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发表于 2012-1-6 00:01:29 |只看该作者 |倒序浏览

　I, Pierre Rivière... An Interview with Michel Foucault (1976)
　　Translated by John Johnston
　　From Sylvère Lotringer (ed) (1996) Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984. USA: SEMIOTEXT[E]. (pp. 203-206).
　　
　　Q. If you like, we can begin by discussing your interest in the publication of the dossier on Pierre Rivière and in particular your interest in the fact that, at least in part, it has been made into a film.
　　
　　MF. For me the book was a trap. You know how much people are talking now about delinquents, their psychology, their drives and desires, etc. The discourse of psychiatrists, psychologists and criminologists is inexhaustible on the phenomenon of delinquency. Yet it is a discourse that dates back about 150 years, to the 1830s. Well, there you had a magnificent case: in 1836 a triple murder, and then not only all the aspects of the trial but also an absolutely unique witness, the criminal himself, who left a memoir of more than a hundred pages. So, to publish a book was for me a way of saying to the shrinks in general (psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, psychologists): well, you've been around for 150 years, and here is a case contemporary with your birth. What do you have to say about it? Are you better prepared to discuss it than your 19th century colleagues?
　　
　　In a sense I can say I won; I won or I lost, I don't know, for my secret desire of course was to hear criminologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists discuss the case of Rivière in their usual insipid language. Yet they were literally reduced to silence: not a single one spoke up and said: "Here is what Rivière was in reality. And I can tell you now what couldn't be said in the 19th century." Except for one fool, a psychoanalyst, who claimed that Rivière was an illustration of paranoia as defined by Lacan. With this exception no one had anything to say. But I must congratulate them for the prudence and lucidity with which they have renounced discussion of Rivière. So it was a bet won or lost, as you like...
　　
　　Q. But more generally, it's difficult to discuss the event itself, both its central point which is the murder and also the character who instigates it.
　　
　　MF. Yes, because I believe that Rivière's own discourse on his act so dominates, or in any case so escapes from every possible handle, that there is nothing to be said about this central point, this crime or act, that is not a step back in relation to it. We see there nevertheless a phenomenon without equivalent in either the history of crime or discourse: that is to say, a crime accompanied by a discourse so strong and so strange that the crime ends up not existing anymore; it escapes through the very fact of this discourse held about it by the one who committed it.
　　
　　Q. Well how do you situate yourself in relation to the impossibility of this discourse.
　　
　　MF. I have said nothing about Rivière's crime itself and once more, I don't belive anyone can say anything about it. No, I think that one must compare Rivière with Lacenaire, who was his exact contemporary and who committed a whole heap of minor and shoddy crimes, mostly failures, hardly glorious at all, but who succeeded through his very intelligent discourse in making these crimes exist as real works of art, and in making the criminal, that is Lacenaire himself, the very artist of criminality. It's another tour de force if you like: he managed to give an intense reality, for dozens of years, for more than a century, to acts that were finally very shoddy and ignoble. As a criminal he was a rather petty type, but the splendor and intelligence of his writing gave a consistency to it all. Rivière is something altogether different: a really extraordinary crime which was revived by such an even more extraordinary discourse that the crime ended up ceasing to exist, and I think that this is what happened in the minds of the judges.
　　
　　Q. Well then, do you agree with the project of Renè Allio's film, which was centered on the idea of a peasant seizing the opportunity for speech? Or had you already thought about that?
　　
　　MF. No, it's to Allio's credit to have thought of that, but I subscribe to the idea completely. For by reconstituting the crime from the outside, with actors, as if it were an event and nothing but a criminal event, the essential would be lost. It was necessary that one be situated, on the one hand, inside Rivière's discourse, that the film be a film of memory and not the film of a crime, and on the other hand, that this discourse of a little Normand peasant of 1835 be taken up in what could be the peasant discourse of that period. Yet, what is closest to that form of discourse, if not the same one that is spoken today, in the same voice, by the peasants living in the same place. And finally, across 150 years, it's the same voices, the same accents, the same maladroit and raucous speech that recounts the same thing with almost nothing transposed. In fact Allio chose to commemorate this act at the same place and almost with the same characters who were there for 150 years ago; these are the same peasants who in the same place repeat the same act. It was difficult to reduce the whole cinematic apparatus, the whole filmic apparatus, to such a thinness, and that it is really extraordinary, rather unique I think in the history of cinema.
