polish 3(171)’10

sociological
review
ISSN 1231 – 1413

SZYMON WRÓBEL
Polish Academy of Sciences

Foucault Reads Freud:

The Dialogue with Unreason and Enlightenment

Abstract: The title of the essay refers to the famous statement in Foucaults introduction to his History of
Madness where he writes that “we have to do justice to Freud“. The problem, however, is that Foucault’s
philosophy does not seem to do justice to Freud. Foucault’s use of Freud is ambiguous: sometimes he
uses him for purely instrumental purposes (when reconstructing the history of madness and sexuality), but
sometimes—for anthropological purposes signaling Freud’s role in redefining our common humanity and
particularly our relation to language, life and work. The author confronts Foucault’s ambiguous reading
of Freud with the equally ambiguous reading of Foucault by Derrida. Derrida discusses Foucault twice.
Once in the essay Cogito and The History of Madness in which Derrida takes on Foucault’s understanding
of Descartes and his role in the exclusion of madness from the realm of reason. The second time—in his
essay To Do Justice to Freud. Here Derrida disagrees with Foucault whether Freud managed to reestablish
the body’s communication with reason which Descartes destroyed.

Keywords: dialogue; enlightenment; freedom; history; interpretation; justice; pleasure principle; reading;
repressive hypothesis; sexuality; unreason; psychoanalysis.

We must do justice to Freud.

Michel Foucault (1965: 411) 1

Foucault speaks little of Freud in this book [Histoire

de la folie à l’âge classique].
Jacques Derrida (1994)

1 Michel Foucault, 1965, p. 411. Foucault wrote in the book in extenso: “This is why we must do
justice to Freud. Between Freud’s Five Case Histories and Janet’s scrupulous investigations of Psycholog-
ical Healing, there is more than the density of a discovery; there is the sovereign violence of a return.
Janet enumerated the elements of a division, drew up his inventory, annexed here and there, perhaps
conquered. Freud went back to madness at the level of its language, reconstituted one of the essential
elements of an experience reduced to silence by positivism; he did not make a major addition to the list of
psychological treatments for madness; he restored, in medical thought, the possibility of a dialogue with
unreason.”
Foucault comes back also to the sentence in the Preface to Madness and civilization: “One day we must
do justice to Freud, he did not make speak a madness that had genuinely been a language for centuries
[…] he dried it out; he forced its words back to their source, all the way back to that blank region of
auto-implication where nothing is said” (Michel Foucault 1997, p. 102).
272 SZYMON WRÓBEL

Presence of the Name

Michel Foucault has made substantial efforts to divert our attention from the sources
of his inspiration which rested in Freud and were underpinning his lines of thinking.
Instead, we were encouraged to investigate Nietzche’s influence. For reasons that
remain unknown, Foucault preferred to be remembered as a nietzcheanist rather
than freudist. However, Freud’s name is always present in Foucault’s writings and,
as for the volume, it outbids Nietzche by generous marigin. Freud’s name and the
word “psychoanalysis” is constantly inflected in yet new ways, new context and in
shifting histories. Similarly, Foucault is constantly shifting his position in relation to
psychoanalysis, changing in his evaluations and granting it less or more importance.
Right here, I need to confess that it is not my intention to investigate this change-
able nature of Foucault’s ways to psychoanalysis—a rather futile endeavour consider-
ing Foucault’s comittment to philosophy of discontinuation and intermittence. I would
rather inverstigate these swings and sways separately, and see them as symptoms of
our own uncertainty concerning the evaluation of Freud’s work, knowing that the
structure of his work—is no help either. I believe that this examination is significant,
as it allows us to relate Foucault’s ever changing diagnosis of psychoanalysis and his
ever changing bid for the importance of psychoanalytic discourse. In our culture, we
have so far been unable to decide what is the true value of psychoanalysis, and define
role it has played.
Foucault’s approach to psychoanalysis is ambivalent. Foucault hesitates whether
to praise it or to condemn. While in the Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique the
psychoanalitic theory of subject is employed to secretly break up the dialogue between
insanity and unreason, the dialogue essential for the rational consciousness of the
West, already in Les Mots et les choeses Foucault makes of it a critical science, which
releases desire from the bonds of human subjectivity. There is one passage in Les
Mots et les choeses which says: “all this knowledge, within which Western culture had
given itself in one century a certain image of man, pivots on the work of Freud”
(Foulcault 1999). The author of Jenseits des Lustprinzips more than anyone else brings
knowledge of man this close to the model of linguistics and philology, and is the first
one to undertake a breakneck task of bridging the gap between the positive and the
negative, the normal and the pathologic, understandable and the inexpressible, the
meaning and the meaningless. Excerpt from Les Mots et les choeses:
Psychoanalysis and ethnology occupy a privileged position in our knowledge—not because they have
established the foundations of their positivity better than any other human science, and at last accomplished
the old attempt to be truly scientific; but rather because, on the confines of all the branches of knowledge
investigating man, they form an undoubted and inexhaustible treasure-hoard of experiences and concepts,
and above all a perpetual principle of dissatisfaction, of calling into question, of criticism and contestation
of what may seem, in other respects, to be established. Now, there is a reason for this that concerns the
object they respectively give to one another, but concerns even more the position they occupy and function
they perform within the general space of the episteme (Foucault 1992: 432).

In 1966, Foucault saw in psychoanalysis a critical science, directly addressing

the issue of unconsciousness, that is directing our attention to a place by definition
inaccessible to any other theoretical cognition, where we see three elements cross:
 FOUCAULT READS FREUD 273

silent repetition of Death, naked openness of Desire, and language—the expression

of Law. From the standpoint of a certain epistemological trihedron (life, work, and
language, or biology, economy, and philology), the human sciences are seen to be at
once inclusive and exclusive. As for this inclusive exclusion, Freud’s work, to which
Foucault unwaveringly assigns a model that is more philological than biological,
occupies the place of the hinge. Foucault in fact speaks about the place and workings
of a “pivot:” all this knowledge, within which Western culture had given itself in one
century a certain image of man, pivots on the work of Freud, tough without, for all
that, leaving its fundamental arrangement.
At the time of writing, Foucault was particularly interested in the analytic of
finitude and started describing human figure by mixing in the discourses on work,
language and life. In his own words, psychoanalysis is a discipline with a potential
for revealing combination of the above discourses, also in its negative aspect, by
uncovering death where previously only life was seen, exposing desires in place of
desired work results, and declaring the mighty existence of words where others saw
orderly work of grammar.
It was here in Les Mots et les choeses, where psychoanalysis earned description of
anti-science, side by side with ethnology. Foucault returns to this concept in his famous
lectures at the College de France in 1976, published in a larger work: Il faut défendre la
société. In these lectures Foucault compares psychoanalysis to Marxism, claiming that
both types of discourse are rather suspicious forms of knowledge. Foucault turns our
attention to the fact that the scientific knowledge of both Marxism and psychoanalysis
were often questioned. So, is psychoanalysis a science at all?
Maybe we should reverse our traditional way of reasoning, and before we ask: to
what extent Marxism or psychoanalysis resemble scientific practice—that is the rules
by which we establish knowledge and the ways we investigate truth, and even before
we ask about the scientific nature of psychoanalysis, we should perhaps analyse the
sole ambition to possess knowledge, which is implied in all claims to science. Foucault
says:

The question or questions that have to be asked are: What types of knowledge are you trying to disqualify
when you say you are a science? What speaking subject, what discursive subject, what subject of experience
and knowledge are you trying to minorize when you begin to say ‘I speak this discourse, I am speaking
a scientific discourse, and I am a scientist’ (Foucault 2003: 23).

Foucault’s point of view allows certain critique of psychoanalysis and Marxism,

namely their pretence to become science, and their attempts to reach the level of
scientific approval (no matter how it is defined). These efforts, made under the
influence of the academic world in order to provide these forms of knowledge the
framing of positive science, reveal only the will to adjust to the disciplinary regimes
of knowledge and also, that the extensive discourses have internalized some kind of
a reflected—mirrored self (also imposed on a self).
Let me put forward a daring thesis, that big names in human sciences of the
20th century—Freud, Lévi-Strauss, Chomsky, Foucault, but also Piaget, have become
great names because all transgressed the limits of their native discipline—psychiatry,
274 SZYMON WRÓBEL

anthropology, linguistics, history, psychology—and entered the territory of philos-

ophy, the land of total discourse. It does not mean however, that discourses were
non-scientific in nature; what it means, is that they were extensive enough to generate
a dictionary for description of reality, which was no longer subjected to the traditional
methods of verification and refutability.
All of the thinkers concerned, before they pioneered anti-sciences, had first sub-
jected their cognitive efforts to discipline, and had first imposed new scientific methods
in their primary disciplines. Reaching high level of cognitive intensity allowed for the
exteriorisation (and extrapolation) of their discoveries, and sending them out into
new research areas. In this way, they were designing their discourse as a philosophical
undertaking. To say that all those triumphs of the humanities in the 20th Century are
non-scientific, is to otherwise admit that all those accomplishments are in a sense
philosophical. I am pleased to agree with this finding. But on one condition, by
‘philosophical’ character I understand: one intending to proceed beyond verifiable
(falsifiable) empirical knowledge.
It makes damage to Freud to name him a psychologist or a therapist, as we do
in fact know, his field was philosophical anthropology or critical hermeneutics of
culture. Similarly, it makes damage to Lévi-Strauss to classify him as a structural
anthropologist and to limit his achievements to working out few complicated systems
of kinship. The more that we know how far reaching were the observations included
in his major work: La Pensée sauvage. Chomsky’s influence on cognitive psychology
was great, and so was the influence of Foucault on history, or Piaget’s on development
psychology. Still, we know too well that Chomsky’s psycholinguistic project, Foucault’s
archaeology (genealogy), and Piaget’s genetic epistemology, all these projects surpass
fragmented research projects and their aspirations reach out higher. The novelty
of their work was so intense and unexpected that at least at the beginning their
projects were classified as anti-science and counter-science, which destabilised the
system of established and institutional knowledge. At some point this counter-science
receives academic recognition and is gradually assimilated into the system of academic
knowledge. There are however some costs involved.
The tendency to make all systems of knowledge a positive science and the pre-
ponderance to tame counter-discourses relate to a withdrawal and elimination of
those assertions which fall short of academic formula. Is it not the case with academic
psychology, which makes Freud the central figure, yet it conceals the most funda-
mental and revolutionary idea included in the concept of the death drive? Is this
not the case with cultural anthropology, which allows Lévi-Strauss to spin tales on
the logics of myths, but silences his thesis, that “the final aim of human sciences is
not to constitute a man, but to dismember him and find answer to the riddle he is”?
(Lévi-Strauss 1996: 370). What about Foucault, who diagnosed death of a man, yet
he is predominantly perceived as a historian pondering on unwanted and repressed
micro-histories? Finally there is Piaget, whose ideas on accommodation and assimi-
lation are widely shared in psychology classes, but whose ambitious project of saving
unity of human cognition (genetic epistemology) is widely unknown. It seems, that the
surplus meaning, the added value hidden in the work of the above authors is crucial
 FOUCAULT READS FREUD 275

when it comes to assessing their greatness, but paradoxically, it is also distant to the
disciplines which owe them a lot.

Freud in Foucault’s Work: Critical Presence

So there we have Freud as the founder of anti-science calling itself “psychoanaly-

sis.” However, Freud’s name is present in Foucault’s work in yet another form. This
presence, let’s make it clear, is more critical towards the author of Totem and Taboo.
This negative presence relates mainly to two extensive narrations by Foucault—one
relating to insanity and second to sexuality. In both, Freud plays a key role, in a sense
bringing to an end these discourses initiated by the Enlightenment. In Histoire de
la folie à l’âge classique, insanity is deposed. Madness has changed into thoughtless-
ness, with its most primary and most obvious manifestation—stupidity. We no longer
explore madness to find the excess meaning which is on its own the most wonder-
ful source of authentic discourse, the source of double language which exists only in
speech, capable of communicating itself only through a language system, the matrix of
all languages. Instead, in madness today we hear mumbling and unwarranted excess,
which—precisely speaking—says nothing. Madmen in the age of reason are incapable
of generating grammatical speech, they are unable to work productively, and they are
incapable of establishing a lasting family. The exclusion of the figure of madman from
the network of social relations and medicalization of madness have opened the world
to a monologue type of the civilisation of reason, where systematic rationalisation and
normalisation set the new order of things.
In the final message of history of insanity Foucault suggested that psychology is
possible either as a form of critique of modern man, and then it becomes psychiatry
or its version—clinical psychology, or as a self-critique, making of it a methodology
(science about science), but it no longer is psychology (science about man). According
to Foucault, psychology using “language of alienation:”
Always and as of its nature is at the crossroads: It is either to follow a deepened negation of man up to
the final point where love and death are almost inseparable, like day and night, in the eternal rush of
passing seasons, to finish at the point of philosophical craziness , or it is to start once again and again to
match subject and the object, the internal and the external, experience and cognition. It was necessary for
psychology—as it appeared—to follow that second path, but that choice is now denied (Foucault 1965: 376).

