**3. Why literature**

Foucault writes for *La Table Rond*, *Tel Quel*, and *Nouvelle Revue Française.* He writes a book on Raymond Roussel and the introductions of other literary works. In the 1960s, Foucault makes his incursions in the world of literature, where he finds confirmation, among other things, about his notion that language precedes us (Blanchot); a language that is an *outside* (*la pensée du dehors*, the precise and famous expression di Maurice Blanchot) that envelops us. Our word is not the beginning. It is not at the beginning. For Foucault/Blanchot, it is a certain *surrealism*, a certain *aestheticism* of the beginning of the century that matters.

In *The Order of Things*, the Renaissance, was for Foucault, a time marked by a way of understanding language as governed by relationships of *similarity* and *analogy*: the inner *microcosm* corresponds to the *macrocosm* of the world via analogies, one resembling the other in the semiotic universe of the Renaissance. With the Baroque, these relationships of similarity are left behind and a crucial shift happens, as language is now considered a *mathesis* that allows things and names to be divided up and linked in a clear and distinct way. Then, in the 18th century, the *signifier-signified relationship* becomes problematic once again: a caesura intervenes between words and things. In any case, language has for a long time, since the Renaissance, lost its relation of similarity with something *enigmatic*, *primitive*, and *shining*, which coincided with an infinite opening up to the world. Foucault claims that no traces remain of that language today. This moment is when a certain literature that has its own semantic autonomy – not unlike a *counter-discourse* without representative pretenses – emerges, in a space otherwise dominated by scientific discourses. With it, a *language that pulsates*, that lives and breathes, makes its appearance once again with Hölderlin, and, for Foucault, Mallarmé, and Artaud, who are the first among the others to engage with this language [17–19].

Let us now move, then, to Foucault's 1960s' France and recall something we are now familiar with, that is, that Blanchot and Bataille intended language as a form of *negation*, a passage that Foucault appropriated. Blanchot and Bataille claimed that a *refus*, una *dépense* had to be opposed to an *omnivorous dialectic* of the philosophers, because things must be *consumed* for a real *expenditure* of energy (not only semantic ones). By doing so, one does not see goals and aims for themself. It could be that in this literary context – and not only in it – it is necessary to also work on *psychic automatisms*, like the Surrealists did, since it is possible to be *manifold individuals* without a definite identity. Certainly, according to Foucault [20], we should not apply a psychological reading to works of art (like Jaspers did, for example [21]) because that would end up, if nothing else, twisting van Gogh's art. Foucault notes [22] that if we want to adopt a psychological lens, then we should say, with Lacan, that the *originary language*, which brought together madness and reason, is always

#### *Between Madness and Literature by Michel Foucault from a Philosophical Point of View… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.100358*

there, within us, even after reason and madness have been separated. And yet, since some rational limits have been set up, that language has trouble making itself heard. For many, *it does not exist anymore*, and thus, there is no possible accommodation, no exchanges, no communication between the madness of some and the so-called *work* of others (for example, some psychiatrists). Madness is the *absence of work* and so is some literature. Are Van Gogh's paintings *works*? In Foucault's reading they are not and this is not because van Gogh cut his ear off, but because his works, his paintings, represent a break with all that precedes them in a historical and dialectical sense. Van Gogh and his paintings mark an *inaugural event*.

Moving with Foucault to an exclusively literary side, Hölderlin, in his time, already *resisted*. Hölderlin resisted through his poetry, a poetic resistance, infused, however, with a *divine violence that illuminates* and *incinerates* [20]. We are with Foucault and the Hölderlin that he reads, at the *limit*. Blanchot (whom Foucault will follow almost to the letter), also reflected on Hölderlin, and wrote in *La parole sacrèe de Hölderlin*, in the book *La part du feu* [5], about a literary journey to an *inner reality* that can be in a relationship with what is *sacred*, here following Heidegger's lesson on *silence*. For Blanchot, this literary *inner reality* – and not only that – coincides with nothing reassuring, as its experience suspends the world and the self. Blanchot observes that, in Hölderlin, all this takes on an ambiguous and dangerous appearance, because it is like we are waiting for the *dawn* and the *song of the Gods*, while, at the same time, facing the loss, the ruin of the self's word. As we have repeatedly pointed out, even if these are not experiences of madness, they are nevertheless painful dimensions that are difficult to hold, being at the very *edge* of what others would treat medically. We can, therefore, consider them as forms of alienation. The literary experience is a path that can be tread, which can lead to a new Zarathustra. Its journey and its outcomes too are painful, almost unbearable, and in any case they are not an experience for everyone. This is the origin of the clear political limits of such a proposal, the missed switch from individual experience to collective sharing, even though Nietzsche clearly changed the course of history, at least for a certain part of the Western world.

