1

Foucault and Literary Theory

Simon During

Michel Foucault began his career in an intellectual world for which literature and

literary theory mattered a great deal. So it is understandable that, early in his career, literature,

or, at any rate, a particular conception of literature, was a touchstone for him. More that that:

it was a centre around which his work as a whole turned. That remained the case up until

about 1968, when the student/worker revolution transformed the political and cultural order

in France. Although Foucault was not himself directly involved in these events, in their wake,

he moved towards a kind of Maoism for a short period. In 1969, he published What is an

author? an essay which subjected the literary field to a distinctly post-literary inspection. Here

he was interested not in literature as such but in the author function, (by which he meant the

terms on which certain texts and discourses came to have authors while others did not), as well

as in the features and structures which enabled such texts to be authored.1 In an obliquely

Maoist spirit, the essay implied that anonymity, and the radical equality it enabled, was a

condition for a purified literary world.

But during his high literary period, from about 1963 to 1969, he published a series of

more insistently literary essays and reviews, as well as a monograph on Raymond Roussel (first

as plain Raymond Roussel in 1963, translated into English as Death and the Labyrinth: the World of

Raymond Roussel in 1986).2 At this point in his career, his interest in literature flooded into his

non-literary works too. Most importantly, it underpins his breakthrough 1961 monograph on

madness, Folie et Draison. Historie de la folie lge classique (first translated into English as

Madness and Civilization: a History of Insanity in the Age of Reason in 1965), just as it does in his

famous revisioning of intellectual history, Les Mots et Les Choses (1967) (translated into English as

The Order of Things in 1970).3

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In The Order of Things, for instance, the works of avant-garde or outsider writers like the

Marquis de Sade, Stephan Mallarm, Raymond Roussel, Michel Leiris and Francis Ponge reveal

experiences and impulsions that have been occluded by both the classical and the modern

epistemes (or regimes of knowledge) that the book describes. In the classical episteme, knowledge

is constituted by ordered representations of a coherent and rational world, and what writers

like Sade and Mallarm reveal is that language is not simply a set of signs open to rational

analysis and bounded patterns but is, instead, penetrated as far as we can reach within it by

inexhaustible values.4 We might say, that inside literature it is possible to enact that

endlessness of signification which early-modern rationality could not contain. In the modern

episteme, on the other hand, knowledge uncovers the origins and determinations of finite things;

it outlines the determinations of Foucaults particular objects of study (life, labour, language)

by referring back to the obscure forces in which these objects find their origins. Here too,

literary writing breaks the bounds of finitude. Indeed writers like Antoine Artaud and Roussel

who are excluded from normativity in this perioddeemed mad indeed articulate an

experience of the limits of modern finitude and causality. The concept experience is

problematic but crucial here, and I will return to it.5

From an intellectual-historical point of view, literature is central to Foucaults early

work because he mainly comes to it by way of two particular schools of thought. To begin

with, in this period Foucaults method remains broadly structuralist. Which is to say that he

sets out to analyse relations that connect different conceptual orders to one another in terms

that posit particular structures for those relations and he does so in neutral terms, that is

without adhering, or seeming to adhere, to any particular political or ethical program,

especially not to progressivism or humanism. (In this anti-humanist, anti-progressivist context,

the word neutral bears a surprisingly heavy conceptual weight as we are about to see.) Thus in

the History of Madness, Foucault is interested in how a new formationmadnessemerged

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throughout Europe in the late seventeenth century alongside, or, rather, within, a particular

governmental practice he calls confinement. Here the connection between the emergence of

a new social and medical typenamely, the mad personand the practice of confinement is

not posited as external and causal, but rather, as internal and structural.

Although, broadly speaking, this kind of structural analysis was established first in

linguistics (by Ferdinand de Saussure), anthropology (by Claude Levi-Strauss), Marxism (by

Louis Althusser) and comparative philology (Georges Dumzil, the young Foucaults most

important institutional patron), it was then being most effectively popularized in literary

studies, and in particular by Roland Barthes. Foucaults short book on Roussel, which describes

various kinds of writing protocols in Roussels strange but wonderful oeuvre is, on one level at

least, an exercise in Barthesian structuralism, one which demonstrates how a mad writer

reveals the borders that delimit the rationalities of his time. Roussel attests not to madness as

the psychiatrists and the state define it, but rather to the draison that, for structural reasons,

inhabits reason itself. Death and the Labyrinth is simultaneously a structuralist literary analysis

and a contribution to the history of madness.

