Foucault and Contemporary Literary History

Abstract

This paper problematizes the uncritical and unreflective reception of Foucault’s concepts of contemporary literary history. It posits that concepts such as discontinuity, intersections, and breaking points should be introduced into modern literary-history discourse in opposition to the traditional concepts of continuity and teleology. A more detailed reading of Foucault’s basic methodological work The Archeology of Knowledge shows that Foucault never speaks of simply prioritizing discontinuity over continuity, but rather what the conditions are from which they both arise (i.e., both discontinuity and continuity). This approach is naturally a transcendental one. However, because in Foucault the conditions of experiential possibilities are never about the constitution of transcendental apperception or a comprehensive subject, his transcendental approach should be referred to as (quasi)transcendentalism. Any escape into comprehensiveness, unity, and synthesis would mean falling back into idealism. The concept of episteme must also be defined in a similar way. This is not a (post)structural translation of the traditional concept of epoch, but, as Deleuze put it, a constitution of a new area of visibility and utterability, which represents a condition of possibilities of the history of ideas and mentalities. As noted by some of his critics, and first and foremost by Foucault himself, such a position is not even possible in the last instance. This is why the “genealogical turn” occurred in Foucault after The Archeology of Knowledge. – Foucault almost never speaks about literary history concretely, except in an interview, in which he claims that Roland Barthes designed a new, structuralist literary history with his concept of writing (écriture), a literary history that no longer sees literature as a product of the human spirit, and people as subjects, but precisely the contrary: literature is the place of birth and death of this allegedly autonomous subjectivity. Literature is what produces culture and not the other way around. – The author believes that romantic literary history is even more relevant than structuralist literary history for exploring contemporary literary history, not only because it “invented” contemporary literary history as such, but also because it treated literary history as an eminent expression of history itself. This, however, poses a great challenge to modern literary studies, which is oriented towards cultural studies.