For Foucault, the fragmentary and incomplete nature of Nietzsche's writings represented the rapture and the shedding of the unitary system of so-called *works* founded on scientific discourses. For Blanchot, the *work* that Foucault mentions with Nietzsche, remains instead, albeit transformed, open, infinite, unfinished: Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and later Kafka and Mallarmé testify to it. Blanchot identifies an anchor in the unbridgeable gap between Hölderlin and Nietzsche's literary experience and their respective *madness*. He believes that Hölderlin paved the way for a new genre. Hölderlin announced the possibility to dissolve the artist's subjectivity, moving toward something deep that could not be reduced to *the orders of the discourse* of scientific knowledge, toward a non-dialectical *dehors* that is an originary dimension. For Foucault, the *dehors* entails moving to a *metaphysical void*. For Blanchot, the *dehors* is a space, where one can *play* at *differing* the meaning of the words that one uses, if they know how to do it. Such words, if put down in a certain way, help one to put themselves at a small distance from reality and the world as they are given to us.

If we return our focus to Foucault, in the span of a few years, his positions will progressively adjust and, from *Non du père* to *La pensée du dehors*, they will move closer to those of Blanchot in a clearer and more definite way. Foucault detects a *void*, an *absence,* in language, what precedes the speaking out. Between 1963/64 and later, after 1966, in *Préface a la trasgression* [23], the introduction to Bataille's work, a certain way of doing literature becomes, for Foucault, a *transgression* of the limit, without being a Dionysian experience anymore, with no relationship with madness. In *La folie, l'absence d'ouvre* of 1972 [24], Foucault pronounces the definitive death

of the *homo dialecticus* and between his death and the liberation of language we go from Nietzsche to Freud and finally Blanchot. Freud, in any case (and for Foucault in 1972) does not, in fact, consider the language of madness a *deraison,* but a *reserve of meaning.* It is not simply silence anymore, but a *doubled-up word*, folded on itself, with double meanings that go beyond the linguistic surface. According to Foucault, Freud reflects on an *esoteric language*, a code that loops back on itself. It is an *absence of work*, where one cannot be univocal. Perhaps, this is how, Freud and Foucault claim, we can disclose a certain closeness between literature and madness, thanks to these features that are essential to any linguistic code [25, 26]. But, in reality, Freud, Blanchot, Mallarmé, and Foucault align on a new front. Because if Freud discovered the hidden meanings of language, Mallarmé took the same language to an originary dimension, which is not madness anymore for both of them, but a shared and originary dimension. Thus, under the sign of a certain interpretation of language, a new union is established, not between madness and literature, but between a certain way of practicing psychoanalysis and literature. Here with Foucault we get close to Heidegger and Blanchot once again, acknowledging that language is something *originary*, a dehors, something that before speaking out is unrestrained, because it is an origin that we cannot dominate.

Roussel, Mallarmé, Bataille, Blanchot accompany Foucault in his *archaeologies* of language, at least for some time. But let us ask once again: why this focus on language? Certainly, Lacan's lesson, among the others, had its importance. But why Lacan? Because Foucault is interested in his psychoanalysis [27], a psychoanalysis that can look beyond the dimension of *representation*, proceeding in the direction of the *limits* of man and his being "finite." *Death, Desire, Law-Language* are the three keywords/cornerstones of Lacanian psychoanalysis. For Lacan, language is not a free expressive capacity. It is a "law" that governs man's thought and action, beyond their conscience and active mechanisms. This is where Foucault's research establishes the point of welding between literature and madness that we have been looking for. Let us read, then, Bruno Moroncini's words: "In other words, if I start reading a text by Maurice Blanchot (or Raymond Roussel, or Georges Bataille, or a poem by Mallarmé), what kind of experience am I having (in the sense of the *Erlebnis* of the phenomenological tradition, or the philosophy of life)? Am I experiencing the contents that have progressively accumulated in the subject and that are communicated to us in a nice form, or is it the experience of language as language, that is of that Language-Law that cannot be separated from Death and Desire, to which psychoanalysis leads us in its approaching the reason of the unconscious and of finitude?" [28].

Whether it acknowledges it or not, the *I speak* is inside a language that can *spread* itself infinitely. Raymond Roussel and Edgar Allan Poe know it: if you know how to play, this language can lead you to the infinite on its surface, breaking you, dispersing you, scattering you in a "naked" linguistic space. But one must pay attention, because this *infinite spreading* also concerns some discourses. These discourses, which purport to tell the truth on people and things, infinitely search for a truth, a certainty, a definition, that does not exist and has never existed, all the while counting who is in and who is out. In such cases, the *I speak* is a "crack" through which other, specific *outsides* form – the various "outsides" of the *discourses of truth*, the ones that are full of rules that *exclude*: the *prohibited*, the *partage* [29]. All these linguistic phenomena express *a will of power*. They are *dehors* the discourses that idealize Reality – like the juridical and historical ones.

