Foucault and Literature

Towards a Genealogy of Writing

Simon During

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780415012423
• eBook ISBN: 9781000153248
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: English Language
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The writings of the French historian, literary critic and philosopher Michel Foucault have been of immense importance to developments in literary studies since the late 1970s. He, more than anyone, stands behind the new historicism' and cultural materialism' that currently dominate international literary studies. Simon During provides a detailed introduction to the whole body of Foucault's work, with a particular emphasis on his literary theory. His study takes in Foucault's early studies of transgressive' writing from Sade and Artaud to the French new novellists' of the 1960s, and his later concern with the genealogy of the author/intellectual, writing and theorizing within specific, historical mechanisms of social control and production. Foucault and Literature offers a critique both of Foucault and of the literary studies that have been influenced by him, and goes on to develop new methods of post-Foucauldian literary/cultural analysis.

1

Madness

EARLY WORK

Foucault’s career has its roots in his years as a student at the École Normale Supérieure. There he studied philosophy under Jean Hyppolite and also came under the influence of the historian and philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard. In Hyppolite he encountered a thinker who, with Alexander Kojève, draws Hegel’s thought into the French philosophic tradition. Hyppolite’s Hegel is not an enlightened philosopher who can affirm the identity of the rational and the real, and the “cunning” with which reason makes use of negativity, closure and death. On the contrary, he is the forerunner of those recent philosophic schools for whom desire and negativity provide history’s continuing and inescapable motor force. As Foucault was to put it in a commemoration address given after his teacher’s death: for Hyppolite, philosophical thought sketches out a field it can never cover (1969a, 132). An ambitious claim lies implicit in this – once we are permitted to think of a Hegel for whom reason and history can never merge, or, rather, for whom this merging (known as “totality”) is utopian rather than realizable, and for whom “reason” itself works not to resolution but as an ongoing process, then much European philosophy since Hegel’s time might exist as footnotes to the master. The anxiety of this influence was especially intense as, by the 1950s, Hyppolite, under the spell of Heidegger, was already able to articulate his position explicitly against both historicism and humanism.¹ It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that Foucault is haunted by this dark and non-totalizing dialect throughout his career though he comes to draw it into his own writing fully only when he conceives of his work as a “history of problematizations.”

In Bachelard, Foucault comes into contact with a body of work difficult to read as Hegelian on any terms. Bachelard argues that justifications for the rationality of science cannot be considered independently of the history of scientific thought and practices. Georges Canguilhem will flesh out this thesis into the “Foucauldian” argument that the human sciences are developed on the highly administered subjects of the modern state. For Bachelard, however, each scientific theory involves a finite “epistemology”; that is, a set of assumptions about what counts as true knowledge. Science, which continuously breaks with common sense, creates its own objects. It deals not with things as they really are but with theoretical constructs: developing not as an orderly continuum, not as a gradual unfolding of increasingly rational theories, but in leaps and discontinuities. As old sciences are sedimented into new modes of common sense, new sciences break from common sense again. Thus each past theory, each past epistemological frame, must be understood in its own terms and not, in the Hegelian manner, as anticipating the present and opening into the future. Yet the philosopher of science must account for past scientific theories from the standpoint of the present. In particular, the Newtonian order must be regarded not as “natural” or “true” but in the defamiliarizing light of post-Newtonian physics. Even from these summary remarks we can see that Hyppolite and Bachelard (who work in quite different philosophic registers) are both concerned with the question of the limit of science or philosophy and, indeed, the history not so much of knowledge itself as of its limits. Foucault takes from his teachers the notion that careful historical research reveals stories about the continual interplay between “truth” and its objects – “continual” because no theory can bridge the separation between truth and its objects once and for all.

