Foucault’s Views on Literature

Abstract

This article discusses the conceptions of literature by the famous French theoretician Michel Foucault. As already implied in the title, Foucault liked to change his views on literature. This basically involved two opposing viewpoints. In Focault’s early works, literature (or, more specifically, modern literature) was at the forefront of his interest, especially because he believed it has a strong liberation potential. However, in his later works this was quite the opposite: literature was perceived merely as a social and political game played by the modern bourgeoisie. Focault’s early works express a positive attitude towards literature and can be divided into four topics: madness or the mad language of poetry, transgression, notions of exteriority, and literary fiction. According to Foucault, until the end of the eighteenth century literature always reflected a non-problematic image of the world and thus served the ruling ideology. Only with the emergence of Romanticism, and finally with symbolism, did literature manage to cut its ties with the communicational function of language and penetrate the field of mad (i.e., uncontrolled and polyvalent) language. Since then literature, especially in the completion of modern literature (which according to Foucault already began at the beginning of the nineteenth century) in modernism, has also been transgressive; this means it constantly moves on the edge of language, without ever crossing over into the field of transcendence. In the sense of (post)structuralism, which was emerging at that time, Foucault claims that writing (écriture) is primary and comes before any subject; literature thus involves thinking that comes from the “outside” (exteriority), although this exteriority is never merely a counterweight to the interior. – In Foucault’s late works (i.e., as part of his genealogy of authoritative discourses), literature is no longer specially thematized. Nonetheless, by the late 1960s it was possible to almost perceive some sort of an anti-literary turn; for example, in his famous essay “What is an Author?” In a 1970s interview, Foucault stated that for him literature had become a bourgeois institution in which transgression was no longer possible. From then on, literature had to be viewed within the context of the discourses of power. Foucault did not carry out this project himself; instead, this work was performed by various cultural and materialist currents of contemporary literary studies.