DALILA PINHEIRO DA SILVA

n the middle of the last century, French philosophy began to show a new appreciation for the singular. Works that remain relevant today, even outside of France, such as The Imaginary (1940) by Jean-Paul Sartre, The Structure of Behavior (1942) and The Phenomenology of Perception (1945), both by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Second Sex (1949) by Simone de Beauvoir, make it clear that the leitmotif “towards the concrete” did not remain merely as an intention. On the other hand, other works like On the Normal and the Pathological (1943) by Georges Canguilhem give to this motif an underlying meaning that transcended philosophical factions. Imagination and image, behavior and perception, the body and woman, medicine and life can be cited as some of the subjects which, relegated by classical and modern French thought to the realm of nonsense, needed to wrest their philosophical legitimacy from a broadened conception of rationality, one shaped by the decisive commitment of this generation of intellectuals. Yet, while other new topics (technology, sexuality, race, colonialism – to name just a few highly valued in philosophy written in French) have continued to be added to this set, contrary to what this proliferation might suggest, their introduction into philosophical debate continues to be accompanied by some turmoil or unease, in a more or less tacit confrontation with the limits of their own philosophical validation, which, in this sense, seems volatile in the face of the monumental presence of major themes more clearly aligned with so-called universals. At this moment, when tensions among these different epistemological arrangements are becoming even more acute, we have taken the chance to explore the thought of Georges Canguilhem, who played a key role in this rehabilitation of the singular within French philosophy, not only as an author through his written works but also as a craftsman, through his institutional work in opening the field to studies of this same character. This research presents its findings along three axes: in the first, I attempt to reconstruct the theoretical and methodological choices grounded in this inclination towards the singular that lead Canguilhem to orient his philosophical craft around the problem of life, responding to what he diagnosed as the task that the philosophy of his time should face, culminating in the project of On the Normal and the Pathological. In the second axis, to reflect precisely on the theoretical and methodological choices that make the examination of the pair of concepts, the normal and the pathological, central to his generation’s philosophical task, this research revisits – in Canguilhemian terms – how these pairs of concepts are brought to the forefront by an emerging sociology and criminology still intertwined with philosophy, which led us to recognize the insistent yet tacit presence of a certain vitalism in the various valuations of how their objects were constituted, or rather transformed, in the social world. The observation that this recognition, however, seems to have escaped Canguilhem led us to reconsider what 19th-century medicine and criminology could offer to the understanding of normativity as a forge of vital and social values: this is the theme of the third and final axis of this thesis. For reasons I hope to demonstrate through the results of my research, not only in his published work but also in Canguilhem’s unpublished archives, it seemed more than pertinent to do this by examining the pair of concepts, the normal and the pathological, in key figures of Brazilian medical and criminal thought. Through this anarchic journey, I hope to finally employ some of the lessons learned from Canguilhem for the philosophical treatment of the singular.