Georges Bataille

Libro dedicado al pensamiento de Bataille, incluyendo en primer lugar un importante texto inédito hasta ahora en español (una conferencia sobre el juego y el placer no incluida en las Obras Completas publicadas en Francia).

A través de sus 18 capítulos, el libro recorre el pensamiento de Georges Bataille en todas sus etapas. Pero propone también un diálogo estrecho con muchas de las temáticas tratadas por Bataille (la transgresión, la soberanía, el juego, la muerte, la experiencia interior, la filosofía, la política, el arte), procurando enfrentarlas con los más variados puntos de vista desde dentro y desde fuera de las perspectivas que en su extensa y compleja obra siguió el propio Bataille.

Este libro tuvo su origen en un congreso en torno al pensamiento de la transgresión de Georges Bataille, celebrado en la Universidad Complutense de Madrid y coordinado por el grupo LA EUROPA DE LA ESCRITURA. Incluye en primer lugar los trabajos que se presentaron en él. Pero se ha abierto también a trabajos relevantes de autores muy cercanos a Bataille como, entre otros, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-François Lyotard o Georges Didi-Hubeman, que amplían enormemente su alcance.

This practice-based doctoral research explores the nature of the feral, as manifested in an object-based installation practice of contemporary art that scavenges - physically, socially and metaphorically - in the gap between defined spaces. My conception of the feral draws out the political promise of this indeterminacy: the state of being partly wild and partly civilised. The page is also constructed materially, as a space where
heterogeneous elements meet: different voices expressed through the writing and images of my practice.

In claiming the feral as a critical concept, I reject its more common, derogatory, usage. In particular, during the 2011 London riots, the former British Lord Chancellor Kenneth Clarke labelled the rioters a “feral
underclass”, seeking to fix them in this uncivilised, abject position. I unfix this separation, through a feral interpretation of my objects, as they interpenetrate domestic, institutional, and civilised public spheres.
Mother’s milk solidifies as plaster-filled condom bombs, at once phallic and breast-like, poised to ignite a pyre of social theory texts in a gallery project space, a former factory; haphazard conglomerations of plant matter and urban debris are strung together in bunting on an inner-city community hall.

The feral becomes here a rival concept to Julia Kristeva’s formulation of abjection, as the seeping bodily organs evoked by my objects are not defined in terms of the individual, but reflected on through the formless
mass of the social body, the displaced undercommons of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, the wild of Jack Halberstam, the rioters of Joshua Clover.
The feral has an antagonistic quality, but it cannot fit the relational models of art put forward by Chantal Mouffe and Claire Bishop that seek to civilise this antagonism. Neither can the positivity of Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman new materialism extract the hybridity of materials I use from the precariousness of the social conditions from which they are drawn. My practice, like the feral, resists these separations.

Georges Bataille was an enemy of "art". He loathed all that attempted to redeem the base with appeals to the lofty, cultivated a sustained distrust of "absolutes" and "beauty," and saw through the hypocrisies of high culture and other bourgeois loci of distinction and anxiety. It would then appear misguided to speak of "Bataille and art." However, Bataille was not simply an aesthetic reactionary. Rather he suggested a reworking of the dispositif of "seeing" which, in his view, should be tantamount to being blinded and indeed torn apart. The capstone of knowledge is found in the dialectical inversion of the positivist gaze, in the blind spot of reason and in the liminal passage between the human and its Other. This "site" is moreover one constituted by the unraveling of semiotic coherence and the descent into non-form, night, and void. And paradoxically, it is from within the interstices between this night and the black hole of the eyes that Bataille's "aesthetic" begins; art,if it was to exist for Bataille, was a bastion of dark sensuality where the aesthetic is swallowed by the ecstatic and the value of the work is found in its capacity to call into question the very nature of human project. The Bataillean aesthetic thus cannot be illuminated if one remains bound in conventional notions of art as the province of the painterly, the writerly, the plastic, and the beaux. Bataille tried to outbid art; Outbidding art moved by way of the subversion and refusal of art's formal and structural limitations, its history, its pretensions, in favor of a repositioning of the aesthetic in what it uncomfortably fl ees from-fl ies, excreta, howls. In a broader sense, Bataille outbid ethics, epistemology, and all forms of totemism through a rabid aesthetic that violated rather than consoled. While "outbidding" does RILEY PRINT.

