Literature and Politics in the Later Foucault

Azucena G. Blanco

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110669008
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire européenne

This study proposes a revised interpretation of Foucault's views on literature. It has been argued that the philosopher's interest in literature was limited to the 1960s and of a mostly depoliticized nature. However, Foucault's previously unpublished later works suggest a different reality, showing a sustained interest in literature and its politics. In the light of this new material, the book repositions Foucault's ideas within recent debates on the politics of literature.

1 Introduction

In recent years, the publication of a series of texts, which had been languishing unedited in the BnF’s collection, has opened a fertile debate on the legacy of the late Foucault. My intention in this work is to revise the place that literature occupied within the work of the Frenchman. In order to do so, I will review texts from the most recent Folie, langage, littérature¹ [Madness, Language, Literature] (2019) and La grande étrangère (2013) [published in English as Language, Madness, and Desire: On Literature (2015)], which are devoted exclusively to literature, to the references Foucault makes to literature regarding other questions, as in the Louvain, Berkeley, and Collège de France lectures on Greek tragedy and modern literature, among others.

As Judith Revel has already stated in “Un héritage de Foucault. Entre fidélité et libres usages”, the opening of the Foucault collection by the BnF in 2013 “reopened and revived everything that we believed we knew up until now” (Revel, 2019: 183). And it gave even more meaning to the statement that the work of Foucault was wide-ranging and that there was no one bearer of a legacy as to the final and closed meaning of his texts. Undoubtedly, Foucault’s oeuvre, in the light of the diverse publications that have appeared in the 21st century, is one that has a discontinuous, resignified history that is necessarily under constant revision. And this is because, as with the scholia in Spinoza’s Ethics, every one of Foucault’s “minor” texts forms a part of his corpus – discontinuous and broken – of as much importance as the rest of his works. With the aim of clarifying some of these discontinuities, it is necessary to revise the classic readings of Foucault’s work. Among texts that have caused a revision of the classic interpretations of the Foucauldian oeuvre, Foucault(s) (2017) is noteworthy. This is a broad collection of texts that each considers the question: what meaning does Foucault’s thought hold today? To which they answer at the book’s beginning, that of a space of thought that is always alive, like thought about the present.

Here I aim to review the relations between literature, subjectivity and politics in the early Foucault. In order to do so, I begin with a hypothesis: that we find in late Foucault not a forgetting of literature but a reformulation of the role that literature had come to occupy in his work; and that there is a trace of the texts that Foucault had devoted to the thought of literature since the sixties up until the mid-seventies in the works of his later years.

In “Politics of Literature in Late Foucault”, I address the definition of the concept of democracy in the literary thought of Michel Foucault, the functions of literature in the social space and a politics of literary form. This literary writing is a critique of the principle of social partition that in modernity is associated with madness. Due to the long tradition that links literature and madness, since the classical period (as inspired poet), literature is shown as a privileged space for political criticism.

In “Literature, Subjectivity and Veridiction”, I set forth an analysis of the forms of veridiction, in which Foucault shows the necessary intertwining of subject and truth, through the analyses of literary texts that he made in the 1970s and the early 1980s. The writings that Foucault devotes to the work of the Marquis de Sade at the start of the seventies show the relation between writing and novel forms of being. Sade’s logic provides Foucault with an alternative to the attributive logic that restricts the forms of being and that would be fundamental in the last stage of his productive output. And it therefore puts forward the connection between truth and desire as a performative truth of self, which Foucault later develops in the concept of parrhesia in the lectures of the 1980s. The concept of desire here is, as Daniele Lorenzini shows, a transhistorical constant and a theory of speech as passion. The technologies of self took up a large part of Foucault’s analyses from the late 1970s until his death. The forms of self-transformation of subjects since the classical era do not make an exception of Christianity – far from it. Hence I will analyze these works from a post-secular perspective that I consider necessary for understanding the ethical and dissident value of these behaviors. Lastly, this chapter discusses the legacy of Foucault in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His concept of subject has been debated and developed by other thinkers, such as Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben, who both maintain a far-reaching dialogue with the Frenchman. In the case of Butler, her concept of the retroactive subject is of particular interest, as is Agamben’s revision of the Heideggerian concept of the subject for death in the light of Foucault’s work. As a result of these readings, I propose a concept of [being] subject to the “intemperie”.

