Madness, Language, Literature 9780226774978

Table of contents :
Contents
A Note on the Text
Introduction
Lectures and Writings on Madness, Language, and Literature
1 MADNESS AND CIVILIZATION
2 MADNESS AND CIVILIZATION Presentation Given at the Club Tahar Haddad, Tunis, April 1967
3 MADNESS AND SOCIETY
4 LITERATURE AND MADNESS Madness in Baroque Theater and the Theater of Artaud
5 LITERATURE AND MADNESS Madness in the Work of Raymond Roussel
6 PHENOMENOLOGICAL EXPERIENCE Experience in Bataille
7 THE NEW METHODS OF LITERARY ANALYSIS
8 LITERARY ANALYSIS
9 STRUCTURALISM AND LITERARY ANALYSIS Presentation Given at the Club Tahar Haddad, Tunis, February 4, 1967
10 [THE EXTRALINGUISTIC AND LITERATURE]
11 LITERARY ANALYSIS AND STRUCTURALISM
12 BOUVARD AND PÉCUCHET The Two Temptations
13 THE SEARCH FOR THE ABSOLUTE
Notes
Index

Citation preview

Madness, Language, Literature

The France Chicago Collection A series of books translated with the generous support of the University of Chicago’s France Chicago Center

The Chicago Foucault Project Arnold I. Davidson, Henri-Paul Fruchaud, and Daniele Lorenzini, series editors The wide-ranging and groundbreaking works of Michel Foucault (1926– 1984) have transformed our understanding of the human sciences and shaped contemporary thought in philosophy, history, critical theory, and more. In recent years, the publication of his lectures, seminars, and public discussions has made it possible not only to understand the trajectory of his work, but also to clarify his central ideas and to provide a better overall perspective on his thought. The aim of the Chicago Foucault Project is to contribute to this enterprise by publishing definitive English-language editions of these texts and fostering an ongoing appreciation of the lasting value of Foucault’s oeuvre in the English-speaking world.

“Discourse and Truth” and “Parrēsia” Edited by Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Daniele Lorenzini Introduction by Frédéric Gros English edition established by Nancy Luxon

About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Lectures at Dartmouth College, 1980 Edited by Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Daniele Lorenzini Introduction and critical apparatus by Laura Cremonesi, Arnold I. Davidson, Orazio Irrera, Daniele Lorenzini, and Martina Tazzioli Translated by Graham Burchell

Speaking the Truth about Oneself: Lectures at Victoria University, Toronto, 1982 Edited by Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Daniele Lorenzini English edition established by Daniel Louis Wyche

Madness, Language, Literature Michel Foucault Translated by Robert Bononno Edited by Henri-Paul Fruchaud, Daniele Lorenzini, and Judith Revel Introduction by Judith Revel

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2023 by Robert Bononno All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2023 Printed in the United States of America 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77483-1 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77497-8 (e-book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226774978.001 .0001 Originally published as Folie, langage, littérature. Édition établie par Henri-Paul Fruchaud, Daniele Lorenzini et Judith Revel. © Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, Paris, 2019. http://www.vrin.fr Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Foucault, Michel, 1926–1984, author. | Bononno, Robert, translator. | Fruchaud, Henri-Paul, editor. | Lorenzini, Daniele, editor. | Revel, Judith, editor, writer of introduction. | Foucault, Michel, 1926–1984. Works. Selections (University of Chicago. Press). English. Title: Madness, language, literature / Michel Foucault ; translated by Robert Bononno ; edited by HenriPaul Fruchaud, Daniele Lorenzini, and Judith Revel ; introduction by Judith Revel. Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2023. | Series: Chicago Foucault project | Collection of thirteen essays, for the most part unpublished. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2022032887 | isbn 9780226774831 (cloth) | isbn 9780226774978 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Mental illness in literature. | European literature—Themes, motives. | Structuralism (Literary analysis) | Mental illness—Social aspects. | Mental illness—Philosophy. | bisac: philosophy / Movements / Structuralism | literary criticism / Modern / 20th Century Classification: lcc pn56.m45 f68 2023 | ddc 801/.95— dc23/eng/20220815 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022032887 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

A Note on the Text vii Introduction by Judith Revel ix Lectures and Writings on Madness, Language, and Literature

1. Madness and Civilization 3 2. Madness and Civilization (Presentation Given at the Club Tahar Haddad, Tunis, April 1967) 17 3. Madness and Society 35 4. Literature and Madness (Madness in Baroque Theater and the Theater of Artaud) 43 5. Literature and Madness (Madness in the Work of Raymond Roussel) 59 6. Phenomenological Experience: Experience in Bataille 69 7. The New Methods of Literary Analysis 73 8. Literary Analysis 85 9. Structuralism and Literary Analysis (Presentation Given at the Club Tahar Haddad, Tunis, February 4, 1967) 97 10. [The Extralinguistic and Literature] 129 11. Literary Analysis and Structuralism 143

12. Bouvard and Pécuchet: The Two Temptations 159 13. The Search for the Absolute 175 Notes 189 Index 209

A Note on the Text

The current volume presents a collection of essays, for the most part unpublished, that Michel Foucault devoted to madness, language, and literature. With the exception of “Phenomenological Experience: Experience in Bataille,” which may date from the 1950s, the essays were written between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s, and fall, more generally, into a decade in which the themes of madness, language, and literature were of central importance for Foucault’s thought. The included essays are organized around three principal problematics: the status and place of the insane in society and the differences in treatment between “Western” and other societies; the relationships between madness, language, and literature, specifically with respect to three fundamental points of reference— the Baroque theater, Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty, and the work of Raymond Roussel— and, finally, the evolution of literary analysis in the 1960s. A study of the concept of the absence of the work in Balzac’s The Search for the Absolute and of the relationship between desire and knowledge in Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony and Bouvard and Pécuchet complete this series. We also find an initial development of Bataille’s concept of the limit-experience, although this doesn’t yet appear explicitly. The following sources have been used in establishing the texts: The two talks given in Tunis in 1967 (“Madness and Civilization” and “Structuralism and Literary Analysis”) are based on recordings held by the University of California at Berkeley. For the remaining texts, the editors worked from manuscripts held

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by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Fonds Foucault, NAF 28730, boxes 54 and 57). The essays have been established in the most literal way possible. We have eliminated no more than a small number of repetitions, and corrected sentences only when it was necessary to ensure the comprehension of the text. We would, in particular, like to thank the Bibliothèque nationale de France for allowing us to consult the manuscripts used in preparing this edition. Without their gracious assistance, none of this work would have been possible. We are also grateful to Robert Bononno for achieving such a careful and elegant English translation, and to Federico Testa for helpful feedback on an earlier draft of the translation.

H.-P. Fruchaud, D. Lorenzini, and J. Revel

Introduction

Thirteen Texts The essays that have been gathered together in this volume are remarkable in several ways. We know, of course, the importance of Raymond Roussel,1 published in 1963, the same year as The Birth of the Clinic,2 and, more generally, Foucault’s interest in literature during the 1960s— the “passion” that seems to provide the strange freedom found in his first great books. Among these many texts, the publication of Dits et écrits,3 twenty-five years ago, allowed us to identify this new understanding. Here, Foucault alternates between a series of references to writers of the past (Sade, Hölderlin, Nerval, Flaubert, Mallarmé, Verne, Roussel, Artaud, Brisset), three tutelary names (Bataille, Blanchot, Klossowski), and those of a generation of writers who were among the most recent members of the literary scene while Foucault himself was writing (Sollers, Thibaudeau, Robbe- Grillet, Butor, Laporte, Pleynet). Three different approaches have, in general, oriented the way in which this complex corpus has been read and analyzed. On the one hand, it was a question of showing that the junction of the experience of madness and the experience of writing served as a fundamental point of 1. Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel (London; New York: Continuum Press, 2007), originally published as Raymond Roussel (Paris: Gallimard, 1963). 2. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan (London: Routledge, 2012), originally published as Naissance de la clinique: Une archéologie du regard médical (Paris: P.U.F., 1963). 3. [Selections from Dits et écrits appeared in English as The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954– 1984, ed. Paul Rabinow and James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others, 3 vols. (New York: The New Press, 1997– 2000). — Trans.]

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intersection,4 and that it engaged, at the same time, with phenomenological reminiscences (the idea of an originary experience that, in both cases, was allowed to emerge from the silence in which it had been trapped) and a certain relation to language. On the other hand, it has been shown to what extent Foucault’s “literary” analyses, in their own way, expressed two themes that would become central to his work long after the 1960s: the radical critique of any form of psychologized subject, endowed with a conscience or interiority, and a heightened attention to the materiality of language, its acoustic aspects, its sonorous thickness, independently of any signifying intention. Finally, the extent to which Foucault’s connection with the review Critique (Foucault became part of its editorial staff in 1963 and he published several key texts in it) and the group Tel Quel (which Foucault never joined formally but whose positions and publications he frequently wrote about) provided the context in which this singular production was deployed has often been pointed out. For, its singularity was obvious— both because the chronology of these texts was very specific, corresponding to a relatively brief period ranging, roughly, from the publication of History of Madness5 to that of The Order of Things,6 and disappearing in the early 1970s;7 and because nothing in these texts reflected the theoretical positions so firmly held by Foucault during this period. These ranged from, on the one hand, a radical bias toward historicization, repeatedly reaffirmed since 1961 and taking the form of a history (of madness), and highly periodized archaeologies (of the medical gaze, of the human sciences); and on the other, a visible fascination with structuralism, understood less as a school or current than as a community of method capable of sweeping away the too persistent 4. The relation between the experience of writing and that of madness is a recurrent theme in Foucault. See, for example, “La folie, l’absence d’oeuvre” (1964), in Dits et écrits I, 1954– 1975, ed. D. Defert and F. Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), no. 25, 440– 48. [In English, “Madness, the Absence of Work,” in Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). —Trans.] The superposition of the figure of the writer and that of the insane (in particular, in the specific figure of the schizophrenic) no doubt helps explain Foucault’s interest in Hölderlin, Nerval, Brisset, Roussel, Artaud, and Wolfson. In all these cases, Foucault seems to hesitate between the perception of a shared experience (which would be associated with the destructuring of the subject and an originary relationship to truth) and that of a commonality (madness enabling the writer to disengage from the sovereignty of representation and experience a different relationship with the materiality of language, which is to say, to constitute a different code). 5. Michel Foucault, History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy (London: Routledge, 2006). 6. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1994). 7. On this point, I would like to refer readers to my “Histoire d’une disparition: Foucault et la littérature,” Le Débat, no. 79 (1994): 82– 90.

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illusion of the centrality of the subject, prevalent “from Descartes to phenomenology,” as Foucault often repeated.8 The thirteen texts, most of them never before published, and presented here for the first time, provide an entirely different perspective on these questions and contribute to altering the stakes considerably. Because their primary focus is on two “classical” subjects of that decade— madness and literature— we have organized them around those topics to facilitate their accessibility. As a result, there are five texts about madness, then a short text, very different in tone, about the concept of experience in phenomenology and Bataille, and, finally, five texts on literary analysis and criticism. To conclude this series there are two texts devoted respectively to Flaubert and Balzac. To the extent that we can date them (or that it might be possible to conjecture, based on various pieces of information, especially of a bibliographic nature), all the texts appeared in the second half of the 1960s (there is considerable doubt, however, about the text on experience in phenomenology and Bataille, which could have been written much earlier). The intervening years, ranging from the time of the publication of The Order of Things to the conclusion of The Archaeology of Knowledge, which corresponds to Foucault’s stay in Tunis, here represent the heart of the chronology adumbrated by these texts. We can, therefore, read not Foucault’s analyses of madness or literature in general, as we are accustomed to, recognizing them as essentially from the first half of the 1960s, but a much later version of those same topics. It is worth pointing out from the outset that the tone is clearly very different, even when the analysis, using an approach that Foucault would employ frequently, refers back to earlier works or reworks a reference that has been previously developed. First, around the years 1965– 1967, there was a significant inflection of the investigations undertaken by Foucault. Of course, the status, extent of development, and context of writing these thirteen texts is far from homogeneous. The unity of the texts gathered here is not strictly tied to one or more identifiable cycles (a series of conferences, a course or seminar, a homogeneous set of radio broadcasts), and thus their dates are, in certain cases, difficult to establish accurately. Moreover, these are texts whose type 8. Foucault would continue to make use of this continuity throughout his life. See, for example, “Sexuality and Solitude” (1981), in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: New Press, 1997), 175– 84. With respect to the figure of the subject, Foucault writes: “The importance given to this question was due to the impact of Husserl, but the centrality of the subject was also tied to an institutional context, given that, since philosophy began with Descartes, the French university could only advance in a Cartesian manner.”

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and degree of preparation vary enormously— from the apparently fully realized writing of the two talks given at the Club Tahar Haddad in Tunis in 1967 (“Madness and Civilization” in April 1967 and “Structuralism and Literary Analysis” in February of that same year), or the short text on the concept of experience whose difficulty in dating we have already noted (“Phenomenological Experience: Experience in Bataille”), to the more schematic texts or those that more closely resemble well-developed outlines (the first text entitled “Madness and Civilization,” which is undated but is later than 1965, or “Madness and Society”). This does not necessarily imply that the graphic markers that we spontaneously tend to identify as signs of a preliminary draft— arrangement of spacing on the page, the use of Latin or Greek letters, or numbers to label lists of items, indents, dashes, and so on— contradict an extremely polished form of writing. There is, at times, in the extremely robust construction of Foucault’s argumentation, a graphic expression of their structure, as is the case with “Literature and Madness” (the text devoted to madness in the Baroque theater and Artaud) and “The New Methods of Literary Analysis” (where the hierarchical structure is especially visible and organizes the written embodiment of his reasoning process). One is reminded here, by association, of the three pages found in one of the unpublished boxes acquired by the BnF in 2013, as part of a collection on Brisset and Roussel, in all likelihood dating from 1962– 1963, and simply labeled “epigrams”: three handwritten geometric constructions together with their compositional rules, revealing the Latin text “in the form” of an isosceles triangle, a labyrinth, a pair of glasses.9 Here, we find the power of the shape of thought— the power, as well, of its rules of composition. Isn’t this one of the possible embodiments of what a fascinated Foucault referred to as a “process”? We are also led to consider that strange hypothesis, formulated a few years later, in 1973, upon which the wonderful text devoted to Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe was based, that of the “defeated calligram”: “To compensate for the alphabet; to repeat without the aid of rhetoric; to catch objects in the snare of a double graphic form. . . . As sign, the letter permits us to establish words; as line, it permits us to figure objects. Hence the calligram playfully seeks to erase the oldest oppositions of our alphabetical civilization: to show and to name; to figure and to speak; to reproduce and to articulate; to imitate and to signify; to look and to read.”10 Which is to say that to engage with the materiality of 9. BnF, Fonds Foucault, NAF 28730, box 54. 10. Michel Foucault, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” trans. Richard Howard, October 1 (Spring 1976): 9. A first, shorter version of this text, with the same title, was published in Les Cahiers du Chemin, no. 2 (1968) as an homage to Magritte, who died on August 15, 1967 (this text is now included in Dits et écrits I, 663– 78).

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writing and its graphical inscription, a Foucauldian theme if ever there was one, is to be immediately engaged with the organization of thought— which is, ultimately, what the texts assembled in this volume seek to remind us of. Second, these thirteen texts make use of a system of repetitions whose development is fascinating to follow. The subsequent appearances of a pattern, a reference, sometimes a name or expression that has been previously created and used earlier, allow the reader to follow the slow work of the construction and formulation of hypotheses— the gradual weaving together of ideas through successive approximations. We must, therefore, read each of these texts for themselves; but we must also read them in succession or, more specifically, in series, following the pathways that a transverse reading allows us to reveal. I would like to give a single example. The tenth text presented, originally untitled (but which we have titled, for greater clarity, “The Extralinguistic and Literature”) and undated (however, a reference to Derrida’s On Grammatology allows us to assume it was written in 1967 or later), introduces the idea of the extralinguistic— a concept that occurs infrequently in other texts by Foucault,11 but which, here, is the subject of important developments. We can assume that these are, at least, partly the result of a desire to address the first volume of Émile Benveniste’s Problems in General Linguistics, published a year earlier by Gallimard.12 The eleventh text in this volume, also of uncertain date, but whose title was supplied by Foucault himself (“Literary Analysis and Structuralism”), immediately makes use of the concept of the extralinguistic, puts it to work, so to speak— with respect to Joyce, Proust, Robbe-Grillet, Butor, Balzac, Dostoevsky rather succinctly, and Flaubert in much greater detail— and reveals an entire system of theoretical references (including one, central to Prieto’s works), which the first text does not explicitly provide. The question is not so much (or not simply) to determine which of the two texts came first. Rather, it is more important to establish a transverse relation between them and elaborate how a hypothesis takes shape and is formulated (“Literature, then, could be defined as a discourse that constitutes, within itself, the extralinguistic dimension that escapes language and enables statements to exist”13), 11. The term appears twice in one of the alternate introductions to The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Vintage, 1982). See Michel Foucault, “Introduction à L’archéologie du savoir,” ed. M. Rueff, Les Études Philosophiques, no. 153 (2015): 327– 52. 12. Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971). This was published in French by Gallimard in 1966. The collection “Bibliothèque des sciences humaines,” directed by Pierre Nora, had also published Foucault’s Les mots et les choses (The Order of Things) that same year and G. CalameGriaule’s Ethnologie et langage: La parole chez les Dogon the previous year. Foucault quotes from this work in “Literary Analysis and Structuralism” (chapter 11 in this volume). 13. Michel Foucault, “Literary Analysis and Structuralism,” pp. 147–48 below.

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and is then mobilized and put to work in analyzing literary texts that serve as a kind of test bed. But the interconnections are many. We can trace a line between the treatment that “Literary Analysis and Structuralism” employs with Flaubert and what Foucault does later with “Bouvard and Pécuchet: The Two Temptations,” during a 1970 conference held at the University at Buffalo, just as we may recall the way in which Foucault, in two successive and slightly different versions of the same text (published respectively in 1964 and 1970) already, and differently, works through The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Third, and related to this last point, we obviously find in these texts the reassuring traces of what we already know (for example, the frequent use of certain passages in History of Madness) or the slightly different presentation of analyses found elsewhere (of Artaud or certain figures of the Nouveau Roman, or on the occasion of a commentary on Proust or Flaubert, or a reference to Rousseau— occurrences that we are familiar with from being at the center of other previously known texts). Where we feel that the reference to other texts is likely to clarify those we present here for the first time, we provide the reference in a note; these echoes are fascinating to follow, including the subtle differences that are often found. But what we most frequently encounter is a series of entirely new elements, which help to modify and complicate the perception that we might have held concerning what Foucault was trying to do in the mid-sixties. It is to these different, and sometimes unexpected, elements that I’d now like to turn.

Four Differences We would like to be able to claim that we will find in these thirteen texts subtle transformations, which make them even more surprising given our supposed familiarity with them. But the differences are far deeper than they appear, and it is important to clearly identify how this is so. There are four key differences, and they imply four important dimensions: the relation to structuralism, the scale of the proposed analyses, the disciplinary models employed, and the relation to history. The first difference, also the most general, is found in the texts on madness as well as those devoted to literary analysis. It consists in the affirmation of an infinitely clearer position than we might have expected with respect to structuralism— a position Foucault has often been assumed to hold following the publication of The Order of Things, a position that, many of us had come to believe, would have discomfited the author himself. We are familiar with the different formulations of this discomfort, introduced by Foucault on several occasions in the late 1960s and which culminated in the

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well-known retort found in The Discourse on Language [L’ordre du discours], in 1970 (“And now, let those who are weak on vocabulary, let those with little comprehension of theory call all this— if its appeal is stronger than its meaning for them— structuralism”14); they are also found in the texts collected in the several volumes of The Essential Works of Foucault. These expressions of discontent generally assume two forms: on the one hand, the recognition of the importance of structuralism, but mostly its identification with a shared method of analysis, a “theoretical activity that exists only within specific fields of activity,”15 rather than an actual school; on the other hand, the insistence that the strategic value of structuralism essentially resides in the fact that it enabled the radical destitution of any reference to a subject (“First, it seems to me, from a negative point of view, that what most distinguishes structuralism is that it questions the importance of the human subject, of human consciousness, of human existence”16). At the intersection of these two elements, Foucault developed the uniqueness of his enterprise, which fell somewhere between a carefully maintained claim of proximity and distance, because what he was trying to analyze, unlike the structuralists, was not “the language system, or the formal rules of its construction. . . . The question I’m asking is not about codes but about events: the law of existence of statements, that which makes them possible.”17 Concerning the removal of references to the figure of the subject, it would appear to be a central element of Foucault’s thought, but, as he himself remarks, this was already adumbrated in his work through his reference to Bataille and Blanchot, and the sentiment of proximity to structuralism has merely provided, though at additional expense and with a different formulation, the possibility of this radical critique: “For a long time, I experienced a kind of poorly resolved conflict between my enthusiasm for Blanchot and Bataille and, 14. Michel Foucault, The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1982), 234. 15. Michel Foucault, “La philosophie structuraliste permet de diagnostiquer ce qu’est ‘aujourd’hui’” (1967), in Dits et écrits I, no. 47, 583. [This essay is not included in The Essential Works of Foucault. — Trans.] In the same text, Foucault goes on to say: “What I have tried to do is introduce structuralist stylistic analyses into areas in which they hadn’t penetrated until now, that is, into the field of the history of ideas, the history of knowledge, the history of theory.” 16. Michel Foucault, “Interview avec Michel Foucault” (1968), in Dits et écrits I, no. 54, 651. [This interview is not included in The Essential Works of Foucault. — Trans.] 17. Michel Foucault, “Réponse à une question” (1968), in Dits et écrits I, no. 58, 681. [This article is not included in The Essential Works of Foucault. —Trans.] A few lines later, we are presented with an even more lapidary statement: “To seek in discourse, not, as with structural methods, its laws of construction, but its conditions of existence.” In a note, he adds: “Is it necessary to again point out that I am not what one would call a ‘structuralist’?” (ibid., 682).

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on the other hand, my growing interest in positive studies, such as those of Dumézil and Lévi-Strauss, for example. But at bottom, both of these orientations, for which the only common denominator might have been the religious problem, have contributed equally to leading me to the theme of the disappearance of the subject.”18 In the texts presented here, and although they were written at approximately the same time as his other previously known works, as we have noted, the tonality is quite different. Of course, we find few direct references to structuralism as such— aside from the title of the presentation made on February 4, 1967, at the Club Tahar Haddad, “Structuralism and Literary Analysis,” and in the undated text “Literary Analysis and Structuralism”— but, rather, a series of quite strongly presented and often repeated markers. With respect to madness, which reemerges here as an object of analysis, we are presented with the relative erasure, but one marked by geographical and historical details that Foucault characterized in History of Madness as being the effect of division. Of course, Foucault sometimes alludes to “European culture” as opposed to “the majority of cultures we have been able to study outside of Europe,”19 but he does so only to confirm, in spite of everything, that “madness is a constant function that we find in all societies.”20 Or that “madness is, in reality, a type of social function that exists in all societies, with a very specific role and one that is quite uniform in all civilizations.”21 We find this generalization of the idea of madness as a social function immediately coupled with a reduction of the importance of periodization, on which Foucault’s analysis always seemed to rely. The following two examples are illustrative: either the principle of historical periodization carried out by Foucault becomes fluid and multiplies the number of ambiguous chronological markers— the inclusive character of our culture, for example, is successively related, in the same text, to the loss of “rituals and practices of exclusion found in the Middle Ages, many of which had retained their relevance until the nineteenth century,”22 before being assigned to the end of the eighteenth century;23 and the noninstitutionalization of the figure of the mad individual appears to float chronologically and very impre18. Michel Foucault, “Qui êtes-vous professeur Foucault?” (1967), in Dits et écrits I, no. 50, 614. [This article is not included in The Essential Works of Foucault. — Trans.] 19. Michel Foucault, “Madness and Civilization,” p. 4 below. 20. Ibid., p. 6. 21. Michel Foucault, “Madness and Civilization (Presentation Given at the Club Tahar Haddad, Tunis, April 1967),” p. 18 below. The next paragraph begins: “So, to my first argument: madness is a constant function we find in all societies.” 22. “Madness and Civilization,” p. 4 below. 23. Ibid., p. 5 below. “Likewise, when the insane stopped being excluded (toward the end of the eighteenth century).”

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cisely, because it is said that “this is true in our civilization only until the end of the eighteenth century, more specifically, until the end of the Middle Ages”24— or madness is presented as a function that appears to transcend historical divisions, even as a universal structure to which would subsequently be applied a series of modifications that were themselves based on a precise historical determination. Thus, concerning the role psychiatry played with respect to madness, we find that “in reality, it is within the ethnological and sociological context of madness, which is constant and universal, that mental health has played a role, and its importance stems from the fact that it has been inserted within a structure that was universal.”25 The second difference involves an explicit change in what we might identify as the disciplinary reference model that Foucault appears to have adopted. The methodological framework associated with Foucault, and which he often claimed as such, both in the titles of his works and in the analyses he employed, appears to be, from the early sixties on, that of history. Of course it was a conception of history that stood in marked contrast to its Hegelian representation,26 and was reformulated following his reading of Nietzsche and the contributions of critical epistemology and contemporary historiography— but a history all the same. History of Madness, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences: three forms of periodization, three ways of categorizing objects, three kinds of historicization (madness, the clinic, mankind as an object of knowledge). In the texts readers were then familiar with, this relationship to history, which sometimes seems to have received ill treatment from Foucault’s critics, represented the terrain on which he chose to respond. I am thinking, for example, of the very fine interview with Raymond Bellour following the publication of The Order of Things (1966), where Foucault forcefully reaffirms the specificity of his own methodological choice: “Each periodization marks out in history a certain level of events, and, inversely, each layer of events calls for its own periodization. There lies a delicate set of problems, since, according to the level one chooses, one will have to delimit different periodizations, and according to the periodization that one is given, one will attain different levels.”27 In the texts included here, the model seems different. It is, sequen24. Ibid., p. 10 below. My italics. 25. “Madness and Civilization (Presentation Given at the Club Tahar Haddad, Tunis, April 1967),” pp. 28–29 below. My italics. 26. Compare this to what Foucault retrospectively remarked at the end of the seventies in “Entretien avec Foucault” (1978), in Dits et écrits II, no. 28, 860– 914. 27. Michel Foucault, “The Discourse of History,” in Foucault Live (Interviews, 1966– 84), ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 13.

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tially or simultaneously, that of ethnology and, to a lesser degree, sociology. “What sociology, ethnology, and cultural analysis have shown . . . ,”28 Foucault writes. Here, we are given a baseline, one clearly presented, from which to reason. Even if the methodological reference is not free of tension (in “Literature and Madness,” it is the lack of responses from sociologists and ethnologists concerning the inscription of madness in any social space that provides the starting point for Foucault’s analysis29), the dialogue falls well within the range of references and discussions introduced by the ethnographic studies Foucault mentions. The number of references to Lévi-Strauss (the Lévi-Strauss of Elementary Structures of Kinship or Structural Anthropology rather than the author of Mythologies, the first two volumes of which were released in 1964 and 1967, and which only appear in “Structuralism and Literary Analysis”30), the use of the image of the circulation of women as “social signs,”31 the reference to the incest prohibition,32 or Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of Nambikwara society,33 allusion to the work of Geneviève Calame-Griaule on speech among the Dogon,34 all of this forms a kind of network that quite literally appears to support Foucault’s analyses. The third difference quite obviously involves the place of linguistics in the texts Foucault wrote while he was in Tunisia. Their place is not, strictly speaking, “new” because it is well known: it determines, at least in part, the system of references that would emerge in 1969 in The Archaeology of Knowledge, a text that illustrates the accuracy of Foucault’s knowledge of linguistics, the philosophy of language, and analytic philosophy. Much has been made of the importance of the library of Gérard Deledalle, then direc28. Foucault, “Madness and Civilization,” p. 3 below. A few lines later, he writes: “In general, over the past thirty years sociology and ethnology have taught us that . . .” (ibid., p. 3 below). And with respect to the “sociological kinship” of the insane: “This definition, while being true for ethnology, also allows us to define the position of the insane in our civilization” (ibid., p. 7). 29. Michel Foucault, “Literature and Madness (Madness in Baroque Theater and the Theater of Artaud),” p. 43 below: “Sociologists and ethnologists have a simple response, which is self-evident. . . . This response is very convenient; unfortunately it is deeply unsatisfactory.” 30. Michel Foucault, “Structuralism and Literary Analysis,” pp. 98, 117–18, 120 below. 31. For example, Michel Foucault, “The New Methods of Literary Analysis,” p. 81 below: “And Lévi-Strauss was able to show that, in primitive societies, women were not only objects of desire (and, therefore, value) but also signs.” And in “Literary Analysis,” p. 94 below: “Lévi-Strauss: women are not simply consumer goods; they circulate according to structures that give them their meaning. They are social signs.” 32. Foucault, “Madness and Civilization,” p. 3 below. 33. Ibid., p. 7 below; “Madness and Civilization (Presentation Given at the Club Tahar Haddad, Tunis, April 1967),” p. 21 below. 34. “Literary Analysis and Structuralism,” p. 156 below.

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tor of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Tunis, which Foucault used assiduously. Some of the lecture notes discovered in the boxes acquired by the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 2013 show this very clearly.35 In the texts we present here, the influence of Luis J. Prieto’s Messages et signaux, which appeared in 1966, is explicit. Prieto’s name appears several times in “Structuralism and Literary Analysis,” the presentation given at the Club Tahar Haddad in February 1967, and in “The Extralinguistic and Literature,” whose probable date is also 1967. This was well before Prieto was appointed Assistant Professor of Semiology in the Department of Sociology at the brand new University of Paris VIII Vincennes, in February 1969, then, less than a year later, Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Geneva, holding the chair that once belonged to Saussure. The discussion with Jakobson is also consistent with these dates and is reflected in “The New Methods of Literary Analysis” (an undated text but probably from the mid-sixties), “The Extralinguistic and Literature,” as well as “Literary Analysis and Structuralism,” all of which extend elements previously sketched out in the second session of the presentation given by Foucault in 1964 to the Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis, in Brussels, with the title “Literature and Language.”36 There are also a large number of references to J. L. Austin. His interest in linguistics is, therefore, confirmed, but it is less Anglo-American than what his notes and certain passages from The Archaeology of Knowledge would lead us to believe, and closer to the tradition of Saussure and the discussions that his work continued to influence. With this should be included the most innovative recent work on literary criticism, primarily that of Genette, whose Figures I was published in 1966, and Roland Barthes. The fourth and final difference is the relationship to history. We have already noted, in the texts gathered here, the relative substitution of the principle of historicization with an ethnological model (or, to a lesser extent, sociological), which reflects a distancing of the movement toward periodization, which seemed so central for Foucault after History of Madness. Of course, interest in the historical nature of divisions remains. I’m thinking, for example, of the analyses in “Literature and Madness (Madness 35. BnF, Fonds Foucault, NAF 28730, box 43. Concerning this, see Martin Rueff ’s presentation in “Introduction à L’archéologie du savoir.” In an appendix at the end of the text, Rueff provides a summary of the notes found in box 43. There we find notes on Austin, Ryle, Quine, Wittgenstein, Ayer, Strawson, Goodman, and Putnam. 36. Michel Foucault, “Literature and Language” (1964), in Language, Madness, and Desire, ed. Philippe Artières, Jean-François Bert, Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, and Judith Revel, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 41 (on Jakobson, see 69– 72).

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in Baroque Theater and the Theater of Artaud),” in which Artaud regains his importance.37 But one text, “Structuralism and Literary Analysis,” the presentation at the Club Tahar Haddad given in February 1967, presents rather unexpected developments. To better understand the very surprising position Foucault takes in this text, I’d like to reverse course for a moment. In the final pages of The Order of Things, after recalling the threefold structure that underlies mankind’s emergence as an object of discourse in the sciences, and the book he has just written about the “birth” of the human sciences (“the three models”: philology, economy, biology 38), Foucault stops successively at History,39 psychoanalysis, and ethnology.40 It is the status of the latter that is of particular interest here because it appears to be drawn between two opposing “positions.” On the one hand, like the other human sciences, it is connected to history: “Ethnology itself is possible only on the basis of a certain situation, of an absolutely singular event which involves not only our historicity but also that of all men who can constitute the object of an ethnology (it being understood that we can perfectly well apprehend our own society): ethnology has its roots, in fact, in a possibility that properly belongs to the history of our culture, even more to its fundamental relation with the whole of history, and enables it to link itself to other cultures in a mode of pure theory.”41 On the other hand, it is also this discipline that not only involves “peoples without histories” but also prefers to study “the structural invariables of culture rather than the succession of events.”42 Even more forcefully, he writes that ethnology is that through which the problem of history is reversed, “for it then becomes a matter of determining, according to the symbolic systems employed, according to the prescribed rules, according to the functional norms chosen and laid down, what sort of historical development each culture is susceptible of; it is seeking to re-apprehend, in its very roots, the mode of historicity that may occur within that culture. . . .”43 Thus, the difficulty appears to be entirely involved 37. In the incomplete text found in box 57, which appears to be an alternative version of the beginning of the presentation and, in spite of the reappearance of the initial assertions (“There is no society without madness,” “there is no culture without division”), we nonetheless find, concerning the connection between literature and madness: “Of course, this connection is not present, identical to itself, throughout history. It has even stopped changing without ever disappearing” (see below, p. 47, note c). And a few lines below this: “Let me be clear: if at a given moment in literature, madness has a given face and not another, it is for reasons that have to do with the thickness of history” (ibid.; my italics). 38. Foucault, The Order of Things, 355– 67. 39. Ibid., 367– 73. Foucault capitalizes “History.” 40. Ibid., 373. 41. Ibid., 376– 77. 42. Ibid., 376. 43. Ibid., 377– 78.

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with the question of history: ethnology, like all the human sciences, is both the product of a certain historical division and that discourse of specific knowledge capable of bringing to light the “relation of historicity, which is constitutive of all ethnology in general.”44 The question of history or, more accurately, of the historicity of the discourses of knowledge [savoir] and of representations, is, therefore, at the heart of Foucault’s concerns. And we find the same difficulty crystallized in the expression “historical a priori,” which appears in the same pages before being taken up in The Archaeology of Knowledge three years later. In parallel with this, several criticisms, which appeared in response to Foucault’s books, were specifically about the relative vagueness with which Foucault expressed his own relationship to history. This occurred at least twice. In the first instance, we have Jacques Derrida’s critique, following the publication of History of Madness,45 which was not limited to pillorying Foucault’s commentary on the first of Descartes’s Meditations, but which also rather harshly pointed out the book’s untenable relationship to history. In the second we have the responses that followed the publication of The Order of Things and which attacked the same question— I’m thinking of the well-known article by Jean-Paul Sartre in L’Arc, or the rather harsh reading given by Michel de Certeau in 1967.46 The impact of these critiques is obvious. It pushed Foucault toward a “technical” appropriation of the question of historicity, in particular, in favor of a deepening of historiographic arguments, of which several fundamental texts from the period explicitly bear the trace47— as does the never realized project of a text on Braudel.48 44. Ibid., 379. 45. Jacques Derrida, “Cogito et histoire de la folie,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 68, no. 4 (1963): 460– 94. [In English, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). — Trans.] 46. J.-P. Sartre, “Jean-Paul Sartre répond,” L’Arc, no. 30 (1966): 87– 96; and Michel de Certeau, “Les sciences humaines et la mort de l’homme,” Études 326 (1967): 344– 60, reprinted in Philippe Artières et al., eds., “Les mots et les choses” de Michel Foucault: Regards critiques, 1966– 1968 (Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2009), 75– 89 and 173– 97. 47. Here, I’m thinking of three texts from 1967– 1968: “The Discourse of History” (see note 27 above); “History, Discourse, and Discontinuity,” in Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961– 1984), ed. S. Lotringer, trans. Anthony Nazarro (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 33– 50; and “On the Archaeology of the Sciences: Response to the Epistemology Circle,” in The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954– 1984, vol. 2, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. J. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: The New Press, 1998), 297– 333. 48. See the “Chronologie” prepared by Daniel Defert in Michel Foucault, Oeuvres, vol. 1, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 2015), LII: “All the same, history is prodigiously amusing. We are less solitary and just as free” (letter). Foucault intended to write a text on the republication of Fernand Braudel’s book on the Mediterranean, maybe even to write a book on historiography that would provide the opportunity for another archaeology of the human sciences (February 1967). The introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge,

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In “Structuralism and Literary Analysis,” the situation is quite different, and this is probably the greatest surprise of these previously unpublished texts. Here, we are presented with the systematic disqualification of the relationship to history, the intention, quite openly stated, to function without history or, more accurately, to dismantle the internal mechanisms of apprehending objects (and, specifically, literary texts). Two points clearly highlight the analysis: the concept of production and that of causality. Concerning the first, it is important to point out its specific reference. What Foucault refers to as the “economic production of objects”49 corresponds in reality to all the elements of explication that govern the way a literary work exists as a work. The very function of conventional literary criticism is to account for this: “For literary analysis was criticism, it was a form of censure that categorized, an aesthetic that offered judgments, and it was, at the same time, a history of the production of the work, an explication of the reasons for which, a reduction of the work to the reasons for which it had been produced.”50 History and production are associated because they reconstruct the processes by which the work constitutes itself as such. In contrast, the literary analysis that Foucault wants to promote sets the process aside and, in its place, substitutes analysis of the document as a document— which he calls “deixological” analysis— by implementing an alternative model to that of the work’s historical process, namely, the informational model, which he borrows from the latest models of biological analysis. Their opposition is presented quite forcefully: “You can see how and why history, historical analysis insofar as it is the study of the production of a work, can no longer be the essential and foremost subject of literary analysis, because literary analysis no longer needs to concern itself with how a work was produced but how a work can give rise to another language in which it is manifest or manifests some of its aspects, which is, the language of the analysis.”51 Quite the contrary: “We always have in mind a certain energy or causal model, what I would call the economic model: how is it that mankind’s works could come about? So, we searched, and we searched, but we didn’t find man, we didn’t find production, we didn’t find causality, the channel of causality, we found something that I call the deixological structure, the documentary structure, the structure and isomorphisms.”52 The idea of causality is directly related to the idea of production because it seems to represent its internal mechanism: where there is history, there in 1969, very clearly bears the trace of these historiographic readings; although no name is mentioned, the references are numerous and easily recognizable. 49. “Structuralism and Literary Analysis,” p. 99 below. 50. Ibid., p. 102 below. 51. Ibid., p. 103 below. 52. Ibid., p. 120 below.

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is causality. Here, too, the text of the 1967 conference proves surprising because in Dits et écrits, that same year, we find references to the way in which the critique of a kind of “simple,” mechanical causality obviously does not exclude history but forces us to rethink the mechanisms of determination in an infinitely richer way and positions itself precisely at the center of a form of historiographic reflection.53 Yet, before the Tunisian public, Foucault’s choice seems to have “hardened.” Now there is no question of making room for an approach to history that is not strictly causal, or reinvesting the idea of causality itself by freeing it of the extreme simplification to which it had been subject. Even the Althusserian analyses that Foucault put forth as an example of a remarkable reworking of history also appear to be invalidated: That’s what Althusser wanted to do by using structuralism in his commentary on Marx: he tried to find a form of causality that wasn’t, roughly speaking, what’s been referred to as mechanical causality, which is a specific type of causality, let’s call it historical causality, and which would be the causality suitable for the structural level of analysis. I don’t think it would be a distortion of Althusser’s thinking to put it this way. Isn’t that what he wanted to do? Personally, I don’t think so, precisely because the epistemological level of the structure is a level where it’s a question of necessity and not causality. And we know that in logic, causality doesn’t exist. The relations we can establish between statements, and valid statements, are relations in which causality can never be assigned. Moreover, it’s very difficult— this is a problem for logicians— to transform a causal argument into a series of valid propositions. I think that in structural analysis, we are exactly at the level where relations between statements have been established, that is, relations that cannot be causal relations. These are relations of necessity. And we haven’t found a new form of causality, we’ve substituted necessity for causality. Which means that, because of this, Althusser’s undertaking is destined for failure.54 53. See, for example, Michel Foucault, “The Discourse of History,” which was published in June 1967. Foucault, referring to new historical research, is very clear about this: “One introduces into historical analysis many more types of relationship and modes of linkage than the universal relation of causality through which one had formerly wanted to define historical method. Thus, for the first time perhaps, one has the possibility of analyzing, as an object a set of materials which have been deposited in the course of time in the form of signs, traces, institutions, practices, and works, etc.” (13). And, illustrating these transformations, Foucault refers both to “the work of Braudel, the Cambridge school, and the Russian school,” and to “the very remarkable critique and analysis of the concept of history developed by Althusser at the beginning of Reading Capital” (trans. Ben Brewster and David Fernbach [London, Verso, 1997]). 54. “Structuralism and Literary Analysis,” pp. 124–25 below.

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To summarize, we can say that what Foucault alluded to at the beginning as a renewal of literary analysis, and which, in fact, became a theory of statements, appears fated to exclude history. Which brings us to the moment of publication of The Archaeology of Knowledge, which will layer, and very precisely, a study of “the relations that can be established between statements” with this subterranean but permanent dialogue with those who, from within the practice of history, attempt to redefine its elements.55 The 1967 conference represents then, in its way, an essential element in the movement of Foucault’s thought. For, at a given moment, he acted to conceive an exit from history, an attempt that we know was not subsequently further developed, because Foucault’s thought finally moved in exactly the opposite direction by enriching the way in which it was possible to practice history differently, which is also to say, to create a different history. Judith Revel

55. Foucault, who alludes to a number of historians of the Annales school, does not mention Paul Veyne, even though they had been close friends for a very long time. But we cannot overlook the book that Veyne would publish with Éditions du Seuil in 1971, Comment on écrit l’histoire: Essai d’épistémologie, to which he added, when it was reissued in 1978, his remarkable text “Foucault révolutionne l’histoire.” There, Veyne devoted a number of very animated pages to causality and retroactivity in historical analysis.

Lectures and Writings on Madness, Language, and Literature

1 M A DN E S S A N D CI V I L I Z AT ION

I We have known for some time that civilizations are defined1 — not only by what they accept and welcome, and by what they value, — but also, and perhaps especially, by what they reject and exclude. Prohibition has been considered by sociologists, and generally by all cultural analysts, as the natural consequence of a positive phenomenon. For example, if incest is forbidden, it is because it violates the blood taboo, whereby the individual recognizes the living substance of society. What sociology, ethnology, and cultural analysis have shown is that negative phenomena (choice, exclusion, prohibition, rejection) — are not derived from positive phenomena (they are only their dark side); — as with positive phenomena and along the same lines, they refer to an act of excision, by which a society structures its behaviors and choices. Initially, there was no recognition of blood as a societal substance; this resulted in a rule of exogamy, culminating in the prohibition against incest.2 But we know, ever since Lévi-Strauss, that there appears, at the same time — a contractual obligation to acquire a father-in-law — along with the prohibition against having sexual relations with one’s own sister. In general, over the past thirty years sociology and ethnology have taught us that BnF, Fonds Foucault, NAF 28730, box 57, folders 5 and 6. 3

4 • C h a pt e r O n e

α. Societies function through complex actions whose various elements are interconnected. β. These actions introduce discontinuities and ruptures to the extent that they do not establish a given form of behavior (or series of behaviors) without excluding others. γ. Cultural forms should not be treated as the result of a continuous effort, as the flowering of a positive element that develops out of itself and gradually removes any obstacles it encounters, but rather as a sort of template that breaks natural continuity and never defines a possibility without at the same time defining a correlative impossibility. Cultures and civilizations are not continuous and evolutionary (as the great metaphor of the nineteenth century would have it when it assimilated them, explicitly or implicitly, to organisms); they are systematic. That is, they function according to a set of yes or no choices— choices that are interconnected. But this fact has long been masked by a unique aspect of our culture (of the culture that, after the sixteenth century, developed in a way that was not uniformly homogeneous but shared a common style throughout Europe). We can state that European culture, in opposition to the majority of cultures we have been able to study outside of Europe, is an inclusive culture. a. Its inclusive character is primarily manifested by the eradication of the rituals and practices of exclusion found in the Middle Ages, many of which had retained their relevance until the nineteenth century. — This is true for religions, for disease, and for other cultural forms. — These exclusionary practices [remain effective]a only in matters of race, but typically — are considered shocking — and occur within a climate of violence without any theoretical justification. It is a fact that medieval Christian civilization was unquestionably one in which the rites of exclusion were the most numerous and the most violent (at a time when Muslim cultures were, on the country, quite welcoming); and it is also a fact that it was transformed into a much more welcoming and “tolerant” culture than those very Muslim cultures. b. But this inclusive character is manifested more positively and, in truth, more interestingly: — We have grown accustomed, since the eighteenth century, to claiming that our civilization is “tolerant.” — But it is not a form of tolerance we are seeing but of inclusion. a. Conjecture— the word is difficult to read.

Ma d n ess a n d C i v i l i z at i o n • 5

That which is excluded, that which lies on the other side of the division, is not only accepted, tolerated, and welcomed, but reappears in positive form, and is experienced as being a part of our own culture, as something belonging to us. For example, other cultures are not simply tolerated, they are absorbed within our culture. This occurs in two ways: — As a kind of asset that we attempt to assimilate: Hindu thought, Japanese painting, African art. (It would be useful to [compare]b these processes of assimilation to those that, during the Middle Ages, managed to produce, in the Mediterranean basin, both Christian and Muslim art. It would also be worthwhile to find out why such practices are always reflected in art.) — But also as an object of knowledge: and this is certainly unique. There are no other cultures that have made other cultures an autonomous object of knowledge. Ethnology is one of the absolutely characteristic traits of our ethnic group. This strange process of inclusion (simultaneously through assimilation and through knowledge) does not apply solely to our attitude toward other cultures. We find it associated with many other forms of exclusion, for example, those affecting — the sick — criminals — the insane A certain type of clear conscience is associated with claiming that this process is simply the result of progress, of humanization, of a recognition of universal values. Whereas, in reality, there exists a range of highly complex problems: α. At the moment processes of exclusion are erased from our culture, we discover that they play a major role in other cultures, in every culture, no doubt. And, consequently, [this] gives rise to the idea that we are living through mechanisms of exclusion that we are unaware of. β. In any case, when inclusion is substituted for exclusion, this does not simply remove a barrier. New and probably more complicated mechanisms appear. — It is obvious that our relation to other cultures is not simplified by including them. — Likewise, when the insane stopped being excluded (toward the end of the eighteenth century), the problem of madness was raised b. The manuscript has “study.”

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within our culture; a way of approaching the mad and setting them aside, of recognizing them and separating them, is sketched out, giving rise to highly complex behaviors and institutions. What I would like to show is that our way of including the mad may be nothing more than a modification (all in all, rather moderate) of the old function of exclusion. — Apparently, we have gotten closer to them through the discovery of mechanisms such as psychology and psychiatry. — Apparently, we have included them through the appropriate medical practices.c We are accustomed to claiming that mental illness, which is in itself, in its deepest essence, a disease, has for a long time been ignored as pathological and is still treated this way in many so-called primitive cultures. And it is interpreted not as a medical but as a religious phenomenon, and so on. But we should reverse the analysis and say that madness is a phenomenon that is found in all cultures, and only some of them (to a limited extent, Greco-Latin civilization, much more completely Muslim civilization, and much more completely [our own]d) have assigned it a medical status. Medicalization is only one of the possible ways of decoding the phenomenon of madness.

II Madness is a constant function that we find in all societies. a. It is a common trope ever since the European eighteenth century and, possibly, even since the Middle Ages, to claim that madness is associated with a certain state of decadence or, on the contrary, with a certain acceleration of progress. And, therefore, some particularly simple and happy societies have no knowledge of the mad. c. In place of “What I would like to show . . . appropriate medical practices,” Foucault had initially written: [For comparison, the processes of exclusion are similar to neurotic repression, the splits typical of hysterics; the processes of inclusion are much more similar to psychotic denial, where it is a question of perceiving the self as unreal.] These are some of the mechanisms I would like to examine in twentieth- century European society: — by comparing them to what has transpired in our culture up until the eighteenth century — and to what may transpire in other cultural forms that are very dissimilar from our own. With respect to madness in our own society, we see that it has been approached from the context of a medical model. d. Conjecture— the word is missing.

Ma d n ess a n d C i v i l i z at i o n • 7

b. Yet, we have found that every society, no matter how simple we assume it to be (and no matter how different from our own), always has a category of individual that is not considered — a criminal — a sick person — sacrede and whose status is different from that of the others in at least [five] ways:3 a) activities of production (work) b) recreational activities c) family status d) the value of their language e) the noninstitutional nature of their designation Two things need to be said about this definition: 1) These criteria allow us to define, in any society, a category of individual that it is not possible to assimilate to the others: — Clearly, these individuals are comparable to the sick because of their particular status with respect to work or play, and also because of the noninstitutional nature of their designation. But they are different, for the family status of those who are sick is not changed, nor is the value of their language. — They are also comparable to a category of individuals we find in many societies, such as sexual or family deviants (who, in general, have a particular occupational status): — bachelors among the Nambikwara — homosexuals in North America — possibly monks in medieval civilization — These individuals are also comparable to sacred individuals because of the unique status of their language, their family status, and their occupations. But they are different because of the noninstitutional character of their designation. All this allows us to isolate the “sociological kinship” of the mad individual. 2) It is also worth noting that this definition, while being true for ethnology, also allows us to define the position of the insane in our civilization. e. In the margin: For example, among the Australians, there are — powerful men endowed with supernatural powers: margidjbu — men persecuted by sorcerers — men who “do not behave as the others,” the bengwar

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1. The mad individual has a unique occupational status: in the seventeenth century, the mad were recruited from among the unemployed. 2. The mad person has a unique status within institutions of entertainment [ jeu]: a) First as a privileged object: the mad person is someone who can be joked about. We laugh at him. Whereas we do not joke about the sick (unless the illness is imaginaryf).4 b) Then as a character who jokes about others, who ridicules them and reveals their truth: — In the theater, during the Baroque era, the madman was a character who knew more than the others, although they were not aware of it. — Madness appears as a questioning of the world, a challenge (denunciation of the world as a joke or game). For example, Erasmus, in In Praise of Folly.5 c) Finally, madness and festivals are identified with one another. Our culture may be the only one in which madness and festivals are identified to this extent. — The only great nonreligious festival in the West since the Middle Ages (excluding certain labor [festivals]) has been the Feast of Fools, characterized by the reversal of occupational status, the suspension of sexual codes of conduct, the liberation of language (insulting bishops), the disruption of the institutions that characterize the individual (masks).6 — Even today, festivals are characterized by this assimilation to madness: drunkenness, drugs.g,7 3. In our society, the mad have a unique status: α) For years madness has been identified and established by the family. Until the end of the eighteenth century, a request from the family (or one’s immediate entourage) was sufficient to result in — a lettre de cachet — an action by the police lieutenant β) Madness also changed the individual’s status within the family: — Because of the declaration of legal incompetence, the family (or a family member) assumed the legal rights of the mad individual. — The madman lost the right of marriage and fatherhood. f. In the margin: since Sophocles’s Ajax. g. In the margin: Sade. Peter Weiss.

