuroses or psychoses, but a logic of the unconscious.J.-A.MILLER: That's very Lacanian, opposing sexuality and the unconscious.And moreover it's one of the axioms of that logic that there is no sexual relation.FoucAuLT: I didn't know there was this axiom.J.-A.MILLER: It implies that sexuality isn't historical in the sense that everything else is, through and through from the start.There isn't a history of sexuality in the way that there is a history of bread [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]