Language, Madness, and Desire: On Literature

177 Pages·2015·1.15 MB·English

by  Michel Foucault

M I C H E L F O U CAU LT
translated by robert bononno
edited by philippe artières,
jean-françois bert,
mathieu potte-bonneville,
and judith revel
LANGUAGE, MADNESS, AND DESIRE
ON LITERATURE
Language, Madness, and Desire

MICHEL FOUCAULT
LANGUAGE, MADNESS,
AND DESIRE
On Literature
Edited by Philippe Artières, Jean- François Bert,
Mathieu Potte- Bonneville, and Judith Revel
Translated by Robert Bononno
University of Minnesota Press
MinneaPolis
london
Originally published in French as La grande étrangère: À propos de littéra-
ture, by Michel Foucault. Copyright 2013 by Éditions de l’École des Hautes
Études en Sciences Sociales.
Selections of poetry from “Simulacre,” “Le Point cardinal,” “Glossaire j’y
serre mes gloses,” “Bagatelles végétales,” and “Marrons sculptés pour Miró”
are reprinted from Mots sans mémoires, by Michel Leiris. Copyright 1969
Éditions Gallimard, Paris.
Every effort was made to obtain permission to reproduce material in this
book. If any proper acknowledgment has not been included here, we encour-
age copyright holders to notify the publisher.
English translation copyright 2015 by Robert Bononno
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior writ-
ten permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401– 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress CataLoging-in-PubLiCation Data
Foucault, Michel, 1926–1984.
Language, madness, and desire: on literature / Michel Foucault; edited by
Philippe Artières, Jean-François Bert, Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, and Judith
Revel; translated by Robert Bononno.
isbn 978-0-8166-9323-8 (hc)
1. Literature—History and criticism. I. Artières, Philippe. II. Bert, Jean-
François. III. Potte-Bonneville, Mathieu. IV. Revel, Judith. V. Bononno, Rob-
ert, translator. VI. Title.
Pn45.f5913 2015
801—dc23 2015005045
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Editors’ Introduction vii
Note on the Text xx
Language, Madness, and Desire
Language and Madness 3
The Silence of the Mad 7
Mad Language 25
Literature and Language 41
Session 1: What Is Literature? 45
Session 2: What Is the Language of Literature? 66
Lectures on Sade 93
Session 1: Why Did Sade Write? 97
Session 2: Theoretical Discourses and Erotic Scenes 115
Editors’ Notes 147