Freud’s role in this exclusion and medicalisation is important, he is closing what

Descartes started when he distanced himself from the threat of insanity.
Foucault’s accusation focuses on Freud’s exploitation of the role of a doctor, on
the “exaggeration of doctor’s wonderful thaumaturgical nature,” granting a doctor
“the status of almost a god,” making of a doctor the “exclusive subject” and the
“absolute Vision,” making him “a judge, who punishes and rewards without the need
to issue judgements,” and “a mirror, in which madness turns to itself in a slow motion,
and turns away from itself” (Ibid: 458–459).
Freud’s listening to patients bridges speech and madness, the clue of the treatment
is talking cure, even though he himself goes silent and “does not hear, cannot hear
276 SZYMON WRÓBEL

the voice of unreason, and he cannot read the signs of nonsense”(ibid). He may be
treating some forms of madness, but the sovereign work of unreason is inaccessible
to him. Here, psychoanalysis is not seen as a critical science, contra-science, but
an element of emerging disciplinary system, which will later—with the help of soft
methods—control and pacify life and language of Enlightened man.
This accusatory tone will once again return in the first volume of the Histoire de
la sexualité, where Foucault shall undertake analysis of ‘confession’—beginning from
the rite known from the church and finishing at the doctor’s couch. Only this time
Freud’s work will be placed in the context of the construction of sexual apparatus
and the new biopolitical construction of power typical for the world, where life and
intensification of life becomes more valuable than good and short life. With a special
sentiment, Foucault attributes the so called repressive hypothesis to Freud. According
to this hypothesis, as to the principle power performs repressive functions, suppressing
human drives and forcing them to impose on themselves serious limitations (Marcuse
1966). From this perspective, we see that power is not masked, its work is not secret;
in fact the opposite is true, as the power is dressed up in the costume of excessive
and almighty Superego (das Überich in Freud’s terminology) which is the source of
authority and law, brought into the individual’s focus by the figure of Father, and in
the social context by the figure of the State.
According to repressive hypothesis: (1) The relation between power and sex is
always negative; power uses rejection, exclusion, refusal, suppression, and rarely needs
to mask itself anyhow. (2) Power is a legal factor in sex. Sex is subdued by the regime
of legality and illegality, prohibition and consent. (3) There is only one provision law
applies to sex—it is prohibition and censorship, aiming at the rejection of pleasure: Sex
is supposed to denounce pleasure, and therefore denounce itself. (4) The influence of
power on sex is similarly seen at all levels: at state and family level, from the princes
to fathers, from priests to teachers. In all these places there is the same mechanics of
power.
Foucault contrasts the so called Reich hypothesis—where the mechanism of power
is repression, with Nietzsche’s hypothesis—the foundation of power is in the warring
nature of the powers. Still, Foucault shares the assumption that both hypothesis are
not necessarily contradictory. “Quite credibly—says Foucault—they even seem to
merge: what is repression if not a political result of war, a little like oppression for
classical theory of political rights, which was an abuse of sovereignty in the system of
law” (Foucault 2003). Then, Reich hypothesis does not cancel out Nietzsche’s, and as
a consequence, these two ways of reasoning are not in a state of war.
There are fragments of Histoire de la sexualité: la volonté de savoir which suggest it
is not a novelty for Foucault that the history of western societies in the last couple of
centuries does not reveal the repressive games of power. For example, Foucault says:
“in fact, it is not a novelty that sex is not repressed. It has been confirmed long ago
by psychoanalysts.” Without hesitation however, Foucault accuses psychoanalysts of
contributing to the discoursification of sex on the West and exploitation of repressive
hypothesis. In Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique Foucault suggests that “psychoanal-
ysis, according to Freud’s own definition, is all about lifting prohibitions”(Foucault
 FOUCAULT READS FREUD 277

1977: 97–104). Psychoanalysts knew very well, that the unconscious is to some ex-
tent constituted by power relations, and that to free unconscious language is to lift
the logics of consciousness. Foucault swiftly goes by this “psychoanalytical discovery”
straight to his repression thesis. He does not seem to be worried about the fact that
what he says is probably what Freud and Reich had said long ago, knowing that his
reference is the social body, not an individual.
All Foucault’s assertions relating to Freud may seem controversial to someone who
knows the effort Freud had made to distinguish gender and sexuality. What relates to
gender aims at procreation—says Freud. And what is sexual aims at pleasure. It is only
thanks to this single differentiation that Freud grants himself the privilege of opening
discourse of children’s sexuality. All Foucault’s insinuations concerning Freud may
seem largely controversial for those who are aware of Freud’s intense decoding of
power (relations) and complex relations between Superego and Id, pleasure principle
and all our efforts that are at first glance beyond this principle.
It seems though, that Foucault uses the term “psychoanalysis” instrumentally and
subjects interpretation of his work to his own conceptual construct. In this construc-
tion western culture suffers from a kind of hyper-developed sexuality discourse, theory
of sexuality, that is the science of sexuality (scientia sexualis). On the other hand, the
abundance of articles on sexuality finds its negative reflection in some kind of inhi-
bition of the individual sexuality of every one of us. This inhibition became the core
issue of Freud’s analysis, who begun his work with description of symptoms of hysteria;
where one of the basic symptoms of disorder is forgetting of one’s self and one’s de-
sires, which is all about sexuality. For Foucault, individual’s inability to perceive one’s
desires and the general hyper-knowledge of sexuality in society are not contradictory
trends: theoretical hyper-production in relation to sexuality in western societies was
the effect of shunning sexuality, which has been made at the individual level, in the
subject itself. And so, it opens a question: why for the centuries we Europeans were
yearning for more truth about sex rather than increase of pleasure? (Foucault 1998:
158–159) . This is what makes Freud so important. Freud colligated our will to knowl-
edge with desire and acknowledged that it is the truth about one self and the truth
about one’s sexuality which is the fundamental obsession of man in the West.
In the two final paragraphs of Histoire de la sexualité: la volonté de savoir Foucault
ridicules our human need of freedom and our past reception of Freud’s work:

People will be amused at the reproach of pansexualism that was once aimed at Freud and psychoanalysis.
But the ones who will appear to have been blind will perhaps be not so much those who formulated the
objection as those who discounted it out of hand, as if it merely expressed the fears of an outmoded
prudishness. For the first, after all, were only taken unawares by a process which had begun long before
and by which, unbeknown to them, they were already surrounded on all sides; what they had attributed
solely to the genius of Freud had already gone through a long stage of preparation; they had gotten their
dates wrong as to the establishment, in our society, of a general deployment of sexuality. But the others
were mistaken concerning the nature of the process; they believed that Freud had at last, through a sudden
reversal, restored to sex the rightful share which it had been denied for so long; they had not seen how
the good genius of Freud had placed it at one of the critical points marked out for it since the eighteenth
century by the strategies of knowledge and power, how wonderfully effective he was—worthy of the greatest
spiritual fathers and directors of the classical period—in giving a new impetus to the secular injunction to
study sex and transform it into discourse (Foucault 1998: 139).
278 SZYMON WRÓBEL

In these final pages of the first volume of The History of Sexuality, the accusation
of pansexualism, which was often leveled against psychoanalysis, naturally comes
up. Those most blind in this regard, says Foucault, were not those who denounced
pansexualism out of prudishness. Their only error was to have attributed solely to the
bad genius [mauvais genie] of Freud what had already gone through a long stage of
preparation. The opposite error, the symmetrical lure, corresponds to a more serious
mystification. It is the illusion that could be called emancipator, the aberration of the
Enlightenment, the misguided notion on the part of those who believed that Freud,
the good genius of Freud, had finally freed sex from its repression by power. The good
genius of Freud would thus be worse than the bad one. It would have consisted in
getting itself well placed, in spotting the best place in an old strategy of knowledge
and power.
Freud is thus torn between the good and the bad spirit of Freud, even though Freud
himself does only as much as is expected according to the common perception of the
sexuality issue: he assigns any sex other than heterosexual to psychiatry, children’s
sexuality to pedagogics, marital sex to socialisation and female sex to hysteria. Our
civilisation Freud equips with sex, and links knowledge of one’s sexuality with the
knowledge of one’s identity. The truth about us lays in the truth about our sex.
Let me return to my main concern, who exactly is Freud and what exactly is his
work? Is this work part of anti-science, which by methods of analysis and critique
allows us to directly confront unconsciousness and to awaken it from anthropological
snooze? Maybe it is rather kind of work directly related to, and even akin to modern
apparatus of power, driving madness into the realm of normalization discourse in
psychiatry, and sexuality into the biopolitical machinery invented upon a discovery
power once made; that it no longer relates to people but a population. What about
Freud in Foucault’s work? Is he like Napoleon was to Hegel? A real life fulfilment
of theoretical postulates? Or like Isaac Newton to Kant? A generalisation of certain
local knowledge elevated to the level of the absolute knowledge?
In a short article Nietzsche, Freud, Marx (1990) Foucault claims that the authors of
Der Wille zur Macht, Das Kapital, and Die Traumdeutung all construct new hermeneu-
tics. We find there that: Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche profoundly modified the space
of distribution in which signs can be signs. Moreover, they create a new figure of an
interpreter, whose direction is opposite to the direction of the interpretation itself. 2
“For if the interpreter must go to the bottom himself, like an excavetor, the move-
ment of interpretation is, on the contrary, that of a projection [surplomb], of a more
and more elevated projection, which always leaves depth above it to be displayed in
more and more visible fashion; and depth is now restored as an absolutely superficial
secret” (ibid.: 61). Are we supposed to believe this declaration pointing to yet another
Freud, Freud—the interpreter, who had to turn into the “underground man,” and
like miners and gnomes do, dive into the “goldmine of meanings” in order to save the
interpretation?
2 Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, trans. Alan D. Schrift, in Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan
D. Schrift (ed.), “Transforming the Hermeneutic Context From Nietzsche to Nancy.” Albany: State Uni-
versity of New York Press, Albany, 1990, pp. 55–67.
 FOUCAULT READS FREUD 279

Who Reads What?

It is not my intention to reprimand Foucault and reproach him for unjust reading of
Freud, not much letter-bound as to what had really been said, and for using Freud’s
name for his own intellectual reasons. It is not my intention to reprimand Foucault—
Jacques Derrida did it so much better in the paper “To Do Justice to Freud: The
History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis.” Here, he suggested that despite
his claim that “we must do justice to Freud,” Foucault must have still felt temptation
to do injustice to Freud, and to be little unfair to him. Foucault regularly attempts to
objectify psychoanalysis and to reduce it to what of which he speaks rather than to
what out of which he speaks. 3 The title Derrida has proposed for the reflections about
the history of madness in the age of psychoanalysis, clearly indicates his intentions. It
is no longer a question of the age described by a History of Madness. It is no longer
a question of an epoch or period, such as the classical age, that would, inasmuch as it
is its very object, stand before that history of madness as Foucault writes it. It is a ques-
tion today of the age to which the book itself belongs, the age out of which it takes
place, the age that provides its situation; it is a question of the age that is describing
rather than the age that is described. In the title, “the history of madness” must be in
quotation marks since the title designates the age of book, the History of Madness—as
a book—in the age of psychoanalysis and not the history of madness, of madness itself,
in the age of psychoanalysis, Foucault regularly attempts to objectify psychoanalysis
and to reduce it to that of which he speaks rather than to that out of which he speaks.
What is special interesting for Derrida is the time and historical conditions in which
the book is rooted, those that it takes as its point of departure, and not so much the
time or historical conditions that it recounts and tries in a certain sense to objectify.
Derrida asks: would Foucault’s project have been possible without psychoanalysis,
with which it is contemporary and of which it speaks little and in such an equivocal