As these remarks have begun to suggest, literature has a double function for Foucault.

It provides content for structural analysis but it also exceeds or stands outside formal

structuration. In this way it forms the ground upon which Foucaults analysis of structures

stands: as just noted already in the History of Madness, for instance, writers from within

Foucaults preferred literary genealogyin this case the Marquis de Sade and Artaud as well as

Rousselmaintain that form of fundamental unreason which madness as a psychiatric and

confined condition displaces. Literature is, as it were, a space which cannot be contained by

the madness/confinement structure, and which allows us to see madness as neither a rational or

natural phenomenon but as a construct.6 Moving away from epistemology, it is also important

to note that this non-containment is not a matter of resistance. It is not political. It is rather, as
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I say, bound to an experience, an experience which indeed, as I will suggest, resonates with

older mysticisms and negative theologies. It is as if by positing a literary/mystical experience of

unreason, Foucault can treat the madness/confinement couple analytically, neutrally,

structurally.

So, a little paradoxically, this allows us to recognize that, during this period and for all

Foucaults adherence to the movement, structuralism was not the most important context for

his understanding of literature. The notion that literature is a use of language that could elude

the binds of organized knowledge and structures has another lineagewhich emerges out of

Georges Bataille and Leiriss work and, probably most significantly, out of Maurice Blanchots

too. Three of Foucaults essay deal with this lineage explicitly and in detail: 1) A Preface to

Transgression, which appeared in a 1963 issue of Batailles journal Critique devoted to Bataille

himself; 2) Language to Infinity, which appeared the same year in Tel Quel and which amounts

to a position paper for that journals distinct and influential project; and 3) The Thought of the

Outside, an essay on Blanchot, which also appeared in Critique three years later.

Let us briefly examine each in turn. But, first, a caution. In these essaysas in some of

his later workFoucault deploys a distinctive rhetoric of ambiguity.7 On the one hand, these

texts present themselves as neutral descriptions or expositions of particular writers and works.

Under that rubric, they imply no commitment by their author to the projects of the writers

whom he is examining. On the other, subtly and without any explicit declaration, Foucault

seems to be endorsingcelebratinghis chosen writers, absorbing their arguments and

perceptions into his own. Or to risk a further step: is he (just perhaps) also ironizing it?8

Foucaults multilayered ambiguity is helped by Bataille and Blanchots own methods:

they are providing a post-Heideggerian phenomenological and ethical account of the modern

condition (describing a metaphysical experience if one likes) as based in a particular relation to

language and literature, and which thus can be pursued as a mode of philosophical literary
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criticism, i.e. one that is unstably and ambiguously positioned between literary

theory/criticism and philosophy. At any rate, in his ambiguous neutrality Foucault has it several

ways. Is he committing himself to, say, Batailles ethic and metaphysics of transgression? No, he

is merely describing it. But doesnt the intensity, the poetry, the literariness of Foucaults own

prose, modelled on the writers he is describing, express enthusiasm and endorsement? That is

hard to deny. But isnt that enthusiasm a little literary, a little excessive to any philosophical

case being made.A little ironical? Which is also hard sometimes not to think.

Back to the literary essays of the mid 1960s. First, A Preface to Transgression.

Bataille, Foucault here insists, is preoccupied with the related categories of exhaustion, excess,

the limit and transgression which have come to interrupt the twentieth centurys urgent need

to produce and consume.9 And, in Bataille, this preoccupationthis commitment to breaking

out of capitalisms dispositions and limits is bound to sexuality. In particular to sexualitys

relation to radical secularity or what Foucault calls, after Nietzsche, the death of God.10 By

this, Foucault means not the social retreat of Latin Christianitysecularization as sociologists

understand it but the profound metaphysical/spiritual/epistemic shift occasioned by the

disappearance of a particular mode of infinityGods infinitys from European thought and

experience, and the subsequent reign of finitude or what Foucault calls the limitless reign of

the limit.11 This reign of the limit is another way of describing the modern episteme in

which proper thought happens in distinct fields or disciplines which, however, and as we have

noted, refers back to opaque origins and forces.

