Foucault on Raymond Roussel: The Extralinguistic Outside of Literature

Abstract

Madness, Language, Literature (2019) brings together a series of unpublished works on literature that belong to Michel Foucault’s first stage of production. This article focuses on those works that express a concept of madness as social partition or outside, and also on those that elucidate the concept of the ‘extralinguistic’ of literature. The combined reading of these texts sheds light on a concept of the extralinguistic outside of literature that enables Foucault to overcome a concept of ontological outside and, therefore, using literature, think on this discourse’s historical possibilities of resistance. As a result of this new reading, I analyse some fundamental aspects of this early Foucault. First, his development of a politics of literary form in the 1960s. Second, I propose that Foucault’s studies on literature in the 1960s were a kind of laboratory in which he was already raising some questions concerning his political history of truth. And, lastly, I examine the capacity of literature to make visible a part of reality that remains hidden (the excluded), the processes by which literature creates (language’s mechanism of self-representation), the possible forms of subjectivation that the fiction of every episteme allows (what Foucault calls verisimilitude), and the formulation of novel forms of being (that he later developed as aesthetics of existence).

Keywords

extralinguistic Michel Foucault outside politics of literature Raymond Roussel

Introduction

The recent publication of Folie, langage, littérature¹ [Madness, Language, Literature] (2019) brings together a series of texts on literature and madness that had been languishing unedited in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)’s collection. These writings belong to the period in which Foucault devoted his wide-ranging reflections to literature and criticism, from the 1960s to the early 1970s. As Judith Revel has already stated in ‘Un héritage de Foucault. Entre fidélité et livres usages’, the opening of the Foucault collection by the BnF in 2013 ‘reopened and revived everything that we believed we knew up until now’ (Revel, 2019a: 183). And it gave even more meaning to the statement that the work of Foucault was widespread and that there was no one bearer of a legacy as the final and closed meaning of his texts. Undoubtedly, Foucault’s oeuvre, in the light of the diverse publications that have appeared in the 21st century, is one that has a discontinuous, resignified history that is necessarily under constant revision. And this is because, as with the scholia in Spinoza’s Ethics, every one of Foucault’s ‘minor’ texts forms a part of his corpus – discontinuous and broken – with as much importance as the rest of his works.

With the aim of clarifying some of these discontinuities, it is necessary to revise the classic readings of Foucault’s work. Among texts that have caused a revision of the classic interpretations of the Foucauldian oeuvre, Foucault(s) (2017) is noteworthy. This is a broad collection of texts that all consider the question: what meaning does Foucault’s thought hold today? To which they answer at the book’s beginning: as a space of thought that is always alive, like thought about the present.

Here I aim to review the relations between the literature, subjectivity and politics in the early Foucault. For this purpose, on the one hand, it is necessary to rethink the status of madness as a category of social division in the previously unpublished texts, ‘Madness and Civilization. Conference at Club Tahar Haddad, Tunisia’ (1967) [Folie et civilisation. Conférence prononcée au Club Tahar Haddad à Tunis en avril 1967]. On the other hand, we will revise the concept of the outside in contrast to the concept of the extralinguistic that Foucault developed in various texts collected in Madness, Language, Literature, but particularly in ‘L’extralinguistique et la littérature’ [The extralinguistic and literature].²

Both concepts, those of madness and the outside, widely used by Foucault, are associated with the literary categories of transgression and outside following Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, respectively. However, the introduction of the extralinguistic already establishes a shift toward his project to draw up a history of truth, which in turn would imply a shift in the status of literature within his own work. I have already developed this in other studies, such as a politics of literature in the work of the later Foucault.³

In La force du vrai, Daniele Lorenzini has shown that Foucault’s project of developing a history of truth began precisely between 1969 and 1971, although it was not fully developed until 1973–4, the moment when he distinguishes between truth-event and truth-demonstration, in the Collège de France lecture series Le pouvoir psychiatrique. He then began the Foucauldian project of a genealogy of games and of regimes of truth: an ethics and a politics of truth-telling, or a ‘political history of truth’ (Lorenzini, 2017: 13).

In order to develop these hypotheses, I will pay particular attention to his early work, Raymond Roussel. This book, the subject of which is the work of an author who was almost unknown to his contemporaries and who would nevertheless soon enjoy renown from among the strange and noteworthy works of the 20th century,⁴ is the only one Foucault devotes entirely to literary thought. It is an exceptional work in which autobiography, text, life/death, madness, hermeneutics and truth-telling (veridiction) about oneself are knotted. By this I do not mean to say that the book on Roussel already contains all the shifts and discontinuities around the concepts highlighted above, but there we do find a special place of reflection for questions that concern us. This is because in Raymond Roussel we find not an origin but perhaps an obsession for a series of constant concerns that are redefined and revised throughout his work – just as has happened with the concept of literature itself. I believe that a change comes about in the status of literature as exercise of resistance; it could be said that a change occurs from the politics of form to the politics of literature.

