Thank you everyone for your sources on Proust, plenty of good stuff for
me to work through here.
Emmaneul--Thanks for your detailed thoughts. I was thinking only of Foucault's comments in a 1975 interview with Roger-Paul Droit (published in Fr. 6 Sept. 1986 in Le Monde Sans Visa as "Foucault, passe-frontieres de la philosophie," and in Eng. in Foucault Live as "On Literature," pg. 150-3 in the big book)...
"Q: What is the place or status of literary texts in your research?
MF: In Madness and Civilization and in The Order of Things, I only mention literary texts, or point to them in passing, as a kind of dawdler who says, "Now, there you see, one cannot fail to think of Rameau's Nephew." But these allusions play no role in the economy of the process. For me literature was each time the object of a report, not part of an analysis nor a reduction nor an integration into the domain of analysis. It was a point of rest, a halt, a blazon, a flag.
Q: You didn't want these texts to play the role of expressing or reflecting historical processes?
MF: No . . . I passed from a state of uncertainty--citing literature where it was without indicating its relationship with the rest--to a frankly negative position, by trying to make all the non-literary or para-literary discourses that were actually constituted in a given period reappear positively, and by excluding literature. In Discipline and Punish I only deal with bad literature."
Versus Deleuze's frequent statements like this one, "is it our fault that Lawrence, Miller, Kerouac, Burroughs, Artaud, and Beckett know more about schizophrenia than psychiatrists and psychoanalysts?" (Negotiations, pg. 23), and the privileging of the literary found especially in A Thousand Plateaus (not to mention the major studies on Kafka, Sacher-Masoch, Proust, etc.)
By my comparison I did not mean to dismiss Foucault's literary commitments. I sometimes imagine Deleuze's project as almost more inclined towards the literary than towards "philosophy" proper--a construction that undoubtedly has more to do with my interests as a reader than his an writer. Anyways, much thanks for the citations of Foucault on literature.
cheers,
Robert
emmanuel pehau wrote:
Emmaneul--Thanks for your detailed thoughts. I was thinking only of Foucault's comments in a 1975 interview with Roger-Paul Droit (published in Fr. 6 Sept. 1986 in Le Monde Sans Visa as "Foucault, passe-frontieres de la philosophie," and in Eng. in Foucault Live as "On Literature," pg. 150-3 in the big book)...
"Q: What is the place or status of literary texts in your research?
MF: In Madness and Civilization and in The Order of Things, I only mention literary texts, or point to them in passing, as a kind of dawdler who says, "Now, there you see, one cannot fail to think of Rameau's Nephew." But these allusions play no role in the economy of the process. For me literature was each time the object of a report, not part of an analysis nor a reduction nor an integration into the domain of analysis. It was a point of rest, a halt, a blazon, a flag.
Q: You didn't want these texts to play the role of expressing or reflecting historical processes?
MF: No . . . I passed from a state of uncertainty--citing literature where it was without indicating its relationship with the rest--to a frankly negative position, by trying to make all the non-literary or para-literary discourses that were actually constituted in a given period reappear positively, and by excluding literature. In Discipline and Punish I only deal with bad literature."
Versus Deleuze's frequent statements like this one, "is it our fault that Lawrence, Miller, Kerouac, Burroughs, Artaud, and Beckett know more about schizophrenia than psychiatrists and psychoanalysts?" (Negotiations, pg. 23), and the privileging of the literary found especially in A Thousand Plateaus (not to mention the major studies on Kafka, Sacher-Masoch, Proust, etc.)
By my comparison I did not mean to dismiss Foucault's literary commitments. I sometimes imagine Deleuze's project as almost more inclined towards the literary than towards "philosophy" proper--a construction that undoubtedly has more to do with my interests as a reader than his an writer. Anyways, much thanks for the citations of Foucault on literature.
cheers,
Robert
emmanuel pehau wrote:
Robert Stuart wrote : " I of course have Deleuze's long essay, and realize F. was much
less engaged with literature"
Sorry Robert, but I sincerely fail to understand where you got this impression from.