Theoria

Colin Gordon has been kind enough to let Jeremy Crampton at FoucaultBlog post a copy of a letter that the Times Literary Supplement declined to publish. While the Gordon/Scull battle over Foucault has been a hot topic in the blogosphere, this letter has not, to my knowledge, been commented on yet.

Scull questions whether many readers will wish to ‘plough through’ this unabridged translation of Histoire de la Folie. The complete failure of his 3700-word review to give an intelligible account of the book’s main ideas, and the reliance on little more than perfunctory recital of chapter headings to convey the content of 300 pages of newly translated material, entitles one to wonder (not for the first time) whether Scull himself has ever ploughed, or only flicked, either in French or English, through the full text of the celebrated work which he is so determined to eliminate from the scholarly canon. One must also wonder why Scull chooses to gamble his own scholarly credibility on such an ill-founded and malevolently unbalanced polemic. For while Scull has certainly criticised Foucault in the past, new readers of Scull’s current annihilating judgement on Foucault would scarcely guess that Scull had written as recently as 1989 that ‘almost all those who have worked in the history of psychiatry during the past two decades and more owe multiple debts to the late Michel Foucault’, or that in 1989 Scull considered it worth citing Foucault’s work as sharing his own view that the moral treatment of the insane introduced by Tuke and Pinel was a significant break from prior medical practice, or indeed that a quotation from Madness and Civilisation served as an epigraph to Scull’s Museums of Madness, a work whose very language is in places steeped in Foucault’s influence.

Let us remind ourselves that the “salutary” lesson which Scull now expects readers to learn from Foucault’s book, “which might be amusing, if it had no effect on people’s lives” is “the ease with which history can be distorted, facts ignored, the claims of human reason disparaged and dismissed, by someone sufficiently cynical and shameless, and willing to trust in the ignorance and the credulity of his customers”. Historians as little given to Foucault-devoteeship as Roy Porter and Jan Goldstein acknowledged some time ago that something had been amiss with much English-speaking commentary on Foucault and the history of madness; in Porter’s words, “the standard criticisms have often been products of prejudice, misunderstanding and ignorance (not least, ignorance of those parts of Folie et déraison omitted from the English translation)”. Today, rather than take the overdue opportunity to move on and allow a more informed and open-minded reassessment, Scull, a keen propagator (alongside Porter himself) of a number of those “standard criticisms”, decides to raise the stakes and reach for the airbrush. It is hard to say what is more astonishing in Scull’s TLS review and his subsequent letter: their obtuse malice and aggression, their indolence and hypocrisy, or their arrogant attempt to silence dissenting voices. One is reminded of Foucault’s remark in reply to a similar attack 25 years ago by Lawrence Stone: “I fear you have taken a considerable risk. Think of those who have read my book; think of those who will read it and want to collate it with your review of it.” It has just got much easier for many people to do exactly that.

Read the rest here.