Foucault and his authors (Michel Foucault)

In early work, historian and philosopher Michel Foucault often wrote about what constitutes literature, as well as the writing of certain, mostly French, modernist authors. Yet despite Foucault's status as one of the important late 20th century philosophers, little has been made of his early interest in literature. The failure to address this part of Foucault's writing stems from his own, for the most part, silence in his later work about the question of literature and from the perception that Foucault left this question behind as he developed his theories of “genealogy” and his analytics of power.; This dissertation argues that although Foucault at a certain point almost entirely stops writing about literature and stops invoking authors such as Sade, Mallarmé, Beckett, Maurice Blanchot, and Raymond Roussel, he does maintain a “literary” interest throughout his work in how “languages” are invented around particular sets of descriptive and conceptual possibilities, which in turn occasion the emergence of whole fields of possible objects and experiences.; Examining Foucault's writing about literature from this perspective brings into relief the way, throughout his work, Foucault keenly wields the figurative capacities of language to recast the very objects and circumstances of history. This makes of Foucault's historical research and writing a “literary” experiment in which he shows us not only how the events, artifacts, agents, dynamics and circumstances of history are embedded within the theories and methodologies one develops for their description and conceptualization, but also how the archives serve as a resource for these possibilities. The “figurative openings” that Foucault looks for in history are therefore the occasion of present insights into possibilities of knowledge and experience authorized by the difference of the archives—authorized by a store of discourses and practices markedly other than our own. In this manner, Foucault's “authors” and the archives serve at once as “masks” for Foucault the historian, as the masks through which Foucault becomes an historian (and produces a work), and yet as those and that which don the mask of Foucault the historian in order that they may themselves speak and become an archive.