　　
　　What's also more important in Allio's film is that he gives the peasants their tragedy. Basically, the tragedy of the peasant until the end of the 18th century was still hunger. But, beginning in the 19th century and perhaps still today, it was, like every great tragedy, the tragedy of the law, of the law and the land. Greek tragedy that recounts the birth of the law and the mortal effects of the law on men. The Rivière affair occurred in 1836, that is, twenty years after the Code Civil was set into place: a new law is imposed on the daily life of the peasant and he struggles in this new juridical universe. The whole drama of Rivière is a drama about the law, the code, legality, marriage, possessions, and so forth. Yet, it's always within this tragedy that the peasant world moves. And what is important therefore is to show peasants today in this old drama which is the same time the one of their lives: just as Greek citizens saw the representation of their own city on the stage.
　　
　　Q. What role can this fact play, the fact that the Normand peasants of today can keep the spirit, thanks to the film, of this event, of this period?
　　
　　MF. You know that there is a great deal of literature about the peasants, but very little peasant literature, or peasant expression. Yet, here we have a text written in 1835 by a peasant, in his own language, that is, in one that is barely literate. And here is the possibility for these peasants today to play themselves, with their own means, in a drama which is of their generation, basically. And by looking at the way Allio made his actors work you could easily see that in a sense he was very close to them, that he gave them a lot of explanations insetting them up, but that on the other side, he allowed them great latitude, in the manner of their language, their pronunciation, their gestures. And, if you like, I think it's politically important to give the peasants the possibility of acting this peasant text. Hence the importance also of actors from outside to represent the world of the law, the jurors, the lawyers, etc., all those people from the city who are basically outside of this very direct communication between the peasant of the 19th century and the one of the 20th century that Allio has managed to visualize, and, to a certain point, let these peasant actors visualize.
　　
　　Q. But isn't there a danger in the fact that they begin to speak only through such a monstrous story?
　　
　　MF. It's something one could fear. And Allio, when he began to speak to them about the possibility of making the film, didn't dare tell them what was really involved. And when he told them, he was very surprised to see that they accepted it very easily; the crime was no problem for them. On the contrary, instead of being an obstacle, it was a kind of space where they could meet, talk and do a whole lot of things which were actually in their daily lives. In fact, instead of blocking them , the crime liberated them. And if one had asked them to play something closer to their daily lives and their activity, they would have perhaps felt more theatrical and stagey than in playing this kind of crime, a little far away and mythical, under the shelter of which they could go all out with their own reality.
　　
　　Q. I was thinking rather of a somewhat unfortunate symmetry: right now it's very fashionable to make films about the turpitudes and monstrosities of the bourgeoisie. So in this film was there a risk of falling into the trap of the indiscreet violence of the peasantry?
　　
　　MF. And link up again finally with this tradition of an atrocious representation of the peasant world, as in Balzac and Zola...I don't think so. Perhaps just because this violence is never present there in a plastic or theatrical way. What exists are intensities, rumblings, muffled things, thicknesses, repetitions, things hardly spoken, but not violence...There is none of that lyricism of violence and peasant abjection that you seem to fear. Moreover, it's like that in Allio's film, but it's also like that in the documents, in history. Of course there are some frenetic scenes, fights among children that their parents argue about, but after all, these scenes are not very frequent, and above all, running through them there is always a great finesse and acuity of feeling, a subtlety even in the wickedness, often a delicacy. Because of this, none of the characters have that touch of unrestrained savagery of brute beasts that one finds at a certain level in the literature on the peasantry. Everyone is terribly intelligent in this film, terrible delicate and, to a certain point, terribly reserved.

补充：
　　We had in mind a study of the practical aspects of the relations between psychiatry and criminal justice. In the course of our research we came across Pierre Riviere's case.
　　
　　It was reported in the Annales d'hygiène publique et de médecine légale in 1836. Like all other reports published in that journal, this comprised a summary of the facts and the medico-legal experts' reports. There were, however, a number of unusual features about it.
　　
　　A series of three medical reports which did not reach similar conclusions and did not use exactly the same kind of analysis, each coming from a different source and each with a different status within the medical institution: a report by a country general practitioner, a report by an urban physician in charge of a large asylum, and a report signed by the leading figures in contemporary psychiatry and forensic medicine (Esquirol, Marc, Orfila, etc.). A fairly large collection of court exhibits including statements by witnesses - all of them from a small village in Normandy - when questioned about the life, behavior, character, madness or idiocy of the author of the crime. Lastly, and most notably, a memoir, or rather the fragment of a memoir, written by the accused himself, a peasant some twenty years of age who claimed that he could "only barely read and write" and who had undertaken during his detention on remand to give "particulars and an explanation" of his crime, the premeditated murder of his mother, his sister, and his brother. A collection of this sort seemed to us unique among the contemporary printed documentation. To what do we owe it?