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Even today the individual’s family rights are considerably altered (no divorce). γ) In terms of fantasy rather than of institutions: — Madness is associated with sexual delinquency (debauchery with madness, chastity with normal and institutional family life, and incompatible with madness). — Madness is shameful to the family and is concealed (the large number of the insane who are “absorbed” into the family and “isolated”). 4. The speech of the mad has a unique status. It is not that it is considered invalid, but that it is understood as something exceptional. It leads to a series of responses that are not those common to everyday speech nor to religious speech. — It is, for example, the speech of the buffoon: — it is devoid of powers: it may offend but it does not wound; it is muffled; — and yet capable of speaking the truth: it is disguised speech: a) When it results in a lie, we must seek the truth it conceals. b) When it tells the truth, it is said without seriousness, as if by accident. The buffoon’s speech is the intermediary of a truth it does not itself possess. — It is, no doubt, the reason why, in the Western world, mad speech and literary speech have been assimilated to one another and often joined. — The theme has been constant, — but there have been high and low periods whenever literary speech changed its institutional status. Whenever we have found ourselves in a situation such that we no longer knew how to perceive literary speech, the model of madness has come into play in three different ways: — As the idea that all poetry is madness — As the wish to listen to madness as poetry — The writer’s experience of literature as madness This is what happened during the sixteenth century with Tasso as well as with the Comte de Permission.8 It is also what happened at the end of the eighteenth century with Hölderlin and Blake. It is also what happened in the twentieth century with Roussel and Artaud.

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5. With respect to the last trait, which characterizes the ethnological position of the mad in general, the fact that their designation as mad is not institutionalized is found in our culture as well. There is, however, a notable difference, which is that this is true in our civilization only until the end of the eighteenth century, more specifically, until the end of the Middle Ages. In other words, our civilization is not one that has changed the ethnological status of the mad with respect to the status they may have had in other societies. Our society has only ritualized, codified the entrance into the world of madness; [it] has established barriers not only to prevent the mad from invading the world and reentering society but to prevent the world from arbitrarily entering the world of madness. We must, therefore, reverse the current analysis. — It is claimed that our civilization has discovered, beneath these ethnologically modeled and defined characters, the genuinely ill, whose pathological nature had until then been unknown. — In fact, to this ethnological character of the mad individual, which is constant, or so it seems, in every culture, our civilization has added a modification, it has added something that is not found elsewhere. It has codified the ways in which individuals enter and exit [this] world of madness. While it has not taken it upon itself to constrain individuals from going mad (and that remains to be seen), it nevertheless assumes responsibility for the criteria that enable it to determine who is and who is not mad. This operation is the medicalization of the mad. Through it the forms of exclusion have become those of inclusion.

III I want to briefly describe how this could have occurred and the consequences of this strange process. A. Historical [background] 1. Typical of the position of the mad during the Middle Ages in our civilization, we have — On the one hand, the specificity of the role the mad are assigned to play: a naïve witness, a speaker of truth, an innocent. — On the other hand, an indifference toward individuals who inhabit this role.

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Consequently: — Considerable speed of circulation, mobility. The ship of fools. — The very limited nature of coercive measures. a) The impossibility of fulfilling certain religious functions (an insane priest does not actually consecrate the host) or of carrying out certain civil acts. b) A limited number of beds with restraints in hospitals for the “violent” (who are assimilated to the feverish). Cells near the city gates are typical of this position. This gave rise to the ease of circulation of the mad, this confusion of wandering individuals, poorly integrated and “maladapted,” in the sixteenth century. 2. The event that transformed the status of the mad was not at all the arrival of classical rationalism but a very significant modification of the requirements of our society with respect to employment: — The great economic crisis of the early seventeenth century, which increased unemployment in the cities — The formation of national armies — The establishment of a mercantilist policyh This resulted in a new awareness of the professional status of the individual and labor laws. (Laziness became the greatest sin rather than lust or pride.) Throughout Europe new laws were instituted for confining individuals who were considered dangerous, lazy, or disorderly in large internment facilities (Hamburg, Lyon, Paris, London). With respect to this point, it is of note that 1) These steps were correlative with the formation of a police force. 2) Labor was obligatory in these facilities. 3) The unemployed, the elderly incapable of work, “libertines” (it was at this time that the word changed its meaning to refer to drunks and the dissolute), heads of families who dissipated the family’s assets, and the mad were all indifferently lumped together in these institutions. 4) This population was extraordinarily large— as many as 6,000 individuals in Paris alone by the end of the seventeenth century. The episode is important for two reasons: h. In the margin: religion work rules

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— First, because it erases (especially on the surface) the ethnological role of the mad by assimilating them to a number of individuals who have a very different sociological status: — the elderly, — the dissolute, — the unemployed (who, it seems, had hardly existed in Middle Age cities). The unemployed citizen. — Second, because his role was now purely negative. The madman was now a useless individual, one who did not work (and, therefore, whose station was akin to that of a sinner), a kind of dissolute individual. This was an individual who had to be swept away, one before whom we had to cover our eyes and ears. The madman has become a “sociologically neutralized” character, his type has profoundly faded, but he is also made to feel culpable. This is not the result of analysis or medical diagnosis; it is the result of an alteration of society’s needs.9 3. Finally, there was a third episode, which leads us to the modern age.10 This transpired at the end of the eighteenth century when houses of confinement that had lasted throughout the entire classical age were closed. — Apparently as part of a movement of liberation, — but for reasons some of which are political and some of which are economic: — The political reasons entail the reduced judicial role of the State. — The economic reasons include the need for unemployment experienced by industrial society. — There were already conflicts with employers in the eighteenth century. — Now this interference in the labor market was no longer tolerated. Normally, this would have led to the general liberation of all those who had been confined, but the mad were the only ones who were not released. Yet it was not because of the political and legal significance [assumed] by the bourgeois family of the time (the Civil Code is the proof of this). — Internment had been made available to families so they could dispose of individuals whose behavior threatened an inheritance or marriage, that is, the economic and social status of the family. This led to their confinement (which already existed). —Yet, during this period as well, but for somewhat different reasons, a hospital system had been organized, which, for the first time, gave the patient a social status.

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For the first time, society as a whole was concerned with sickness in general. This was extremely significant for the history of medicine, but it also played a decisive and strange role in the history of madness. The hospital served as a model for confinement (and its justification). — Just as families could relieve themselves of caring for the sick by placing them in a hospital, — families could relieve themselves of dangerous individuals who were mad by placing them in a quasi-hospital or in a hybrid institution that provided both internment and hospital care. From this point on madness was included in the medical model. And the assimilation of madness to illness became so obvious that society could sleep easily at night. Now there was nothing to complain about. But we shouldn’t analyze this assimilation as the discovery of something obvious, rather, we should see it as an alteration of the ethnological character of the mad individual: — The change was due to the coalescence, the conjunction of several phenomena, which were sociological, political, and economic. — At bottom this did not change the nature of the mad person. It altered, first and foremost, the way in which entrance into the world of the mad was ritualized, together with a number of elements that were constant in the function of madness. B. The consequences of the medical model In the Western world, after the nineteenth century, we find that — the ethnological function of madness — has fallen under the auspices of a form of medical practice and knowledge that arises elsewhere — and which takes place within a privileged space known as a hospital or an asylum. It is not necessary to enumerate all the consequences of this phenomenon, but I would like to point out the following. 1. Madness is now associated with a privileged place, which is that of internment. a) This functions as a place of exclusion (similar to a prison). b) At the same time it serves as a place of inclusion (because it is within the asylum that madness must be healed and the insane reabsorbed by society). We should point out that it is a place of inclusion (or recovery) only to the extent that it is also a place of exclusion (it can heal only to the extent that it can separate and isolate). There is no therapy

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inherent in the asylum, and it is typical that all the progress that has been made over the past fifty years in the organization of the asylum has been designed to transform the asylum into something as unlike what it really is as possible. We see that the medicalization of madness tends not to include what other civilizations exclude but distributes inclusion and exclusion differently. 2. The establishment of a medical model of madness results in a significant modification of the physician. Now, a considerable weight falls upon his shoulders.11 a) The psychiatrist, who did not exist in the eighteenth century, makes an appearance. b) Practices, diagnostic and analytical methods, and so on, parallel one another. c) Medicine and psychiatry are resistant to any form of practice concerning madness that does not follow a medical model. d) The doctor becomes someone capable of decision-making, who possesses legal power, police power, the power of confinement and release— a range of powers that doctors did not have previously. And, curiously, from which doctors in general would benefit. The idea of the involvement of the doctor in the social organization of medicine, in obligatory care, in forced hospitalization, aspects of the physician that were unknown among other ethnic groups, clearly owes its origin to the existence of the configuration that assimilates madness with illness. 3. Finally, this medical model has undoubtedly played a decisive role in the modification of the ethnological characterization of the insane. a) Madness will no longer be recognized other than as a form of illness, and, consequently, will follow the model of organic disease. To be truly mad, you need to be truly sick. From this follows the importance, throughout the nineteenth century, of pseudo-organic diseases whose model was outlined (by Charcot and his contemporaries working with patients in the asylum). We can assume [that] conversions or psychosomatic syndromes today have a similar origin.12 b) The character of “patient” is proposed to individuals as a solution or, in any case, as a possible role they can assume. The mentally disturbed individual has become a profoundly ambiguous social character: — truly but not truly ill — shameful and yet innocent

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— someone who needs to be hidden but who must be taken seriously c) Finally, with respect to the role that the mad played in the sixteenth century, there is one important reversal: — The madman was responsible (in the theater or in popular mythology) for speaking the truth. He was the instrument of speech that was beyond his understanding. — The madman is now, because he is sick, an object of genuine understanding (medicine): this true object enables us to understand the truth about the man. He holds the truth, but as an object. We see how the medicalization of the mad in no way represents the abolition of a fundamental ethnological function. It has simply concealed and hidden it; it has modified certain features; and, in fact, the only one that it has changed profoundly is the nonritualization of entrance into the world of madness. The psychic medicine of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is nothing other than this ritualization— the ceremony of the entrance and exit of the patient (which leads to the importance of internment methods, of diagnosis, and the sacralization of the physician). When the pharmacologist suppresses behavioral drives in certain individuals — which propel them toward madness — and which are used to recognize the character of madness in them, does it mean that the earlier ethnological function will disappear? Or will it assume a different form, giving rise once again to other deviants, other excluded individuals, individuals who are given a particular status at work and play, in sexuality and language?13

2 M A DN E S S A N D CI V I L I Z AT ION Presentation Given at the Club Tahar Haddad, Tunis, April 1967

Honorable Minister, Ladies and Gentlemen, my dear friend,1 I am going to address you first because it was you who were so kind as to introduce me. We have known each other now for how long— twelve, thirteen years. We first met during the Swedish night and now find ourselves beneath the Tunisian sun. I am touched by the sympathy and understanding you have shown this evening as so often in the past. For that, I want to offer my sincere thanks. I would first like to apologize for something, namely, returning to a subject I have previously addressed, about which I have already spoken, [about which] I have already written— the topic of madness. You know, writing books is at least a minor source of pleasure, it’s enjoyable to write books, and that pleasure arises from the fact that books, like our inanities and our indiscretions, are always pleasurable the second time around, but differently. And now I would like to again begin the book I once wrote, but I would like to begin it differently. And it is, to some extent, that impossible book that I would like to tell you about this evening.2 So, this evening, I would like to tell you how I would like to write a book I have already written and that I have, of course, bungled.3 My topic for this book that I will no longer write because it has already been written, and poorly written, the topic I would like to discuss, is the following. In general, we are accustomed to saying that madness is clearly a mental illness and that a number of civilizations, more or less primitive, A partial transcription of this presentation was published in Les Cahiers de Tunisie 39, nos. 149– 50 (1989): 43– 59. Concerning this presentation, see Dominique Séglard, “Foucault à Tunis: À propos de deux conférences,” Foucault Studies, no. 4 (2007): 7– 18. 17

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more or less developed, have failed to recognize the pathological phenomenon directly, and those civilizations have given madness an interpretation, sometimes religious, sometimes magical; and we had to wait several centuries, we had to wait for several more developed civilizations before we could finally recognize in this fact of madness, so poorly interpreted at the outset, what it really was, that is, a disease. In fact, I would like to try to demonstrate the opposite, quite the opposite. I want to show you that madness is not a disease that occurs everywhere and then is simply recognized as a disease in some more advanced and privileged civilizations. I would like to demonstrate that madness is, in reality, a type of social function that exists in all societies, with a very specific role and one that is quite uniform in all civilizations. And there are a certain number of civilizations, Greco-Roman civilization, Muslim, and Western Christian, that have given this social function a sense, a meaning, a medical status. In other words, the medicalization of madness is not so much the discovery of its profound truth; the medicalization of madness is a possible avatar that was produced in some civilizations, an avatar that we will find among Muslims, among Christians, among the Greco-Romans, but nowhere else. That is, madness as mental illness is only a particular case of this great social function of madness that we find in all civilizations. That’s what I would like to develop, the argument I would like to demonstrate to you and, hopefully, convince you is true. And if you are not convinced, so much the better, because I am not here to convince you. You’re not here to be convinced. I’m here to try to convince you and you’re here to leave skeptical and critical, and dissatisfied. That’s how it should be and how it must be. So, to my first argument: madness is a constant function we find in all societies. Since the eighteenth century, it has often been said, in Europe, that madness is only found in the most complex civilizations, the most developed and, at the same time, the most decadent; and madness continues to grow as a society becomes more complicated, as the civilization becomes entangled and turns inward, as people’s conditions of existence become increasingly complex; but in the simplest civilizations, those closest to nature, those closest to humankind in its truth, there can be no madness. This notion, which was often formulated in the eighteenth and later centuries since, is most likely absolutely false. First, it’s not true that the simplest societies, the most primitive or, as one says, the closest to nature, are free of madness. There is not a single society in the world, no matter how simple, [that is unaware of the phenomenon of madness]. Even in the most primitive Australian societies, even in those Siberian societies we know very little about, none of those societies is unaware of the phenomenon of madness.

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On the other hand, it is not true that the number of the mad increases as the civilization grows more complicated. For example, we are accustomed to saying that there are many more mad people today than there were in the nineteenth century, and that there were many more in the nineteenth century than in the eighteenth. But the quantitative studies that historians have now begun and which look at the past show, rather curiously, that the proportion of the insane (those who have been recognized, diagnosed, and treated as insane, of course), that the number of the insane has hardly increased since the seventeenth century in the Western world. In seventeenth-century Paris, 6,000 people had been interned in a population that didn’t exceed 200,000. You see that the proportion is high, higher even than today. Simply put, more people were interned— I’ll return to this later. But the quantitative proportion of the insane is not greater today than before. Consequently, this idea of madness, which increased along a civilizational gradient, is probably a chimera invented by the West in the eighteenth century, and we need to accept that madness is found in all societies. But in what form is it found? That’s the type of common denominator that could allow us to describe this very general phenomenon of madness. I think we can say the following: in every society, no matter how simple or complicated, no matter— I’ll take them all as a whole now— there is always a category of individual that is set apart, and those individuals are neither considered nor treated as criminals, nor are they considered or treated exactly as patients, or as sacred individuals. Yet, to a certain extent, they do belong to the category of criminals, to the ill, to the sacred, but their status is different. For example, in an extraordinarily simple Australian society, some individuals are recognized as sacred in the sense that they possess supernatural powers, they have a certain name, a certain status in the society. There are also a certain number of individuals who are, in some sense, considered to be ill and fall prey, become victims to the manipulations of sorcerers— which is another category. And then you have a third category of people who bear a particular name. That name is the bengwar— well, it’s not too important— and when people in that society are asked, “But what is that, the bengwar?”4 the only definition they can provide is that “they are people who do not behave like the others.” It’s an astonishing category, one that does indeed somewhat designate the strange status of individuals considered mad. How are those individuals, in the society I just referred to, but also in other societies, recognized? Why are they different? We can characterize them by five features. First, those different individuals, who don’t behave like the others, those bengwar as the Australians say, or the mad as we would say, are distinguished from the others because they do not have the same

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status in productive activities. They are not asked, and, moreover, are incapable, of doing the same work as the others. In the general circuit of labor, within the status of those who work, the mad have a different status than the others. Second, in ludic activities, in games, amusements, distractions, festivals, and, as we would now say in our somewhat flattened vocabulary, leisure activities, the mad do not have the same status as the others. Third, the mad individual does not have the same status as other individuals in the eyes of the family and, in general, within the system of sexual guidelines that prevail in the society; he or she is a deviant from the family’s point of view and in terms of their sexuality as well. Fourth, the mad person is an individual whose language— what he says, his words, his speech— does not have the same meaning, the same status, the same function, the same role, the possibilities of circulation, the same worth as the speech of other individuals. And fifth, the mad are referred to by society somewhat spontaneously, not institutionally, without there being a ritual that would identify them as mad in absolute terms. In other words, the limit between those individuals and the others, while being quite sensitive to immediate perception, that difference is not absolutely institutionalized and always remains somewhat fluid. These [five] features— difference in work, in play, in family status and sexuality, in language, and, finally, the noninstitutional character of all these differences— allow us to characterize the phenomenon and fact of madness in any and all civilizations. I would like to make two remarks about this very general and somewhat negative definition. First, you see how, in all societies, assuming my definition is true— which it is certainly not— there exists a very specific category of individuals who cannot be assimilated to the others but are nonetheless close to a number of other individuals. The mad are quite similar to the infirm because of their particular status, for example, in the system of labor occupations: like the invalid, we do not ask that the insane work. Similarly, in most societies, the infirm are generally not designated by any particular institution. This is true nearly everywhere except for modern societies, where hospitals and medical institutions perform this ritual of elimination. In general we can say that the madman, like the invalid, is someone who is immediately recognized as such, but without any absolutely definitive criterion. Yet the mentally ill person is not like the invalid, and cannot be treated or considered as an invalid. For the family status of the invalid does not change, he retains the same condition and plays the same role within the family; and the value of what the invalid says, the discourse of the invalid is not altered as the discourse of the mentally ill is altered. So there is a relationship among all societies between the

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mad person and the invalid, but also a very clear distinction: there is no difference in the family status of the invalid or in the status of his discourse, whereas there is for the mad. A second form of similarity is found in the fact that the mad are quite similar to individuals who, in different societies, are recognized as sexual or family deviants. For example, you have societies like the Nambikwara, studied by Lévi-Strauss, who assign a very specific status to celibate individuals, to unmarried individuals, to those without a wife, not so much because they don’t have a wife but because this prevents them from having brothers-in-law.5 Lacking any brothers-in-law, they are unable to enter the general circuit of families, exchanges, and so on, and, consequently, are given a status of deviance. And, to a certain extent, in a society like that of the Nambikwara, the mad are very close to these family and sexual deviants. Yet, here as well, there is a difference. These family and sexual deviants generally, but not always, follow the same system of occupation, of labor, and play as the others, but what they say, their discourse, has no particular status. The third association, the third possible similarity, is that the mad are very much like sacred individuals, who may be magicians, who may be possessed, who may be priests, or prophets, and this association between the madman and the sacred individual is marked by several characteristics. For one, the sacred individual formulates, articulates a language that has a very specific value, which does not have the same value as the language of others and, to that extent, the mad and the sacred individual to some extent exchange the possibilities of their discourse. Everyone knows, in the history of religions, whether it is the Muslim religion, or the Jewish religion, or the Christian religion, the extent to which the distinction between the discourse of the mad and the discourse of the mystic or the discourse of the prophet or the discourse of one who speaks on behalf of God, the extent to which distinction is difficult because the commonality is so great. All the same, there is a great difference between the madman and the sacred individual in every society, which is that the sacred individual is always recognized as sacred by a given institution, a preexisting religious institution or a religious institution that the individual creates for himself. An example of this is the prophet who has assigned an institutional status to his own religious speech, thereby distinguishing it from all the other deviant speech that one might encounter in his milieu.6 So, you see, the sacred individual is always institutionalized whereas the madman is in some sense on his own and, unlike the sacred individual, lacking in institutional support. Consequently, we can refer to what I would call the sociological kinship of the mad, that mad individual found in all societies: he is similar to the infirm, similar to the sexual and family deviant, also similar to the sacred

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individual, and yet is not exactly identified with any of those three categories. Here you have an entire constellation, a distribution, a dispersion of singular individuals within the homogeneity of society. The madman is part of this group but is not identified with any of the fundamental categories of this group. He is associated with them, of course, but yet distinct. That’s the first series of remarks I wanted to make about this definition of the mad in all societies. The second thing I want to say is this: in the civilizations that I would call, roughly, Western, and by “Western” I’m also thinking Mediterranean, because, from our current position, between the Arab-Muslim civilizations and the European and Christian civilizations, there is hardly any difference, except that the Arab-Muslim civilizations, especially from the Maghreb, were in advance of Europe by a century, sometimes even two centuries, in the phenomenon I’m about to describe. So, from this point of view and at this moment, there is no difference. In all of those civilizations, we find (and my remarks also apply for the contemporary period) that these various characteristics, the five characteristics by which I have attempted to characterize the insane in all societies and, especially, in primitive societies, are found in our own civilizations. Even in the modern world, in the homogenized form we are familiar with, the five characteristics I have just spoken about or, at least, four, because the fifth is somewhat problematic, the first four characteristics that typify the insane in primitive societies are found to be exactly the same in ours. First, the insane in our societies have an occupational status that is quite unique, that is, their position in the network of production and labor. I’ll give just one example here: in European societies, the insane began to be recognized and referred to as such at the end of the sixteenth and start of the seventeenth centuries when we began to refer to them and to recognize them as insane to the extent that they were incapable of work or simply unemployed. This is the economic perception of unemployment that, in Europe, has allowed us to recognize the insane, to refer to them as such and to treat them differently. We can say that in our societies, which are laboring societies, the insane are, above all, those who are unable to work, that is, they are essentially, fundamentally, the unemployed. The second characteristic found in our societies is that the mad, just as in primitive societies, have a unique status in play and leisure activities. We should first note the strange fact that the madman is an object of entertainment. We amuse ourselves with the mad, we do not amuse ourselves with the infirm; there are no comedies whose subject is the sick patient. You’ll claim that there is indeed one such. Yes, but it’s Le malade imaginaire, which involves a man who imagines himself to be sick but who is not, and who is,

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therefore, mad about illness, but his illness is the result of his madness and not the opposite.7 We don’t laugh at the invalid. However, we do laugh at the madman, who is an object to be mocked, with which we play, which we can imitate; the madman is someone we can put on stage and laugh at. So, madness is a form of amusement but sickness is not. And it is even stranger that the madman is someone who plays with others, who plays with the seriousness of reason, who plays with the seriousness of those who are not mad and ridicules them, who possesses, to a degree at least, the truth of that famous reason that others believe they possess. In all of Western theater— and I believe it’s the same in Arab and Maghrebi theater— especially during the Baroque period, the seventeenth century, we often find the character of the madman, of the individual who has lost his reason. But this character always has a very specific role in these plays. For, to be mad in the theater is to know more than the others, it implies divining the truth that others are unable to perceive, it is to be endowed, in a sense, with second sight, a doubled vision; it is to have, behind the somewhat blind gaze of reason, one that is more perceptive, one that sees things, unmasks them, denounces them, that perceives the truth, and recognizes in the quivering flash of delirium what reason, in its lengthy discourse, is unable to formulate. Madness, the mad in this capacity, is played in the theater and always shown playing the others, and knowing more than they do.8 And in general, madness in the Western world and in Western thought has always, to an extent, served to ironize the entire world. You may recall Erasmus and In Praise of Folly, where it is finally all the characters, all the institutions of sixteenth-century Europe, everything that was most sacred, most serious, most accepted throughout Europe at the time, that was mocked by madness, which was praised.9 Thus, madness is a game, something that is played with, and madness plays with all that is not mad. In general, throughout the West— and here, I’m not so sure, perhaps someone can tell me if this is also true in Muslim countries— in Western countries, there is an extraordinary relationship, an association between madness and festivals. After all, throughout the Western Middle Ages, the only large festival that was not a religious festival, which was not tied to Christian ritual, was the feast of madness, the Feast of Fools or, as it has come to be known in certain parts of France, the Feast of the Ass. And during this feast, what is it that transpired? People imitated the mad, and at these feasts one encountered all of the characters I have indicated: the mad were no longer represented as themselves, they changed, they inverted their social role and their labor and occupational status. The poor disguised themselves and pretended to be rich, the rich disguised themselves as the poor, those who were powerful mimed those who were humble and, for a day,

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the humble put on the sumptuous clothing of those who were powerful. These were the great Saturnalias of the medieval world. We also find a suspension, a bracketing of all the codes of sexual conduct. There was, as well, a liberation of language— for a day one could say whatever one wished. And in the cities of northern France, for example, the entire population, their faces painted, masked, costumed, with all the roles reversed, paraded before the palace of the burgomaster, or the mayor, or the lord, or the bishop, and there told him whatever was troubling them; and, naturally, it was with curses and obscenities that the carnival of the powerful was enacted. It presented a great rupture, a wholesale shift of institutions, even including the loss of identity of the individual, because everyone was masked and no one knew who was who.10 The Feast of Fools is a medieval institution that disappeared relatively early, but which we still find in an extraordinarily attenuated form today in many cities in Belgium and Germany. But, after all, the West in general has not completely lost this connection between festivals and madness, for Westerners, and maybe even non-Westerners, when they want to celebrate, what else do they do but get drunk or even, as is the case in some countries— Sweden, of course, but also the United States, and even France— take drugs? And what is this fascination with drugs that we currently find in countries around the world, other than the somewhat nostalgic attempt to reconnect with this old connection to feasts and madness, which had formerly intensified life in the Middle Ages. So, you see that in our society, as in primitive societies, the ludic situation of the mad is one that is unique and privileged. Another characteristic of the mad, which I mentioned was found in all societies and, especially, in primitive societies, and which we still find in our own, is that the mad, in our society, have a very unique, a very particular family status; not only that but, in general, a unique status with respect to the rules governing sexual life. For a very long time, in the sixteenth and, especially, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we mustn’t forget that it was the family itself— and not the physician and certainly not the administrative authorities— who identified those of its members who were mad. In France it was enough for the head of the family to make a request to the king to obtain a lettre de cachet, or to the lieutenant of police, and, then, based on this family decree alone, on this single diagnosis made by the family, based on this request originating with the family, the individual would be sent at once to an internment facility, whether Charenton, the Salpêtrière, Bicêtre, or elsewhere.11 Madness was essentially a kind of expulsion of the individual from the family constellation to which he or she belonged. Moreover, madness always changed the individual’s status within the family. There exists in

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the French Civil Code a provision that is, I believe, hardly ever applied any longer but was for a very long time— in fact, there’s a text by Balzac, which was all about this— and that is the interdiction, the legal process by which a family or a family member or a family advisor can be substituted for the mad individual and become, in a sense, their respondent or, rather, their legal proxy.12 And the madman quite naturally lost his rights as a husband and father. And you know that, today as well, as terrible as this may be in many situations, the family rights of the insane as well as the rights of the family of the insane are profoundly altered: for example, you cannot divorce someone who is confined, even if confined for their entire life. In more general terms, we can state that, in our society, madness has a very strange relationship not only with the family but with sexuality. And nearly all the research that has been conducted from the eighteenth century until Freud, all the research about madness, revolves around this curious relationship that exists— which we suspect, maybe which we even fantasize about— between madness and deviance or sexual delinquency. In the eighteenth century, we frequently come across the idea that debauchery, the excesses of debauchery, led to madness. And among the somewhat anticlerical positivist physicians of the nineteenth century, we encounter the contrary idea that it was chastity that led directly to madness. In either case, we find that normal family life, institutionalized family life is, generally speaking, incompatible with madness, which is a source of shame for the family, something that remains hidden. So you see, in our societies as in primitive societies, the madman is someone who has a very unique family status. One final characteristic is that the speech of the mad also has, in our societies as in primitive societies, a very unique status. The speech status of the mad is problematic. I don’t want to claim that in our societies the speech of the mad is completely disregarded, but to an extent it is placed between parentheses, between quotes. The speech of the mad brings about reactions that are not those that ordinarily respond to people’s everyday, normal speech. The speech of the mad is heard, but in a way that leads us to assign it a very specific status. You may recall, for example, that curious character we find not only in literature but even in the institutions of the Christian Middle Ages— and I’m quite certain that he has a parallel in Muslim societies— and that is the character of the jester. This court jester, this king’s fool, who lived in the midst of those extraordinarily hierarchical, extraordinarily closed societies, where everyone had a specific role, this jester was there and had his role alongside the cupbearer or the chancellor, whatever, and he had a role that was nearly as specific, as well defined as that of the cupbearer or the chancellor. So why was this jester there? He was there to speak, to say, to circulate this strange speech,

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which had a strange status; and that speech was mad speech, it was unreasonable speech. And what did this speech consist of ? On the one hand, it was, in a sense, stripped of power, that is, when the madman, when the king’s jester said something spiteful or obscene, or even when he told the truth to someone who was incapable of receiving it, it was unimportant; the jester’s speech was inoffensive, it didn’t wound, it was protected speech, like the tip of a fencing foil. And yet, this speech devoid of power, this naked speech, this unimportant speech that was listened to like the bell the jester wore— by a kind of redundant doubling of his own speech, he wore an array of bells and his words could be no louder than the bells that were attached to his clothing and sounded as he moved, jingled at his slightest gesture— this speech, although devoid of power, was responsible for telling the truth. It did so subtly, obscurely, and in a way that doubled back on itself. The madman told lies, but behind those lies a kind of truth was concealed, which we had to discover. And when the madman told the truth directly, the bare truth, he said it in a way that was deprived of seriousness, as if accidentally, and yet that truth, spoken as if by accident, which no one understood, held a given destiny. What the jester said to the incredulous ear of the king, who did not want to recognize the truth, that speech was like the prophetic speech of the ancient seers, which inscribed, once and for all, in the past and in the future, the sealed destiny of the powerful who had remained deaf and blind to that speech. In many Mediterranean civilizations, the jester’s speech had, I believe, a very special importance. Today, the character of the jester has disappeared; roughly speaking, he disappeared at the end of the Middle Ages. However, the ambiguous role of speech that is both true and false, speech that lacks seriousness and yet says what is essential, the paradox of speech deprived of power, which still reveals something more important than all the truths that circulate, this notion, this idea of speech that is so strange, so privileged, has not disappeared from our civilization. In fact, there exists speech that is even more important than that of the jester and plays exactly that role: literature is the heir of the jester’s speech. And the man of letters, the one who writes, does something in our society similar to the king’s fool. For, after all, what is literature if not a kind of empty speech, self-regarding speech, which is not made to tell the truth, which is not made to relate what really happened? The man of letters, the novelist, the one who invents a story does not relate a history, he doesn’t speak of events, he says something that does not exist and speaks into the void; and literary speech is a bell in our world. And yet, literary speech is made to reveal something that our everyday statements, that the truth of our scientific statements, that the heavy weight of our philosophical statements cannot say; and that something is a form of

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truth from below, or truth from beyond, and, as you know, the great novelists and the great dramatists have done a much better job of relating the fate of mankind than philosophers or intellectuals. In any case, we haven’t forgotten this connection between madness and literature. It was discussed by Plato.13 And it has not ceased to haunt all the literatures I would call Mediterranean, roughly speaking. You are aware of the importance this idea has had in Muslim civilization, the importance it has in our society today. And these three themes— the idea that all poetry and all verbal invention is similar to madness, the idea that we must listen to literature and poetry with as much seriousness and as much anxiety as we do madness, the idea that the writer is himself someone who is quite close to being mad— these three themes have continued to be reflected throughout that great, and now millennial, tradition. Additionally, this theme acquires greater intensity and relevance whenever literature experiences a crisis. For example, in the Christian West, in the sixteenth century, when the status of literary language changed, at the end of the Middle Ages, during the Renaissance, at a time when literary language, the language of fiction had re-equilibrated around new forms and acquired a new status, at that moment, we experienced, and with particular intensity, the connection between literature and madness. Naturally, this was the case with Erasmus and In Praise of Folly, but there were stranger things still. For example, at the start of the seventeenth century in France, there was a character who was mad, but mad, absolutely mad— I was going to say mad like you and I, but actually much more— an individual who would today be committed. This was the Comte de Permission. The count wrote completely mad texts, which were published with the help of several other people— they paid for the printing costs and advocated for their publication. I forget who his protector was, maybe the Duc de Bouillon, who published this insane literature, at his own expense.14 You are also aware of that strange connection, at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, that was discovered between madness and literature at the time of Hölderlin and Blake.15 And even today, with Raymond Roussel,16 with Antonin Artaud,17 the experience of the mad writer is an experience that is highly privileged for us. And, in a sense, we can say that Artaud is the most decisive of all French modern writers to the extent that he managed to pierce, to overturn the entire status, the old status of literary language and released it into that new space, which was the space of madness. And that a writer like Michaux might write from within an experience, which was in fact a drug experience (because he drugged himself to write), shows the extent to which, for him and for others, systematic madness and the search for a form of writing are interconnected.18 So you see, I think that, here too,

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we can recognize in these relations between literature and madness, this general characteristic that I referred to earlier: the speech of the madman, in every society and in our society, has a very particular, a very unique status, which enables us to situate the character of the mad. There remains the last characteristic, which is the noninstitutional nature of the identification of the mad. As I was saying, in every society, what typifies the mad, aside from the four previous characteristics, was the fact that there was really no organization, no institution, no agency that could identify them, that could absolutely recognize them as such. I believe this has been true for the majority of civilizations; it was true for ours until the end of the Middle Ages, and stopped being so near the end of the sixteenth century, or toward the fifteenth century in Muslim civilizations. In the sixteenth century in Western civilizations, a means was found to recognize or, in any case, to attempt to recognize the mad as such. We attempted to institutionalize the division and the difference that existed between madness and non-madness. The medicalization of madness, the invention of something like psychiatry, like psychopathology, the organization of those large establishments known as asylums, that now go by the more noble term “psychiatric hospitals,” all of this organization is nothing other than the institutionalization of this division between madness and non-madness, an institutionalization that no other culture had copied but which the Arabs began to refine in the Maghreb as early as the fifteenth century, and which was also refined, under Arab influence, by way of the Spanish in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is this institutionalization of the division between the mad and those who are not that I would now like to briefly describe. But before doing so, you can see how I have constructed my argument, which is probably false, which is filled with errors and traps, but ultimately amounts to this: I want to try to show that there are five major characteristics that, in every society, enable us to recognize the mad, that define the status of the mad, and that the first four characteristics are the same in Europe or in the modern world as they are in any other society. It is only the fifth that is variable, and the variation consists in the following: this last characteristic, which is the noninstitutional nature of the designation of the mad, has been changed. It has been changed and has been invested with the role and function of mental health. So that, if my demonstration is true, we come to the conclusion that it is not mental health or psychiatry that discovered the long concealed truth, a truth about madness that has long been forgotten and obliterated, but, in reality, it is within the ethnological and sociological context of madness, which is constant and universal, that mental health has played a role, and its importance stems from the fact that it has been inserted within a

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structure that was universal. In other words, mental health is only one of the functions within the general sociological structure of madness, and far from discovering the truth of that madness, mental health has occupied only one of the possible functions, the one that was inscribed in this general structure. Having said this and having revealed my strategy, I want to rapidly sketch the establishment of the division between the mad and the non-mad.19 We can say that, in general, during the Middle Ages— and I believe this is true for Muslim civilizations as well as Western civilizations— the status of the mad or, [rather], the division between the mad and the non-mad was extraordinarily uncertain and fluid. And we can say that until the fifteenth– sixteenth century, anyone could be mad, and we never asked anyone to identify the mad, and when someone wished to cease being mad, he could do so. In other words, there was no gateway, there was no entryway between madness and non-madness. This, to some extent, unencumbered status of madness in the medieval world is characterized by several things. You have, on the one hand, the fact that the mad were very willingly recognized, very willingly welcomed, very willingly designated as such, very willingly listened to as well, although there was no institution to accommodate them. We find, in the hospitals of a city as large as Paris at the time, that there were in all only four beds at the Hôtel-Dieu, which was the only hospital in existence at the time in which a system of chains and cages had been installed on the beds to secure the insane. Moreover, their fury was not so much considered a category of madness as a kind of fever. As to the mad properly speaking, the mad who were recognized as such, identified, listened to, they were absolutely free to circulate throughout the city as they wished and where they wished. The status of madness was completely unrestricted and whenever a mad person became slightly agitated or when someone wished to be rid of them, it was the custom to turn them over to travelers, either to merchants or, preferably, to sailors, either sailors on board the barges that traveled along the rivers or sailors on the open sea. And for those of you who have read the legend of Tristan, you know that Tristan in disguise set off with someone, I no longer recall who— it’s unimportant— disguised as a madman, with a cross shaved on his head, and he was immediately recognized as a madman.20 And he was asked, “But what sailor brought you here?” for only sailors could convey the mad. In this way, the mad traveled along the roads using various means of transport, attached to caravans, to columns of merchants, to boats; and this ill-defined circulation of the mad, this confusion of floating individuals, poorly integrated, poorly adapted, as we would say in the nineteenth century, this confusion indicated the extent to which the division occurred spontaneously, freely, noninstitutionally.

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How then did this institutionalization take place? How is it that, at a given moment, our societies found the situation intolerable and decided that they had to find a means to separate, clearly and distinctly, those who were mad from those who were not? By what process did reason attempt to separate itself from madness? In the European world, the reason, the process was relatively simple and easy to assign. The important change that occurred near the very end of the sixteenth [and] start of the seventeenth century did not at all involve the progress of reason, it did not at all involve a concern for a more accurate understanding of this strange and enigmatic phenomenon of madness. Physicians did not become interested in madness by saying to themselves “But what is this curious illness?” No, not at all. If we began to seek to separate the mad from those who were not, it was for reasons that were essentially economic. The great economic crisis that endured for the greater part of the seventeenth century— for the seventeenth century may have been, in Europe and, especially, in France, the golden age of literature and art, but it was a period that saw an extraordinarily heightened economic crisis— brought about enormous unemployment in the cities, a phenomenon that was made worse by the end of the various wars, guerrilla wars, religious conflicts, and others, that had devastated Europe in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This led to the appearance in the cities of multitudes of men who were jobless and unaccustomed to urban life. A third factor was the introduction of mercantilist policies. Which is to say that the bourgeoisie, as it began to assume, if not political power, at least economic power, needed a mass of laborers to produce, at the lowest possible cost, products it could sell abroad and thus acquire that well-known precious metal, which was quite rare at the time. Seventeenth-century European politics was entirely controlled by the need to hoard precious metals. So what became of those unemployed men? Quite simply, this enormous floating population that had been allowed to circulate during the Middle Ages and even in the sixteenth century over all the roads and canals of Europe was simply detained. In Hamburg, a port, in London, a port, in Paris, a very large city, and in Lyon, the leading, if not industrial, then manufacturing city of France at the time, they opened— or should I say closed!— immense buildings capable of accommodating thousands upon thousands of people. And who were those thousands of people, of whom 6,000 were detained in Paris alone in 1660? They were essentially the unemployed, men without a trade, old men, libertines, the dissolute, drunkards, they were spendthrift heads of families who spent the family’s assets instead of increasing them— and there were the mad. All those people, those who were unsuited to the prevailing conditions and norms of labor, found them-

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selves incarcerated. We can say that, in general, the entire ethical system, the entire moral system of the Middle Ages, and the sixteenth century as well, was overturned when, in the Christian world of sin, idleness superseded all other faults and all other sins, when, in the bourgeois world, the cardinal sin was no longer pride but sloth. And from that moment on— obviously, it’s very sad21— we interned people, and that whole economic and ethical world that had been formed at the time excluded and pushed away from its field of activity and light those individuals who were useless, who didn’t work, individuals who could not be present within the great circuit of economic production. In Paris there were three large buildings that were opened for this purpose: Charenton, which was a hospital but became an internment facility for these many uncertain and doubtful people; the Salpêtrière; and Bicêtre. In all, 6,000 people out of a population of less than 200,000— the proportion is high. Of course, those 6,000 people were not all mad in the sense we understand the term but— and I want to insist on this point— the mad found themselves, for the first time in the Western world, equated with a number of individuals with whom they had not been previously, which is to say, the elderly, the dissolute, the unemployed, with those who were jobless, the infirm, and so on. And suddenly, the mad lost the sociological, quasiethnological specificity they had known in the Middle Ages when they were still such picturesque, highly valued individuals, whose rantings and ravings were expected to contain something like the truth. Suddenly, the madman was devalued, neutralized, useless, an extra mouth to feed; extra in every sense of the word, for he ate although he did not work, and spoke when he should have kept quiet. The madman became a neutralized individual, but one who was at the same time guilty. The mad left the old paradoxical world of hidden truth and now entered the world of guilt, the world of sin, the world of indolence, of idleness. This is the first moment of that great institutionalization of the division between the mad and the non-mad. This division was not carried out directly. European society in the seventeenth century did not isolate the mad from other people; in reality, it separated the working population from the population that was not capable of working, the population that did not comply with, that did not obey economic norms. And within that population, among the ill, the dissolute, the elderly, and so on, we find the mad. So this first division was not between reason and unreason, but between labor and nonlabor, labor and idleness. As for the second episode of that institutionalization. Well, the second episode is the one that occurred at the beginning of the nineteenth century when, at the time of the French Revolution, and not only in France but

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throughout Europe, the traditional status of confinement was revised. The large internment facilities that held the unemployed were opened. Why were they opened? For two reasons primarily. A political reason, which was the fact that the State, and the State apparatus, the executive, as we might say, had lost the very important and burdensome role it had held over the judiciary, and, to that extent, the role of the police, which had been so important in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was thereby diminished. It was no longer possible for the State apparatus, even at the request of the family, to put someone away and lock them up until the end of their days. This limitation of State power and, consequently, of the power of the police, this reduction was significant and played an important role in the reevaluation of the division between madness and non-madness. But there was an economic reason as well. Nascent industrialization (and it was more than nascent at this time), which was widespread in the Western world, was associated with the well-known need for unemployment. There had to be a pool of the unemployed so industrialists could have at their disposal cheap labor, which would ensure low manufacturing costs and, consequently, the possibility of significant returns. The need to have a mass of the unemployed as a safety margin for economic regulation led, in all the countries of Europe at the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to the opening of the asylums and the release of those who had been confined. Everyone who had been confined was released— the infirm, the dissolute, the good-for-nothings, the idle— they were all put out onto the street because the system of economic production needed them. At that moment, they should have released the mad along with everyone else. But they did not release them, they kept them confined to the asylums. In a way, it was the mad who became the only rightful tenants, the sole occupants of those large houses of internment that had been built in the mid-seventeenth century. Why? Why were they the only people confined at a time when everyone else was released? The process had not been problem free. Many reformers at the end of the eighteenth century wanted the mad to be freed along with the others. But that did not happen. The mad remained behind and remained confined. They remained for a different reason, one that doesn’t intersect the one I have just given: European bourgeois society, as it was taking shape during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, having adopted a code in the form of the Napoleonic Civil Code, as many European countries had done, was essentially a society [. . .]a of the family. Yet, at the same period and for reasons largely different, it so happened that society and the family had need of hospital facilities to a. There is a brief interruption in the recording.

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provide medical care, not to the mentally ill but to those who were simply ill. And this resulted in a type of contamination. To justify getting rid of the insane, of all those who were dangerous to their economic or other status, to justify, therefore, the exclusion of the insane from the family, to justify the fact that they were confined, internment was given a medical status, and asylums and internment facilities were given the purely analogical status of hospitals. Society acted as if internment was, in reality, a process of medicalization and as if the mad were interned so they could be healed, whereas, in reality, they were interned so they could be gotten out of the way. By doing so the houses of internment became, little by little, psychiatric hospitals, and internment became something like hospitalization. But this phenomenon was an extraordinarily long, slow process, and demanded not only decades but nearly a century to unfold because, throughout the nineteenth century, while medical justifications may have been given for internment, the care that was given to the mentally ill in nineteenth-century Europe was practically nonexistent. It essentially consisted in confining people, classifying them, calming them, dividing them according to their illnesses, and allowing them to leave if they were able to adjust to life outside or retaining them until their death if they were unable to adapt. And it is only during the twentieth century that this false institution or, rather, this falsely medical institution known as the psychiatric hospital truly became a medical enterprise, that the place of internment became a genuinely therapeutic place. And two important events had to transpire for this to happen. The first dates from the end of the nineteenth century but really only became widespread in the twentieth, and that was psychoanalysis and, in general, psychotherapy and the diffusion of psychotherapeutic methods, which turned the psychiatric hospital into something like a real hospital. The second involved the great biological discoveries of pharmacology in the years 1950– 1960, which led to the purely medical treatment of the phenomenon of madness. Therefore, it’s more a series of, I won’t say accidents, but economic, political, institutional, legal, and other events that finally defined madness as a mental illness rather than a true scientific discovery of madness as a previously unrecognized disease. And if what I have presented to you is true, you should have a rough idea of both the process and the pattern. Madness can be viewed not as something gradually recognized by a constantly advancing medical science as a disease but as a complex sociological structure, ranging across several time periods, with different characteristics, different features, a universal sociological structure that is found in practically all societies, and in our societies from the seventeenth century on, for reasons that are primarily economic, sociological, and legal, but modified in one respect,

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namely, the necessity, the obligation for our societies to define a division between those who are able to work and those who are not able to work. And little by little, a series of new divisions took place at the conclusion of which the mad, as such, were isolated, the mad, as such, were provided a place of welcome or, if you like, a place of confinement— that is, the asylum. And finally, because of this medical model, which was not inherent in it but ran parallel to it, the asylum became something like a therapeutic institution. And it wasn’t until, roughly speaking, the nineteenth century that madness finally became something like a mental illness. If what I have said is true, I cannot believe that madness is simply, even in our societies, a disease that would appear under the same conditions as any other disease and disappear under the same conditions. So assuming what I have said is true, it is highly probable that madness is a constant sociological function, one we can find in any society, no matter how medicalized we might imagine. And when psychoanalysis and pharmacological medications will have triumphed over certain aspects of madness, we can assume and we can hope that there will again be new ways of being mad, which will always maintain, at the same level, this great universal function of madness.

3 M A DN E SS A N D SOCI ET Y

I Within the division normal/pathological, uncover a different division; bring to light an older, more general, more rudimentary, more complex function. Older: The opposition between normal and pathological is a recent opposition that was modeled on the opposition health/illness in the mideighteenth century (Italian and Viennese school). It wasn’t grafted onto the opposition madness/reason until several decades later. More general: We find in all cultures that the opposition normal/pathological is very localized. In our culture we find it applied to domains that are not associated with disease: to things, discourses, works. More rudimentary: The pair madness/reason has a very weak internal structure. Madness is a monotone function that is applied indifferently to a range of things. But the pathological is a structural concept with internal differentiations. More complex: The system of values for the opposition normal/pathological is simple; it is complex for madness (relation of madness to truth, to beauty, to innocence, to perversity, to criminality). BnF, Fonds Foucault, NAF 28730, box 57, folder 6. After the title, Foucault indicates that this is for a conference.

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The system that is manifest in the opposition madness/reason is quite different from that which supports the opposition normal/pathological, health/illness. But this autonomy, the no doubt originary and general character of the opposition madness/reason, has been forgotten. It has been concealed by the opposition normal/pathological, whose current imperialism we are familiar with. It conceals α. the opposition criminality/legality, β. the opposition forbidden sexuality/permitted sexuality, γ. the opposition between regular religious practices and those that manifest an irredentism. However, if we look a little closer: — We may wonder about this extension of the opposition normal/ pathological: 1. Because it is differentiated (or operative for many analyses). 2. Because it puts us in the presence of a very simple value system. 3. Because it implies a reductive technique. There exists a body of techniques that shift the pathological to the normal side. That is why we end up equating all oppositions with this one. Ultimately, even political oppositions. — But we can also ask ourselves how this concealment occurs, this confiscation of all the other oppositions by this one. How can we medicalize political error, crime, religious irredentism, sexual deviation? The instrument is the opposition madness/reason: — From a theoretical point of view, it is entirely coded by the opposition normal/pathological. — But it implicitly serves as a general code for translating diverse oppositions, such as the criminal and the licit, deviance and conformity (in the sexual or religious domain). The opposition madness/reason functions as an intermediary code that owes its privileged position — To its lack of internal structure, which allows it to be extended indefinitely. Because it is purely binary, it can translate any opposition. — To its translatability into the explicit, theoretically governed, and, in practice, manageable code of the normal and the pathological. — To its archaic, primitive, originary, implicit character. This old opposition between madness and reason (which seems to be an absolutely universal feature of every culture) seems to have been dismissed

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a long time ago, only to be replaced with a more rational opposition. In fact, we make use of it surreptitiously as a relay to translate and order all other oppositions into the system of the normal and the pathological. It’s an old opposition that has been reactivated to serve as an implicit relay, a language of translation, a language never spoken for its own sake. It is a “trans-oppositional” opposition (to distinguish it from the opposition normal/pathological, which would be meta-oppositional). Consequently, it no doubt now plays a very important role, even more important than in the past. And our struggle with it is much more urgent now than when it presented a clear and obvious opposition. — We continuously see it rise up and claim its independence from the opposition normal/pathological. The prerogatives of a madness that would [not] be one of the categories of the pathological: — Roussel — Artaud — drugs — art brut — But to the degree that it frees itself, it becomes generalized; it detaches itself from the hospital and from medical bodies to haunt art, literature, and painting. Having done so, it prepares, although ambiguously, the medical encoding and the reuse of works, behaviors, and language in pathological terms. This is, no doubt, the reason for the importance of drugs: α. They begin to become in Europe what they were in China: a comprehensive cultural fact. β. Unlike the use of drugs in the Far East (which was that of the Europeans until 1950), it is not so much a question of — escaping the unreality of the world and its madness for what might appear as truth, by which individuality would be dissolved, — but rather a release of the silent region of madness and a restoration of its powers of contestation. The actual, explicit, voluntary, and considered use of drugs confronts the theoretical, implicit, spontaneous, careless use of madness. Drugs decode madness (that is, they free it from its encoding in terms of the normal and the pathological). They can do this because we can, in principle, use them in a way that is voluntary and of limited duration (LSD/opium). But this act of decoding is itself encoded by society as “social illness.”

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II — We have just seen how the opposition madness/reason plays the role of a code with respect to the other major functional divisions (those for morality, justice, politics, society). It enables these divisions to be shifted to the opposition between the normal and the pathological (which is a functional and technical opposition). It is a code between two groups of functional oppositions. — But from another viewpoint, this opposition between madness and reason has a role to play with respect to the codes that are active in our culture; in particular, with respect to the code of all the other codes: language. It is a code with respect to functional systems, but it is a function with respect to linguistic codes; rather, the linguistic code and madness maintain between them complex functional relations. The study of this functionality could be outlined as follows: 1. How has madness disturbed the established linguistic code? How can the speech of the mad be compared [to] a normally informative set of messages? a. We could say, roughly speaking, that until Freud madness had been interpreted mostly as noise that obscured the message; whereas Freud [believed]a that the effect of the obscurity was due to the fact [that there was]b only a single chain of signals — bearing different messages, — each with its own code, — but having a more general code by which they could be translated into one another.1 b. We must also note that, for a given language, there can exist — a configuration that is perceived as obscuring at a given moment — and that no longer is at another moment. Roussel. 2. How can the speech of the mad be an instrument of identification for madness? a. Its role compared with other signs: very important in the sixteenth century, less important now. b. In speech what is immediately identifiable as deviant? As nonsensical, unreasonable, chimeric, stubborn? a. Conjecture— the word is missing. b. Conjecture— the words are missing.