Madness and Literature as Principle of Social Partition

In Folie, langage, littérature, the first seven texts define madness in its two senses: madness in relation to society, where it acts as a principle of partition between what a society finds reasonable and what it does not – a classification that equally affects social subjects and that distinguishes between reasonable and non-reasonable subjects. These categories of social division, however, are not stable but historical and, therefore, under constant modification. Precisely because of this, it proves difficult for us to see this partition principle, given that at present madness is associated with mental illness, being confused with it. As a consequence, two perfectly distinct regions of experience are identified: mental illness and the category of people who are considered foolish, irrational, alienated, useless and unproductive (Foucault, 2019: 112).

In ‘La littérature et la folie (La folie dans le théâtre baroque et le théâtre d’Artaud)’, Foucault declares: ‘There is no culture without partition’ [Il n’y a pas de culture sans partage] (2019: 43). Thus, all society finds itself divided and shaped, at the same time, by that which it values and that which it rejects and prohibits. In this way, Foucault is giving materiality to a society’s negativity – what in L’ordre du discours he called ‘materialism of the incorporeal’ – which is that which aims to exclude but that in any case forms part of it, because it is present. Because, according to Foucault, the limits that all culture establishes are not only against others but in the very interior of its own dominion. Moreover, the mechanism of a society’s organization (for example, to be Athenian or not in order to be a free man and to be able to speak with freedom in classical Athens) lies simultaneously inside and outside society. Madness, therefore, as a dividing mechanism, both forms a part and does not form a part of the society that organizes it.

As Foucault sets forth in ‘Madness and Civilization’, the reasons for which our civilization leaves certain behaviours and subjects ‘outside’ do not come only from Cartesian rationalism – remember the dispute with Jacques Derrida over this – but also from an economic and political motivation typical of the mercantile politics that had just been established in the modern age: the law of work. In the face of this new change that determines exclusion, these subjects occupy a purely negative role. They are non-productive subjects: useless individuals who do not work, deviants. Given this double exclusion, the insane person becomes a ‘sociologically neutralized’ character.

But if the word of this useless subject who is insane maintains such a singular relation with the truth of the society that excludes them – even if it be by chance or by obscure means that makes it necessary to seek this hidden truth in their words – it is because, like madness, it shapes and covers over the concept of modern man like its obverse. That is, as madness is the category of social partition that founds and excludes at the same time, the subjects considered ‘insane’ represent the negativity of modern subjectivity (I speak/I think), subjects who will be key to understanding the redefinition of the subject as process that Foucault undertook in later years. It is with this madness that is unproductive at the same time as organizing that literature is associated. As Foucault asserts, following Mikhail Bakhtin, the defining trait of madness in the West is its proximity to the feast. For this reason, art and literature belong to this order of separation. However, this does not mean, according to Foucault, that madness and literature remain under the same regime in the future, although currently it is that way.

In ‘Literature and Madness. Madness in the Work of Raymond Roussel’, Foucault shows the importance of the relationship between literature and madness. For if there has been literature without love and without war, there has not been literature without madness and without death. Above all, in the present and in the Baroque, indeed, certain works have even been called madness. According to Foucault, when madness is associated with literature, it shows three truths: it speaks of social reality, it shows the edges/borders of the story of literature itself, the fiction of which it is made: ‘The role of madness is not only to show, as if by trickery, the truth of things, but also to tell the truth of literature, theatre, fiction (to manifest it in its ambiguous role as a false truth, and a true lie)’ (Foucault, 2019: 112). But above all, says Foucault, ‘madness makes you see the invisible […] Don Quixote evokes the small, miserable, greedy and often grotesque world of sixteenth-century Spain; and at the same time denounces what lies in its reality of falsehoods, chivalresque romances with which Spain is enchanted’ (p. 115). But in the 19th century, says Foucault, what governs the relation between literature, madness and society is no longer representation: ‘It is in the heart itself of madness that one experiences what literature is’ (p. 115). Insanity, which in the 19th century is considered a mental illness, expresses this new relation in literature, from Mallarmé to Roussel and the Surrealists – although, as Foucault declares, it is necessary to be already a great writer in order to be a madman and a great writer.