ABSTRACT: This article considers how the erotics of the real, of Bataille, might contribute to the ethics of the real, of Lacan, and also to the genealogy of morals disclosed by Nietzsche. Combining Bataille’s anthropological understanding of a taboo-transgression correlation with Lacan’s analytic episteme of the real, symbolic, and imaginary, I trace a recessive loss of the erotic function of being through the Platonic, Christian, and Modern Science epochs that Nietzsche’s revaluations of the Good also centre on. What emerges is the possibility that like Bataille, figuratively speaking, the brothels of Paris should become our churches again.

This article traces the radical devaluation of the phantasm throughout Western civilization. With the help of Nietzsche's critical perspective, I develop a notion of hystery as the series of collective traumas repeated in each individual's growth, whereby the phantasm changes value from psychosomatic interface, to evil incarnate, to disease of learning. Beginning with the Classical episteme represented by Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, then moving up through the Christian era, I focus primarily on Enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes and Bacon, who represent the last nail in the imagination's coffin. The next section examines Nietzsche's rediscovery of the phantasm and the theoretical contributions of post-structuralism that follow in Nietzsche's wake. Juxtaposing Bataille and Deleuze, I look at Deleuze's early enthusiasm and ultimate betrayal of the phantasm, and I posit Bataille's emphasis on the affective force of the mythological phantasm as an insurrection to reclaim our experience and life along with it. The article ends with speculation, offering Bruno's art of memory as an ontic and epistemic alternative to dominant Western hystery, other pasts opening to other possible futures, an ungrounding that paradoxically leads to a restoration of the human house in a re-enchanted cosmos.

A few years before the beginning of the Second World War, the rapprochement between socialism and western esotericism  would  be  outlined  in  France.  This  effort,  produced around the Collège de Sociologie as a reaction to Fascism, aimed to reactivate ideas and efforts that can be traced back to the French Revolution. The resulting meta-narrative,  constructed  by  various  intellectuals  around  Georges  Bataille,  including  Walter  Benjamin  and Pierre Klossowski, sought to establish its origins in Valentianism and, later, in Roman theology. The aim was to create an intellectual alternative to Marxism through the  ideas  of  Fourier,  Blanqui,  Sade,  and  Nietzsche  inventing  a  construct  that  would  decisively  influence Post-structuralism in the 1960s.KEYWORDSPALAVRAS-CHAVEMarxismo; História da historiografia; Walter BenjaminMarxism; History of Historiography; Walter BenjaminRenato Amado Peixotohttp://orcid.org/0000-0002-2342-4215

This is my own translation of Bataille's "epic poem," "L'Archangélique" (1942, republished in 1967). This version corrects the erroneous or awkward renderings in the published English translation by Mark Spitzer, which was consulted in the course of this translation.

Extended review and discussion of Emily Apter's "Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability" (New York: Verso, 2013). The book's most powerful argument, in my view, is that the "untranslatable" profitless excreta of the world's literatures are both the matter with which to rethink comparison and the limits of the inflationary World Literature industry.