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3. How has madness changed the circulation, diffusion, valuation, recording, and preservation of speech? The modalities of existence of mad speech in a culture: — Speech may become true from the moment it can be classified as mad. — It becomes sacred or, on the contrary, loses its sacralization (the Christian Mass). 4. How can language function as an instrument for healing madness— in any event as a means of access to it? — Theatrical realization — The avowal — Hypnotic language before psychoanalysis 5. Finally, what relation is there between madness and this singular language that is literature? — A problem added to the others; — but one that intersects them, severs them, duplicates them to the extent that literary speech is in correspondence with all other speech; — additionally, this problem is of unique importance in the Western world for historical reasons that would have to be analyzed. For two or three centuries, literary speech and insane speech have been, for us, related in very specific ways. [We cannot say that they are more closely connected because the deviance of the narrator, of the poet, of the prophet, the deviance of all those who use language uniquely has almost always and everywhere been placed under the auspices of madness.]c In general, there is hardly any literature without madness: 1) without the presentation of a character who, compared to the others, is mad 2) without the insertion of a language that can pass as the language of a mad person 3) without the acknowledgment of a certain relation between the act of writing and the fact of being mad In the West, we have seemingly gone from technique no. 1 to technique no. 3 (the theater in the Middle Ages, Rameau’s Nephew,2 Strindberg3). In fact these three elements have no doubt been constantly present, but from the Renaissance to the Baroque age their interactions have been given a configuration that has never been completely undone.

c. This passage is between square brackets in the manuscript.

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1) In this literature, the character of the mad is identified by a language of misunderstanding. The madman is one who identifies a thing for another thing, a person for another person: Don Quixote: throughout the novel (and in Part 2, it was important that no one pass themselves off as him).4 [Les] folies de Cardenio.5 (It’s the model for the theatrical theme of disguise. And probably a derivative of the misunderstanding found in chivalric romances.6) 2) The mad engages in self-denial: — either by identification with the other (Don Quixote) — or by the magical suppression of the self (believing that he is dead as in L’hypocondriaque7). (It is a derivative of the quest of the hero who goes into hiding, passes himself off as someone else, and confronts death in chivalric romances. It is the model for comic misunderstanding.) 3) The madman oversteps limits: — the limits of insolence, of temerity, of courage — the limits of understanding — the limits of death (Hamlet8) — the limits of truth: for what he says is true (but is treated as a [lie]d and those who pretend to be mad can really speak the truth, but in a way that is false) The mad communicate what is incommunicable; they disturb the borders of the world and the most well-established divisions. (The madman is a spin-off of the magician, of the sorcerer in the medieval novel. He is the model for the passionate hero who sees but does not see, who knows but only in his blindness, who communicates love and its opposite, death and life.) 4) This presence of the mad character in the midst of others, this presence of his insane speech in the midst of others— these have a very precise function, they are truth operators. The fictive world, literary speech in which the madman appears with his language undergo (by his fault or his virtue) some very strange alterations in their truth status: 1. It is first revealed to the eyes of the madman that everything he believed in was simply mistaken. The madman never remains mad: he himself always reduces his own chimeras.

d. Conjecture— the word is difficult to read.

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Don Quixote at the moment of his death.e,9 2. But he enables a truth to be revealed that, without him, would not have appeared: — that Lucinda is not dead10 — that Hamlet’s father was murdered — that the sentiments of King Lear’s daughters are not what they seem11 The madman is a revelator. 3. He shows that there is always, in irrational language, a profound connection, secret, difficult to decipher with the truth, as if, in spite of himself and without knowing it, the madman spoke the truth. — The hypochondriac has reason [to believe]f that everyone is dead, for we are all whitened gravestones. — Don Quixote has reason to believe that all the inns are castles, for all castles, after all, are only inns. In this sense the madman has the power to allegorize. He is allegorical power. 4. Finally, this shows that all the characters who surrounded him and compared to whom he was considered mad were, in reality, themselves blinded by a strange madness. Quite mad were those who believed that Hamlet was mad. Prophetic function of madness. Thus, the madman is the great truth operator, the alternator— he establishes and erases the truth at every level of speech. — His own speech— he establishes its truth [through]g the allegorical function 3; vanity by the self-reducingh function. — The speech of others who surround him— he establishes the truth through function 1; he establishes error through function 4. — The speech of the author— he establishes the truth through function 2; error through function 3 (because the author was wrong in presenting him as mad). All speech appears as both true and false. In this position, the madman is the analogon of the author. A complex analogon, a kind of perverse imp, a small, perfidious image, a clever daimon e. In the margin: Self-reducing. f. Conjecture— the words are missing. g. Missing word. h. That is, function 1.

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who plays at being an author; he undoes what he has done while pretending to be him. He is a counter-author, like Hamlet who inserts a play into Shakespeare’s play, like Don Quixote, who writes a novel out of the least serving girl whose path crosses his own. A number of consequences follow from this: — Literature, after this episode, enters the ambiguous domain of representation: — representation of the true — improbable representation of the true — true representation of the not-true It is possible that we haven’t yet left this age of representation. — Because madness and literature exist in an equivocal relationship. — Because it is not “madness” that causes literature to change; but the introduction of speech that is supposedly inane is correlative with a complete reorganization. In this we again discover the reciprocal function of speech. — But this madman, this mad speech, where does it come from? From the festival— where the madman presents an alternate reality (the feast of fools). And when the fool, presenting this alternate reality, enters the domain of this quasi-language that is literature, he causes the quasi-truth to scintillate. He releases all its fantasy, all its powers of invention and indefinite repetition; he brings to life the small internal feast of a truth that is [not]i true. — The world of epic has disappeared, as well as the feast. — Festivities will no longer take place other than in language. In the modern world, only language can offer true feasts. These are feasts of truth, that is, feasts of representation.

i. Conjecture— the word is missing.

4 L I T E R AT U R E A N D M A DN E S S Madness in Baroque Theater and the Theater of Artaud

There is no society without madness. Not that madness is inevitable or a necessity of nature, but rather because divisiona is found in all cultures. By this I mean that a culture is distinguished not simply with respect to others (opposite, against the others), but that within its space, its own domain, every culture establishes limits. What I have in mind is not so much what is permitted and what is not, good and evil, sacred and profane. I’m thinking of that obscure, uncertain, but constant limit between the mad and those who are not. But where is this limit established, and who is affected by it? Sociologists and ethnologists have a simple response, which is selfevident: the mad are those who are maladjusted, deviants, those who do not behave like everyone else. This response is very convenient; unfortunately it is deeply unsatisfactory. And it takes no account of the always very singular and very differentiated nature of the yardstick a culture uses to define madness. If the response by sociologists were true, madness would be a more or less attenuated, more or less bizarre variety of crime. And it is true that madness is very often associated with criminal conduct and guilt. But there is no society, no matter how primitive, that does not meticulously distinguish the mad from the criminal. The designation of the mad is always a specific social function. This function is applied to language. Madness is perceived through language and against the background of language. BnF, Fonds Foucault, NAF 28730, box 57, folders 1 and 7. a. [“Partage” in the original French. — Trans.] 43

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There was a great crisis in the European awareness of madness. This took place around 1820– 1830, when forms of madness without language, without delirium were discovered: the silent madness of gestures and behaviors. An astonishing crisis where the distinction between crime and madness was suddenly confused, calling into question the majority of penal practices and introducing correctional usages into asylums.1 In fact, psychoanalysis has inserted the concept of madness directly into its tradition by showing that it is always more or less a language and that what is hidden beneath behavioral disturbances is always a disturbance of expression. This was followed by a discovery that had remained obscure until the present day among sociologists, which is that language, in a society, is a place of privileged and particular interdictions, a domain where singular divisions are established. The same is true of language as for sexuality. Just as there is no society in which all forms of sexual behavior are permitted, and in which transgressions are not found, likewise, there are no cultures in which all language is authorized; and in every culture there are language transgressions. And madness is, no doubt, only one of them. Madness is a different language. We must now establish [several things]:b The first is that madness exercises a strange fascination on every language: there are literatures without love, without work, without poverty, some without war. There are none without madness or death. It is as if literature was connected, in general, to that which constitutes madness and death. The second is that this connection is curiously one of imitation and doubling. The thematic relationship between madness and the mirror in literature, in legends, and in folklore is a strange one. Looking at oneself in a mirror can lead to madness. Spend too much time in front of your mirror and you will see the devil. The typical form of madness is seeing your physical double (Dostoevsky).2 Or the madman is a kind of mirror that, passing before things and people, [reveals] their truth (The Idiot;3 the mad in Shakespeare’s plays). Or (but this is only a variant of the same theme) the madman is someone who has lost his image (Maupassant);4 someone who is doubled (Dr. Jekyll).5 Madness is something that involves the double, the same, a shared duality, the analogon, the indeterminable distance of the mirror. While madness b. Conjecture— words are missing.

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in societies is an absolute difference, the other language, inside language it is represented as the same thing, a reflected truth, a duplicate film. In Praise of Folly is the represented truth of mankind.6 Cervantes is literature itself within literature.7 Rameau’s Nephew is universal imitation (he imitates a musician, a philosopher, dance, nature).8 And conversely, among these madmen, our culture seeks something like an image of its language. In Hölderlin’s madness or in that of Roussel, we read an abbreviated form of our entire literature. We need to clarify these strange relationships (the mirror and difference, limit and identity) between madness, language, and literature. Maybe I’ve marked the deck. To find out, not to resolve the problem but to advance toward a solution, I have chosen two examples, both of which belong to a world of reflection and doubling in the theater. This risks complicating the problem (by multiplying the mirrors) but may also simplify it by setting aside outside elements. Paroxysmal theatre that is dissociated from any subjective experience. A fact of pure representation.c c. We find, in folder 1 of box 57, an incomplete text that appears to be another draft of the start of this conference: There is no society without madness. Not that mental illness is inevitable; not that it is a necessity of nature. But rather because there is no culture without division. That is, a culture is not distinguished simply by comparison to other cultures (opposite others, against others) but that within its space, in its own domain, every culture establishes a limit. In speaking of this limit, I’m not thinking of the one that exists between what is permitted and what is not, between good and bad, or the sacred and the profane. I’m thinking of that uncertain but constant limit that runs between reasonable people and the mad. You will at once make two objections: — There may indeed be societies without madness (whereas every form of social organization assumes a law and, therefore, a division between what is permitted and what is not). Those who are referred to as mad are those who do what is not permitted. — We recognize the mad by their gestures, their behavior, their actions. And if they are declared mad, it is because they commit actions, manifest behaviors, or exhibit gestures that are outside the rules and norms of the society. Therefore, what is essential is the rule, the law. Madness is merely the result of a deeper division and a more essential limitation. In response, I will say that, in general, what causes someone to be defined as mad in a given society is not their behavior, it’s their language. Let me give you a specific example. Until 1830, in Europe, the mad were recognized only by their speech. Of course, strange behavior, outside the norm, could lead one to “suspect” madness, and those behavioral irregularities were codified, for example, in canon law. But such visible deviations were always suspected of concealing a linguistic element, which was the secret source, the inexhaustible center. There is no madness without delusion.

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[I.] Madness in Baroque Theater It is an odd fact that scenes of madness in the theater of the first half of the seventeenth century are as common and as necessary to dramatic economy as scenes of avowal in the theater of Racine. The Racinian avowal, by ritually, ceremoniously naming the truth, sets loose the machinery of tragedy. Baroque madness, on the contrary, by evoking a fantasy world of errors, illusions, and misunderstandings controls the dramatic movement entirely (and if we examine the situation more closely, we will find that the classic And it was only around 1830 that moral madness was discovered: a madness without speech, entirely rooted in gestures and behaviors, silently invested in the plasticity of the body. This idea, too, was short-lived because, fifty years later, psychoanalysis would discover that all madness speaks. If you prefer, [it’s] because one speaks that one is mad— it is within the space of language that all cultures (including our own) recognize madness. The idea of a mad gesture, insane behavior, is only secondary, is derivative with respect to this idea of an inherent limit to language, of an absolute division of speech. Another way of saying this is that transgression is inherent in this language limit and that this transgression is madness. But the mad are found in all societies. And maybe, after all, language is like sexuality. Just as there is no society where all forms of sexual behavior are permitted, and just as there is, consequently, no culture without sexual transgression, likewise, there is no language in which just any form of speech is authorized. There is no culture where any possible language is, in effect, possible. Obviously, I’m not speaking of what is impossible because of the linguistic code itself: there exists, in any society whatsoever, a certain number or, rather, an indefinite number of sentences that are perfectly correct grammatically, phonetically, and syntactically, but which are not acceptable. They are deprived of that which constitutes the essence of all speech: the right to be expressed openly, to circulate, to be heard. This is an obvious phenomenon, one that we are familiar with. And yet we may never have reflected a great deal on the prohibitions of language. On what a limit of language might be. And the transgression of that limit. Of course, these limits are related to the practical prohibitions (we don’t have the right to say what we don’t have the right to do), but this is not all that simple. And the limits of language are far from coinciding with the negative precepts of behavior. The populations for whom the rules concerning the prohibition of incest are most severe have written epics in which incest plays a large role. Conversely, homosexuality in France has not been prohibited since the institution of the penal code, while the linguistic taboo against its masculine form lasted until after Zola. So, one could conduct an in-depth study on the prohibitions of language and their transgression. In any event, on the modes of limitation that have been imposed on speech as such. [In the margin: Problem that has been concealed by the freedom of thought, which is different.] 1. There is a critical limitation that affects the sense or form of what is said. We then refer to the rules of syntax or logic. To the order of meaning and form.

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avowal is merely the reverse of Baroque madness and is situated at the same point in the drama, and with dramatic effects that are often the same). But how does Baroque madness operate? 1. It introduces a world of death or quasi-death. One of the most common situations is the following: the hero discovers some piece of news that over2. There is a prohibition, strictly speaking, that condemns the utterance of a word or a meaning. Verbal taboos and censorship. 3. Finally, there is a third form of limitation, more discreet, but more massive, more imperceptible and cloaked because it is more general, more immediate, and less easily justified in speech. This limitation proceeds by exclusion, by nonrecognition, obstinate and almost mute, by a monosyllabic assertion of invalidity. We do not contest the signified, or the signifier, or their relationship but the very fact that they exist as sense or sign. As if it wasn’t language at all but an empty shell, speech without language, the hollow shape of words. This is the exclusion of non-sense. Yet— and I am going to ask that you accept this for the moment as fact, a fact we do not seek to explain (and we may never explain), that literature involves these three forms of limitation I have briefly presented. Literature always falls within the confines of those limits and is in the process of bringing about their transgression. Yet, while the transgression of taboos, of censorship, of morphological or semantic regularities has a very visible function at certain moments of history, its relation to nonsense is much more enigmatic. And this is true for two reasons: [Foucault had initially written: because it is a relation of imitation. Through a very odd doubling or mirror phenomenon, literature imitates non-sense, welcomes it, takes it under its wing, as if it might discover there one of its secrets, as if there was, in nonsense, something that concerned the very being of literature. And the other reason is that the relation to nonsense . . .] The first reason is that the relation to nonsense is constant in literature (at least in Western literature). Oddly, there are literatures that have ignored love; there are others that have ignored work, others history or war; others poverty, desire, ugliness. But none have ignored madness (nor have any ignored death). Madness and death appear to be deeply connected to what is essential in literature in general. Of course, this connection is not present, identical to itself, throughout history. It has even stopped changing without ever disappearing. This mobile and flexible obstinacy of madness in literature tends toward paradox. For example, in the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth, medical knowledge of madness, the social status of the mad, had not changed one iota. In fact, madness had never been less of a problem than during this period. Yet, at this moment, the presence of madness in language had never been more insistent; literature had never more fully experienced its relationship with madness (Shakespeare, Cervantes): as if the connection of madness with literature was a fundamental connection, autonomous, and did not depend on the history of knowledge, of technology, of societies. Let me be clear: if at a given moment in literature, madness has a given face and not another, it is for reasons that have to do with the thickness of history.

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whelms him. He feels as if he is going to die and collapses on stage. Soon after, he rises but doubly modified: — on the one hand, he is mad — on the other or, rather, at the same time, his madness consists in believing himself to be dead This is what transpires in the first scene of L’hypocondriaque by Rotrou, and the remainder of the play is marked by death. For, to overcome the hero’s delirium or to make themselves understood, the other characters pretend to be dead.9 The stage is then set with graves, skeletons, and a version of Hell, which occupy the production until its conclusion, until the hero is cured.d We find that the mortal imminence that defines the tragic space of Andromache, Mithridates, Phaedra, and Athaliah is structurally identical to this Baroque madness.10 We also find that this madness plays the role of an analogon of the Passion of Christ as represented in the theater of the Middle Ages: Christ’s death and descent to Hell, his judgment and resurrection. From a formal point of view, Baroque madness is exactly intermediate between the Christian Passion and tragic passion. It is the structural equivalent— the presence in man of the power of death. 2. Madness introduces a complex interplay of masks. Madness during the Baroque is the power of illusion: — The madman causes the world around him to wear the mask of his own insanity. Cardenio (in the play by Pichou based on an episode found in Cervantes) believes himself to be abandoned by Lucinda. He takes refuge in But that literature, in general, has been connected to madness, in general, with a constancy that has not been discussed (or almost) throughout all of Western history, is a form of enigmatic evidence. [The text breaks off here. The end of the page is crossed out: Perhaps this enigma and this evidence can only be clarified by providing specific examples. I’d like to take two examples, one borrowed from contemporary literature, whose vigilance concerning all phenomena of madness we are aware of, the other borrowed from seventeenth-century literature, from a literary experience contemporary with the Cartesian decision to exclude, at the start of the Meditations, the possibility of madness. In one case (the most recent), madness is the very subject of literary experience: this is the case for Artaud, for whom any undertaking concerning language was in direct communication with his madness. In the other (and I’ll begin with this), madness is represented in a highly external manner, as something strange and bizarre, a fact . . .] d. In the margin: It draws tragic space from exterior space.

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the forest, where the trees, the rocks, even the barber who comes to care for him appear with the features of his beloved.11 — Anyone who resists his madness is at once recognized as mad. Rotrou’s hypochondriac, encountering his mistress’s father, treats him as if he were dead; and because the man wishes to convince him that he is quite alive, Cloridan assumes he is dead— but a dead man who is mad. — And the madman himself appears masked in the eyes of the others. For they refuse to believe that he is mad. And they accuse him of intentionally wearing, whether from cunning, spite, or personal interest, a mask of feigned madness. He is treated as a reasonable man who pretends to be mad, whereas he is, in reality, a madman who believes himself reasonable. This results in an inextricable web of errors, misunderstandings, and doublings, of people who mistake one person for another (there are two twins in one of the plays). Yet, a characteristic of all of these frail (and improbable) architectural elements is that they are canceled by the intrigue and suddenly resolved in truth by the simple multiplication of errors. Here, as well, the successive declarations of classical theater, which gradually lead to the final statement of truth, [are] like the reversed reflection of the masked proliferation of Baroque madness. 3. Madness makes impossible communications possible, surpasses limits that ordinarily cannot be surpassed. Madness is the impossible encounter and the site of impossibility. In madness, dream communicates with waking life (no one knows who lives and who dies, who is awake and who is asleep, who is rational and who is irrational): Characters are confused with one another. They mistake themselves for someone else. They do things that are not expected of them. This creates two privileged situations in Baroque theater: 1) disguise, which confuses identities, ages, and sexes 2) bestiality, which transforms men into wild animals and causes them to commit monstrous acts In La Tragédie mahométiste (an anonymous play from 1612), we find a sultan who goes mad after the murder of his son, who kills the murderer on stage, cuts him up into little pieces, and eats him (also on stage).12 For everything that classical theater assigns to the unreal violence of speech (dream, menace, narrative, memory), madness will provide a visible presence on the stage of the Baroque theater.

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4. And here we are led to a fourth major function of madness in Baroque theater. When the hero goes mad on stage and this world of confusion, disguise, disorder, false death, and quasi-resurrection is set in motion, at that moment, what is brought about is a kind of second theater within the first, a more oneiric theater, one more fantastic than the first, whose function is to make it appear as the site of verisimilitude and reality. Yet, this second, interior and irrational, theater is, in its fantastic aspect, merely the exemplary and enlarged truth of the first; and what transpires on the small stage of madness is intended to state the truth and unravel that which, on the theater’s main stage, was unable to find a formulation or a solution. So that the flash of truth that bursts forth from this mad microcosm illuminates, with a light that is gentle or cruel, the macrocosm of the theater. We can say then that a function of madness is the theater’s selfrepresentation: the theatrical madness of theater. The theater is doubled on the small stage that reveals the invisible truth, the decipherable improbability, while the large stage circles around this interior spectacle and is represented in its theatrical truth by the play of madness itself. Concerning this doubling, the classical theater will retain no more than a very thin structure. There is no interior theater in Racine. But tragedy must be raveled and unraveled on a day of celebration (it’s possible that the rules are only the consequence, not of this day but of this festival: marriage, religious ceremony, coronation, pact or treaty). The Racinian ceremony (always evoked in speech, never shown and always suppressed by tragedy), this empty form of the festival, is the very structure of madness giving birth to the theater in the theater, the figurative time of representation in the actual time of the dialogue. The Racinian festival and Baroque madness represent the very theatricality of theater within the theater. If I have insisted at some length on madness in the Baroque theater, it is for two reasons: — To demonstrate that the madman is not just one character among many others at a given period in the history of the theater (alongside the braggart or the innocent) but that madness is [a] function of the theater as such and that we rediscover [it], although differently invested, in a theater without mad characters (Oreste in Andromache is the last). — To show that this madness has a curious function: it serves as a mirror of language. It duplicates and reduplicates it. This extreme, im-

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probable character of the madman in the theater is, in reality, the theater itself acknowledging itself in its birth and its truth. (That is why there is no psychological, pathological, or medical truth in the theatrical madman; his distinctive characteristics are theatrical. At the core of his being and his passion, at the core of his dramatic existence, he is himself theater.)

[II.] The Theater and Its Double I would now like to move to a point extremely distant. To a time when madness is no longer represented but lived from within, experienced on the surface of language, or even prior to language, when it is worn away from the inside and cannot come to light other than as a ruin. Naturally, I want to speak about Artaud for whom madness is not the extreme subtlety of a doubled representation but something that merges with the most originary thought, something that is one with the body. And if I have chosen Artaud (while I could also have chosen Roussel or J.-P. Brisset), it is because the problem of the theater was central for him.13 But it existed in an inverse relationship to the one we have just been discussing. By this I mean that the matter of theater (the theater and its double) is situated, for Artaud, within the sickness he suffered from (at the heart of that Void, as he himself referred to his madness); and it is not madness that hollowed out the theater from within and duplicated it. 1. I won’t discuss the well-known episode of the letters to Rivière.14 Rivière is said to have rejected Artaud’s poems because of a discordance, an almost stylistic formal divergence. Artaud replied that it wasn’t a question of a perfection he hadn’t yet acquired but of interior erosion, a sickness that ate at his ability to think, that removed it in such a way that he was stripped of something that served as the very heart of his existence. But nothing could eliminate this interior void, not even language. And in language, least of all literature. So that all the words Artaud wrote speak of this void, refer to this void, are born there only to cast themselves back, escaping only in the movement of their loss. 2. But this void, never to be abolished and which leaves all language in a derisive suspense, is also experienced as coming from the world: it is the void of things, institutions, culture, of all the words written well beyond any memory. It is the reigning desert. Yet, strangely, concerning this irremediable desert, Artaud experiences

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it in the theater in two ways. In the theater, more than elsewhere, the void is the void; for him the contemporary theater is the paradoxical point where the void culminates: absolute desolation. And the theater, in spite of or because of this, is indeed the form of expression by which one can most successfully, and with the greatest haste, return from this void. It is both the summit and the dead end of the void. As the emptiest point is also that of the most pressing appeal. “In the midst of confusion, of absence, of the denaturation of all human values . . . the idea of theater is probably the most affected.” And further on: “The theater is the most impossible thing in the world to save.”15 Yet, a few months later: “In this period of disarray in which we live, a period entirely filled with blasphemies and phosphorescences of infinite denial . . . I have had the weakness to believe that I could create a theater, that I could at the very least initiate this attempt to give life to the universally despised value of the theater.”16 In this extreme void, in this void of thought and language, what possibility of return is there for Artaud? Against the evil that eats away at words and the world, what can the theater do, “an art based entirely on the power of illusion”?17 In truth, what Artaud finds in the theater, what he seeks to discover, is not to fill this void but rather to explore its limits, to dig deep within it and identify an affirmation in its savage state. In the theater of cruelty, the first essential technique is the restoration of speech to the voice, of the voice to the body, of the body to gestures, or muscles, or the skeleton itself. A kind of general, systematic, and violent collapse of language’s powers of illusion to what is most flagrant in the body. To return the speech of the enchantment of words to a kind of breathlessness and danse macabre. It is not the sense nor the spirit of the text that exists but the “displacement of air that its utterance provokes. A point is all.”18 We must “undertake, in a new dance of the body of man, to unsettle this world of microbes, which is only coagulated nothingness. The theater of cruelty wants eyelids to dance, couple to couple, with elbows, knees, femurs, and big toes, and this must be seen.”19 Second technique: nothing in the décor, the accessories, the objects should be allusive or symbolic. Everything on stage must be what it is. No fantasy but the most meticulous reality, so that the stage communicates spatially with the audience in a way that is absolutely direct. Yet the staging, the movements of the actors, their evolutions, points in space on the stage where they freeze and jump must be symbolic; that

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is, they must speak a silent language that does not communicate through words. Speaking another language, direct and violent; a language both augural and divinatory, which suddenly reveals “the fatality of life and the mysterious encounters of dreams.”20 In other words, it is a question of substituting for the customary theatrical structure (real gestures and words in a fictional décor) the reverse structure: in a pitilessly real space, to employ gestures and movements that speak a different language. To substitute for the power of illusion of real words the magic of symbolic operations on real objects. 3. From this follows the disappearance of what we ordinarily understand by representation, which was replaced, every evening, by a highly perilous operation in which actors and spectators were violently compromised, caught in the fatality of this pending operation. “During each performance, we played a serious game. . . . We didn’t address ourselves to the intellect or the senses of the audience but their entire existence. To theirs and ours. We acted out our lives in the play that unfolded on stage. . . . [The spectator] will now go to the theater just as he goes to see the surgeon or the dentist.”21 4. This led to the discovery that the heart of the theater, its source (in the true sense of the word), where the play is born and continuously enacted, is not the stage but the theater itself. The auditorium in which the audience is confined is the point of convergence of possibly deadly rays. To threaten them absolutely, those rays must surround them, somewhat like a crown that rules them. The true theater would be one in which the audience would be at the center of the [play]e that is around them, in a gallery in which successive scenes unfold simultaneously, their gaze shifting arbitrarily but always significantly. Free as well from all temporal law, sovereign over all visual scrutiny, the play would then assume its true power of hallucination. It would reign above and around that central void to which the audience was condemned. And concerning the erosive void that Artaud continued to experience, the theater is no more than a means to give it its own, collective space, both absolutely dangerous and absolutely ritualized. It is not a void to fill but one that must always be exposed. e. Conjecture. Foucault initially wrote “theater,” then crossed it out and replaced it with “audience.” Given what follows, it is likely that Foucault meant “play.”

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In 1937, in “Les Nouvelles Révélations de l’Être,” he wrote: For a long time I have felt the Void, but I have refused to throw myself into the Void. What I have suffered from until this moment is to have rejected the Void, the Void that was already inside me.22,f

Strangely enough, the theater, which was Artaud’s great positive preoccupation, and which he constructed as a bulwark against his madness (throughout it and to triumph over it), has exactly the opposite structure of the Baroque theater. For example, consider this theater-in-the-round with the audience in the center; it is the negative image of the stage within the stage that is so common in the seventeenth century. This threat by which Artaud compromised the very existence of the audience is the opposite of that protective ring that Baroque theater traces when it presents the monstrous, the unbearable within the parentheses of madness. And the Baroque interplay of illusions, mistaken characters, masks, bodies that vanish with the simple power of words, is the exact counterpart of those real, indisputable, acute bodies with which Artaud seeks to create the only theatrical truth. As if the Baroque theater and that of Artaud were two symmetrical figures, reversed on either side of an enigmatic line, an imperceptible mirror. What then is this line? You may recall that the role of madness in preclassical theater was to manifest the theatricality of the theater. To show its power of illusion, that is, to both defuse and reproduce it. For Artaud theater consists in giving space to its sickness, to reproduce it, reversed; to provide the central collapse of its soul with a body (or rather thousands of bodies) so that he might dance to the limits of that space, the dance of its persecution. So we can say that this undertaking is in no way intended to conjure forth his madness, to escape it, so to speak, but to remain within it while also keeping it at arm’s length. f. At the bottom of the page, Foucault added: 1) This is the image of his madness 2) but at the same time it is an [impossible] theater — not because it is mad — but because it involves the representation of literature in its essence: — an originary language more perilous than words — a magical power — sacred and religious

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III But, you may ask, what’s the purpose of this strange rapprochement? What more does it tell us about madness and literature in general?g Even if it is true that the madness of Baroque drama and Artaud’s theatrical experience appear similar, and even assuming at the worst that they possess this relationship, in what sense are we closer to discovering the shared association of literature and madness?23 I’d like to return for a moment to the prohibitions of language. For years now we have distinguished between language— la langue— (that is, the linguistic code that is used by everyone who uses a language: vocabulary, phonetic rules, grammar, and so on), and speech— la parole— which is what we may be saying at a given moment (and which obeys the code, more or less, at least sufficiently for us to be understood by another speaker or by one who understands the same language). — But what societies reject are speech transgressions: things the verbal code allows us to say but that are made taboo by another code (religious, political, familial, ethical). A “sorcerer” is someone who infringes this taboo by uttering the word that must not be spoken (Beelzebub in the Our Father) or inverting the order of elements (reciting the Mass in reverse). — But they also reject changes of meaning; that is, to a certain extent, they contrast what the words say with something other than what they say. Language, as a code, is affected. This semantic outrage is heresy (I use the word for convenience given that the outrage can involve lay societies and nonreligious transgressions). — There is a third type of transgression (one involving self-implication), which consists in the fact that language (or the code) is engaged in speech, is at risk in speech (we assume that it is speech that is now and, for as long as it rules, the keeper of all the rules of the code), and, in return, speech must be regarded as a language. g. There’s a reference to a passage added at the bottom of the previous page: Initially by antipsychologism. Reasonable men, who know nothing about madness, or the madman creating a theory of theater from the depths of his madness, [would perceive] madness functioning in a way that is similar in language. In other words, madness is not an indifferent and variable cultural theme; it is not an individual experience transposed into literature. It is an autonomous and constant role of language with regard to itself — like criticism — like death which psychology cannot clarify (Roussel).

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We encounter this reversal and this extreme danger that speech imposes upon language in three situations: — one that is pure, which is esotericism, when a spoken word conceals its own code (but that code is known by others); — and two others, madness and literature, that are not always easy to distinguish from the first. Ever since Freud, we have known that it is speech that, in the case of madness, holds its own code. As for literature, we cannot say that the rules of language are not fulfilled; for nowhere is this the case more than in literature (when written by a good writer). But from the moment when literature begins (for writer and reader), the danger is present, or at least the risk that language might be absolutely compromised and subsumed by written speech. Whether it is thereby transfigured (as in Ronsard and Chateaubriand) or remains identical to itself (as in Voltaire, Gide, or Camus), it has run the same risk. This explains why literature is closely related to esotericism (beneath which it is hidden, pretending that it obeys another, external code, hidden within it, just barely visible). This also explains why it often appears to transgress language taboos (practicing sorcery with what cannot be uttered— the ineffable or unnameable) and why it so often risks heresy (the imaginary heresy of the fantastic or the conceptual heresy of thought). But the essence of literature is found neither in the one nor in the other. That essence is found nearest to madness, in the way speech radically endangers language. And if literature has frequently needed to represent it (if, ever since Homer and Ajax’s profound drunkenness, it has continued to represent it), it is because it finds there its reflection, its double, its image.24 That is, its own key. While it is true that literature places its code into its speech, and while it does not reveal its code, it does show what it is; it clearly states that it contains its code within itself by its self-representation in madness (this involuntary double of itself ). That is why madness in the Baroque theater always represents the theatricality of the theater; it is why Artaud, in speaking of his theater, refers to “the theater and its double.” The difference, the unforgettable difference was that, during the Baroque era, literature was in the process of being formed, and madness was merely a slender figure on the wane, present only long enough to reveal the theater of theater, the language of language, disappearing almost at once so that the calm, unruffled language of classical literature would prevail. For Artaud, a theater of hallucination was not an internal figure of the theater; it was an opening, a chasm, an abyss. Ironically, its purpose was [not] to demonstrate what literature was within literary speech; its pur-

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pose was to use violence to bring literature closer to what it was, to its most exposed being, to that something that is infinitely beneath it and infinitely less than it. To the simple cry of madness that is its sovereign double. We see why madness exerts upon literature the fascination we are familiar with and why literature always recognizes the theme of the mirror within itself. It is because madness is indeed the mirror of literature, the fictive space that reflects its own image back to it: — to the extent that literature represents itself in its voluntary [construction]h according to the rules of language, madness is its image: [wise]i madness that illustrates the theatricality of theater, the literariness of literature; — to the extent that literature is experienced as an absolute danger whereby language risks perishing, while madness remains its image: madness that reveals the cry beneath speech and the undoing of all meaning. Madness is indeed the playground of literature, the distance over which it extends and which is bound at each end only by this obsessive, derisive double that holds, ever so cruelly, its fictive truth.j h. Conjecture— the word is illegible. i. Conjecture— the word is difficult to read. j. In folder 1 of box 57, there is an isolated sheet that appears to be another draft of the end of this presentation: The representation of madness, for literature, or its constitution following an experience of madness, is, at bottom, nothing other than a demonstration of what it is, a statement of its own truth in an image. There is nothing surprising in the fact that madness is always organized in literature around the theme of the mirror. It is assumed to provide, in its fictive space, the truth of the world; in fact, it obscurely reveals something that involves the being of literature. But, of course, it doesn’t always say it in the same way: — During the Baroque era, it was the ludic reflection of a language in the process of being constituted as oeuvre. It was the slender, waning figure that revealed the theatricality of theater, the language of language. — During Artaud’s lifetime, in ours, madness violently returns literature to this simple truth, to the rock of its being, where it discovers what it is, exposes it to this movement that eats it away, and to the void when it discovers that it is purely and simply language. But beneath these two forms (one which multiplies the illusory powers of representation, the other which ushers in the perilous, unique, and indefinitely repeated festival), madness defines the playground of literature. The distance it continues to travel. The limits beyond which it sees outlined, en abîme, like the very near and very distant background of a mirror, a strange image, which is itself. And at each of these extreme points, those confining regions where the end is also the beginning, where daybreak is also the night by which it is extinguished, literature is haunted by this obsessive, derisive, double that holds and strips, ever so cruelly, its fictive truth, its true fiction.

5 L I T E R AT U R E A N D M A DN E S S Madness in the Work of Raymond Roussel

[I] There are no societies without madness; no culture that does not make a place along its margins for those we refer to as mad. There isn’t a society in the world in which this strange category doesn’t exist, not a language that doesn’t have a word to refer to it. The mad are not avoidable in a society the way those with consumption or cancer might be; for though they exist now, they will disappear the day an adequate treatment is found for those diseases. The existence of madness is different. — First because there are, among the mad, not only those who are mentally disturbed (in the medical sense of the term) but people who are not sick, as well as things: works of art, sentences, books, products of all kinds that are referred to as “mad.” Is this a misuse of language? Probably not. But possibly because madness is more or less secretly, more or less openly a principle of classification and organization; the standard of binary distribution that societies enact spontaneously between two regions of existence: reason and unreason. — And we must also remember that this distribution is not the same in different societies. With the possible exception of a small group of people who would be considered mad here or in Melanesian societies, the definition of madness is highly variable. Ethnologists have often noted that the indigenous peoples they select as informants, those who appear most BnF, Fonds Foucault, NAF 28730, box 57, folders 1, 3, 6, and 7. 59

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capable of saying reasonable things about the group to which they belong, are specifically considered by their group to be deviants and unreasonable. Over time, in a given society, we find important variations. Some religious or parareligious practices such as magic or sorcery have, for a long time, been prohibited in Western Christian societies. It is only recently that they have made their entrance into the category of the unreasonable. No doubt, madness is not a natural phenomenon— a pathological risk to which all individuals on the surface of the earth are uniformly subjected. Madness is a general function of the division we find in every human culture, but is not enacted in the same way in every culture. Every form of society, every civilization has its own laws of division and its own standards. Overall, in a given society, madness is not an accident; it is a result of distribution. This evidence has been obscured because we now consider madness and disease to be structurally identical. But this was not always so everywhere or at all times. Until about 1780, there existed, in western Europe, two quite distinct social functions and two regions of experience. — One involved mental illness and entailed a series of legal and medical obligations. — The other involved a category of people referred to as insane, unreasonable, alienated. They were given no medical treatment, no strict legal measures were applied. They were confined under conditions that, to us, appear completely arbitrary but that complied with imperatives that were quite clear at the time. But at the end of the eighteenth century, there was a superposition and confusion in Western thought between the separation of madness and the definition of mental illness. It was thought that we could precisely match the categories of unreason with those of pathology. And the following axiom was expressed, which is quite obvious for us as well: in earlier times the mad or the insane were merely invalids we were unable to recognize as such. Medicine, it was believed, had been too rudimentary to acknowledge this and incorporate them in its own precincts. But it was hoped that from now on any experience of madness would be absorbed into the field of medical illness. But this failed to account for the autonomy of those social functions that can easily accommodate a form of positive knowledge about life, the body, and illness, but are not fully reduced to them. Consider what happened with death. It is the most limiting biological fact. And yet in no society does an individual die without releasing a specific function that is quite different than the pure fact of death. This function appears in the ritual that surrounds death and often does not declare social

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death until long after biological death (mourning), but sometimes decrees it before death (in the case of illness, condemnation, or even old age). And today, while it may be the medical profession that scientifically defines death (the moment of death, the cause of death), the social function that surrounds death, exalts and consecrates it, is far from having disappeared. The same is true of madness. Medicine has indeed attempted to annex the experience of madness to mental illness, but the experience of madness remains outside the pathology of behavior. From this follows the overlaps, the errors, the marginal but insistent phenomena that manifest the irreducibility of madness to psychiatry. It is hard to say whether certain criminal or sexual deviations are or are not diseases. There is an ambiguity with respect to the mad (considered both in danger and as dangerous). And there is the very strange experience of the relationship between madness and literature (I should say between madness and art, but the subject is too broad, infinitely so, for a discussion).

II The relationship between madness and literature does not actually date from the nineteenth century. We can even say that these relationships are constant— strangely constant. There have been literatures without war, literatures without love, but there are none that have not mentioned death or madness at one time or another. Ever since the madness of Ajax, madness has always been present in Western literature, but has experienced privileged moments, peak periods.1 It’s possible that it has been most frequently represented in our day and throughout the sixteenth century. I’m thinking of Erasmus, Cervantes, of course, but also the Elizabethan theater and what we could call the Baroque theater, during the early seventeenth century in France. But it seems to me that the contemporary experience of madness has a very different character than this lengthy tradition. In the following examples, I want to briefly characterize these older and contemporary experiences of madness (bearing in mind that, neither then nor now, was it ever a question of the realistically medical representation of mental illness). [A.] In the sixteenth century, the madman is someone who takes himself to be another: — Though living he believes he is dead (Rotrou’s L’hypocondriaque).2 — Though rich he believes himself to be poor; an impoverished knight, he believes himself to be the great righter of wrongs (Don Quixote).

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— Though loved he believes that he is hated; or old and ugly, he believes that he is loved. Conversely, he mistakes one person for another. In Les folies de Cardenio, the hero thinks that everyone is Lucinde (including the trees in the forest in which he seeks refuge, including the barber).3 So, the madman is the great instrument of the most surprising metamorphoses. He organizes the great game of self and other. And because these episodes of madness are generally combined with incidents where disguises, cross-dressing, or mistaken identities are involved, we can imagine the inextricable muddle this can produce. But this highly complex interplay has only a single result: to reveal a deeper and more hidden truth, one that was unknown to us. Madness reveals the invisible. Mistaking other people for what they are not and himself for something other than he is, the madman paradoxically brings the naked truth to light.a Don Quixote reveals the teeming, wretched, avid, grotesque little world that sixteenth-century Spain often was, and, at the same time, he denounces, in their reality of lies, the novels of chivalry that enchanted that same Spain. Likewise, Hamlet, from the depths of his melancholy, reveals the invisible truth of the assassination of his father, which he first presents as a simple theatrical fiction and which gradually becomes the truth of the play itself. We see that madness plays a dual role: it shows the truth of things and people; it denounces and reveals; and, at the same time, it serves as an image of literature, a kind of double within it. Don Quixote4 is a novel that, through the intermediary of madness, represents other novels; Hamlet5 is a play that represents another play. It is as if literature doubled itself and observed itself through the play of madness; as if madness held a mirror up to literature in which it saw itself reflected. The role of madness is not only to reveal, as if by a trick, the truth of things but to also express the truth of literature, theater, the novel (to manifest it in its ambiguous role as deceitful truth and truthful deceit).b B. Yet, since the nineteenth century, madness has played an apparently very different role in literature, no longer that of representation and image. Madness is no longer represented to represent literature; the experience of literature is found at the very heart of madness. Madness becomes a subjective experience of the author himself: as if madness and writing belonged there from their origin. Of course, I’m thinka. In the margin: The madman is like the truth teller. b. In the margin: The mirror inside language. As in paintings that represent mirrors.

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ing of those authors who have experienced madness from within mental illness, like Nerval or Artaud, as well as those who have undergone medically indecisive experiments (disease or not?), but that served as twin experiences of madness and language (Flaubert at the time of the Mémoires d’un fou,6 Mallarmé at the time of Tournon, when he underwent what is described as a crisis of melancholy and wrote Igitur7). I’m thinking of all those who invoked, at the edges of their language, the promising fire of madness, such as the surrealists; and those who artificially and meticulously altered it through drugs, like Michaux. No doubt, this is a highly complex experience in which literature, madness, and mental illness intersect and intertwine. And we are at once prompted to ask if the experience of madness was necessary for someone like Artaud to become a writer, for, prior to his crises, he had written no more than a handful of adolescent poems. But, after all, there are many mentally ill individuals who write nothing of value. We can then conclude that one must already be a great writer to be both mad and a great writer. In truth, these endless discussions are not very meaningful: they have no more or no less meaning (which is to say, very little overall) than the debates about the conditions in which genius can come into being. And yet, there is in this real link between writing and madness something enigmatic, which no doubt raises the question of what literature is today. I’d like to take a very pure and, consequently, highly complex example. Not, obviously, to resolve the problem but to try to establish its dimensions. It’s a question of one of those rare cases in which the work, the experience of madness and mental illness are exactly superimposed to form a unique figure. I’m referring to Raymond Roussel, a writer who was little known during his lifetime outside the surrealists (he lived from 1877 to 1933).8 But his importance and stature have continued to grow since then. And through the Nouveau Roman, through the work of Robbe-Grillet, we see that Roussel has made language into an experiment, which is that of contemporary literature.9 Since he was seventeen or eighteen years old, Roussel was what could be called sick in the strict sense of the word. He was classified and treated as such by Pierre Janet.10 He presented what can be recognized as obsessional symptoms ( Janet called it psychasthenia; Freud called it a neurosis; maybe it was a “pseudo-schizophrenic neurosis,” the term now used for all borderline forms between neurosis and schizophrenia to which contemporary psychiatry is very attentive, including both obsessional behavior and signs of hysteria).

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— At the age of seventeen– eighteen, Roussel had an experience of blinding illumination. The impression that a brilliant light was emanating from [. . .]c tiny photograph contained in the lens of a souvenir penholder. — The other part of his work is just as obsessive and even stranger. He chose ready-made sentences at random (“I have good tobacco”), extracted approximate sound patterns, and from them constructed a series of words that served as a guide for a new story. It involved the use of chance in language: subjecting sentences to phonetic explosions and using the sonorous dice once they had been cast to construct a new verbal structure from the figure thus formed.11 Yet, these two aspects of the work exactly map the most important experiments of modern literature: — The introduction of change into literary language and the birth of the fantastic, no longer from the old constants of the imagination but from the cracks, gaps, and shocks of language. — The constitution of a language that is no longer presented as invention or the first, early expression of a subjectivity but [as] the repetition of an already spoken language (variations of systematic repetition): namely, the idea that literature is not made with ideas, or feelings, or impressions but with language and laws that are internal to that language. Literature is found only in a certain playground in language. — The discovery of a strange relationship to things: literature’s goal not being to magnify things or demystify them, or cause them to vibrate or sing, but above all to make them speak— to introduce them into language and introduce language into them, to establish a shared space or tissue for things and words. — The discovery, as well, of an entirely empty and transparent writing. Literature is not made of the intrinsic beauty or splendor of words but, rather, of a mutation in the very being of language. Literature is not a choice of vocabulary or syntax, it is language’s way of being with respect to itself and to things.d c. A page of the manuscript is missing. d. On a separate sheet placed in this location, Foucault had written: But none of this dominates literature other than to the extent that it is the upside-down mirror image; that is, that Roussel’s experience is astonishment before the absolute and originary power of words; that very familiar yet enigmatic power that allows words to name things and cause them to appear, that wordplay and word breaks can bring forth the impossible; and that that highly utilitarian instrument, entirely intended for exchange, is susceptible, through an alteration of its being, to transform itself into this straight, intransitive, useless figure known as literature. Roussel’s madness gives literature an image in its emulsive state; it relates, in the most

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All of this was discovered, and really discovered in Roussel’s work by the surrealists, by Michel Leiris,12 by Butor,13 and by Robbe-Grillet. In fact, Robbe-Grillet even thought of calling The Voyeur, Sight, in homage to Raymond Roussel.14 In this way the problem was presented in all its purity. — A man who, until the age of seventeen, had written only songs, becomes ill, medically ill. He begins to write, in direct connection with his madness, a series of works (which are not, as with Nerval or Artaud, a debate with his madness), but the serene translation, into language, of the great, classical structures of obsession. — And suddenly he invents, even before it existed (between 1897 and 1914), what constitutes the essence of modern literature, to the point that he was successively discovered by Breton,15 Leiris, Robbe-Grillet, and Butor as the “discoverer” of what they are.

III There is no doubt that a phenomenon such as this has never occurred before. And it raises the question, in the clearest way, of the relation between contemporary literature and madness. We cannot evade the issue by claiming that we are dealing with a writer who had gone mad because for him the experience of madness and that of literature are one and the same. Nor can we say that here is a man who, through madness, has reconnected with a preexisting aesthetic experience. We are forced to acknowledge that we are dealing with a mental patient in the strict sense of the term, who has discovered, in the space opened up by his disease, a certain experience of language, where literature is belatedly recognized. And if we pay careful attention to Roussel’s work, we see that his is a literature that is both highly enigmatic and very clear. Very clear, because he says nothing that is ambiguous, confused, or allusive. All the words are ordinary, and the syntax is limpid. But its enigmatic nature arises because it asks the question: why this? Why these endless descriptions? Why these fantastic and absurd stories based on language games? primitive way, how literature can come into being; it provides the mirror representation of the most matutinal power of words. And what I have said about Roussel could also be said of Artaud. Except that Artaud’s experience is not that of the initial power of language but, on the contrary, its collapse. Collapse, impotence, central anfractuosity, which Rivière had noted in Artaud’s earliest poetry. But Artaud cannot resolve them by himself; his language is the very collapse of his language. And it is this void he traversed in his work that, paradoxically, he [wants] to make visible in his theater.

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A body of work that is so enigmatic that Breton and the surrealists believed it to be esoteric and animated by a sense of mysticism. In fact, Roussel’s work does conceal something, but what it conceals is also what it most reveals, and that is language. The secret of each of his texts is an exploration of the properties and possibilities of language. Roussel made, beneath language, an inventory of language (its capacities for naming, description, transformation, arbitrary construction). Yet what literature is discovering in the twentieth century, certainly since Mallarmé, but especially since the surrealists and contemporary authors, is that it is made with language, and that far from having to say, using a more or less modified language, things that are more or less new, its actual role is to deepen, reveal, and modify its relationship to language and its existence as language. To use the vocabulary of linguistics, we could say that contemporary literature is no longer a speech act written into a preexisting language, but speech that compromises, questions, and surrounds the language with which it is made. Speech that contains its own language. Since Freud we have known that madness is speech of this kind. Not meaningless speech but speech that possesses its own cypher, and which we can decipher only on the basis of what it says. Madness obeys no language (which is why it is meaningless), but it contains its own code in the words it pronounces (and in this way it has meaning). So, we can understand how this enigmatic convergence between madness and literature can be outlined. They are both adjacent, probably adjoining, experiences of language. And, therefore, they are like images of one another, one reflecting the other so that, at every moment, this unreal mirror space between them exposes and destroys a distance and an identity. In classical literature, madness was always represented; within the literary work it was a small image (frequent, of course, but never absolutely indispensable) of the work, it doubled the work to demonstrate its power and, at the same time, deprecate its prestige. It denounced it, repeated it, and manifested the paradoxical truth (somewhat like the presence of a mirror in paintings, in which the painting itself was reflected).16 In contemporary literature, madness and literature remain in a mirror situation; they continue to exist as each other’s double. But this time, they no longer reside within an established language (literature using the language wherever it resides, and madness residing in literature); they are both outside language, those strange, marginal, and slightly transgressive experiences that trigger, in their own space, their code, their cypher, and their own language system. Earlier I said that there is no society without madness. We could also say that there isn’t a single society in which it is permissible to say every-

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thing. Language is like behavior: it is not an indefinitely open domain where everything is possible. But the limitations a society imposes on language are varied. — There are limitations that are due to the language itself (its structure and its laws). If we transgress them, we are not punished, we are simply not understood. — There are limitations that affect words that are grammatically possible but are loaded with a religious, sexual, moral, or magical surcharge, and, consequently, cannot be used (taboo words or expressions). And we can be [punished]e in various ways. — There are things that are grammatically [correct],f which can be expressed with acceptable words, but whose meaning is rejected. There are phenomena of censorship that, under various institutional forms, exist in all cultures. — Finally, there are forms of verbal behavior that cultures rarely condemn but tolerate with difficulty. These behaviors are those that consist in employing an approximately correct language (in terms of its form, its words, its meaning) that obeys the language that everyone speaks only superficially; in fact, this language contains, within itself, its code and its language system, and, as a result, is open only to those who understand it. This is something a society never fully admits. Of course, today at least, such behavior is not punished, but we keep it on the margins, confined and marked with the sign of deviance.g e. Conjecture— the word is difficult to read. f. Conjecture— the word is missing. g. The following page was inserted in this location: There are two languages of this type: madness and literature (not esotericism, which obeys a different code). Literature, whenever it questions itself, when it interrogates its nature, gives this image to itself, this double, this analogon that is madness. — When, at the end of the sixteenth century, theatrical and romantic fiction, this grand fictive language that had been that of the Renaissance and the Baroque, questioned itself about the powers of fiction, it represented itself in speech that contained its own code, which stated its truth. It simulated itself in madness. It wasn’t literature that simulated madness, it was madness that simulated literature. — Today, literature is again being challenged, no longer as truth but as language. It is within an experience of language enfolding itself that it will question and criticize itself. Madness, in its derision, is the critical conscience of literature. [Unlike] philosophy (Descartes and Nietzsche). And if we imagine that mental illness since Freud has again become madness, then we can understand how the critical conscience of literature has now become infinitely [close] to the lyrical conscience of the madman. And that it is no longer the image of madness that can transmit, like a reflection, the image of literature, but the very experience of madness that can say and speak the very being of literature.