3 Jacques Derrida, (1994: 227–266). Derrida relates to Histoire de la folie a l’âge classique on two
ocaasions. First, in a polemic article Cogito and the History of Madness (Jacques Derrida 1978). Here, the
controversy between Foucault and Derrida relates to Descartes, and his role in the exclusion of madness
from the space of reason. In another article, “To Do Justice to Freud”—originally designed as a speech
commemorating the 20th anniversary of publication of The History of Madness—Derrida argues with
Foucault about Freud, and whether Freud managed to rebuild communication with reason previously
excluded by Descartes. What is noteworthy, is that the ‘joust’ between Derrida and Foucault related to the
names and their role in destabilizing historical time. Derrida reading and questioning of Foucault’s book
gives rise to the question: what makes the history of madness possible? Such a question should have led
him toward the situation of psychiatry and psychoanalysis rather than toward a questioning of a reading of
Descartes. But if Derrida substituted Descartes for Freud, it was perhaps not only because of the significant
and strategic place that Foucault confers upon the Cartesian moment in the interpretation of the Great
Confinement and of the Classical age, at least implicitly, because of the role that the reference to a certain
Descartes played in the thought of the time, in the early sixties, as close as possible to psychoanalysis, in
the very element, in truth, of a certain psychoanalysis Lacanian theory. This theory developed around the
question of the subject and the subject of science. Whether it was a question of anticipated certainty and
logical time or of the role of the cogito and of the deceitful God in La science et la verite, Lacan returned
time and again to a certain unsurpassability of Descartes. In 1945, Lacan associated Descartes with Freud
in his Propos sur la causalité psychique and concluded by saying that “neither Socrates, nor Descartes, nor
Marx, nor Freud, can be surpassed insofar as they led their research with this passion for unveiling whose
object is the truth” (Jacques Lacan,Propos sur la causalité psychique (1946), in: Jacques Lacan 1966: 193).
280 SZYMON WRÓBEL

or ambivalent manner in the book? Does the project owe psychoanalysis anything?
Would the debt, if it had been contracted, be essential? Or would it, on the contrary,
define the very thing from which the project had to detach itself, in a critical fashion, in
order to take shape? In a word, what is the situation of psychoanalysis at the moment
of, and with respect to, Foucault’s book? And how does this book situate its project
with respect not only to psychoanalysis in general, but to a particular psychoanalysis,
at a particular phase of its history, in one or another of its figures?
Indeed, Foucault does and does not want to situate Freud in a historical place that
is stable, identifiable, and open to a univocal understanding. Sometimes Foucault
wants to credit Freud, sometimes discredit him, unless he is doing both indiscernibly
and at the same time. The Freudian place in the work of Foucault is not only the
techno-historical apparatus, the artifact called hinge. Foucault does and does not
want to situate Freud in a historical place that is stabilizable, identifiable, and open
to a univocal understanding. The interpretation or topography of the Freudian mo-
ment with which he presents us is always uncertain, divided, mobile, some would say
ambiguous, other ambivalent, confused, or contradictory.
Freud is going to be doubly situated, twice implicated in the chiasmus—the sub-
ject of Foucault’ and Derrida’s interest. On the one hand, Freud was immediately
associated with Nietzsche, as a person who is able to reopen the dialogue with unrea-
son that was in the West interrupted. On the other hand, in a more indirect way, to
recall the necessity of taking into account a certain Evil Genius of Freud, namely, the
presence of the demonic, the devil, the limping devil, and so on in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, where psychoanalysis finds its greatest speculative power but also the place
of greatest resistance to psychoanalysis (death drive, repetition compulsion, and so
on and fort/da!).
Freud is reintegrated into the modernity out of which The History of Madness is
written and from which he had been banished at regular intervals. It is by taking ac-
count of death as “the concrete a priori of medical experience” that “beginning of that
fundamental relation that binds modern man to his originary finitude” comes about
(Foucault 1997: 198–199). This modern man is also a “Freudian man:” the experience
of individuality in modern culture is bound up with that of death: from Hölderlin’s
Empedocles to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, an on to Freudian man, an obstinate relation
to death prescribes to the universal its singular face, and lends to each individual the
power of being heard forever” (ibid.: 199). Originary finitude is a finitude that no
longer arises out of the infinity of a divine presence. It now unfolds “in the void left
by the absence of the gods”(ibid.: 200). What we have here, than, is, in the name
of death, so to speak, a reinscription of Freudian man into a “modern” grouping or
whole from which he was sometimes excluded.
Freud himself will in fact take on the ambiguous figure of a doorman or door-
keeper. Derrida says:

Freud as the doorman of the today, the holder of the keys, of those that open as well as those that close the
door, that is, the huis: onto the today [l’aujourd’hui] or onto madness. He [lui], Freud, is the double figure
of the door or doorkeeper. He stands guard and usher in. Alternatively or simultaneously, he closes one
epoch and opens another. And as we will see, this double possibility is not alien to an institution, to what is
 FOUCAULT READS FREUD 281

called the analytic situation as a scene behind closed doors [huis clos]. That is why—and this would be the
paradox of the serial law—Freud does and does not belong to different series in which Foucault inscribes
him (Derrida 1994: 234).

Perhaps this is the reason why in same book, Freud is sometimes associated with
and sometimes opposed to the great witnesses of madness and excess, these great
witnesses like—Nietzsche, Artaud, Van Gogh, Nerval and Hölderlin, and sometimes
he is associated with and sometimes he is opposed to the great doctors and psychiatrist
like Pinel, Tuke, Janet, Brunschvicg. But suggesting injustice in Foucault’s reading of
Freud, we must still remember that the 20th Century got us used to unjust readings
so much, that today we expect nothing else. We have already seen unjust reading of
Plato by Nietzsche, unjust reading of Nietzsche by Heidegger, Heidegger’s by Derrida.
However, what Foucault does with Freud is truly unique and exceptional. Is this, what
Foucault does with Freud, called reading at all? Did Foucault actually read Freud?
Anyhow, the resemblance of the two is striking. Both are fascinated with the
entanglement of life and death, excess life and all-pervading death. In Freud, the
controlling instance is directed at investigating driving forces of das Es, in Foucault
the disciplines and inspections are related to birth and death, only that he goes beyond
the individual level and refers to population. Both had a feeling that will do live is
only a reading (translation) of the death drive. I think it is not a coincidence that
both felt archaeologists at heart, that both put their cognitive activity to excavation
work and to bringing to daylight mouldering monuments of the past. Those, at first
sight, meaningless traces (scars), influence our actions, our speaking and living. Both
shared detectivistic passion—obsessively searching for and archiving traces where no
one would spot. It sometimes feels whereas Freud provides a method for investigating
the internal workings of the psyche, Foucault seeks to show how the method itself is
an ancient technique of self-fashioning that has over the centuries shaped the mind
externally. 4 Our conception of the psyche, Foucault contends, has been sculpted by
4 Patrick H. Hutton, Foucault, Freud, and The Technologies of the Self , in: Technologies of the Self , Ed.
Luther Martin, Huck Gutman, Patrick H. Hutton, Massachusetts 1988, p. 121. The similarities between
Foucault and Freud should not blur obvious differences between the two. All boil down to the following:
(1) Psychoanalysis was the method that Freud invented to oblige the unconscious psyche to open its secret
history, to reveal to the conscious psyche those unrequited desires or unresolved conflicts that unconsciously
paralyze its actions. For Foucault our human nature is not a hidden reality to be discovered through self-
analysis but the aggregate of the forms we have chosen to provide public definitions of who we are, so there
is no such a thing as a human nature. (2) Freud believes that the knowledge of the self enhances one’s
power to cope more realistically with present problems. Knowledge drawn from the unconscious restores
lost dimensions of ego’s identity. Foucault rather believes that it is not knowledge of our sexuality (and the
past) that gives us power over ourselves (as Freud taught) but our will to establish power over sexuality
that incites our search for self-knowledge. (3) Foucault inverts Freud’s proposition about the relationship
between knowledge and power. Whereas Freud sought to explain how knowledge gives us power over the
self, Foucault seeks to demonstrate how power shapes our knowledge of the self. (4) Freud is concerned
with origins. He insists on the determining power of experience as a precedent for future behaviour. But
if human nature for Freud is shaped by the recollection of past experiences, it is for Foucault constructed
through humankind’s activity as a maker of forms. We are beings that create form which ironically imprisons
our creativity. (5) Freud would counter the psyche is a discrete reality which workings we can objectively
understand, Our conception of the psyche may be limited by the images we employ to describe it. But the
inadequacy of our theory does not diminish the reality of the object it seeks to define. Foucault, to the
contrary, argues that the self is not an objective reality to by described by our theories but a concept that
is actually constituted by them.
282 SZYMON WRÓBEL