This paper will be a revitalisation of Bataille's theories of community by looking at the spaces of communion that digital telecommunication have opened up. Thinking through Deleuze and Guattari's work on the "virtual," the paper will argue that digital telecommunication has opened an ever expansive space where subjects are brought in a form of communion with the potential to facilitate the formation of new subjectivities that radically break away from philosophy's traditional understandings of community. This paper will begin by briefly sketching out how schizoanalysis (the philosophic system developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) understands the formation of subjectivity and then briefly stich together a schizoanalytic understanding digital telecommunication from the fragments of Deleuze and Guattari's later work. Following that will be an schizoanalytic critique of online communities, arguing that these communities are largely " false " insofar as they lack any sense of communication and communion. These virtual " communities " serve to atomize and alienate people, reducing individuals to dividuals, numbered and controlled bodies lacking both agency and subjectivity. This paper will briefly conclude by looking at points of resistance found within political online communities. By juxtaposing Deleuze's interest in political Third Cinema and his concept of the time-image with Bataille's work on communion and sacrifice, this paper will look at how manifestations of political action are transmitted between globally diffuse activists, engendering new forms of resistant subjectivities.

The young adult series The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (2008, 20091 has been one of the most successful franchises on page and screen of the last decade. But what motivates the popularity of this admittedly grim tale of teenagers fighting one another to the death? The French literary critic René Girard once pithily wrote that “violence is the heart and secret soul of the sacred” (2013, 34), and it is this insight that I will use to examine the connection between the violence of The Hunger Games and its broader religious and cultural connotations. Building on the work of Girard and other key theorists of religion like Georges Bataille and Jacques Derrida, I shall discuss the sacrificial logic at work in Suzanne Collins’ series. Even as I presume neither belief nor unbelief on the part of author and readership alike, I read Collins’ work as manifesting a deeply religious sensibility in the way that it imagines sacrifice in its dystopic future of the United States. In this paper, d...

With usefulness expanding and consuming more and more areas of our lives, the useless – philosophy and the humanities in general – are fighting a losing battle and gradually becoming extinct. In order to defend them I attempt to give uselessness a positive meaning. Trying to redefine the concept of usefulness in order to make it work for the useless is a bad strategy because it endues usefulness with qualities that are considered alien to it in the modern world. For something to be useful it has to be so in an obvious way and if it is not – it’s labeled useless. In our times usefulness reigns unstoppably – universities are turning into companies, students into clients, teachers into bureaucrats and knowledge into a product whose value is equal to the profit it brings. Anything that is perceived in terms of its usefulness or end-use is consequently subjugated to that end-use and therefore has no independent existence. In our consumer society of late capitalism this brings a great burden on individuals because by commercializing themselves they also internalize usefulness as it functions in commerce. The consequence of this is unfreedom, unhappiness and inability to connect with each other on a deeper level. In order to escape the dreadful world of usefulness individuals – as suggested by George Bataille –must try to re-connect with their violent and atemporal past that would help them transgress boundaries laid down by reason and experience a sovereign moment. On a similar note Diogenes of Sinope suggest a sovereign and useless life of a beggar and philosopher. Emil Cioran contends that we should only serve eternity in idleness.

En la posmodernidad el recorrido artístico por el cuerpo tiene todavía bastante de antropomórfico, de orgánico, de referencial, de natural, en línea directa  con las prácticas de body art  de los años setenta, pero sobretodo es un cuerpo que ahonda en el doble y casi siempre contradictorio terreno del simulacro, de lo  artificial, de lo posorgánico, de lo tecnológico, por un lado,  y de lo abyecto y traumático, por otro. Un cuerpo que a causa de la proliferación de las teorías de la subjetividad (de Goethe a Nietzsche, de Freud a Lacan y en especial de Deleuze y Guattari) o de lo que conoce como “multiculturalismo en los modos de construir la subjetividad”,  se convierte en epicentro de numerosas actividades artísticas algunas relacionadas con el deseo, otras con la ideología, la identidad sexual, el género, la escritura, la tecnología. Un cuerpo como tema y significante, como envoltura de la conciencia, como desarrollo de la identidad, como testigo, en suma, de los límites entre el “yo” y el “mundo”.
En este sentido el cuerpo se puede entender como un site , un lugar nada neutral, ni pasivo, sino más bien obsesivo en el que  convergen y se proyectan a la vez discursos críticos y prácticas artísticas que nos llevan a hablar, por un lado, de la experiencia individual del cuerpo (la esfera de la experiencia individual) , pero también  de un cuerpo social, de un cuerpo rasgado y exhibido como un espectáculo, en suma de un cuerpo político abierto a la esfera pública de la experiencia. El cuerpo humano como un campo metodológico cuya experimentación debe ser considerada como la verdadera estética del arte del fin de siglo.
Ya en 1993 Rosalind Krauss en su estudio monográfico sobre Cindy Sherman indicó el camino a seguir: de la mano de Sherman y de sus períodos creativos adentrarnos en una gran diversidad de teorías, desde el  psicoanálisis de Lacan , el feminismo de Mulvey,  la abyección de Kristeva, el simulacro de Baudrillard o la “muerte del autor” de Barthes, teorías que hablan del paso del universo de los simulacros (una nueva forma de ilusionismo que cubre lo real con superficies de simulacro) del posmodernismo posestructuralista al retorno de lo real y lo traumático basado en un ataque a la verticalidad sublimada de las imágenes de arte tradicionales.

