Madness, Language, Literature

By Michel Foucault and Daniele Lorenzini

Newly published lectures by Foucault on madness, literature, and structuralism.
 
Perceiving an enigmatic relationship between madness, language, and literature, French philosopher Michel Foucault developed ideas during the 1960s that are less explicit in his later, more well-known writings. Collected here, these previously unpublished texts reveal a Foucault who undertakes an analysis of language and experience detached from their historical constraints. Three issues predominate: the experience of madness across societies; madness and language in Artaud, Roussel, and Baroque theater; and structuralist literary criticism. Not only do these texts pursue concepts unique to this period such as the “extra-linguistic,” but they also reveal a far more complex relationship between structuralism and Foucault than has typically been acknowledged.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Apr 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9780226774978

Michel Foucault

One of the most important theorists of the twentieth century, Michel Foucault's (1926-1984) many influential books include Discipline and Punish, The Archeology of Knowledge, The History of Sexuality, and The Discourse on Language.

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Cover Page for Madness, Language, Literature

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     1 2 3 4 5

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

www.centrenationaldulivre.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 Henri-Paul 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

Introduction by Judith Revel

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

Footnotes

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 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 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 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 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 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 exist¹³), 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 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—structuralism¹⁴); 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 existence¹⁶). 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, 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 imprecisely, 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 Ages²⁴—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, sequentially 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