“Foucault for Psychoanalysis”: Monique David-Ménard’s Kind of Blue

Foucault for psychoanalysis? This is a paradoxical question. Foucault also produced a critique of psychoanalysis, aiming to show that sexuality was not an a-temporal reality, nor a truth eventually discovered by Freud. It was a discursive formation, one among others.

—Eloge des hasards dans la vie sexuelle, 172.

To the philosophers . .

A practicing psychoanalyst and a professor of philosophy, Monique David-Ménard extends a singular proposition to philosophers. She is not the first philosopher to engage the assumptions of psychoanalysis, but hers is a particularly idiosyncratic suggestion for how to think with the analyst’s clinical work, intimate and alien. She has proposed we do so in the company of Gilles Deleuze,¹ and most recently, in Eloge des hasards dans la vie sexuelle (2011) has extended her invitation to think with the clinic through an ingenious reading of Michel Foucault.

As Eloge opens, David-Ménard’s reading of Foucault is far from the scene. Early in the work, we are asked to think with a practice, seemingly in a different register. An analyst finds herself accused of being an obstacle, of opposing the analysand’s wishes in life. In this context, we are asked to think about the blue of a painting in the room where the analysand waits (David-Ménard 2011, 34).

Given the criticisms of psychoanalysis elaborated in the work of Foucault and Deleuze, one might have expected these philosophers to be considered in Eloge in that stead.² Or, one could imagine Foucault playing a role because of his genealogical analysis of the formation of the Oedipus complex.³

Two years after the publication of Deleuze’s Anti-Oedipus, Foucault had, in Abnormal, characterized the desiring space of the family as stimulated in a capillary network of individualizing normalization (Foucault 2003, 257), linked by medicalized and expert concern of which parents became the auxiliaries. They are charged, and charge themselves, with the goals of family health, of preservative and defensive good parenting, and with the conduct of the child’s conduct. Foucault describes the pre-twentieth century emergence of lay and expert preoccupation with the dangers of childhood masturbation. This produces an environment whose intensive scrutiny involves a close “folding of . . . parents’ bodies over . . . children’s bodies” (ibid., 265) in a saturated, hermetic environment stimulating oedipalized desire. This means one can offer a genealogical account of the conditions of formation of the latter. These include a responsibilization of parents, who control for the presence of abnormal sex, advised by new experts (lay, medical, pseudo-scientific) in collective crusades for health and life. Thus there is differentiation through minor gradations of abnormality. Even the specificity of the architectural spaces in which scrutiny is directed plays a role in the hollowing out of the child’s putatively interior psychic-sexual life, the intense object of “palpating” interest (Foucault 1978, 45) in new apparatuses of knowledge-power (Foucault 2003, 327).

Because he presents this as the context in which the “nuclear and substantial family was gradually constituted” (Foucault 2003, 264), along with its oedipal configurations of desire, Foucault emphasizes the contingency of both. Psychoanalysis would be, from his perspective, willfully indifferent to these or other possibilities for genealogical analysis of the apparatus of power, knowledge, and the body, of the repeating configurations of desire that are its special domain of expertise,⁴ and the emergent forms of authority associated with the analyst, described in History of Madness (Foucault 2009) and in Psychiatric Power (Foucault 2006).

Perhaps we’d expect to see David-Ménard, the psychoanalyst, addressing these accounts, but they are neither repudiated in Eloge, nor extensively discussed. Far from rejecting a genealogical analysis of psychoanalysis, she promotes its promise. But this is so in a particular sense.

Necessity and repetition

A particular patient might fear being “mad like her mother.” She might fear being denied, trapped, or annihilated (David-Ménard 2011, 33). She might consider herself somehow denied a lover. She might seem to be denying herself a lover. There’s a degree of necessity in all these variants. Perhaps these...