　　
　　Almost certainly not to the sensation caused by the case itself. Cases of parricide were fairly common inn the assize courts in that period (ten to fifteen yearly, sometimes more). Moreover, Fieschi's attempted assassination of the king and his trial and his sentencing and execution of Lacenaire and the publication of his memoirs practically monopolized the space devoted to criminal cases in the press at the time. The Gazette des Tribunaux never gave the Riviere case more than a brief mention, in the main producing the Pilote du Calvados, the Riviere case never became a classic of criminal psychiatry like those of Henriette Cornier, Papavoine, or Leger. Apart from the article in the Annales d'hygiène, we have found practically no references to Riviere. And Riviere's counsel, Berthauld, who was later to become fairly well known, seems never to have alluded to his former client in his writings.
　　
　　Riviere's case was not, then, a "notable crime." The unusually full treatment in the Annales may be accounted for by a combination of chance circumstances and general considerations. Probably a doctor or some local notable in the Caen area drew the contemporary Paris experts' attention to the sentencing to death on November 12, 1835, of a parricide considered by many to be a madman. They must have agreed to intervene when the petition of mercy was presented, on the basis of the records compiled for the purpose; in any event, they drew up their certificate on the basis of the material evidence without ever seeing Pierre Riviere. And once the commutation of the sentence had been granted, what they published in the Annales d'hygiène was the whole or part of the dossier on the case.
　　
　　Over and above these circumstances, however, a more general debate emerges, in which the publication of this dossier by Esquirol and his colleagues was to have its effect. In 1836 they were in the very midst of the debate on the use of psychiatric concepts in criminal justice. To be more precise, they were at a specific point in this debate, for lawyers such as Collard de Montigny, doctors such as Urbain Coste, and more especially the judges and the courts had been very strongly resisting (especially since 1827) the concept of "monomania" advanced by Esquirol (in 1808). So much so that medical experts and counsel for the defense hesitated to use a concept which had somewhat dubious connotation of "materialism" in the minds of the courts and some juries. Around 1835 it looks as if doctors rather tended to produce medical reports based less directly on the concept of monomania, as if they wished to show simultaneously that reluctance to use it might lead ro serious miscarriages of justices and that mental illness could be manifested through a far wider symptomatology. In any case, the Riviere dossier as published by the Annales is extremely discreet in its references to "monomania"; on the other hand, it makes very considerable use of signs, symptoms, and the despositions of witnesses, and very diverse types of evidence.
　　
　　There is, however, one fact about all this that is truly surprising, that while "local" or general circumstances led to the publication of a remarkably full documentation, full not only for that period, but even our own, on it and on the unique document that is Riviere's memoir, an immediate and complete silence ensued. What could have disconcerted the doctors and their knowledge after so strongly eliciting their attention?
　　
　　To be frank, however, it was not this, perhaps, that led us to spend more than a year on these documents. It was simply the beauty of Riviere's memoir. The utter astonishment it produced in us was the starting point.
　　
　　But we were still faced with the question of publication. I think that what committed us to the work, despite our differences of interests and approaches, was that it was a "dossier", that is to say, a case, an affair, an event that provided the intersection of discourses that differed in origin, form, organization and function - the discourses of the cantonal judge, the prosecutor, the presiding judge of the assize court, and the Minister of Justice; those too of the country general practitioner and of Esquirol; and those of the villagers, with their mayor and parish priest; and, last but not least, that of the murderer himself. All of them speak, or appear to be speaking, of one and the same thing; at any rate, the burden of all these discourses is the occurrence on June 3. But in their totality and their variety they form neither a composite work nor an exemplary text, but rather a strange contest, a confrontation, a power relation, a battle among discourses and through discourses. And yet, it cannot simply be described as a single battle; for several separate combats were being fought out at the same time and intersected each other: The doctors were engaged in a combat, among themselves, with the judges and prosecution, and with Riviere himself (who had trapped them by saying that he had feigned madness); the crown lawyers had their own separate combat as regards the testimony of the medical experts, the comparatively novel use of extenuating circumstances, and a range of cases of parricide that had been coupled with regicide (Fieschi and Louis-Philippe stand in the wings); the villagers of Aunay had their own combat to diffuse the terror of a crime committed in their midst and to "preserve the honor of a family" by ascribing the crime to bizarre behavior or singularity; and, lastly, at the very center, there was Pierre Riviere, with his innumerable and complicated engines of war; his crime, made to be written and talked about and thereby to secure him glory in death, his narrative , prepared in advance and for the purpose of leading on to the crime, his oral explanations to obtain credence for his madness, his text, written to dispel this lie, to explain, and to summon death, a text in whose beauty some were to see as a proof of rationality (and hence grounds for condemning him to death) and others a sign of madness (and hence grounds for shutting him up for life).
　　
　　I think the reason we decided to publish these documents was to draw a map, so to speak, of those combats, to reconstruct these confrontations and battles, to rediscover the interaction of those discourses as weapons of attack and defense in the relations of power and knowledge.
　　
　　More specifically, we thought that the publication of the dossier might furnish an example of existing records that are available for potential analysis.
