Recently I wrote a paper on "some affinities" between Foucault's and Samuel Beckett's ideas. Foucault, of course, frames his "What is an Author?" essay with a quotation from Beckett "'What does it matter who is speaking,' someone said ...etc" (actually, the "framing" is nicely performative, come to think of it, with the concluding reference a kind of throwaway allusion and pastiched gesture of closure, having assimilated Beckett's "voice"). I surveyed a few instances of what is quite evidently a close relationship between the two patterns of thought (determination of subject by the gaze, by discourse, by geometry; introjection of an obsessive system of "order" (chaos); ambivalent internal/external perspectives, subject decentredness; etc). There are so many striking similarities that I'm surprised no-one's done much on it in Beckettian and literary studies (performance studies generally refer to the panopticon). I generally read Beckett as enacting (e.g. performatively, in the!
prose) ideas that we can read "philosophically" in Foucault's genre.
What do others think about genres of discourse in this respect, and the relative status of genres? I guess that disciplinary demarcations probably affect the way Foucault is read, that his discourse is probably considered by (sympathetic) philosophers as the more authoritative; but this may be ironical, given his comment to the effect that he writes "fiction," since the institutions don't yet exist that could validate what he says. And in the context, probably a pretty silly thought about the flow of ideas: I wonder whether Foucault appropriates any ideas from Beckett, and vice-versa. I presume that notions of influence, authority (i.e. originality of idea), and tradition of thought, serve a conservative function in terms of the academy, whereas a notion such as the episteme would tend to be destabilizing, since individual human agents (original thinkers, academic high priests etc) are derived in terms of it. I guess I just can't help wanting to know, where do they get those d!
urn crazy ideas from, anyhoo?
Too vague for the essay, but this droll narrator strikes me as seeing the world through an outmoded episteme: "First change of all in the end a fragment comes away and falls. With slow fall for so dense a body it lights like cork on water and scarce breaks the surface" (_For To End Yet Again_).
Cordially
Michael G
guest@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
**...My people seem to be falling to bits...
...I can't see any trace of any system anywhere...** (SB 1956)
prose) ideas that we can read "philosophically" in Foucault's genre.
What do others think about genres of discourse in this respect, and the relative status of genres? I guess that disciplinary demarcations probably affect the way Foucault is read, that his discourse is probably considered by (sympathetic) philosophers as the more authoritative; but this may be ironical, given his comment to the effect that he writes "fiction," since the institutions don't yet exist that could validate what he says. And in the context, probably a pretty silly thought about the flow of ideas: I wonder whether Foucault appropriates any ideas from Beckett, and vice-versa. I presume that notions of influence, authority (i.e. originality of idea), and tradition of thought, serve a conservative function in terms of the academy, whereas a notion such as the episteme would tend to be destabilizing, since individual human agents (original thinkers, academic high priests etc) are derived in terms of it. I guess I just can't help wanting to know, where do they get those d!
urn crazy ideas from, anyhoo?
Too vague for the essay, but this droll narrator strikes me as seeing the world through an outmoded episteme: "First change of all in the end a fragment comes away and falls. With slow fall for so dense a body it lights like cork on water and scarce breaks the surface" (_For To End Yet Again_).
Cordially
Michael G
guest@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
**...My people seem to be falling to bits...
...I can't see any trace of any system anywhere...** (SB 1956)