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| Michel Foucault |
Personally I've never met any intellectuals. I've met people who write novels, others who treat the sick; people who work in economics and others who compose electronic music. I've met people who teach, people who paint, and people of whom I have never really understood what they do. But intellectuals? Never.
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| Jobsite Theater’s production of Macbeth, starring Giles Davies (Macbeth) and Dahlia Legault (Lady Macbeth). Photo: Crawford Long |
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| Michel Foucault. Photo: Martine Frank, 1978 |
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Thomas Pynchon ranks among the most critically acclaimed American authors of the past fifty years; certainly so when viewed in terms of academic scholarship. He has two academic journals devoted solely to his work and influence (Pynchon Notes and Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon), over twenty monographs exploring his writing and, since 1978, there have been 23 doctorates awarded in the United Kingdom alone on, or in major part concerning, his fiction. This trend shows no sign of stopping; with apologies to the well-known formulation of James Joyce, almost a century ago, it seems as though Thomas Pynchon will continue to keep the professors busy.
The reasons for this critical proliferation are not hard to fathom. Pynchon is a man of mystery, refusing to be photographed or interviewed, who has published some of the finest works of post-war literature, particularly V., Gravity’s Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49 and Mason & Dixon. His novels have most frequently been type-cast as exemplary of the postmodern – saturated as they are with paranoia, indeterminacy and failed quest-narratives – but this seriously underplays the scale of Pynchon’s writing. Consider that Pynchon is also a writer of enormous historical scope. V. spans the defining moments of crisis in the twentieth century, Gravity’s Rainbow re-casts the sixties in terms of World War II and the history of Calvinism (including a flashback to a Mauritian Dodo hunt) while Mason & Dixon explores the interrelation of its eponymous protagonists with the Age of Reason and slavery in America. If this weren’t enough, his novels are interdisciplinary, incorporating metaphors from science and technology, cartography, popular culture, cartoons, aural puns, mathematical in-jokes, outrageous character names (and sexual practices) and sublime prose poetry.
More important than any of these preceding aspects, though, is the fact that Pynchon is a politically engaged, ethical writer. Gravity’s Rainbow is not just a dense, postmodern sprawl, but instead makes one of its central observations on the fact that the evil of mankind, parallel to nature, “does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation”, a spatio-temporal transposition to a new setting, persisting Beyond the Zero of any Pavlovian deconditioning, and always collecting around centres of power, embodied by the novel’s final, America-bound, transatlantic V-2/ICBM. Through this impossible moment, Pynchon highlights that behind twentieth-century America’s technological and economic supremacy lies the dark negotiations of Operation Paperclip and a re-embodiment of the right-wing politics supposedly vanquished in the Second World War. How many of us notice, inscribed upon our antibiotics, the second label, permanently hidden beneath the surface-level, reading “sulfonamide” and “I.G. Farben”? How many of us see, when we watch satellite television, the German technician crying: “Vergeltungswaffe”? [Read More]
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| Michel Foucault. Photo: Randolph Badler. |
Music and the analysis of folklore were not the only areas of formalist ferment that interested Foucault in these years. Between 1953 and 1956, he also followed closely the book reviews published each month in the Nouvelle Revue Français by Maurice Blanchot—a critic preoccupied, like both Barraqué and Foucault, with the relationship between the formal unities of an artwork and the anguish of the artist haunted by death.Also at A Piece of Monologue:
In the 1950s, Maurice Blanchot was one of France's most famous invisible men. A working critic whose stature in his own country warrants comparison with Edmund Wilson's in America, Blanchot eschewed any direct contact with his public. Like J. D. Salinger, he generated a mystique and sustained a kind of cult following by making a fetish of anonymity. He permitted no photographs of himself to circulate. He never lectured or read his work in public. He granted no interviews, though he did make a habit of "interviewing" himself.
Foucault found Blanchot's mystique irresistible. "At that time, I dreamt of being Blanchot," he confided to one friend years later. A close student of Blanchot's critical theories, he also studied his rhetoric, using the device of "interviewing" himself in his book Raymond Roussel and also at the end of The Archeology of Knowledge. In a touching homage to the faceless author, he even turned down an invitation to meet Blanchot over dinner, remarking to Daniel Defert that he knew the writing—and had no need to know the writer.