On finishing his degree, instead of continuing with philosophy or history – the traditional paths for entry into teaching or public administration – Foucault turned to psychology. What was still more unorthodox, he turned towards so-called existential psychology, which decisively rejects the dominant French psychological tradition founded by Freud’s rival, Pierre Janet. Resisting claims to scientificity, existential psychology applies (often rather trivialized) versions of Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein to actual non- “normal” mental phenomena. Bachelard, Hyppolite and the existential psychoanalysts do not – cannot – merge as a seamless web in Foucault’s work. His very first book Maladie mentale et personnalité (1954a) is dramatically split in two. The first half consists of a critique of both evolutionary psychology and Freudianism from the post-Heideggerian point of view. He argues that neither psychoanalysis, which is based on the individual’s life history, nor any psychology which regards mental events as effects or aspects of physical lesions or regressions, can account for the fact that mental illness is experienced as, for instance, anxiety. This means that, whatever causes it, the illness as lived remains connected to a deeper and fundamental reality, an “a-priori” as he calls it, which constitutes Being- in-the-world and shapes human moods and responses. So mental pathology is not simply to be regarded as a deviation from normalcy, it involves a flight from the world towards a radical solitude, an abandonment of meaning for incoherence. Such a flight is “morbid,” yet it is also a movement towards the profoundly unstable structures of human existence, upon which the same order of cause and effect is built. In its second part, however, the book has a different tone. It urges a marxian analysis of the ways that the symptoms of mental pathology are determined by social contradictions. (Foucault had not long left the Party at this time). Mental illness is here understood as a strategy for coping with social alienation; indeed it depends quite closely on the Russian psychology of the time. These two approaches, which barely seem to belong in a single book, can never unite, because of what I want to call the historico-ontological gap. This gap exists because, from the side of existential psychology, actual social contradictions must themselves be reducible to the fundamental conditions of Being-in-the- world; whereas from the side of historicism, “anxiety,” “boredom” and so on do not belong to the way things are but are characteristics of individuals formed by specific historical circumstances – or historical and cultural discourse about such individuals. Foucault tries to sidestep this discrepancy by differentiating mental illness from madness. Madness (la folie) becomes the name for a condition which expresses a basic, not to say cosmic, lack, while mental illness is the term used to describe how society conceives of, and controls, madness. It is important to grasp this move because it, and increasingly subtle versions of it, remain basic to his work right up until the work on power.

In the same year as Maladie mentale et personnalité appeared, Foucault also published a long “Preface” to Ludwig Binswanger’s Dream and Existence (itself first published in Germany in 1930), although the “Preface” was actually written the year before. Thus Foucault’s work begins, like Derrida’s, when he introduces a German phenomenological work. (Derrida translates Edmund Husserl’s late work The Origins of Geometry.) In his preface, Foucault does not summarize Binswanger’s thesis, or produce a commentary on it, rather – in an approach which will become characteristic – he defines its “problematic” (to use a word that he borrowed from Bachelard). This problematic is the confrontation between Freud and phenomenology, and the topic which highlights this confrontation most clearly is the dream. Binswanger rejects psychology’s title as the founding science of man. For him there is an ontological condition of possibility within which “man” operates. As Foucault puts it in directly Heideggerian terms: “Let us say … that being man (Menschsein) is after all only the effective and concrete content of what ontology analyzes as the transcendental structure of Dasein” (1954b, 11). Binswanger’s task is to show how this transcendental structure is to be traced in psychoanalysis. Foucault suggests that the transcendental structure of Dasein can be connected to the concrete contents of that structure – that is, human existence (Menschsein) – by analyzing the conditions in which meaning is possible. The logic goes like this: being man means living in a world which had meaning or significance, so the conditions of possibility of being-man are also the preconditions of meaning. But the grounds of meaning are things which can never be fully explained purely in terms of their communicative function or in a grid that already contains a semantic (or “meaningful”) aspect. Thus meaning is already embedded in a primordial world of space and time. And Binswanger, as a phenomenologist, also wants to give a fundamental account of these primordial experiences (or forms) embedded in space and time.

