Foucault | Blanchot: Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside, and Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him

by Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot, Brian Massumi (Translator)

In these two essays, two of the most important French thinkers of our time reflect on each other’s work. In so doing, novelist/essayist Maurice Blanchot and philosopher Michel Foucault develop a new perspective on the relationship between subjectivity, fiction, and the will to truth. The two texts present reflections on writing, language, and representation that question the status of the author/subject and explore the notion of a “neutral” voice that arises from the realm of the “outside.” This book is crucial not only to an understanding of these two thinkers, but also to any overview of recent French thought.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, France

109 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1966

About the author

Paul-Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationships between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory.
Born in Poitiers, France, into an upper-middle-class family, Foucault was educated at the Lycée Henri-IV, at the École Normale Supérieure, where he developed an interest in philosophy and came under the influence of his tutors Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser, and at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), where he earned degrees in philosophy and psychology. After several years as a cultural diplomat abroad, he returned to France and published his first major book, The History of Madness (1961). After obtaining work between 1960 and 1966 at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, he produced The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The Order of Things (1966), publications that displayed his increasing involvement with structuralism, from which he later distanced himself. These first three histories exemplified a historiographical technique Foucault was developing called "archaeology".
From 1966 to 1968, Foucault lectured at the University of Tunis before returning to France, where he became head of the philosophy department at the new experimental university of Paris VIII. Foucault subsequently published The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). In 1970, Foucault was admitted to the Collège de France, a membership he retained until his death. He also became active in several left-wing groups involved in campaigns against racism and human rights abuses and for penal reform. Foucault later published Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976), in which he developed archaeological and genealogical methods that emphasized the role that power plays in society.
Foucault died in Paris from complications of HIV/AIDS; he became the first public figure in France to die from complications of the disease. His partner Daniel Defert founded the AIDES charity in his memory.

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

How far we are from the proliferation of sentences in ordinary discourse, sentences that never stop being generated, in an accumulation unimpeded by contradiction but, on the contrary, provoked to a point of a vertiginous beyond.

I asked aloud last week, what the hell is so special about Blanchot? Of course, I had read so little, just some wartime book reviews he penned for a newspaper. Still I saw reverence for him everywhere, across seventy years of European thought.

I imagined that this tome --where Foucault and Blanchot reflect on the other-- would afford me some perspective. It did. Unfortunately, Foucault talks about Blanchot the novelist, where I have no experience nor immediate access. There are references to darkened hallways, locked anterooms, foggy boardinghouses -- all of it fascinating, but alas. There is also a suspicious lack of politics.

Blanchot provides a gleaming tribute to Foucault's career and accomplishments. As with most of these encounters between thinkers, I only long for more.

[Ruben · Rating 3 out of 5]

”Fiktionen består alltså inte i att visa det osynliga utan i att visa i hur hög grad det synligas osynlighet är osynlig”.
Ja, han gör det inte så lätt för oss den gode Foucault.

[michal k-c · Rating 3 out of 5]

Foucault gets really tripped up at the beginning talking about the classic playground paradox “i’m lying when i speak”, which is a good reminder that being an analytic philosopher is mostly just being baffled by things children understand. this is an endorsement of the book though. seeing lots of “wish i had read some Blanchot before reading this” but i found you could just as easily pretend he was talking about Kafka or even Beckett and it still lands.

[Sajid · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The characteristic movement of mysticism is to attempt to join — even if it means crossing the night — the positivity of an existence by opening a difficult line of communication with it. Even when that existence contests itself, hollows itself out in the labor of its own negativity, infinitely withdrawing into a lightless day, a shadowless night, a visibility devoid of shape, it is still a shelter in which experience can rest. The shelter is created as much by the law of a Word as by the open expanse of silence. For in the form of the experience, silence is the immeasurable, inaudible, primal breath from which all manifest discourse issues; or, speech is a reign with the power to hold itself in silent suspense.”

They will always surpass meanings,signification, unity. Language will be naked in its perpetual opening, a streaming of perpetual discourses. Silence will also loose the foundation of meaning. Foucault and Blanchot—they imagined each other not as a person,but as a process of individuation. Thought without interiority, depth; everything from the outside. A madness, an anxiety of language itself!

[Arielle Stern · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Hence the necessity of converting reflexive language. It must be directed not toward any inner confirmation—not toward a kind of central, unshakable certitude—but toward an outer bound where it must continually contest itself. When language arrives at its own edge, what it finds is not a positivity that contradicts it, but the void that will efface it.”

[Felix · Rating 4 out of 5]

Foucault on Blanchot is about as obscure as I've come to expect from Foucault, not least because I've read no Blanchot as yet - the clearer moments, however, make me all the more excited to attempt the latter. Perhaps moreso Blanchot on Foucault - at least in translation Blanchot here speaks clear as a bell, and even considering his measured avoidance of praise in his treatment of Foucault's work, nevertheless drums up a passion and delight that he himself appears to have experienced in the younger man's work.

This was a quick and fun read, over the course of which my reading list filled out a great deal. A curiosity in itself, or a springboard to further exploration. I expect I'll look forward to reading it again once I've read more by each author.

[Lance Grabmiller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wish I would have brushed up on my Blanchot before reading the Foucault piece. The Blanchot is surprising easy to read and points out the idiosyncratic and very personal (all too human) discourse (as life) that was the work of Foucault.

[Alex Obrigewitsch · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting chiasmus in which the thought of two thinkers thinks upon the other, thus showing forth the moment at which their thought intersects.
Foucault produces an insightful reading of Blanchot, and Blanchot (in his customary fashion) uses Foucault's reading of his thought to read Foucault's own thought.
Foucault creates the bridge and Blanchot dismantles it so that they meet at the bottom of the chiasmus.
I highly recommend this short text for anyone interested in Foucault, Blanchot, or both.

[Lisa]

new

[Dreamersemporium]

like new

[JL · Rating 2 out of 5]

Incomprehensible