Foucaults claim in this essay is that it is possible to entertain an inner experience of

this new finitude. Inner experience was itself the title of a book Bataille had published during

the war to which Blanchot had also made a cogent contribution. To put it bluntly: inner

experience is a spiritual experience of that nothingness which exists where God once was.12 As

such, Foucault claims, it is impossible but not non-existent, all the more so because Gods
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death is the death of a God who has never existed and who thus cannot finally die. God was

always a simulacrum, and in Bataille this opens inner experiencea mystical experience up

to affects not traditionally associated with mysticism or indeed any of the spirits operations:

mockery, cruelty, eroticism, profanation.13

For Bataille, sexuality stages such inner experiences not just because, via psychoanalysis

(a modern form of knowledge par excellence), it has provided a master code for the limitless

reign of limits, but because, so Foucault contends, sexuality was itself discovered in the late

eighteenth centuryby Sade no lessin and through transgression itself. In sexuality, the

hidden forces uncovered by (or imagined) by modern disciplined knowledge hold energies that

that knowledge cannot constrain.

For all that, neither Bataille nor Foucaults interest in the inner experience of finitude

is primarily sexual. It is, rather, philosophical and literary. At one level, it is bound to

communication. It is as if the experience of transgressing limits cannot but take the form of

utterance. Foucault affirms this via a classical literary reference: as Homer has said, the gods

send disasters to men so that they can tell of them and as men tell of these disasters (or these

limit experiences), finitude vanishes into the boundlessly adaptable network of language, and

speech finds its infinite resourcefulness.14 In this way, the experience of the nothing that lies

outside (not beyond) the finite provides the basis for finally liberating our language.15 In

Bataille this use of language, which arriving at its confines, overleaps itself, does so because it

does not posit or come under the control of a sovereign subject, and, in this way, outlines its

essential emptiness.16 In what becomes an important thematic for French literary theory of this

period and provides the justification for much avant-garde writing, especially that associated

with the magazine Tel Quel, this sweeping away of the sovereign subject also enables this literary

language to fold back in on itself and tell of itself.17 Lets put it like this: literary language

which approaches metaphysical and spiritual nullity, which frees itself from the control of
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individual subjects, becomes a language that points to its own linguisticity. This proposition is

not argued for by Foucault (or Bataille). It is phatically announced. In its bare emphaticness, it

seems to represent an experience, if (as we can say a little sceptically) an experience actually

grounded on whatever authority the French literary system was then able to ascribe to Bataille.

In Language to Infinity (a programmatic essay for Tel Quels project, almost a

manifesto) Foucault takes up this line of thought from a different, if no less philosophical and

literary, perspective.18 Here, once more, he points to languages capacity to pursue an empty

space beyond finitude. This time Foucault presents this possibility as a breaking down of the

distinction which helped ground Kantian critique: the difference between nihil negativum and

nihil privitumthat is, between a nothing which lies beyond conceptualization, and a nothing

that is merely a determinate absence or gap. Today, so Foucault, the null void cannot be

thought of as a nothing in either of these senses. It is to be figured, somewhat confusingly, as

an empty infinity, a phrase with Blanchotian resonances. (Confusingly because the modern

episteme as Foucault presents it, while it gestures towards opaque origins and forces, does not

set them into an infinity.) But, leaving this aside, this empty infinity is figured here as the space

in which literary language appears and does so, once again, endlessly to extend and double

itself. In this essay, Foucault calls this space, the space of the library in which words lose their

temporality as they are ceaselessly archived. Or, as we can also say, for Foucault here literary

language is language that is true to the endless written production of meaning and thought, a

production that, from within itself, ultimately empties out the tangible world, and, somewhat

mysteriously, allows the written archive to become just about itself.

This line of thought allows Foucault to present an early statement of that method which

would come to be called deconstruction in the US, and to be associated with Derridas name

rather with Foucaults. He contends that natural language have as their condition of possibility

another kind of work of language which can neither be contained within discrete utterances or
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finite texts nor aligned to particular situations and presences. It is, instead, a murmuring that

repeats, recounts and redoubles itself endlessly, and undergoes an uncanny process of

amplification and thickening, in which our language today is lodged and hidden.19 And, once

again, this enabling grammatology (as we can call the murmuring of the library, loosely

borrowing Derridas term) appears only as directed towards the null place that appears on the

far side of secular finitude.