Therefore, at this point I can conclude that, on the one hand, literature in its connection with madness is capable of making visible the invisible in two ways in accordance with its nature: namely, the material outside such as that which has been socially excluded, and, at the same time, the outside as other possible forms of partition from the real. As Etiènne Balibar puts it, Foucault has superimposed two schema or topologies: ‘that of internal exclusion or exclusion from within, the institutional model of which is confinement, and that of the excess of externality (or beyond externality) that makes it inaccessible (or “invisible”) as such’ (Balibar, 2017: 25). Furthermore, the literature of modernity establishes a new relationship with madness that, on occasion, is marked by the counter-subject, the madman. Furthermore, in accordance with this, the outside is both material negativity – those negative phenomena of exclusion, of rejection, of prohibition, of choice, that shape a society – and the same mechanism that shapes society. The outside is simultaneously inside and outside the social system, and this configuration is historical.

The Extralinguistic Outside of Literature: Being Able to Say Everything and Not Being Able to Say Everything

This ambiguous character of literature defines its nature and also affects its autonomy. The concept of the outside defines literature by its autonomy which occurred, according to Foucault, at the end of the 19th century, with Mallarmé, more or less. At the beginning of modernity, literature, on ceasing to be subject to the code of rhetoric or that of images or ideas, becomes its own language and ‘a certain experience common to madness and literature’ emerges (the outside). Literature thus acquires the capacity/incapacity to say everything: ‘in one sense it has the possibility and the right to say everything, perhaps it would even have the obligation to say everything, since nothing exists […]. In every literary work, there is an excess’ (Foucault, 2019: 230). However, this capacity to be able to say everything becomes a limit, because who is capable of saying everything? So it is that this ‘being able to say everything’ that modern literature gains with its autonomy also brings about its impossibility of saying everything. It is dependent on the extralinguistic because who is capable of really saying everything in a book of limited pages (as much as Borges yearned to write the infinite book)?

In ‘The Extralinguistic and Literature’, Foucault introduces a variant to the concept of the outside that is of great importance for understanding concepts he develops in the last years of his output. Literature is presented here not as an outside of social partition, but rather necessarily involving the immanent extralinguistic. Foucault cites as his sources linguists such as Roman Jakobson and Noam Chomsky, although the fundamental contribution for his thought is How to Do Things with Words (1962), in which John L. Austin propounds his theory of the speech act. This text is a crucial contribution to understanding the later development of a political history of truth, already typical of the 1970s, as has been shown; and the renewal of the process of subjectivation as aesthetics of existence. Thus, following Austin, Foucault agrees that what introduces the extralinguistic in literature is where and who reads it.

The author here proposes taking a step from the intralinguistic outside to the extralinguistic outside. If the outside was, at the same time, the material negativity of society – all of that which, existing, was excluded by the partition of madness – and the partition that inaugurates and founds all society. The extralinguistic is defined, according to Foucault, by the situation, by real objects – present or absent – and the relation with these objects; and for the speaking subject, in accordance with the position that he/she occupies and with expository ritualization in the case of performative acts (Foucault, 2019: 225). Austin’s studies allow Foucault to begin to examine statements there where they are directed and interrelate with their historical moment, which he would go on to develop fully in his studies on parrhesia in the 1980s.

However, in this study, what Foucault proposes is the analysis of the consequences of the extralinguistic for literature. Certainly literature is made up of statements, but is literature related to the extralinguistic? How is literature connected to and how does it interfere with the extralinguistic outside? And, vice versa, does the extralinguistic outside interfere in literature? To the third question, Foucault answers that the extralinguistic undoubtedly interferes in the literary tradition since – as T.S. Eliot had already stated in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1998 [1920]) – the literary tradition, what is considered literature or not, changes throughout history. Moreover, as Foucault says, it is vitally important in the circulation of the book in the world and for literary criticism itself:

It is this ‘outside’, this extralinguistic immanent to the work, which criticism, precisely, must not exclude from its purpose. Literary analysis need not mimic the work, nor repeat it, nor retrieve its intimacy, nor interpret it (as a sacred text). It must lodge itself precisely in that exterior that is its proper place. One can define the role of literary analysis by saying that it has transformed the extralinguistic immanent to the work’s discourse into statements. (Foucault, 2019: 251)

Literature’s interference in the historical moment is more complex. For Foucault, the extralinguistic is an insurmountable wall in the study of the relations between language and history, which affects form and content:

In the analysis of language or statements, linguists and logicians encounter the ‘wall’, the limit of the extralinguistic, in two ways: at the level of the content (meaning) … [and] at the level of the form of the statement and in the act itself that states it, the extralinguistic appears. (Foucault, 2019: 229)

According to Foucault, the relationship of literature with the extralinguistic has a formal nature and one of content. The former originates in a lack, an incapacity: that of not being able to say everything, for which literature constantly refers to the historical moment of the reader in order to fill out the gaps in the finitude of the work. Therefore, we can no longer declare that literature is a self-referential activity: ‘literature is the barbarism of the extralinguistic immanent to discourse’ (2019: 226). The signs of these relations can be seen at the level of meaning: the ‘original’ meaning disappears, as the extralinguistic is what conditions the interpretation of the text, because all text refers to its historical outside. But how does literature intervene in the world? For Foucault, the arrival in the 18th century of the horror novel – and he had already underlined the importance of these novels in ‘Language and Literature’ (1964) – is key, because the reader is exposed to the reading experience in order ‘to be afraid’.⁵ The reading places the text in the world and its meaning is historical/cultural. It happens: literature, in its performative capacity, exists and makes exist.

Therefore, literature relates with the extralinguistic as event in the margin between autonomy – ‘the literary text is immanent to the discourse’ – and its place in the world. In other words, its activity is not self-referential but performative. This would explain the ambiguity with which in his work Foucault refers to the historical and ahistorical character of literature, an ambiguity noted by Laurent Jenny, among others, in ‘Foucault et la littérature: un passante’ (2016). We can argue that literature is historical in its action as event, but this is only possible for the autonomous character of its statements.

To this making visible the invisible incorporeal, Foucault adds the ability to make visible the possible that is contingent to every historical moment. Literature establishes the extralinguistic for itself, which allows it to not have to say everything. Thus the very ambiguity of literature, which says too much: literature is an excess that names that part that had remained outside of the social partition, making the invisible visible, material and possible – at the same time as not being able to say everything – in its formal finitude. This making visible the ‘not necessary possible’ is what Foucault calls verisimilitude. For him, verisimilitude has a certain affinity of nature with truth, a kinship, and was made in order to make it reality: ‘there is something of internal truth in discourse’. Discourse creates a certain truth, in such a way that literature modifies the nature of truth not as descriptive mimesis but as performativity of the literary discourse. At the same time, it is because the work must be verisimilar that the relation between the work and the extralinguistic – which is the historical present – is a necessary one.

Therefore, at the same time as literature acts on history, the relationship of literature with history has an impact on literature, which is why literature is never closed nor complete, and its meaning is not finite insofar as it is historical. But this does not mean that there is a hidden, everlasting truth that literature is capable of letting us see. In literature, as Foucault reminds us in ‘Behind the Fable’ (1966), the relationship between fable and fiction is determined by ‘the mythical possibilities of the culture’: its writing or weaving depends on the possibilities of the language (langue), while its fiction is determined by the possibilities of the speech act (parole) (Foucault, 1998: 138). In other words, the verisimilitude of a narrative, what a society is prepared to accept as credible, depends on a specific historical moment, and not on the structure of the narrative (which it did for Aristotle). Therefore, literature has among its functions to actualize (act) in every episteme the possibilities (potential) of speaking (parole). No era, says Foucault, simultaneously utilizes all the modes of fiction: those that are excluded in a determined historical moment are marginalised, while those that a determined era privileges are those that define a norm (Foucault, 1971: 10–12). Every episteme, therefore, admits new modes of fiction in the literary oeuvre and it becomes possible to read again texts that, ‘populated by parasitic discourses’, had been expelled. Literature makes visible, therefore, through its historical variations, the different possibilities that live together in the same culture, in the actualization of its ‘parasitic discourses’.

