Economy and Society

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Georges Canguilhem: an obituary notice

Pierre Bourdieu

To cite this article: Pierre Bourdieu (1998) Georges Canguilhem: an obituary notice, Economy and
Society, 27:2-3, 190-192, DOI: 10.1080/03085149800000012

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03085149800000012

Published online: 28 Jul 2006.

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Georges Canguilhem: an
obituary notice

Pierre Bourdieu
Translated by Graham Burchell

Precisely because of the difficulty of appreciating it today, I would like to evoke

what there was about this man, Georges Canguilhem, and his work that was able
to inspire such admiration and affection in an entire generation of French
thinkers. Extending the work of Gaston Bachelard, of which he gave an admir-
able presentation, Georges Canguilhem produced a decisive contribution to his-
torical epistemology, or, rather, to the historicization of epistemology, that is, to
the rigorous analysis of the genesis of scientific concepts and the historical
obstacles to their emergence, in descriptions of the pathologies of scientific
thought, false sciences and the political uses of science, particularly biology. In
this he doubtless represents the best of a rationalist tradition that can be called
French insofar as it is rooted in a political or, better, civic tradition, but which
deserves to be universally known and recognized.
This does not mean that he represented what is most commonly or frequently
found in French philosophy and French universities. On the contrary, what made
him a kind of reference point or touchstone for myself and, I think, for many
others, was his dissonance, not to speak of his resistance. Although holding the
apparently most conventional posts within the university system, he was not like
the others. Simply, without pretence or sham, with neither complacency nor
pomposity, he fully fulfilled his function as a professor, as a professor of philos-
ophy (he never played the philosopher), and also - if such a pompous expres-
sion is allowable with regard to him - his function as a man. This, it will be
admitted, is quite unusual.
He did not fully belong to the university world which nevertheless accorded
him every sign of its recognition and for which he undertook every assignment.
Those who evoke his memory speak of his gravelly voice and accent, which had
the effect of making him seem always angry, and the sidelong glance coupled
with an ironic smile which accompanied his stern judgements on the academic
world. This was no doubt the effect of a cultural difference: it was the product
of the tradition of a region where, as the vibration of the voice or the severity of

Economy and Society Volume 27 Numbers 2 6 3 My11 1998: 1YO-192

O Routledge 1998 0308-5 147
 Georges Canguzlhem, an obztuury notzce 191

expression attest, the body is always involved and in play in speech. This hardly
lends itself to participation in the pointless games of irresponsible thought with
which philosophy is identified by some people, or in the mystical-literary en-
thusiasm~for the existential exaltation of Holderlino-Heideggerian thought
which enchants the poet-thinkers.
No doubt he warmed to me because of an affinity of habitus. I remember that
after the agregation he proposed a position at the Bayonne lycee, thinking he
was doing me the greatest favour by sending me back to the 'country'. I recall
also that he was very surprised, perhaps even a bit shocked, when I refused.
Then, when I went to see him in his office on the rue du Four, he kept me the
whole afternoon (giving me offprints from his library which often had signed
dedications of great foreign scientists, like Cannon) and I only left him at night-
fall. It was striking to note that, when one passed from the more technical sub-
jects of philosophy or science to more mundane questions of life, his thought
and speech did not undergo that drop in tension which was so disappointing
for me when I observed it in so many other philosophers I knew (certainly very
dazzling and profound when talking about Kant or Malebranche). With an
extraordinary cheerful expression, and without ever seeming to play the
philosopher, it seemed to me he spoke of things quite freely and with profound
wisdom.
We often talked during the days of May 1968 which were an ordeal for him:
he was one of those oblates who had given everything to the School and who
cxperienced the sympathy of their students for the student movement as a
betrayal inspired by cynicism or ambition. He told me, no doubt because it was
then that he discovered it, how difficult it had been for him to adapt to the school
world (for example, m-hen he arrived as a young boarder at the Castelnaudary
Lycee he did not know what the toilets were for). It seemed to me that he became
aware for the first time of what separated him from his friends of the Ecole
Normule, Sartre or Aron (who played tennis at a very high level, whereas he
played rugby) and which perhaps, even if the integrating power of the republi-
can school had led him to forget or repress it, was fundamentally that kind of
anger which seemed to be always within him, beneath an exterior of the warmest
civilitj, and which sometimes broke through in the face of certain forms of arro-
gant incompetence.
He left the limelight to others: they have found it easy to praise his modesty
and his rigour. He wrote for the Toulouse Dipgche de Toulouse, which is where,
I think, I read him for the first time, while others wrote in the big Parisian papers.
He resisted, and I am not speaking only about the period of war-time occupation,
every form of compromise with the age. Those who do not forgive his merciless
judgements, or his mere existence, as a kind of living reproach, may even
reproach him for having fulfilled his function as a 'mandarin' until the end - he
was in turn, professor for the khligne, general inspector, and jury member for the
agregation - instead of devoting himself to activities more usually associated
with the picture of the free philosopher. He never gave interviews and never
spoke to the radio or the television. In this I think he was mistaken and wrong
192 Pierre Bourdieu

to leave the spot to show-offs and impostors, but I also think that he could not
have done otherwise, which in itself was a fine thing.

Collige de France