Il senso del segreto si compone di approfondimenti tematici su cinque filosofi che hanno indagato la questione del segreto e della segretezza, attraverso un confronto – spesso esplicito, talvolta latente – con l’opera di Marcel Proust. Da Walter Benjamin a Georges Bataille, da Maurice Blanchot a Jacques Derrida, passando per Gilles Deleuze, il volume mette in chiaro l’influenza che la Recherche ha esercitato sulla filosofia del Novecento, disegnando anche un affresco sul rapporto tra filosofia e letteratura, due discipline che indagano lo stesso ordine di questioni con voci e consistenze irriducibilmente diverse.

Finire dentro un vortice e farsene risucchiare, ci sembra una disgrazia, come inciampare su un sasso o ricevere una tegola in testa. Invece è un evento molto quotidiano, non facciamo che incontrare vortici, anche noi siamo vortici. Il vortice allaccia momentaneamente l'uno all'altro flussi che fino a quel momento si ignoravano. Dentro un vortice i flussi si rincorrono, si stringono, si sciolgono. La teoria della complessità ha scoperto nel vortice uno dei comportamenti fondamentali della materia fisica ma il vortice è una struttura energetica che riconosciamo anche nella società e nella vita dello spirito. Per studiare l'articolazione vorticosa dell'esperienza diventa utile ripercorrere con un nuovo sguardo alcune tappe filosofiche, letterarie e artistiche: il binomio volumen-rivoluzione di Sade, la sensazione in Merleau-Ponty, la visione mescalinica di Henri Michaux, gli ideogrammi poetici di Ezra Pound, il cinema zenoniano dei fratelli Safdie. Una corrente fatta di mulinelli attraversa i corpi e le idee, le azioni e le esitazioni, gli slanci e le ricadute, è capace di formare e distruggere mondi, stringere e sciogliere i nodi di cui è fatta l'esperienza, ogni esperienza.