As Judith Revel has stated in ‘The Invention and the Déjà-là of the World’ (2019b), the ‘revelatory’ function of literature comes from the influence of Merleau-Ponty. For Revel, the ‘revelatory’ use of literature must be separated from the ontology of literature. Instead, she considers the term in an almost ‘photographic’ sense: ‘what enables a certain image to appear’, and literature as experience that is operative of change. It is through this experience of writing that escapes the ‘discursive mass’, that it is possible to understand literature as a practice, as a practice of speaking that shows the outside of all language and that ‘denounces its internal economy and its founding divisions at the same time’ (p. 33). This concerns the models of exteriority that Foucault develops in his texts from the 1960s: transgression as ‘inexorability of the denial of limit’, indebted to the thinking of Bataille; and exteriority, having its roots in Blanchot. However, the model that accompanies Foucault’s work until his last writings are those that he calls ‘the processes’, which show that ‘it is the change of the world’s grammar that allows the change of the world’s imagination, and not the other way around’. For Foucault, overcoming the influence of Blanchot, ‘the outside is a myth’; thus there is no outside of history. The issue, therefore, for the literature that is recurrent in Foucault, is to answer the following question: how is it possible that, from the very interior of a given epistemic and historical configuration, from the very interior of the ‘weave of the real’ unfolded by an economy of the discourses and practices of a specific moment – in short, from the interior of a grammar of the world historically determined – it can dismantle and replace its articulations, shift its lines, move its points, empty its meaning and reinvent its balances (2019: 43)? That is to say, Foucault’s work on literature has its heart precisely in the practices of reinvention, eruption, freedom, in the very interior of the system, which he develops through ‘compossibility’. The Foucauldian expression of ‘making one’s life a work of art’ carries with it, in turn, an involvement with others, and a style. This allows the subject to carry out practices of freedom from history itself, surpassing the present state of things. The style in Foucault makes reference to Baudelaire but also to the definition of style understood as a ‘coherent deformation’, as Merleau-Ponty understood it in Le langage indirect et les voix du silence (1952). For Merleau-Ponty, these practices are about literature and painting at the same time: ‘Like a painting, a novel expresses tacitly’, Revel quotes Merleau-Ponty. But in both, the question is how, from the very interior of history, a possibility to create arises (2019b: 43).

In Merleau-Ponty, this novelty is located not from the side of extraordinarily innovative elements, but from the side of ‘experimentation of new structures of relation’ (Revel, 2019b: 48), the production of the new through new relations between what is already there. Here Revel establishes the immediate antecedent of the construction of life itself as a work of art, as a radicalization of the forces within the history of the present.

This insertion of the world into the literary work is a development of the political capacity of literature, which introduces the change towards what Foucault called ‘bad literature’ in the mid-1970s and ‘80s. If literature is no longer an outside – in the more Adornian sense – if its autonomy is ambiguous, it is because literature is capable of doing things in the world. This identification between the outside and the extralinguistic revives the most political view of the Blanchodian Outside, as Foucault himself recognizes: ‘It is the presence of this extralinguistic inside language that Blanchot constantly invokes; it is to the absence of this presence that he has lent his voice’; and it is, at the same time, the inseparable outside of the work (2019: 228).

In Écrits politiques: Guerre d’Algérie, Mai 68, etc. 1958–1993 (Blanchot, 2003), we find references to this political character of the outside and the need for the ambiguity of literature in Maurice Blanchot. In ‘Refusing the Established Order’, a response to a questionnaire on politically committed literature, Blanchot states that the political vocation of a work must always be ambiguous, otherwise ‘it always runs the risk, should it lose this ambiguity, of putting itself at the service of another power that subjugates it’. For Blanchot, writing is what ‘cannot be effected, thus always in search of a nonpower, refusing mastery, order, and the established order above all, preferring silence to the speech of absolute truth, thereby contesting things and contesting them incessantly’ (Blanchot, 2010: 117). And he concludes that the political commitment of the author with the work is the commitment of the work with the other, to:

... maintain the immemorial memory that reminds us that we were slaves, that even liberated we remain and will remain slaves as long as others remain so, that there is thus no freedom (to put it too simply) except for others and through others: certainly, an infinite task that risks condemning the writer to a didactic, pedagogic role and in so doing, of excluding the demand he carries within him and that constrains him to lack a place, a name, a role, and an identity, that is, never yet to be a writer. (2010: 118)

This postponement of the truth of the text is, therefore, the extralinguistic other that is made manifest in the work in every historical present. The extralinguistic outside is thus what takes place in the work itself: ‘It’s a matter of the setting up, or better still, the instauration, by discourse alone, of the extralinguistic upon what any statement articulates’ (Foucault, 2019: 229). In ‘Language and Literature’ (1964), Foucault confirmed that the polysemous nature of literature depends on its historical and political nature:

In reality, literature is polysemantic, which means that, when saying one thing alone or maybe when saying noting at all – for there is no proof that literature has to say something – in any case, whether it says something or nothing, literature is always obligated to traverse a number of semiological layers [...]. This means that literature is nothing other than the reconfiguration, in vertical form, of the signs present in society and culture in separate layers. Literature cannot be based on silence. It is not ineffability of silence, literature is not the effusion of that which cannot and will never be said. (Foucault, 2015: 53)

In short, it is due to the formal finitude of the work (not being able to say everything) and to the autonomy gained at the beginning of modernity (being able to say everything) that the extralinguistic – as a fold of the historical outside that dwells in the work itself – constitutes the work’s radical historicity. This ambiguous character of literature, between autonomy (that which it acquires in modernity thanks to its relation with madness as mechanism of partition) and dependence on the history wherein it is read (due to the necessity that its limitation, as a book of a certain number of pages, makes of the extralinguistic outside for its reading), allows literature to speak a contingent truth: that of the possibilities of being from a given historical moment. It is here, therefore, that truth and literature’s capacity for resistance lie.

