Foucault: A Very Short Introduction

Foucault, however, emphasizes that even in these cases the writer’s achievement is never literally that of a madman. ‘Madness’, he reminds us, ‘is precisely the absence of the work of art’ (MC, 287).

In this world, God is dead, which means that there are no objectively defined limits of thought or action against which we can hurl ourselves. ‘Profanation in a world that no longer recognizes any positive meaning in the sacred – is this not more or less what we may call transgression?’

Accordingly, when authors write, much of what they say is a product not of their distinctive insight or ability but the result of the language they are employing. For much of the text it is just language that is speaking. Authors can react to this fact in different ways. One standard (romantic) idea sees the author as straining against the 13

structures of language to express unique individual insights.

But it remains clear that, for Foucault, language can and must take us beyond the mode of subjective or even inter-subjective expression.

Foucault concludes that we should, strictly, not speak of the ‘author’

but of the ‘author function’. To be an author is not merely to have a certain factual relation to a text (for example, to have causally 11

produced it); it is, rather, to fulfil a certain socially and culturally defined role in relation to the text. Authorship is a social construction, not a natural kind, and it will vary over cultures and over time.

As Foucault suggests, even when we aim at collecting ‘everything’ by a great author such as Nietzsche, we do not include these texts. Only certain kinds of texts count as the ‘work’ of an author.

Foucault’s response to this objection will be the title of one of his best-known essays: ‘What Is an Author?’. Is being an author a matter of having an identity (a certain nature, character, personality), like, for example, being a hero, a liar, or a lover?

I dreamt of being Blanchot.

We have seen how Foucault wanted to write books in order to escape from any fixed identity, to continually become someone else, thereby never really being anyone.

But as in Foucault’s literary study, the concern with space (as opposed to time) and with language (as an autonomous system) reflects a mode of thought that removes subjectivity from its usual central position and subordinates it to structural systems.

And death, in Foucault’s history of modern medicine, remains at the heart of human existence. It is not mere extinction but ‘a possibility intrinsic to life’ (BC, 156), one that grounds (through the dissections of pathological anatomy) our scientific knowledge of life. ‘Death’, Foucault concludes, ‘left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret’ (BC, 172).