The mask of death - Foucault, Derrida, the human sciences and literature

Angelaki - Journal of the Theoretical Humanities

Volumn 5, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 211-221

  Rajan, Tilottama ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO   (Canada)

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EID: 62749172880     PISSN: 0969725X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09697250020012304     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. I have used the following abbreviations to refer to texts by Foucault: AK, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972);
2. BC, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1986);
3. DIE, "Dream, Imagination and Existence" (1953) in Dream and Existence, ed. Keith Hoeller, Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 19. 1 (1984-85);
4. DL, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, trans. Charles Ruas (Berkeley: U of California P, 1986);
5. OT, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1970).
6. For a more extensive discussion of this distinction see Tilottama Rajan, "Trans-Positions of Difference: Kristeva and Post-Structuralism," in Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva's Writing, ed. Kelly Oliver (London: Routledge, 1993) 215-37;
7. "Language, Music, and the Body: Nietzsche and Deconstruction" in Intersections: Nineteenth-Century Philosophy and Contemporary Theory, ed. Tilottama Rajan and David L. Clark (Albany: SUNY P, 1995) 147-69.
8. Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, trans. David Webb (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992) 12-17.
9. Edmund Husserl, "Philosophy as Rigourous Science" (1911) in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper and Row, 1965) 71-147;
10. Cartesian Meditations (1929/1950), trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988) 151.
11. See also The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1934-37), trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1970).
12. Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post- Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London: Verso, 1987) 110.
13. I have used the following abbreviations to refer to texts by Derrida: Gr, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977);
14. P, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981);
15. PI, Points . . . Interviews, 1974-1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995);
16. RP, Resistances of Psychoanalysis (1996), trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998);
17. SP, Speech and Phenomena; and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973);
18. WD, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978).
19. Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu'est-ce que la littérature? (Paris: Gallimard, 1969) 16-21, 45-48 n.
20. Maurice Blanchot, "Literature and the Right to Death" in The Gaze of Orpheus, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown NY: Station Hill Press, 1981) 48-52. Interestingly- and it is here that the Sartrean context is most apparent- Blanchot associates even "meaningful prose" (51) with a being intimately connected to nothingness: with "the movement of negation by which things are separated from themselves and destroyed in order to be known, subjugated, communicated" (48). There is thus a thin line separating a literature concerned with "the world" from one interested only in "the reality of language" (52), and thus in a negativity that leads nowhere except to the Levinasian il y a as the "unknown, free, and silent existence of things" (49, 51).
21. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987) 248.
22. Timothy Clark, for instance, links Derrida to Blanchot and Heidegger. He discerns a partition in Derrida's corpus that in effect corresponds to Sartre's division of prose from poetry: between his work on philosophical texts which remains a form of "post-Hegelian dialectics" and his very different essays on literature, the concerns of which are ontological rather than epistemic [Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot: Sources of Derrida's Notion and Practice of Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992) 109]. As will be apparent, I would also want to qualify Clark's association of Derrida's and Blanchot's sense of literature with a "strange mode of the transcendental" (73), although the phrase fits Foucault's reading of Blanchot.
23. In effect, Foucault associates Blanchot with a hypostasis of negativity that turns nothingness into a form of being. This idea is more explicitly developed in his monograph published in the same year as The Order of Things: Maurice Blanchot: the Thought from Outside, where he associates Blanchot with negative theology [in Foucault/Blanchot, trans. Brian Massumi and Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Zone Books, 1987) 16, 19].
24. It is arguable, however, that Blanchot himself is careful not to be tempted into a negative essentialism. As early as "Literature and the Right to Death" he describes language as "having become an interminable resifting of words, instead of the silence it wanted to achieve" (50). Much later, in The Infinite Conversation (1969) echoing Sartre's critique of Mallarmé as the poet of nothingness (see n 14 below), Blanchot implicitly dissociates himself from Mallarmé by recognizing the latter's desire for nothingness as the inverse mirror image of Hegel's desire for being [trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993) 423].
25. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Sage, 1993) 149.
26. Foucault briefly outlines the structure of this "correlation" as a double deconstruction, in which the positivism of psychoanalysis as a "history of individuals" would be articulated upon "the unconscious of culture," while the repositivizing of the "historicity of cultures" as an affirmative pluralism would be exposed to "the unconscious of individuals," in a folding back of the ethnological cogito into the space it has not thought (OT 379). We can see Foucault working towards this double articulation of psychology and the social in Madness and Civilisation (1962) and deploying it more successfully in The Birth of the Clinic. Yet neither text actually engages "ethnology"- a rising star in the university world of the 1960s- and neither actually draws on psychoanalysis, although in his very first two texts (Dream, Imagination, and Existence [1953] and Maladie mentale et personnalité [1954]) Foucault had set out to rethink the discipline of psychology. In short, around and after the period of The Order of Things Foucault apparently loses faith in the project of a chiasmic supplementarity between psychoanalysis and ethnology.
27. The genealogy of "madness" in Foucault's early work is similar to that of "literature. " As already suggested, Foucault's first two studies are motivated by the affirmative exigency of rethinking psychology, first through Binswanger's Daseinanalyse and then through existential psychoanalysis. In Maladie mentale et personnalité the experience of madness is thus reengaged with the disciplinary project of deconstructing and remaking the human sciences. However, starting in part with Madness and Civilisation and culminating in I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother . . . (1973), Foucault makes madness absolutely inaccessible: madness becomes that which is wholly outside, a kind of negative absolute. The beginnings of this construction of madness as a form of being-in-itself are apparent in The Order of Things, where madness and literature are associated through writers such as Artaud and Hölderlin.
28. Sartre, Mallarmé, or The Poet of Nothingness, trans. Ernest Sturm (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1988) 136-37, 129.
29. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other (1947), trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1987) 41. Although Sartre's full text was only published posthumously in 1986, a shorter version containing this passage appeared in an introduction to an edition of Mallarmé published in 1966, the same year as OT.
30. As Derrida points out, the "tragic Freud . . . who talks it out with death" is the one to whom Foucault is drawn, even as he also sees Freud and psychoanalysis as committed to "anthropologization. " This "hinge" position is what finally leads Foucault (albeit ambivalently) to defer psychoanalysis in favor of the purely ontological experience of madness as that which is completely beyond representation, and thus beyond psychoanalysis, even as the latter takes us to its threshold (RP 97, 104-07).
31. See Tilottama Rajan, "The Phenomenological Allegory: From Death and the Labyrinth to The Order of Things," Poetics Today 19. 3 (1998): 453-61.
32. Sarah Lawall describes Blanchot's work as a phenomenology in which "the signs are reversed. Blanchot's philosophy refers to a negative rather than positive presence" [Critics of Consciousness: The Existential Structures of Literature (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1968) 221].
33. Interview with Paolo Caruso, quoted in Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity 238.