　　
　　(a) Since the principle governing their existence and coherence is neither that of a composite work nor a legal text, the outdated academic methods of textual analysis and all the concepts which are the appanage of the dreary and scholastic prestige of writing can very well be eschewed in studying them.
　　
　　(b) Documents like those in the Riviere case should provide material for a thorough examination of the way in which a particular kind of knowledge (e.g. medicine, psychiatry, psychology) is formed and acts in relation to institutions and the roles prescribed in them (e.g., the law with respect to the expert, the accused, the criminally insane, and so on).
　　
　　(c) They give us a key to the relations of power, domination, and conflict within which discourses emerge and function, and hence provide material for a potential analysis of discourse (even of scientific discourses) which may be both tactical and political, and therefore strategic.
　　
　　(d) Lastly, they furnish a means for grasping the power of derangement peculiar to a discourse such as Riviere's and the whole range of tactics by which we can try to reconstitute it, situate it, and give it its status as the discourse of either a madman or a criminal.
　　
　　Our approach to this publication can be explained as follows:
　　
　　1. We tried to discover all the material evidence in the case, and by this we mean not only the exhibits in evidence (only some were published in the Annales d'hygiène publique), but also newspaper articles and especially Riviere's memoir in its entirety. (The Annales reprinted only the second part of it.) Most of these documents were to be found in the Departemental Archives at Caen; Jean-Pierre Peter did most of the research. (with the exception of a few documents of minor interest, we are therefore publishing everything we could find written by or about Pierre Riviere, whether in print or in manuscript.)
　　
　　2. In presenting the documents, we have refrained from employing a typological method (the court file followed by the medical file). We have rearranged them more or less in chronological order around the events they are bound up with - the crime, the examining judge's investigation, the proceedings in the assize court, and the commutation of the sentence. This throws a good deal of light on the confrontation of various types of discourse and the rules and results of this confrontation.
　　
　　And, placed as it is at the time of its writing, Riviere's memoir comes to assume a central position which is in its due, as a mechanism which holds the whole together; triggered secretly beforehand, it leads on to all the earlier episodes; then, once it comes into the open, it lays a trap for everyone, including contriver, since it is first taken as proof that Riviere is not mad and then becomes, in the hands of Esquirol, Marc, and Orfila, a means of averting that death penalty which Riviere had gone to such lengths to call down upon himself.
　　
　　3. As to Riviere's discourse, we decided not to interpret it and not to subject it to any psychiatric or psychoanalytic commentary. In the first place because it was what we used as the zero benchmark to gauge the distance between the other discourses and the relations arising among them. Secondly, because we could hardly speak of it without involving it in one of the discourses (medical, legal, psychological, criminological) which we wished to use as our starting point in talking about it. If we had done so, we should have brought it within the power relation whose reductive effect we wished to show, and we ourselves should have fallen into the trap it set.
　　
　　Thirdly, and most importantly, owing to a sort of reverence and perhaps, too, terror for a text which was to carry off four corpses along with it, we are unwilling to superimpose our own text on Riviere's memoir. We fell under the spell of the parricide with the reddish-brown eyes.
　　
　　4. We have assembled a number of notes at the end of the volume, some on the psychiatric knowledge at work in the doctors' reports, others on the legal aspects of the case (extenuating circumstances, the jurisprudence of parricide), yet others on the relations between the documentary levels (depositions, records, expert opinions), and others again on the narrative of the crimes.
　　
　　We are aware that we have neglected many major aspects. We could have gone into the marvellous document of peasant ethnology provided by the first part of Riviere's narrative. Or we could have brought out the popular knowledge and definition of madness whose outlines emerge through the villager's testimony.
　　
　　But the main point was for us to have the documents published.
　　
　　This work is the outcome of a joint research project by a team engaged in a seminar at the College de France. The authors are Blandine Barret-Kriegel, Gilbert Burlet-Tovic, Robert Castel, Jeanne Favret, Alexandre Fontana, Georgette Legee, Patricia Moulin, Jean-Pierre Peter, Philippe Riot, Maryvonne Saison, and myself.
　　
　　We were aided in our research by Mme. Coisel and M. Bruno at the Bibliotheque Nationale, M. Berce at the Archives Nationales, M. G. Bernard and Mlle. Gral at the Archives departmentales du Calvados, and Mme. Anne Sohier of the Centre de Recherces historiques.
　　
　　Pierre Riviere's memoir was published in pamphlet form in the same year as the trial. There is no copy in the Bibliotheque Nationale. The pamphlet contains the version published in the Annales d'hygiène publique, but published there only in part and with some errors.
　　
　　The whole file is to be found in the Archives du Calvados, 2 U 907, Assises Calvados, Proces criminels, 4th quarter 1835.