Foucault-what is an author

The Modern Language Review, 2004

This is a proof of an essay on Foucault and Literary Theory to be published in a student-directed Cambridge UP collection, After Foucault..

Literature and life has an interconnection that cannot be broken. Literature is a reflection of life as a portrayal of the brilliance of a literary artist. The literary artist can structure the society with her/his genius literary technique, as the excellence of the literary work evolves in the mind. The personality and ideas of the writer echo in her/his writings. The philosophies portrayed amaze the society of all times, thus leaving an imprint on the minds of the readers with her/his varied thoughts. Thus, literature is relevant at all times, growing into a treasure house of learning that has examples for all walks of life and always shines bright as a guiding light. Literature is a mixture of real and imaginary characters and societies, which function to establish an ideal and moral world. Keats designed his own imaginary world, whereas Wordsworth' s discourses approve that he is a worshiper of nature. One common aspect of all the great masters of literature was that all were touched by human suffering. Bacon, John Milton, William Shakespeare, John Keats, Shelley, Valmiki, Kalidas and Socrates have always been motivated to sympathize with the pathetic state-of-affairs of human life in their respective era. Accordingly, literature intellectually and emotionally educates man through various languages. In conclusion, life is literature and literature is life.

Evanescent: Young Adulthood Transadapted, 2022

A piece of literary fiction can be interpreted in light of philosophical questions such as our understanding of being and/or have a concrete function such as entertainment or indirect commentary. The metaphysical character of such fiction might, for example, engage in the pursuit of universal or conditional truths. The functional conception is aimed at the contemporary environment of its emergence, serving as both documentation and probably at least hinting at a view the author thinks readers should share (commentary). This essay on the purpose of literary fiction will primarily focus on the functional aspect of literary works since this has been unclearly formulated in our work to date. There is a certain contemporary problem that, even under the prerequisites of good health and stable financial circumstances, is plaguing the modern-day middle and upper class. So far, this issue has been primarily embedded in the depths of perypatetik texts like Peripatetic Alterity or the introductions to the preceding volumes of transadaptations, but not stated explicitly: the disease producing the deadeye or glazed-over eye syndrome – the brain fog. This symptom is a reflection of an individual’s disengagement. That disengagement, also to be understood as a disconnect between the subject (individual) and whatever object (surroundings, life, another person), is found in people of all backgrounds, but it is astonishingly widespread among the people who are ostensibly most in harmony with the dominant ideology of our time in the West: pragmatists in the world of pragmatism. There are issues with the distribution of wealth. We certainly have inequality, discrimination, mistreatment, exploitation of women and children as well as the lower classes. War, education, political policy, migration, climate change are issues that should be taken seriously. But first it is the disease producing the symptoms that must be cured in order to then properly grasp the macroissues. This disease is attacking everyone, albeit pragmatists for different reasons than romantics. The deadeye syndrome is that blank look people have on their face at the checkout line in the grocery store, on the subway or in the car, after watching motion picture or reading the internet. The person’s eyes are open too wide. They are not thinking. A portion of their brain required for processing input and producing output in the form of a coherent response has been shut down. It is exactly the same expression you see on many uneducated or downtrodden members of the precariat, only in this case we are talking about the educated middle and upper class as well as children, young adults and people in their alleged prime. Obviously, it takes forms other than large dead eyes. At times it is just silence; at others talk resembling babble; further possible symptoms are too short sentences, statements shot as if out of a canon or responses that are at best tangentially related to what the speaker is talking about. Headaches, migraines – if you believe in a difference between them –, insomnia, waking up for hours at night, inability to breathe through your nose, jiggling legs are all additional symptoms. But most of all it is our own honest self-assessment. Many of us, especially in the literary or artistic sphere, can probably recall the dissenting origins of our interest. We were children in a familial or social environment that annoyed or repulsed us. At that time, we could not put our finger on the issue. We pointed to idiosyncrasies in our parents or their/our milieu, but now that we are older, those annoyances seem persnickety and would be applied by younger generations to us. Yet we still sense that rebellion. We still recall something that ate at us back then and still does today. Most of us have not figured it out, as we shall see in the case studies here: Eventually we accept the leitculture, can’t conceive of a better alternative, don’t see any options in the world that are better, and develop the disease reflected in those dead eyes. In the West at least, this framework fosters moderation. Writers do not produce treatises on art and literature today, but rather scribble a few words on why they write, if that. And their reasons for writing are exactly what we would expect: self-interest, personal development, improvement. But not improvement directed at society :-) No. Improvement of their craft is what they pursue. And then they celebrate this as the essence of being human. It used to be different. When writers identified debilitating structures, the reasons for writing were more ambitious and relevant to readers. Tolstoy penned a theory of art. Sartre did a deep dive into literature. Literary scholars at the beginning of the century embraced definitions of literature. Even our independent, translation-funded perypatetik project has a vision because of a universal or at least widespread imbalance accounting for the disconnect we see in all these deadeye people around us. This paper will begin, in chapter one, with some remarks on the general context in which literature has appeared over time and the context today. It will focus on what we refer to as pragmatism, the leitculture of our age in the West, and discuss literature’s relationship to this context along with how stakeholders and the public influence writers and the interpretation of works of literature. It summarily recounts the fundamental dichotomy between pragmatism and romanticism, as we define these terms in Peripatetic Alterity. The three parts of chapter two look at writers’ relationship to their given context. It begins with glosses of Tolstoy’s and Sartre’s philosophies of art to compare dissenting writers in a given context with complicit ones. The latter is then explained in an elucidation of remarks by John Updike, Russell Banks and Paul Auster on why they write. In chapter three, we review some contemporary authors whose work is ideally positioned to serve as the basis for dissent a la Tolstoy or Sartre, but whose fiction ultimately aligns with the agenda of pragmatists. Chapter four discusses the philosophy of Robert Pirsig, the author of the cult classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The point of this digression is threefold: (i) to elucidate how the disconnect observed in mankind can be overcome, (ii) to highlight the contiguous relationship between Pirsig’s resolution of subject-object dualism with Aesthetics (Quality) and the pragmatic-romantic dichotomy, and (iii) to clarify why romantics – the discriminated, silenced mass in the leitculture of pragmatism – will ultimately lead the way to the next revival of Western civilization, which in turn will cure the deadeye syndrome in both pragmatists and romantics. Romantics and romanticism as depicted in the perypatetik project are examined in chapter five. A few authors and texts are interpreted to showcase the widespread presence and appeal of ignored romanticism. The philosophy of Pirsig is then collated with literary fiction in the documentation of romanticism on its Tolstoian and Sartrean march to overcome the dogma of pragmatism in chapter six. This does not just result in the resolution of the current disconnect, but also provides a template for future cases where a unipolar ideology asserts itself: Literary fiction must document the poetry and potential of the discriminated in any given time to foment regeneration. To conclude, we elaborate on the potential that romantic renewal would harbor for areas ranging from economics and education to social work and literary philosophy.

