Just wanted to respond quickly to one thing ... this discussion has been
very stimulating, and there are lots of things in it that I'd like to get
back to (thanks especially to Stuart for your comments and references),
but to do so intelligently may take some reading which I may not be able
to do for awhile. Anyway:
On Sat, 23 Oct 1999, Sebastian Gurciullo wrote:
> Does anyone have any ideas on the connection which Foucault makes between
> literature and madness. I am thinking in particular of the appendix to the
> second french edition (which went in along with "My body, this paper, this
> fire"), "Madness, the absence of the work"? I am particularly interested in
> the idea Foucault raises, not just here but elsewhere, of certain "mad"
> writers who are dismissed or misunderstood in their own times but who later
> come to be understood as responsible for some kind of literary novelty or
> breakthrough.
I was looking at the Conclusion in M&C yesterday and having trouble with
what Foucault says on this issue. Case in point: Nietzsche's "madness" has
always been used as an excuse to dismiss him as a philosopher--and a
reason to call him, rather, an artist! I think that, quite to the contrary
of madness and art being seen as mutually exclusive, there is a strong
identification between the artist and the madwo/man in the popular
imagination. Many might agree with Foucault's Descartes that madness
cannot speak, but contend that madness *shows*, in art, what it cannot
say. Art is just what cannot be put into (literal) words. Art *expresses*
what cannot be *communicated*, or something like that. (It seems as if
Foucault's thought here is infected by something like Barthes's idea that
art *is* just another kind of speaking.)
Put it this way: to be mad is to be unable to speak *literally*. And so it
is the modern separation of literal from figurative modes of speaking
which cuts the mad off from the non-mad--but cuts them off only so far as
literal speech is concerned.
Matthew
---Matthew A. King---Department of Philosophy---York University, Toronto---
"Whatever we have words for, that we have already got beyond.
In all talk there is a grain of contempt."
--------------------------------(Nietzsche)--------------------------------
very stimulating, and there are lots of things in it that I'd like to get
back to (thanks especially to Stuart for your comments and references),
but to do so intelligently may take some reading which I may not be able
to do for awhile. Anyway:
On Sat, 23 Oct 1999, Sebastian Gurciullo wrote:
> Does anyone have any ideas on the connection which Foucault makes between
> literature and madness. I am thinking in particular of the appendix to the
> second french edition (which went in along with "My body, this paper, this
> fire"), "Madness, the absence of the work"? I am particularly interested in
> the idea Foucault raises, not just here but elsewhere, of certain "mad"
> writers who are dismissed or misunderstood in their own times but who later
> come to be understood as responsible for some kind of literary novelty or
> breakthrough.
I was looking at the Conclusion in M&C yesterday and having trouble with
what Foucault says on this issue. Case in point: Nietzsche's "madness" has
always been used as an excuse to dismiss him as a philosopher--and a
reason to call him, rather, an artist! I think that, quite to the contrary
of madness and art being seen as mutually exclusive, there is a strong
identification between the artist and the madwo/man in the popular
imagination. Many might agree with Foucault's Descartes that madness
cannot speak, but contend that madness *shows*, in art, what it cannot
say. Art is just what cannot be put into (literal) words. Art *expresses*
what cannot be *communicated*, or something like that. (It seems as if
Foucault's thought here is infected by something like Barthes's idea that
art *is* just another kind of speaking.)
Put it this way: to be mad is to be unable to speak *literally*. And so it
is the modern separation of literal from figurative modes of speaking
which cuts the mad off from the non-mad--but cuts them off only so far as
literal speech is concerned.
Matthew
---Matthew A. King---Department of Philosophy---York University, Toronto---
"Whatever we have words for, that we have already got beyond.
In all talk there is a grain of contempt."
--------------------------------(Nietzsche)--------------------------------