In Foucault then (but not in Derrida), the emergence of this kind of language is a

historicizable condition just because it exists in and for the modern era of secular, spiritual and

epistemic finitude. It comes into being just as literature alongside (or inside) the modern

episteme. More specifically, of course, literature emerges when thickened, doubled, ceaseless

language takes written form, something that can only happen in flashes directed towards the

null void. But as Foucault claims, channelling Blanchot, in the late eighteenth century literary

texts are directed towards the null void as it appears under the cover of personal death itself

that modern death that promises no immortality. By this account, literature as such appears

most concretely in late eighteenth-century Gothic fictions where language takes flight from its

received usages and genres to confront the consequences of tombs in which bodies merely rot.

It is in these terms that in 1962 Foucault published an important essay about the little known

Gothic writer, Rvroni de Saint-Cyr and his recently reprinted novel, Pauliska ou la Pervesit

(1795) whose underground cages and traps, devoted to counter-natural eroticisms, mark the

boundaries of the human and inhuman and thus a kind of living death.20 And which (although

Foucault does not himself explicitly gesture at this) it is difficult to read today except as tinged

by an irony, a libertine self-mockery we might say.

Of the three major literary essays I am describing, the last, Language to Infinity is the

least ambiguous in the sense that I have just outlined. If it is not merely analytic, its

programmatic and literary nature remain under wraps. That is less the case with the piece on
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Blanchot that Foucault published in 1966. Here, Foucault returns to the question of literatures

origins both at a particular historical conjuncture and in a particular turn in language, or, to

state this more carefully, in the new relation that language has to itself. Literature begins,

Foucault here proposes, rifffing on his 1963 essays, not where language becomes self-conscious

and self-referential as where it gets as far away from itself as possible.21 It comes into being

when language passes itself off not in thoughts about the world or in representations of the

world or in expressions of interiority but in performative and self-referential speech acts as

modelled in the bare statement: I speak. Such performances in their nakedness and apparent

independence of the system of language that they nonetheless depend upon dissolve the subject

itself. Here sheer utterance stands in the place of the self. This line of thought has, of course, a

familiar ring. But what is important this time, is that the fiction (as Foucault also now calls it)

through which language detaches itself from representation and subjectivity and thus empties

itself out, is presented as a neutral space which is also an outside. It is neutral, in particular,

because it lies outside subjectivity. Neutral, too, because it is a language spoken by nobody

and because it belongs to a space in which no existence can take root.22 More particularly, it

has no truck with the human itself.

And for Foucault here once again, it is possible to experience this neutrality, this outside.

It is this insistence on experience that demands that we understand his analysis of the

emergence of modern literary language not just as a prophecy or as an announcement reliant on

accumulated authority but in relation to the history of mysticism. This is especially true because

here Foucault again insists that the experience of the neutral happens via an attraction to the

null void that envelops the modern cosmos, which opens up with death. For him, it is just such

an experience that Blanchots writings, his fictions or rcits articulate, and which form the basis,

it may appear, of Foucaults own literary (and spiritual) disposition at the time.
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At any rate, it is in the context of making this point that Foucaults own language

becomes poetic:

Languagein its attentive and forgetful being, with its power of dissimulation

that effaces every determinate meaning and even the existence of the speaker, in the

gray neutrality that constitutes the hiding place of all being and thereby frees the space

of the imageis neither truth nor time, neither eternity nor man; it is instead the

always undone form of the outside. It places the origin in contact with death (il fait

communiquer..lorigine et la mort), or rather brings them both to light in the flash of their

infinite (indfinie) oscillationa momentary in a boundless space. The pure outside of

the origin, if that is indeed what language is eager to greet (attentive accueillir), never

solidifies into a penetrable and immobile positivity; and the perpetually rebegun

outside of death, although carried toward the light by the essential forgetting of

language, never sets the limit at which truth would finally begin to take shape. They

immediately flip sides. The origin takes on the transparency of the endless; death opens

interminably onto the repetition of the beginning. And what language is (not what it

means, not the form in which it says what it means), what language is in its being, is

that softest of voices (cette voix si fine), that nearly imperceptible retreat, that weakness

deep inside and surrounding every thing and every facewhat bathes the belated effort

of the origin and the dawnlike erosion of death in the same neutral light, at once day

and night. Orpheuss murderous forgetting, Ulysses wait in chains, are the very being

of language.23

This is a paean to how modern literary language bleaches the world into a timeless gray

melancholy. But the passage is, of course, deeply ambiguous. Is the passage merely

ventriloquizing Blanchot? Or is it better understood as Foucaults own assent to Blanchots

project, and a prophetic affirmative evocation of a turn in language which has the capacity to
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erase all traces of historical humanity? Or do overwritten phrases like dawnlight erosion of

death bear with them an excess that points to their own undoing?