tr. It. di F. Serna, La parte maledetta preceduto da La nozione di dépense, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 2003 La parte maledetta viene definita da Bataille come un'opera di economia politica, si tratta però di un'economia definita dallo stesso filosofo come generale, ovvero distinta da quella scienza economica ristretta di cui si occupano gli economisti "di professione". Tale definizione risulta più chiara alla luce del contenuto del testo stesso: Bataille non si occupa, come l' economia politica ristretta, isolatamente del sistema produttivo e del consumo, bensì considera la produzione e il consumo nel quadro più ampio all'interno del quale tali attività si svolgono. Bataille sostiene addirittura di considerare il sistema economico integrato a quello naturale, dell'intero globo originato dallo stesso dono dispendioso del sole. La parte maledetta, prima di diventare il titolo di un progetto più ampio che avrebbe dovuto comprendere diverse opere di Bataille tra cui La nozione di dépènse, L'Erotismo e La Sovranità, è nato come articolo che Bataille scrisse per La Critique Social nel 19.. ed è pubblicata in Italia in un volume che comprende anche un testo successivo ad essa legato: La nozione di dépense. Questo articolo rappresenta un momento centrale nel pensiero di Bataille, lo conferma il fatto che ne sono state rinvenute sette versioni differenti. Il principio alla base, tanto de La parte Maledetta quanto de La nozione di dépense, è il dispendio. Bataille sostiene infatti, in controtendenza rispetto alla maggior parte delle analisi economiche del tempo, che l'economia generale della natura, ma anche il principio su cui originariamente si fondavano gli scambi economici era la dépense (dispendio improduttivo) ossia «il gioco dell'energia non limitato da alcun fine». Come l'organismo dispone di un'energia in eccesso rispetto a quella che gli serve per la semplice sopravvivenza e che utilizza o per crescere o, se non può essere utilizzata in questo senso, viene spesa improduttivamente, così il sistema, considerato al di fuori della logica individuale, disporrà di un eccesso di energia non utilizzabile per il proprio ulteriore accrescimento e che dovrà essere dissipato. La ragione per cui le teorie economiche sembrano sostenere il contrario è data dal fatto che esse generalizzano una situazione isolata, essendo ristrette applicano -a torto secondo Bataille -la logica dell'individuo al sistema. Tuttavia, come in natura, al singolo i problemi si pongono sempre in termini di necessità, è solo nel sistema, nel gioco dell'energia relativo alla materia vivente nella sua totalità che il problema si pone in termini di lusso. Secondo Bataille il passaggio da un'economia ristretta a un'economia generale è una vera e propria rivoluzione copernicana che non considera la ricchezza come mero elemento destinato

Lo spettro del fascismo si aggira di nuovo per il mondo contemporaneo. In questo libro, Nidesh Lawtoo prende il Caso Trump per illustrare l'(in)attualità della tesi di Nietzsche che un giorno, "gli attori, ogni tipo di attori, saranno i veri sovrani." Iscrivendosi in una genealogia di teorici della mimesi-da Pla-tone a Nietzsche, passando per Tarde, Le Bon, Freud, Bataille, Girard, Lacoue-Labar-the e Nancy-Lawtoo dimostra che il (new) fascism non è del tutto nuovo, e per niente originale. Eppure, attori che giocano il ruolo di apprendisti presidenti ricaricano il vecchio fantasma della mimesi via new media che hanno il potere sconcertante di trasformare la realtà politica in un reality show.
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In copertina: Con/dividere, mixed media su carta, © Michaela Lawtoo

Dieses Buch untersucht Konzeptionen der Mimesis und des Mimetischen in der Kontaktzone zwischen Ethnologie und (post-)surrealistischer Avantgarde im Paris der 1930er Jahre: bei Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, Michel Leiris und im außerakademischen Forschungskollektiv Collège de Sociologie. In den Texten und Projekten der drei Autoren kreuzen sich ästhetische und ethnologische Diskurse – mit dem Ergebnis einer umfassenden ›Entgrenzung‹ der Mimesis und des Mimetischen. Die künstlerischen, wissenschaftlichen und politischen Praktiken, die im Zentrum von Batailles, Caillois’ und Leiris’ Überlegungen standen, sind nicht auf die optische imitatio oder die bloß poietische Neuschaffung der Welt beschränkt. Sie sollten vielmehr umfassende Transformationsprozesse initiieren, die nicht zuletzt das mimetisch agierende Subjekt selbst erfassen.


Eine Studie über die Einschreibung des sogenannten ›Primitiven‹ in die künstlerischen und literarischen Diskurse zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts, über die Faszination der Avantgarde für ›primitive Denkweisen‹ und den Wunsch, sich diese Denkweisen auf mimetische Art und Weise anzueignen – und über die umfassenden ästhetiktheoretischen Revisionen, die daraus folgten.