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| Michel Foucault. Photograph: Bruce Jackson |
Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was an enormously influential French philosopher who wrote, among other things, historical analyses of psychiatry, medicine, the prison system, and the function of sexuality in social organizations. He spent some time during the last years of his life at UC Berkeley, delivering several lectures in English. And happily they were recorded for posterity:Also at A Piece of Monologue:
These last lectures are also available on YouTube (in audio format) [Read More]
- Four Lectures on Truth and Subjectivity (1980)
- Six Lectures on Discourse and Truth (1983)
- Three Lectures on “The Culture of the Self” (1983)
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| Friedrich Kittler |
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| Friedrich Kittler |
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| Thomas Bernhard |
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| Jacques Derrida. Photograph: Richard Melloul/Sygma/Corbis |
In addressing a philosopher of the importance of Jacques Derrida, whose massive output – about 60 volumes not including his as yet unpublished seminars – has been translated and debated the world over, Benoît Peeters has quite rightly chosen not the origins or content of the work itself, but the life of the man behind it. In short, he has written an excellent biography entirely in keeping with Anglo-Saxon traditions. He is the first to have gained access to the writer's records at France's Institute of Contemporary Publishing Archives and the Langson Library at the University of California, Irvine. He also interviewed around 100 essential figures.Also at A Piece of Monologue:
He has reconstructed the events that prompted a young, non-practising Jew, born in 1930 in Algeria and banned from his lycée in 1942 by the Vichy government, to move to Paris in 1949 to study at the Lycée Louis le Grand, subsequently graduating to the Ecole Normale Supérieure.
In 1966, after acquainting himself with the work of the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, Derrida took part in the celebrated symposium on structuralism organised by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore that brought together Roland Barthes, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Jean Hyppolite, René Girard and Jacques Lacan, among others. A year later he met Paul de Man, a theorist of modernist literary criticism, who introduced him to several US universities. He was soon rewarded with considerable success, particularly after the publication of De la Grammatologie (Of Grammatology) and L'Ecriture et la Différence (Writing and Difference). Over the next 10 years he found his place between two generations of brilliant thinkers, engaging in constant dialogue with Emmanuel Lévinas, Maurice Blanchot, Jean Genet, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and Louis Althusser.
Meanwhile, he worked hard on research, teaching and publication. In 1983, with several fellows, he founded the International College of Philosophy, then took up a post at the Graduate School of Social Sciences. His fame spread and his virulent critique of Marxism, structuralism and a certain ideal of overturning the established order – mistakenly seen as "1968" thinking – percolated down through French public opinion. From 1986 he increasingly came under attack. The tide of hatred grew so strong as to dash any hopes of election to the Collège de France.
In fact, Derrida remained a social democrat opposed to colonialism and capital punishment, a feminist, a true Enlightenment scholar, attached to republican values, and an admirer of De Gaulle and Mandela. But from around 1987, as Peeters points out, he was successively depicted as an anti-democratic nihilist and an adept of two Nazi theorists – Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger – whose work he had investigated, then as an extreme leftwinger, on account of Spectres de Marx (Spectres of Marx), a major work on the concept of revolution. Finally he was accused of being a Nazi, after making a clumsy attempt to defend his friend De Man, whose murky past working on an antisemitic Belgian newspaper had emerged after his death.
Peeters sheds light on all this nonsense while revealing the many facets of a passionate thinker who travelled widely and invented a new language of philosophy. This explains his interest in a wide range of subjects (literature, law), social situations (exclusion, homosexuality) and struggles against suffering and discrimination (racism, antisemitism). [Read more]
In his recent short biography of the writer, Samuel Beckett, Andrew Gibson makes the essential attempt to restore to the dramatist and his characters the difficult and thankless nobility of the compassionate view. Coming nearly fifteen years after the monumental biographies by Anthony Cronin and James Knowlson, Gibson's 200-page monograph seeks to offer something of a corrective to the academic and cultural hagiography of the writer. "It is impossible to ignore this self-deprecating, reticent, disciplined, conscientious, diligent, implacably well-mannered, dauntingly forbearing person, not least because he appears to have been the origin of the myth of 'Saint Sam' amongst a generation of scholars who made his acquaintance," Gibson writes (and bearing in mind the emphasis on the comedy, not the tragedy, that these scholars found in his work: The subtitle of Ruby Cohn's first book on Beckett was "The Comic Gamut," and Hugh Kenner included him in a study entitled The Stoic Comedians). "Look straight at the works themselves," he continues, "and there is a great deal of material that — even insisting on the detachment of writer from narrator or character — simply does not square with the myth at all: the superciliousness and arrogance perceptible in the early writings, for example; the hysterical rage of the Trilogy; the extreme and sometimes murderous forms of violence from Molloy to All That Fall to How It Is and beyond."Also at A Piece of Monologue:
Gibson performs this rescue by balancing Beckett's work between what he calls melancholia ("the conviction that there is 'nothing to be done'") and misericordia (which "assumes that one cannot remain indifferent to the plight of others astray in the labyrinth"). He emphasises that this corrective is not meant to undermine Beckett's clear caritas — "goodness to others" — but to establish the difficulty of maintaining that compassion in a twentieth-century historical culture which encourages quite the opposite. In the eight chapters of his biography, Gibson traces this historical culture and Beckett's response to it in Ireland of the 1920s, Europe of the 1930s (Gibson is very good on the viciousness of fascist governments in suppressing and demonizing Modernism), postwar France, and the more international globalized culture of the Cold War and after. In doing so, Gibson draws upon recent revisionist histories of Vichy France (in which Beckett's career with the resistance formed the background to the great trilogy of novels), Mark Nixon's fine examination of Beckett's German diaries (which were discovered posthumously) over the past ten years or so, and the views of Foucault, Badiou and Adorno towards Beckett's work in an administered society. [Read the article]
I have chosen to inaugurate this series with a few considerations on "The Death of the Author" because of its truly iconic nature: it symbolises the rise of what would come to be known as "theory". Even if he never names them, Roland Barthes (like Proust before him) launches an attack on the traditional biography-based criticism à la Sainte-Beuve or Lanson which still dominated French academia in the sixties. The paradox, of course, is that this essay – with its symbolic slaying of the paternal "Author-God" – could lend itself to a textbook psychological reading given that Barthes lost his own father before his first birthday. The "Death of the Author" theme itself takes on added meaning, in hindsight, when you consider that Barthes's critical career was, at least in part, a displacement activity to avoid writing the novel he dreamed of. Does any of this invalidate his theories? I'll let you be the judge of that...
In 2002, the prestigious Pompidou Centre in Paris devoted a major exhibition, not to an artist, philosopher, scientist or novelist, but a literary critic: Roland Barthes. Now that the "theory wars" – which had once torn apart literature departments on both sides of the Atlantic – were largely over, it served as a reminder of a time when a posse of structuralists and post-structuralists superseded the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre as France's premier intellectual icons. Many of them were primarily philosophers, anthropologists, historians, linguists or psychoanalysts – Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva et al – but the locus of this intellectual revolution was undoubtedly literary criticism.
La nouvelle critique was flavour of the month, much like its culinary counterpart, nouvelle cuisine, albeit more of a mouthful. Critics-cum-thinkers such as Barthes himself – who was equally at home at the lofty Collège de France or down the trendy Le Palace nightclub – achieved bona fide celebrity status. Their works often became bestsellers in spite of their demanding and iconoclastic nature. Soon, NME journalists were peppering their articles with arcane references to Baudrillard while Scritti Politti dedicated a postmodern ditty to Jacques Derrida. The whole movement seemed as provocative, and indeed exciting, as Brigitte Bardot in her slinky, sex kitten heyday. Its defining moment was the publication of a racy little number called "The Death of the Author". [Read the Article]
[...] The second theme is even more familiar: it is the kinship between writing and death. This relationship inverts the age-old conception of Greek narrative or epic, which was designed to guarantee the immortality of a hero. The hero accepted an early death because his life, consecrated and magnified by death, passed into immortality; and the narrative redeemed his acceptance of death. In a different sense, Arabic stories, and The Arabian Nights in particular, had as their motivation, their theme and pretext, this strategy for defeating death. Storytellers continued their narratives late into the night to forestall death and to delay the inevitable moment when everyone must fall silent. Scheherazade's story is a desperate inversion of murder; it is the effort, throughout all those nights, to exclude death from the circle of existence. This conception of a spoken or written narrative as a protection against death has been transformed by our culture. Writing is now linked to sacrifice and to the sacrifice of life itself; it is a voluntary obliteration of the self that does not require representation in books because it takes place in the everyday existence of the writer. Where a work had the duty of creating immortality, it now attains the right to kill, to become the murderer of its author. Flaubert, Proust, and Kafka are obvious examples of this reversal. In addition, we find the link between writing and death manifested in the total effacement of the individual characteristics of the writer; the quibbling and confrontations that a writer generates between himself and his text cancel out the signs of his particular individuality. If we wish to know the writer in our day, it will be through the singularity of his absence and in his link to death, which has transformed him into a victim of his own writing. While all of this is familiar in philosophy, as in literary criticism, I am not certain that the consequences derived from the disappearance or death of the author have been fully explored or that the importance of this event has been appreciated. To be specific, it seems to me that the themes destined to replace the privileged position accorded the author have merely served to arrest the possibility of genuine change. [...]
Michel Foucault, 'What is an Author?'Screen, vol. 20, no. 1 (1979)