At the very least, it is possible to accept the final pages of Foucaults essay on Blanchot

as the culmination of an attraction to what we might call deconstructive mysticism, as sketched

out by Blanchot most of all. But as we know, by the early 1970s, this attraction and the writerly

mode it solicits disappear in Foucaults work. That statement needs a crucial qualification,

however. Foucaults position to the various objects and forms that he analyses after 1968

remains neutral. This, however, not quite the neutrality of the structuralist or the scientist or

the positivist historian say. Nor is it quite Blanchots literary-mystical neutrality: it is at the very

least, the ambiguous neutrality of someone who believes that neutrality is strictly speaking

impossible, and who accepts that neutrality is an desire for, or attraction to, a fiction of an

outside which bears with it an ambiguity, an oscillation to use Foucaults word in the passage

just cited, between inside and outside, evocation and description, commitment and

detachment, affirmation and irony. And indeed, bears with it, at whatever remove, an

oscillation between what is living and has force and what has dead and has none.

This ambiguity is, in the end, literary. Or, better put, it comes most powerfully into

existence at the point at which the spiritual, the metaphysical and the literary intersect.

Foucaults relations to many of those formations he will examine from the seventies on

disciplinarity and prison; sexuality, the truth/power relation, biopower, governmentality in

general, philosophical forms of ancient Greek care of self, neoliberalismare neutral in this

literary sense, that is to say, ambiguous, suggestive, ungraspable. Did his turn, for a moment,

to thinking about how lives might be shaped aesthetically contain an element of social and

political critique? Did, for instance, Foucault become a proto-neoliberal? A cynic? A partisan of

governmental rationalities? It is ambiguous. And that amibiguity is, as I say, finally literary.

***
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I have attempted to describe Foucaults understanding of literature during the period it

mattered most to him intellectually. But what about the impact of that understanding on

others? On Anglophone literary studies in particular? After all, if today we wish to treat

Foucualt other than intellectual historically then it is the traces of his work on othersits

continuing shaping forcethat is important. As a literary theorist, Foucault was, as we have

seen, positioned between structuralism and a particular strand of post-Heideggerian

phenomenology for which language possesses, unstably, profound metaphysical and spiritual

capacities. Which is to say is that he was, ambiguously, something like a mystical

deconstructionist. But his contributions to literary theory were not taken up in the English

speaking world. In particular, they had no impact comparable to Derridas less prophetic, less

ambiguous, more philosophically serious, version of deconstruction.

Nonetheless Foucaults contribution to Anglophone literary studies was profound, even

if what English-speaking literary critics and historians came to find useful in his oeuvre was not

his own work on literature as such but his startlingly original historical arguments. Let me give

just three instances: his concept of a carceral society and, especially, his typification of

Benthams Panopticon, was taken up by new historicists in the 1980s.24 His famous

denunciation of the repressive hypothesisnamely his argument against the claim that

sexuality had been repressed in the 19th and early 20th centuries and liberated in the nineteen

sixties and his suggestion that, to the contrary, sexuality as a conept was produced in the

effort to know and control it (a line of thought already implicit in his literary essay on Bataille)

had an immense impact on theory, for instance, because it detached the concepts of sexuality

and of sexual identity from gender. (And so his counter-intuitive notion that there were no

homosexuals until the late 19th century helped liberate queer literary theory). Last, his interest

in care of self and self-fashioning in the period following the first volume of his History of

Sexuality lay behind not just new historicist interpretations of the early modern period (in
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Stephen Greenblatts Renaissance Self-fashioning of 1980 (which also influenced Foucault) but

also behind more recent accounts of how literary reading helps form practices and personas.25

More broadly still, Foucauldian historiography which is neither progressivist nor conservative,

which does not think in terms of traditions, nations, or epochs, helped order new historicisms

understanding of history, as a more or less contingently assembly of genealogies,

problematizations and relations.

