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:
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.