On the other hand, meaning itself must already express: “In order to mean something, the word implies a world of expression which precedes it” (1986a, 41). Foucault argues that what underlies all its structures is an act of expression: “word and image are conjugated in the first person at the very moment that they achieve objective form” (1986a, 41). Here “expression” differs from signification: it belongs neither to the social world of communication, not to the structuring processes that semiotics brings to light, nor to the psychological world of interpretation and therapy. Rather, it describes the way that the meaning of the image itself is shaped and constructed by experiences – as if signs must carry the traces of experiences (of pleasures and pains) in order for them, ultimately, to have meaning. (In Husserl’s Logical Investigations, to which Foucault and Binswanger are deeply indebted here, “meaning” is the product of the resistance that the materiality of the signifier presents to the act of expression.) Thus, in existential psychology, dreams express or (in this sense) “mean” more than they apparently signify – and what they express are not symptoms, phantasies, simple desires or traumas but primordial, ontological forces. Indeed, the dream’s first person, its subject, connects to the way that things fundamentally are just because dreams are not in the ordinary sense of the term meaningful, saturated by signification: “they are rich by reason of the poverty of their objective content” (44). This category of “poverty” that permits the (paradoxical) passage from being to meaning can be analyzed. Foucault argues that to do so one must move, at least provisionally, from Husserl and Heidegger to Freud. Phenomenology has a deeper understanding of the processes of, structures of, and lacks in meaning than psychoanalysis, but it needs psychoanalysis to fill out these meanings, to show what they indicate. Thus the formula which determines the “Preface”: “Phenomenology has succeeded in making images speak; but it has given no one the possibility of understanding their language.” That is existential psychology’s task, borrowing as is does from psychoanalysis the interpretative techniques spelled out in Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. Where does psychoanalysis fail? Freud believes that the symbol fully connects the interior world of meaning to the exterior world of matter and sensation just because it is what it means (and what it means is, ultimately, always desire) – rather than how it feels or what it looks like. According to Foucault in the “Preface,” psychoanalysis has ignored the materiality of the image, the stuff of the imaginary, at the same time as it tells us that signification can never divest itself of a certain materiality. In short, Freud turned expression into signification too easily, and so came to believe that stories about familial and inter-generational conflict could ultimately explain the shaping of subjectivity and the “meaning” of cultural forms. (One should remember that another interpretation of Freud’s work is possible: for instance, in their work Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok have insisted on the importance of “word-things,” words as things, in the mental processes that Freud brings to light.) This is the beginning of Foucault’s long critique of Freud as remaining too close to the human sciences, as believing that the conditions which make consciousness possible can be drawn into the domain of science, that the opaque thisness of things can be make to speak. (As I have already indicated, later in Foucault’s career this critique will broaden out into an attack on the analytic power of the category of “lack” – or “castration” – itself. We can put it like this: Foucault will come to envisage a poverty that is not a lack.)

This play between the materiality of signs and their “expression” is focused on by much of the philosophic work done in France between Merleau-Ponty and Derrida. (Such work will reach its fullest development during the 1960s in Jean-François Lyotard’s Discours, figure and Gilles Deleuze’s Logique du sens). It also lies behind Derrida’s use of words like “trace” and “spacing” which gestures to a spatio-temporal object (more apparent in writing than in the voice) which is the precondition of the effect we call “meaning”; but which cannot either ever ground meaning or be fully accounted for within it. As we began to see in the “Preface,” an insistence that sheer, meaningless, chancy materiality enables the order of sense is characteristic of post-phenomenological thought, though Derrida and Paul de Man remind us that we cannot permit our sense of the irreducible materiality of the sign to reassure us that language might function outside the paradoxes of signification, that language can be accounted for in terms of the play of the matter which is its vehicle.

In second generation phenomenologists like Binswanger, the basic, ontological conditions of existence are layered or broken: Being is folded in the Heideggerian sense. At one level, these conditions take the form of simple polar oppositions. The play of light and shade, the movement from large close spaces to distant ones, rising and falling – these become the contents of experience embedded in Dasein. For this kind of thinking, phrases like “falling in love” are not just metaphors. As Binswanger writes: “The nature of poetic similes lies in the deepest roots of our existence where the vital forms and contents of our mind are still bound together. When, in a bitter disappointment, ‘we fall from the clouds,’ then we fall – we actually fall. Such falling is neither purely of the body nor something metaphorically derived from physical falling” (1963, 223). Here language is the immediate expression of the shape of our responses (so to speak) at the deepest “anthropological” level. Yet for Binswanger, phenomena like “rising” or “falling” in turn become what can only still be described as “metaphors” for increasingly abstract conditions: the play of authenticity and inauthenticity, of risk and stasis and so on in the human condition. Or rather, deep experiential content is structured as the play of oppositions between dark and light, here and there, rise and fall and so on. At the most “profound” level, human experience consists, in fact, of the play of opposition itself – a thesis which begins to dissolve phenomenology into structuralism. Nevertheless, in the early introduction to Binswanger, Foucault, not yet a “post-structuralist” or a “post-phenomenologist,” can still champion a “philosophy of expression,” expression, as we have seen, standing for something beyond meaning already embedded in the meaning given to the world by man. The phrase “expression,” and its synonym “experience,” do not pull the whole problem far enough away from notions of intention and subjectivity; they permit Foucault to place his work in what he thinks of in the “Preface” as the passage between “anthropology” and “ontology.” It is only in his archaeological studies that he turns away from any attempt to understand and appropriate the so-called “deep” and experiential conditions of the lived world.