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On the day that literature, no longer subjected to the code of rhetoric or to images or ideas, became its own language system for itself (this took place approximately toward the late nineteenth century, with Mallarmé), on the day when madness appeared as a strange phenomenon of speech, where the language system would be inside speech, then a certain experience [common]h to both madness and literature was in the process of being delineated. And madness and literature became two twin figures, at least on the level of the experience that gave rise to them— at the level of that language system lost in speech, which gave rise to them. But maybe one day literature will metamorphose again, leaving the experience of madness where it is, separating completely from it, unless— but who are we to say?— it remains the destiny of literature to always have its image and its double in madness.

h. Conjecture— the word is difficult to read.

6 PH E NOM E NOL OGIC A L E X PE R I E NCE Experience in Bataille

For phenomenology, the philosophical experience is a journey through the field of necessary possibilities, an approach that, with rigor and an indispensable decisiveness, allows itself to be guided by the necessary deployment of every variation possible. From the outset, this journey is guided by the need for something essential that will just precede it, not by much but continuously, until the end of its course. Experience for Bataille follow’s Blanchot’s wish— that it be the authority, thereby reversing the sense, the direction of philosophical progress, pulling into the absolute initiative of its step, its stars and their sky. It is not enough to state that it rediscovers its freedom; rather, we should say that it has turned over the blade of its freedom; no longer the free exercise of necessity or the happiness of received authority— but in an original gesture of authority, it becomes authority, a creative authority of itself resting upon itself, gathering into itself, enacting itself in the expansion of self; an experiential freedom that no longer traces the straight line that separates but elevates the scepter that encircles, gathers, and rules. No longer is it a mind seeking reconciliation, a consciousness that faithfully listens to itself, nor a subject always shifted toward its most originary self, but, by the authority with which it provides proof and forms its proof, it dissipates all the mythologies of origin, all the phantoms of alienation; it has broken with all forms of consciousness forgetful of self, it has erased all the faces of slave consciousness; it at once renders pointless all attempts at remembrance or deliverance, for it has lost nothing of itself, no homeland has gone before it, no heaven has fixed the destiny of its birth; it

BnF, Fonds Foucault, NAF 28730, box 54, folder 9. 69

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bears its sovereignty in the moment of its initiative, and what it establishes is not a practice, an exercise, or a task, it is dominion. But dominion is also a game with the possible, and if its free movement does not follow the paths of necessity with parallel fidelity, shouldn’t it encounter them at the crossroads of destiny? Doesn’t sovereignty encounter, in the event, that which fidelity pursues as its task? Isn’t sovereignty, after all is said and done, a fidelity, a moment separated from its destiny? This is true only for sleeping sovereignties, for those that operate— child’s play— within the gardens of the possible: the sovereignty of judges, of politicians, of those who probe backs and hearts, the sovereignty of philosophers; will they have surveyed all possibles, given that the possibility of possibilities will always remain; and it is here that all of them stumble; this is their torment: the judges who do not reach the end of death, the politicians the end of history, the priests the end of life, and the philosophers the end of philosophy? For justice to live, it must be killed with vengeance and left to perish day by day, in blood; for politics to live, it must be smothered at the end of history; so that the religion of hearts may live, it must be killed with pardon; so that philosophy survives, it must be made impossible and its end ensured in an ontology. It is the element of decision that reveals that the decisive is decisively missing. For experience, and its weight of authority, do not consist in reviewing the possible but in crossing the field of the possible and actually reaching the line, which is impossible to reach, of the impossible. Phenomenology, at the end of its road through the possible, encounters in the Urgegebene the point at which the possibility of possibilities is crushed upon the thickness of an ontology that has remained implicit. Bataille’s experience cleaves the possible in an instant, and its sovereignty over the possible consists in reaching its limits promptly and in now keeping watch, like a dawn, low in the sky, that endlessly repels the night, at the outer borders of the possible; and what it encounters, what it illuminates, is not the already risen day of being but an absence of being or, rather, an absence in which all possibles are asphyxiated, which is to say that being is not possible there and that night, which allows sovereign impossibility to reign, brings to its greatest depth the enigma of impossible-being as absolute presence of being. It is toward this depth without hope of daybreak that the gaze of experience must remain open. The discovery of what exists only as silence— eroticism, obscenity, Klossowski in Roberte ce soir— those things that exist only when silenced, and which speech desacralizes, violates, indeed renders obscene, or erotic.1 Sexuality owes to silence its sacred weightiness, which profanes speech at every moment. But speech “is consecrated” in speaking being, and being, in the ceremony in which it is spoken, receives the sacredness of truth. The truth

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of eroticism already comes into being as profaned truth, and what is decisive in the scandal of erotic language is that it designates that which is secretly profanatory in all truth; the unbearable burden— not shame but a suffocation that grabs discourse by the throat— is seeing, in slow motion, this theft and displacement of the sacred, from which only truth can arise. That is why erotic language and literature are so sumptuously vain, for they are the first to disentangle themselves, “true” languages among all languages; what they confront is not that which we are unaccustomed to say, it is that which, by nature— I should say by a fundamental absence of nature— manifests in broad daylight this forced entry of the sacred by which language takes flight. It isn’t morality that denounces, in erotic words, that which should not be said, but a silence that cannot be compared with the omissions of modesty: the silence in which reposes the being that imperiously rejects any designation, any sense, any language, and comes to light in the absolute night of speech. Eroticism forms the outside edge of ontology: the vertical wall where being, in the nick of time, leaps into itself, freeing itself at once of the fear of the Logos. Erotic literature is the proof by the absurd of the originary impossibility of an ontology with which it faithfully shapes caricature, simulating through tireless repetition the impossibility for being to offer its entire presence in the space of the Logos; simulating, by the prodigious exhaustion of its words, that it is being bled dry, words with which it must be replenished every day, so that none of them, in the end, will carry with it the coveted kernel of silence. There is something as simple, as rudimentary as the “being is” of the Parmenidean pathway, but the tautology of being enclosed in its immediate circle language enough to give rise to philosophy and to unspool in its religious space all the formulable ceremonies, all the hymns of being. And if “being is— non-being is not” promoted silence, it is because it insisted upon introspection by indicating, as ontological field, the second silence of thought; the work of thought is only the false labor of grace— the favor of a silence granted to language.2 And even before Parmenides, so that Parmenides in his poem might think being, the same decision chose language absolutely by the unbroken sphere of being and by thought. Return for a moment to that decision to see reappear, alongside itself, the crest from which being plunged into the night of language and whose edge limits, but for us alone (for our thought and our language), the indefinitely open space of the other side, where the possibility of ontology is impossible— which for us can only mean, concretely, that we take eroticism seriously and advance, blindly, hands extended, as night fills our hollow eyes, over ruined fields, where being is made manifest in silence.

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This choice gives their definitive weight, their irresistible force of equilibrium, even disequilibrium, to all those forms of red and somber mysticism in which our thought could not be recognized and which served, for Western thought, as a border of night. Hidden in the depths of our culture, it has continued to designate, to betray, a choice that has been dissimulated as choice. They have betrayed before— almost all magicians— just as, today, those who take eroticism seriously, some of whom are homosexuals, also betray. They betray because they denounce, because they reveal, because they manifest and lead into daylight, slipping between the loose network of words, of the often immense languages of night. From the heights of our thought, we cry out that this is not true. It is precisely that: [not]a being true. Absolute weight of the black being. Here as well, in this beginning, philosophy ends; rather, it is backed, once and for all, against its own impossibility, leaving behind it that empty space into which it can no longer withdraw— ontology tracing the ultimate line of its possible withdrawals toward its origin but also delineating the arbitrary division of its possibility and its impossibility.

a. Conjecture— the word is illegible.

7 T H E N E W M ET HODS OF LI T E R A RY A NA LYSIS

In appearance, criticism has never had greater importance than it does today. It has never covered more pages in print. And yet, at the same time, there is one species of human that is in the process of disappearing: homo criticus. That is, we are seeing the disappearance of a category of individual that appeared for the first time at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, and whose specific, determined, and stubborn function was to produce criticism— to talk about the books of others, to judge them, compare them, recommend or condemn them. The derisive or terrifying role, whichever you prefer, majestic in spite of everything, formerly held by Sainte-Beuve and later by Sacy, Brunetière, and Thibaudet is currently held by no one.1 Not because there are no longer candidates, but simply because the role itself no longer exists. We could characterize the situation as follows: critical activities increased just as the subject of those activities was being eliminated. As if those activities generated themselves in a kind of anonymity, out of language. A general function without its own organism. The real critics of the period are not X and Y, assigned by newspapers and magazines to write notes or reports. The real critics, rather, are Sartre (formerly) or Blanchot (today)— people whose critical activities are part of their philosophical or literary behavior. More specifically, the real critics, today, are the texts themselves (the novels of Robbe-Grillet or Blanchot, Beckett’s plays). Criticism has become a constant function of language with respect to BnF, Fonds Foucault, NAF 28730, box 54, folder 1. In this presentation, Foucault discusses several themes he discussed previously, although from a somewhat different point of view, in “Literature and Language” (1964), in Language, Madness, and Desire: On Literature. 73

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language. Criticism is the web that language spontaneously and tirelessly weaves between each of its points. It is no longer a matter of decision but a form of coexistence. You may reply that we have only returned to the situation that existed in the seventeenth century, when there were no critics and when every work addressed itself (more or less directly, more or less obliquely) to all the works that came before or appeared with it. Thus Voltaire spoke to Leibniz, Diderot to the Cartesians, Rousseau to Helvétius, and so on. In fact, today’s critical activity assumes its own form, which prevents us from confusing it with the spontaneous and constant criticism of the eighteenth century or with the solemn institution of the nineteenth. But, perhaps, to define what criticism is today, we again need to briefly investigate what it was between the start of the twentieth century and the 1940s. 1. First, it was judgmental. It judged the quality, value, and importance of works. It reflected certain tastes. Of course, it sometimes recognized, often frequently, that these tastes were singular, relative, that they would pass or were anachronistic (representative of the norms of past generations). But this recognition of subjective [value]a remained a form of affirmation. It was the despotic character of criticism. 2. It was both terrorizing and discreet: — Terrorizing because it acknowledged an immediate connection, a limpid resemblance between the work and the author. Monsieur Zola was a bad man because he wrote about impure things. I’m exaggerating, but not much. — Discreet because it never sought the other side of the work, something that was present but hidden. Its implicit truth. For criticism, the work (and the author) were both wholly present in one’s reading of the work. 3. It was the age of hierarchical consumption. Criticism did not communicate with the work in terms of the act of writing. It did not present itself as a form of writing parallel with or subsequent to the work itself. It was a kind of reading behavior, consumption of the work alongside or prior to public consumption. It was not a second writing but a “preview” of reading. The meaning of this prior reading was more hierarchical than chronological. It assumed that readers, in the broad sense, could be duped; that their reading was naïve and defenseless and that a privileged reading was necessary to serve as a relay and a bulwark between them and the work— that of the critic. a. Conjecture— the word is missing.

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We could offer this simple historical explanation. It seems to me, though, that while it might be simple, and historical, it may also be inaccurate. — As long as the bourgeoisie (in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) possessed its own language, criticism was directed, and by the works themselves, against ideas, things, and institutions. — But when the work of language became disconnected from those who were able to read it, a form of criticism became necessary that addressed the relationship between the work and reading; a criticism that governed the consumption of works. Such was criticism in the nineteenth century, and such was criticism until the middle of the twentieth. Yet, several things transpired and, quite recently, that completely altered not only the style of criticism but its very being. I want to introduce the following somewhat at random and out of order, since we are very close to putting them into some kind of series. 1. I’m thinking of the sudden emergence, devoid of any critical filter, of a so-called esoteric or difficult literature. The pocketbook is both the sign and the channel of this emergence. Books were printed in runs of tens, even hundreds of thousands of copies, which had reached, through criticism, no more than a handful of readers. It was as if literary consumption had become a social phenomenon regulated by factors that may have been economic or political but were no longer aesthetic. 2. At the same time, criticism lost the transparency necessary for its former mediating vocation. It often condensed into an extremely complex discourse, often much more difficult than the work itself for which it provided a commentary or exegesis. (After all, nothing is simpler and, in a sense, more transparent than the work of Roussel.) Such complexity was often reflected in this strange requirement articulated by the critic: “I assume you read the work I’m speaking about before reading me.” This looks insignificant but the statement is quite strange when you consider what criticism once was. And it is presumptuous because it appears to make the work one is writing about a simple introduction, barely essential, to that important, solemn thing, to that ship of language strictly speaking, which is criticism. 3. This strange vanity uses as a pretext two simultaneous but somewhat contradictory claims: — The claim to be a work. A claim that may not always be justified but which has its undeniable models. Blanchot’s The Space of Literature is no doubt one of the most beautiful, most original, least ancillary books we can imagine.2 — The claim of being a positive and scientific language. The use that

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Mauron made of psychoanalysis, that others made of linguistics, justify themselves by the fact that these were fully formed, recognized, and validated sciences.3 4. Of course, these two claims of being a work and developing as a form of scientific discourse are somewhat contradictory. Even completely contradictory. But we can put aside those two claims and allow their assumptions to come into focus. They assume that criticism, in speaking of a first language, is not condemned to be purely and simply reading, to be only a type of language assigned to represent outside agencies before language, whether those be the public, [meaning],b history, truth, reality, politics, or who knows? Within language in general, there would be two levels: that of the first languages and, in relation to them, and to them alone, but remaining languages themselves, there would be secondary discourses. I’d like to outline a few of the features that characterize [criticism]. How [can it be] an analysis of another language, but one that has the characteristics of a positive and first language? Here, I will borrow a term from logic: can criticism be a metalanguage? (By this we mean any language that takes a given language as its object in order to analyze either its signifier or its signified.c For example: A French grammar is a metalanguage of French. An analysis of an argument using symbolic logic is a form of metalanguage. But a simple remark you might make about the two meanings of the word lièged in French, that remark, is a form of metalanguage.) Can criticism be organized as a metalanguage? Can it analyze a literary language? It is likely that the construction of criticism as literary analysis rests on two discoveries— that is, two simple, but decisive updates. The first is that the work relates to space more than time. And, in any case, time is not a satisfactory mode of decipherment for a language work. Yet, it has served as a guiding principle in traditional criticism: as an analysis for determining temporal periods, as a study of successive states, or as b. Conjecture— the word is difficult to read. c. In the margin: Metalanguage that has two senses: to speak about language and to position language in relation to itself. The problem of criticism, on the contrary, is to find out if it can become a metalanguage. d. [Its primary meaning is “cork,” either the bark on the tree itself or the products made from the bark. — Trans.]

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a search for ways into a biography. A profound biological, indeed vegetal, metaphor animates all these considerations. We now acknowledge that the work is contemporaneous with itself, simultaneous in each of its points. Additionally, by work, we do not refer to only the unity of a book but that layer of language that bears the author’s name. A heterogeneous layer (because it can comprise any book— prose, poetry— [as well as]e any level of language: public texts, letters, newspapers, fragments), but one that has this principle of coherence of being the language of someone. Yet, this rule of synchronism does not exclude the consideration of time, but this, as we will see, is considered a spatial phenomenon: displacement, deployment, shifting, in short, movement. It is in the fundamental space of the work that time assumes its place as one of its figures. The time of language would simply be the mobility of its space. 1. This space of the work, in its simplest form, is a kind of implicit architecture, where every element of the work (and every element of every individual work by an author) is necessarily in its place. This is how Jean Rousset analyzed Corneille’s theater. All the plays were said to have the same structure: that of a loop.4 — In The Palace Corridor, two youths who are in love separate, cross paths, separate again, then find one another again.5 The Cid has the same configuration.6 — In Polyeucte, we find a similar figure but one who is profoundly unbalanced or, rather, rebalanced in a different way:7 — Polyeucte loves Pauline but leaves her for God. Pauline loves Severus but separates from him to join Polyeucte. — Every step that leads Polyeucte to God and, therefore, further from Pauline detaches her from Severus and brings her closer to Polyeucte. The looping configuration is completed by a vertical axis (with a dual polarity upward— God— and downward— Severus), which gives the play the shape of a spiral, a helical dynamic (easily found in the ascending draperies of Baroque sculpture). Such analyses are very good and difficult to challenge. They are probably (one should also mention Barthes’s analysis of the Racinian bedroom)8 the best introduction to the fundamental question of the spatial aspect of the work. But only an introduction because what they decrypt is a secret architecture: — a subarchitecture because that is what supports, beneath the ground, the visible arrangement of the stones e. Conjecture— the word is missing.

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— a superarchitecture, because it applies indifferently to all an author’s works 2. But where does this “meta-architecture” come from? To what space does it belong? It is not the compositional space because it is clear that it is more fundamental — for Corneille than the use of five-act composition — for Racine than the unity of place That these forms are adapted to external guidelines does not imply that they are their result; this is simply a convenient means of expression. It is clear that there are cultural spaces. For example, the sphere after the fifteenth century: — The Earth is round, a reduced image inside the celestial sphere. — Man himself is a microcosm, a small sphere, as proven by the possibility of inscribing him in a circle according to the golden ratio. — Therefore, these spheres are images of one another: they are reflections and mirrors (you may have noted that mirrors are [often spherical]f during this period— at a time when paintings and windows were rectangular). — These reflective spheres are soap bubbles, fragile, easily distorted, about to burst, illusory; changing shape at the slightest puff of air, stretching from the effect of an imperceptible weight. — From this follows the sinuousness, the loop, the rupture, and the various movements that characterize the iridescence of forms in Baroque aesthetics. We could perform a similar analysis for the line in the modern world. The transparent line that allows us to see the superposition of several things en abîme but yet remains uncrossable, unbreakable: Mallarmé, Proust, Roussel, Faye.9 A culture of glass. But such analyses would remain quite distant from the spatial quality inherent in a work, that is, the space that every language arranges for itself. For this is the space everyone is familiar with, but is also the space of science, the space of drawing, and so on. As for the space typical of the language that we call Mallarmé or Rousseau, what is it?10 Where does it come from and where is its natural place? Was it at the point of rupture of language, where it came into being? In the initial outburst of words? We could say, at the surface of contact of an existence with the world. So, we see that Rousseau’s language arises at the point of rupture that was, for him, a mendacious accusation. From that false speech, the entire f. Conjecture— words are missing.

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world lost its originary transparence; from that false speech was born the great utopia of a limpid world in which words could be exchanged like glances.11,g,12 Mallarmé’s language arises at the point of contact of an existence and a cold surface, impenetrable, pure, closed, and unbreakable: the contact of an existence with the very essence of virginity.h Psychology? After all, isn’t all this associated, as in a historical analysis, with a biographical event and the chain of its repercussions? In fact, the analysis would be psychological if it used psychological concepts (such as compensation, projection, dream symbolism. This is exactly what Mauron did in his psychocriticism). But neither Jean-Pierre Richard nor Starobinski makes use of such concepts.13 The point of anchorage of language in history allows them to open a space with its own laws— thematic rather than psychological laws. Among those laws, we find the following: — The appearance of coherent semantic fields (Mallarmé identifies the field of virginity with words such as whiteness, snow, cold, glacier, mirror, wing). — The isomorphism of the theme on different “topological” levels. We find the theme of virginity in the nudity of smooth bodies, in innocence, in the language that is impenetrable to those who hear it. — Psychological ambivalence. The theme is not a preference or phobia of the author, or a form of nostalgia. It is found throughout the work, indifferently, with a plus or a minus sign. Sometimes revitalized, sometimes devitalized. In Mallarmé falling flowers are a sign of withering or fading (“an avalanche of malignant roses whose scent is sin”);14 as well as the figure of beatitude (“Each word falls, a rain of flowers. To stand and raise one’s arms on tiptoe to receive and touch, Oh, joy!, with human hands!”).15 — From this, the privilege of complex but balanced forms; from this, g. In the margin: Debate with psychology: — The application of psychoanalysis as method of spatial analysis. — This seems to present two drawbacks: α. maintaining an equivocal work-author β. reintroducing time: biography — The subject matter is an analysis of individual spatiality external to any psychology and any return to time. J.-P. Richard ≠ Weber h. On a page inserted here, Foucault adds a third comment: 3. And there is an even more interior and secret space, which is that of language and words themselves. — Mallarmé — the wing and the fan — the grotto and the diamond [— ]the word tomb

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figures with multiple virtualities that link in a single sigil the entire course of the theme’s destiny. For example, the fan that opens and folds but conceals when opened and reveals when folded.16 The discovery of the work as a language space puts us in contact with a very particular spatiality. Much less geometric than that of the lines, spirals, and spheres discussed earlier, which remain very close to the visible architecture of works. Here, it’s a question of the space of adjacencies, of qualities, of mixtures, of the shrinkage or expansion that mathematics has recently attempted to formalize. In referring to mathematics, I’m not trying to suggest that we could one day apply it to literary materials. I only wish to show that in speaking of these qualities and these experiences, in analyzing this world of folding and unfolding, the forms of the fan and disclosure, it is not, as one might hastily assume, to a psychology that Jean-Pierre Richard is referring, but to difficult properties of fundamental spaces. The second great discovery that characterizes literary analysis today is simpler, more elementary, but one yet still closer to fundamental axioms: namely, that literature, after all, is made with language. You will retort that this is so obvious as to be insulting. My reply will be that for centuries literature was considered to have been made with feelings, ideas, characters. It was even believed that it was made with style, with grammatical rules, both respected and violated, with words that were common, or refined and polished. With images beautiful or clumsy, eyecatching or simply naïve. We even went so far as to imagine that literature had something to do with reality. But that it had to do with language— with language in general— is an idea that had never entered anyone’s brain. Of course, we knew that literature was made with words and grammars— Spanish, French, German, and so on. But every speech act (whether literary or banal) makes use, more or less well, more or less freely, of those words or that grammar. But what is the relationship that literature as literature maintains with language? This study of literature as language (we are only just beginning to sketch it out) must comprise several levels: 1. It must take seriously the fact that literature involves signs. Of course, we know that literature has a sense. It is something we have been interested in for a long time. But for it to have a sense, there must be signs (as the linguists would say, for there to be a signified, there must be a signifier). Yet in every culture, there exists an entire series of signs, some verbal

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and others that are not. There are rules of politeness, clothing, sexual behavior. And Lévi-Strauss was able to show that, in primitive societies, women were not only objects of desire (and, therefore, value) but also signs.17 To understand what literature in general is and, at a given period, what a literary work is, we must undertake a general study of the sign systems (verbal or nonverbal) used by a society at a given moment. The study of literature must take place within a general semiology. In truth, we have barely scratched the surface in terms of contemporary societies. But Dumézil has been able to show that the historical narratives of the Romans and the Scandinavian sagas are sign systems that are isomorphic with other nonverbal signifying systems such as rituals in other Indo-European cultures (among the Iranians, for example).18 But we consume literature. 2. It is clear that, within different sets of signs, literature has a particular structure. And something signals that it is literature. α. Jakobson:19 the systematic use of the properties of the sign.i β. Those signs we could call writing, which Roland Barthes began to analyze in Writing Degree Zero (the popular and revolutionary writing of Père Duchêne; those solemn, ritualized signs we find in Chateaubriand and that are often preserved in adjectives of shape or color; words that cause us to see things but, at the same time, see that their use is literary).20 γ. There are also those signs by which literature represents itself. The book is always narrated by itself. — We have the impression that it is a recent discovery that literature tells the story of itself (cf. Proust). — But this is only one of the possible forms of an entire series of doubles that have existed throughout literature and that may exist, more or less secretly, in every work:21 — The visible doubling in The Arabian Nights22 — The nonexistent double in Proust23 — The invisible double in The Nun24 δ. Finally, literature is also a language that signifies the entire language in a word. Whenever someone picks up a pen and a piece of paper, not to say something but to say that he is saying it, or to say it while holding the signified in suspense (not to escape reality, not to remain enfolded i. In the margin: Péguy Roussel

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within itself, but to introduce itself as literature), then, what that word engages and reveals, what it assumes responsibility for, what it refers to (but as internal to itself ), is the language system as a whole. Literature is not a word located on the horizon of language; or, if you prefer, is not a message that refers to a stable code, certain and well known; it is a message that uses the code for its own purposes (that is, a message that does not indicate whether or not it obeys that code, nor the extent to which it obeys it). It is a word in which the entire language system is at risk. Of course, a work of literature never completely alters the language to which it belongs. And we shouldn’t measure the importance of a work by the number of changes made (although he introduced argot into the novel and into literature, Eugène Sue did not write an important work).25 But what is important is the endangerment of the language there in that work; it is this movement of withdrawal, of absorption, by which a language comes to reside in the space of a work or the space of the work covers the language. A work is speech in which the language to which it belongs is at risk. Literature is a certain use of the language such that, at every moment, the word risks becoming its own language system. Of course, it is convenient to determine how a work risks the language to which it belongs in the words it utters. Until now, no method has been available to analyze such a relationship. To put the problem into historical perspective, we can say, roughly, that the classical work, appearing to inscribe itself compliantly within a language [langue] constituted and recognized by everyone, nonetheless calls it into question by the very use of rhetoric. For rhetoric makes language obedient to a first word (Writing or Truth) that must be restored in that second word, which is the work. In its ideal form, the work is merely the repetition and double of the absolute Word. At the end of the eighteenth century, a new relationship appeared. This was the one defined by Sade (and taken up by Mallarmé), a Book that would destroy all the other books; in their wake, it would take them up and destroy them. Every book has the obscure pretension of being the end of all the others. In the space of the Library, every book that rests on the shelf against the others tends to render them useless.26 In the twentieth century, a literature appeared that was made from language itself, as if it was literary matter, a subject of literature, as if it coincided with the very space of literature. That is why Joyce and Ponge are so important.

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But these are only rough historical approximations. We would need detailed analyses for each individual work. I simply want to draw one or two consequences from this strange relationship between language [la langue] and speech [la parole] in literature: — The possibility that a comprehensible work may not be understood. — The methods [for analyzing]j literature are inadequate from the outset using the properties of language (as Jakobson attempted), precisely because literature is not grasped within language, but just the opposite: language is engaged within literary speech. — The necessity, in general, of a commentary for every work. Clearly, this is because language does not overflow literature, but literature, at every moment, risks language in its totality, because every work triggers a series of second languages, of languages whose murmur, rightfully, is never extinguished. This inessential and inevitable murmur is that of criticism. Ours. Reverse the image of the bell and the snow. These two ideas, that criticism discovered the work as space and the work as language, are not incompatible. Nor, if we listen closely, very different from one another. There have always been strange, profound spatial metaphors to animate the analysis of language (the chain, the paradigm, the syntagm, the network). Profound and enigmatic space. But the most disconcerting discovery (the most unsettling for the customary pathways of our thought) is that language (language or speech) is not temporal but spatial. Ever since the eighteenth century (the beginning of research on language), language was always considered as a bearer of history, as a dense form, stratified, slowly moving through time. And, to be frank, this idea has never been called into question. We find it expressed in identical fashion in Hegel, Marx, Husserl, even Heidegger. Only one person, Bergson (in Matter and Memory), saw this, but he turned his back on this discovery, creating a philosophy of the ineffable.27 Yet we learned empirically that language was space (Saussure, neurologists, and so on), but philosophically this discovery remained barren.28 Heidegger may have been the first to perceive how we should think about the being of language if it is something other than time. And in the absence of this ontology of language, there existed an entire body of criticism, lively, j. Conjecture— the word is missing.

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interesting, but literally without any basis. Criticism that questioned us about what the being of language might be if it is not time. And we didn’t know how to respond. And just as the logical metalanguages question philosophy about truth, if it is no longer experience or totality, the critical metalanguages question philosophy about a work of language, if it is no longer memory or meaning, if it is only a figure in the deep space of language.

8 LI T E R A RY A NA LYSIS

I have decided to use the somewhat pedantic, somewhat scholarly word “analysis” to avoid the word “criticism.” Not that it’s outdated, but it presents too many problems, and has continued to undergo mutations, of which the current “analysis” is but an avatar. I’d like to start off with a few simple facts: — The density of critical institutions: the existence of that “homo criticus” discovered in the nineteenth century; the existence of journals entirely devoted to criticism; the critical structure of journals like the NRF; the active criticism of writers who are not critics by profession (Leiris introducing Butor).1 — But along with this solidification, this densification, the second feature of criticism grew in importance: what criticism possessed of liveliness, freshness, what it “initially” had in Diderot or Hugo, or among the surrealists, continued to decline to the benefit of a second language. Criticism was no longer the search for a primary language among others but the positioning of its own language within another’s language. Perhaps it is a fundamental feature of our culture that language can proliferate on its own, not only in extent but in depth, building upon itself in stages upon which it corrects, judges, and establishes itself— in short, criticizes itself. I do not want to offer a formal presentation but share with you the thoughts of someone who has approached criticism through philosophy. Someone who has not failed to be surprised by the language structures found in the world of literature: BnF, Fonds Foucault, NAF 28730, box 54, folder 1. 85

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— Surprisingly naïve for someone who comes from a much simpler world — But who perhaps has the right to formulate such a presentation to the extent that criticism makes use of philosophy.

I I would like to insist on several specific features assumed by criticism over the past few years. We can say that, until the early twentieth century, the situation of criticism was relatively simple. 1. It was judgmental: its judgments of a work were based on taste, appreciation, quality, and value. 2. It accepted the immediate unity between the work and its author— a judgment about one was equally valid for the other. In that sense, it was profoundly psychological and moral. Man was defined by what he did and what he said. It was both terrorizing and discreet: — because it refused to accept any disavowal of what was said or manifesteda — because it refused to be exploratory: to search within the shadows It saw the work as a field of shared experience. 3. But while it left untouched this relation of work and author, it implied a profound break in the world of readers: — the critic being an absolutely privileged reader, capable of formulating a judgment — the others being second- degree readers (able to read only through an initial reading) In other words, criticism had a meaning in a world of reading that was both naïve and hierarchical. It was naïve because the reader could be fooled, could judge badly, or fail to focus his attention where it was most needed. It was hierarchical because some people were able to read and others were not. We can see how criticism was a matter of consumption and defense. I feel that a historical analysis is here indisputable: — As long as the bourgeoisie (in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) was in possession of its own language, the essence of criticism was directed against ideas, things, and institutions. — When, in the nineteenth century, a language was born in which criticism was no longer able to recognize itself, criticism became a necessity, a. In the margin: what was referred to as “sensibility”

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directed toward the relationship between language and reading, toward consumption itself. In a sense, a kind of literary Malthusianism. However, criticism changed its significance in the twentieth century, focusing, to a much greater extent, on writing and the origin of language, rather than the reader and consumption. — A change for which literature was, in a sense, responsible because, ever since Mallarmé, Valéry, and Proust, it has always reflected upon its own conditions of possibility: — In a sense, we can say that it has fashioned its own criticism, making critics useless. — At the same time, it has turned the attention of critics toward something other than the judgment of taste; it has forced criticism to question itself about the point of origin of language and its possibility. From this a certain number of consequences follow: a. Criticism ceases to be judgmental. The text is a fact or, rather, a possibility, and must be investigated on that basis. b. Criticism, by placing itself at the origin of the work, places itself at the heart of a literary and creative activity, and thus rediscovers a type of freshness, a primary characteristic that it had lost since the nineteenth century. — But this change is reflected in today’s sociology of literature: a. The absolute separation between a judgmental criticism, a criticism for the consumer (dailies or weeklies), and an analytical criticism, one that seeks to position itself at the level of the work (that of journals, and so on): no point at which they encounter one another. b. As difficult or esoteric as a work may be, it always claims to be able to address the totality of readers. In its own eyes, it possesses a characteristic of immediate obviousness that makes criticism pointless. What’s more, criticism is often much more “difficult” than the work. It “esotericizes” the work. c. The pocketbook is a way to provide the possibility of unfiltered consumption of the work itself. To present the work as it is; critics speak of this as a sociological phenomenon but remain silent about the works themselves.

II We can say that, in general, analysis treats works, that whole sediment of language that is part of our civilization, as a cultural fact that must be approached with the serenity and objectivity of a historical manifestation.

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— Consequently, there is no difference, at least methodologically, between good and bad, or major and minor literature. All facts of language are subject to analysis. (Ultimately, a general science of all the books that circulate in our world: a semiology.) — A new sensibility toward the historicity of literature: — In a sense, we dissociate it from an eternal judgment of taste or beauty. We approach it from the point of view of its purest historicity. — And, in another sense, we perceive it within the totality of productions of the period; in its synchronic density. Without evolution. — A new indifference to the individuality of the author. a. The author was never again present (Racine was born in a Jansenist milieu; Lautréamont’s aggressiveness; the whiteness, the cold, smooth virginity in Mallarmé). b. But he doesn’t serve as a transfer figure, a personification of the work, a double (as when Zola was referred to as a gutter): the author is merely the focal point; the site of analysis.2 The work is no longer responsible for itself; the work has become both possible and fatal. We see the importance of — the Marxist method of analysis — linguistic methods — the history of art — A problematization of the work as such. It is no longer the characters that are important, or the ideas, or the forms. The problem arises because there is something like a work: that is, an upright language, erect, which possesses a status unlike that of everyday language, the language addressed to anyone. The problem arises because language, which, in spite of everything, is addressed to a public, preserves a reserve of signification and can be read repeatedly at any period of time. That is, there can be, within a culture, indefinite reserves of meaning that cannot be reduced to needs, to consumption, to historically determined circuits. There can exist undifferentiated figures, figures whose features are absolutely mobile and always capable of being recomposed. It’s a problem that was once resolved by saying that beauty was eternal. But this is no longer possible to the extent that what we are looking at is the work and not the value of those ideas or the reason for those forms. — This leads to a final important feature— the necessity of providing a status to those implicit significations that slumber inside a written text:

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— Significations that were not part of the author’s intentions. It was not Mallarmé’s intent to write poems about virginity or Baudelaire poems about perfumed expansiveness, of quintessence. — Significations that are not even among the visible forms. They float in a kind of neutral space within the limits of language. It is difficult to insert them. The problem with criticism is reversed compared to the nineteenth century: — Then, it sought to insert a work into the world of possible readers. — Now, it seeks to establish possible readings upon the work itself: upon that consistent, [substantial]b density that constitutes the black and monumental mass of the work.

III Below are several concrete examples of this method, together with the problem associated with it. 1. Formal analysis This rests on the idea that there exists an implicit architecture for the work— a spontaneous structure — that is not the outline; — that is not the dramatic movement of characters; — [nor]c is it the aesthetic and musical equilibrium of strong and weak beats, rhythm. — We can find these forms in the immediate readability of the work— in a certain relationship of their theme with their composition. For example, Georges Poulet, studying the circle:3 Baroque poetry and thought have been haunted, ever since the Earth was round, by the figure of the sphere: — which is the microcosm — therefore, the reflection — and the soap bubble (fragile, illusory) — and the idea of fragility, the rupture of the moment — and sinuosity — We find these more deeply buried in the work; they require decryption: — Polyeucte4 by Jean Rousset.5 b. Conjecture— the word is difficult to read. c. Missing word.

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— The Palace Corridor:6 two young lovers separate, meet, separate again, and meet one another again. — Same structure in The Cid.7 In Polyeucte, we find a similar figure but profoundly unbalanced: — Polyeucte loves Pauline but leaves her for God. — Pauline loves Severus but leaves him for Polyeucte. The above configuration culminates in a third term (rather, two third terms, one above and one below). They pursue one another until their final meeting above. Every step that draws Polyeucte toward God, therefore, further from Pauline, detaches Pauline from Severus and draws her to Polyeucte. The loop and the circle. A helical movement (which we also find in Baroque sculpture). 2. Thematic analysis The idea that form (this linear and abstract structure) cannot be dissociated from the sensible content of the work; that it is one with that content, animates it from within or, rather, is nothing other than that content itself in its living presence. Importance of two philosophical experiences: a. That of phenomenology: the sensible is not some raw material that animates judgment after the fact; the sensible is already oriented; it is the very body of spatiality and temporality. Time is given to us by things that age, space by perspective, the haze in the far distance. Sense is contemporaneous with being. b. That of Bachelard: a kind of rectified psychoanalysis. For Freud, the imaginary torsion was infinitely flexible— everything could participate. For Bachelard, the imagination was marked by its own plasticity— it had its own laws. The claw belonged to a certain type of aggression: instantaneous, bloody, lightning bolt, sucker.8 Jean-Pierre Richard’s application of the process to Mallarmé: how can we identify a theme and analyze it? For example, that of naked virginity in Mallarmé.9 a. Frequency (Guiraud):10 but the theme overflows the words that point to it (whiteness, snow, glacier, wing) because it establishes relationships that are semantically clear but cannot be translated a priori into words. Moreover, words do not always have the same meaning (does “cold” signify death or virginity?). b. Their topological quality:

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— The importance of a theme is characterized by the fact that it is found at several topological levels: — Nudity: eroticism, metaphysics, poetics (bare language) —Virginity: innocence, the body, language’s relationship to its hearers — The law of functional equivalences: — The virginity of things is their whiteness. — Resistance, the modesty of virginity, is cold (frost, that thin breakable carapace that protects the mobility of water; it is also the winter sky, blue but distant, very distinct, very profound, where forms are delineated with inaccessible precision). It is also the sky on the other side of the glass. c. Their psychological ambivalence: the problem is not to determine what Mallarmé thought or felt, if he was for or against. The theme proves its consistency, its coherence, its stubbornness, the force with which it is imposed in the work and on the work, in and on the author, by the fact that it has been valued sometimes positively, sometimes negatively. For example, the faded, the fall, falling wings: “An avalanche of malignant roses whose scent is sin,”11 but: “Each word fell, a rain of flowers. To stand on tiptoe and raise one’s arms to receive her and touch, Oh, joy!, with human hands!”12 d. Their equilibration: which leads to the privilege of complex forms or figures with multiple virtualities, which interconnect, with a single rule, the entire development curve of the theme: — The fan that opens and folds, but hides when it is open and reveals when it is closed.13 — The dancer who unfolds in the distance, on stage, in a circle of unreality; which is closed when she is seen from nearby. — The book also. e. Chronological evolution. In spite of the chronological structure of the analysis, we see how it can enable a temporal form of analysis. — Mallarmé’s earliest poems: virginal whiteness is a way for the world to present an unbroken totality, a kind of integrity close to the self, without distance: the communication of things among themselves: Cloud are you the foam Of the celestial ocean whose surface is limpid and pure? Are you the white feather Snatched by the breeze, while crossing the azure sky, From the wing of angels?14

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— And with “The Windows,”15 we see come into view a different experience of inaccessible blueness, cold and hostile, where all communication will become degraded, withered. Similarly, in “Sigh,” he writes: And, on dead water where anguished leaves wander Driven by wind, furrowing a hollow, Let the sun be drawn out in a long ray of yellow.16

IV The problem, then, is to discover the final basis for such analyses. — It’s obvious that a generalized aesthetic can account for certain forms, at least from a distance: Baroque torsion. — But the modulation of a work in its individuality can only escape a generalized aesthetic. The analysis of a work as a work (oeuvre) and in its internal structure does not escape its individuality, but reveals it more fully, beneath a light that is, moreover, enigmatic. What then of the status of the individuality of what is implicit, unconscious, in a work and, therefore, not referable to the author’s intentions, to what he explicitly sought to accomplish? It is obvious that recourse to psychoanalysis is also unacceptable because we need to account for a work as a work, its internal dynamics, and not as a psychological fact (or to the extent that it is an expression of such). 1. Existential analysis. Sartre: Baudelaire,17 Saint Genet.18 Starobinski: Transparency and obstruction.19 The idea that the work and life are part of a shared structure, and that they must be treated as a common text, a single network — that is apparently a destiny — but profoundly a project. Thus, Rousseau, ever since he lost the transparency of the world when faced with a lie, a calumny: — His entire life is an attempt to reunite with that transparency ([that is,] the association of the gaze with innocence). — But his work is also part of the same effort: — whether in the form of a political project — or a romantic dream — or a delusion

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— or a justification — or a form of [reasoning]d 2. Historical analysis. Rather than expressing a single framework, the work and the life of the author (the totality they form) are part of larger totalities in which they must be situated. For, the possibilities of readings offered by the work reside in its objective signification (and not in the author’s project alone). Yet what gives a work an objective meaning is the historical totality in which it is placed: — Descartes is a believer, but his rationalism is atheist.20 — The conception of grace for the Calvinists does not have the same meaning (worldly asceticism) as it does for the Jansenists (rejection of all social life). What needs to be isolated, then, is the concrete totality in which a thought assumes its meaning (even if that meaning is obscure to the author). From which follows — The idea of grouping [those]e for whom behavior and thought are adequate — The idea that they have a shared ideology (a “vision of the world”) — The idea that the concept of class is too broad for such analyses Goldmann: Racine’s tragic vision.21 — The officers (who had supported the king) — The commissioners (appointed by the king when he becomes closer with the high nobility) This leads to Jansenism: — Nothing to do with the world: power is bad. — One’s salvation cannot be obtained in this world. — God is absent from the world, intervening only remotely. Two attitudes follow from this: — Absolute rejection (Barcos, Saint-Cyran) — Living with the world (Arnauld) Racine living in the world: theater of rejection withdrawal: God’s theater intervening in the world (joins with Arnauld, who himself is like the king) Between the two, the theater of peripeteia: Phaedra.22 d. Conjecture— the word is difficult to read. e. Missing word.

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3. There is, probably, now coming into focus, a third possible basis for these analyses. This would be an awareness of the fact that literature is language; it is something that takes place inside language and, yet, is separate from it; something that is housed in language and overturns it. The idea is simple. And which continues to be increasingly made evident by literature: the implication of language as a whole by the very specific use of language that is literature. This is what Barthes attempted when he sought, in Writing Degree Zero,23 to define that region of signs by which literature is known as literature. There is said to exist something that is neither language system (which is the shared horizon of every speaking subject), nor style (which changes from writer to writer and text to text), but all of the signs by which a written text is known as being part of literature (Hébert and Le Père Duchêne). The study of these signs would, as every other study of signs, fall under the auspices of that semiological method first defined by Saussure. — It would enable a diachronic, temporal, historical analysis: Chateaubriand: sign for being seen. Spectacle. On the other hand, Queneau, Camus, Céline are signs of nonexistence (which does not mean that they are signs that do [not]f exist). And a synchronic analysis of totalities, of systems. — This would also allow us to connect literature to all the signs circulating in a society at a given period. Literature and language are, after all, only signs among others. After all, clothing and food are signs and not only in wealthy societies. Lévi-Strauss: women are not simply consumer goods; they circulate according to structures that give them their meaning. They are social signs.24 Couldn’t we include literature in a kind of general semiology, characteristic of a society, in which we asked not what it signified (ideas, beauty) but the nature of its signifying structure? — And perhaps we would arrive at a curious paradox for our society: — In primitive societies, women are signs but also creators of signs (which leads to a division). — In our society, literature is a use of signs that are self-signifying, self-relating; that are immobilized in this reduplication, forming, in one sense, a blazon.

f. Missing word.

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Literature is language signifying itself, experiencing itself in its nature as a sign and avidly exploring its own tautology. — We see clearly under these conditions the historical content contained [in]g the literary formalism of the new novel: — Not the expression of anguish — But the elucidation, within literature, of its self-referential posture. It is not because it is formal and abstract, and without content, that literature today is what it is; it has never been closer to its content; it has never better signified language as signifier. It is in the process of becoming a full form. This is a function of a historical maturation that dates back to Cervantes. — Nonetheless, by also designating itself in a reduplication that may be as essential as the division produced by the first language of mankind, literature reaches a limit: — as it disappears in the appearance of its being — a vertigo that awaits it in its content Therefore, we shouldn’t investigate literature as an activity, at the heart of a culture, that translates (or disguises, or defends, or attacks) the contents (or values) but as a limit-experience. One of those limitexperiences by which a culture cannot fail to be defined: there is no culture without madness, no culture without sexual prohibitions, no culture without some access to the limit of the language, without some use of signs that consume themselves in fire, leading to the generation, from their blazing trajectory, of something like literature.

g. Missing word.

9 S T RUC T U R A LISM A N D LI T E R A RY A NA LYSIS Presentation Given at the Club Tahar Haddad, Tunis, February 4, 1967 Ladies and Gentlemen, I believe we are here primarily to have a discussion among ourselves, that is, I shouldn’t speak at all. However, so that you can exercise your right to ask questions, both the right to examine and the right to criticize, I feel it is necessary that I expose myself to your judgment and, therefore, I’m going to make a few disorderly statements, after which I hope you will have the opportunity to express yourselves. My chosen subject, given that I didn’t know to whom I would be speaking— fortunately in this case, because had I known, I would have abandoned the idea of speaking entirely, given that my audience consists of some very intimidating individuals, mostly my colleagues, who know more than I do, as well as a number of students, who know me already and have already seen me during my lectures, so, this is all a bit intimidating and uncomfortable for me— all that to say that not knowing exactly who my audience was going to be, I thought I would speak of the problem of the relationship between structuralism and literary analysis. Obviously, you may rightly feel that I am not competent to talk about the problem of the relationship between structuralism and literary analysis. And, if I have chosen this subject, it is, to a large extent, because it is currently the site, the locus of considerable ambiguity. All of you, having at least heard the reports, are familiar with the debates about what is called the new criticism, and within those debates there resides a number of poorly defined A partial transcription of this presentation, without the discussion that follows, was published in Les Cahiers de Tunisie 39, nos. 149– 50 (1989): 21– 41. Concerning this conference, see the article by D. Séglard, “Foucault à Tunis.” 97

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concepts.1 So I would like to devote the bulk of this meeting, including our forthcoming discussion, to a search for definitions. I think that, broadly speaking, we can say the following. It appears that, within this debate, which has been going on now, not only in France but in other countries as well, for a number of years, we find several things and people on opposite sides of the discussion, largely around the juxtaposition of a so-called scientific criticism to one that could be said to be impressionistic. We also find that it contrasts believers of content and meaning with believers of pure form, and that this debate pits historians against those who are interested only in the system and the synchrony of works. And, finally, we see that it involves a conflict between individuals, even social groups, because, on the one side, we find those from the old, outmoded French university and, on the other side, those who believe in a kind of intellectual renewal that would necessarily come from outside the university. I’m not convinced that this way of characterizing the debate is absolutely accurate. It’s not true that those who are the most retrograde in this debate concerning the new criticism come from within the university; moreover, the university, which doesn’t always have many reasons to be proud of itself, can take pride in not counting among its members a number of people who cling, precisely, to that older form of criticism. Nor is it true that analyses, like those of Jean-Pierre Richard, completely ignore the meaning of a work and speak only of its contents.2 It is not true that the current trends in literary analysis reject history in favor of pure system and synchrony. Therefore, I don’t believe that all these qualifiers, all these determinations allow us to exactly situate the argument. To better identify what we are talking about, I would like to introduce a concept that is now very familiar to us, one which, at first glance, should bring with it many more difficulties than it can resolve, and that is the concept of structuralism. We can say that the discussion currently revolves around the possibility, and rightly so, of the fecundity of a method known as the structuralist method. But what is structuralism? It is hard to define when we consider that we use the word to refer to such varied analyses, methods, works, and individual authors: Dumézil’s3 history of religion, the analysis of mythology by Lévi-Strauss,4 Barthes’s analysis of Racine’s tragedies,5 Northrop Frye’s analysis of literary works in America,6 the analysis of popular tales like those of Propp in Russia,7 and the analysis of philosophical systems by Gueroult.8 All of this falls under the label of structuralism, and therefore fails. So, it is slightly dangerous to try to clarify all of these problems with such a confusing notion. Yet, I would like to talk for a moment about this structuralism, which is not, of course, a philosophy. It’s not a philosophy, and structuralism can

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be connected with philosophies that are completely different from one another. Lévi-Strauss explicitly associated his structural method with a philosophy, let’s call it materialist. Someone like Gueroult, on the contrary, associated his own method of structural analysis with what might be called an idealist philosophy. Althusser used concepts of structural analysis within a philosophy that is explicitly Marxist.9 Therefore, I don’t believe we can establish an unequivocal and determinate connection between structuralism and philosophy. You’ll reply that all of this is well known, that we know that structuralism isn’t a philosophy but a method. But here is where I would like to raise an objection. In fact I don’t think we can really define structuralism as a method. It is difficult, for example, to see how Propp’s method of analysis of popular folktales might resemble Gueroult’s method of analysis of philosophical systems, or how Frye’s analysis of literary genres in America could resemble Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of myths. In fact, it seems to me that we use the word “structuralism” much more often to refer to a set of disciplines, maybe not even disciplines, but concerns, analyses that share an object, so, quite paradoxically, I would define structuralism and its different forms by the commonality of their object. I would say that structuralism is actually the set of attempts by which we try to analyze what we might call a documentary mass, that is, all the signs, traces, or marks that humanity has left behind and that humanity continues to generate, now and always, and in increasingly greater numbers, around itself. But what is it made of, this documentary mass, this mass of traces and signs that have been deposited and sedimented throughout the world’s history and that are recorded in the universal archive that has been and continues to be formed? Of course, these are strictly verbal traces, written traces, literature, but it is also, more generally, all the other things that have been written, printed, and distributed. It is also everything that has been said and that, in one way or another, has been preserved in mankind’s memory, which is its psychological memory or the material memory of some form of recording. It also comprises all the marks that mankind has left scattered around itself, works of art, architecture, cities, and so on, everything that ensures that the objects man has fabricated obey not only the laws of production strictly speaking but also the systems that constitute them as marks, and precisely as marks of what mankind itself has made. What we are in the process of discovering is actually the autonomy of that aspect by which and through which we can analyze everything mankind can make, that aspect being not that of the economic production of those objects, of those things, of those signs, and marks, but the aspect by which those marks and signs are consistent with one another as marks and as signs.