The chapter entitled “Tragedy and Historical Event” looks at the texts of the eighties in which Foucault makes use of the tragedies of Sophocles (Oedipus Rex) and Euripides (Ion, The Trojan Women, and Orestes), in order to study the emergence and analysis of the notion of parrhesia. In these lectures, Foucault presents literature as a place of “event”, hence the time of literature is the time of Kairos. Foucault also analyzes the pre-democratic concept of truth as symbol, a truth that can be reconstructed from different testimonies, which is in the origin of this right to free speech in the Assembly, as Oedipus Rex shows. The problematization of this concept, which presents a parrhesia that is open “to anyone”, proceeds from a truth that can no longer be reconstructed into one single truth (symbol), instead it will be plural, fragmentary and, ultimately, difficult to manage. Therefore, Foucault shows that democracy is based upon an idealization of truth as symbol, a truth that could be reconstructed univocally through the testimonies of all the citizens. In its different stages, however, parrhesia demonstrates that the truth is not univocal. Thus, from Ion to Cassandra, parrhesia loses its positive attributes until it is ejected from the democracy. It is at this juncture that it is considered that in order to exercise parrhesia one needs mathesis or paideia. Then, technologies became a part of the self and not a supplement to it. It is at this moment that the truth about oneself, the truth about the world and the technologies of self are left interwoven until modernity. As a consequence, they begin to draw the outlines of a concept of power that will be coercive and productive at the same time. In Deleuze’s words, “Foucault’s fundamental idea is that of a dimension of subjectivity derived from power and knowledge without being dependent on them” (Deleuze, Spinoza, 101).

Among the different destinations of this concept, I here look at what ties it to modern literature, from tragedy, passing through Menippean satire, down to the polyphonic novel. Literature acquires from this mode the capacity to act critically in the world.

Finally, the last chapter, “Foucault and Literary Theory in the 21st Century”, is a proposal for the dialogue of this later Foucault with the literary theory of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, I take up elements from Foucault the “reader of literature”, from his texts of the sixties, to show his strategies of reading, framed in principle by a Nietzschean legacy and his plurisignificant consideration of text. I have examined the wide use of the metaphor of the eye as reader in his first texts and shown his closeness to Barthes in the early sixties. In the second part, I have set up a dialogue between Foucault and the Marxist tradition of literature, through the Althusserian concept of “Donner à voir”, in particular with Lukács, Bakhtin and his circle, Althusser and Adorno. Lastly, I consider that Foucault’s politics of literature most fruitfully engages with that proposal by Jacques Rancière. For this reason, the last section is devoted to analysing the similarities and differences, principally, based on their respective concepts of truth and literature.

2 Towards a Politics of Literature in Foucault

2.1 Democracy of Literature

The publication of the Collège de France lectures in 2013 have made it necessary to reconsider the question of literature in Foucault’s work. We can affirm that in the early 1960s, literature principally occupied a transgressive “outside”, a marginal-central corpus in relation to his work on the history of thought.² Literature was then an archaeology of discursive forms in a privileged relation to a non-contradictory logos (madness-truth), which enabled Foucault to construct, as Judith Revel would observe, a discourse of experience as passage to a limit that is based in the blurring of the subject (Revel, Foucault, une pensée du discontinu).

At the end of the 1960s, however, following the critique made by Derrida in 1967 in “Cogito and the History of Madness” and his readings of the Anglophone analytic philosophers, Foucault³ accepted the impossibility of thinking a free and freed subject from a position of exteriority, that zero point to which Derrida had referred. As a consequence, the Foucauldian project of the search for novel forms of being would outline in his later works a genealogy that, responding to Derrida, did indeed plant its Greek roots. This was in concordance with his work from the sixties, in which he announced that “fût-il celui de la dissolution du sujet-demeure une expérience, et c’est probablement en cela que reside l’étrangeté de la position de Foucault” (Revel, Foucault, une pensée du discontinu, 143).

After this turn at the end of the 1960s, Foucault sought an alternative to the inside/outside, self/other, law/transgression dichotomy, and literature ceased to occupy that privileged and marginal place that had associated it with Unreason. Following the Buffalo lectures on Sade in 1971 – which I consider to be the threshold between the two definitions – literature is formed as an eventual historical discourse for resistance, which entails consequences for the configuration of common space.

It is therefore at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, as Antonio Campillo states in “Foucault y Derrida: historia de un debate – sobre la historia” [“Foucault and Derrida: history of a debate – on history”] (1995), that a model of thought, Nietzschean in nature, appears: that of thought as resistance. This concept evinces the abandonment of the inside/outside dialectical structure, because it appears inseparably united to power as a reversible concept, in the words of Judith Revel. If power relations are established everywhere, and if there is no outside to transgress towards, resistance implies the possibility of opening new spaces of struggle. The relations of power and resistance are founded contemporaneously and reciprocally. The concept of power in Foucault is now more complex, and it cannot be judged as positive or negative: power is, simultaneously, coercive and productive.