These reflections solicit the question: Why did the literary theory that Foucault was

associated with not take a firmer grip on the Anglophone academy? The reasons for this, I

would argue, are fundamentally structural. But in order fully to acknowledge this we need a

firmer understanding of what Anglophone literary criticism has been.

Academic literary criticism, as practiced in the US and, more especially, in the UK and

the British Commonwealth, was a very specific disciplinary formation.26 Up until the mid-

seventies, it took various forms of which, however, two were centralin the US new

criticism, and in the UK and the Commonwealth, Leavisism. Both were offshoots of a

critical mode that had been established by T.S. Eliot in his literary journalism around 1920, and

first developed for pedagogy and scholarship by I.A. Richards, William Empson and others at

the University of Cambridge soon after.27

To present this new form of knowledge and practice in summary form, we can say that

it assumed a particular account of cultural history, namely that, as traditional society

disappeared under capitalism, rational thought was turn asunder from emotion. As result,

modern experience was disjoined, prone to cruel instrumentalisms on the one side and

sentimentalisms on the other. But traces of and possibilities for experiences that unified affect

and reason were still to be found in certain literary textsmost of all in metaphysical poetry

and Elizabethan drama, but also in some novels. If the reader were properly trained, to read

such works was to have an experience that came from outside modernity and its modes of
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experience. The task of the literary critic was to scrutinize and assess the archive; to select a

canon of texts that had this capacity; and to train students to recognize and respond properly to

them too. That educative process proceeded through minute attention to linguistic detail,

through so-called close reading.

This project was most full realized by F.R. and Q.D. Leavis who had been trained at

Cambridge in the immediate postwar period. Especially after the second world war, they

attempted to institutionalize it from within the social democratic state, in their idea for an

English school. For their part, the American new critics, however, downplayed the ethical

and political dimensions of Eliot and Leaviss enterprise by emphasising the unity and balance of

the literary text just as a discrete verbal thing. The canons restitutive powers were less

apparent to them.

Obviously enough, this project is very different from Foucaults own account of

literature in the sixties. But they share a couple of significant features.

First, both Foucault and early Anglophone literary criticism proposed a literary canon

against normative modernity. Of course their vision of literary resistance was very different. As

we have seen, Foucaults canon was selected from the French avant-garde, while Eliot, Leavis,

Cleanth Brooks etc canon was Anglophone and mainstream. Also: for the Anglophone critics,

old literature countered modernity primarily because it carried traces of traditional society,

while Foucaults canonfrom de Sade to Blanchot and Pierre Klossowiskitook modernity to

its limits. It did not so much resist modernity as spill out of it.

Second, and relatedly, for both Foucault and the Anglophone critics, literary texts

were not just linguistic. They were experiences. As we know, this was what tied Foucaults

affirmation of the transgressive or exorbitant canon to mysticism. And, in F.R. Leaviss case in

particular, this is what allowed him to think of literary training as a practice of selfa reshaping
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of sensibilityso as to make students responsive to those fuller, more coherent experiences,

those traces of the past, that some texts (supposedly) offer.

Foucaults contributions to literary theory were written just before the moment that

this particular form of literary criticism disintegrated in the English-speaking world. By the

time that they were translated, new criticism and Leavisism had been replaced by a

heterogeneous set of practices, of which the most important were, first, the kind of

poststructuralism developed each in their own way by Derrida and Paul de Man, and, second,

identity politics critique heralded by feminism in particular. In this context Foucaults own

literary theory, based on Bataille and Blanchot, made little headway. Why?

Because unlike other post-structuralisms but like the forms of criticism that followed

from Eliot, it was based in counter-hegemonic experience, and indeed in an abstract, universal,

mystical experience. As such, unlike the criticism that followed Eliot, it held no promise for

pastorality: it was not trying to form fuller, richer, more sensitive sensibilities or selves. Au

contraire. Nor was it emancipatory in intent, unlike feminism or postcolonialism for instance.

