The present paper focuses on a specific aspect of Michel Foucault’s interest in literature, addressing his study on the French poet and novelist Raymond Roussel. Published only few days before The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1963), Death and the Labyrinth (1963) provides a philosophical reading of some Roussel’s writings, in a constant confrontation with the posthumous essay How I Wrote Certain of My Books (1935) in which Roussel explains his peculiar process (...) of composition. Here, I propose considering that Death and the Labyrinth offers not only a critical account on the relationship between philosophy and literature, but it also displays the significance of philosophy towards the study of literature. From this perspective, I will mainly focus on three themes – the death of the language; the repetition of the language; the duality of the language –, showing also that the first source of the Foucauldian further interest on the relationship between “words” and “things” has been Roussel’s oeuvre. (shrink)

French surrealist author Raymond Roussel’s novel Locus solus depicted a brain-in-a-vat apparatus in which the head of the revolutionary orator Georges Danton was reanimated and made to speak. This scene of mechanically-produced language echoes Roussel’s own method of quasi-mechanical literary production as presented in How I wrote certain of my books. Roussel’s work participates in a wider fascination in modern French thought with the fragile connection, or violent disjuncture, between the body and mind. This paper discusses (...) a number of instances in which bodiless and reanimated heads played a central role in reflections on knowledge, art, and individuality. Roussel’s works offer a sidelong commentary on the notion of explanation in the sciences and the cult of reason in a technocratic society. (shrink)

Madness, Language, Literature (2019) brings together a series of unpublished works on literature that belong to Michel Foucault’s first stage of production. This article focuses on those works that express a concept of madness as social partition or outside, and also on those that elucidate the concept of the ‘extralinguistic’ of literature. The combined reading of these texts sheds light on a concept of the extralinguistic outside of literature that enables Foucault to overcome a concept of ontological outside and, therefore, (...) using literature, think on this discourse’s historical possibilities of resistance. As a result of this new reading, I analyse some fundamental aspects of this early Foucault. First, his development of a politics of literary form in the 1960s. Second, I propose that Foucault’s studies on literature in the 1960s were a kind of laboratory in which he was already raising some questions concerning his political history of truth. And, lastly, I examine the capacity of literature to make visible a part of reality that remains hidden (the excluded), the processes by which literature creates (language’s mechanism of self-representation), the possible forms of subjectivation that the fiction of every episteme allows (what Foucault calls verisimilitude), and the formulation of novel forms of being (that he later developed as aesthetics of existence). (shrink)

In 1968, Michel Foucault agreed to a series of interviews with critic Claude Bonnefoy, which were to be published in book form. Bonnefoy wanted a dialogue with Foucault about his relationship to writing rather than about the content of his books. The project was abandoned, but a transcript of the initial interview survived and is now being published for the first time in English. In this brief and lively exchange, Foucault reflects on how he approached the written word throughout his (...) life, from his school days to his discovery of the pleasure of writing. Wide ranging, characteristically insightful, and unexpectedly autobiographical, the discussion is revelatory of Foucault’s intellectual development, his aims as a writer, his clinical methodology, and his interest in other authors, including Raymond Roussel and Antonin Artaud. Foucault discloses, in ways he never had previously, details about his home life, his family history, and the profound sense of obligation he feels to the act of writing. In his Introduction, Philippe Artières investigates Foucault’s engagement in various forms of oral discourse—lectures, speeches, debates, press conferences, and interviews—and their place in his work. _Speech Begins after Death_ shows Foucault adopting a new language, an innovative autobiographical communication that is neither conversation nor monologue, and is one of his most personal statements about his life and writing. (shrink)

Taking as the focus of enquiry the engagements of Félix Guattari with Marcel Duchamp, namely, those rare passages in Schizoanalytic Cartographies and Chaosmosis, the question of the encounter is posed in the field of the sign, but of a sign ‘destructured’ (as Duchamp du signe), in the sense also that Guattari started by destructuring Lacan (from Psychoanalysis and Transversality to Anti-Oedipus). Introduced by the relationships between Guattari and Foucault to better play in between the early and the late Guattari, Guattari’s (...) key insight into the Bottle Rack readymade as an existential function is critically discussed from a reopening to enunciation through the ‘Duchamp effect’. If the latter seems to privilege language contrary to Guattari’s own semiotics, it is to derail it as a machinic unconscious. Duchamp’s writings on his readymades and other machinations are analysed, with the role of Raymond Roussel for Duchamp (and Deleuze-Guattari via Foucault), as well as the implications of a trans-Duchamp, his alter-ego Rrose Sélavy, as an opening to a machinic alterity undoing and queering gender binarity and phallic centricity, recovering the singularity of the bachelor machine and its rupture of subjectivation. The article shows how it could be transversally returned to the very middle of the Guattarian trajectory. (shrink)