2017 publizierte Michael Stausberg einen Artikel über die unterschiedlichen Verwendungsweisen der Begriffe des «Sakralen» und des «Heiligen» bei Autoren wie Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Roger Caillois, Nathan Söderblom und Rudolf Otto. 1 Darin widmete er Roger Caillois und dem Collège de Sociologie einen eigenen Abschnitt. 2 Hierbei kritisierte Stausberg insgesamt bezüglich der Definition des «Sakralen» in den Schriften von Caillois und Bataille aus der Zeit des Collège, dass nirgends eine klare Definition dessen gegeben wird, was sie unter diesem Begriff verstanden. 3 Dennoch schließt er den Abschnitt mit dem Postulat: «Während Caillois später den Krieg als die Stelle der Emergenz des Sakralen interpretierte, verlor Bataille sein Interesse in sakraler Soziologie.» 4 Stausberg selbst gibt keinen Beleg für diese Aussage an, wodurch die Argumentation zweifelhaft wirkt. Wenn nicht einmal klar ist, was Bataille unter sakraler Soziologie verstand, woraus ergibt sich die Schlussfolgerung, er habe sein Interesse an ihr verloren? Ziel des vorliegenden Artikels ist es: (1) Zu rekonstruieren, was Bataille während der Zeit des Collège de Sociologie 1937-1939 unter sakraler Soziologie verstand und (2) Zu überprüfen, ob Bataille tatsächlich in seinen Schriften nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg das Interesse an diesem Zugang verloren hat. Für den Nachweis werden exemplarisch zwei Schriften der Periode der Nachkriegszeit zu Grunde gelegt: (1) La part maudite (1949) und (2) L´Erotisme (1957). I. Bataille im gegenwärtigen wissenschaftliche Diskurs Bevor näher darauf eingegangen wird, was Bataille unter sakraler Soziologie verstand, lohnt es sich, einen kurzen Blick in einige Publikationen zu werfen, die in den vergangenen zwei Jahrzehnten erschienen sind und dem Werk des Mitbegründers des Collège de Sociologie eine Bedeutung in gegenwärtigen wissenschaftlichen Fachdiskursen zuschreiben. Die folgenden Ausführungen beanspruchen keine Vollständigkeit, sondern beabsichtigen lediglich einige wenige problematische 1 Stausberg Michael, The sacred, the holy, the numinous-and religion: on the emergence and early history of a

Dans le numéro spécial de L’Europe en formation sur « Le fédéralisme personnaliste », c’est en en appelant à « Marc au-delà de Marc » qu’il était « vu de Ouagadougou » par Lazare Ki-Zerbo, soucieux d’en compenser la relative insensibilité aux enjeux de la spatialité tels qu’ils se présentent en Afrique. J'ai tenté d'ébaucher ici la réponse à ce défi qui pourrait provenir d’en amont de Marc, en me basant sur un ensemble de textes inédits d’Arnaud Dandieu que ce grand ancêtre du fédéralisme personnaliste avait pu rassembler avant sa mort prématurée en 1933 sous un titre qui parle de lui-même: L’espace ami de l’homme. C’est que Dandieu s’y propose précisément de « Repartir de la durée Bergsonienne »  pour opérer un « Renversement du bergsonisme »  , en construisant une phénoménologie de l’espace qui en fasse ressortir l’aspect hétérogène négligé par Bergson -et par Alexandre Marc à sa suite, ainsi qu’a pu le relever Ki-Zerbo. Si selon lui « les afro-fédéralistes appréhendent l’hétérogénéité à travers la spatialisation de la vie », la pensée de Dandieu franchit allègrement la « coupure épistémologique » située par Ki-Zerbo dans la Méditerranée, car elle comporte de nombreuses allusions explicites ou implicites à des aspects caractéristiques de la culture et de la pensée africaines comme points d'appui d'une phénoménologie de l'"espace vécu" (Eugène Minkowski) jusque dans ses implications sociopolitiques, voire religieuses.