That, I would further argue, was precisely because it was French. In France, the state carried

out a centralizing, universalist, republican ideological program which officially took care of

pastorality and emancipation. Resistance to the French state project, which was commonplace

in and after the Gaullist period, did not however take the form of emancipating identities or

supplementing or intensifying citizens self-care, it rather contended for different, less

restrictive, less hierarchical power structures. Politics and the formation of selves were not

considered to be a responsibility of, or even a possibility for, a literary pedagogy which was,

anyway, under the control of the state. That was true of Foucaults literary theory of the sixties

too: it had no political or pastoral charge. It turned itself, rather, to emptiness, to impossible

infinities, to languages inexhaustibility, to death. And that message was not especially

attractive to Anglophone liberal-arts intellectuals of the seventies and eighties who, in the
 16

absence of state ideology, felt they had the responsibility to raise consciousness across civil

society, not to annul it.

1 What is an Author? in Aesthetics: the Essential Works 2, ed. James D. Faubion. Trans. Robert

Hurley et al. (London: Allen Lane, 1998), 221. Henceforth cited as Aesthetics.

2 Secondary sources on Foucault and literature include Simon During, Foucault and Literature,

(London: Routledge 1992); and Timothy OLeary, Foucault, Experience, Literature, Foucault

Studies, 5 (2008): 5-25

3 Another unexpurgated English translation of Folie et Draison was published as The History of

Madness in 2006.

4 Michel Foucault, The Order of Discourse: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences, (New York:

Pantheon 1971), 114.

5 For an insightful line into Foucault, literature and experience see Timothy OLeary, Foucault

and Fiction: the Experience Book, (London: Bloomsbury 2011).

6 For another articulation of this way of thinking, see, Judith Revel, The Literary birth of

Biopolitics , in V. Cisney and N. Moraer (eds.), Biopower: Foucault and Beyond, (Chicago, The

University of Chicago Press, 2013), 16-42.

7 Foucaults use of ambiguity is not a topic that has received as much attention by Foucault

scholars as it might. But see Alan Megill, Foucault, ambiguity, and the rhetoric of

historiography, History of the Human Sciences 3/3 (1990): 381-396.

8 On Foucaults irony, see Mark D. Jordan, Foucaults Ironies and the Important Earnest of

Theory, Foucault Studies, 14: 7-19.

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9 A Preface to Transgression, Aesthetics, p. 84.

10 Aesthetics, p. 71.

11 Aesthetics, p. 71. It is important to understand here that this account of the modern finitude

stands in more or less direct contradiction of Alexandre Koyrs famous 1959 theory of modern

cosmology as moving from a closed Aristotelian system to an infinite one.

12 Aesthetics, p. 72.

13 Aesthetics, p. 74.

14 Aesthetics, p. 89.

15 Aesthetics, p. 76.

16 Aesthetics, p. 83.

17 Aesthetics, p. 90.

18 For Tel Quel and literature, and Foucaults role, see Danielle Marx-Scouras, The Cultural

Politics of Tel Quel: Literature and the Left in the Wake of Engagement, (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania

State University Press 1996).

19 Aesthetics, p. 91.

20 Aesthetics, p. 65.

21 Aesthetics, p. 149.

22 Aesthetics, p. 166.

23 Aesthetics, p. 168. Because the translation does not quite catch all the tones of the original (no

translation can), I have inserted some important phrases from the original in brackets. They

come from, Michel Foucault, La pense du dehors, in Dit et crits 1. 1954-1975, eds. Daniel

Defert and Franois Ewald. (Paris: Gallimard 2001): 546-567.

24 Perhaps the most often referred to book in this vein is D.A. Millers The Novel and the Police,

(Berkeley, Ca: University of California Press 1988).

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25 As for instance in Joshua Landys excellent recent, How to Do Things with Fictions, (New York:

Oxford University Press 2012).

26 The most useful available history of modern literary criticism is Chris Baldicks Criticism and

Literary Theory: 1890 to the Present, (London: Longman 1996); William Marxs Naissance de la

critique: la literature selon Eliot et Valry, (Arras-Cedex: Artois Presses Universit 2002) shows

that modern French and Anglophone literary criticism were on different tracks from the

beginning of the twentieth century. Its argument helped suggest my own here.

27 The following paragraphs condense the argument of my When literary criticism mattered,

in The values of literary studies, ed. Ronan McDonald. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

2016), 120-136. See also Mark Janowitz, The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism, (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press 2006).