Recent French Thought at the Intersection of Culture, Subjectivity, and Psychopathology

Recent French Thought at the Intersection of Culture, Subjectivity, and Psychopathology Louis Sass (bio) Keywords Durkheim, Mauss, Foucault, individualism, autonomy French thought no longer enjoys the kind of prominence in the Anglophone world that it did in most of the last half of the twentieth century, a time when Sartre and Camus, then Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, and Derrida (to mention only the names most familiar to North American ears) exercised a decisive influence on innovative work in literary and cultural theory, the human and social sciences, and on social thought more generally. It would be a mistake, however, to exaggerate the degree to which this represents either a decline in the actual influence of twentieth century French thinkers or an enervation of contemporary theorizing in France. Derridean deconstruction and Foucauldian power/knowledge analyses have, for example, not been transcended so much as incorporated as part of the standard armamentarium of many thinkers in the English-speaking world. The impact of other major figures of the recent past, notably Lacan and Deleuze, is now more prominent than ever in certain fields, including film and gender studies. Contemporary developments in France over the last couple of decades or so are less well-known to most Anglophone readers. There is, however, considerable intellectual ferment and innovation that deserves to have a wide audience as well as a profound impact in the English-speaking world. The present special issue of Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology (PPP) introduces recent French perspectives, or perspectives on French thought, that are of special relevance to readers interested in theoretical and philosophical issues at the intersection of psychiatry, clinical psychology, and psychopathology with culture and society. There is a strong Anglophone tradition of writing on the interactions of symptoms and culture; this issue of PPP foregrounds some of the more distinctive French contributions to these and related concerns. In this special issue, we make no claim to encompass all the major current French developments at this particular interdisciplinary nexus. [End Page 279] That would be an impossible task for an intellectual culture as vibrant and diverse as France—and where intellectual critique has often been allied intimately with various social movements. We only wish to bring out two themes that can be viewed as having particular importance, without claiming they represent the most dominant or mainstream views in contemporary France. The theme most prominently represented in this issue involves a return to an earlier tradition of French social thought, largely grounded in the work of Émile Durkheim (1858–1917, one of the founding fathers of sociology), his nephew, the anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1872–1950), and the Indianist and anthropologist of individualism, Louis Dumont (1911–1998). This trend has affinities but also important differences from later, post-structuralist developments, especially as dominated by the thought of Michel Foucault (see below). The second theme—sometimes in tension with the first—is a revising of our understanding of some of the prominent post-structuralists, particularly Foucault and Lacan, such that their perspectives, now liberated from certain polemical polarizations, need no longer be placed so dramatically in opposition to their predecessors, especially those associated with phenomenology and existentialism (but also, perhaps, Durkheim, as indicated below). The primary focus of the four main texts featured here is on the nature of human subjectivity, self-hood, and psychopathology, especially in modernity, as these are interwoven with or even constituted by more encompassing sociocultural institutions and frameworks of understanding. Themes of special relevance include the nature and challenges of modern individualism, with its promotion of the sense of interiority and the autonomy ideal, together with the challenges and forms of psychopathology that seem to accompany the near-universalizing of this condition and this ideal. What might be termed the intermeshing of selfhood (or subjecthood) and society is, in fact, something of a French specialty. It was a crucial theme for Durkheim (1969), Mauss (1985), and Dumont (1986) as well as for Foucault and Lacan, among others. Work on this topic illustrates a distinctly French sort of synthesizing ambition, a blurred genre that is difficult to classify in standard disciplinary terms: it brings sociology and social history together with cultural anthropology, and may include, as...