« Foucault et la problématique des origines » : Folie et déraison lu par Althusser
Traduit de l’anglais par Thierry Labica
Warren Montag
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.