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It’s a question of finding a system for identifying a document insofar as it is a document. And, making use of etymologies— a subject about which I know relatively little— and based on the verb deiknumi,10 we should be able to come up with a word like deixology11 for the general discipline of the document as document, and that would ultimately be what structuralism is really in the process of constituting. Thus, an analysis of the internal constraints of the document as such. And from this we can understand the apparently all-inclusive character of structuralism, because structuralism pretty much touches everything: philosophy, publicity, cinema, psychoanalysis, works of art, and so on. Second, I believe this explains the importance that structuralism cannot fail to assign to something like linguistics, to the extent that linguistics is central to all the documents that mankind scatters around it, for, after all, language [la langue] is the most general form under which the human document is presented. Third, this explains the conflicts that the method, let’s say the concepts of structuralism, structural descriptions [bring about],a the conflicts that arise concerning this structural description in disciplines that study the document, not specifically as a document, but insofar as it might be the product of an economic system in the broadest sense of the term. Faced with everything that has been sedimented in the history of humanity, we can assume two attitudes: either seek the interconnection of processes that have allowed the different objects created by humanity to be produced, and search for the laws of production that I would call, in very general terms, the economy; or we can try to study this body of remainders, of marks that define the objects created by humanity, we can study them insofar as— and only insofar as— they are documents. It is this second aspect that I believe characterizes, in the face of the economy, of the economic analysis of production, what we could call the deixological analysis of those same objects. It may, of course, be somewhat difficult to distinguish between these two forms of analysis and you can see why this would cause problems. But, after all, we have a model at hand. And that model is the one offered by the natural sciences. For more than thirty years now, we have known that the older form of analysis practiced in the nineteenth century, the analysis of energy processes, is no longer sufficient to fully account for a number of phenomena— physical, chemical, especially biological— and that, in addition to those energy processes, we must analyze what are known as information processes. At present we can no longer do biology without accounting for the perpetual interaction between energy processes and the information a. Conjecture— the word is missing.

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processes that make all biological phenomena possible. Obviously, the definition of the relationship between energy processes and information processes presents a number of problems, but the analysis of those relationships can only take place insofar as we have distinguished both levels, the energy level and the informational level. It seems to me that the problem is approximately the same with respect to so-called human phenomena, namely, that human phenomena must be analyzed at two levels: that of their production, which is the economic level; and that at which they obey the laws of the document qua document, the deixological level. And if it’s true that we are one day going to need to study the interference between those two levels, that interference, which is the very substance, the very object of history, can be defined only insofar as we have first clearly distinguished the two levels. The methodological importance, the epistemological importance, the philosophical importance of structuralism lies precisely in this. And it was first a method, and there is no doubt that it was as a method that it, in a sense, broke through toward this new object, this layer, this new epistemological domain that I have called, somewhat arbitrarily, deixology. And it is through this methodological breakthrough that this new object began to be formed, and once the new object was formed, structuralism necessarily ceased being defined purely and simply as a method. It, quite simply, becomes the obligation to survey this new domain before which we stand, which means that structuralism has reached the point where it must erase itself and disappear as a method in order to recognize, by turning back on itself just as it is disappearing, that what it has done was simply to discover an object. We could compare the example of structuralism with that of pathological anatomy at the end of the eighteenth century. At the time, this was simply a method employed by physicians, but one that led to any number of polemics and difficulties. Finally, the analysis of pathological anatomy discovered an object that had not been foreseen, and that was physiology; with the result that physiology then became an autonomous discipline, with pathological anatomy as a particular method.12 This is probably what will happen with structuralism. So, roughly speaking, that is the current situation with structuralism. That’s about what I wanted to say concerning the general meaning of the word. So, where does literary analysis fit in all of this? If what I have said is accurate, literary analysis is necessarily one of the disciplines of the document, for it involves studying those documents we call literary works in a very specific way. In fact, literary analysis, and structural literary analysis, have always had a somewhat forward-looking position with respect to those disciplines, which have, until now, been grouped under the name structur-

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alism. For literary analysis was among the first to engage with the field of the deixological disciplines. Why and how did this happen? I think we could schematically summarize the situation as follows. Formerly, literary analysis was essentially a function intended to open lines of communication, a way of mediating between the work strictly speaking and its consumption, that is, its reading by a public. Literary analysis was a kind of ambiguous act, halfway between writing and reading, which was supposed to enable reading by some people of a text that had been written by someone else. This mediating function of literary analysis can be summarized, can be described along three lines. First, literary criticism, for one of the functions of literary analysis was to sort through written texts to identify those that should be read and those that weren’t worth reading. In this way literary criticism could eliminate once and for all works such as those by Sade or Lautréamont. That was its first responsibility. Its second was to judge works, to indicate in advance, to the possible reader, if the work was worth something and how it compared to other works, that is, to position it within a scale of values. And thirdly, it was responsible for simplifying the work, in any event, for simplifying the operation of reading a work; it had to provide an outline of how the work itself was produced, explaining how the author had written it, why he had written it, what he had been trying to do, and so on. Those three functions— sorting, judging, explaining or clarifying— made it so that literary analysis, presented along with a written work, was placed in the position of an ideal reader. And the literary analyst, the one who performed this absolute reading, overarching and ideal, wrote a text that was supposedly a mediator for the future reader, and would authorize, establish, and simplify the act of reading for that future reader, his reading of the first text. So, it was a linear structure: (a) writing, (b) literary analysis, (c) reading, which defined the role of what was known as criticism. For literary analysis was criticism, it was a form of censure that categorized, an aesthetic that offered judgments, and it was, at the same time, a history of the production of the work, an explication of the reasons for which, a reduction of the work to the reasons for which it had been produced. Roughly speaking, that is why all literary analysis was fundamentally a critique. And also why there existed, in all societies, at least those that followed the Western model, that strange, feared character known as the literary critic, whose invention, the sad invention one could say, dates back approximately to Sainte-Beuve. During the course of the twentieth century, the position of literary analysis changed. And that linear pattern I attempted to represent was replaced by a completely different configuration. Literary analysis has now escaped the connection between writing and consumption that formerly helped

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situate it. Now, it has become a relation, no longer between writing and reading, but between writing and writing. That is, literary analysis is now, essentially, the possibility of constituting, from a given language known as a work, a new language, and a new language that is such that this second language obtained from the first can speak of the first. The problem of criticism, you see, is no longer, as it once was, as it was in the nineteenth century, the way in which readers in general, and the ideal reader in particular, might judge the work in question. Currently, the subject of criticism is the following: what transformation should be applied to the language of a work so that the language thus transformed speaks of that work and manifests something about that work? To the extent that this is what criticism, literary analysis, has become, you can see how and why literary analysis will no longer interest itself in the actual production of the work, in the way it came into being, but will take an interest in the work insofar as it is a document, that is, insofar as it is made with that form of document known as language; which is to say that literary analysis will take an interest in the work insofar as it is fundamentally language. And it is in this way that it will become, this literary analysis, like the analysis of myths, and alongside them, a kind of deixology. Second, this explains why literary analysis, to the extent that it transforms a given language into a new language that speaks about it, is now very closely associated with the problem of linguistics. This also explains how and why it is associated with the problem of logic, that is, with the problem that essentially affects the transformation of statements. You can also see how and why, no longer being this mediation between writing and reading, literary analysis cannot not abandon that older function of categorizing, criticizing, and judging that it formerly engaged in. From now on, literary analysis will suspend any judgment about the work, will suspend any sorting function for the reader, there will be no more sacred works, no more works immediately promoted for literary analysis. The role of the critic, which consisted in sorting and judging works, will now be no more than that of an inspector of literature. Compared with literary analysis, the kind of criticism we can read in the newspapers is, in a sense, no more than a vestigial remnant, and, of course, it is into the most prominent point of that remnant that we find planted the pen of Pierre-Henri Simon.13 You can see how and why history, historical analysis insofar as it is the study of the production of a work, can no longer be the essential and foremost subject of literary analysis, because literary analysis no longer needs to concern itself with how a work was produced but how a work can give rise to another language in which it is manifest or manifests some of its aspects, which is, the language of the analysis.

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In this way we could explain the presence, first, of this new discipline known as literary analysis, and, second, the proximity of literary analysis to disciplines that are apparently quite remote, but whose relationship now becomes clear, disciplines that treat the document as a document, whether this is a spoken document, as in the case of psychoanalysis, or a document from the oral tradition, such as those found in the analysis of popular folktales, or documents such as those of interest to sociology. That’s approximately what I wanted to say to situate the problems of structuralist disciplines and literary analysis. I would now like to— and this will be the third direction for a possible discussion— present, although you know the subject better than I do, current trends in structuralism insofar as it is the form of literary analysis. The use of structural concepts in literary analysis presents a rather strange, albeit minor, historical problem. You are aware that structural analysis in the field of literature was invented quite a long time ago, exactly half a century, in Russia. It was in 1915 that the Russian formalists, whose training had primarily been in linguistics, began to apply concepts that were, more or less, already structural to literary analysis. Then in Prague, Czechoslovakia, the United States, and England, where a number of Russian formalists had emigrated, a structuralist approach to literary analysis was developed. And, after the war, after 1940– 1945, in France we find what we could call literary structuralism begin to develop, although rather tentatively. But, and this is the strange thing, in France, structuralism in the literary field did not at all initially develop out of a consideration of the nature of language [la langue]; that is, the linguistic model historically played only a very limited role, almost none at all, in the formation of the new French criticism. In fact, the vehicle by which the new criticism took shape in France, the point of entry of the new criticism, was psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis in the strict sense of the term,14 the expanded psychoanalysis of Bachelard15 and the existential psychoanalysis of Sartre.16 The new criticism developed on the basis of these forms of analysis. And it was only afterward, quite recently in fact, less than ten years, barely seven or eight, that literary analysis in France discovered the linguistic model and transferred its methods of psychoanalytic persuasion to linguistic persuasion. Psychoanalytic persuasion was, of course, relatively loose, very free in its observance of standard Freudian practice. Nonetheless, it was in this direction that structuralism came into being. And it’s not at all surprising that structuralism in the new criticism came about on the basis of psychoanalysis and for a very simple reason: psychoanalysis, insofar as it, too, involves the study of a document, a study of human speech as spoken by someone in a carefully determined situation,

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and [as]b you know, insofar as psychoanalysis itself is a form of document treatment, it cannot be other than structuralist, at least in the sense that it is also a deixological discipline. So, it’s not surprising that literary analysis in France has rejoined structuralism, not by way of linguistics but by way of psychoanalysis. I believe this will help situate the birth of this new criticism historically.17 How did it develop and in what directions? I think we can say, roughly speaking, that the objective of everything we know as new criticism is essentially to define, with reference to a given text, that is, a literary work, the following: first, what elements can be used to dissect the given work; second, what is the network of relations maintained by the elements thus defined. You will claim that this is all quite simple, but it presents problems. And it presents problems because the work itself can be divided into chapters, paragraphs, sentences, and words, but this division is not what analysis needs in order to show how and in what way the work functions. The first principle of structuralism in literary analysis is the consideration, unlike the old nineteenth-century approach, that the work is not essentially the product of time; that a work doesn’t follow, throughout its creation and its current existence, a linear path that would be roughly chronological. The work is accepted as a spatial fragment, all of whose elements are simultaneous. Given this simultaneity and the fact that the entire work is being juxtaposed, we can then divide the work into elements and establish how those different elements function among themselves. In other words, it is not the diachronic thread of the work that should guide us but the synchrony of the work with itself. This doesn’t mean we can ignore the fact that the work has appeared at a given moment, within a given culture, or from a given individual. But to define how the work functions, we must acknowledge that it is always synchronic with respect to itself. Roughly speaking, literary analysis until the present has established the synchrony of the work with itself in two ways: first, in the dimension of the imaginary and, second, in the dimension of language. The place within which the work is spatialized and made contemporary with itself was initially the imaginary; and we have attempted to formulate, and we can say that a number of works of literary analysis have formulated, a logic or a geometry of the imaginary. This occurred initially in Bachelard’s work, which created an elementary logic of the literary imagination by juxtaposing a number of qualities to one another, independently of the author’s psychology, independently, as well, of the reader’s psychology, qualities that would b. Missing word.

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objectively exist in themselves, in a sense at the heart of things, and whose system of oppositions would give the work its possibility and its logic. The attempt at a geometry of the imaginary can be found in a work such as that by Poulet, for example, where, in discussing the circle, he conducted a series of analyses in which he showed how the works themselves, by virtue of what they narrate and the law of their composition, the law that composes its different parts and different elements, obey geometric figures that are simultaneously represented in the work and representative of the work.18 It is along these lines that, following Poulet, Starobinski used the idea of the obstacle and transparency in his study of Rousseau. He looked at Rousseau’s entire body of work and showed how you would find this strange spatial figure whose opacity conceals things and isolates man from things, together with a search for transparency that cannot be obtained, but which must be obtained by language as an instrument of “translucidification” of that veil, of that wall that separates the individual from things; and language is what polishes and makes transparent that veil.19 The work, therefore, in terms of its themes, is animated by this, but at the same time, the work is precisely this spatial figure, for it is through his work and through this particular literary work that Rousseau wrote; it is through this work that Rousseau attempted to make the world transparent, the world that, since his childhood and the injustice of which he had been a victim in his childhood, had become for him absolutely opaque and lost. So the work is, effectively, in itself, this type of spatial configuration and dynamic of space that is represented in what it says. In this way, we can situate a number of what would be analyses of logic and of the geometry of the imaginary. There is a second, much more recent direction, which is the analysis of the literary work based on the linguistic model that characterizes it. Such an analysis was undertaken for the first time in France by Lévi-Strauss using a sonnet by Baudelaire. In the analysis, he showed how the sonnet “Cats” was entirely governed by the phonetic possibilities given to Baudelaire, who constructed the sonnet based on a system of redundancies available to him through the phonetic characteristics inherent in the French language.20 This study, which was greatly misunderstood, and forgotten for a number of years, has quite recently come to light, and the work of Barthes and the work of Genette are quite similar, except that the linguistic models they use to define a work are not those of phonetics but of syntax and semantics.21 And it is primarily rhetoric, and rhetorical models, that guide them in their analysis of works. This assumes, of course, that the literary work itself is nothing more than a duplication or redoubling of linguistic structures on themselves. It assumes that the literary work is, in some sense, language [la langue] manifesting itself in its structure and in its virtuality.

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And, finally, there is a third direction, which I’d like to briefly describe. This third direction has been left mostly unexplored, but we have to ask whether it shouldn’t be [accepted].c You are aware that those who have recently been researching language, linguists and logicians, have noticed that, when studying statements, there was an element or, rather, a series of elements that were at least as important as language, and these were referred to as extralinguistic elements.22 Linguists such as Prieto,23 and logicians such as Austin,24 have shown that the linguistic structure of a statement was far from sufficient in accounting for its total existence. Prieto, in particular, has shown how contextual elements formed by the situation of the speaking individual are absolutely necessary to provide meaning to a number of statements, in fact, a large number of statements. Every statement is silently reliant on a given objective and real situation, and the statement wouldn’t have the form it has if the context were different. The first example given by Prieto is the following: if you have a red notebook on a table and you want to ask someone to take the notebook, you say to them, “Take it,” or “Take the notebook.” If there are two notebooks, one red and one green, you ask your interlocutor to take it by saying, “Take the red,” or “Take the one on the right.” You can see how these two statements have exactly the same signification (an order from A to B to take the notebook on the table), and how that same signification will give rise to two completely different statements depending on whether the objective context is the first or the second. Consequently, the definition of a statement, the choice of the form of a statement, is possible only as a function of context. Now, concerning the work of logicians, someone like Austin has shown that statements themselves cannot be analyzed independently of the speech act carried out by the speaker at the moment of speaking. For example, when someone says, “The meeting is in session,” this sentence is not simply a factual statement. For, in practice, the meeting is not in session, the speaker is not stating that the meeting is in session; nor is he giving an order, for the meeting doesn’t obey and cannot begin of its own accord because someone has given the order to do so. So, what is this statement doing? The statement is, grammatically, exactly similar to an observation and, yet, is not an observation, and the meaning of this statement is neither an observation nor an affirmation. It is something that Austin calls a “performative.” The name is not important, but you can see in this simple example that defining the linguistic structure of a statement in no way provides a complete description of a statement. You can see from these two examples— simply reference points— that c. Conjecture— the word is inaudible.

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we are in the process, within the field of language studies itself, of understanding that discourse analysis can no longer be done solely in terms of linguistics. Discourse is not simply a particular case within language, it is not a way of using linguistic rules to combine elements that are given by language itself; it is something that necessarily overflows language. We might then wonder if literary analysis, the analysis of this singular discourse that is a literary work, shouldn’t take into account all of those extralinguistic elements we are now discovering in our analysis of language. And I see that there are threed directions in which this could take us. First, we could try to define, somewhat along the lines that Prieto described, what is actually said when literary statements are made. When you open a novel, there is no context for that novel. When Joyce, for example, in the beginning of Ulysses,25 says— unfortunately the name of the character escapes me— “Come down the stairs,”26 the staircase designated by a definite article is not next to you, it is not like when you say, when I say, for example, “the glass.” When I say, “the glass,” you know perfectly well what it is. When Joyce says “stairs” in his novel, no one knows what that stairs is, there is no actual context. And yet, Joyce doesn’t say everything, he doesn’t explain exactly what context we should use to complete the empty reference provided by the definite article. It is the work itself that, in a way, dissects, in a nonexistent context, that which must be present and that which doesn’t need to be present. And it is sufficient to compare a description by Balzac and a description by Robbe-Grillet to see how there exists in works of the Balzacian type a number of things that must absolutely be said and that are, in some sense, the context, the extralinguistic element present in the work itself: the date of the event, the city where it takes place, the name of the character, his family, what happened to him, his past, and so on.27 And if you take a novel by Robbe-Grillet, when he begins The Labyrinth, saying, “Here,” you will never know what this “here” refers to, if it’s a city, or which one, in what country it’s located, if it’s an apartment, a painting, a real space, an imaginary space, and so on.28 You see how the way in which the extralinguistic element is presented in statements in a literary work differs considerably from one era to another, and from one writer to another. And we could, following Prieto’s linguistic analyses, study the role of extralinguistic context within the work itself. Second, we could also study what logicians have done. Austin, in particular, for the way that statements are placed within the text of the literary d. Foucault will provide only two directions. This can be explained by the interruption of the recording that took place at the end of his description of the second direction; but this appears to have been short. It’s also possible that Foucault made a mistake in stating that there would be three directions.

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work: what act is accomplished in a given sentence? It is obvious that in a description, a recorded dialogue, in an aside by the author about his own character, in a psychological remark [. . .]e [you] are confronted with a formal analysis of the work, but one pursued in a direction that is not at all the direction of linguistics, but rather a structural study of the extralinguistic elements in statements, although linguistic, in the work itself. So, I have indicated these possible directions for research to show you how structuralism, far from being tied to a given doctrinal position, far from being tied to a specific and definitively acquired method, is, in fact, much more a field of research, one whose reach is probably open-ended. And as long as we haven’t examined the entirety of this documentary mass that humanity has deposited around itself, of which literature is only one portion, as long as we haven’t used every method possible to show what this document is insofar as it is a document, structuralism, if it is true that structuralism is simply the science of the document, will have a vibrant future. In any case, we must be careful not to identify structuralism with a philosophy or even with a particular method. So there you have, very roughly, an idea of what I wanted to present to you— unfortunately, I went on a bit too long— so I’d like to give you an opportunity to ask any questions or present any objections you might have. Moderator:29 I will serve as your interpreter by thanking Michel Foucault for his brilliant and rich exposé of the structuralist interpretation of the literary work. I would also like to thank him for having clearly explained his philosophical position. I think I can, now, present it to you. His philosophy is one of semiological structuralism or a structuralist semiology, at least for his current philosophical position. And, judging by his reference to Austin, his future philosophy will probably be a form of linguistic phenomenology. I want to turn this over to the audience, but I ask that you be brief and allow everyone to express their own point of view. The discussion can focus on the three points mentioned, but I don’t think you need to ask questions in a given order. I believe an open discussion is preferable. So, who would like to speak? Audience member: Ultimately, the basis of your structuralist method consists in a form of prohibition. Structuralism would be the work seen insofar as it is itself within itself. That’s poorly expressed, but I think that this prohibition exists somewhere. But in your final remarks, which I find very engaging, it seems to me that the work, as perceived by analysis, seeks this absence of itself, based on what you said. Analysis is conceived insofar as it seeks to isolate an absence in the language, for example, the stairs: what stairs? What hasn’t been said will, in the end, be what is most important. At that moment, to what extent do you e. The recording is interrupted here.

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go beyond structuralism itself to eventually end up with what would be considered the most traditional of criticisms? I’ll give an example. For me, “literary structure” always implies, more or less, a kind of fatality. When you spoke of the spatialized work, flattened out, like a map spread out in front of you, there may have been something of this idea of fatality. At that moment, wouldn’t the afterlife of the work, or its absence, be— and here, I think, I am terribly traditional and would tend to view every work as autobiographical— wouldn’t the afterlife of the work be this fatality, whether realized or not, which the writer transcribes into his own work, either to exorcise it or to do something else, whatever? Haven’t you, in fact, restored the traditional link between the work and what exists outside literature, that is, the era, the writer, what have you? At least, wouldn’t this be, rather than a clearly defined line as you expressed it, a dotted line? Michel Foucault: Do you want me to reply now or to several questions? Moderator: Does anyone have a similar question? Would anyone like to support this point of view? Or possibly my own! But, clearly, there’s no risk of that happening. Moderator: I think that dialogue is preferable. Okay. So, what I wanted to say is that the essence of a literary work is not to have an actual context. If I had had time, if I didn’t have to stop with these preliminary remarks, we could have looked at the very typical example of a first-person novel. When you open a first-person novel and read, “For a long time I went to bed late,” you know that the “I” can in no way be assimilated, you have no right, in any case, at the outset, to assimilate this first person “I” to the individual who put his name on the cover page and who, in this case, happens to be Marcel Proust.30 This “I” is an “I” that literally doesn’t make sense, that is, doesn’t find its element of designation, doesn’t find its referent, until well within the text; and the “I” that says, “For a long time, I went to bed late,” will only be determined by the set of all the “I’s” found in the text, by everything that will happen in the text to this person who says “I,” the set of all the epithets, all the qualifiers, and so on, that will gradually fill that empty form that is pointed to by that “I.” The same holds for the things that are mentioned. What is not said, in a sense, is whatever falls outside the text, outside the statement of the text, but that is not what falls outside the work. That is, the extralinguistic elements of the work are not the outside of the work. And it is here, I believe, that traditional criticism goes wrong, or would go wrong if it were to use the models I referred to when I said, “But it’s up to us, we’ve already done it.” Because traditional criticism consists in saying, “For a long time, I went to bed late”— Who went to bed late? Well, Marcel Proust. Marcel Proust, who was completely Oedipal and couldn’t fall asleep without his mother kissing

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him first. Here, we’ve gone outside the work, we’ve filled the “I” indicated as such, as being empty, with something that is not only extralinguistic but extra-opus. Whereas the method I suggest involves showing how the work forms not only its statements, the linguistics in which it manifests itself, but the extralinguistic elements that are part of the work but left unsaid. Do you see what I’m saying? Same audience member: Don’t you think that the “I” is, really, infinitely more complex in its behavior? I see what you’re saying and am fully in agreement with you, but I think there’s also a moment when this sort of membrane that surrounds the work also comes into contact with what is outside the work, which is, let’s say, reality, quite simply. Only, your method is limited to the membrane, it stops at the membrane, at the pia mater. Moderator: Could you talk about your reservations, perhaps? Same audience member: Finally, we’re in the process of establishing successive layers of bark around the work, if I’m not mistaken. I understand what you’re trying to say when you state that we shouldn’t expand into the life of Marcel Proust. But we know that the “I” of the Search is, in fact, an “I” purely intraliterary, but also, up to a certain point, there is a constant ambiguity [with] Proust’s life itself, as he himself experienced it when he was writing his purely literary “I.” I would like to respond by saying that— and I didn’t mention it, that was absolutely my fault, but I was pressed for time— an analysis of speech acts like those I mentioned previously obviously needs to take into account several things: of course, the speech acts that can be defined in terms of one another within the very text of the work, but, in fact, the simple existence of a book, that is, the fact that there was a language written on a piece of paper by someone, that this piece of paper was then given to a printer, who printed 2,000, 3,000, 100,000, a million copies, that these were read, and so on; this already implies a very strange form for the language act. There are many civilizations that have never known, that have never even suspected that we could introduce language acts as strange as the one that consists in saying, “For a long time, I went to bed late,” while not speaking about oneself, and that we were also somewhat speaking about ourselves, and so on. It is the general category of the literary speech act that needs to be defined in terms of its formal existence, its historical existence as well. Take, for example, within literature itself, the difference between the sentence “For a long time, I went to bed late,” which you can read in Proust, and, if you happen to be watching a farce, or anything for that matter, at the theater, and someone says, “For a long time, I went to bed late,” this won’t be the same speech act; yet, it will be understood. What I want to say is that the methodological postulate that consists in saying, “I don’t care about Proust,

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his life isn’t what’s important,” this methodological postulate is essentially designed to bring to light for themselves all those different layers of speech acts, which I would hope, finally, when we’ve examined them all, put us in the presence of Proust, the individual, who one day picked up his pen and began to write. But, in fact, if you move from the sentence you read, if you suddenly jump to Proust, the individual, you miss all the sedimentation of those speech acts, and the typology, and the mythology of the speech acts that make this apparently quite simple, but, in truth, totally absurd, sentence possible, which consists in saying, “For a long time, I went to bed late.” Same audience member: Well, I think I want to insist especially on the dialectic between, let’s say, the most literary interiority and the real world for the writer. Finally, I would emphasize the act, the literary act, less than the work in itself. I’m completely in agreement with the metaphor of the layers of bark that you used. But I’m not only speaking about the bark, rather, I’d say that literature is an onion. Other audience member: I want to ask a two-part question. First, a question about truth. What guarantees this formalist interpretation of the work, this structure we’ve found? Sometimes we have the impression that we’ve found absolutely improbable things. And my other question is about the value of the work. You said that you would exclude sorting, the critical aspect of criticism. But, still, it’s quite significant that we choose some works and not others, for example, Racine or Valéry. And even within a work, do we treat equally, do we display, as you stated, works of different value, such as The Fratricide31 and Phaedra,32 or Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker33 and those aberrant dialogues34— interesting but aberrant— in which Rousseau judges JeanJacques? So, can we describe this question of value? Concerning the last point, obviously, well apparently, Rousseau’s Confessions are good, but Rousseau’s Dialogues are surreal, they can’t be analyzed.35 But, I tried. I tried. I published, it probably doesn’t amount to much though36 . . . But just to let you know that one can always do something. Second, it’s obvious that a certain number of choices are made, which are essentially due to external factors. Why did Barthes choose Racine? In general, contrary to what one might believe, the more important a work, the more it is, as they say, literarily rich, the more difficult is its structural analysis. The best proof of this is that, when one succeeds fully, where we come out ahead, is when we imitate Propp or some of the people working at the Centre d’études sémiologiques, who study popular stories, folktales, crime novels. Structuralist analysis of the James Bond novels, which is currently being done by the people at CECMAS, that works well.37 However, when

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it comes to a literary work, where the structures are extraordinarily rich and overdetermined, this becomes much more difficult. So, you see, there’s a choice, unquestionably, we can’t do anything without choosing, but the choice isn’t in general one of making value judgments. If there is a choice, I won’t hide the fact that it’s the choice of taking the path of least resistance. Second, what guarantees the truth of these analyses? I don’t wish to be polemical, but do you believe that the guarantee of truth that can be obtained by structural analysis is weaker or less certain than one that allows us to claim that a traditional critical analysis is true? When you establish a psychological or biographical relation between a given event in the life of Flaubert and what you read in Sentimental Education, you have made a judgment.38 That judgment, insofar as it’s a judgment of fact, is based on a demonstration of truth; but the demonstration of truth, well, whatever . . . Structural analysis also runs into this same problem. Structural analysis establishes isomorphisms, it finds the presence of relations between elements that are elements of the work. How can we be sure that those relations are true, or that we are right to affirm that those relations exist? In general, it is only through a method that uses division and overdetermination, that is, that the relation you find between element A and element B, you are going to find between element B and element C, or between element C and element D, so that you will have the same relation between four elements. From the moment you find the same relation between several elements, the chances increase that it also existed between the first two elements. It’s a method of increasing probability. Whereas, in the historical analysis that is ordinarily practiced, we establish a probability, the probability never increases, the truth of the proposition we have advanced is based solely on the truth of the psychological theory we employed at the outset. It has been assumed that Madame Bovary was Flaubert,39 or that Fréderic Moreau was Flaubert; it was assumed that because a given individual had had a given adventure with a woman, he could only experience bitterness, regret, sorrow, and so on; we accepted that a writer, from the moment he had experienced suffering in his youth, couldn’t do otherwise than transcribe them into his work, and so on. And it was this series of very doubtful postulates that made for truth, that constituted the truth of a historical judgment. Another audience member: I would like to make a comment about the function of language and, in particular, the relation between the context of a work and its linguistic reality. It seems that if, for example, we have, on the one hand, a pamphlet and, on the other, some hermetic poem, isn’t it context that results in the difference in the difficulty of structural analysis between the pamphlet and the hermetic poem? If the hermetic poem presents greater analytical complexity, it’s not because of the linguistic structure itself of the poem’s elements,

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[but] the context; whereas in the pamphlet, what has occurred, which is one of the fundamental elements, for example, of the action of language, an immediate action in an immediate context, the problem arises of knowing what the position is, where the difficulty lies, what will be the level of difficulty of analysis using the structural method. Do you believe that structural analysis of the hermetic text will be made more difficult because of the context or for reasons that are purely linguistic? You acknowledge that the hermetic poem is more difficult from the structural point of view than the pamphlet? Same audience member: I have no idea. I was making a hypothetical case that with a hermetic poem, it’s the context that creates the total structural analysis, that of the Prieto type, which is not based solely on analyzing the signifiers but looks at the entirety of the context of the work alone— still, I remain solely within the context of the work for the hermetic poem. And there’s a second problem, which comes up immediately concerning the analysis, for example, of the literary category “pamphlet,” because with the pamphlet, the context becomes both larger and simpler. In all likelihood, when you publish a pamphlet, the context is broad and simple. When you are dealing with a hermetic poem, the context is narrower, apparently more closed, and, no doubt, harder to analyze. Well, with the example of the pamphlet, it’s very awkward. Same audience member: It resembles that of the crime novel. Not exactly, because, with the pamphlet, you’re dealing with a fragment of language, a series of statements that are directly associated with a situation, that situation being defined by the texts of other people, and also defined by the historical situation, the association with the social class of the individuals in question, and so on. So with the pamphlet, you are dealing with texts that, like scientific texts, like political texts, are not literary texts. When did anyone ever call a pamphlet literary? We say it, precisely when this turns out to be the case, that is, when it obeys structures that reflect the same patterns, structures, and so on, as those found in a literary work, which, in the end, talks only about itself. Naturally, this raises the very difficult problem of the analysis of nonliterary discourse. Philosophical discourse: what is that, what relation does it have with context? In a sense, philosophical discourse is as pure as a literary text, because if you open to the first page of Descartes’s Meditations, the “I” that you see there is . . . is not, it is and it isn’t that of René Descartes.40 The relation between the “I” of the Meditations and the individual, René Descartes, is certainly not the same relation as that between the “I” of In Search of Lost Time and the individual, Marcel Proust. The philosophical text, therefore, certainly requires a different structural analysis, the political text as well. So, when you say pamphlet and hermetic poem, I would reply: if the pamphlet can

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be considered a literary work, it’s because its structures are related to those in the hermetic poem. And we will know that it’s a literary work if we can perform the same analysis. The proof is given reciprocally, you see, one in terms of the other. I don’t know if you’ll find my response satisfactory because the problem, well, it’s the problem that currently exists. In terms of literary works, we have before us a number of analyses that are interesting and fecund, that, in any case, have considerably renewed the object of literary analysis compared to what it was twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years ago. We are now confronted with the problem of other types of discourse. Roughly speaking, we can say that Gueroult analyzed philosophical texts in a structuralist manner, at least, assuming that we can associate the structure of a philosophical work with its logical armature, which is not absolutely certain.41 As for the analysis of other texts— scientific, political, ideological in the strict sense— we are still dealing with the basics, and we scream blue murder whenever someone tries. That’s our responsibility today. Same audience member: There’s a second point that could be made, and I want to ask if you agree with this analysis. It seems that at this time literary analysis or the analysis of linguistic texts reintroduces, in a sense, through its effects of necessary context, signification, whereas, especially since purely linguistic structuralism, this signification had been rejected. For my part, I get the impression that we are witnessing here, I wouldn’t say a return to the past because the method is different and progress has been made, but when I pick up the Port-Royal Grammar and its heirs, a scholarly grammar, where everyone knows that sense and form are frequently mixed, there’s little doubt that in this standard analysis of the eighteenth-century Ideologues, Condillac and the others, that at the time they hadn’t yet resolved the problem, but this kind of perpetual mix between sense and form was simply a prefiguration or a form of momentary inadequacy for a future analysis.42 This was followed by a necessary bath of objectivity. I said somewhere that the linguistic structuralism, based on Saussure’s method, of Harris and Hjelmslev, and others, was parallel to behaviorism, that is, there had been a revolution essential to the progress of linguistics; but, in a sense, aren’t we now seeing a return of signification, not only among structural analysts of literary works but also among linguists, an energetic return of the concept of signification?43 I would say that, first, I don’t think we can claim that linguistics has, at any time, abandoned the concept of signification. It has always dealt with it, in one way or another. For example, when mainstream structuralist linguistics makes use of the proof that Hjelmslev calls commutation, we are referring to meaning; it’s important to understand what we mean by the word, and it’s simply that, if the form, if a new phoneme, brings about a new

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word and a new meaning, we can say, that, that is, in fact, a phoneme.44 So, meaning was present at that moment. Second, linguistics was tied first to the problems of phonology before moving on to other fields, and it is now entering the field of semantics, that is, the structure of signification. It has been doing this for a while, and it is doing it now, in a sense, in terms of the problems it has been presented with. Third, the introduction of considerations having to do with context or the act performed by a speaking subject at the moment he speaks are not exactly considerations of meaning but about what constitutes the statement in its signification, the statement as a set of signifying elements. In other words, it is always the signifier qua signifier that is under consideration. But the speaking subject and the context, that’s not the meaning of the statement. In other words, it’s to reach a better definition of the statement. That is, we are in the process of moving from an analysis of the very elements of linguistics to an analysis of what is known as the statement. And that is what appears to be the novelty of recent analyses such as those by Prieto or those by Austin. Same audience member: Couldn’t we then describe the situation as follows: we have the signifier “thing,” either the spoken word or the written word, initially, which would be the signified of the signifier, so then, would the meaning be, for you, the signified of the real? And, between the two, we could then, that is, between the signifier “thing” and the meaning, situate an entire range, which might consist of the elements of contexts you were speaking of recently, with signifieds of the signifier to the first power, to the second power, and so on, until a certain point, and the simplicity of the structural analysis or its complexity would be a function of that number. Here, we come back to the story of the bark, the story of the onion; this would be the onion in the sense that we would have, successively, a whole series of membranes all around the system. I would also say that there has been an attempt at linguistic analysis without any return to meaning, and that is decryption. Work has been going on with decryption for completely unknown languages, where methods of pure linguistic structural analysis have been successfully used, not to understand meaning, but— and this confirms what you were just saying— to identify the signifiers, where the signification or the meaning depends, at that moment, on completely external elements for their identification. In other words, we have succeeded in identifying all the signifiers of a language without knowing the meaning by using the structuralist method. But, in effect, classical phonology initially began with meaning when investigating phonemes. What characterizes structuralist linguistics is not the systematic suspension of meaning, it’s the investigation of signifiers. And it’s obvious that, at a given moment, under certain conditions, we are forced to do away with meaning, or, it is preferable to do away with meaning, but that’s not an inte-

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gral part of the vocation or the definitive method of linguistics. So, to introduce considerations like those of context is not at all a step backward, on the contrary, it is continued movement forward. In other words, we can analyze phonological elements without taking context into account. When we get to units as large as syntagms, such as statements, then we cannot do otherwise than to take context into account, and we have to introduce it. And while I have spoken of the new possibilities of literary analysis, it’s because there is, at present, a new trend, represented by those around Roland Barthes, which consists in saying: because the phonological method has been successful with phonemes, we should shift those same models over to the literary work itself. In other words, we have gone from the phonemic level to the totality of discourse; and, I believe, we are missing the very reality of the statement. But with Prieto, with Austin, with linguists and logicians, we have a theory of the statement that is now being developed. And I feel that literary analysis should not simply transpose the methods developed by Trubetskoy,45 transpose them to the text itself, it must be attentive to what is actually happening when we try to establish what a statement is.46 Another audience member: There’s one thing that bothers me and that I don’t understand. Structuralism claims to be universal. Yet, apparently, in the three approaches that appear to be taking shape, we arrive only at an extension of the understanding of a given cultural sphere to literature, that is, to that particular level that would be literature, myths or signs. But, though we can examine some literary object using one of the three approaches, we can’t reach an understanding of nonidentical structures, given that cultures are different, although at least analogous from one cultural sphere to another, because maybe we could rediscover some correspondences, given the context, given the historical discontinuity, and so on. Could you give us some insight that would help us resolve this contradiction in terms of current research? Look, I think that in this field you have two types of research, which are, in a sense, closely related to one another and present exactly the same problem: and that’s the work done by Lévi-Strauss and Dumézil. Dumézil has done structural analyses of Indo-European mythology. Those structural analyses are valid only for Indo-European civilizations. That would present a problem for Greece because it didn’t work out very well. They tried to transplant Dumézil’s analyses, first to the Bantu, then to the Japanese, which resulted in an outcry from Dumézil— but you’ll say that this isn’t really all that important. In any case, it failed. However, with Lévi-Strauss you have an analysis of South American mythologies whose origin is sometimes quite different, and which allowed him to identify structural elements that could be found in any culture. But what characterizes the South American mythol-

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ogies, for example, Bororo mythology in those South American mythologies, is the ensemble of the transformations that the general model will have experienced. In other words, cultural differentiation is a differentiation at the level of transformation operations. Same audience member: And so, at that moment, can a literary analysis avoid, because of the patterns inherent in each given cultural sphere, an analysis that would be based on lived experience and which we would find at that particular level? Otherwise, we’d end up with empty structures. That’s the problem. A structure is always empty. Same audience member: No, I don’t think so. For example, when you yourself analyze something, you rely on your understanding, you remember it, determined and, at the same time, determining. That is, there exists in your outlook, an outlook that is, at the same time, cosmogonic, even if you cut it at a certain point. For example, how could the Bororo make use of your analysis? I don’t mean that you, you would make your analysis down there, but that they themselves would use it. How could they use your tools? Look, I have to say that I don’t really see the point of the question. You’re asking me what the Bororo would do. All I can say is that, from the moment the Bororo become familiar with and practice the structural method, they’ll apply it to themselves and to us, there is no reason why they wouldn’t. Besides, Lévi-Strauss always speaks highly of his informers who, it appears, described to him roughly the structures he had found. But no, I don’t see . . . I don’t see what your question is objecting to. Moderator: I don’t want to reply directly to the question, but if structuralism isn’t a method, all the same, there is a problem, and that’s the problem of content; and that problem, for me, could be reduced to the following question: are there immanent structures? That’s how I see the problem. Another audience member: I wonder if the problem isn’t the following: we analyze a structure, the structure of a literary work, but it might be as interesting to study other structures and compare different structures. Lévi-Strauss provides a very brilliant example of the correspondence between the structure of Caduveo society and the structure of tattoos.47 I think that’s the problem being presented; it’s the problem of the correspondence between the structure of a myth, between the structure of a literary work, between the structure of a folktale, and other structures, because, finally, the value of structuralist research is to compare some structures with others. And, finally, I wonder if the structuralist method doesn’t ultimately involve responding to certain problems raised by conventional literary analysis, but with greater rigor and depth. You recently referred to the fact that, at a certain moment, we began applying psychoanalysis to the explication of some literary works; in a way, we directly compared

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the structure of a work with the structure of the author’s personality. Another thing, on several occasions we attempted to develop a sociology of art, to compare the structure of literary works with a social base, a social infrastructure. But, in reality, structuralism may allow us to respond with greater rigor to the question of finding out how a given society projects its structure into certain creative outlets of a mythic or a literary order. No? I’m entirely in agreement with you. One of the essential points of structural analysis is that it allows for the use of comparative disciplines, which until then had been given over either to the imagination, as during Humboldt’s time, or to empiricism. Someone like Dumézil, when he performed his mythological analyses of Indo-European mythologies, always positioned the mythic structure in relation to a given social structure, which is the three-part social structure of warriors, politicians-magicians, and farmers. And it’s the confrontation of these different structures that, together, confirms the analysis of each one and enables a given relationship to be established. Similarly, he analyzed one culture in terms of another, for example, Scandinavian mythology with the organization of Roman religion. At different levels, he isolated the same structures. So, I agree with you completely that structural analysis is not necessarily limited to the interior of a work or [to] the interior of a text or [to] the interior of an institution: it is a powerful instrument of comparative analysis. The problem is to determine whether these comparative analyses will necessarily lead to a determination of causality. When someone said: the structure of a work resembles the structure of the mentality or the biographical structure of an individual, first, the word “structure” was very poorly defined and, second, they established a preexisting channel of causality. What’s important in current structural analysis is that, on the one hand, obviously, the structural instrument is understood in itself, we try to fully understand what a structure is before using it, and, second, the isomorphism between structures is not necessarily an indication of causality. In fact, the two analyses are different and, when I tried to distinguish economic analysis, which is the analysis of the production of things, and deixological analysis, which is the analysis of the documentary structure of the thing, I was specifically alluding to this. And it is likely that, one day or another, both analyses will have to be articulated in terms of one another, but for the moment we have to conduct them separately. Same audience member: Of course, we shouldn’t reject a type of causality, mechanical causality, and, how should I put it, unidirectional causality, such as explicating the structure of a literary work in every case using an economic and social structure. There could be a correspondence between the structure of a literary work and the structures of kinship. For example, Engels, in the first pages of The Origin of the Family, drew a comparison between the structure

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of the Oresteia and the kinship structures at the time.48 So, when we speak of a correspondence between structures, we are not locked into a concept of unequivocal, monotonal, almost mechanical causality. And there can be all kinds of causality; strictly speaking, we could adopt a conception of history like that of Fustel de Coulanges and imagine that the structure of religion determines everything else.49 We have rejected dogmatism in this field of inquiry. But if the discovery of structures doesn’t lead to a confrontation among various structures and the establishment of a causal link between those structures, then where does structuralism lead? Precisely, now we are getting somewhere. Now we’re at the heart of the question, from my perspective. For we would gladly admit that structural analysis was worth something if we were certain that it clarified the old problem of causality. If, at the beginning of this presentation, I said some things that may have appeared obscure, they were for me critical. You see, I used as a reference something that is currently going on in biology, specifically, in embryology. We continued to ask ourselves how is it that, given the fact of an embryo, two or four small cells, like that, how is it that it resulted in an individual of a given species, one that, more or less, resembles its fellow creatures and its parents. We looked for the determining factor, the cause. Finally, we presented the problem in terms of causality and in terms of energy. This led nowhere. What we now know is that there is, in reality, an information process that leads to something like isomorphism between the makeup of the nucleus of the cell and what will be present in the organism, as if a message had been deposited in the cell nucleus and as if that message had been heard. Now, we are certain that that’s the way it works. We understand nothing about causality, we penetrated the information process. Curiously, we sought an energy solution, we sought a solution in the web of causality, and we found something else, which is not at all the solution of the problem of causality, we discovered the information process. I think that this is what is now happening in the life sciences. We always have in mind a certain energy or causal model, what I would call the economic model: how is it that mankind’s works could come about? So, we searched, and we searched, but we didn’t find man, we didn’t find production, we didn’t find causality, the channel of causality, we found something that I call the deixological structure, the documentary structure, the structure and isomorphisms. Lévi-Strauss always wondered why the hell there were myths, just like all the other anthropologists. And, finally, what he found was a type of structure in layers, myths are related to one another like that. And he still didn’t know why there were myths. No one, at that point, had ever been able to explain how a myth was made; he had been unable to explain how it was produced.

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Other audience member: My question runs somewhat along the same lines, it’s the opposite of the first question I had asked. I had tried to question the outer layers of your onion, but, finally, what is there at the center of the onion? In other words, the literary work, taken by itself, in itself, is there anything other than structure? I think you’ll probably say: no, there is only the structure given that there is only language, phonemes, articulations. In other words, where is the substance? It’s not a matter of causality. There is no substance, there is no causality. So, no; when I say, “there is no substance, there is no causality,” [it’s] from the moment that we find ourselves at the epistemological level that I defined [the level of deixology]. Sorry, I’m always referring to that word, deixology, which I have used to avoid the word archaeology, which I used elsewhere, but which is too narrow and, really, not good, because, I think we need to completely dissociate the structural method from the new object that is discovered. That new object, which structural analysis as a method enabled us to discover, the way pathological anatomy enabled us to discover physiology, that new object is one in which there is no longer substance, in which there is no longer cause. Do you see? Same audience member: Yes, that makes sense. Having said this, we are going to be looking at this field for years, probably, and then, one fine day, we’ll discover another epistemological level that may encompass the two previous levels or will be located somewhere else. It’s an epistemological level, and, for that reason, the quarrel with structuralism is misplaced because some people pose the question in terms of method and others reply to them in terms of epistemology; and vice versa. Other audience member: Lack of causality or a causality that is so complex that we never manage to discover it? No, absence of causality. The level in itself excludes it . . . Same audience member: When the various structures have been isolated, we try to compare them to one another by trying to use them to clarify each other, [. . .] f and we end up with something completely indecipherable. Other audience member: I’m not sure I’m talking about exactly the same thing as the others, but I want to try to use another language that might help us escape this impasse. And in that sense, I have two questions. You spoke of archaeology and I’m always talking about geology. That gets back to the onion, there are always stratifications and things. So when we talk about the new criticism, I wonder if it doesn’t reflect a new sensibility, which would be a contemporary sensibility, whose requirements are different than those of the past. f. The recording is briefly interrupted here.

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So that, in the first place, the goals of traditional criticism being what they are and not squaring with the requirements of the new sensibility, wouldn’t the new criticism be a search for the requirements of the new sensibility? In that sense, it would be contemporary in the strict sense of the term. To take another example, I would say the following: assume that we played— excuse me, but I’m leaving geology and archaeology and moving over to music— assume that, in centuries past, we played a violin that had only three strings and, for example, that we added two or three other new strings to produce a different kind of music, then, would this new criticism be the criticism that takes as its instrument one with several more strings than the older one? That’s one question. And a second question. Since Bergson, we speak about the explosion of systems, the impossibility of a coherent, closed, total system, and we have somewhat haphazardly introduced the idea of an open philosophy. Wouldn’t this structuralism be the language suitable to this open philosophy, culminating in a kind of pluralism, whether coherent or incoherent? That’s another question. I have to answer two people. There are at least two questions that overlap somewhat. You asked me if the new criticism corresponds, is the product of the new sensibility, that is, you asked me about the very causality of this system, these structures known as structuralism. And so, we again get back to the well-known problem of causality, which I know is something fundamental. You said, you haven’t found a cause, you can’t assign a causal network for the simple reason that there’s too much causality. My response is no and no. The systems, the economic or energy analyses, these look for such causality. This causality is highly complex and it is very likely that to the degree that we haven’t found that causality, we have been forced, we have been shifted to new forms of research. If, for example, we had found the causal system that allows us to account for embryological development, we wouldn’t have had to make use of this new epistemological form, which is the analysis of biochemical information. If the development of embryology had been as simple as explaining that the presence of a microbial disease . . . Pasteur had a disease right in front of him, he was lucky enough to discover the cause: it was a microbe, and he had no need to deal with all that information. You understand? It’s obviously the result of the failure of causality that there has been a shift in the epistemological level in the case of biochemistry. It is probably also true that it was the failure to make causal connections in the field of human production that led to the shift toward information analysis, deixological analysis. But it is part of this epistemological level to no longer anticipate a relation of causality. This means that, first, at this level, we will never find causality because we’re not looking for it and because the level is defined such that there will be no causal object, because causality cannot be an object at this level, an object of knowledge. Second, this does not prevent

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the energy level or the level of the analysis of production from continuing to exist, and we can certainly conduct analyses at this level, and maybe, at this level, we’ll find causalities. We might find them by making use of what was found at a different level. Third, there still remains the problem of the relation between these two levels. Just as biologists currently ask about the relation between the information level of intercellular exchange and the energy level— and, well, that’s their problem— one day, our problem will be to determine the relationship that might exist between this deixological level of the document, insofar as it is a document, and in its inherent structure, and the level of production of the document itself, the production of the work. Same (?) audience member: We agree. But once again, at the level of structure, you’ll never find causality. Same audience member: But at the level of structure. When we look at the various structures . . . Absolutely not. Same audience member: So, under those conditions, we will never clarify the production process. Other audience member: We can say that it’s a new language we make use of to avoid the problem of causality. But not to avoid it! Other audience member: When you make a comparison in the field of the natural sciences, you’re making the comparison in a field where causality has not been established. There are other fields in which causality has been established. Precisely because it turned out that the inability to identify a causal model led to an epistemological mutation that was not needed. Pasteur had no need for information theory to discover the cause of disease in the microbe. When the search for the cause of embryological development resembled the search for the cause of disease, we didn’t find it. Epistemological mutations always arise out of scientific failure. Other audience member: You speak about structures and isomorphisms, comparison of structures, but maybe we should define the structure in terms of what contrasts with the structure. And I think that what contrasts with the structure— maybe I’m wrong— but, in my opinion, it’s not causality, it’s not substance, it’s time. We’re not playing in a world of Platonic ideas. Take, for example, the family in the Oresteia, the structure of the Oresteia succeeds the Greek family, that has a meaning, an irreversible meaning. You yourself, in your book, showed structures that follow one another, and it’s hard to see how they might be reversed.50 So how do you understand time in this structural analysis? What do you do?

