PROBLEMATIZING THE PROBLEMATIC

Abstract

In this article, I re-examine the relationship between the thoughts of contemporaneous and associated late twentieth-century French philosophers Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, through the prism of the notion of the problem. I discuss the philology of the use of the noun “problematic” in French philosophy in relation to Foucault and Althusser’s use of it, concluding that while Althusser makes this a term of art in his thought, Foucault does not make any particular use of this concept. I nonetheless consider the possibility of the existence of a similar notion under a different name, episteme, in Foucault’s thought, but conclude that this is a distinct notion from Althusser’s “problematic.” I then consider Foucault’s later, idiosyncratic notion of problematization and its possible relation to Althusser’s conceptual framework. I conclude that, despite divergent vocabularies, Althusser and Foucault do have a common problematic and approach to problematization, though Foucault also problematizes aspects of Althusser’s problematic, effectively taking problematization a step further.

Keywords:

• Althusser
• Foucault
• Marxism
• problematic
• problematization

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under Grant FT140101020.

1 That said, there is some indication that this (over)valuation is much more general for Althusser. His autobiography, The Future Lasts a Long Time, begins with his recollection of the occasion in 1980 when Althusser killed his wife, Hélène. This episode is an obvious choice to begin the book with: it was the single moment of Althusser’s life which would ever after be most remembered, and his murder of his wife surely dominated every day of his life from that point on, not only because it had separated him from a woman with whom his daily life had been entwined for decades, but because it had also caused his separation from two institutions, the École Normale and the French Communist Party, with which his association had been scarcely less close. But in this moment of realizing he had killed his wife, he is reminded of Martin, apparently so forcefully that he was driven to rearrange his wife’s corpse so as to resemble the scene of Martin’s suicide. Though Martin was younger than Althusser, the older man was taken prisoner during the Second World War and spent most of the war in a prison camp, hence Martin started at the École Normale before Althusser, during the war, and despite a sojourn of his own in Germany as a labourer, remained ahead in his studies. According to Althusser, Martin had introduced him to Cavaillès’s and Canguilhem’s thought (The Future Lasts 183), and also explained Jacques Lacan to him (332). Knox Peden (101) indicates that Althusser saw Martin as the decisive influence leading him to Marxism, the explicitly defining intellectual commitment of Althusser’s life.

2 The Grand Larousse de la langue française locates the origin of problématique with Albert Camus in 1951. One indeed does find the term – once – in his 1951 book L’Homme revolté. But Bachelard had used the term as early as 1949. I can find no trace of the term in Bachelard’s works before that date, nor indeed in Camus’s (though in neither case can I claim to have conducted an entirely exhaustive search of their writings). Peden (297) reports that Balibar suggests that Heidegger is the origin of Martin’s concept – though Peden and/or Balibar do not specify any connection to any specific concept in Heidegger. Maniglier is at pains, however, to distinguish the concept from Heidegger. Yet there is at least one user of the word in French philosophy approximately as early as Bachelard, namely Paul Ricoeur – I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out to me Ricoeur’s early usage of the term.

3 This discussion occurs in the context of Foucault’s first Collège de France lecture of 1983, but the precise formulation in terms of “problematization” does not occur in the published version of the lectures (Government of the Self and Others 12). Rather, it is to be found in a re-edited version which was published during Foucault’s lifetime, in May 1984, as “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?” [“What is Enlightenment?” – one of multiple texts of Foucault’s on the common theme to bear this name], and translated into English multiple times; the quotation here is from a text translated as “What is Revolution?” 85.