the techniques that we have devised to probe its secrets, to oblige it to give up hidden
knowledge that will reveal to us the truth about who we are. Psychoanalysis is from
a historical perspective a late addition to that enterprise, born of a long but erratic
lineage of techniques for the care of the self.
The symmetry of interests and methods of research and the totalizing discourse is
so evident, that it may provoke a question: which of the two thinkers created stronger
and more spacious conceptual and interpretative apparatus? At first sight it seems it
is Foucault who interprets the work of Freud, putting him in the context of emerging
power games and to some extent exposing cultural role of psychoanalysis in the
civilisation of reason, civilisation of the Enlightenment, which lost touch with unreason
and equally well with sovereign, patriarchal power structures. It seems though, that
the instrumental use of Freud’s work, the pinnacle of which is Histoire de la sexualité
by Foucault, is not the last word in this game of dependence and control. We could
apply psychoanalysis to Histoire de la sexualité and see it as vain search for a place
where the Master‘s discourse was replaced by plenitude of anonymous academic
discourses which are shaped as truth, and where cognitive subject is lacking. Histoire
de la sexualité for Jacques-Alain Miller does justice to psychoanalysis suggesting that
Foucault got caught in the phantasmal loop in his search for the exact moment when
western sexuality was arranged. Foucault deepens his search and leaves modernity
behind, then finds this moment when ancient ethics of self concern disintegrates into
Christian confession ethics. If we look closer at the last two volumes of the Histoire
de la sexualité: L’usage des plaisirs, Le souci de soi which are devoted to pre-Christian
ethics, we will see that they differ from the previous interference with the power,
knowledge and sexuality complex—instead of micro-practices they provide a kind of
history of ideas, which in itself is enough to deepen our worry, whether Foucault’s
Greece and Rome are not, by any chance, pure phantasms. If we followed that trace
and employed psychoanalysis to look through the work of Foucault, we could possibly
interpret it as a quest for father function in the world seemingly deprived of it.

Freedom and Psychoanalysis

As Julia Kristeva (1999) accurately remarked in the paper Psychoanalysis and Free-
dom: “freedom is not a psychoanalytic concept.” If we are to believe the Index to
the Standard Edition, Freud employs the word very rarely—in The Uncanny (Das Un-
heimliche) (1919), and especially in Civilization and Its Discontents (Das Unbehagen
in der Kultur) (1929)—to convey the sense of an instinctual urge shackled by the ne-
cessity for humans to live in communities. This libidinal urge proves to be profoundly
ambivalent, always more or less taken up, or dominated, by the death instinct which
civilization refuses to accept. In resuming and deepening the propositions in Totem
and Taboo (Totem und Tabu: Einige Übereinstimmungen im Seelenleben der Wilden und
der Neurotiker) (1913) on the founding myth of the murder of the father, Freud spec-
ifies the two conditions inherent in being human, which limit the absolute freedom
Freud attributes to the individual: namely, the realization of his desires. On one hand,
 FOUCAULT READS FREUD 283

there is the need to share satisfactions with the other members of the community
on whom the individual depends, given his physical weakness and the inadequacy of
his technological mastery of nature. On the other hand there is consciousness itself
(or conscience), which is constituted at the origin, precisely through a limitation on
the freedom of the drives imposed by repression and censorship, or, in other words,
“civilization.” Through censorship, conscience transforms the reined-in desire into
remorse and guilt, but also into self-destruction, in which aggression takes the ego as
its target in masochism or melancholia.
Moral consciousness and its organ, the super-ego, thus impose, from the beginnings
of primitive man, a renunciation of drive freedom, which Freud partly regrets but must
eventually accept as a necessary compromise in the name of survival. Freud seems
to begin with a naturalistic conception of pleasure: with the man of pleasure who
wants to satisfy his drives naturally. Such concept is situated not far from a Greek
idea of freedom as “I can,” as opposed to “I want,” which implies an objective state
in the body, without a constraint emanating from a master or a physical force. For the
Greeks, freedom (éleutheria) is essentially freedom of movement (Freud says drang).
However, this freedom comes face to face with the fable of the “murder of the father,”
implying another conception of freedom, which is consecutive to a commandment.
The tyranny of the assimilated/introjected father becomes moral consciousness, the
conscience or super-ego, which forbids: you should not sleep with your mother, and
you should not kill your father. This biblical resurgence in Freudian thought, which
structures the psychoanalytic conception of the psychic apparatus, is the starting
point for what Jacques Lacan, (1992) reader of Civilization and Its Discontents, calls
an ethic “beyond the notion of a command, beyond what offers itself with a sense of
obligation.” This means that desire is not subordinated to a commandment exterior
to it. To state this more positively, moral obligation is rooted in desire itself; it is the
energy of desire that engenders its own censorship.
The human subject who recognizes himself there recognizes himself first as a sub-
ject of human plurality: concretely, the plurality of his family but also that of his
analyst and of other analysands. Thus, with the help of the analyst, the helplessness of
the end of my analysis, i.e., that I expect nothing from anyone is first felt as a shared
fate, something in common with the suffering of others. But this community isn’t
really a community, for no institution will officially embrace this shared experience,
this perception of the plurality of the “discarded.” Moreover, to the extent that my
analysis is terminated but not finished, the suspension of the transferential bond in
which a portion of my drive life and my desires is left unelaborated and unsublimated
incites me to turn my aggression against every unity, identity, norm, and value: in
short, to make myself the subject of a perpetual rebellion, an incessant questioning,
a perpetual analysand.
Ultimately, for this reason exactly—the liberation of my desire through its elabo-
ration or sublimation—I am in a state of perpetual rebirth at the end of my analysis.
Donald Winnicott says something new and incontrovertible on this subject. He seems
to hold that birth already presupposes an autonomy of bio-psychological life, making
it possible for the infant to withdraw from environmental impingement and to avoid
284 SZYMON WRÓBEL