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It’s a rule of transformation. A structure of type A can be transformed into a structure of type B, but the structure of type B can’t be transformed into the structure of type A. That’s all. Time is the transformation of structures. And that’s what Sartre didn’t understand; he believed that there’s a division when we talk about transformation.51 All the same, it’s incredible! Other audience member: If I can interject, rather than B, there could also be C or D, it makes no difference. Not necessarily. Same audience member: No, but it could. There is no relation between A and B outside of the transformation. Well, yes, there is no relation between A and B other than the transformation. I agree. Other audience member: Why? That’s exactly what structuralism needs to demonstrate: why did this transformation here take place, and why must it necessarily take place before the transformation from B to C? Other audience member: So, there is a “why”? Well, that’s the reason for the structure. That is, given a structure, it is not possible that it produces C, it can only produce B. And to go from A to C, we must pass through B. This is not causality, it’s necessity. And necessity, precisely, all of contemporary thought . . . Other audience member: Are there only transformation relations between two structures, or is it, more simply, as it seems to me, that [the person who commented before] is bothered because he’s looking for a relation of causality between two structures in the sense that is customarily understood, a relation of mechanical causality? But maybe what structuralism helps us understand is the need to develop a new concept of causality that is not, for example, a causeand-effect relation in the simplest sense. And it seems that you yourself replied to this in your presentation when you said that structuralist criticism, taking a literary work as its object, was intended to discover what is not said in the text, without which there is no literary work. Perhaps it’s in the relation of absence between what is said and what is not said that we need to look if we want to find a new meaning for the relation of causality. That’s where, in my understanding— we’re speaking very generally— that’s what Althusser wanted to do by using structuralism in his commentary on Marx: he tried to find a form of causality that wasn’t, roughly speaking, what’s been referred to as mechanical causality, which is a specific type of causality, let’s call it historical causality, and which would be the causality suitable for the structural level of analysis. I don’t think it would be a distortion of Althusser’s thinking to put it this way. Isn’t that what he wanted to do? Personally, I don’t think so, precisely because the epistemological

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level of the structure is a level where it’s a question of necessity and not causality. And we know that in logic, causality doesn’t exist. The relations we can establish between statements, and valid statements, are relations in which causality can never be assigned. Moreover, it’s very difficult— this is a problem for logicians— to transform a causal argument into a series of valid propositions. I think that in structural analysis, we are exactly at the level where relations between statements have been established, that is, relations that cannot be causal relations. These are relations of necessity. And we haven’t found a new form of causality, we’ve substituted necessity for causality. Which means that, because of this, Althusser’s undertaking is destined for failure. Do you understand what I’m saying? Other audience member: I’d like to offer a very practical point of view, but one that will share in your concerns. It’s the problem of building the structure. I feel that, at a given moment, a given moment in their research, all structuralists end up working as follows: they take a piece of paper, they place a small cross in a corner, a small cross in another corner, which represent elements, whether they are fragments of myths or statements, it doesn’t matter. And once they’ve made this series of points in space— I’d also note that they have already arranged them over time, because they can’t make two crosses at the same time, unless they work with both hands, but in any case I feel there must be a chronological aspect to the placement of the points— then, what do they do? They take their pencil and, using vectors, attempt to join the points based on the relations they think exist between the concepts or the elements that their points represent. When it’s done, and if it’s well done, they end up with a structure. And what happens at that moment? In a way, they’ve transformed a temporal action, which unfolded over time, into an atemporal but spatial structure. So what happens between the moment the structuralist moves from one point to another with his pencil? If I say: it’s causality, I at once understand quite clearly that there is no causality. But, at that moment, doesn’t implication come into play, that is, necessity? I think it’s in this way that I’d explain the methodological work of the structuralist. And, at that very moment, he really has no need for causality. Besides, he can account for causal structures and, which would demonstrate the higher epistemological level of the structuralist level, he can account for causal phenomena by means of those structures, whereas, in all likelihood, the opposite would not be possible, that is, reconstructing the structure by using only ordinary causality, physical causality. I think you perceive the problem of structure in this way. Only, I remain somewhat partial to a certain form of causality because the construction of the structure is not atemporal. You may object that the structure existed previously, that there was no involvement, it existed before and I rediscovered it or structuralism rediscovered it. But, again, the problem [presents itself:] in this action of rediscovering the

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structure, aren’t we rediscovering a— how can I put it— a causal model? At that moment, we can drop to the physiological level and say: but what about physiological causality? We would then fall into the problem that hasn’t been resolved and increasingly shows that the concomitance between the physiological and action has no direct connection and that, on the contrary, there is considerable freedom between necessities, here even the energetic causalities of operation and production. Nonetheless, it’s as if there were a number of degrees of freedom between the necessary and indispensable energy moment, which remains indispensable . . . And maybe it’s here that we will find the seat of causality because, if the individual who is making his vector has an embolism, the action stops, and, consequently, causality here, on the energy level, controls the involvement; but, still, involvement itself retains much greater freedom. This is where I would maintain there exists a kind of causality that would be much less rich but nonetheless necessary. I completely agree with you. To take one simple example, look at eighteenth-century economic theories, make a structural analysis, and you’ll notice that you have a first structure that can yield, through transformation, two systems. You can deduce the systems without knowing who supported them. And once you’ve done that, you notice that one of the systems necessarily favors landed property and the other necessarily favors, let’s say, trade and exchange. It’s obvious that it’s the property owners who are going to recognize themselves in the first system and will support it. And, in fact, this gave rise to the physiocrats.52 Do you see? Other audience member: And that’s where we find causality? It’s the causality of choice by individuals of a structure they have not authored. Same audience member: Yes, but there is causality. At that moment, I positioned myself at the level, not of the structure, but at another level, which was the energy level, the reason why an individual had chosen that structure. Same audience member: But if causality exists for those who choose a given system rather than another, why wouldn’t it exist for those who developed both systems? Because those who developed the systems are produced by the system. It’s the system that makes its production possible at the level of the real, and not the reverse. Other audience member: Since we’ve discussed the idea of structure and causality at length, I’d like to ask about the approach used for literary analysis. I can see the advantages of the approach that you are defending; as well as the progress made by the structuralist approach compared to the traditional type of formal criticism. I also feel that one of the methods for approaching literature,

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by sticking to the discourse associated with the structure itself of the work, is an order of analysis that is legitimate in its own way. But, in fact, there are not just two types of criticism, formal criticism and structuralist criticism, there are other approaches; I’m thinking, for example, of the one used by Lukács in his analysis of critical realism.53 It’s not a question of causality, to the extent that it seeks to account both for the content of the work and for the form that a given work assumes. For example, why does the work of someone like Kafka or Thomas Mann assume a given form? Here, too, the analysis is not in terms of causality but in terms of discourse itself. We have, for example, since we’ve been talking a lot about the Bororo, in underdeveloped countries, a form, theater has a literary form of production that, given the context in which those works appeared, has given us a theater that is made to be read, for example, not to be acted. It’s obvious that the context here assumes its entire importance compared to the form of discourse as well as the writing style and form of development. That’s why I would like your opinion on the types of analysis offered by Lukács, without [addressing]g the interpretation of content or form; and [I would like to know] the extent to which they are similar to structuralism, the extent to which they can add to it, and the extent to which structuralism, which provides something new, yes, but already encounters other analyses that are equally legitimate. Your question presents a problem because I’m wondering if we can really say that Lukács’s analyses are all that new, or irreducible to either of the two analyses we spoke about. Take his study on Goethe,54 for example, or on the novel, whichever you prefer.55 He addressed the very form of the novel and the novel as form, much more so than its content, the story it tells. What is a fictional story, what is a picaresque story, what is a classical novel like The Princess of Clèves, and so on?56 He establishes forms. From another perspective, using a Marxist analysis, he establishes, between the social classes and the productive forces, a series of relations that we can call structural relations. And, in this sense, I think Althusser was absolutely right: the analysis of production relations for Marx is the analysis of a structure. There is no doubt. But there are two possibilities. Either Lukács proceeds like Dumézil, that is, he says: I am in the presence of two structures; those two structures are isomorphic up to a point, or they are different and they are different for this reason, to move from one to the other requires a transformation, and so on. His analysis is structural, absolutely. Or he says: one of the two structures has necessarily created and produced the other. And I think that this is where Lukács’s analysis was heading, that is, establishing a model, a network, a production channel between a structure and some other strucg. Conjecture— the word is difficult to hear.

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ture. Which leads me to believe that there is no third path between the two that have been traced. It’s much more the incessant, rapid, and dialectical passage between these two analyses, but nothing more than that. Maybe I’m mistaken. These young students aren’t speaking, they sit there, silent as stone. Moderator: Would any of the students like to ask a question? No, they are still afraid. Moderator: I’m sure you have other interesting questions to ask. And your replies will be no less interesting and brilliant. But I think we’ve gone on for some time now, and while it’s been very enjoyable, I think we have to end. Thank you.

10 [T H E E X T R A L I NGU IS T IC A N D L I T E R AT U R E]

For at least thirty years, literature has been analyzed as an internal form of the general forms of language, associated, more or less directly, with linguistics. Yet, by an inverse movement that has grown more noticeable over the past ten years, the importance of the extralinguistic is becoming increasingly apparent. This eruption of the extralinguistic is closely tied to the difficulties encountered in analyzing meaning; but it cannot be reduced to those difficulties and, most importantly, is not based on them. The problem has been stated incorrectly. The debate is often presented in terms of signifier and signified. Harris attempted to entirely avoid meaning in defining signifying elements (and those who, in researching nonlinguistic material— posters, and so on— fail to find criteria for defining signifying elements, have placed their hopes in Harris).1 To which one replies that the dimension of the signified cannot be forgotten, and the criterion of permutation (introduced by the most formalist representatives of structuralism) assumes a reference to the signified. On the other hand, the difficulty in analyzing the signified in terms of structures, the difficulty in organizing a semantic field, also leads to the search for a model for the signifier rather than seeking to avoid the parallelism. BnF, Fonds Foucault, NAF 28730, box 54, folder 4. Foucault didn’t provide a title for this text.

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But that may not be the real problem. For a while now, what language analysis has taught us is the intrinsic importance of the extralinguistic: — Either within linguistics itself — through the analysis of motivations in Jakobson — by reference to explicit discourse in Chomsky — by the analysis of sense-signified relationships in Prieto — Or in studies with speaking subjects (especially aphasic subjects)2 — Or in studies conducted on the theory of statements derived from logical positivism: — aside from statements in the form of affirmations (and susceptible of being true or false), — we are familiar with statements that have the form of a query, a wish, or an order (here as well, linguistic criteria enable us to recognize such statements). — But Austin saw that3 1) On the one hand, some statements, although there is nothing distinctive about their form, constitute a completely different speech act: “I open the meeting” (which depends on extralinguistic conditions). 2) Following this, he analyzed the speech act, no longer as an isolated act completely embedded within the possibilities of language (la langue), but as a complex act, which contains (in addition to the effect strictly speaking) at least two levels: locution and illocution. We see that, up to a certain point, [for]a linguistic analysis, and also for the analysis of speech (whether carried out from Prieto’s linguistic viewpoint or one that is outside linguistics, such as Austin’s), the extralinguistic is defined by — the situation: the place where one speaks, the object one speaks about (not as referents but as real objects, present or absent), the position one holds with respect to them; — and the speaking subject: both the position the subject holds when he speaks and the act he performs by speaking (for example: if he makes a performative proposition, it will be ritualized, that is, the characteristics that are to be made pertinent will be defined in advance). In other words, linguistics to a certain extent and the theory of statements almost entirely present the problem of the extralinguistic and its relation to the discussion about linguistics. But with respect to literature, this raises several questions. Everyone a. Conjecture— the word is missing.

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knows that literature is speech, that is, it involves a series of statements. But we also know that there is no extralinguistic element in literature. At first glance, we find the extralinguistic — Either in what the author or the people of his time think; but, obviously, here we lack what is inherent in literary discourse. A thought or a system of thought can never demonstrate that speech is literary, rather than simply speech. — Or in the existence of the book. In reality, it’s already more serious than this. The fact that literature, today and in the majority of countries, is printed on sheets of blank paper that we turn, and that we have to turn in a certain order, is of great importance. Butor4 has suggested [. . .]b In a book that can be read in any direction, like Ricardou’s, what we might say about it will be different than if we had to read it page after page.5 In this way we come back to the problem of the public less through the lens of ideology than that of consumption. Not exactly “Who reads?” but “How does one read?” What does reading consist of? What is the activity of reading? For example, it is clear that the appearance of the gothic horror novel at the end of the eighteenth century in Europe indicates a new relation between the reader and what is read. The act of reading certainly changed its structure given that we began reading in order to frighten ourselves. But there is something much more fundamental behind this. We should say that literature is speech that, in and of itself (the act that causes statements to appear), engenders in itself the extralinguistic that enables it to exist as a statement. Literature is the barbarism of the immanent extralinguistic inherent in speech. After all, there are statements that almost entirely escape the extralinguistic: grammars, philosophies insofar as they are systems; scientific discourse. [In other words],c everything that is system. There are written statements that escape the inherent extralinguistic but not the extralinguistic: these are all forms of informational discourse. Finally, there is a category of statements that forms the extralinguistic that is inherent in it. A discourse can, paradoxically, bring about an extralinguistic dimension that escapes language, while being completely embedded within the words employed or, in any case, the signs employed. b. The passage is illegible. c. Conjecture— this passage is difficult to read.

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Therefore, we shouldn’t claim that literature is a message centered on the signifier rather than on the referent (as in the discourse of information). Literature is not a self-referring activity (otherwise, it would suffice to say, “The words I speak are severe, or solemn, or obscure,” to make literature). It would then suffice for me to speak about what I say to make literature. We can see why critics are so seduced by this hypothesis: it uniquely reduces the distance between the critic and the writer. The writer would be someone who questions his own language, or encodes in his language; the critic would be almost the same, except that he would speak of the language of others. Were he closer (it would suffice for the language of others to become his own), he would become a writer. And, after all, if he manages to understand the language of others well enough to make it his own (by discovering that it is the language of a language)— why, then, he’s a writer. This is unimportant, however. What is important is that literature is, on the contrary, a deeply “extroverted” act, one that is entirely focused on an extralinguistic that does not preexist it, that cannot take shape other than through its own discourse, that comes into being by its own efforts, that can only be formed from words. (Note that it is possible that this extralinguistic is brought about if not outside words, then on their outside surface, on the side where they touch that nonverbal extralinguistic of the white sheet of paper, its space, its rectangular dimensions. All the work that has been done since Mallarmé on words and signs arranged on the paper space, all of that work involves not the exploration of the sign but its shift toward an extralinguistic that is made manifest and only exists because of it.d No doubt, it is in this direction that Derrida pointed out the fundamental and primary character of writing compared to language, thereby enacting a reversal of the linguistic primacy that is certainly radical.6 We need to bear this idea in mind and save it for when we analyze the speaking subject, who speaks in the act of writing.) But the extralinguistic that becomes literature in its own speech must be sought where linguistics and the theory of statements reveal it. That is, in the “situation” understood not in terms of the situation of the writer in the actual world, or the distribution of the book, or the conditions of publishing (although this is important and plays a role, but through various diversions that multiply the number of detours), but understood as the position of the speaking subject within the book, his ambiguous posture ([residing]e d. In the margin: Its prestige and possibly illusion, for this extralinguistic is not inherent even though it is made of signs. There is a misunderstanding here that needs to be clarified. e. Conjecture— the word is missing.

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entirely in speech, for we would not be able to isolate it outside the presence of verbal signs— we don’t see it, don’t perceive it, its silence causes it to disappear— and outside speech because it is the extralinguistic that contains it). [We see then why literature tends toward silence, as they say. This is because it exists only through this invisible and, in a sense, silent character (because this character never enters the language); and because the immense murmur of words, of which it is made, causes this extralinguistic breath to exist (and in a sense amounts entirely to bringing about such existence), this empty position with which language is aligned.]f We see, then, why contemporary criticism has been pointed in the right direction by the solitary speech of Blanchot. Because it is this extralinguistic presence in language that he continued to invoke; it is the absence of this presence to which he lent his voice. And that voice, which never claimed to reach the heart of the work, never maintained the foolish presumption of intimacy, presented itself as the inseparable outside of the work. And, indeed, that outside, better than any other, could open itself up to the outside that the work continued [to]g foster even while arising from it. Blanchot and Artaud may be the only ones to have sensed this outside of speech, this erosion that occurs when speech furrows within itself. But it will be said that this amounts to claiming that the work exists in a mysterious relation between the writer and his language, a relation that leads to the disappearance of the writer in his work, although the writer only exists through it. It’s a well-worn paradox. But it is not at all about that. The extralinguistic to which every discourse relates and by which it is defined is inside the statement. It can only be recognized and exist through it. In which sense it is profoundly different from the extralinguistic that can be embedded in speech (the extralinguistic, for example, that unites the structure of the semantic field, or the forms of logic, or the ideological domain). But it is also quite different from the extralinguistic constituted by the author, what he thinks or wants to say. It is a question of the construction or, rather, the establishment, by speech alone, of the extralinguistic on which every statement rests and through which it is ordinarily articulated.h f. The square brackets appear in the manuscript. g. Missing word. h. In the margin, opposite this and the preceding paragraph: For a long time, criticism has filled this hollow, this outside of the extralinguistic with the “inside” of the author. The author was understood to be the totality of the extralinguistic inherent in the statement.

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What does this inherent extralinguistic consist of? In the analysis of language or statements, linguists and logicians have run into a “wall,” the limit of the extralinguistic: — At the level of content (sense), essentially in the organization of the semantic field. Let’s say that, until now, no semantic field has been able to present its structures from a purely linguistic perspective. — At the level of the form of the statement and the act that brings it forth, the extralinguistic appears: a. In the form of what Prieto calls pertinization (the features that must be stated or that can be ignored depending on the extralinguistic context so that one and only one sense appears).7 We don’t say everything. But if we say some things, we are obligated to say certain others, and so on. b. In the temporal position of the speech act compared to what it states (Guillaume’s analysis).8 c. In the very nature of the speech act. Because there are constative statements, other performatives. But literary speech has this in particular about it: A. (Corresponds to a.)i Having only the sheet of paper as an extralinguistic context, it has, in one sense, the possibility and the right to say everything, possibly even the obligation to say everything, since nothing exists. Of course it doesn’t say everything: indicating obliquely, as a kind of extralinguistic present in its discourse, the context enabling it not to say everything. But it is obligated to say a great deal more than one says ordinarily when really speaking (when really speaking, the mute things, the silent space in which we find ourselves, the arrangement of speaking subjects, constitute part of the very form of the message: an added code that can provide a sense not suspended in the message— the code itself is not sufficient). Literature itself constitutes the extralinguistic, which enables it not to say everything. And it does so in several ways: 1) By what is always implied (at least at the time in question) by every act of writing. In The Princess of Clèves9 or in Hyperion,10 we are not told how many centimeters separate one character from another. And when we read “this” morning, we don’t have enough information to exactly determine the sense of this expression because we don’t know what day of the week it was, and that it does [not]j relate to the reader’s now. 2) It has at its disposal (and within the limits of fundamental nonexistence just mentioned) things, characters, physical traits, decorations i. See above, this page. j. Missing word.

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that, when stated, will play the role of the extralinguistic, based on which we can sort out that which is pertinent and that which isn’t (the context, in every discourse, plays the role of this extralinguistic element; but there, everything is context). Descriptions. For [example],k description in Balzac. It is exhaustive but supplied once, serving as a situational a priori for the remainder of the novel. The same holds true for the description of bodily features or character. In Robbe-Grillet, it is always fragmentary, slightly different, and connected with the speech act. We could prepare a history of these contextual dispositions by which a portion of literary speech plays, with respect to statements, the role of a preexisting extralinguistic element. 3) It establishes (accepts or undoes or re-forms) connections. In contemporary language, some pertinizations are connected; others are de facto exclusive. This results in the ambiguity inherent to literature. We can say that literature is not the “suspension of sense” for the exaltation of the signifier as such. But to the extent that the extralinguistic is established only by means of the signifier and the signified, literary language is never closed, nor full. It is a kind of open class. Whereas normally a statement is susceptible to different countable senses (from 0 to 1 finite quantity) that form a class whose elements can be counted and defined, a literary statement opens a sense class that is absolutely infinite. This doesn’t mean that the literary statement has no sense, just that an uncountable sense class can fill it. (This does not authorize literary criticism, but it makes reading itself a very particular kind of linguistic activity.) In every literary work, there is excess. A certain manner of saying too much. No matter how little we say, we say too much. (This is how fiction may contrast with the fable.)l B. (Corresponds to b.)m The position of the speaking subject, whose location and movements form, in contrast to what is said (lekton), the lexis of the work.11 We should note from the outset that this lexis (as with fiction) does not consist of elements of the work or speech. In short, they do not have any k. Missing word. l. In the margin: It is through the fiction/fable relationship that theater is unlike any other form of literature. m. See above, p. 134.

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intrinsic signifying substance, although speech can only be analyzed on the basis of this signifying substance. It can, however, be analyzed within the story in the form of characters, of an individual who says “I” and can be as discreet as possible. Consequently, they are elements of the lekton or dispositions characteristic of the story, which allow us to define the forms of fiction or the typical configurations of the lexis. But lexis, as we will see, is often found in a characteristic situation of doubling, in the sense that the subject is represented. In truth, although it is always fundamentally absent, there is always a mode of presence (at least indirectly) in the story itself (almost always, that is). Fable

Lekton

Fiction

Lexis

This is the difference between [nonliterary language]n and theater, on the one hand, and narrative, on the other (epic or novel). This gives: Fiction + + −

Lexis + − +

Poetry Narrative Theater

−

−

Nonliterary language

In nonliterary language, the context, which allows us not to say everything, is assured — either by real things — or by supposedly existing informative content (Whereas, in literature there is nothing more than the blank page and the absolute beginnings of literature.) Therefore, no fiction. Nor is there any lexis because the subject is always present, constantly: — either in the form of personal affirmations reported to the speaking subject — or in the form of a neutrality that refers unwaveringly to a named or anonymous author who states what he knows or thinks This constant relationship (which is not even altered when another’s opinions are related in one’s own discourse) characterizes scientific or philn. Conjecture— the abbreviation is illegible.

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osophic language. [In the case of ] a philosophical text, where the lexis is not a homogeneous function and, therefore, neutral, but varies (and, consequently, begins to exist), we have a literary text. The Birth of Tragedy12 is philosophy; Thus Spoke Zarathustra13 is a literary work (even if, from another point of view, it has a philosophical sense, just as Hölderlin’s Empedocles,14 for example).15 The aphorism as limit. In one sense, in every aphorism, the relationship is constant. But from one aphorism to another, the structure of the lexis is modified. This means that the aphorism is that which is most literary in philosophical discourse, most philosophical in literary discourse. Referring to the table: — Theater: in one sense, fiction doesn’t exist because the reality of the context, of the actor, the presence of a speaking subject means that a noninherent extralinguistic element can be used. No matter how minimal the set, the mere existence of space, of an inside and an outside, of a direction, reduces the sense of fiction. However, by the mere fact that each character exists only because of what he says (in a way, every sentence is performative in Austin’s sense), because the actor, who appears to be the speaking subject, is not that subject and functions only in the extralinguistic context to avoid the fiction, we can say that the entire speaking subject is in the discourse: the discourse exists only through him and brings him into being. Because of this relationship (and not the [double]o reality of the actor), every word is sincere, false, made to persuade, external, intimate. The lexis then is maximum and fiction minimum (but not equal to zero, for, from the moment that, in language, there is lexis, that is, the immanence of the speaking subject in the statement, a certain number [of ]p things— the extralinguistic aspect of this subject as well— do not appear: [they] must [be]q uttered in language: we speak the name of the character, his civil status, age, past). Of course, we can try to suppress all this (all fiction, as in Ionesco: speaks without fiction). Or, conversely, we decrease the lexis, that is, we make a theater in theater. Then, theater no. 1 appears to be “true” and in theater no. 2 the actors appear as actual characters of theater no. 1. — In the narrative, in its naïve form, fiction is maximal, lexis minimal. The relation of the narrator to the narrative can be considered constant (he says what he has seen and heard). However, since he cannot say everything, it is from within the discourse that the extralinguistic o. Conjecture— the word is difficult to read. p. Missing word. q. Missing word.

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element must be inserted. The entire narrative will consist, unlike direct speech, of bringing about this extralinguistic element. But it can only do so by intervening as speaking subject in what it narrates. Sometimes narrating what it has experienced, sometimes speaking on behalf of others, taking the place of a foreign and neutral spectator. Every narrative has a certain lexis. The closer we are to oral literature, the more this lexis appears in the proliferation of characters who narrate within the narrative (The Arabian Nights).16 The more we deepen our engagement in the act of writing, the more the narrative tends to order itself around its lexis. Lexis and fiction merge. The entire fiction consists in shifting toward lexis. — In poetry lexis and fiction are at their maximum. Saturation (in contrast to everyday language). As in the [narrative itself ],r only the act of speaking exists (the voice in silence, signs arranged on the blank sheet); as in the theater, the speaking subject is, at every moment, determined by speech alone, without fiction securing his position as a visible character. The “literary” reaches its point of saturation in poetry because that is where language is the most charged with the functions and powers of decision typical of the extralinguistic. Here, as well, it is strange to find that poetry has always been experienced as close to silence; whereas it is much more closely linked solely to the existence of discourse than theater or the novel (it cannot be translated; it cannot be “staged,” it doesn’t “speak” of any objective referent). It is normal that we compare it to silence (while the novel and theater are, in fact, much more silent). That is because all of those extralinguistic powers [exist]s in its discourse alone. That is why it is so important for poetry to be elliptical. Its essence is to be elliptical and only then typified by rhythm or rhyme (to be tied to a constrained form). Being charged with extralinguistic powers, it can only implement them in a fiction or in displacements of the lexis. But it lets them shine through in words unspoken, in images and sensations (which are not even associated with an “I”). It allows the extralinguistic, which is controlled by its discourse alone, to appear in what is not said: in its interstices and ruptures. Its outside edges. Consequently, brevity, the fragment typical of poetry. In this sense, it is like the aphorism, which is, in a sense, the other side, the interior r. Conjecture— the passage is difficult to read. s. Conjecture— the word is missing.

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edge of literature. But nothing is worse than an aphorism that attempts to inflate itself to the level of poetry. And nothing is more beautiful than a fragment of language that sparkles. A thought lies within (whereas in a poetic aphorism, an idea is disguised). I want to return to the analysis of lexis. The position of the speaking subject. This position can be defined a) Either simply, and in a sense negatively, as if in relief, by the disposition of the lekton. — The importance of verb tense. Whether the narrative takes place in the simple past or the present already identifies the position of the speaker. — The fact that it is narrated event by event (from the perspective of duration) or, on the contrary, from a higher level. b) Or by the story and in two ways: — It happens that the speaker is in fact identified (without this being explicitly stated) with a character or several, or none. 1) In the latter case, speech is anonymous, murmuring, encompassing the totality of what occurs (character, events) and investing them like an undertone from an unknown source. 2) In some cases, there is an implicit identification with a character. Although this is always in the third person, it is a privileged point of view. This implies that speech arises (the totality of statements) from what he knows, what he sees, what he experiences. But this should never be identified with an “I” or with a quasi-“I.” The monopoly of discourse has often been considered as a sign of literary coherence ([Sartre]t). 3) But the surreptitious or explicit passage from one site of discourse to another is very often found — either in the transition from anonymous speech to a privileged third person — or in the transition from one third person to another, directly or indirectly, through the transition to a narrator: “Let us return to . . .” (See The Arabian Nights) This multiplicity is not necessarily incoherence. For a long time it has been the very sign of naïve literature. But the actual proliferation of languages, of discourse types and levels, restores its actuality and its value for this dispersion of point of view. In all these cases, it is primarily the structure of fiction that indicates the position of the speaking subject. t. Conjecture— the word is difficult to read.

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— But it can arise directly and in the story itself in the form of someone who says “I” — either as a transitory character (The Arabian Nights) — or as being fictively the one who writes the narrative— the quasi-author. Here we enter a highly complex region. The speaking subject is present and visible in the story. He is an element of his story. This is a paradox that manifests itself — either simply in the “I” who speaks of his reminiscences, an adventure, what he has seen, — or in the form of a fictional report to the writer (to the actual person, whose name [has been printed on the cover of the book]): 1. I’m not the one who wrote this, but I found the manuscript (Cervantes);17 it is the denial that from time to time will intersect the narrative: the manuscript that I read is interrupted here, becomes illegible. 2. Or, on the contrary, there is an insistent intervention: one must believe that this is unlikely. 3. Or there is a dialogue between the character and the author (Sterne,18 Diderot,19 the eighteenth-century novel). 4. Or the person who says “I” narrates the birth of the novel and, consequently, circumvents the name written on the cover. The insertion of lexis into the story, the definition of the speaking subject in what is narrated by the one speaking, is certainly what is most specific and the most difficult to identify in all literature. 1) In actual language, this position of the speaking subject is never problematic. The truth of what he says or his sincerity can indeed be challenged. He is the one who is speaking, a point, no more. However, it is probably through this mechanism that the problem of madness intersects that of literature. Madness is not an “unreasonable” or “insane” or “untrue” language: it is a discourse in which the speaking subject occupies a particular position. He is entirely present because his madness, his existence as mad, is defined and fulfilled entirely by what he says; but it is absent because, by that same process, he is not the speaking subject who articulates a statement. For, in that place, reigns a void in which we recognize the “insane,” that “insanity” also being, through some poorly understand mechanism, the characteristic of the discourse, the singular feature of the one who speaks, the extralinguistic within which he dwells. Historically, the connection between madness and literature comes from a mutation in the cultural mode of being of our language (that of the Western world): when literature became a language that encompassed

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the speaking subject, and when the madman ceased to be present as a social personage to become the indeterminable subject of a language from which he was absent, although it was fully manifested in him. The presence of the mad “as speaking subject” in Baroque theater, in the early seventeenth-century novel, signals this ongoing mutation. Rousseau’s Dialogues displayed the change once the process was completed.20 All of the literature of madness (Roussel, Artaud) is characterized by this. See also Hölderlin and Nietzsche. 2) In literature, the position of the speaking subject is the kernel of uncertainty around which the entire discourse vibrates. To the extent that the position of the speaking subject is more immediately extralinguistic, closer to language, but less reducible to it, the presence of the speaking subject within discourse is critical. It reveals the irreducibility of literature to the structures of language. And it does so to an even greater extent when the speaking subject is integrated into the discursiveness of the text. The relationship is complex. — The most typical gradient of modern literature is a reciprocal enfolding of discourse and the speaking subject (or, rather, a dislocation). — In this way, the speaking subject, being caught in the discourse, should be part of a linguistics; but since the subject introduces the extralinguistic into the discourse, he makes literary discourse irreducible to linguistics. And strangely, the idea (which is possible only now because of this insertion of the speaking subject into the discourse) that all literature is part of linguistics is applicable only to a literature in which the speaking subject is remote from those statements (or whose presence can be determined: either completely visible or completely invisible): in classic literature or in Flaubert, for example. In order for a linguistic analysis to secure a purchase, the relation of the speaking subject to a discourse must be persistent enough to be neutralized, to be considered indifferent, and not to introduce some singular effect. C. (Corresponds to c.)u The act of speech itself. Perhaps we could say that the insertion of the speaking subject (always more visible and problematic) in the literary statement has revealed a new dimension of speech that linguistics can only ignore and that the logic of affirmative statements has also left in the shadows. As long as the subject was at a nonproblematic distance from what he u. See above, p. 134.

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said, all such statements could pass for facts or quasi-facts. The subject reported what he had seen, heard, experienced. So that, in literature as in affirmative statements, it was the truth that was in question or that mimesis of truth, that quasi-truth that was verisimilitude. To make true. But already this is not very clear. For the plausible is that which resembles truth, which is to say: — it has a natural resemblance to the truth, a kinship; — it was made to be true: there is an interior truth of discourse. Discourse creates a kind of truth. But from the moment the strictly literary “volume” of language is formed and expands following this presence of the speaking subject in discourse, the act that consists in making a statement cannot be summarized or identified with the act that consists in affirming (not even affirming what one thinks, describing what one feels). [Proliferation of acts or performative?]v

v. This sentence is between square brackets in the manuscript.

11 LI T E R A RY A NA LYSIS A N D S T RUC T U R A L ISM

I I’d like to quickly review the preliminaries that will serve as evidence. — For more than fifty years, literary analysis (I’m speaking here of only the most serious) has been closely linked with structural research whose importance and model have been suggested by the history of religions, psychoanalysis, folklore research, and ethnographic studies.1 — More recently, literary analysis has established very close and complex relations with linguistics; and the discovery of those relations has been of critical importance. This deep connection between literary analysis and linguistics can easily be explained: — it is in the field of linguistics that structural studies has had its most decisive successes; — ever since the Russian formalists of the years 1910– 1920, we have continued to deepen and explore this simple truism, the absolutely obvious evidence that literature is made with language. There is little point in going over the above: — either to explain them once again — or to renew a polemic that, in reality, makes no sense — or to condemn the connection, the relationship, the complicity between the linguistic formalism of literary analysis and the formal character of contemporary works.

BnF, Fonds Foucault, NAF 28730, box 54, folder 4. 143

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This relationship indicates no responsibility; it must be accepted as a historical fact. But I would like to insist upon the importance assumed, in the very field of linguistic facts, by what is known as the extralinguistic. It turns out that a number of essential facts concerning language can only be understood by the decisive and, in truth, structuring control played within language by the extralinguistic. I would like to talk about the importance of this extralinguistic element in the field of literary facts. First, I’d like to make one remark: I do not intend (either with respect to linguistics or to literature) to enter a discussion that has been repeated a thousand times and question whether sense is indispensable to the analysis of the signifier or if we must always have recourse to it. a. Today, linguists continue this debate around Chomsky and his work. b. As for literary analysis, it revolves continuously and with little progress around the same question: — Don’t significations (historical or individual) determine forms? — Or does the formal, in itself, quite adequately define literature and what distinguishes it from all other speech? Therefore, by raising the problem of the extralinguistic in literature, it’s not the question of content and form, of signifier and signified, that I want to present; rather, I want to introduce questions about literature, which those who are interested in language are already familiar with.

II. The extralinguistic in linguistics First, what are these questions? Where in the study of language did they arise? And to what do they direct our attention? — First, in linguistics strictly speaking: The importance granted to context and situation by Prieto.2 The importance and difficulty of those signs that, through a determined grammatical structure, refer to the [speaking] subject alone, when he speaks and where he happens to speak. “Shifters.”3 —Work done in the field of aphasia (and in France by David Cohen) shows that, — contrary to what Jakobson believed, strictly linguistic categories (syntagm, paradigm) are not sufficient for accounting for language disturbances;

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—but these are most likely associated with a position of the speaking subject with respect to his speech. David Cohen and Michel Gauthier, writing about aphasia in 1965, noted: “Of course, the form of the message remains its essential symptom; but the distributional analysis is significant only if we reintroduce the text into the moment of speech.”4 — Finally, from another point of view, logical positivism, especially that aspect of it which has recently been developed in England under the influence of or, rather, in connection with a sociology of language (Firth following Malinowski), has looked into nonaffirmative utterances; those that cannot constitute a corpus of true or false propositions; those that cannot be organized into scientific discourse.5 This led to the development of what is known as speech act analysis, whose fundamental aspects have been described by Austin.6 These research efforts, some of which are convergent, others isolated, lead to the foregrounding of something that cannot be reduced to Saussure’s division between langue and parole. This something is discourse, the text, the statement or utterance. The structures of the statement and discourse, the structures of the text are, of course, made possible by language, but [they] are not simply language structures actualized by circumstance or the whims of subjects. A discourse, a statement, a text, these are figures of language made possible and necessary by the existence and position of a speaking subject: — position refers to the subject’s location in time and space, the surrounding objects, the speakers with whom the subject speaks, — but which also refers to the subject’s posture with respect to what he says, the speech act he carries out by saying what he says, his presence or absence in the discourse he engages in. This amounts to a theory of the statement that is being researched somewhat blindly; a theory of discourse quite different from the one prevalent during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but one that is comparable in certain respects. The study of language doesn’t return to the “speech” facet, which Saussure’s linguistics had neglected once philology had exhausted its possibilities; it discovers the statement as a third form, both dependent on and independent of speech and language. Perhaps all language studies, dispersed until now (among linguistics, logic, language pathologies, analysis of works), will find their own space, their common ground, in a theory of statements.

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III Can we speak of the extralinguistic in literature? A. Apparently not. At first glance, we can say that literature is in a paradoxical position: — It consists of statements, like any other discourse. —Yet, it contains none of those extralinguistic elements we have identified: α. If we wish to speak of “situation,” it is only by misusing language; in any event, it should not be understood in the sense that a statement has a situation. When we say: “Someone is at the door,” the sense of “the” is defined by the context in which the subject speaks.a When Joyce says: “Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead,” there is no context:7 — it is not James Joyce, the man, — nor Ireland, not even Dublin, which are the context. The only context that gives the sense of the definite article consists of the remainder of the text (everything that follows), that is, language. Therefore, the extralinguistic context is nonexistent. β. Additionally, the speaking subject in literature is not comparable to the subject who actually speaks. For — The author-text relation cannot be superimposed on the relation that I myself can have with the speech I am actually engaging in. — And the relation that a character in a novel who says “I” (as, for example, in epistolary novels) maintains with his discourse, that relation is entirely intralinguistic because the characters are entirely defined by the novel and only exist because of it. There is, as a result, a temptation to define literature as a speech act that exists only in the element of language. Literature would be language manifesting itself. Ultimately, it would speak only of language. This implies — a very rich series of research efforts into the linguistic structures of literature a. In the margin: “situation” is neither — the social position of the writer, — nor the door that actually exists.

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— and the somewhat hastily advanced topic— and very poorly controlled in terms of its requisites and conceptual implications— that literature, because language is its object, is a metalanguage. (This same topic is found in the idea that literature is a message about its own code.) B. Yet, I believe this argument is flawed; if not by a fault of logic, then by a lack of attention. We need to distinguish three types of statements: a. those everyday statements that are made by actual speaking subjects b. those whose only extralinguistic element is the blank page; we only need to know what the words say: — a book of mathematics — a book of pure philosophy — a novel We can say [that]b the extralinguistic is eliminated by the metalanguage. — The speaking subject is effectively eliminated because it’s the truth or things that speak. — The entire context exists within the discourse through the presence of axioms, definitions, and so on. — The use of symbols is a given. c. In literature the extralinguistic is not eliminated or fixed once and for all. It is continuously re-created through discourse: — It is only by reading In Search of Lost Time that I can determine who is speaking, the distance separating the speaker from his speech, the language act he carries out when he speaks.8 — Concerning the context, on which statements are based, it is indicated by other statements, but never completely. — No metalanguage. When Proust says “this book,” “I am going to write,” there is no metalanguage to indicate the meaning of the pronouns “this” or “I,” or the future in “I am going to.”c Literature, then, could be defined as a discourse that constitutes, within b. Missing word. c. The start of section B was modified by Foucault. The original formulation is as follows: B. Yet, I believe this argument is flawed; if not by a fault of logic, then by a lack of attention. — The extralinguistic is not necessarily something that actually exists, materially, outside language. It is something that is not part of the code and which makes possible, in its structure, a statement. — Most statements are connected to a real context, to an actually speaking sub-

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itself, the extralinguistic dimension that escapes language and enables statements to exist. There are three types of discourse: — Everyday discourse, the one we employ, in which the extralinguistic is outside language and statements. — Scientific discourse (formalized or tending to be formalized), in which the extralinguistic is neutralized. After all, science is a language. Not in the sense that it is a well-made discourse but in the sense that it implies the statement of the rules by which its own symbols must be used. — Literary discourse, in which the extralinguistic is inherent in the statement. Or, to put it somewhat differently, from another perspective literature is a set of statements turned toward the construction of this extralinguistic that makes them possible. C. This has considerable importance for the conception of literature in general. a. We are accustomed to define literature as a message that is centered — not on the referent (as with informational discourse) — but on the signifier (this would be a self-referential discourse). In fact, any discourse referring to itself would at least have the general form of literature (it would be enough for me to say: “What I am stating is important or ridiculous” for me to already be doing something like literature). [That literature is language about language is an idea found in critiject; but some of them can form a body of speech without any real context other than the blank page; we simply need to know what the words intend to say: — a book of mathematics — a book of pure philosophy — a novel Yet, there is a difference: — In scientific statements, we can say that everything is a statement: — The speaking subject is effectively eliminated because it is truth or things that speak. — The entire context exists within the statement through the presence of axioms, definitions, and so on. — Finally, the use of symbols is a given. — In literature, the extralinguistic is not eliminated or fixed once and for all. It is continuously re-created through discourse: — It is only by reading In Search of Lost Time that I can determine who is speaking, the distance separating him from his speech, the language act he carries out when he speaks. — Concerning the context, on what are the statements based; this is indicated by other statements; but it never functions in the same way as this window when I say: “We have to close it.” — No metalanguage.

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cism: a way for those, who speak only of language, to get as close as possible, not only through their comprehension but through the very act of writing, to what literature is.]d b. Rather, literature should be interpreted as a language act entirely directed within itself. An “extroverted” act that gives rise, through its efforts, or within its own limitations, to an extralinguistic that doesn’t preexist it. For this reason, maybe we should seek the essence of literature in Artaud’s experience rather than Valéry’s; in Blanchot’s critique rather than Jakobson’s analyses. We shouldn’t treat literature as a language folded over on itself but as a language worked by an “outside,” haunted by something external to it and, yet, that only comes from within itself. Literature would be a language that would always be in the process of migrating from its own exterior limit. This hollow, this exterior that causes literature to exist, there is no need for this to be filled by criticism: — either as performed previously from inside the author (his intentions, his life, or his feelings) — or, as has been done for several years now, from inside language (the positive structures of linguistics)

IV It is this “outside,” this extralinguistic inherent in the work, that criticism must not allow outside its scope. Literary analysis need not mimic the work, nor continue it, nor share in its intimacy, nor interpret it (as a sacred text); rather, it must settle within that exterior, which is its proper place. We can define the role of literary analysis by saying that it must transform the extralinguistic inherent in the discourse of the work into statements. Summarily, and as a potential avenue of exploration, we can say that this analysis should touch upon: A. First, on the relation between what is said and what is not said. Here, too, we must proceed with caution: it is not the secret of the work that would be forced and revealed, but things that are much more specific. 1) We know (and Prieto’s analyses have demonstrated this) — that although nothing exists that is not present in a language, — statements never say everything. d. The passage is between square brackets in the manuscript.

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With respect to a unique direction (Pierre’s order to Paul to give Paul’s book to Pierre), several entirely different statements are possible: pass it to me, give the book, your book. These different statements depend on the situation in which the subjects find themselves and what they are speaking about. 2) In literature, these nonlinguistic contexts do not exist; therefore, we should be able to say everything. But we don’t say everything: the work itself, even if interrupted or fragmented, is finite. There are going to be a number of things designated, or indicated, or alluded to in discourse, which will play the role of this extralinguistic context. When Flaubert, at the beginning of Sentimental Education, speaks of a boat smoking before “the Quai Saint-Bernard,” the simple use of the definite article supports the statement in terms of the shared presence of a city known as Paris, which,9 — on the one hand, surrounds the quay, the river, the people, and so on — and, on the other hand, is known by the one who is speaking in the book and by its readers. This city will be partly described: by the names of streets, by the features of some of its neighborhoods, by the arrangement and furnishing of some of its apartments. Always more than a proper noun, never an exhaustive description. On the other hand, when Robbe-Grillet writes, at the beginning of Labyrinth: “I am alone here now, under cover,” the apartment where he happens to be, the street, the city are designated; they will be partly described during the course of the book.10 But the way in which the city is both present in what is said and outside what is said, the emergence between the statements and what, outside them, gives them a meaning, the entire system of here, now, right, left, the entire system of definite articles, proper nouns, the entire system of these designations that pin the statement to what is never stated, this entire system, this articulation of presence and absence, is not the same in both authors. And this constitutes what we could call fiction. If it is convenient to call “universe of discourse” everything that could be said for everything to be a statement, fiction is the triage, the contour, the sculpture, the fashioning that allows a portion of what there was to say to emerge in the manifest language. Between the universe of discourse, which would be the indefinite mass of what could be said, and the story, which consists of the elements of

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the narrative (of limited number and common to many narratives), there would then be fiction: that is, the act or, rather, the set of acts that, within the discourse, define, implicitly, the extralinguistic that organizes and structures the statements. [In myth, the story and universe of discourse have a combinatory relation; consequently, fiction is minimal.]e 3) It is important to state that this fiction is unrelated to fantasy or instantaneous choice. It has its own logic and limiting laws. — For example, when Balzac says here or now, he will never exhaust everything that can be said about this here; but we will know the name of the city, the date on the calendar, the succession of days within the story, the house, the color of the paper. — When Robbe-Grillet says here, now, there is little chance that we will know the name of the city or the date, but the color of the wall, the location of stains on the wall, the diagonal shadow it projects, the gesture made at that particular moment, we will know. This logic of fiction is associated with two other levels we will study (the position of the speaking subject and the act of writing). But it has its own coherence — which we can follow, in a coarse-grained way, at a given time and in a given literature. For example, we can closely study (and not simply to state that we are looking at things abstractly) the disappearance of the proper name and its replacement by the personal pronoun. — which we can follow to varying degrees of detail in a given author or work. — For example, what aspects of Paris are made pertinent in Madame Bovary11 — and Carthage in Salammbô.12 Literature and each literary form could then be characterized by the extralinguistic it suggests and upon which its statements are articulated. Far from being a suspension of sense and the collapse of the signifier upon itself, literature appears to be exposed to a void that is essential because it supports it, but which also limits and harries it because it enables it not to say everything. To this extent it is an open form, ambiguous, susceptible to several interpretations. It is not a question of a lack or abundance of meanings, the polysemanticism of the work is only the surface effect of this presence of the extralinguistic in and from discourse.

e. This passage is between square brackets in the manuscript.

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B. The relation between the speaking subject and what he says. Dostoevsky begins The Brothers Karamazov as follows: “Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov was the third son of a landowner from our district.”13 In appearance, nothing could be simpler. — Someone called Dostoevsky was familiar, in one way or another, with a story that took place in the region where he lived. — And he transcribed this story onto a sheet of blank paper, which, in turn, in one way or another, came into the hands of a printer. In reality, the situation was much more complicated. Reading the Preface, apparently intended to highlight the “biographical” nature of the book, in reality, only complicates the situation. In the case of contemporary language, the speaking subject (even though he relates a story in which he himself is not present, even if he doesn’t say “I”) is situated in space and time, and his discourse (the tense of the verbs he uses, the personal pronouns, all the place-names and time periods, proper nouns) is distributed with respect to that point and that moment from which he is speaking. The discourse spreads outward from this zero point. But in literature? Let’s leave aside the difficult problem of the writer who says “I,” pretending (through complex mechanisms) to be identical with the everyday individual when he speaks. 1) When Flaubert, at the start of Sentimental Education, writes: “On the 15th of September 1840, at six o’clock in the morning, the Ville-deMontereau was lying alongside the Quai Saint-Bernard,” we have the impression that there is no speaking subject; or, rather, the speaking subject is Flaubert-the-storyteller, Flaubert-outside-the-book, Flaubert with his pen, and while carefully keeping his distance, he tells a story in which he doesn’t appear (not even through the use of the discreet “our district,” which pinned Dostoevsky to the interior of his own novel).14 Among these characters, the voice speaks, sometimes with detail (familiar with their thoughts, as if he had been taken into their confidence), sometimes hastily, from a distance, as if he was an unknown observer, posted at a street corner, or an unenlightened informer: “He traveled, he returned, he frequented the salons.”15 Everyone does this when telling a story: the grain of attention isn’t always the same; sometimes fine, sometimes rough. The difference is that in literature (even if one happens to narrate a true event) there exists only what it says, and, conversely, the speaking subject exists only as long as he speaks. The ensuing relationship is highly complex:

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— When the speaking subject distances himself from what he says, when his speech shrinks, he himself tends to vanish. — When the speaking subject approaches, appears to pay attention to his characters, and contemplates the details of their behavior, then it is the speaking subject himself who takes on shape and volume, and is amplified. Concerning this amplification and this shrinkage, this correlative pulsation of discourse and the speaking subject, Flaubert’s work very clearly bears witness. Flaubert never says “I” in his novels, but the relationship between the speaking subject and his discourse is highly mobile. — At the beginning of Sentimental Education, the date, the time, the crowd: the speaking subject remains at a distance, depending on what is related— an incident, some bit of gossip, or an assassination. — Less than twenty lines after, the speaking subject immediately appears alongside Frédéric Moreau (but without knowing his name), he sees him in profile. He perceives his long hair and recognizes the direction of his gaze. There is another slight shift: the speaking subject takes up a position extremely close by, parallel; his gaze intercepts that of Frédéric Moreau: “He . . . took a last look at the Île SaintLouis.”16 — And while he adds to this a very rapid shift: “He gazed through the mist at spires and buildings whose names he did not know,” this shift is ambiguous:17 — Either there is partial identification with the subject: for “whose names he did not know” is nearly equivalent to “I wonder what their names are?” — Or, on the contrary, there is a movement of withdrawal, a review of the documents. We know what he knows and what he doesn’t know. We can determine this by the accuracy of the documentation. This equivocal movement will be resumed in both directions on the following page: — biographical information; — identification with the object: “Frédéric thought about his room at home, an idea for a play, subjects for paintings, future loves.”18 All of Sentimental Education is made of this inconstant dance of the speaking voice around, alongside, behind, inside, and outside Frédéric Moreau, a voice that cannot say “I” because of this uncertain relation, this always moving distance from the object of its speech.