Des 1963, Foucault & Deleuze forment un couple tacite sur le plan de la pensee. Ils ont recours au procede de Raymond Roussel, au metagramme b/p (billard/pillard), pour ecrire et forger de nouveaux concepts. La doublure, concept roussellien et foucaldien, peut etre convertie en termes deleuziens: la doublure affirme la difference dans la repetition. Aragon et Breton avaient elabore un projet philosophique et invente le temps sans fil. Foucault et Deleuze rejouent cette sequence. Tels Brisset, Roussel et (...) Wolfson, ils vont fendre les mots et fracturer les choses. Conscients que l'histoire est sortie de ses gonds, ils cassent eux-memes les ages. Ils sont a la recherche de l'evenement pur, de l'inactuel, de l'eternel retour du different. Le duo redige a l'encre sympathique de Nouvelles Impressions du Surrealisme. On y lira que Foucault est la doublure de l'auteur de La Doublure et que Jarry est le precurseur sombre de Deleuze. (shrink)

In 1968, Michel Foucault agreed to a series of interviews with critic Claude Bonnefoy, which were to be published in book form. Bonnefoy wanted a dialogue with Foucault about his relationship to writing rather than about the content of his books. The project was abandoned, but a transcript of the initial interview survived and is now being published for the first time in English. In this brief and lively exchange, Foucault reflects on how he approached the written word throughout his (...) life, from his school days to his discovery of the pleasure of writing. Wide ranging, characteristically insightful, and unexpectedly autobiographical, the discussion is revelatory of Foucault's intellectual development, his aims as a writer, his clinical methodology ("let's say I'm a diagnostician"), and his interest in other authors, including Raymond Roussel and Antonin Artaud. Foucault discloses, in ways he never had previously, details about his home life, his family history, and the profound sense of obligation he feels to the act of writing. In his Introduction, Philippe Artieres investigates Foucault's engagement in various forms of oral discourse--lectures, speeches, debates, press conferences, and interviews--and their place in his work. Speech Begins after Death shows Foucault adopting a new language, an innovative autobiographical communication that is neither conversation nor monologue, and is one of his most personal statements about his life and writing. (shrink)

RESUMO Neste artigo propomos estabelecer uma comparação entre escritos de Foucault sobre a literatura, notadamente seu livro “Raymond Roussel”, e textos que se consagraram pela fortuna crítica enquanto fundadores da genealogia, especificamente “Nietzsche, a genealogia e a história”. Organizamos essa comparação em torno da repetição do uso de duas figuras: i) a proliferação de máscaras enquanto processo de desidentificação e ii) uma experiência da finitude com viés não fundacional. Sustentamos que a recorrência da multiplicação das máscaras para apagar (...) o rosto, assim como a íntima relação entre linguagem e morte, a qual se desdobra, no artigo sobre Nietzsche, nos termos do sacrifício genealógico do sujeito de conhecimento, é sinal de que Foucault estaria se apropriando de certos elementos do pensamento literário que lhe interessavam na década de 1960. Contudo, essa segunda apropriação ocorre mediante algumas mudanças, notadamente com sua mudança de solo, de uma reflexão voltada para o ser da linguagem na modernidade, para uma genealogia histórica. Finalmente, esboçamos uma terceira e última apropriação do pensamento literário por meio de seus escritos derradeiros. Trata-se de uma atitude-limite que passa por uma ontologia crítica e histórica de nós mesmos. ABSTRACT In this article we intend to establish a comparison between Foucault’s writings on literature, specially his book Raymond Roussel, and other texts which were consecrated by the critical readings as founders of genealogy, specially Nietzsche, genealogy and history. The comparison is organized through the repetition of the use of two figures: the proliferation of masks as a process of disidentification, and a non-foundational experience of finitude. We sustain that the recurrence of the multiplication of masks in order to erase the face, as well as the intimate relation between language and death, which in the article on Nietzsche, results in the genealogical sacrifice of the subject of knowledge, is a sign that Foucault would be appropriating some elements of the literary thought which interested him at the 1960’s decade. However, this second appropriation occurs through certain changes, especially by the displacement from a thought directed to the being of language in modernity, to a historical genealogy. Finally, we describe a third and last appropriation in his late writings. It goes through a limit attitude which is part of an historical and critical ontology of ourselves. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze, les vampires, Emil Cioran, Samuel Beckett, le dandysme, Friedrich Nietzsche, Raymond Roussel, Casanova, Arthur Schopenhauer, Jean-Luc Godard, Goscinny & Uderzo, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Le réel, le double, l’illusion, le tragique, la joie, la musique, la philosophie, la politique, le péché, l’enseignement. Faits divers sont les miscellanées de Clément Rosset : le répertoire désordonné et jubilatoire de ses passions et de ses dégoûts, de ses intérêts et de ses bâillements, de ses tocades et de ses (...) coups de sang – ainsi que de la prodigieuse liberté de ton et de pensée avec laquelle il les exprime et les pense. Un des philosophes, un des écrivains les plus singuliers de notre temps revisite les coulisses de son œuvre. Et vous êtes invités. (shrink)