the traumatic violence of labour and delivery. This nuclear independence would be
the precondition, in a way, of the later “internal world,” which Winnicott (1964) con-
siders the most precious and mysterious freedom inherent in being human. Indeed,
human being is here meant in the sense of being, as opposed to doing or acting.
Winnicott rediscovers this freedom equally in the capacity to be alone and in the
isolation of the secret ballot in the democratic voting booth. Better still, he finds it
in the process of analytic treatment, in the undoing of the false self constructed as
a defence against external impingement, and the recovery of that native interiority
that, however, must always be recreated, and thus alone makes us free. Freedom thus
becomes synonymous with an interiority to be recreated in relation to an external
world to be internalised. This is not freedom in the sense of resisting the two tyrants
of instinctual desire and external reality, as Freud thinks; but rather freedom as the
interiorization of the outside, if and only if this outside (to begin with the mother)
allows for play, and lets itself be played with.
In sum, at the end of an analysis terminated but still infinite, we are able to refined
ourselves, and we rediscover ourselves, because we have unveiled the freedom-unto-
death of our desires, not only as mortality, but as “natality”—to use Hannah Arendt’s
(1978: 108–109) term in The Life of the Mind. This brings us to yet another perspective
on freedom in psychoanalysis: far from the unrestraint of the one who will not give
ground relative to her desire, freedom in psychoanalysis implies two kinds of issue
that have already been encountered in philosophy. But psychoanalysis broaches each
of them in a new way: the issue of choice and the issue of beginning.
In history of philosophy there has been elaborated two models of freedom: free-
dom as adaptation, and freedom as revelation. The first of these (freedom as adap-
tation) was announced by Immanuel Kant, along with the French Revolution, in the
Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft) (1781) and Critique of Practical
Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft) (1789). Echoing the initium of Augustine,
Kant defines freedom for the first time, not negatively as the transgression of a limit
or a constraint, but positively as a self-beginning (Selbstanfang) understanding as the
capacity of each to undertake an action, to initiate an act from within. This is a mag-
nificent idea of freedom, but we can already see the possible deviations contained
within it: we are free to undertake within the terms of a preestablished logical order,
the moral logic of a good, the economic logic of free enterprise, and globalization.
The second model of freedom was linked by Martin Heidegger, in his reading
of Kant, to pre-Socratic thought prior to the establishment of logical categories and
values. This other freedom has to do with the revelation of self in the presence of
the other through speech. Here I am not concerned with making a point about the
Christian connotations of pre-Socratic philosophy, or details about the deconstruc-
tion of metaphysics implied in Heidegger’s debate with Kant; and even less with the
problem of political disengagement that Hannah Arendt tries to solve in her proposed
philosophy of “judgement.” I would say only that if this freedom as revelation, as op-
posed to freedom as adaptation, has more than a speculative existence, it would be in
the transference-countertransference experience that it is actualized. Free associating
in the transference, the subject confronts both the unspeakability of the instinctual
 FOUCAULT READS FREUD 285

drives, her/his desires, and their traumas, and also the injunction that is imposed by
the very fact of language (the capacity to symbolize) as well as the place of the analyst.
The subject constitutes her/himself within her/himself for the other, and in this sense
she/he reveals her/himself: in the strong sense of the word, he/she frees herself.
Analytic discourse is a constant process of questioning. Questioning, or putting
into question (which have nothing to do with posing questions or answering them) is
the method par excellence of expression in psychoanalysis. Its eternal return puts us
in the timelessness of the temporal frame of the session, which actualizes, through
analytic speech, the timelessness of the unconscious. It challenges identities and
values, but it also provisionally restructures the subject in a new rebirth, as enabled
by his transferential bond.
However, if this bond is itself undone by terminating the treatment, it does not
mean that the patient is restructured once and for all by his/her analyst or a particular
school of analysis. Rather, it means that he/she has achieved a psychic flexibility capa-
ble of traversing the repression barrier, of remobilizing drives, and thus of promoting
creative adventure in his/her subsequent experiences of life as a subject. An aptitude
for the renewal of relational bonds, links, and connections is thus established in the
optimal conclusion of treatment. Of course, we all know how often we remain far from
achieving this optimal result. Nevertheless, the implicit significance of it is obvious,
insofar as it is true that the analyzed subject is an irreconcilable subject, a subject nec-
essarily in revolt. To say that the analyzed individual discovers his/her irreconcilable
conflictuality, the dramatic split that constitutes him/her and detaches him/her from
any will toward control, power, or even unity, means that this freedom of which we
have been speaking distances psychoanalysis from the moralistic or beatifying kind of
humanism.

The Dialogue with Unreason and Enlightenment

Freud’s Enlightenment is rather suspicious: all because at the same time it is murky,
dark, sensual, and analytical. Freud’s imagination is inhabited by both “murky”
middle-class writers and “dark” denouncers thinking of truth as a “moving army
of metaphors.” According to Freud, only sublimation makes thoughts free from their
erotic past possible, and transforms the drive without killing it. In a sense, thought
is never truly free from its erotic past and always carries the stigma of wishful think-
ing. On the other hand, as we read in Die Zukunft einer Illusion, thought is slow, or
better said: it is always late, persistently, and relentlessly when it comes to imposing
discipline. We find the following in Die Zukunft einer Illusion:
We may insist as often as we like that man’s intellect is powerless in comparison with his instinctual life,
and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about this weakness. The voice of the
intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of
rebuffs, it succeeds ( Freud 1968: 150).

