RIPh 35_f1_8-28 8/2/05 2:37 PM Page 11 UN ECART INFIME (PART I): FOUCAULT’S CRITIQUE OF THE CONCEPT OF LIVED-EXPERIENCE (VÉCU ) by LEONARD LAWLOR The University of Memphis ABSTRACT In this essay, I start from Foucault’s last text, his “Life: Experience and Science.” Speaking of Canguilhem, Foucault makes a distinction between “le vécu” (lived-expe- rience) and “le vivant” (the living). I then examine this difference between “le vécu” (lived-experience) and “le vivant” (the living); that is, I examine the different logics, we might say, of immanence that each concept implies. To do this, I reconstruct the “cri- tique” that Foucault presents of the concept of vécu in the ninth chapter of The Order of Things (Les Mots et les choses): “Man and His Doubles.” I try to show how this cri- tique applies to the early Merleau-Ponty, the Merleau-Ponty of the Phenomenology of Perception. Then, I construct the positive logic of Foucault’s relation of immanence by means of another text, which is contemporaneous with Les Mots et les choses: This is not a Pipe. The critique of the concept of vécu is based on the fact that the relationship in vécu is a mixture (un mélange) that closes “un écart infime.” Conversely, Foucault’s con- ception of the relationship in “le vivant” is one that dissociates and keeps “l’écart infime” open. At the end, I suggest, through three “landmarks,” how Foucault’s cri- tique might be applied to the later Merleau-Ponty. This essay is Part I of a trilogy on Merleau-Ponty and Foucault. Part II concerns Merleau-Ponty’s “mixturism,” while Part III concerns “the blind spot” in Foucault. These three texts complete the work necessary to open the problem of memory and life. At the end of his life in 1984, Foucault revised the introduction he had written in 1978 for the English translation of Georges Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological. Foucault gave no title to the original introduction, but in 1984 he gave it the simple title: “Life: Experience and Science.”1 Here, Foucault tried to show that Canguilhem “wants to re-discover... what of the concept is in life” (VES, 773–74/475; Foucault’s emphasis). For Canguilhem, but also for Foucault himself as well, we must think that the concept is immanent in—“dans”—life.2 What is at issue in immanence is the logic of this relation between concept and life. Now, clearly, one could just as well say that phe- nomenology consists in the immanence of the concept in life. Yet, just Research in Phenomenology,35 © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands 2005 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 08:30:01AM via free access RIPh 35_f1_8-28 8/2/05 2:37 PM Page 12 12 as clearly, Foucault thinks that what Canguilhem was doing with the concept of life was radically different from the phenomenological con- cept of life. In fact, this is what Foucault says at the end of his revised introduction: “It is to this philosophy of sense, of the subject, of lived- experience [le vécu] that Canguilhem has opposed a philosophy of error, of the concept, of the living [le vivant] as another way of approaching the notion of life” (VES, 776/477). Now what I intend to do here is examine this difference between “le vécu”3 (lived-experience) and “le vivant” (the living); that is, I intend to examine the different logics, we might say, of immanence that each concept implies. To do this, I am going to reconstruct the “critique” that Foucault presents of the concept of vécu in the ninth chapter of The Order of Things (Les Mots et les choses): “Man and His Doubles.”4 Then, I am going to construct the positive logic of Foucault’s relation of immanence by means of another text, which is contemporaneous with Les Mots et les choses: This is not a Pipe.5 As we are going to see, the critique of the concept of vécu is based on the fact that the relationship in vécu is a mixture (un mélange) that closes “un écart infime.” Conversely, Foucault’s concep- tion of the relationship—here we must use the word “vivant”—in “le vivant” is one that dissociates and keeps “l’écart infime” open. Perhaps I will give my conclusion away if I say that, for Deleuze—whom we must also keep in mind here—immanence is defined by a kind of dualism, a dualism that “is a preparatory distribution within a plural- ism,” within, in other words, a multiplicity.6 I. Lived-Experience ( le vécu) in Merleau-Ponty In chapter nine, Foucault names no particular philosopher when he criticizes the concept of vécu. But we know from “Life: Experience and Science” that, for Foucault, the side of the subject and le vécu refers to phenomenology, and