Therefore, neither will literature be the mere production of a word outside the order of discourse; rather, it is spread as “real” discourse. Yet, Revel says, this literature would be a real “that overflows, exceeds, disorders, abandons ‘nature’” (Foucault, une pensée du discontinu, 121), and which would be close to Deleuze’s concept of plane of immanence. We now find the references to literature in Foucault’s work not in the margins or at the periphery, but threaded throughout his principal works. In “The Stage of Philosophy” (1978), Foucault states that the theatre always deals with the event, but this statement can be extended to literature in general. The status of literature shifts, and it now forms part of the discourses that work on the possible as opposed to the immutable. Literature is a historical testimony of an event, which in Foucault, since The Archaeology of Knowledge, always has a linguistic nature.

In an interview given in 1975, “Se débarrasser de la philosophie: À propos de la littérature” [“The Functions of Literature”], Foucault refers to this step as a shift toward “bad literature”. This designation is very similar to what Gilles Deleuze, in that same year, defines in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature as “minor literature”. We must remember that in Deleuze’s definition of “minor literature”, in reference to Kafka, the second characteristic is that “everything in it is political”, insofar as each individual problem is immediately connected with the political, and with the collective – literature is the affair of the people, Deleuze emphasizes in his reading of Kafka (Deleuze, Kafka, 17). Literature is defined by Deleuze as a collective device of utterance and as a machine of desire. “There isn’t a subject; there are only collective assemblages of enunciation, and literature expresses these acts insofar as they’re not imposed from without and insofar as they exist only as diabolical powers to come or revolutionary forces to be constructed” (18).

This evolution toward a politics of literature also has an internal connection with his contemporary works on a political ontology of the present. At the same time, it entails a distancing from his original proposal of an ontology of literature, in which the influence of Martin Heidegger had been fundamental. The relation with Heidegger is particularly interesting in this evolution. In 1947, Heidegger published his Letter on Humanism, in which he confronts the question of the current state of “Humanism”, and for the first time introduces the debate that would culminate in what has been called “posthumanism”. Heidegger considers that the question for the human being passes through a critique of the language of logic and grammar. Philosophy and poetry, says Heidegger, would therefore be responsible for freeing language in order to make possible the happening of being in language, and to expose the truth of being as disclosure:

Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home. Their guardianship accomplishes the manifestation of being insofar as they bring this manifestation to language and preserve it in language through their saying. […] The liberation of language from grammar into a more original essential framework is reserved for thought and poetic creation.

(Letter on Humanism, 11–12)

This event or Ereignis is an ontology of language and is dependent on the classic concept of truth as aletheia. We can consider that Foucault, for his part, at first shared with Heidegger that search for alternative modes of discourse for philosophy in hand with literature, by which I refer to the pieces on literature that he published in the 1960s. But I think that Foucault, in his project of the search for novel forms of being, sets off from a definition of truth that is radically changed, no longer understood as aletheia – in the sense in which Heidegger defined it – but as “games of truth” or veridiction (that is, the modes in which truth is enunciated). In Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling, Foucault stated:

If critical philosophy is a philosophy that starts not from the wonderment that there is being but from the surprise that there is truth, then we can clearly see that there are two forms of critical philosophy. On the one hand, there is that which asks under what conditions – formal or transcendental – there can be true statements. And on the other, there is that which investigates the forms of veridiction, the different forms of truth-telling. In the case of a critical philosophy that investigates veridiction, the problem is that of knowing not under what conditions a statement is true, but rather what are the different games of truth and falsehood that are established, and according to what forms they are established. In the case of a critical philosophy of veridictions, the problem is not that of knowing how a subject in general may understand an object in general. The problem is that of knowing how subjects are effectively tied within and by the forms of veridiction in which they engage.

(Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling, 20)

This distance with respect to Heidegger is crucial, since the constitution of subjectivity will no longer depend on the being of language but on the political subject’s ability to speak, which is defined by their linguistic capability – a linguistic capability that, nonetheless, both for Foucault and for Heidegger, was dominated by rationality, or what in “The Stage of Philosophy” (1978) Foucault called “the theatre of truth”.

Therefore, the concept of literature as event differs from the Heideggerian concept of...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Towards a Politics of Literature in Foucault
• 3 Literature, Subject and Veridiction
• 4 Tragedy and Historical Event
• 5 Foucault and Literary Theory in the 21st Century
• 6 Conclusions
• Index