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5 Un écart infime (Part I) Foucault’s Critique of the Concept of Lived-Experience (Vécu) In 1984, at the end of his life, 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, 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. Clearly, one could just as well say that phenomenology consists in the immanence of the concept in life. Yet just as clearly, Foucault thinks that what Canguilhem was doing with the concept of life was radically different from the phenomenological concept 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). Here I intend to examine this difference between le vécu (‘‘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 chapter 9 of Words and Things, ‘‘Man and 57 His Doubles.’’3 Then I am going to construct the positive logic of Foucault’s relation of immanence by means of another text, contemporaneous with Words and Things: This Is Not a Pipe.4 As we will see, the critique of the concept of vécu is based on the fact that the relationship in vécu is a mixture (un mélange), which closes un écart infime. Conversely, Foucault’s conception 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 pluralism,’’ within, in other words, a multiplicity.5 Lived-Experience (le Vécu) in Merleau-Ponty In chapter 9, 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, more particularly, to Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Thus it is probable that Foucault, in chapter 9, is thinking of the early Merleau-Ponty, the Merleau-Ponty of the Phenomenology of Perception. Foucault’s use of the word écart, to which we shall return, 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 shall remain with the Merleau-Ponty of the Phenomenology of Perception .6 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.’’ In the chapter called ‘‘The Phenomenal Field,’’ for example, 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).7 Yet he uses the word as a noun—le vécu—only once (so far as I know). In the chapter called ‘‘Space,’’ 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 analysis of intersubjectivity in the Phenomenology of Perception (PhP 411 / 358). Here ‘‘lived solipsism’’ (solipsisme vécu) is defined by selfgivenness (PhP 411 / 358), but...

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