The article stresses the relevance of Bataille in Deleuze and Guattari's (D-G) Anti-Oedipus (AE), to show the debt or affiliation between the notion of "improductive expenditure" and that of "desiring production". Framing the sense of the former in a general economy, affinities between such thinking and the project of D-G in AE are shown, having in sight a certain reading of the marxian thesis of the identity between man and nature. Conclussions are drawn upon possibles re-inscriptions that Bataille and D-G's works may have in the history of marxism and contemporary thought.

The aim of the essay is to situate Bataille’s idiosyncratic thought on consumption in the context
of the modern debate on this topic, to unravel its vacillations and contradictions, and to tease out
its main implications. The modern philosophical and ideological debate on consumption, while
highly variegated, can be usefully divided into two main camps, two broad intellectual traditions or
lineages, a Marxist and a Nietzschean one. These camps are diametrically opposed in all important
respects, including consumption, yet paradoxically enough, Bataille had roots in both. This point
is of crucial importance for understanding his position and its striking peculiarities. Bataille’s
contradictory political position is explored, a position which overtly embraces radicalism but
remains in fact profoundly attached, it is argued, to capitalism.

étrangère. À propos de littérature, Editions de l'EHESS, collection "Audiographie", 2014. EAN13: 9782713223860. « Les beaux livres sont toujours écrits dans une langue étrangère». Marcel Proust, Contre Saint-Beuve. Il y a toujours eu quelque chose d'inquiétant qui ne cessait de circuler entre les titres de ses livres: Histoire de la folie, Les mots et les choses, L'archéologie du savoir ou L'ordre du discours. D'emblé, c'est un grand styliste qui s'impose dès les premières pages, avec ces étonnantes images d'ouverture comme la Nef des fous qui sillonne sur les canaux flamands emportant de ville en ville sa cargaison d'insensés, l'arabesque des regards qui traversent une toile de Vélasquez pour venir se résorber dans un petit miroir improbable au fond d'une pièce ou encore le supplice de Damiens le régicide. Images inquiétantes qui rodent au seuil de livres d'épistémologie sur nos modes de savoirs et sur l'histoire de nos idées. Images qui cernent nos connaissances et nos pratiques de l'autre, du corps, du langage ou de la folie. Images qui inspirent toute une stylistique, le grand style classique au service d'une pensée baroque. Un style qui relève de « par sa splendeur et sa précision, qualités apparemment contradictoires » 1 , une nature double, inquiétante qui risque d'entamer le savoir auquel elles convient le lecteur. Enfin, ces images ne cessent de se dédoubler en de sorte de montage qui amènent le lecteur à questionner chez Michel Foucault le rapport complexe qui se cristallise entre ces tableaux et l'écriture entendue comme un certain usage de la littérature. Loin d'être absente des préoccupations du philosophe, la littérature s'est comme retirée, voir effacée d'un certain horizon de pensée tout en y inscrivant la trace d'un écart ou d'une rupture qui ne cesse de se dédoubler et se déplacer à travers les textes de Foucault. Dans la foulée de son Histoire de la folie devait suivre sa lecture de Raymond Roussel, qui prolonge et dédouble les réflexions autour de la folie et du langage pour aboutir à cette littérature qui produit du langage en folie. La dispersion du langage qui caractérise la fin de l'âge classique dans Les mots et les choses était redevable de ce décalage du langage par rapport à lui-même, donnant ainsi naissance à la philologie, à la critique et à la littérature, tandis que cet ébranlement engendrait la découverte de la transgression comme expérience-limite chez Georges Bataille ou encore de cette pensée du dehors chez Maurice Blanchot. En retour, de telles lectures inspirent une autre figure de style: celle de la disparition de l'homme annoncée dans les dernières lignes du livre Les mots et les choses et qui était un collage à partir de sa lecture de Georges Bataille 2 . 1 Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault tel que je l'imagine, Fata Morgana, 1986, p. 11. 2 Michel Foucault, « Préface à la transgression », Critique, n°195-196, août septembre 1963, p. 759.