more particularly, to Sartre and Merleau- Ponty. Thus, it is probable that Foucault, in chapter nine, is thinking of the early Merleau-Ponty, the Merleau-Ponty of the Phenomenology of Perception.7 Foucault’s use of the word “écart” also makes us think of the Merleau-Ponty of The Visible and the Invisible. Below, I shall turn to the later Merleau-Ponty. But here at the beginning, we are going to remain with the Merleau-Ponty of the Phenomenology of Perception for the time being.8 On the very first page of the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty speaks of le vécu, and throughout the Phenomenology the word modifies the word monde, “world.” For example, in the chapter Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 08:30:01AM via free access RIPh 35_f1_8-28 8/2/05 2:37 PM Page 13 ’ - 13 called “The Phenomenal Field,” Merleau-Ponty says that “the first philosophical act therefore would be that of returning to the lived- world on this side of the objective world” (PhP, 69/57).9 Yet, he uses the word as a noun—“le vécu”—only twice. The first time occurs in the chapter called “Space”; here he says “lived-experience [le vécu] is really lived by me . ., but I can live more things that I can think of [ plus de choses que je m’en représente]. What is only lived is ambivalent” (PhP, 343/296; my emphasis). For Merleau-Ponty, ambivalence is the crucial characteristic of vécu. And this characteristic guides his analy- sis of intersubjectivity in the Phenomenology of Perception, which is where he uses “le vécu” for the second time, in the chapter called “Others and the Human World.” Here “le vécu” is defined by self-givenness (PhP, 411/358); but, this self-givenness is also given (PhP, 413/360). In other words, the active is also passive. In this formula we can see the importance of the positive affirmation in the “is.” This positive affirmation is the heart of ambivalence. Now, these two uses of “le vécu” in the Phenomenology of Perception depend of course on Merleau-Ponty’s appro- priation of Husserl’s concept of Fundierung.10 In the chapter called “The Cogito,” Merleau-Ponty speaks of the relation between founding (le fon- dant) and founded (le fondé) as one that is “equivocal” (équivoque), since “every truth of fact is a truth of reason, every truth of reason is a truth of fact” (PhP, 451/394; my emphasis).11 Merleau-Ponty also says that the relation of matter and form is a relation of Fundierung: “The form integrates the content to the point that it appears to end up being a simple mode of the form . but reciprocally... the content remains as a radical contingency, as the first establishment or the foun- dation of knowledge and action.... It is this dialectic of form and content that we have to restore...” (PhP, 147–48/127). We can now summarize what we see in Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “le vécu.” For Merleau-Ponty, “le vécu” is ambivalent or equivocal—it is, we could say, a mixture, un mélange—because the content of experience, le sol, as Merleau-Ponty also says, becomes, is integrated into, the form of expression. This relation would have to be formulated as a positive affirmation; the copula indicates the sameness of things related. We know, however, that the logic of the Fundierung relation in Merleau- Ponty is not yet complete. Since he calls it a dialectic, it must involve some sort of negation. We shall return to the question of negation in a moment. Now let us turn to Foucault’s critique of the concept of vécu in Les Mots et les choses.12 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 08:30:01AM via free access RIPh 35_f1_8-28 8/2/05 2:37 PM Page 14 14 II. The Analysis of Lived-Experience (Vécu) Is a Discourse with a Mixed Nature It is well known that this chapter—chapter nine, “Man and His Doubles”—contains Foucault’s critique of modern humanism. The chapter therefore focuses on man (and not on the human being). Foucault defines man, of course, as a double; he is at once an object of knowledge and a subject that knows (MC, 323/312). Man (and again not the human being) is what occupies, as Foucault says, this “ambigu- ous position.” The entire critique of humanism unfolds, for Foucault, from this designation of man as “ambiguous,” a designation that recalls Merleau-Ponty (but perhaps not Sartre, at least not the Sartre that Merleau-Ponty portrays in Adventures of the Dialectic). For Foucault, the ambiguity consists in two senses of finitude. In one sense, finitude con- sists in the empirical positivities, the empirical contents of “work, life, and language,” which tell man that he is finite (MC, 326/315).