Abstract
After the publication of History of Madness in 1961, Foucault spent the 1960s writing on two parallel themes. The first continued the historical, archival, and conceptual work of that book, leading to major works such as The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, and The Archaeology of Knowledge. The second picked up on the more literary and artistic aspects of the work on madness and treated authors such as Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Gustav Flaubert, Pierre Klossowski, and Gérard de Nerval. Many of these essays were translated for the Language, Counter-Memory, Practice collection; some more in the second volume of the Essential Works; and some remain untranslated. His book on Raymond Roussel – alongside Le désordre des familles, probably his most neglected work – exemplifies this literary theme and highlights the parallel work: it was published on the very same day as The Birth of the Clinic. His essays on Gilles Deleuze sit somewhere between these two themes, and literary figures sometimes appear in the more clear historical work – consider the use of Don Quixote in The Order of Things, for example.
Language, Madness, and Desire: On Literature is the translation of a small French book from 2013, La grande étrangère: À propos de littérature. The collection comprises six texts: two radio lectures from 1963, two lectures on Literature and Language from 1964, and two lectures on the Marquis de Sade, delivered multiple times in North America between 1970 and 1972. In the initial pieces, Foucault ranges widely across mainly the French literature, including many of the names mentioned above as well as Balzac, Diderot, Mallarmé, Proust, Rabelais, and Racine. There is a brief reading of a key scene from Shakespeare’s King Lear, which was played as a recording in the radio broadcast. Passages from other texts were read, and are here reproduced, before being commented upon. There is a brief discussion of Georges Dumézil and how his work is helpful in analyzing literary themes. In one of 1964 lectures, we can see an interest in the workings of language, which would be developed most fully in the Archaeology of Knowledge. Geographers may be especially drawn to the discussion of spatiality in the 1964 lectures (pp. 81–88), which begins to anticipate some of the themes of the work on heterotopias. There are also some striking passages on why Sade writes, which can profitably be read as concerning the creative process much more generally.
The translation is very readable and captures the style of the original well. Given the literary material being discussed, this is no small task. Some useful notes are provided: most by the editors but a few by the translator. Perhaps the biggest disappointment – and the English translator and publisher bear no responsibility here – is that the French editors chose to omit extant materials. The radio lectures were a series of five, and we know Foucault gave lectures on Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet at the same time as the Sade lectures at State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. The grounds for their omission are unclear, and while they might yet see the light of day, this would have been the obvious place to complete the picture. Nonetheless, the present book is a very valuable supplement to the understanding we have of Foucault and literature.