Editors’ Introduction
“At one time, I read a great deal of what is referred to as ‘liter-
ature.’ In the end, I rejected many of them because of inability,
most likely because I didn’t have the right code to read them.
Now [1975] we have books such as Under the Volcano and The
Opposing Shore. A writer I like very much is Jean Demelier; I was
very impressed with Le rêve de Job. Tony Duvert’s work as well. For
those of my generation, great literature was American literature,
it was Faulkner. It’s reasonable to assume that having access to
contemporary literature through foreign literature alone, whose
source one can never reach, introduces a kind of distance with
respect to literature. Literature was the great unknown.”1
In this 1975 interview about Jacques Almira’s Le voyage à Nau-
cratis (the manuscript of which he received in the mail), Foucault
indulged in a rare description of the literature in his library.2 As
we can see, this short list is very diverse. The range of Foucault’s
readings extended from young authors like Jean Demelier3 and
Jacques Almira to Julien Gracq. At the same time, he expressed
his admiration for Thomas Mann, Malcolm Lowry, and William
Faulkner,4 an admiration that, in 1970, led him to visit Faulkner’s
world, traveling the Mississippi River valley all the way to Nat-
chez. Foucault’s history as a reader has yet to be fully explored.
According to his brother, in their childhood home in Poitou, two
separate libraries confronted one another: one was paternal—
learned, medical, and off limits—a nd resided in the office of his
father, a surgeon; the other was maternal, literary, and open.
There, Foucault discovered Balzac, Flaubert, and classical litera-
ture. At school, where he was educated by members of the Cath-
olic clergy, he read Greek and Latin.5 It was on the Rue d’Ulm,
where he had access to the amazing library of the École Nor-
vii
Editors’ Introduction
male Supérieure, one of the leading public libraries in France,
which held poetry and philosophical treatises, critical essays
and historical texts, that Foucault was able to experience a form
of unrestricted reading. In the ENS library, maintained by Mau-
rice Boulez, he deconstructed an order of discourse, and litera-
ture appeared before his eyes.6 Daniel Defert, in his chronology
in Dits et écrits, provides some additional information: Fou-
cault read Saint-J ohn Perse in 1950, Kafka in 1951, Bataille and
Blanchot in 1953, followed the progress of the nouveau roman
(including the work of Alain Robbe-G rillet), discovered Raymond
Roussel in the summer of 1957, the authors associated with Tel
Quel (Philippe Sollers, Claude Ollier) in 1963, reread Becket in
January 1968.
We cannot overlook the importance of Foucault’s foreign trav-
els in 1956: daily trips to the archives of the Maison de France in
Uppsala and the Centre de civilisation française in Warsaw had
a significant effect on Foucault’s close relationship to literary
language. Amid the solitude of the Swedish and Polish winter,
Foucault read a great deal—R ené Char’s poetry was his bedtime
reading—a nd taught literature. It was there, surrounded by two
languages that were foreign to him, that he underwent his first
great experience with writing, there too that he taught French
several hours a week and several courses on French literature,
including a memorable lecture on love in French literature from
Sade to Genet. In Sweden, Foucault led a theater club, where he
put on several contemporary works with his students.7 In 1959, in
Cracow and Gdansk, he gave lectures on Apollinaire. More anec-
dotal evidence in the history of Foucault the reader is found in his
meetings, while in Uppsala, with Claude Simon, Roland Barthes,
and Albert Camus, who had come to receive the Nobel Prize. Just
as, toward the end of his life, he frequented several young writers
(Mathieu Lindon, Hervé Guibert) without ever “discussing” liter-
ature, it is likely that he read these authors without ever entering
into a dialogue with them, just as he never met Maurice Blan-
viii
Editors’ Introduction
chot, claiming that “he admired him too much to become friends
with him.”8 During the early 1960s, Foucault engaged in an inti-
macy with literature that is apparent from an examination of his
preparatory notes for the History of Madness. An investigation
of the archives of institutionalization, registers from Bicêtre, as
well as lettres de cachet served initially as a literary experience,
which he would later describe to the historian Arlette Farge in the
introduction to Le désordre des familles.9 Foucault was drawn to
the beauty of the poetics of the archive, these pure graphic exis-
tences, which he himself referred to as “the course that literature
would follow from the seventeenth century onward.”10
Nonetheless, he continued to guard himself against such inti-
macy. For example, Foucault describes his first encounter with
the work of Raymond Roussel, an author to whom he devoted
an entire book in 1963, as follows: At the José Corti bookstore,
“I found my attention drawn to a series of books of that faded
yellow color used by publishing firms of the late nineteenth cen-
tury . . . I came upon the work of someone I had never heard
of named Raymond Roussel, and the book was entitled La Vue.
Well, from the first line I was completely taken by the beauty of
the style.”11
The “great unknown” would, in fact, be a clandestine moment;
for Foucault was not just a demanding reader and a writer whose
style, with the release of each of his books, came to be admired
and recognized. Reading him closely, at a time when we have
access not only to his major publications but also to his col-
lected writings (Dits et écrits) and his lectures at the Collège de
France, it has become clear that the philosopher’s relationship
with literature—t he documents contained in the present volume
are a magnificent testimony to this—w as complex, critical, and
strategic.
In reading the many prefaces, interviews, and lectures that
Foucault devoted to literature in the 1960s (whether they address
writers such as Blanchot and Bataille directly or examine the tra-
ix