LEONARD LAWLOR A MINISCULE HIATUS: FOUCAULT’S CRITIQUE OF THE CONCEPT OF LIVED-EXPERIENCE ( VE ´ CU ) At the end of his life in 1984, Foucault revised the introduction he had written in 1978 for the English translation of Georges Canguilhem’s T he Normal and the Pathological. Foucault gave no title to the original intro- duction, but in 1984 he gave it the simple title: ‘‘Life: Experience and Science.’’ 1 Here, Foucault tried to show that Canguilhem ‘‘wants to re-discover ... what of the concept is in life’’ (VES 773–74/475; Foucault’s emphasis). For Canguilhem, but also for Foucault himself as well, we must think that the concept is immanent in – ‘‘dans’’ – life.2 What is at issue in immanence is the logic of this relation between concept and life. Now, clearly, one could just as well say that phenomenology consists in the immanence of the concept in life. Yet, just as clearly, Foucault thinks that what Canguilhem was doing with the concept of life was radically different from the phenomenological concept of life. In fact, this is what Foucault says at the end of his revised introduction: ‘‘It is to this philoso- phy of sense, of the subject, of lived-experience [le ve ´cu] that Canguilhem has opposed a philosophy of error, of the concept, of the living [le vivant] as another way of approaching the notion of life’’ (VES 776/477). Now what I intend to do here is examine this difference between ‘‘le ve ´cu’’ 3 (lived-experience) and ‘‘le vivant’’ (the living), that is, I intend to examine the different logics, we might say, of immanence that each concept implies. To do this, I am going to reconstruct the ‘‘critique’’ that Foucault presents of the concept of ve ´cu in the Ninth Chapter of T he Order of T hings (L es Mots et les choses): ‘‘Man and His Doubles.’’ 4 Then, I am going to construct the positive logic of Foucault’s relation of immanence by means of another text, which is contemporaneous with L es Mots et les choses: T his is not a pipe.5 As we are going to see, the critique of the concept of ve ´cu is based on the fact that the relationship in ve ´cu is a mixture (un me ´lange) which closes ‘‘un e ´cart infime.’’ Conversely, Foucault’s concep- tion of the relationship – here we must use the word ‘‘vivant’’ – in ‘‘le vivant’’ is one that dissociates and keeps ‘‘l’e ´cart infime’’ open. Perhaps, I will give my conclusion away if I say that for Deleuze – whom we must also keep in mind here – immanence is defined by a kind of dualism, a dualism that ‘‘is a preparatory distribution within a pluralism,’’ within, in other words, a multiplicity.6 417 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXVIII, 417–427. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.