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But this dance and its uncertainty, nonetheless, obey laws and logic. And it is this logic that literary analysis must discover. 2) In Sentimental Education, the speaking voice is, in one sense, subordinated by Frédéric. In Madame Bovary, this is done first by Charles and then by Emma, before being freed and allowed to wander among the survivors. Many other solutions are possible, which correspond to types that can be easily catalogued. At another extremity of this catalogue, we find the voice that is pinned to the interior of this discourse by the personal pronoun I. In one sense, the use of the pronoun I in literature determines (should determine), once and for all, the distance of the speaking subject from what he says. Of course, it can be said with greater or less detail, but he won’t budge from his relationship to his own discourse. In fact, this determination presents problems of its own and opens up other possibilities. 1. At times, it serves as a relay: a type of fictional first person appears and says: I learned this story and want to tell you about it (Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus).19 This process can be renewed, like Japanese nesting dolls, within the story: a character (in the third person) is introduced and announces, in the first person, that he is going to tell a story (The Arabian Nights).20 2. Sometimes, on the contrary, this first person introduced at the beginning of the story, becomes the very substance of the story. Suddenly, it appears that the relationship between the speaking subject and the discourse is fixed: the speaking subject tells us what he is thinking, feeling, what he experiences or knows. But, at once, there arise uncertainties or an entire network of complex relationships that constitute the literary work: — Uncertainty of the relationship to the author, to the one whose name appears on the cover. — Uncertainty with respect to the act of writing (to the moment of its completion, to the nature of the act itself ). For, from the moment someone who speaks introduces the act of his writing into what is being said by him, he speaks at some remove from what is being said, and there exists a discourse antecedent to this writing. Here, we have an entire field of analyses that should be developed for their own sake. — They would allow us to define literature as speech in which the position of the speaking subject is simultaneously — defined, not from without, by the visible, temporal, or local existence of an individual, but from within, by the series of speech acts,

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— and, yet, always mobile with respect to this effective discourse, moving in it, with it, against it. — If we call the set of all possible positions a speaking subject (anonymous, visible, fictive, real, present, absent) can occupy with respect to his speech the domain or field of speech, and that which is said or is about to be said the lekton, then lexis will be the set of positions and displacements of the speaking voice as they appear through what is said (through the lekton). Just as, between the universe of discourse and the folktale, we found a level that belonged neither to linguistics nor to the study of folklore or myth, but to literature alone (what we called fiction), similarly, between the field of speech and the lekton (the first of which falls within the camp of philosophy, and the second stylistics), there is a purely literary level, which is that of lexis. Literature is a discourse whose story is constituted by a fiction: it is a speech act whose lekton is determined by a lexis. Lexis and fiction are the privileged and singular domains of literary analysis. They are part neither of a philosophical model nor of a linguistic model. And this is important: 1) On the one hand, for the definition of the logos — as discourse that is not evinced by a real subject but by an anonymous voice; — but this voice, which is manifested only from within the lekton, has an absolutely fixed relationship to what it says. What characterizes the logos (philosophy, science, discursive speech, even when polemic, lyric, or irrational) is not its rationality, not even its relation to truth (or the presumption of a relation to truth), it is the definitive and conclusively fixed nature of its lexis. Speech, lexis, and lekton are precisely adapted to the logos, just as discourse, fiction, and fable are precisely adapted to myth. That is why literature is not myth, as Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss tend to believe; that is why literature is not logos, as Sartre and Lukács tend to believe. 2) On the other hand, for the definition of literature as imitation. C. This would all lead to an analysis of literature as a speech act that is both singular and institutionalized. — Strangely, whenever we have tried to conceptualize the relationship of literature to the body of cultural forms in which it is embedded, it has been stripped of its form as literature:

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— seeking, from the content side, that which allows it to communicate with philosophy, ideology, and so on — seeking, from the authorial side, that which allows it to communicate with social forms and institutions — Maybe we should (although this is simply a possible direction) consider it as a speech act that is absolutely irreducible to other speech acts. And it is the existence of this speech act in a society like our own and the forms of this act that must be thought of as institutions. a) Firth studied the speech act in different societies (similarly, Mrs. Griaule’s book on speech among the Dogon).21 As well as analyses (Austin’s formal and nonsociological) on performative statements. b) Studies should be conducted on the mode of being of literary speech (compared to religious, mythic, magical, philosophical speech) in a society like our own (rather than looking for the traces of magic and religion). The analysis of this speech act can and must be conducted on several levels. — In terms of its supports, literature is, in a sense, ritualized — in the act of recitation, and for a long time, — or in theatrical representation, — or in the book. But the book itself is not a neutral and blank support. We are accustomed to considering the book only in terms of consumption, print runs, and so on. But the book is a complex assembly affected by — its mode of existence in a society: for example, it changed at the end of the eighteenth century,f the result of large print runs of horror literature;22 — its relationship to writing: It was absent from writing until the serialized novel. The book is not a newspaper but a book; Mallarmé was the first to recognize this. This leads to the presence of the book, as such, in the act of writing: — Either as a project: In Search of Lost Time23 — Or as [immediate]g current events: Sollers f. In the margin: libraries bindings g. Conjecture— the word is difficult to read.

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— Or as the compendium of a language that was not made for books: Butor’s San Marco24 — But it would also require analysis of the very nature of the speech act (in this case, writing). — This is not an act of affirmation (even when it appears to be so in naturalist or romantic literature). — Nor is it an act of desire or exhortation (even when it assumes this form in lyrical or poetic literature). — It may be similar to those language acts that Austin isolated under the name of performatives. a) They are not true or false. b) They cause something to exist. c) They obey a ritual. d) They are susceptible to failure. e) They have the same grammatical structure. Perhaps it is along these lines that we should seek the analysis of literary speech. They may not be absolutely similar, but there must be a relationship between them: — because literature is neither true nor false (and any analysis of whatever truth it contains is destined to fail); — yet, it causes something to exist (and not simply its own discourse; but we know that the cultural world in which we live has been changed by Dostoevsky, Proust, and Joyce); — because [literary speech acts] obey a ritual (the book or theater: a word, as beautiful as it may be, is not literature if it does not undergo this ritual)— the sociology of literature; — because they are susceptible to failure in the sense of nonexistence. We believe we can sometimes judge [literature] in terms of beauty, but we can judge it only in terms of existence; — because no grammatical or linguistic analysis will succeed in telling us what it is. Like all performative acts, it uses ordinary language. What is characteristic of literature is not what it says or the words it employs, but the strange speech act it brings about.

12 BOU VA R D A N D PÉC UC H ET The Two Temptations

Introduction Try to analyze, one by one, these two great tales of knowledge: —The hermit—the stubborn believer—tempted by demonic knowledge. — The attempt by two ignorant men to acquire all human knowledge. These two tales of knowledge have several shared characteristics. a. The fact that, throughout his life, Flaubert had dreamed about them without being able to entirely dismiss them. — The three Temptations:1 1849 before Madame Bovary2 1856 before Salammbô3 1874 before Bouvard and Pécuchet4 But before them all, there was Smarh (1839)5 — The documentation for Bouvard and Pécuchet was acquired over several decades. It was used on several occasions (Monsieur Homais). And before that, there had been the Histoire naturelle of the sales clerk.6 b. The two texts refer to one another through a number of common elements, sentences, and textual fragments that circulate between them. Presentation given in 1970 at the State University of New York at Buffalo (BnF, Fonds Foucault, NAF 28730, box 54, folder 3). In this text, Foucault makes use of analyses he developed in the afterword to The Temptation of Saint Anthony, which he had written for a German edition published in 1964. See Michel Foucault, “(Untitled),” in Dits et écrits I, no. 20, 321– 53. The same year as the Buffalo presentation, the text of this afterword was reissued in a modified version with the title “La bibliothèque fantastique,” in R. Debray-Genette, Flaubert (Paris: Didier, 1970), 171– 90. 159

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For example: Bouvard and Pécuchet: “Reason tells you the whole includes the part; and Faith replies with transubstantiation. Reason tells you: Three times three; and Faith tells you: Three is one.”7 First Temptation: almost the same dialogue. Temptation: “The Church has made marriage a sacrament.”8 Bouvard and Pécuchet: Jeufroy: “Marriage having been established by Jesus . . .” Pécuchet: “In which Gospel? In apostolic times, it was placed so low that Tertullian compared it to adultery. . . . And it’s not a sacrament! For a sacrament, you need a sign.”9 Bouvard and Pécuchet: the flagellation of Pécuchet.10 The Temptation: flagellation.11 Substance and infinity. Suicide and the black hole. The martyr. And perhaps the end of The Temptation corresponds to the first rural vision in Bouvard and Pécuchet. After all, in both, there is the matter of withdrawal, desire, and knowledge. c. But even more than these reciprocal communications or local analogies, which suggest a rapprochement, in both of them we find verbal accumulations that are — entirely populated with erudition, Flaubert having filled them with vast quantities of his reading and notes; — organized along very simplistic and rudimentary lines: a succession of characters, a series of attempts; — irreducible to genre, to the type of discourse whose appearance they assume. Thus take shape these strange texts that Flaubert had so much difficulty writing, and to which traditional categories, judgments, and analyses cannot be applied. Whether [they] were successes or failures, he himself was unable to say. They also have a very unusual relationship to the truth: — they are not scientific, of course (in spite of his scrupulous concern for accuracy), — nor are they similar to what we might find in literature.a They might be compared to the Stromateis by Clement of Alexandria, a. In the margin: Examine not the subject matter but the fiction-document relationship, or ready-madelanguage writing in the thickness of speech.

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the mountains of text that we find during the Renaissance, or in contemporary literature. Something like discursive fiction.12

I. Transcription A. The Temptation 1. Apparent organization: Three temptations: Alexandria— simple pleasure Constantinople— power and wealth The Orient— [Queen of Sheba] Heresies. Martyrs. The Gods (India and Greece). The entire world. The living cell. This is all presented as the Saint’s vision, a proliferating hallucination, the intersection of sumptuous imagery. And Flaubert, speaking of his work at the time of its writing, refers to his own delirium, the orgies of his imagination, of his intoxication. 2. Yet if we pay attention, we can perceive that all these grand mad images are fragments of knowledge, documentary elements that are cast into the text almost without elaboration. a. Sometimes it involves a text. For example: — the Memoirs of Beausobre (index card)b — and the passage about martyrs.13 b. Sometimes, it involves a schema. Example: the Pleroma.14 c. Sometimes, it involves an engraving: Dürer: Lust and death. Text.15 Vishnu (symbolic).16 b. The index card, probably read during the presentation, loosely repeats several passages from the Histoire de Manichée et du manichéisme by Isaac de Beausobre (Amsterdam, 1734– 39), and contains the following lines: Mémoires of Beausobre (concerning martyrs): “The Christians had a very human affection for the bodies of martyrs. They kissed their garments . . . Monique had them brought bread, wine, and a type of food the Latins called pultis, made with water, flour, and eggs. . . . Festivals were added. These nocturnal devotions could only result in unpleasant consequences. They had to ban women from attending. But there was another form of debauchery as well: drunkenness.”

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3. Perhaps, it could be said that it involves a process that Flaubert used elsewhere (Salammbô).17 But we should point out — That the process is absolutely general throughout the text. There is practically no element that does not refer to a documentary element. Process of the “respondent.” — That the process does not consist in investing this knowledge within a character, a scene, an episode, or an event, but of leaving it as a fragment, an exploded remnant, without elaboration. Example: the Gnostics and heretics.18 “Insertion.” — That the process is not merely based on written material but on material that is written, drawn, painted, which itself represents other texts, other themes, other images, and that all these elements are restored by Flaubert in the general element of writing. Transcription — With respect to these elements, Flaubert uses them Sometimes to create various types of discourse Sometimes to create characters (and scenic notations show how they are dressed, the gestures they employ) Sometimes to create various types of discourse (which are themselves also marked by scenic notations) Sometimes to create visions that the characters relate However, sometimes he uses an image to create a discourse (the Pleroma) or a discourse to create a background or a character (the description of the hippodrome). Redistribution — Flaubert introduces stylistic metamorphoses: making a concrete text abstract; giving rise to a color where there was none; adding a gesture or a scene where there was only a sentence. For example, concerning martyrs, the bones that shine in the night.19 Transformation Conclusion: a writing process that already assumes the presence of a set of preexisting elements that are neither things, nor thoughts, nor impressions, but sentences, speech, drawings, engravings, images; that is, elements that represent, that reproduce others, that duplicate others. A form of writing that absolutely does not seek to be originary, or say what has never been said, but, on the contrary, seeks to situate itself within the indefinite undulations20 of the repeatable. It is desacralized as originary trace to become no more than a peak among other peaks in the movement of free repetition that always continues. We see, then, the significance of theater in a text such as this:

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— Whereas the romantic writing of Madame Bovary or Sentimental Education ranges from sensation— the immediate contact of things themselves with a thought, a desire, lassitude, disgust— to text, — here, the role of writing is reversed, things previously said or seen, or previously represented become characters, backgrounds, spaces, and so on. B. Bouvard and Pécuchet 1. The process is approximately the same: behind all the major episodes, there are texts: agronomy, gardening, economy, homemaking, chemistry, anatomy, physiology, astronomy, geology, archaeology, history, literature, politics, gymnastics, spiritualism, philosophy, religion, pedagogy. 2. But in this case the process appears to be simpler and more readable: it is spoken within the text. — The two friends read texts (they name them). — They provide quotes (which are given between quotation marks) or general ideas (which are expressed as summaries). — They apply them or verify them, or discuss them, or make use of them during a discussion. 3. However, there is a complication: — Because some of those quotes slide. “Truth on this side . . .” attributed to Lévy.21 — Because some texts are distorted. — Because certain elements are presented without differentiation: we don’t know if they are the thoughts of the two friends or something they have taken from a book, or a quotation, or even a statement by Flaubert: “All the books in the world cannot replace personal observation.”22,c — Because Flaubert has slipped in certain images, when he is hardly speaking of texts. See p. [163] (geology). Conversely for the garden. — Because in places where there is no quotation at all, he nevertheless uses a kind of generic language: all of the commentary by the Count of Faverges. So that, here too, everything that is said has already been said. But in a very different way: — Whereas the process is hidden in The Temptation, here it is visible in its center but unnoticeable along the edges. c. In the margin: “Linnaean classification is all well and good, with its genera and species, but how do you determine the species?” (Bouvard and Pécuchet, 149).

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— Whereas, in The Temptation, the apparitions begin to solidify (and the whispers from beneath grow silent), here there is an uncertain interlocking between what is quoted, what is insidiously repeated, what has possibly been said, and what has never yet been said. — The only stable points are — the beginning — the disruption of the Revolution — the end And several comments about the weather, the heat. We should note that — very soon, in these descriptions, impressions by the friends themselves are slipped in, their habits of thought, or, rather, their way of expressing themselves, their reactions; — the story of the Revolution of 1848 is given primarily through the use of gossip, what has been said about it; — and the beginning begins with the symbolic reading of the name in the hat.23 The two friends are then described as if they were exiting, like a magician’s rabbits, from their own hat. (Flaubert hesitated a long time over their names.) In The Temptation, writing serves to arrest and fix the indefinite whisper of the already said and already seen, within the eruption of a vision. In Bouvard and Pécuchet, writing serves to make visible and elude the already said and the already seen, which results in an effect of oneiric doubling: Have I already heard what I am hearing or what I am reading? Has it already happened? Where does this voice come from? Who is speaking? Is it you, or another? Is it today? Yesterday? Are you really speaking to me?

The transcription is more well thought out, more organized in The Temptation; it is moving, uncertain, disturbing in Bouvard and Pécuchet. It doesn’t stop.

II. The dispersion of the subject 1. Temptation Superficially, it involves something quite simple: a monk kneeling before his hut, and, in succession, carefully, never two at a time, the temptations appear. It is the flat, linear world of marionettes. [Difference] with Brueghel and the simultaneity of painting.24 Yet, in the text, in spite of its linearity, there is an effect of depth:

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— Here, Saint Anthony is reading The Book — because it is his duty — to banish the memories that assail him Yet, he reads three passages that will, of necessity, lead him toward temptation. The three images that arise: the table, wealth, and the Queen of Sheba, in fact, emerge from the book. — Hilarion: — he is the heir of the Queen of Sheba — the “black child” — the disciple (science-wisdom) Here, both desire and knowledge, but for Anthony it is — desire that has been mastered — and knowledge that is communicated, the opposite will occur: knowledge overcome and a [conquering]d desire. But he has introduced these visions. Subsequently: Hilarion— to determine the source of a new layer of visions. — Therefore, the visions will continue, each with its theories, its knowledge, its own visions. Example: Manes, his book and globe. Or the followers of Knouphis. — It so happens that these visions have visions of their own. But we shouldn’t overlook the fact that this is a theatrical presentation: Saint Anthony himself is only a vision, on stage, for the audience. What’s more, this theater is read: it is a book, read by real readers. So, we have the following pattern:25 V1

V1

V2

V3

Reader — Actual — Saint — Book, — Hilarion — (Hidden — Visions — Book book Anthony, a theatrically books) written theatrically real by real character Flaubert

We can conclude — That beyond its linear organization, and the continuous perpendicular divisions, there is also a form of organization in depth. Visions of visions. Visions that envelop one another, that emerge from one another. d. Conjecture— the word is difficult to read.

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— That, faced with each of the visions that are presented, we cannot determine its degree of reality. Whereas in a world as construed by Condillac, the deepest should be the palest (memories of memories of memories), here their modality and their intensity have no relation to one another.26 They have the same value for desire. — That we cannot even know precisely who is watching them. Other than Saint Anthony, of course. But between him and them, what is there? Hilarion, another, a third, perhaps? The viewing subjects are telescoped into one another; while Anthony is dispersed among the others, is scattered along this perpendicular line. He is, alone, all the points of the arrow that strikes the deepest, the most distant, the most withdrawn of visions. Temptation: scattered among multiple instances of the subject. Achilles on the arrow of desire. 2. Bouvard and Pécuchet Here, too, an effect of marionettes; linear and mechanical appearance. In the scene with the two friends, the bench, the hats, the “me, too,” physical appearance, and the characters that pass by [at the beginning with]e those of the novel: — marriage Madame Bordin — the prostitute Mélie — the worker Gorju — the priest Jeufroy There is then a series of episodes: agriculture, chemistry, anatomy, physics, astronomy, geology, archaeology, history, literature, politics, gymnastics, philosophy, spiritism, pedagogy. But this linear organization is modified, as in The Temptation, although in a very different way: — In The Temptation, the visions are developed from one another and reach such a degree of density that we don’t know who is seeing. — In Bouvard and Pécuchet, the question becomes: who is speaking? But the difficulty doesn’t arise from the fact that the various discourses are embedded in one another (as in The Arabian Nights27 or Jacques the Fatalist28), but from the fact that there are multiple, intersecting voices, often anonymous, and it is unclear if what they are saying is original or if they are repeating something. To analyze these voices, we would need to examine Flaubert’s sentences one by one, and then ask three questions: e. Conjecture— the passage is difficult to read.

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a. The speaking subject. To whom should we attribute the sentence we are reading? Who is supposed to be speaking it? Example: “Then, as before . . .”29 1. The sentences spoken by the narrator, this anonymous observer, who never says “I” and who accompanies them: narrative sentences. 2. At the other extremity, the sentences spoken by Bouvard and Pécuchet: articulated sentences. 3. Between them are intermediary sentences in indirect style: indirect sentences. 4. In terms of descriptive sentences, there are statements that cannot easily be identified as narrative sentences, articulated sentences in the silence of their consciousness, or indirect sentences. Example: “The firmament seemed a sea of azure, with archipelagos and islets”: mixed sentences.30 5. Along with the dialogues, there are sentences that are spoken only as sentences already spoken by others, read in a book, in a prospectus, heard during the visit to the telescope on the Place Vendôme: repeated sentences.31 b. The question of support. This question arises because, throughout the text, even when the narrator is speaking, there are added elements, which turn the text into a type of collage, a mosaic of preexisting sentences. — There are elementsf that have been discussed so often and repeated so many times that they appear to be a part of language itself. They designate nothing, refer to no identifiable speaking subject; signify nothing. They simply show that someone is speaking: “Everything is in flux, everything is moving.”32 These are the indefinite signifiers of the discourse. — There are elements that are supported by a particular social class or a specific type of dialogue, or type of situation. The “iron fist” of Monsieur de Faverges.33,g Or the dialogue about women between two very ignorant bachelors.34 The definite signifiers of a discursive situation. — Elements whose support is not a given book but the book, in general: the summary, the inclusion, in a single syntagm, of a series f. Above “elements” Foucault has written: syntagms. g. In the margin: “in which the most sacred things, like family, property, and marriage, were held up to ridicule!” (Bouvard and Pécuchet, 254).

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of sentences that, along with their numerous variants, can be found in different books: “Is it better to trust in what the senses tell us?”35 The signifiers of knowledge gleaned from books. — Elements whose support is a specific book, or a specific series of books. For example: Spinoza and his commentators, Cuvier and the flood, the life of the Duke of Angoulême. The signifiers of knowledge. [c.] The point of insertion. These “preexisting” elements attach themselves to very different levels in individuals: — Obviously, at the level of their discourse and their conversation (see the passage on astronomy).36 — But at a somewhat deeper level, in their experience, their practice: ready-made language becomes a secret code, a type of action (gardening). — Possibly, even beyond this, in their behavior with others, as elements of disagreements, instruments of polemics, political or social differentiation: the religious discussions with the priest. — Possibly, even deeper still, at the level of their innermost convictions, their deepest reveries, their fantasies: the dream of a primitive world.37 — Perhaps, at an even deeper level yet, in their very bodies, where real speech settles: Their efforts at gymnastics.38 Or when they investigate the food that passes through their body.39 — And finally in the dissociation of their body and their identity, when they no longer know what to eat, what diet to follow, whether they are souls or bodies, some material substance, or [corrupt]h aggregate. Cf. suicide. From this we can conclude 1. That we cannot analyze Bouvard and Pécuchet according to traditional categories: We do not have a “story” on one side and discourse [on the other] (the moment when the author intervenes to provide a special explanation). In addition to the mosaic of added elements, we have a large number of voices that intersect, that appear before us then grow quiet, that seem to come out of nowhere, that play different roles that are inscribed on multiple levels: h. Conjecture— the word is difficult to read.

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— in addition to the heterogeneity of syntagms (the fact that Flaubert took them from conversations, from books, from newspapers, and strung them end to end), — a multiplicity of discursive modes. 2. And, suddenly, the characters disappear into their identity: — Traditionally, the character of a novel is a relay between what is said about him and what he says. The point of intersection between a language spoken (by the author) and a speaking language (which he is supposed to maintain). — Here, the characters are only kernels of discourse, stars in a network of fragmentary discourses with different subjects, different supports, different functions. 3. Given this, we can understand the subtitle that Flaubert used in his correspondence: “The lack of method in the sciences.”40 Bouvard and Pécuchet is not the critique of an autodidact, it is the grand tale of the previously said. The previously said coming from all sides, assuming all forms, attaching itself at all levels— becoming discourses, weapons, marks, blazons, reveries, images, bodies, gestures, pains, dispersed members, deaths. Science is a known constant for limiting and using the previously said. Science is a way of doing things with words.41 Bouvard and Pécuchet stomp around, splash around within the previously said, a disorderly and fragmentary previously said; a previously said without limits or rules, which they are and which they do. Doing nothing, being nothing. How to do nothing with words. How to be nothing with words.

III. The law of series A. The Temptation of Saint Anthony It is, therefore, a theater, in which we have — on one side, Saint Anthony, alone, ignorant, desiring not to know; — on the other, Hilarion,i constructing through knowledge the very images of desire; — and between them: — somewhat on the side of Saint Anthony, the book as instrument of learning how not to desire,

i. Above “Hilarion,” Foucault has written: Devil.

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— and on Hilarion’s side, the Devil, who causes images of desire in the form of nonknowledge, that is, vision, to appear.

At one extreme: Saint Anthony: The book: Vision: Hilarion:

desire

knowledge

− − + +

− + − +

Therefore, Saint Anthony has withdrawn. And the images of desire and knowledge will pass before him according to a complex order that Flaubert had long sought: — from ascesis to life, passing through heresies, gods, science — from the most distant East (and the most fantastic— the Queen of Sheba) to the West (science) — from his desire to his desire (through successive purifications) Architectural order, encyclopedic order. B. Bouvard and Pécuchet Superficially the whims: of nature or of their “ennui” or of others ([. . .])j The order is entirely different because they are — Themselves their own Hilarion: no one other than themselves, their envy, their boredom, their failures, their successes is there to guide them. — Themselves consubstantially tied to knowledge, to the previously said— they are made of ready-made sentences. The web of their thought and their bodies is discourse. This lengthy series is made of different serial principles: 1. The principle of bookish succession: three first chapters— agronomy, arboriculture, domestic economy (farm, garden, home). They are the three chapters of the “Rustic Houses.” 2. The principle of the encyclopedic succession of the sciences: — Anatomy, physiology — Ancient, medieval, modern history 3. The principle of epistemological foundation: preserves— chemistry. 4. The principle of semantic opposition: gymnastics— soul. 5. The principle of reverse connotations: — The wretchedness and uncertainty of physiology — The great mathematical calm of the stars j. Abbreviation illegible.

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6. The principle of metaphor: — Medal (fossil) — Fossil (boat) From paleontology to archaeology. 7. The principle of wordplay: — Atomicity — Anatomy 8. The principle of traditional form: Christmas night, resurrection. A serial principle [that]k is, therefore, associated with language [langage], but not simply formal language [langue]; it is, rather, a question of the succession of discourse. The space in which they move is discourse— with all its rhetorical elements, wordplay, logical articulation, encyclopedic passages, narrative forms. In general: — In The Temptation of Saint Anthony, discourse is used to bring about something other than discourse: visions, images, fulgurations that break language. (In Smarh, there is a passage on the inadequacy of language in bringing forth the very images of sensuality.42)l — In Bouvard and Pécuchet, it is a question of moving within discourse that is already completed; of constructing a text that will be nothing other than a text of text. In discovering that, if it’s true that literature is made with its language— that is, if it is nothing other than a certain manner of speaking— there can be texts that are made with discourse and that are, or are not, nothing other than a certain form of repetition. The theme: rebeginning, repetition.

[IV.] Knowledge and desire The Withdrawal. A. The Temptation of Saint Anthony Saint Anthony has withdrawn to the desert, a retreat from all desire. a. But desire is not simply one thing: cities, the port, pyramids of fruit, the ankle of the young girl going to draw water, are figures or symbols, are objects, they are not desires themselves. One cannot escape desire.m k. Missing word. l. In the margin: remake the world m. In the margin: dreaming the inevitable desire

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So they return, and their vanished objects have become their metaphors: the same ankle returns as a metaphor of sensuality, the same swaying of the ship as a metaphor of wealth. b. In response we have the intervention of the Book, of Writing, as knowing not to desire. But no sooner is it opened than desire is revealed as its essence, the very heart of oneself:n — wealth — power and glory (Nebuchadnezzar-Daniel) — sensuality (the Queen of Sheba) Scenes 1 and 2. The renunciation of knowing not to desire. c. And the third moment then appears: the desire to know.43,o But the desire to know what?p a) What the nature of desire is, like the heresiarchs? But they do not wish to know desire; they simply wish to desire. And their knowledge is only that desire. b) What is beyond desire, like the gods? But the gods themselves are subject to the harsh law of desire. They fight, they triumph, they are jealous, they fight, they die. Even the god of the Jews was only a god of pride. c) What is stripped of all desire, like science? “I go on forever,— freeing minds, weighing worlds,— without hatred, without fear, without pity, without love, and without doubt. I am Science!”44 But the knowledge of what is without desire, that knowledge itself is interwoven with fear, terror, cold, good, and evil. We think we understand the world and the indifference of substance, but we only understand our own desire. There can be no knowledge without desire. d. So we arrive at the fourth moment, desire without knowledge. — Death and Lust. Desire of nothingness, desire of the moment. — The Sphinx, desire of stupidity and silence; the Chimera, desire of the impossible and the unreal. Pure desire, which affects animals. The desire that appears in the smallest cell. Saint Anthony wants to be that desire; but it is outside him, he can n. In the margin: reading: learning not to desire o. In the margin: vision the desire to know p. In the margin: vision

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do no more than see it, contemplate it, perceive it. And already, in what should no longer be anything other than pure desire, knowledge returns, day can return. And the cycle goes on. The gaze. Thus, we have, starting with the withdrawal, three elements: to know— to desire to see 1) Knowing and desiring, during the withdrawal, can only be connected by a negative bond. 2) The four types of negative relations correspond to four types of seeing: — not desiring in order to know: dream — knowing in order not to desire: reading — desiring to know that which is outside desire: vision — desiring and not knowing: illusion 3) To desire, while already beginning to know, is to look. B. Bouvard and Pécuchet They do not withdraw to know. — What separates them from others is their desire. — They reject the library. — They begin with a contemplation that is the respondent to the final contemplation of Saint Anthony. a) But the desire to know arises from success: — This success is brought about without their assistance because it is nature, — but they attribute it to themselves because it is in their garden. They want to learn how things are done: — They address themselves to the count.45 — They read books (Gasparin, agronomists, gardening books, domestic economy).46 The desire to know for . . . b) The desire to know for the sake of knowing. From chemistry to literature. But then, we are nothing other than our knowledge: history, literature. c) The desire to know.

13 T H E SE A RCH FOR T H E A BSOLU T E

I. The arrangement of the text 1. In several of the philosophical studies (The Unknown Masterpiece, Gambara, Louis Lambert), the explicit theme is the absent work— and the work of madness.1 Gambara, Frenhofer, and possibly Louis Lambert are anti-gods: they engage infinitely in a work never achieved, a work without rest or relaxation, a work that their death will leave in ruins. But these anti-gods are not demons, they do not undo or pervert a finished work. Theirs is not the power of negation but that of cancellation. What they do is neither good nor evil, it is nothing. The tireless laborers of nothing. More specifically: a) Nothing is not the last-minute failure of a work that collapses because the final piece is missing. Nor is it the perpetual resumption at the point of departure; the endless treadmill of the first phase. Nor is it the void that precedes every gesture, the empty contemplation of Hoffmann’s painter.2 It is the active, incessant destruction— patient or enraged— of a work that has never been made. The laceration of a work that does not exist. The immediate confusion, in one and the same gesture, of genesis and destruction. The shrill, motley, boisterous struggle against an absence. Scribbling. Presentation given in 1970 at the State University of New York at Buffalo (BnF, Fonds Foucault, NAF 28730, box 57, folder 4). 175

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The commotion of Gambara. The foot of The Unknown Masterpiece: it’s not so much what remains of a work that has been slowly crushed, but rather what emerges, as if by accident, from the haphazard application of paint that alone constitutes the entirety of the work.3 It is the cancellation of the work in the very movement that brings it into existence. b) This leads to the other aspect of the theme: the gesture of creation/ cancellation appears as a typical gesture of madness. — The gesture encompasses the entire cycle of the work, from its inception until its final roots. But this cycle takes place in a single moment, and is always begun again. — Madness: — involves genius to the extent that it brings about the entirety of its cycle in the work (it even overflows it because it proceeds to its conclusion) — involves mysticism because it escapes time and brings about, in an instant, what years of gestation and centuries of ruin would require — involves contemplation because it sees something where there is nothing Madness is not so much the accidental, pathological cause that provokes the absence of work, but the sudden telescoping of time and eternity, of the real and nothingness, of the world and the dream — which enables the destruction of the work in the movement of its existence — which puts the author in contact with the beyond 2. This theme (absent work-work of madness) is both preserved and transformed in The Search for the Absolute:4 a) Preserved without transformation: Balthazar Claës makes discoveries but he neglects them, as if they didn’t exist. And if he succeeds in creating a diamond, as Frenhofer created a foot, it will be by accident. He neglects his discovery just as Gambara did his ability at musical interpretation. b) But the theme is transformed in two ways: — The object of destruction is shifted. Balthazar Claës doesn’t necessarily destroy what he makes. He destroys something else. In place of the central cancellation there is a lateral cancellation, which assumes much greater importance. — It affects social relationships, the bonds of kinship, conjugal love, paternal obligations.

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— It affects wealth: money, land, diamonds, silver, which turn into smoke. — It affects other works: paintings, sculptures. Self- cancellation becomes heterocancellation (which does not occur in The Unknown Masterpiece). — But the mechanism of cancellation is also transformed to the extent that it becomes one of the formal characters of the narrative: — In The Unknown Masterpiece and Gambara, what is narrated is the cancellation of the work based on its principles of construction. — In The Search for the Absolute, everything that concerns Balthazar’s work is evaded or passed over in silence. a. Balthazar never explains what he is doing, unlike Frenhofer and Gambara: — He relates the initiation. — On another occasion, he is interrupted by his daughter. b. No one ever enters the laboratory: — His wife and daughter are rebuffed. — Only once do we see him prepare something at the moment of his departure. Balthazar, someone who rises and falls, appears and disappears; someone who is elsewhere when he is present. But wherever he is, is never here. — There is never a final confrontation, as with Frenhofer, or a decisive proof as with Gambara. The ambiguity of death. Not only does the work cancel itself, but the process of its cancellation is canceled in the story. The work is doubly absent: — In terms of the theme, it fails. — In terms of the form, the failure itself is presented only from without. And what is narrated? a. Cancellation, not of the work but by the work: cancellation of social relationships, of fortunes, of other works. The absence of a work is like a gulf, like a center of the destruction of things and beings. b. And the reconstitution from entirely different sources of that which has been canceled by the work: wealth is reconstituted, the family is formed anew, social relationships are reestablished. The entire network is restored. So that, ultimately, the structure of The Search for the Absolute is the opposite of The Unknown Masterpiece: — Frenhofer explains all the principles of the ideal work. He works

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for years. And, suddenly, the cancellation takes place— the cancellation that had continued to operate in secret. — Here, it’s a question of a cancellation that gradually appears through its effects. And then the process of cancellation arises from the cancellation. Everything is repaired.

[II.] What is the Absolute? “What is he looking for?”5 The question is never fully clarified. — Two things are certain: 1. He is not a chemist in the traditional sense of the word (although scientifically valid). Beyond Lavoisier. The discoveries of the modern chemist proceed in the direction of his work: but he doesn’t stop there. 2. Nor is he an alchemist in the traditional sense of the word, although he doesn’t hide the fact that he wants to manufacture diamonds and gold, and make his family rich. (Yet, there are symbolic elements: the house, the woman.) — What is he looking for? At a certain level, his research is clearly formulated, but at another level, hardly at all; and at a third, not at all. 1. The level of what is articulated: the unity of mineral chemistry— organic chemistry.a — Organic: the body — Mineral: metals To reduce them and, possibly, later return to the Ternary.6 This is part of a series of works: Davy,7 William Prout,8 JeanBaptiste Dumas9 (Dumas spoke of the vaporization of metals). 2. The level of the implicit: An experiment with watercress and sulfur. However, it proceeds in a direction opposite that of its predecessors.b How, starting from a single principle and single energy, can a variety of organic and living things be made to appear? This follows the line of work begun by Dutrochet,10 Pyrame de Candolle,11 and Brongniart.12 Beyond this, we face the problem confronted by Goethe,13 Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire,14 and Cuvier.15 The unity of living nature. The production of diversity. a. In the margin: declarative elements b. In the margin: allusive elements

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3. The lacunary level: What Balthazar Claës seeks is not spoken of, which is to position oneself at the point where the principle of the reduction of chemical multiplicity becomes the principle of the production of organic diversity. — To incorporate all bodies into a single body. — To reproduce, from a single body, all beings. In positioning himself here, Claës would bring about, by his very gesture, the unity of nature. He would assume the place of God. This level of the lacunary is reflected in the text by various symbolic elements: — “Oh! Oh! God!”16 — The movement of Balthazar Claës’s rise and fall. He is the being from on high. He “appears.” — The cult that springs up around his absence. 4. The level of the excluded: That which cannot be said. The unity of nature is the point that can, by its own action, produce and reproduce all of nature. It is the point where relationships, the other, sexuality become useless and disappear. It is the creative principle made whole; a paradoxical sexuality because it is nonlinear. The sexless phallus compared to the man without a woman; it is desire, but without a relationship to the other. It is important to remember that a) This element is excluded from the novel (although it governs the external system); yet, it is not excluded from scientific, philosophical, or ideological discourse of the time. The unity of nature, the confusion of sexuality (Schleiden).17 b) What makes for the force of Balzac’s novel is that he makes this search for the Absolute the metaphor of science. Why seek the point where conventional sexuality is abolished? Is it the highest figure of knowledge? Or because, in the West, knowledge must free itself of desire; but it cannot free itself of the desire to know, and this desire to know can only be a desire for desire free of relationships. Desiring to know is to desire access to a desire that has no need of the other. That is why, in the West, the relation of knowledge to sexuality is always one of exclusion. Knowledge is not the province of women (the woman is in the world of nonknowledge, ignorance, and feeling). Knowledge is symbolized — either by mystical and chaste union — or by homosexuality: the first philosopher loved boys But such loves, chaste or homosexual, are merely insipid images

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compared to the desire of knowledge: the fury of a pure desire, like a libido of knowledge. Thus, the greatness of Balzac’s novel is based on the following: — It has made a place for this disconnected desire of desire in a fictional discourse focused only on society, family, wealth, material goods, and exchanges, in short, the other and the desire of the other. — Throughout the novel, the emphasis is actually and visibly on these relationships alone; and what will appear as implicitly excluded is the opposite of this desire that excludes the other. To summarize, we can say that the entire novel is a development of the expression often repeated by Balthazar Claës: “to bring glory and wealth to his family.”18 — He attempts to do this by discovering the point at which — his family is not glorious but useless — his family is not rich but poor in the presence of such productive unity —Yet, in doing so, he brings about the opposite— he impoverishes his family and finds himself about to overwhelm it with shame. — But this he can do only if greater and greater material assets are provided to him by his family. So that the wealth and glory of his family must continue to increase. Thus, the system of relationships, of others, of the family, of marriage, of sexuality appears as the condition of a search whose goal is to demonstrate the pointlessness of sexuality, of marriage, of family, and of relationships.

[III.] The “bisexual” position of knowledge It appears in several elements of the story. 1. Balthazar Claës as the point of convergence and the elimination of all diversity: — Flanders: commerce, the diversity among countries, wealth and tranquility. — The stabilization of the Claës fortune: more business relationships; a house, objects, lands. — Collections of great diversity: great men, paintings, silver, flowers, increasingly impalpable. In the world of the sign. Nothing remains but science as an internalized collection. All relationships are wound around a point, stabilized around it, have been internalized in it. Final characteristic: he has abandoned his Spanish name and now only uses that of Claës.

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2. Balthazar Claës and the signs of universality: — The initiation (and reflections of Joséphine Claës): “It was no idea that thrust me upon this path but a man.— A man! she shouted terrified.” This thought is even more remarkable given that Balthazar was replying to these words from his wife: “I alone . . . must be the source of your pleasures.”19 — Intimacy with Lemulquinier:20 — He shares in all his confidences. He makes sure that no one enters the laboratory. — Marguerite21 discovers that her father has established an “equivocal relationship” with Lemulquinier.22 — “If you knew how far we’ve gotten!— Which we? .  .  .— I’m talking about Mulquinier, he has finally understood me.”23 Yet, a short while earlier, Marguerite had told Emmanuel de Solis of her decision to marry him with a “we.” And Emmanuel: “We! he repeated excitedly.”24 — But much more important is the clearly alternative nature of sexuality and the search. — Throughout the first period of his search, Balthazar Claës is separated from his wife. — When she faints and he brings her to his bedroom, he notices that he has locked the door from his side with a key.25 — She tries to win him back through sexuality.26 — The end of that same [scene]:c “Tonight, my dear Claës, let us not be only somewhat happy.”27 — Finally, when his children get married. — But he must go further: the entire system of social relationships is suspended. Social relationships such as the status of the family, the result of marriage, the condition of marriage. — The family is struck by “civil death” — and the festivals begin again only when science ([that is,] the desire of desire free of relationships) has been suspended. — Similarly, death as the moment of intensification of family relationships. — Finally, the paradox of this desire of desire free of relationships bursts apart: a) If it is free of relationships, no one can desire it. It is fulfilled without anyone. This is the episode of the diamond. — When Marguerite enters the laboratory, her father and Lemulquinier are attempting to make a diamond from coal. c. Conjecture— the word is difficult to read.

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She prevents them (they assume). — But this occurs by itself. And here as well he believes that it is the fault of exile, of family obligations.28 — This is true, but it is also because he isn’t there. Desire without relationships (that is, nature) proceeds without anyone’s help. He can never be there. b) And the great episode that illustrates this is obviously death: — He can only achieve this when he is already no longer able to speak (without relationships), — and when he is already no longer a living being. To achieve desire without relationships is to already be outside any relationship— or we fall outside it. Conclusion Clearly distinguish this universal or homosexual “position” of knowledge and what a psychoanalytic interpretation might call the homosexual meaning of the novel. — Clearly, several elements could lead us to this conclusion: the whispers of the city, secrecy, initiation, the two old friends assailed by children.29 — But this is only the marginal effect of another, deeper determination. The desire of knowledge as desire of a desire free of relations. In this sense, Balthazar is unlike Faust, for whom the desire of knowledge is, at the same time, a desire of universal relation: — the relation among the elements — the relation among beings (sexuality) — power

III. Desire without relation d The double absence of Claës: — the absence of any result from his work — the absence of Claës himself in the fictional discourse relates to his position outside familial or sexual relations, outside any fecund and procreative relation How did he come to occupy this position and what are the effects of this position?

d. This section appears to be a reformulation of the previous section. Therefore, we have left the numbering unchanged.

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1. He appears as the point of convergence and cancellation of all forms of diversity: — Flanders: the activity of production, commerce, relations with various countries. The manner in which Flanders has unified this in its chiaroscuro, its smoke and beer. Tranquility, now, of Flanders. —He belongs to the Claës family: merchants, burgomasters, wealthy. Social relations (political, commercial). These activities stabilized at 15,000 francs in rents. — He lives in a home where generations have accumulated portraits, collections, even flowers. — Finally, in this home, the parlor: an interior space separated from the world by the front building. A place of family rather than social relations. Lap and breast. At this point of fixity, stabilization, internalization, Claës will not be a man of relations but of thought, of collection, of unity, not of accumulation but of play. And that he is unique is symbolized by the fact that he abandons his Spanish name and only uses that of Claës. Point of convergence and cancellation of all forms of diversity. 2. Knowledge is transmitted and exercised in the form of homosexuality. — Initiation. See, in particular, this dialogue: “I alone, Monsieur, must be the source of all your pleasures. . . . It was no idea, my angel, that thrust me onto this path, but a man.— A man! she shouted, terrified.”30 — Intimacy with Lemulquinier: — Madame Claës’s jealousy. — Marguerite discovers that her father has established an “unhealthy familiarity” with him.31 — “If you knew where we are!— Who is we? . . .— I’m speaking of Mulquinier; he has finally understood me.”32 Yet, on page [786]: the use of we as a sign of love between Marguerite and Monsieur de Solis. The same we on either side of exile.33 3. Knowledge excludes binary sexuality. The suspension of sexual activity [is] implied by the exercise of knowledge; and, conversely, the reappearance of the sexual relation puts an end to knowing. a): — Balthazar has “left” the parlor: place of exchange, of the family, the place where contracts are signed, where exchanges are made. — But there is also the double history of the key:34

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— he doesn’t have the key to his wife’s bedroom — he has locked his own from his side — His daughters do not have to marry as long as he is searching. They will marry afterward. b) However, there are three moments when he abandons his search: — The first time, when his wife wants to win him back with sex. See the scene of seduction, page [722– 24]. This concludes with “This evening, dear Claës, let us not be halfway happy.”35 Halfway, that is, when one is married, not to be happy alone. — At the moment of death, knowledge is made taboo in that death reactivates the love relationship. Death, which breaks the real bond, reactivates the libidinous bond. Rejection of science. — When his children get married, he abandons knowledge. 4. More generally, it is the social relation that excludes knowledge: — The family is struck by “civil death.” Claës no longer has visitors. — Periods when knowledge is suspended are periods of intense social relations: — two parties — death 5. The death of Balthazar Claës. Claës’s nonexistent discourse (on science) substitutes for another discourse that is silently maintained throughout the novel and which is as follows: “If you wish to know, avoid all relations; desire nothing that is different or, rather, see that your only desire is to achieve desire without relations. Prefer men to women because men are, all things considered, somewhat less different than them; but, above all, prefer the absence of any man. If you can withhold your desire from any object, you will discover that the law of desire does not rely on the other but on its own intrinsic movement, its own division, the scission by which it continues to multiply, that brings it forth through its own efforts alone, the difference to which it gives rise through its own efforts; you will discover the unity of nature in your desire itself; you will have freed your desire from the limitations and oppositions of sexuality. Your desire and your knowledge will be one and the same.” Here, the difference between this discourse (not that of Claës but the one that supports his existence and his silence) and Juliette’s in Faust is apparent: — Faust asks Mephistopheles that his desire for knowledge might become desire in sexuality.

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— Juliette affirms that her sexual desire increases her knowledge and her knowledge makes her sexual desire infinite. — Balthazar Claës asks that his knowledge reveal to him the realm of absolute desire, which is a desire without an other, a nonsexual desire.

IV. Disequilibrium and exchange On top of this discourse, which never transpires, there appears the novelistic discourse. As if, above and around Claës’s absent work, there unfolded the interplay of social relations, exchanges, contracts, inheritances, divisions of property. Two-part discourse: 1. Madame Claës. a) The signs of disequilibrium: The hump, the limp. The torn dress, the wooden ramp.36 b) Opposition: — Body, reproduction — The physical and the soul — Her ignorance, her science of the heart — Her timidity, her boldness c) Disequilibrium: — She is of Spanish origin, whereas Claës’s progenitor was killed by them (a blood debt); while the Spaniards had prevented the Claës family from holding on to their assets (Nourho).37 — She sacrificed her fortune to her brother, so she was poor when she married. — She, an ugly woman, marries him, a handsome man. d) Yet, all of these forms of disequilibrium, at the same time, help maintain circulation and exchange: — Although ugly, her love is perfect, and she establishes a stable reciprocity of feeling. — She is poor, the wealth that comes to her is exactly equal to that of her husband— the marriage turns out to be good business.38 — She fosters her husband’s work with her Spanish assets (diamonds that become coal). — And, finally, she sacrifices her life. In this way, she returns to Claës everything that had been withheld from him.

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But the paradox is that she wants to capture [him] in this network of relations, and she binds herself to him when he breaks them. She is led — to ask her husband for a separation that weighs upon him, — or to tie up her entire fortune and that of her children in the search for the Absolute. And in both cases, she is led to break one side of the relation. Negative heroine of the relationship. 2. Marguerite Claës. The renunciation of sexuality. a) Rather than wanting to let theme play out as her mother did, she takes them over. See page [782]: “I have been too much like you.”39 — Compared to her brothers and sisters, she is the mother (. . .);f she is the father (preparation of the dowry, choice of profession, financial investments). — Compared to her father, she is — The woman: he feels like a “guilty husband” when confronted by her.40 — The mother: “Angel whom the celestial spirits should applaud, . . . how many times have you restored your father to life?”41 — The father: “Did he feel humiliated to have relinquished the majestic rights of paternity to his child?”42 b) Rather than seeking to keep her father within the sphere of relations, she excludes him: — by taking all his rights — by exiling him — by forcing him to finance his search for the Absolute from tax collections c) The great return by way of commerce. She, the Spaniard’s daughter, will bring Claës more than the Spaniards themselves took. She, Balthazar’s daughter, will add to Joséphine’s memory more than her husband had ever spent. The principle of the return is clear: — These are Spanish assets, invested in land, which will become differently fertile than the unity of nature.

e. Foucault probably means to say “the relations.” f. Left blank by Foucault.

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— They are going to be divided in as many portions as there are children: they will be cultivated by the children of a farmer. — With these dowries the children will marry: — Félicie with Pierquin, the Douai fortune. — Gabriel with a Conyncks, their wealth is in Cambrésis and Flanders. — Her husband, Solis, provides Spanish assets. The entire Claës fortune is restored (the three fragments— French, Flemish, and Spanish— that were lost are reunited, and each portion increased). — All the debts are extinguished. The portrait of old Claës can be sold, together with the paneling, for they are of no further importance. — However, the Absolute has been found, and it exists in relations. When Claës dies and says that he has found the Absolute, we have the impression that he has discovered a secret by dying. In fact, the Absolute is what has recently happened.

V. The gemstone and discourse One episode requires explanation: the diamond that is formed. It can be explained in two ways: a) Nature: if nature produces unity, it has no need of anyone. We cannot desire that which is without relation. Balthazar had to be absent. b) Social: the diamond is formed while Marguerite rebuilds their fortune. A symbol that here lay the absolute truth. The father understands this quite well: he gives the diamond to the daughter named Marguerite. Gemstone and diamond: gift and dowry, the husband’s wealth and the wife’s [treasure].g The fleeting figure of incest between a relation without desire and desire without relation.

g. Conjecture— the word is difficult to read.

Notes

Chapter One 1

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3 4 5

6

The term “civilization” is unexpected in Foucault, and, what is more surprising, it appears twice, in two successive presentations (see also “Madness and Civilization (Presentation Given at the Club Tahar Haddad, Tunis, April 1967),” below). The term may be an echo of Émile Benveniste’s text “Civilisation: Contribution à l’histoire du mot,” which appeared in Éventail de l’histoire vivante: Hommage à Lucien Febvre (Paris: Armand Collin, 1954) and again at the very end of Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, [1971]). Benveniste himself relies on Febvre’s presentation published in Civilisation: Le mot et l’idée (Paris: Publications du Centre international de synthèse– La Renaissance du livre, 1930), 1– 55. Foucault may here be referring to the theory of the incest prohibition developed by Émile Durkheim in “La prohibition de l’inceste et ses origines,” L’Année Sociologique 1 (1896– 97): 1– 70, reprinted in the Journal sociologique (Paris: PUF, 1969), 37– 101. It is also based on the analyses of Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose Les structures élémentaires de la parenté, published by PUF in 1949 [The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. J. H. Bell, J. R. von Sturmer, and R. Needham, ed. R. Needham (New York: Beacon Press, 1969)] was reprinted by Mouton in 1967 with a new preface. The book is not explicitly cited in the text although Lévi-Strauss’s name appears. However, it is very present in other texts from the same period (see, for example, pp. 21, 81, and 94 in this volume). Foucault may here be referring to R. Bastide, Sociologie des maladies mentales (Paris: Flammarion, 1965), 77. Sophocles, Ajax, trans. Herbert Golder and Richard Pevear (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Erasmus, In Praise of Folly, trans. Betty Radice (London: Penguin Books, 1993). See Michel Foucault, History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006). See Michel Foucault, “Langages de la folie: La folie et la fête,” a radio presentation broadcast on January 7, 1963, on the RTF France III national station. The program, produced by Jean Doat, was the first in a cycle of five presentations that

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8 9 10 11

12 13

were part of the series “The Uses of Speech.” See also J.-F. Bert and E. Basso, eds., Foucault à Münsterlingen: A l’origine de l’ “Histoire de la folie” (Paris: Éditions de l’Ehess, 2015). In the marginal note, Foucault is referring to the play by Peter Weiss, The Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of Monsieur de Sade (1965). On Bernard de Bluet d’Arbères, the Comte de Permission, see History of Madness, 42. Concerning the confinement of these populations, which includes the insane, see History of Madness, part 1, chapter 2, “The Great Confinement.” Ibid., part 3, chapter 4, “The Birth of the Asylum.” A few years later, Foucault will develop this theme in Le pouvoir psychiatrique: Cours au Collège de France, 1973– 1974, ed. J. Lagrange (Paris: Seuil-Gallimard, 2003). See Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973– 1974 (Michel Foucault Lectures at the Collège de France), ed. Jacques Lagrange and Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2008). Psychosomatic conversion is the transformation of a psychic disturbance into a somatic disturbance. It has been analyzed by Freud in the case of hysteria. The theme of the “disappearance of madness” is not new in Foucault. See, for example, “La folie, l’absence d’oeuvre” (1964), in Dits et écrits I, 1954– 1975, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), no. 25, 448, where Foucault already evokes, although from a radically different point of view, the consequences of the pharmacological control of mental illness. The English translation of this essay appears as an appendix to History of Madness.

