Birth of the Clinic, Preface: 10/1 meeting

The group began, as usual, with questions:

1. Can we explore what MF means by a "psychoanalysis" of medical knowledge? (late 18th, early 19th century) (p. x; xvii)?

2. Speech, signifier, signified, -- commentary (xvi)

3. Concrete apriori (xv) - "new experience of disease".

4. Foundations (xv) vis-a-vis antifoundationalism.  Foundations of knowledge?  What does MF mean by this?

5. seeable / sayable -- clinic -- 'carving up' and 'verbalization' (xviii)

6. transition from 'what is the matter with you' to 'where does it hurt' (xviii) -- role of subjective experience

7. A discourse based neither on csns. of clinicians nor even on a repeition of what they once might have said (xv) -- how does MF understand this detour?  Is the detour purposefully veering away from narratives of the origins of modern medicine told by the clinicians/'insiders' themselves?

8. Methodological status of origins here -- is MF relying on a notion of origins here? (Interesting if so, because later this gets rejected.)

9. Methodologically, what makes this an archaeology rather than a genealogy -- 1. historical bookends (at start), 2. medical rationality and medical practice (  ), 3. framing in terms of inquiry into conditions of possibility of medical experience [is this a problematization?]

10. MF has this target of a certain positivist notion of positivities or facts (xii) - positivities as always already perceivable -  ch. 7 takes this up again in terms of both a critique but also an explanation of the emergence of this kind of epistemology.  "rediscovery" versus "reorganization".



Discussion then began:

We began with questions of epistemology and MF’s relation to foundationalism.  Ref to “foundations of our discourse” (xv).  We asked: does this shift in MF’s later work?  (Does this track a shift from a more Kantian Foucault to a more Hegelian Foucault?)  Are these foundations secure foundations?

Is this a methodological point?  Or is it more MF trying to establish/secure foundations?

Distinguish epistemological foundationalism from methodological foundations.

If MF is not foundationalist how can we think of ‘conditions of possibility’ and the ‘apriori’ of concrete apriori in a non-foundationalist way?

Is there a connection to MF on being “doomed historically to history” (xvi)?

We discussed the conjunction of “historical” and “critical” (xv; xix).

Two targets for MF: medical experience and medical knowledge.