Georges Canguilhem's The Normal and the Pathological
Here's my review of Canguilhem's The Normal and the Pathological . An old book, but deserving of new love. This is a lovely and humane book which takes as its starting point the advent of something new in the empire of nature: the presence of pathology among the living. For if neither the hurricane nor the waterfall can fall sick or recover, strictly speaking, then the arrival of life-which-falls-ill marks a break in the continuity of things, the eruption of an interruption in the cosmic order. While what counts as the ‘living’ has been the subject of much healthy debate (the inclination to ‘finality’, the work of the gene, the capacity for reproduction, to list a random few), Canguilhem’s wager is to look for the singularity of life in the presence of exactly what threatens it: illness and disease. Accompanying life as its ever-present shadow, it’s just in plumbing the recesses of pathology that the living itself comes into relief. Trained as both a physician and a