The strongest moment of the “Preface” occurs when Foucault embarks on a summary history of dream. He traces the story of dream-commentaries and the use of dreams for literature from Aristotle to the Romantics. But he also argues, “what has changed from one epoch to another has not been … the reading of destiny in dreams, nor even the deciphering procedures, but rather the justification of this relation of dream to world, and the way of conceiving how the truth of the world can anticipate itself and gather together its future in an image capable only of reconstituting it in a murky form” (1986a, 47). Foucault sets out a narrative of the connection between the dream as primordial form and what is held to be the truth of the dream at particular epochs. This presupposes, in the manner of Bachelard, that the “truth of the world,” or what is true in the world, is not an absolute but varies in time and place. Truth about dreams becomes belief about what is true in dreams. Much more radically, it also presupposes that truth is more relative than the dream. For the young Foucault, dreams are an “anthropological index of transcendence” (49). It is there that the central structures and polarities of existence reveal themselves, just because they are indices of solitude (not “subjectivity”) and of the irreducible thisness of existence. And Foucualt differs from Binswanger in his account of what dreams indicate. Space is especially important (as is so often the case in Foucault’s writing): the dream “deploys itself” in the “original spatiality of the scene,” where that “scene” is radically to be distinguished from geographical space. The dream scene is not divided into “near” and “far,” rather motion is a perpetual series of sudden encounters (“nothing but displacements”); it is not bounded but is “paradoxically closed by the infinite openness of the horizon; it is not secure or the “sign of my power” (signe de ma puissance) in that it is fundamentally porous – in dreams a train can travel into a room via the window, journey right through one’s head and then crash out through castle gates without even being derailed (60–1). (As such it is not cinematic, for instance.) Furthermore, dreams in their universality, solitude and sheer materiality are always closer to death than life. “Death is the absolute meaning of the dream” (55), it is the “open horizon” in relation to which dreams occur. More generally still, at the level that Foucault is concerned with, what one dreams is always the same, because the “first person” who dreams is not a socially constructed individual but (somehow) an expression of experience itself before the split into subjectivity and objectivity. This is why the dream is not so much constructed in and by images as trapped or weighed down by them. Images clog the sheerness or freedom of fundamental experience, thus, paradoxially, it is in them that the “first person” begins to be individualized. And psychotherapists are to the dream-work, what poets are to the tropes that language throws at them: both are limited by the finitude of their material. The poet “consumes and destroys” images in collecting and signing them; the therapist, who locates the movement of a particular “imagination” toward existence and death beneath images, achieves the “transcendental reduction of the imaginary” (72).

Foucault is not merely introducing Binswanger in his “Preface,” he is developing his own line of thought, his own style. Intriguingly for our purposes, Foucault’s major departure from Binswanger lies in the way that, unlike his master, he deals not with dreams as such but with the literary or discursive account of dreams. His history, necessarily, relies on texts which deal with dreams from Heraclitus to Novalis, via, amongst others, Shakespeare and Racine. This has one important consequence: what Foucault finds in dreams is literature, not just in the sense that the task of the therapists has more in common with the practice of poets than it does, for instance, with that of medical practitioners, or in the sense that literary writing often attempts to appropriate the content and forms of dreams. He finds literature in his own writing. How else to read lyrical passages such as this?

The subject of the dream, the first person of the dream, is the dream itself, the whole dream… The dream is an existence carving itself out in barren space, shattering chaotically, exploding noisily, netting itself, a scarcely breathing animal, in the webs of death. It is the world at the dawn of its first explosion when the world is still existence itself and is not yet the universe of objectivity. To dream is not another way of experiencing another world, it is for the dreaming subject the radical way of experiencing its own world.

(1986a, 59)

The dream is the moment of absolute creativity and (existential) freedom in which the “lessons of the tragic poets,” learnt before the fall into truth and objectivity, still enact their message – as they do in that metaphor of the dream as a “scarcely breathing animal.” Again, Foucault never escaped this interaction between the literary and the phenomenological, the poet and the theorist. Increasingly, thou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Before reading Foucault
• 1 Madness
• 2 Medicine, Death, Realism
• 3 Literature and Literary Theory
• 4 Knowledge
• 5 Genealogy, Authorship, Power
• 6 Discipline
• 7 Life, Sexuality and Ethics
• 8 Post-Foucauldian Criticism: Government, Death, Mimesis
• 9 After Reading Foucault: Back to the Author
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index