2017

This chapter examines three works by Coetzee that explore the relation between author and character and between art and life: the novels Foe and Slow Man, and Coetzee’s Nobel lecture, “He and His Man.” The chapter reads the metanarrative reflections as an engagement with power structures in acts of writing and reading, in specific with colonial and canonical processes of silencing, and in the context of apartheid South Africa. It argues that Coetzee’s texts level the hierarchies between author and character, or between life and art, in service of a negotiation of both levels. The chapter pays particular attention to the ambiguity of single words and of deictic markers.

2020

In "Politics of Literature in Late Foucault", I address the definition of the concept of democracy in the literary thought of Michel Foucault, the functions of literature in the social space and a politics of literary form. This literary writing is a critique of the principle of social partition that in modernity is associated with madness. Due to the long tradition that links literature and madness, since the classical period (as inspired poet), literature is shown as a privileged space for political criticism. In "Literature, Subjectivity and Veridiction", I set forth an analysis of the forms of veridiction, in which Foucault shows the necessary intertwining of subject and truth, through the analyses of literary texts that he made in the 1970s and the early 1980s. The writings that Foucault devotes to the work of the Marquis de Sade at the start of the seventies show the relation between writing and novel forms of being. Sade's logic provides Foucault with an alternative to the attributive logic that restricts the forms of being and that would be fundamental in the last stage of his productive output. And it therefore puts forward the connection between truth and desire as a performative truth of self, which Foucault later develops in the concept of parrhesia in the lectures of the 1980s. The concept of desire here is, as Daniele Lorenzini shows, a transhistorical constant and a theory of speech as passion. The technologies of self took up a large part of Foucault's analyses from the late 1970s until his death. The forms of selftransformation of subjects since the classical era do not make an exception of Christianityfar from it. Hence I will analyze these works from a post-secular perspective that I consider necessary for understanding the ethical and dissident value of these behaviors. Lastly, this chapter discusses the legacy of Foucault in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His concept of subject has been debated and developed by other thinkers, such as Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben, who both maintain a far-reaching dialogue with the Frenchman. In the case of Butler, her concept of the retroactive subject is of particular interest, as is Agamben's revision of the Heideggerian concept of the subject for death in the light of Foucault's work. As a result of these readings, I propose a concept of [being] subject to the "intemperie". The chapter entitled "Tragedy and Historical Event" looks at the texts of the eighties in which Foucault makes use of the tragedies of Sophocles (Oedipus Rex) and Euripides (Ion, The Trojan Women, and Orestes), in order to study the emergence and analysis of the notion of parrhesia. In these lectures, Foucault presents literature as a place of "event", hence the time of literature is the time of Kairos. Foucault also analyzes the pre-democratic concept of truth as symbol, a truth that can be reconstructed from different testimonies, which is in the origin of this right to free speech in the Assembly, as Oedipus Rex shows. The problematization of this concept, which presents a parrhesia that is open "to anyone",

TRANSSTELLAR JOURNALS, 2018

The origins of literature in areas as diverse as the Far East, East, Middle East, Mediterranean, Europe, America and Africa is seeded in a great body of oral histories’ myths, creation myths and legends, many of which were subsequently put into written form. They preserve a vast reservoir which is drawn on by writers since the emergence of literary culture in various parts of the world.

Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 2012

This article focuses on Foucault's ''archeological'' books: Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, and The Order of Things. It addresses two issues in particular: first, Foucault's criticism of modern philosophical and scientific knowledge about man, showing how this knowledge is based on Nietzsche's criticism of humanism in modernity; second, Foucault's thoughts about modern literary language, contending that it is an affirmative counterpoint to the historic-philosophical analyses of knowledge about man he carried out during this archeological phase. In addition, the objective is to situate Foucault's views on literature during this period of genealogies of power and subjectivity.