Chapter Two 1

2 3

According to Dominique Séglard (“Foucault à Tunis: À propos de deux conférences,” Foucault Studies 4 [2007]: 7– 18), this could be a reference to JeanChristophe Öberg, whom Foucault met during his residency in Sweden. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1988). A few years later, in an interview given upon the republication of History of Madness by Gallimard, Foucault referred to what should have been this “other book” that he had not written: “Why did I write this book that has this somewhat bizarre title, History of Madness? Mostly because I was unable to write a different book; a different book that I would have been very envious of and which would have been the history of the insane, that is, the actual history of that population, which, if we begin to examine it from the eighteenth century forward, has not ceased to live, to exist, to grow in the margins of our society, and about which we really know nothing. All we know is how that population has been captured, how it has been divided up, classified by doctors. We know what doctors have made of [the mad], the categories in which they have been placed, which treatments, and eventually, which punishments, they were subjected to. But, ultimately, who they were, what they said, what this writhing mass was, that’s what I would have liked to do and that is what I was unable to do, and I was unable to do it simply because this writhing mass passed without a trace; their cries left behind them no memory, no recollection. I was only able to find the hollow mold, in a sense, in which they had

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4 5

6 7 8

9 10 11

12

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14 15

been placed, but they themselves, the madness, the mad in their positive, real, historical existence, I was unable to do that” (Michel Foucault, “Entretien avec Georges Charbonnier,” France Culture, September 8, 1972). In 1973, in the first lesson of Psychiatric Power, Foucault would present a different critique of History of Madness, and reproach himself for having “settled for an analysis of representations” and for having sought the origin of practices established for that purpose. During the course, he advanced a “radically different” approach, which consisted in taking as his point of departure no longer representations but a mechanism of power, the producer of representations that madness had become (Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973– 1974, ed. Jacques Lagrange and Arnold Davidson, trans. Graham Burchell [New York: Picador, 2008]). Concerning the way in which Foucault returned retrospectively to History of Madness, see, for example, Philippe Artières and J.-F. Bert, Un succès philosophique: L’“Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique” de Michel Foucault (Caen: Presses universitaires de Caen, 2011), 193– 239. The idea of a “critical return” to the book was also central to The Archaeology of Knowledge. See above, chapter 1, note f. See, for example, Claude Lévi-Strauss, “La vie familiale et sociale des Indiens Nambikwara,” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 37 (1948): 1– 132; The Elementary Structures of Kinship (New York: Beacon Press, 1969); Tristes tropiques, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (New York: Penguin Books, 1992). The Prophet Muhammad. Molière, The Imaginary Invalid. Concerning the place of the mad in Baroque theater, see chapter 4 in this volume, “Literature and Madness (Madness in Baroque Theater and the Theater of Artaud).” Erasmus, In Praise of Folly. See above, chapter 1, note 5. See above, chapter 1, note 6. This is a topic that Foucault will return to much later, after years of patient labor in the archives. See Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault, Disorderly Families: Infamous Letters from the Bastille Archives, ed. Nancy Luxon, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). Honoré de Balzac, “L’interdiction,” in La comédie humaine, vol. 3, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 403– 93; trans. as “The Interdiction.” Foucault had already referred to this text in Maladie mentale et personnalité (Paris: P.U.F., 1954), 80, and in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. See Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2009), 90. Aside from “The Interdiction,” the reference to Balzac does not appear in any of Foucault’s texts before his presentation “The Search for the Absolute” in 1970 (see chapter 13 in this volume). No doubt Foucault is alluding to the passage in the Phaedrus in which Plato speaks of the delirium inspired by the Muses. See Plato, Phaedrus 245a, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon, 1964), 492. See above, chapter 1, note 8. See Michel Foucault, “The Father’s No,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology:

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16

17

18

19 20 21

Essential Works of Foucault 1954– 1984, vol. 2, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: The New Press, 1998), 3. We are, of course, reminded of Foucault’s own book on Raymond Roussel, Death and the Labyrinth, trans. Charles Ruas (New York: Continuum, 2007). See also chapter 5, “Literature and Madness (Madness in the Work of Raymond Roussel),” in this volume. See the analysis of the relation between madness and language in Artaud, chapter 4 in this volume. On Artaud, see Foucault’s “The Language of Madness: The Silence of the Mad,” a radio presentation broadcast on January 4, 1963, on RTF France III national (the second broadcast in the cycle), published in Language, Madness, and Desire: On Literature, ed. Philippe Artières, Jean-François Bert, Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, and Judith Revel, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 3– 24. Henri Michaux explored the experience of writing while under the influence of drugs. See Henri Michaux, “Peace in the Breaking,” in Thousand Times Broken: Three Books, trans. Gillian Conoley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2014); Light through Darkness: Explorations among Drugs, trans. Haakon Chevalier (London: Bodley Head, 1964); The Major Ordeals of the Mind, and the Countless Minor Ones, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1974). On the relation between drugs and madness, see, in this volume, chapter 3, “Madness and Society.” On these and the following pages, Foucault returns to some of the analyses found in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. The reference is to King Mark of Cornwall. See Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, 12. This remark is made with a certain degree of humor, for laziness appears to have become the cardinal sin.

Chapter Three 1

2

3

4 5

6

Foucault discusses the displacement used by Freud in the relation between madness and language in greater detail in “Madness, the absence of an oeuvre.” [This appears as an appendix to History of Madness. — Trans.] Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, trans. Margaret Mauldon (London: Oxford World Classics, 2006). See Michel Foucault, “Language and Madness: The Silence of the Mad,” in Language, Madness, and Desire: On Literature. See the passage devoted to August Strindberg’s Inferno in Michel Foucault, “Langages de la folie: Persécution,” a radio presentation broadcast on January 21, 1963, on RTF France III national (the third broadcast in the cycle). Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Edith Grossman (New York: Ecco Press, 2005). Pichou, Les folies de Cardenio (Paris: François Targa, 1630). See chapter 4, “Literature and Madness (Madness in Baroque Theater and the Theater of Artaud),” in this volume: “Cardenio . . . believes himself to be abandoned by Lucinda. He takes refuge in the forest, where the trees, the rocks, even the barber who comes to care for him appear with the features of his beloved” (pp. 48–49). Foucault is alluding to the traditional character known as the “unknown knight” in chivalric romances.

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J. Rotrou, L’hypocondriaque, ou Le mort amoreux (Paris: Toussaincts du Bray, 1631). William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. On Don Quixote’s realization of his own madness at the time of his death, see “Language and Madness: The Silence of the Mad.” Pichou, Les folies de Cardenio. William Shakespeare, King Lear. See Michel Foucault, “Language and Madness: The Silence of the Mad.”

Chapter Four 1

2

3 4

5 6 7 8

9 10

11 12 13

14

The theme of the discovery of madness without delirium will be taken up much later. See Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974– 1975, ed. V. Marchetti and A. Salomoni, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2004), Lecture of February 5, 1975, especially Foucault’s analysis of the case of Henriette Cornier, 109– 37. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Double. See Michel Foucault, “Langages de la folie: Le corps et ses doubles,” a radio presentation broadcast on January 28, 1963, on RTF France III national (the fourth broadcast in the cycle). Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Everyman’s Library (New York: Knopf, 2002). Guy de Maupassant, The Horla (first version), trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Melville House, 2005). See Foucault, “Langages de la folie: Le corps et ses doubles.” Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Erasmus, In Praise of Folly. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote. Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew. Readers may recall that Rameau’s Nephew was the subject of impassioned analysis in History of Madness, as were the two references that immediately precede it in the text: Erasmus and Cervantes. See Foucault, “Language and Madness: The Silence of the Mad.” J. Rotrou, L’hypocondriaque. Jean Racine, Andromaque, Mithridates, Phaedra, Hippolytus, Athaliah, in The Complete Plays of Jean Racine, trans. Samuel Solomon, 2 vols. (New York: Modern Library, 1967). Pichou, Les folies de Cardenio. Anonymous, La tragédie mahométiste (Rouen: Abraham Couturier, 1612). Concerning Jean-Pierre Brisset, see Michel Foucault, “Le cycle des grenouilles” (1962) and “Sept propos sur le septième ange” (1970), in Dits et écrits I, nos. 9 and 73, 231– 33 and 881– 93. See also Foucault’s “The Language of Madness: Mad Language,” a radio presentation broadcast on February 4, 1963, on RTF France III national (the fifth and final broadcast in the cycle), published in Language, Madness, and Desire: On Literature, ed. Philippe Artières, Jean-François Bert, Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, and Judith Revel, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 15– 39. Antonin Artaud, “Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière,” in Œuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 69– 83. See Antonin Artaud, Collected Works, vol. 1, trans. Victor Corti (London: Calder and Boyars, 1968), 27– 39. See also Foucault, “The Language of Madness: The Silence of the Mad.”

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24

Antonin Artaud, “Le théâtre Alfred Jarry,” in Œuvres, 227. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 230. Antonin Artaud, “Le théâtre de la cruauté,” in Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu (Paris: Gallimard, 2014), 168. Antonin Artaud, “Manifeste pour un théâtre avorté,” in Œuvres, 233. Artaud, “Le théâtre Alfred Jarry,” 228. Antonin Artaud, “Les nouvelles révélations de l’être,” in Œuvres, 787– 88. Concerning this shared association of literature and madness, which is a recurrent theme in Foucault, see, for example, Michel Foucault, “Madness, the Absence of an Œuvre,” in History of Madness, 541– 49. The episode of Ajax’s madness is not related by Homer but by Sophocles in his Ajax.

Chapter Five 1 2 3 4 5 6

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Sophocles, Ajax. J. Rotrou, L’hypocondriaque. Pichou, Les folies de Cardenio. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Gustave Flaubert, Mémoires d’un fou, in Œuvres de jeunesse, vol. 1 (Paris: Louis Conard, 1910), 483– 542. See Memoirs of a Madman, trans. Andrew Brown (London: Hesperus Press, 2002). Stéphane Mallarmé, “Igitur,” trans. Mary Ann Caws, in Stéphane Mallarme: Selected Poetry and Prose (New York: New Directions, 1982), 91– 102. We know the importance of Roussel in Foucault’s thought. See, in particular, Michel Foucault, Raymond Roussel, as well as “Dire et voir chez Raymond Roussel” (1962), the first version of chapter 1 of the book from 1963, and “Pourquoi réédite-t-on l’oeuvre de Raymond Roussel? Un précurseur de notre littérature moderne” (1964), in Dits et écrits I, nos. 10 and 26, 233– 43 and 449– 52; and, much later, “Archéologie d’une passion” (1983), in Dits et écrits II, 1976– 1988, no. 343, 1418– 27. “Archaeology of a Passion” appears as an afterword to the English translation of Raymond Roussel. There also exist several radio presentations devoted to Roussel, including Michel Foucault, “Raymond Roussel,” broadcast on November 21, 1962, on RTF France III national, and two interviews with Roger Vrigny ( June 11, 1963) and Roger Grenier ( June 27, 1963), both broadcast on RTF France III national. On Alain Robbe-Grillet, see Michel Foucault, “Distance, aspect, origine” (1963), in Dit et écrits I, no. 17, 300– 313. In that essay, Foucault writes about RobbeGrillet’s Jealousy, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1978) and La chambre secrète (1959) (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2020). Pierre Janet refers to Raymond Roussel’s case, using the name Martial, in De l’angoisse à l’extase, vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1926), 116– 19. Foucault is referring to the process used by Roussel to compose his books, which he described in How I Wrote Certain of My Books, trans. Trevor Winkfield (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change Books, 2005). See Michel Foucault, Raymond Roussel.

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The topic of the writing process will be taken up again by Foucault in the work of J.-P. Brisset (and to a lesser extent of Roussel and L. Wolfson) in “Sept propos sur le septième ange” (1970). Michel Leiris, Roussel & Co. (Paris: Fayard, 1998). Michel Butor, Essai sur les modernes (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1957), 199– 221. Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Voyeur, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 2018). André Breton, Anthology of Black Humor, trans. and intro. Mark Polizzotti (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997). This brings to mind the pictorial presentation of a similar reflection included in Manet’s Un bar aux Folies Bergère, which Foucault discussed during a 1971 conference in Tunis. Foucault was planning to write a book about Manet, Le noir et la couleur, a few traces of which are contained in the archives of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Concerning Manet, see Michel Foucault, La peinture de Manet, followed by Michel Foucault, un regard, ed. Maryvonne Saison (Paris: Seuil, 2004). In his Journal intellectuel, preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Foucault also refers to Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait and Ingres’s Vicomtesse d’Haussonville. Here we have the reverse configuration of Velazquez’s Las Meninas, which Foucault brilliantly analyzed in the beginning of The Order of Things, in 1966, and which places at the heart of the painting the reflection of what is outside the painting (the royal couple).

Chapter Six 1 2

Pierre Klossowski, Roberte ce soir, trans. Austrin Wainhouse, intro. Michael Perkins (Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press, 2002). The reference to Parmenides and the tone of the commentary call to mind Heidegger, whose 1942– 1943 lectures had in fact been devoted to Parmenides. Although it was many years before Heidegger’s lectures became available (Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992]), Foucault may have been referring here to passages in Being and Time where the question of being for Parmenides is raised, or to other works that restored its importance. See, for example, A. de Waelhens, “Heidegger et le problème de la métaphysique,” Revue Philosophique de Louvain 33 (1954): 110– 19, where the reference to Parmenides is central. See also Heidegger’s “Moïra (Parménide, VIII, 34– 41),” in Essais et conférences (Paris: Gallimard, 1958). References to Foucault’s lectures on Heidegger are found in his notes from the 1950s, preserved in the Foucault archive in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Chapter Seven 1

Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804– 1869), one of the founders of literary criticism in the nineteenth century, who emphasized the connections between the work and the author; Samuel Silvestre de Sacy (1904– 1975) was the editor of a number of classical works of French literature and was editor in chief of the Mercure de France; Ferdinand Brunetière (1849– 1906) was primarily interested in

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literary genres and their evolution; Albert Thibaudet (1874– 1936), the author of studies on literature and the history of philosophical and political ideas, was also a literary critic at the Nouvelle Revue Française. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). Foucault is alluding to the work by Charles Mauron, Des métaphores obsédantes au mythe personnel: Introduction à la psychocritique (Paris: José Corti, 1963). Jean Rousset, Forme et signification: Essai sur les structures littéraires de Corneille à Claudel (Paris: José Corti, 1962). Pierre Corneille, The Palace Corridor, or The Rival Friend. Pierre Corneille, The Cid. Pierre Corneille, Polyeucte. Roland Barthes, On Racine, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 2017). Although Mallarmé, Proust, and Roussel are often cited by Foucault, the name of Jean-Pierre Faye is less commonplace in his work. He already appears, however, in “Distance, aspect, origine,” in connection with the writers who, at the time, gravitated around the journal Tel Quel (Sollers, Robbe-Grillet, Thibaudeau, Pleynet). See Foucault’s introduction to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau juge de JeanJacques: Dialogues (Paris: Armand Colin, 1962), vii– xxiv, reprinted in Dits et écrits I, no. 7, 200– 216. See Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). In the marginal note, Foucault is alluding to Jean-Paul Weber, author of Genèse de l’ œuvre poétique (Paris: Gallimard, 1961) and Domaines thématiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1963). Jean-Pierre Richard, L’univers imaginaire de Mallarmé (Paris: Seuil, 1962). Foucault had written a review of the book, “Le Mallarmé de Jean-Pierre Richard,” Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 5 (1964): 996– 1004, reissued in Dits et écrits I, no. 28, 455– 65. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Symphonie littéraire,” in Œuvres complètes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 263. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Nala et Damayantî,” in Œuvres complètes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 631. See Michel Foucault, “The Mallarmé of Jean-Pierre Richard,” 462: “The fan hides the face but not without itself revealing the secret it kept when folded, so that its power of concealment is a necessary manifestation; conversely, when it closes on its pearl ribs, it hides the enigmas painted on its membrane, but leaves exposed to light the decipherable features whose role it was to shelter.” Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship; and Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Shoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1974). See, in particular, the comparative analysis of the legend of Horace and the Curiatii and the Irish legend of Cuchulainn in Georges Dumézil, Horace et les Curiaces (Paris: Gallimard, 1942). Foucault discusses this work in an unpublished text, “Structuralisme et histoire,” BnF, Fonds Foucault, NAF 28730, box 70, folder 2. Roman Jakobson, On Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). The reference to Jakobson appeared as early as 1964 in the presentation

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“Literature and Language,” given during two sessions at the Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis, Brussels, and reprinted in Language, Madness, and Desire. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012). Concerning these doubles of literature, Foucault discusses, but in greater detail, the case of The Arabian Nights and Diderot’s The Nun in “Language to Infinity” (1963), in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, 89– 101; and In Search of Lost Time in “Literature and Language,” in Language, Madness, and Desire, 56– 58. The Arabian Nights, trans. Husain Haddawy (New York: Knopf, 1992). Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, trans. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright (New York: Modern Library, 2003). Denis Diderot, The Nun, trans. Russell Goulbourne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Eugène Sue, The Mysteries of Paris, trans. Carolyn Betensky and Jonathan Loesberg (New York: Penguin Classics, 2015). See Foucault, “Language to Infinity.” Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1990). References to Saussure are rare in Foucault’s work. It may be a memory of the course that Maurice Merleau-Ponty had given on the author of the Course on General Linguistics at the Sorbonne in 1949, which Foucault, many years later, said that he had attended. See Michel Foucault, “Structuralism and PostStructuralism” (1983), in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, 436: “And, as you know, Merleau-Ponty’s later efforts addressed that question. I remember clearly some lectures in which Merleau-Ponty began speaking of Saussure, who, even if he had been dead for fifty years, was quite unknown, not so much to French linguists and philologists but to the cultured public. So the problem of language appeared, and it was clear that phenomenology was no match for structural analysis in accounting for the effects of meaning that could be produced by a structure of the linguistic type, in which the subject (in the phenomenological sense) did not intervene to confer meaning.”

Chapter Eight 1

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See Michel Leiris, “Le réalisme mythologique de Michel Butor,” Critique 129 (1958): 99– 119. Foucault was very close to the editorial team at Critique in the early sixties and became part of the advisory board in 1963. After the publication of Thérèse Raquin (1867), which preceded and anticipated the Rougon-Macquart cycle, Zola had been violently attacked and presented as a sewer cleaner and a pornographer. He responded to the accusations in the preface to the second edition of the book, a year later: “I am astonished only that my peers have made me into a kind of literary sewer worker.” Zola, Thérèse Raquin, trans. Andre Rothwell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3. Nonetheless, he continued to be associated with the image, which resurfaced even more violently at the time of the publication of Pot-Bouille (1882) [trans. as Pot Luck by Brian Nelson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)] and during the Dreyfus affair.

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Georges Poulet, The Metamorphoses of the Circle, trans. Carley Dawson and Elliott Coleman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966). Pierre Corneille, Polyeucte. Jean Rousset, Forme et signification: Essai sur les structures littéraires de Corneille à Claudel (Paris: José Corti, 1962). Pierre Corneille, The Palace Corridor, or The Rival Friend. Pierre Corneille, The Cid. Gaston Bachelard, Lautréaumont; “Lautréaumont’s Bestiary,” trans. Robert S. Dupree (Dallas: Dallas Institute Publications, Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, ca. 1986). Jean-Pierre Richard, L’univers imaginaire de Mallarmé. Pierre Guiraud, Les caractères statistiques du vocabulaire: Essai de méthodologie (Paris: P.U.F., 1954). Stéphane Mallarmé, “Symphonie littéraire.” Stéphane Mallarmé, “Nala et Damayantî.” See above, chapter 7, note 16. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Le nuage,” in H. Mondor, Mallarmé lycéen, avec quarante poèmes de jeunesse inédits (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 176. Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Windows,” in Collected Poems, trans. and comm. Henry Weinfield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 11. Ibid., 22. Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire, trans. Martin Turnell (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1950). Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint-Genet, Actor and Martyr, trans. Bernard Frechtman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction. This is probably an allusion to Martial Gueroult, Descartes’ Philosophy Interpreted According to the Order of Reasons, trans. Roger Ariew with the assistance of Robert Ariew and Alan Donagan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Gueroult’s reading is very specifically directed against the work of F. Alquié, for whom the Cartesian “gesture” guides the interpretation of his thought. Another reference here is Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the “Pensées” of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine, trans. Phillip Thody (London: Verso, 2016). Goldmann, The Hidden God. Racine, Phaedra and Hippolytus. Barthes, Writing Degree Zero. Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship.

Chapter Nine 1

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See, in particular, R. Picard, Nouvelle critique ou nouvelle imposture (Paris: J.-J. Pauvert, 1965) and the response by Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, trans. Katrine Pilcher Keuneman, foreword by Philip Thody (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). For example, the two studies referred to by Foucault in “Le Mallarmé de JeanPierre Richard,” concerning L’univers imaginaire de Mallarmé, and Onze études sur la poésie moderne (Paris: Seuil, 1966).

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Among the many works published by Dumézil before 1967, we can cite Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus, vols. 1– 4 (Paris: Gallimard, 1941– 48), and Archaic Roman Religion, with an appendix on the religion of the Etruscans, trans. Philip Krapp, foreword by Mircea Eliade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mythologiques, vol. 1, The Raw and the Cooked (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); vol. 2, From Honey to Ashes, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). Volumes 3 and 4, The Origin of Table Manners, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), and The Naked Man, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), weren’t published in French until 1968 and 1971. Barthes, On Racine. At the time Northrop Frye had published extensively. He received considerable acknowledgment in 1957, following the publication of Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays; for a series of texts devoted to literary authors (especially 1963’s Fables of Identities: Studies in Poetic Mythology, a collection of texts from 1947– 1962, including essays on Milton, Shakespeare, and Dickinson); for a book on T. S. Eliot, in 1963; and for two books published in 1965, devoted to the works of Shakespeare and Milton. None of these had been translated in 1967, which leads us to assume that Foucault had consulted the original English editions, possibly in Gérard Deledalle’s library in Tunis. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977). Foucault is alluding to Gueroult, Descartes’ Philosophy Interpreted According to the Order of Reasons. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2006). See also his two contributions to Reading Capital, with Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, P. Macherey, and Jacques Rancière, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2009): “From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy,” and “The Object of Capital.” Deiknumi, from the Greek, meaning “to show, reveal, make known.” The word is clearly a neologism (see “that I have called, somewhat arbitrarily, deixology,” below), formed by Foucault to refer to the “general discipline of the document as document.” See David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 190. Michel Foucault, Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1994). Pierre-Henri Simon (1903– 1972), writer, former professor of literature at the University of Fribourg, became the literary critic for Le Monde. He was the author of Histoire de la littérature française au XXe siècle, 1900– 1950 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1956) and Le domaine héroïque des lettres françaises, Xe–XIXe siècles (Paris: Armand Colin, 1963). He was elected to the Académie française in November 1966. See, for example, Jean Laplanche, Hölderlin and the Question of the Father, intro. Rainer Nägele, ed. and trans. Luke Carson (Victoria, BC: ELS Editions, 2007), and Foucault’s article on the book, “The Father’s No.” See Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan C. M. Ross (New York: Beacon Press, 1964); Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. Edith R. Farrell (Dallas: Pegasus Foundation, ca. 1983); Air and

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Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, trans. Edith R. Farrell and C. Frederick Farrell (Dallas: Dallas Institute Publications, Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, ca. 1988); La terre et les rêveries du repos (Paris: José Corti, 1946); La terre et les rêveries de la volonté (Paris: José Corti, 1948). See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Sarah Richmond (New York: Routledge, 2018), as well as Baudelaire and Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr. Readers will note the very surprising absence in this passage of any reference to Jacques Lacan. Poulet, The Metamorphoses of the Circle. Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction. Roland Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss, “‘Les Chats’ de Charles Baudelaire,” L’Homme 2, no. 1 (1962): 5– 21. Gérard Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). On the concept of the extralinguistic, see chapters 10 and 11, “The Extralinguistic and Literature” and “Literary Analysis and Structuralism,” in this volume. L. J. Prieto, Messages et signaux (Paris: P.U.F., 1966). J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). The French version of the book, Quand dire, c’est faire (trans. G. Lane), wouldn’t be published by Seuil until 1970, three years after the 1967 presentation. It appears that Foucault had read the work in English. James Joyce, Ulysses (1922). In reality, Joyce writes: “Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful Jesuit!” Concerning Balzac, see chapter 13, “The Search for the Absolute,” in this volume. Alain Robbe-Grillet, In the Labyrinth, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 2018). The moderator is Gérard Deledalle (1921– 2003), head of the philosophy department at the University of Tunis from 1963 to 1972, whose library served as Foucault’s “working library” during his stay in Tunis. Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1, Swann’s Way. Readers may have noticed that Foucault, strangely, quoted the first sentence of the book inaccurately. It should be “For a long time, I went to bed early.” There is a comment about the same sentence (quoted correctly) in the second session of the presentation “Literature and Language,” in Language, Madness, and Desire. Racine, The Fratricides. This was Racine’s first play. See The Complete Plays of Jean Racine, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Alan Argent (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010). Racine, Phaedra and Hippolytus. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, trans. Peter France (New York: Penguin Books, 1979). Rousseau, Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues, trans. Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, and Roger D. Masters (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, an imprint of University Press of New England, 1990). Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. P. M. Furbank (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1992). Michel Foucault, “Introduction” to Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques: Dialogues. Foucault also presented this text on Rousseau on France Culture, during a series of four radio broadcasts: “L’entreprise” (February 29, 1964), “La machination”

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(March 7, 1964), “L’innocence” (March 14, 1964), and “L’heureuse entreprise” (March 21, 1964). He also refers to it, a year earlier, in “Langages de la folie: La persécution.” Les Centres d’études des communications de masse [Center for the Study of Mass Communication] was created in 1960 by Georges Friedmann, Roland Barthes, and Edgar Morin. Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Penguin Classics, 2004). This is an allusion to Flaubert’s comment “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” which has never really been attested to in Flaubert’s texts, but which nonetheless remains largely accredited by criticism. See Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Penguin Classics, 2011). René Descartes, Meditations and Other Philosophical Writings, trans. Desmond M. Clarke (New York: Penguin Classics, 2000). During his stay in Tunisia, Foucault gave a course on Descartes, especially the Discourse on Method and the Meditations. See R. Boubaker-Triki, “Notes sur Michel Foucault à l’université de Tunis,” Rue Descartes, no. 61 (2008): 111– 13. Foucault is alluding to Gueroult, Descartes’ Philosophy Interpreted According to the Order of Reasons. A. Arnauld and C. Lancelot, Grammaire générale et raisonnée (Paris: Pierre le Petit, 1660). Zellig S. Harris (1909– 1992), an American linguist, and Louis Hjelmslev (1899– 1965), a Danish linguist, were two of the principal representatives of structural linguistics. See Louis Hjelmslev, Language: An Introduction, trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970). Nikolai S. Trubetskoy, Principles of Phonology, trans. Christiane A. M. Baltaxe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). The characterization of the statement (which is not reducible to a sentence or a proposition) will be central to the analysis found in The Archaeology of Knowledge in 1969. Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology. Friedrich Engels, “Preface to the Fourth Edition,” in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (New York: Penguin Classics, 2010). Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (1830– 1889), historian of antiquity and the Middle Ages, and author of The Ancient City: A Study of the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome (Mineola, NY: Dover Editions, 2006). Foucault, The Order of Things. Foucault is alluding to Bernard Pingaud’s interview with Sartre, “Jean-Paul Sartre répond,” L’Arc, no. 30 (1966): 87– 96, reprinted in Philippe Artières et al., “Les mots et les choses” de Michel Foucault: Regards critiques, 1966– 1968 (Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2009), 75– 89. See also Michel Foucault, “Foucault Responds to Sartre,” in Foucault Live (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 35. Foucault, The Order of Things. Georg Lukács, Essays on Realism, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981). Georg Lukács, Goethe and His Age (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1969). Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (New York: Beacon Press, 1963).

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Madame de Lafayette, The Princess of Clèves, trans. Terence Cave (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Chapter Ten 1 2

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Z. S. Harris, Methods in Structural Linguistics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951). The reference to aphasia suggests several bibliographic references: the work of Kurt Goldstein, whose writings were promoted in France by Merleau-Ponty. On aphasia, see Goldstein, Language and Language Disturbances: Aphasia Symptom Complexes and Their Significance for Medicine and Theory of the Language (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1948), as well as the work of Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Aspects of Aphasic Disturbances,” in On Language. An article by D. Cohen and M. Gauthier, “Aspects linguistiques de l’aphasie,” in L’Homme: Revue Française d’Anthropologie 5, no. 2 (1965): 5– 31, provides a good summary of the discussions around aphasia. No doubt this is the essay that Foucault had in mind here because he cites it explicitly in another text in this volume: “Literary Analysis and Structuralism.” Austin, How to Do Things with Words. On Michel Butor, see Michel Foucault, “Distance, Aspect, Origin,” in The Tel Quel Reader, ed. Patrick Ffrench and Roland-François Lack (London: Routledge, 1998). The reference is to Jean Ricardou, La prise de Constantinople (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1965). The book, considered to be emblematic of the New Novel, and which was awarded the Prix Fénéon in 1966, is characterized by several interventions into the form of the book itself, such as the lack of any pagination. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). Prieto, Messages et signaux. Gustave Guillaume, Temps et verbe: Théorie des aspects, des modes et des temps, suivi de L’architectonique du temps dans les langues classiques (Paris: Champion, 1965). Madame de Lafayette, The Princess of Clèves. Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion, trans. Ross Benjamin (New York: Archipelago Books, 2008). The distinction between lexis (speech, utterance) and lekton (what can be said or expressed) is Stoic in origin. Concerning the precise meaning Foucault gives to the word, see below, p. 155. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1978). Friedrich Hölderlin, The Death of Empedocles: A Mourning-Play, trans. David Farrell Krell (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008). See Le discours philosophique, an unpublished text dating from Foucault’s stay in Tunis. The beginning of this text is given over to a lengthy analysis of the different forms of speech: everyday, literary, scientific, religious, philosophical (Michel

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Foucault, Le discours philosophique, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Fonds Foucault, NAF 28730, box 58, folder 1). The Arabian Nights. trans. Husain Haddawy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). Cervantes, Don Quixote. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (New York: Penguin Books, 1997). Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, trans. David Coward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Rousseau, Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues.

Chapter Eleven 1

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This list alludes to the work of Georges Dumézil, Gaston Bachelard, Vladimir Propp, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, figures who have already been cited in other chapters in this volume. What is surprising, however, is the complete absence of any reference to the work of Jacques Lacan. Prieto, Messages et signaux. A shifter is used to articulate an utterance from the vantage point in which it is made: adverbs of place or time, demonstratives, possessives. Cohen and Gauthier, “Aspects linguistiques de l’aphasie.” John Rupert Firth (1890– 1960), an English linguist, and Bronislaw Malinowski (1884– 1942), a Polish anthropologist, both assigned great importance to the idea of context in the field of semantics. Austin, How to Do Things with Words. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Modern Library, 1992), 3. Proust, In Search of Lost Time. Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education, trans. Helen Constantine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 3. Robbe-Grillet, In the Labyrinth, 141. Flaubert, Madame Bovary. Gustave Flaubert, Salammbô, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin Classics, 1977). Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1992), 7. Flaubert, Sentimental Education, 5. Ibid., 451. Foucault quotes Flaubert’s text inaccurately: “He travelled the world. He tasted the melancholy of packet ships, the chill of waking under canvas, the boredom of landscapes and monuments, the bitterness of broken friendship. He returned home. He went into society, and he had affairs with other women.” Ibid., 5. Ibid. Ibid., 6. Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Everyman’s Library, 1992). The Arabian Nights, trans. Husain Haddawy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). Geneviève Calame-Griaule (1924– 2013), ethnolinguist, daughter of the ethnologist Marcel Griaule. Here, Foucault is referring to Words and the Dogon World,

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24

trans. from the French by Deirdre LaPin (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, ca. 1986). Foucault, in “Language to Infinity” (1963), refers to the success of horror novels during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Michel Foucault, “Guetter le jour qui vient” [To Await the Coming Day] (1963), in Dits et écrits I, no. 15, 289: “Proust told his story up to the point when, with the release of time regained, he can begin to tell the story; so that the absence of the work, while it is implicit throughout the text, fills it with everything that makes it possible and already allows it to live and die at the pure moment of its birth.” See also Foucault, “Literature and Language.” Michel Butor, Description of San Marco, trans. Barbara Mason (Fredericton, NB: York Press, 1983). See, Michel Foucault, “Le langage de l’espace” (1964), in Dits et écrits I, no. 24, 435– 40.

Chapter Twelve 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20

Foucault is alluding to the three versions of the text: from 1874, 1849, and 1856. Flaubert, Madame Bovary. Flaubert, Salammbô. Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pécuchet, trans. Mark Polizzotti (Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press, 2005). Gustave Flaubert, Smarh, in Œuvres de jeunesse, vol. 2 (Paris: Louis Conard, 1910), 8– 120. Gustave Flaubert, Une leçon d’histoire naturelle: Genre commis, in Œuvres de jeunesse, vol. 2 (Paris: Louis Conard, 1910), 198– 203. Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pécuchet, 235. Flaubert’s text is somewhat different: “Reason says that the whole includes the part; and faith answers with transubstantiation. Jesus having communion with his apostles holds his body in his hand and his head in his mouth. . . . Reason says, three equals three; and faith states that three is one.” Flaubert, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, trans. Lafcadio Hearn (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 59: “The Church has made marriage a sacrament!” Flaubert, Bouvard and Pécuchet, 240– 41. Ibid., 214. Flaubert, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 134. Clement of Alexandria, The Stromateis, Books 1– 3, trans. John Ferguson (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005). Flaubert, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 80– 81. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 173– 74. Ibid., 120. The term “process” is not arbitrary. It is found in Foucault’s analyses from the appearance of Raymond Roussel (1963) until “Sept propos sur le septième ange” (1970), and indicates a form of work carried out, through writing, on the materiality of language. Flaubert, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 60, 62, 63. Ibid., 86. The expression would also be used in the form “the indefinite undulation of com-

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25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

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45 46

mentaries,” on December 2, 1970, during his inaugural lesson at the Collège de France. See Michel Foucault, The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1982). It is already present in The Order of Things. “‘Truth on this side of the Pyrenees, an error beyond,’ stated Mr. Lévy, and Becquerel added that it was not a science.” Bouvard and Pécuchet, 156. The sentence is, of course, taken from the fragment on “Wretchedness” in Pascal’s Pensées, trans. Honor Levi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 23. Bouvard and Pécuchet, 161. Ibid., 61. The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, which Flaubert had seen in Genoa in 1845 at the Balbi Palace and which inspired him to write The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Foucault’s relationship to the figure of Saint Anthony is, in turn, mediated by the painting because, in Lisbon in November 1963, he had seen Bosch’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony. He saw it again four years later, in September 1967, during a Bosch retrospective at the Noordbrabants Museum in the Netherlands. It is worthwhile to compare this diagram to the one that appears in the afterword to the German edition of The Temptation of Saint Anthony. See Michel Foucault “(Untitled).” Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Traité des sensations (1754), ed. F. Picavet (Paris: Delagrave, 1885/1928). The Arabian Nights. Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist and His Master. Flaubert, Bouvard and Pécuchet, 157. Ibid., 158. Ibid. Ibid., 159. Ibid., 287. Ibid., 187– 88. Ibid., 351. Ibid., 158– 59. Ibid., 163– 64. Ibid., 311– 12. Ibid., 141– 42. Gustave Flaubert, “Letter of December 16, 1879, to Madame Tennant,” in Correspondance, vol. 8 (Paris: Louis Conard, 1930), 336. A reference to the work of J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words. The French translation of Austin’s book was published by Éditions du Seuil in 1970 with the title Quand dire, c’est faire. Flaubert, Smarh, 96. Flaubert, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 53. Ibid., 161. Flaubert’s text is slightly different: “I go on forever,— freeing minds, weighing worlds,— without hatred, without fear, without pity, without love, and without God. Men call me Science!” The Count of Faverges, who allows them to visit his farm. Bouvard and Pécuchet, 91– 93. Agénor de Gasparin (1783– 1862), agronomist and politician. Bouvard and Pécuchet, 93.

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Chapter Thirteen 1

2

3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

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Honoré de Balzac, Le chef-d’œuvre inconnu and Gambara, in La comédie humaine, vol. 10, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 412– 38 and 459– 516; Louis Lambert, in La comédie humaine, vol. 11, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 589– 62. Balzac appears rarely among the group of authors to whom Foucault regularly returns during the 1960s. However, he is mentioned in the two presentations he gave at the Club Tahar Haddad, in Tunis, “Structuralism and Literary Analysis” and “Madness and Civilization” (see pp. 97–128 and 17–34), in February and April 1967, and in the undated and untitled text (most likely from 1967) presented in this volume as “The Extralinguistic and Literature” (see pp. 129–42). The persistent interest in Balzac was most likely spurred by the publication of Balzac et la “Recherche de l’Absolu,” by Madeleine FargeaudAmbrière (Paris: Hachette, 1968). This may be a reference to the painter Berklinger, who appears in the Court of Artus. See E. T. A. Hoffmann, “La cour d’Artus,” in Contes fantastiques, vol. 4, trans. H. Egmont (Paris: Béthune et Plon, 1836), 373– 75. In The Unknown Masterpiece, the only thing that appears on the canvas painted by Frenhofer is “the tip of a bare foot” emerging from “a chaos of color.” The Unknown Masterpiece, trans. Richard Howard (New York: New York Review Classics, 2001), 40. Balzac, La Recherche de l’Absolu, in La comédie humaine, vol. 10, 657– 835. Ibid., 786. [The term is used by Balzac in The Search for the Absolute and is a reference to Trismegistus— the “thrice great”— and his writings. — Trans.] Humphry Davy (1778– 1829), English chemist and physicist. William Prout (1785– 1850), English chemist. Jean-Baptiste Dumas (1800– 1884), French chemist. Henri Dutrochet (1776– 1847), French physicist. Augustin Pyrame de Candolle (1778– 1841), Swiss botanist. Alexandre Brongniart (1770– 1847), French mineralogist and naturalist. As part of his scientific activities, Goethe was especially interested in botany and zoology. Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772– 1844), French naturalist. Georges Cuvier (1769– 1832), French naturalist. Balzac, La Recherche de l’Absolu, 720: “Cursed science, cursed demon! You forget, Claës, that you have committed the sin of pride, of which Satan was guilty. You encroach upon God.— Oh! Oh! God!— He denies it, she shouts, wringing her hands. Claës, God possesses a power you will never have.” Matthias Jakob Schleiden (1804– 1881), German botanist. La Recherche de l’Absolu, 696. Ibid., 714. Lemulquinier, sometimes familiarly called Mulquinier, is both Balthazar Claës’s personal valet and his assistant in his research. Marguerite Claës, Balthazar’s daughter. La Recherche de l’Absolu, 816. Ibid., 818. Ibid., 786.

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Ibid., 699, 701. Ibid., 722– 24. Ibid., 724. Ibid., 823. Ibid., 831– 33. Ibid., 714. Ibid., 816. Ibid., 818. Ibid., 786. Ibid., 699. Ibid., 724. Ibid., 699. Ibid., 662. Ibid., 683. Ibid., 782. Ibid., 815. Ibid., 824. Ibid., 799.

Index

Bellour, Raymond, xvii Benveniste, Émile, xiii, xiiin12, 189n1 Bergson, Henri, 83, 122, 197n27 Bert, Jean-François, xixn36, 190n6, 191n3 Blake, William, 9, 27 Blanchot, Maurice, ix, xv, 69, 73, 75, 133, 149, 196n2 Bosch, Hieronymus, 205n24 Braudel, Fernand, xxi, xxin48, xxiiin53 Breton, André, 65, 66, 195n15 Brisset, Jean-Pierre , ix, xn4, xii, 51, 193n13, 195n11 Brongniart, Alexandre, 178, 206n12 Brueghel, Pieter (the Younger), 164, 205n24 Brunetière, Ferdinand, 73, 195n1 (chap. 7) Butor, Michel, ix, xiii, 65, 85, 131, 157, 195n13, 197n1, 202n4, 204n24

Alquié, Ferdinand, 198n20 Althusser, Louis, xxiii, 99, 124, 125, 127, 199n9 Angoulême, Duke of (Louis-Antoine de Bourbon), 168 Arnauld, Antoine, 93, 201n42 Artaud, Antonin, vii, ix, xn4, xii, xiv, xviiin29, xx, 9, 27, 43, 45, 47n3, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 63, 65, 133, 141, 149, 191n8, 192n17, 193n14, 194nn15–22 Artières, Philippe, xixn36, xxi, 191n3, 192, 193, 201 Austin, John L., xix, xixn35, 107, 108, 109, 116, 117, 130, 137, 145, 156, 157, 200n24, 202n3, 203n6, 205n41 Ayer, Alfred Jules, xixn35 Bachelard, Gaston, 90, 104, 105, 198n8, 199n15, 203n1 Balibar, Étienne, 199n9 Balzac, Honoré de, vii, xi, xiii, 25, 108, 135, 151, 179, 180, 191n12, 200n27, 206n1 Barcos, Martin de, 93 Barthes, Roland, xix, 77, 81, 94, 98, 106, 112, 196n8, 197n20, 198n1, 198n23, 199n5, 201n37 Basso, Elisabetta, 190n6 Bastide, Roger, 189n3 Bataille, Georges, vii, ix, xi, xii, xv, 69, 70 Baudelaire, Charles, 89, 92, 106, 198n17, 200n16, 200n20 Beausobre, Isaac de, 161 Beckett, Samuel, 73

Calame-Griaule, Geneviève, xiiin12, xviii, 156, 203n21 Camus, Albert, 56, 94 Candolle, Augustin Pyrame de, 178, 206n11 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 94 Certeau, Michel de, xxi, xxin46 Cervantès, Miguel de, 45, 47, 61, 140, 192n4, 193nn7–8, 194n4, 203n17 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 14 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 56, 81, 94 Chomsky, Noam, 130, 144 Clement of Alexandria, 160, 204n12 Cohen, David, 144, 145, 202n2, 203n4 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 115, 166, 205n26

209

210 • i n d e x Corneille, Pierre, 77, 78, 106, 198n4, 198nn6–7 Cornier, Henriette, 193n1 Cuvier, Georges, 168, 178, 206n15 Davy, Humphry, 178, 206n7 Debray-Genette, Raymonde, 159 Defert, Daniel, xn4, xxin48, 190n13 Deledalle, Gérard, xviii, 199n6, 200n29 Derrida, Jacques, xiii, xxi, xxin45, 132, 202n6 Descartes, René, xi, xin8, xxi, 67, 93, 114, 198n20, 199n8, 201n40 Dickinson, Emily, 199n6 Diderot, Denis, 74, 85, 140, 192n2, 193n8, 197n21, 197n24, 203n19, 205n28 Doat, Jean, 189n6 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, xiii, 152, 157, 193nn2–3, 203n13 Dumas, Jean-Baptiste, 178, 206n9 Dumézil, Georges, xvi, 81, 98, 117, 119, 127, 196n18, 199n3, 203n1 Dürer, Albrecht, 161 Durkheim, Émile, 189n2 Dutrochet, Henri, 178, 206n10 Eliot, T. S., 199n6 Engels, Friedrich, 119, 201n48 Erasmus of Rotterdam, 8, 23, 27, 61, 189n5, 191n9, 193n6, 193n8 Establet, Roger, 199n9 Ewald, François , xn4, 190n13 Farge, Arlette, 191n11 Fargeaud-Ambrière, Madeleine, 206n1 Faye, Jean-Pierre, 78, 196n9 Febvre, Lucien, 189n1 Firth, John Rupert, 146, 156, 203n5 Flaubert, Gustave, vii, ix, xi, xiii, xiv, 63, 113, 141, 150, 152, 153, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 169, 170, 194n6, 201nn38– 39, 203n9, 203nn11–12, 203nn14–18, 204nn2–11, 204nn13–16, 204nn18–19, 205n24, 205nn29–40, 205nn42–44 Freud, Sigmund, 25, 38, 56, 63, 66, 67, 90, 104, 190n12, 192n1 Friedmann, Georges, 201n37 Frye, Northrop, 98, 99, 199n6 Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis, 120, 201n49 Gasparin, Agénor de, 173, 205n46 Gauthier, Michel, 145, 202n2, 203n4 Genette, Gérard, xix, 106, 200n21

Gide, André, 56 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 127, 178, 201n54, 206n13 Goldmann, Lucien, 93, 198nn20–21 Goldstein, Kurt, 202n2 Goodman, Nelson, xixn35 Grenier, Roger, 194n8 Griaule, Marcel, 203n21 Gueroult, Martial, 98, 99, 115, 198n20, 199n8, 201n41 Guillaume, Gustave, 134, 202n8 Guiraud, Pierre, 90, 198n10 Harris, Zellig S., 115, 129, 201n43, 202n1 Hébert, Jacques-René, 94 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, xvii, 83 Heidegger, Martin, 83, 195n2 Helvétius, Claude-Adrien, 74 Hjelmslev, Louis, 115, 201nn43–44 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus, 175, 206n2 Hölderlin, Friedrich, ix, xn4, 9, 27, 45, 137, 141, 199n14, 202n10, 202n14 Homer, 56, 194n24 Hugo, Victor, 85 Humboldt, Alexander von, 119 Husserl, Edmund, xin8, 83 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 195n16 Jakobson, Roman, xix, xixn36, 81, 83, 130, 144, 149, 155, 196n19, 200n20, 202n2 Janet, Pierre, 63, 194n10 Jesus Christ, 160, 204n7 Joyce, James, xiii, 82, 108, 146, 157, 200nn25– 26, 203n7 Kafka, Franz, 127 Klossowski, Pierre, ix, 195n1 Lacan, Jacques, 200n17, 203n1 Lafayette, Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, Comtesse de, 202n9, 202n56 Lagrange, Jacques, 190n11, 191n3 Lancelot, Claude, 201n42 Laplanche, Jean, 199n14 Laporte, Roger, ix Lautréamont (Isidore Lucien Ducasse), 88, 102 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 74 Leiris, Michel, 65, 85, 195n12, 197n1 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, xvi, xviii, 3, 21, 81, 94,

i n d e x • 211 98, 99, 106, 117, 118, 120, 155, 189n2, 191n5, 196n17, 198n24, 199n4, 200n20, 201n47, 203n1 Lévy, Michel, 163, 205n20 Louis-Antoine de Bourbon, Duke of Angoulême, 168 Lukács, Georg (György), 127, 155, 201nn53–55 Macey, David, 199n11 Macherey, Pierre, 199n9 Magritte, René, xii, xiin10 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 145, 203n5 Mallarmé, Stéphane, ix, 63, 66, 68, 78, 79, 82, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 132, 156, 194n7, 196n9, 196nn13–16, 198n1, 198n9, 198nn11–12, 198nn14–16 Manet, Édouard, 195n16 Mann, Thomas, 127, 154, 203n19 Marchetti, Valerio, 193n1 Marx, Karl, xxiii, 83, 88, 99, 124, 127, 199n9 Maupassant, Guy de, 44, 193n4 Mauron, Charles, 76, 79, 196n3 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 197n28, 202n2 Michaux, Henri, 27, 63, 192n18 Milton, John, 199n6 Molière ( Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 191n7 Morin, Edgar, 201n37 Muhammad, 191n6 Nerval, Gérard de, x, xn4, 63, 65 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xvii, 67, 141, 202nn12–13 Nora, Pierre, xiiin12 Öberg, Jean-Christophe, 190n1 Pascal, Blaise, 198n20, 205n21 Pasteur, Louis, 122, 123 Péguy, Charles, 81 Permission, Bernard de Bluet d’Arbères, Comte de, 9, 27, 190n8 Picard, Raymond, 198n1 Picavet, François, 205n26 Pichou, 48, 192n5, 193n10 (chap. 3), 193n11 (chap. 4), 194n3 Pingaud, Bernard, 201n51 Plato, 27, 123, 191n13 Pleynet, Marcelin, ix, 196n9 Ponge, Francis, 82 Potte-Bonneville, Mathieu, xixn36, 192n17, 193n13 Poulet, Georges, 89, 106, 198n3, 200n18 Prieto, Luis Jorge, xiii, xix, 107, 108, 114, 116,

117, 130, 134, 144, 149, 200n23, 202n7, 203n2 Propp, Vladimir, 98, 99, 112, 199n7, 203n1 Proust, Marcel, xiii, xiv, 78, 81, 87, 110, 111, 112, 114, 147, 157, 196n9, 197n23, 200n30, 203n8, 204n23 Prout, William, 178, 206n8 Putnam, Hilary, xixn35 Queneau, Raymond, 94 Quine, Willard Van Orman, xixn35 Racine, Jean, 46, 50, 78, 88, 93, 98, 112, 193n10, 196n8, 198n20, 198n22, 199n5, 200nn31–32 Rancière, Jacques, 199n9 Revel, Judith, xixn36, 192n17, 193n13 Ricardou, Jean, 131, 202n5 Richard, Jean-Pierre, 79, 80, 90, 98, 198n2, 198n9 Rivière, Jacques, 51, 65, 193n14 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, ix, xiii, 63, 65, 73, 108, 135, 150, 151, 194n9, 195n14, 200n28, 203n10 Ronsard, Pierre de, 56 Rotrou, Jean, 48, 49, 61, 193n7, 193n9 (chap. 4), 194n2 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, xiv, 74, 78, 92, 106, 112, 141, 196nn10–11, 198n19, 200n19, 200nn33–36, 203n20 Roussel, Raymond, vii, ix, x, xii, 27, 37, 38, 45, 51, 55, 59, 63, 64, 65, 66, 75, 78, 81, 141, 192n16, 194n8, 194nn10–11, 195n12, 196n9, 204n17 Rousset, Jean, 77, 89, 196n4, 198n5 Rueff, Martin, xiiin11, xixn35 Ryle, Gilbert, xixn35 Sacy, Samuel Silvestre de, 73, 195n1 (chap. 7) Sade, Donatien Alphonse François de, ix, 8, 82, 102, 190n7 Saint-Cyran, Jean-Ambroise Duvergier de Hauranne, Abbé de, 93 Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin, 73, 102, 195n1 (chap. 7) Saint-Hilaire, Étienne Geoffroy, 178, 206n14 Saison, Maryvonne, 195n16 Salomoni, Antonella, 193n1 Sartre, Jean-Paul, xxi, xxin46, 73, 92, 104, 124, 139, 155, 198nn17–18, 200n16, 201n51 Saussure, Ferdinand de, xix, 83, 94, 115, 145, 197n28

212 • i n d e x Schleiden, Matthias Jakob, 179, 206n17 Séglard, Dominique, 17, 97, 190n1 Shakespeare, William, 42, 44, 193n8 (chap. 3), 193n10 (chap. 3), 194n5, 199n6 Simon, Pierre-Henri, 103, 199n13 Sollers, Philippe, ix, 156, 196n9 Sophocles, 8, 189n4, 194n1, 194n24 Spinoza, Baruch, 168 Starobinski, Jean, 79, 92, 106, 196n11, 198n19, 200n19 Sterne, Laurence, 140, 203n18 (chap. 10) Stevenson, Robert Louis, 193n5 Strawson, Peter F., xixn35 Strindberg, August, 192n3 Sue, Eugène, 82, 197n25

Thibaudet, Albert, 73, 196n1 Trubetskoy, Nikolai S., 117, 201n45

Tasso (Torquato Tasso), 9 Thibaudeau, Jean, ix, 196n9

Zola, Émile, 46, 74, 88, 197n2

Valéry, Paul, 87, 112, 149 Van Eyck, Jan, 195n16 Velazquez, Diego, 195n16 Verne, Jules, ix Veyne, Paul, xxivn55 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 56, 74 Vrigny, Roger, 194 Waelhens, Alphonse de, 195n2 Weber, Jean-Paul, 79, 196n12 Weiss, Peter, 8, 190n7 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, xixn35