Date: Sat, 23 Oct 1999 15:47:48 +1000
From: Sebastian Gurciullo <sebtempo-AT-silas-1.cc.monash.edu.au>
Subject: literature/madness


Does anyone have any ideas on the connection which Foucault makes between
literature and madness. I am thinking in particular of the appendix to the
second french edition (which went in along with "My body, this paper, this
fire"), "Madness, the absence of the work"? I am particularly interested in
the idea Foucault raises, not just here but elsewhere, of certain "mad"
writers who are dismissed or misunderstood in their own times but who later
come to be understood as responsible for some kind of literary novelty or
breakthrough. The case of Roussel comes to mind here.

Considering many of Foucault's early essays were so concerned with various
kinds of Unreason and transgression, what are the connections between
literature, madness, and the aesthetics of Foucault's own textual
performance in Histoire de la folie? It would be hard to believe that such a
self-conscious stylist, and one who came to make the theme of
self-stylisation in life as much as in works such a central theme of his
later writings was not already attempting such a performative dimension in
his early texts. Remember the concluding pages to the introduction of the
Archaeology of Knowledge, and the (in)famous comments about preparing "a
labyrinth into which I can venture" and which presumably those who seek to
discover what Foucault was on about must also risk. What retrospective
effect could this statement have regarding not so much Foucault's "position"
on madness (which would presume that Foucault actually had only one, or a
resolved view that was self-identical to itself) but his performance, what
he does with regard to the problematic that has been raised.

I don't think it would be so much a case of "writing madly", as if there
were some kind of peculiar and self-evident style which can be described as
"mad" writing, but of the kind of transitions in ideas and thinking, and the
status that they seek to present with regard to themselves, as they occur in
Foucault's text. If for Descartes, madness is certainty, and reason is the
capacity to doubt one's senses in a continuous manner (my body, this paper,
this fire), is Foucault rational or mad (especially, but not only, when he
claims to be writing with a view to madness itself), or is his writing, the
space it seeks to occupy, somewhere else altogether, neither strictly mad
nor rational and for that reason already risking the boundary that would
relegate it as mad, or (less polemically and with Derrida) a failed
application of reason?

I would like to follow up these points myself but don't know French and so,
for the moment, the question of trying to follow the aesthetics of
Foucault's own (con)textual practice (and its wider ramifications) in
Histoire de la folie remains barred to me. Maybe I should learn French, but
perhaps someone can help?

cheers

sebastian