On one hand, the shaping of death drive as a prototype of all drives makes Freud
a late cousin of Marquis de Sade. Was it not Freud who noted that death stands at the
286 SZYMON WRÓBEL

very beginning of life, which may defend itself against death only with the economy of
death, postponing it, repeating it, and resonating death. On the other hand, Freud’s
work on narcissism and psychology of human assemblage makes him akin to Hobbes,
dark middle class writer. It is in Freud’s writings on culture, especially in Das Unbeha-
gen in der Kultur, that we find suggestion, that “The liberty of the individual is no gift
of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization, though then, it is true,
it had for the most part no value, since the individual was scarcely in a position to
defend it”? (Freud 1968: 42). The studies on sublimation and children’s eroticism in
turn make Freud a distant relative of Schiller and Kierkegaard, sharing the legacy of
anthropology of “man the player.” It seems that Freud finds connection between rep-
resentation and libido in early symbolic games of a child, the one in which a child—just
after his/her mother left, starts playing a game of coming and leaving with a spool and
a string. Freud decodes and deciphers the Vor und Da game and later finds it to be the
prototype of effective release of a trauma. And finally there is Freud’s early imagining
of unconsciousness as optical apparatus, a typewriter or a copying machine—which
he has never gone beyond, and which relates him to the linkage of rationality, deter-
minism, and even positivism. Freud, with his most scientific projects, appears to be
the prisoner of methodology of natural sciences which he cannot transcend—unlike
Galileo described by Husserl in Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die
transzentale Phänomenologie. One again the short quotation from Die Zukunft einer
Illusion: “No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that
what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere” (Freud 1968: 123).
Beyond eighteenth century psychology and, very broadly, beyond the psychologis-
tic modernity of the nineteenth century, beyond the positivist institution of psychology,
does it not seem as if Freud were joining back up with a certain classical age or at
least with whatever in this age does not determine madness as a psychical illness but
as unreason, that is, as something that has to do with reason? In the classical age, if
such a thing exists (a hypothesis of Foucault that I take here, in this context, as such,
as if it were not debatable), unreason is no doubt reduced to silence; one does not
speak with it. One interrupts or forbids dialogue, and this suspension or interdiction
would have received from the Cartesian cogito the violent form of a sentence. For
Freud too madness would be unreason (and in this sense, at least, there would be
a neo-Cartesian logic at work in psychoanalysis). But this time one should resume
speaking with it: one would reestablish a dialogue with unreason and lift the Cartesian
interdiction.
What else, if not these ambiguities, trap psychoanalytical discourse in between
restitution of subjectivity and its rapid disintegration? Doesn’t it provide inspiration
to both anti-humanistic extremists who focus their attention on human grave as well
as neo-humanists who are calling for restoration of humanity? The ambiguities also
seem to allow many to speak on Freud and feel justified in their comments. So maybe
we use and abuse Freud for our own reasons? Maybe even as refined analytic as
Foucault fell victim to this ambiguity in the following stages of his work?
It is probably not such a good idea to follow Habermas (1968: 214) and to reproach
Freud with his incorrect and flawed self-understanding: his ontological naturalism
 FOUCAULT READS FREUD 287

explicitly incoherent with his ostentatious methodological anti-naturalism. It is not

a good idea to follow Paul Ricoeur (1970), and justify Freud claiming that psychoanal-
ysis has yet to work out mixed language, combining dictionaries of dynamics, energetic
and even hydraulics of the impulses with the vocabulary of the exegesis. Those mixed
concepts do not prove mistakes in the conceptual system of psychoanalysis, but quite
opposite, they correctly identify space where discourse appears, the tangle of power
and meaning, impulse and discourse, energetic and semantics. Similarly, it’s a bad
idea call Freud for support or fierce critique of the Enlightenment. It is bad idea at all
to provide evidence material in his own work to support this or that thesis. The thing
about Freud is above all to honour his work in its complexity, it is about refusal of
‘blackmail of the Enlightenment’—in Foucault’s (1984: 48) own words: one has to be
‘for’ or ‘against’ the Enlightenment. I suppoese that in that way and only in the way,
we do really justice to Freud.
Freud, as one of the few 20th Century writers presents us with a suggestion, that
thinking can be passion: a passion which does not subordinate nor oppress other
passions and talents, but brings in some order and overcomes them. We have so
much got used to the opposition of reason and passion, spirit and life, that a new
found idea of passionate thinking still catches us unaware and disturbs a lot, after
we have only regained balance. We have so much got used to these oppositions,
that the sole idea of intellectual erotica (or erotic intelligence) leaves us astounded.
Living and thinking, as presented by Freud, have not much to do with the Buddhist
self-renunciation, nor it is Georges Bataille’s movement of transgression—it is more
about controlled erotic life hoping for something unconsciously sought for: truth and
gratification. Sometimes, there’s no difference between. This said, we have perhaps
argument supporting Foucault’s diagnosis which is this time not in contradiction with
Freud basic insight: we are part of a society with sex and we see no other gratification
than that which life under spell of pleasure principle may ever bring.

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Biographical Note: Szymon Wróbel is Professor of Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology
of Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw and at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies “Artes Librales”
(IBI AL) at the University of Warsaw. He is a psychologist and philosopher interested in the contemporary
social theory and philosophy of language and mind. His main spheres of scientific interest are: theory
of social power, contemporary linguistics and the reception of psychoanalytic ideas in political theory.
From 2003 he is involved in a research project of British Academy of Sciences and Polish Academy
of Sciences: Post-Structuralism. Psychoanalysis. Politics. He is currently working on a new book: Grammar.
Mind. Evolution. Essays on theory of knowlegde and cognitive sciences. Szymon Wróbel has published 4 books
and over 70 articles in academic journals. Books (in Polish): The Limits of the Political. Warszawa: Aletheia
2008; Power and Reason. The Reflective Stages of the Critical Social Theory, Poznań: University Press 2002;
The Galaxies, Libraries, Ashes. The Cartography of Monstrous Literature. Kraków: Universitas Press 2001;
The Discovery of the Unconscious or Destruction of the Cartesian Concept of Mind?. Warszawa: Foundation
for the Polish Science 1997.

Address: [email protected]