Date: Thu, 25 Feb 1999 07:44:27 -0800 (PST) From: Anita Berber <fdrtikol-AT-yahoo.com> Subject: Roussel and Foucault The Roussel book would not be especially important if it were the one book by an obscure writer. It is, I think, important because it gives us a clue to what Foucault was actaully up to in his other works. Roussel wrote a book titled something like "How some of my works where written". In this book he revealed that the plots of several of his novels grow out of playing endlessly with of a single pun by following the chain of it's associations wherever they might go. The result, weirdly enough, is an odd surrealist kind of plot that seems to hang together and mean something even though it is very hard to say exactly what it all means in board final terms as in answer to the question "what is this book about." The dessiminating pun which opens up the discoursive space of the narrative is never specifically mentioned in the narrative. Imagine reading Roussel in English translation or even Foucault writing about Roussel in English translation. Something totally arbitrary on the surface of a language, something to superficial to survive translation into another language, has generated a whole discoursive space policed by the associations and extensions of itself. This is, I think, where Foucault got his idea of how discourses in general come to be, from the pure example offered in Roussel's work of the process at work. Foucault's point is that we live inside discourses which seem to us essential but which are actually rooted historically in pure and capricious chance. We are all living inside one vast language game of a Roussel novel with the grammar rules which police our lives being derived from a pun made in a dead language it takes archeology to recover. In the beginning was the word and the word was if not God at least grammar. It's a very liberating sort of pie in the face to realize that the word was a pun. The learned pedant of law or psychiatry seems less deep and daunting spinning his webs after this insight is achieved and that, I think, was Foucault's radically subversive final agenda. ---Stuart Elden <Stuart.Elden-AT-clara.co.uk> wrote: > > Clare wrote > > >But I think Raymond Roussel would have to be Foucault's least read book > >(with good reason I might add)!! > > Agreed: I quite liked it but it didn't really get used greatly in my work on > Foucault. As I recall I suggested that Foucault's work on literature often > paralleled his work on history, that the opening line of Birth of the Clinic > could easily stand as a description of Roussel. I was actually talked about > neglected (ie not used) rather than not read, because it is so difficult to > know whether books are read! Les mots et les choses may have been a > best-seller in France, but as someone else suggested, how many copies were > actually read, and how many 'just looked good on the shelves'? > > But the neglected pile also includes books that have never appeared in > English, although they are collaborative pieces: Les machines a guerir (aux > origines de l'hopital moderne) and Les desordre des familles. The first of > these, along with the Rio lectures, make a really essential supplement to > Birth. > > >I agree Birth of the Clinic is > >neglected - I have seen people in the health related areas referring to > >Disicpline and Punish when a reference to Birth of the Clinic would have > >been much more helpful. > > > >Clare > > > > > Yes, the Bunton & Robinson collection contains many examples of this sort of > thing. Let's hope the Foucault centre conference proceedings are published, > as they intimated they would be, and that an English translation can be > arranged so that it doesn't remain closed from the English speaking folks > who seem to be Foucault's largest current audience. > > Best wishes > > Stuart > > ="I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask me who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order." Michel Foucault _________________________________________________________ DO YOU YAHOO!? Get your free -AT-yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
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