Raymond Roussel or the Politics of Form: The Political Subject of Literature

The critical consciousness of literature has become infinitely close to the consciousness of the lyrical madman. (Foucault, 2019: 122)

The relationship between literature and the extralinguistic passes through the ‘situation’ and the ‘subject that speaks’ inside the act of writing. The latter is the core of the relationship: ‘the position of the subject that speaks is the core of uncertainty around which the whole discourse vibrates’ (p. 227). To the extent that the position of the subject that speaks is the extralinguistic that is most immediate, closest to the language, but the most irreducible, this presence of the subject that speaks inside the discourse is crucial – it makes manifest the irreducibility of literature to the structures of language. The position of the subject that speaks, their location, the displacements they constitute, as opposed to what is said (lekton), the lexicon of the work. It should immediately be evident that this lexicon – as with fiction – is not so much an element of the work or discourse as ways via which literature and the extralinguistic are connected:

Just as between the universe of the discourse and the fable a certain level has been discovered that did not belong under linguistics or the study of folklore or myths, but under literature alone (this is what was called fiction), in the same way, between the field of the word and that of the lekton (the former being the concern of philosophy and the latter stylistics), there is a strictly literary level that comes under lexis.

Literature is a discourse whose fable is constituted by a fiction: it is a speech act the lekton of which is determined by a lexis. Lexis and fiction are privileged and singular domains of literary analysis. They fall under neither a philosophical model nor a linguistic one. (2019: 259)

For this reason, we need to reflect on the relationship between literature and subjectivity. As we have seen in the first section, madness, as a mode of social partition, entails the seclusion of a type of negative, unproductive subjectivity, which is that of the insane. At the same time, Foucault asserted that in modernity madness has been associated with literature and, in the 20th century, with mental illness as well, as the two are confused. Therefore, the issue is whether the question on modern literature would not be a viable route toward the other question on new ways of being – that is, on alternative ways of being to the concept of modern man, or in Foucault’s words, the literature of Roussel creates ‘forms without parentage or species’ (Foucault, 1986: 21). The work of Raymond Roussel is presented as a special place for this work: the madman, the ill person and the writer come together under the same proper name. In this early Foucault, the analysis of literature is also the politics of literary form.

We reach the consideration of literature as political speech in Foucault’s work via one route that is intrinsic to his work and via another that is historical. As I have already shown in ‘Parrhesia and Dissent: Truth-telling as Politics of Literature’ (2019), the relationship of parrhesia with modern literature is extensive and we find it in its very origin. Parrhesia, in its etymological meaning – truth as saying excessively and ‘eventally’ – having been expelled from politics in the classical era, had found, as Foucault explains, a line of continuity in Socratic-Platonic philosophy and later in pastoral Christian care of self. Parrhesia had traced a discontinuous line with regard to unreason and modern literature, casting upon it its political dimension. The basis of this statement is, on the one hand, in the derivative that Socratic dialogue had in Menippean satire; and, on the other hand, in the transformation of parrhesia in Cynic philosophy as a way of life. Bakhtin himself had already highlighted Menippean satire from among the tragi-comic genres of classical antiquity that would prepare the way for the carnivalesque view of the world and of the modern dialogic novel in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (2013).

However, as has been noted, Foucault would not develop the question about the political history of truth until the mid-1970s. Yet, as we have seen up until now, Foucault’s studies on literature in the 1960s were a kind of laboratory where he was already posing some of these questions. As mentioned, in Foucault’s early work there was already an interest in the politics of literature, in relation to the outside/extralinguistic of the text. I have shown how Foucault, in texts from the latter half of the 1960s, sets forth the performative capacity of the literary text. This performative capacity, which depends on the immanent relation between literature and the extralinguistic outside, allows literature to state three types of truth: literature is able to speak of and intervene in the historical reality in which it takes place and it is also able to make visible what is invisible due to the social partition between right and wrong and between productivity and unproductivity. This capacity to say the truth is, in Foucault’s terms, its capacity to say everything, because literature, as fiction, is capable of naming the possibilities of every historical moment – heterotopia – of ‘heroizing the present’. This reflection on the politics of form is developed in a joint manner with his revision of structuralism, as he states in ‘Interview avec Michel Foucault’ in 1968:

In a positive manner, we can say that structuralism investigates above all an unconscious. It is the unconscious structures of language, of the literary work, and of knowledge that one is trying at this moment to illuminate. In the second place, I think that one can say that what one is essentially looking for are the forms, the system, that is to say that one tries to bring out the logical correlations that can exist among a great number of elements belonging to a language, to an ideology (as in the analyses of Althusser), to a society (as in Lévi-Strauss), or to different fields of knowledge; which is what I myself have studied. (Foucault, 1994: 654)

Significantly, this politics of literary form that Foucault propounds comes close, critically, to classical Marxist literary theory, to the early Lukács of Theory of the Novel (1971), and to the later Althusser of aleatory materialism in ‘Le courant souterrain du matérialisme de la rencontre’ [‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’] (2006 [1982]). With Lukács, Foucault shares the idea of form as a sociological question. However, for Lukács one can observe in the analysis of form ‘the vital temporal and historical elements’, and this analysis of form allows him to explain how the appearance of a new historical subject matter produces new formal laws. Yet Foucault introduces the performative capacity of literary form, because the analysis of the form allows us to perceive not only changes or events but that the form itself produces effects on history. For his part, Foucault came close to the Althusser who argues for freedom in the face of necessity and the introduction of the aleatory, although we find in Foucault a broader development of his politics of literature: the aleatory comes in through literary language itself. For Althusser, however, the non-irreducibility of literature, as he puts it in ‘Letter on the Knowledge of Art’ (Althusser, 1971), is a ‘making visible the ideology’ [‘donner a voir l'ideologie’], which in Foucault represents only one of the constants of premodern literature. Foucault had found, in his interest in structuralism and in the unusual linguistic forms of Raymond Roussel, modes of experimentation in his search for new structures of relation and novel forms of being as aesthetics of existence. As Judith Revel has stated, it is the production of the new through new relations between what is already there.

Furthermore, for this rereading, it is necessary to look at two clearly recognisable traits for literary tradition. First, Foucault paints a kind of ‘portrait’, genuinely Mannerist, in the style of the ‘Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror’ by Parmigianino, a tradition in which Roussel could also be included – as John Ashbery has already considered:

At the moment of his death, in a gesture both cautious and illuminating, Roussel holds up to his work a mirror possessed of a bizarre magic: it pushes the central figure into the background where the lines are blurred, placing the point of revelation at the farthest distance, while bringing forward, as if for extreme myopia, whatever is farthest from the moment of its utterance. Yet as the subject approaches, the mirror deepens in secrecy. (Foucault, 1986: 4).

And, on top of this, another story, that of the death of Roussel, and that locked door that sets in motion How I Wrote Certain of My Books (2005), and which refers to the hermeneutic tradition, distancing himself from it, because it transforms into an enigma the process that he clarifies:

This door, which had been open at all times, was locked from the inside. The death, the lock, and this closed door formed, at that moment and for all time, an enigmatic triangle where Roussel’s work is both offered to and withdrawn from us [...] a simple key which is marvellously ambiguous, ready in one turn either to lock in or to open up. (Foucault, 1986: 6)

Origen, in Philocalia, relates this parable on the interpretation of the sacred Scriptures, referring to the origin of hermeneutics:

Inspired Scripture taken as a whole was on account of its obscurity like many locked-up rooms in one house: Before each room he supposed a key to be placed, but not the one belonging to it; and that the keys were so dispersed all round the rooms, not fitting the locks of the several rooms before which they were placed. (Origen, 1911: 32)

This presentation introduces the work in the Mannerist tradition and distances it from the tradition of classical hermeneutics. Raymond Roussel is not a work on how to interpret its true meaning. On the contrary, the comment that ought to clarify ‘opens a space of infinite uncertainty’ (Foucault, 1986: 11). Therefore, what is the truth of which Roussel speaks as a discovery of the formal procedures with which he writes his book? This truth is not an unveiling; his ‘truth’ is other, that of the mechanisms of self-representation of language, typical of the Mannerist tradition. Recall Deleuze’s definition of Mannerism in his lecture series on the Baroque, delivered at Vincennes in 1987, as the evental logic of substance – the predicate is always event, says Deleuze. In other words, Mannerism refers to the definition of the subject by his/her ways, by which logic the being ceases to be attributive, and comes to be predicative:

It will have to be said that Leibniz breaks with the scheme of attribution, and at the same time breaks with the essentialism of substance, of the substance constituted by an essence. To attribution it replaces predication, the predicate always being relation or event, and to essentialism it will substitute what? So here we can be all happy to have found a word, I say it very quickly, let’s call it mannerism. (Deleuze, 1987)

The eventual logic of literature and its relation with the unknown processes of subjectification was fully developed by Foucault in his lectures on Sade (see Blanco, 2020), but in my opinion it is in Raymond Roussel that Foucault lays out an early version on evental subjectivity. The forms of being, their ways, such as event, are described though two principal processes: paradoxical statements, which the very subheadings of Foucault’s book indicate (‘the threshold and the key’, ‘rhyme and reason’, ‘the metamorphosis and the labyrinth’, ‘the empty lens’, ‘the enclosed sun’) and the constant use of polysemic terms or phrases, which show the introduction of difference in identity and, at the same time, the impossibility of the closure of meaning. These formal processes show us the impossibility of attributively confirming subjectivity. Good meaning, such as closed and certain meaning, is impossible. Paradox and polysemy are the affirmation of two meanings at the same time, and they affect both language and the impossibility of defining a subjectivity as fixed identity. At the same time, the extralinguistic – as the capacity of literary language to name the invisible material – also forms part of the study, as it does in all literature. In this regard, Foucault on Roussel’s La Vue: ‘everything can be seen from afar, but with a stare that is so penetrating, so supreme and so neutral that even the invisible rises to the surface under a unique, immobile and even light’ (Foucault, 2019: 279). Moreover, the descriptions of Roussel’s works reveal the formal and untamed gaps of resistance to the discursive mechanisms of power. Roussel’s literature, above all thanks to the reduplication of his How I Wrote Certain of My Books, is an act of making see the possible non-existent. Modern literature, as opposed to what Aristotle expounded in his Poetics, utilizes its own negativity to ‘make see’: ‘The Nouvelles Impressions can only be described by what they are not’ (Foucault, 2019: 123, emphasis added).

Finally, Raymond Roussel is an exercise in criticism, literary criticism but above all criticism of the social partition, aiming there where the identity of reason is placed face-to-face with the identity of unreason. The procedures of Roussel’s writing show that language and identity cross where the partition of the social mixes, indifferently, madness and literature. And this is so because Roussel’s work is ‘one of those rare cases in which the work, the experience of madness and mental illnesses are precisely superimposed to form a single figure’ (Foucault, 2019: 116).

Conclusion

While, as Foucault declares, ‘we could say that there is not one single society in which it is permitted to say everything’, literature – as writing of madness – is the discourse of excess that speaks beyond what a society allows in a given historical moment. A political study of form allows Foucault to show how literature thus coincides with madness, insofar as it is a category of social organization, through fiction. In modernity, literature succeeds in making see: a part of reality that stays hidden (the necessary as the excluded), the processes by which literature creates (being of language: mechanism of self-representation of language) and the possible forms of subjectification that the fiction of every episteme allows (and the contingent as the historical possible non-existent): ‘In both Roussel and Robbe-Grillet, description is not language’s fidelity to its object, but the perpetually renewed birth of an infinite relationship between words and things’ (Foucault, 1994: 280). Thus, literature has a paradoxical nature for Foucault: the extralinguistic, as the limit of the autonomy of literature, is inserted like a fold in literature. This is why literature can also affect the historical extralinguistic.

I consider that this performative intervention of literature on the extralinguistic, as criticism of the partitions between reasonable-productive subjects and unreasonable-unproductive subjects, is an early development of some aspects of the critical discourse of parrhesia that Foucault elaborated in the 1980s. It establishes an underground link between madness, literature and parrhesia, in short, between literature and the political history of truth, which is of great interest both for the political studies of current literature and for the necessary revision of the Foucauldian oeuvre in the light of the unseen writings that are to be published in the coming years.

Footnotes

This article is part of the Theory, Culture & Society special issue on ‘Foucault Before the Collège de France’, edited by Stuart Elden, Orazio Irrera and Daniele Lorenzini.

ORCID iD

Azucena G. Blanco

Notes

Azucena G. Blanco is an Associate Professor at the University of Granada. She is the author of Literature and Politics in Michel and editor of Literatura y Política. Nuevas perspectivas teóricas (2019). She is founder and editor of the online peer-reviewed journal Theory Now. Journal of Literature, Critique and Thought.

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