Madness too inhabits this *dehors*/*outside* of language, but it does it in its own way, a very difficult way to interpret. Death, the dark sides, the unsaid of *discourse* have their own *I speak* that we need to be able to listen to. It is not enough to label them as "mad" because they are not. They make up an important part of us and, in the

#### *Between Madness and Literature by Michel Foucault from a Philosophical Point of View… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.100358*

end, are neither good, nor bad. There is, thus, let us say it once more, a sharing of a *wild territory* from different sides, a looking at it from different shores that must be kept separated: that of literature and that of mental illness [30]. In Blanchot [31] and Foucault's case, this wild dimension could, for some years, correspond to one of the findings of an *archaeology of silence*, a *silence* that once had a voice. For Blanchot, his *dehors* is not madness, but a way to distance oneself from reality and the world. It is an *outside* that is a *sign* that wanders the world and develops itself in a constant *deferral*. For Foucault, literary language is a language of literary *fiction*, which weakens the discourse of the Cartesian subject. Then there are other types of fiction, like those Bentham reflects on [32], but here we get to *Discipline and Punish* of 1976, almost ten years later and they are linguistic and symbolic fictions discussing the power relations and, perhaps, even the prison's architectural structure. In any case, the thread that goes from Blanchot to Bentham remains. In the end, almost of the 1970s, Foucault will visit Japan where he will discover a different theater, even a different *ars erotica*, that will lead him to think of another semiotics, a semiotics of the *scene*, of the *ceremony*, of the *ritual*, of *martial arts*, all of them disciplines of the body that are different from those of the West. But this is a different story for a different paper [33].

Going back to the 1960s, literature was, for Foucault, *transgression*, resistance, *contestation*, a questioning of dialectics and of those who profess it. At that time, contestation could still realize itself, not only in politics, but in a literary space going from Sade to horror novels. Literature is a *pretext*, something non-historiographical that *comes before* the text, is not an academic discourse, and does not follow a method. The book dedicated to Raymond Roussel is Foucault's "secret garden." His step toward politics is drawing near, while at the same time still far away, because, in these years, Foucault practices mostly, not really an esthetic, nor a hermeneutics, but a philosophical-literary study standing between history and *non-history*, semiotics and *noise*, which is an archeology that is useful to take a step back and oppose those who adopt a strictly scientific method, thus counting who speaks and does not speak [34].

This switch is not easy, we have already said this. Poe, Roussel, Blanchot split words. They embed them in different codes, from which the paradox can originate of a word that says what it says, while adding a *mute surplus*, that shows, almost silently, not only what it says, but also the code and codes that allow it to speak. In such a way, we move inside the *existential folds of the word*, where some words do not have a single *meaning* and what counts is not their *verbal matter*, but the *game* they play and the *transgressions* that they allow. These words do not hunt the truth, because they are not *confessions*, neither in Augustine's way, nor Rousseau's or Freud's. Here, for Foucault, we need a poet's talent, since writing, at the time of the first edition of the *Archaeology of Knowledge*, is something we *lose* ourselves in, we *step back* from, we *play* with, whereas the subject of knowledge of the same poetry must be destroyed and vanishes, since there are no authors anymore when we write and read (from Kierkegaard to some variants of the structuralism of the time). In any case, for Foucault some books are interesting, because, as you write and read them, you cannot say where they will lead you and they thus teach you what you do not know. These books are *inventions* that can transform those who write and read them. They can be real *events*.

Coming to the end of this review of Foucault's literary studies, let us insist again that a certain structuralism and the Heidegger of *Being* that *manifests itself in language –* as well as Nietzsche, Bataille, Canguilhelm, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, certainly Blanchot – have had an impact on Foucault's research, inducing him to believe in a language that *precedes* any scientific discourse. Literature admits this *anteriority*, it traverses it, opens itself to it and lets it flow, something that, at that time, the *Nouveau Roman* in France had been teaching for a long time. Literature grasps and practices an *originary language* and if someone expects to find their identity in this semiotic experience, then they will not. Writers, those who try to study language *formally* (the Russian formalism and more) [35], those who study the myths (Levi-Strauss), or those practicing a certain psychoanalysis (Lacan), all know it. The language that they contend with imposes to the self, not so much to keep quiet, as to retreat, if it expects to engage in discourses intending to represent the truth of something. It is a matter of stepping *outside* the discourses that make dialectics and existentialism, the same structuralism, and listening to a different way of saying things.

This is how we can again create an *opening* (Heidegger), allowing the same language to spread itself infinitely, certainly in a *void* of words, for those expecting to say the truth. In this void, the signs come together, but they are also kept apart, because it is like they are *dispersed*, without a space that would let man and woman fold on themselves to seek their own truth. The language, that Blanchot experiments with, takes things to their limit, because it is a *self-contestation*, a *void* of Consciousness, inside the *noise of* language, where words go after one another indefinitely, overcoming the same literary fiction. Raymond Roussel had allowed Foucault in 1957 to break with phenomenology. Foucault will then read Blanchot, Bataille, and finally Nietzsche, in an almost exclusively literary procedure with a *sui generis* philosophical outcome [1]. For him, language will then be a *non-place*, made of uncontrollable similarities, a neutral space where nothing can root, no one speaks, where all has already been said in a different and often ungraspable way. It is not easy to claim all this: it stands on the border of madness' territory.

In 1983, Foucault will declare that there exists a *writing of the self*, which has been practiced, following a certain old, pre-Christian morality. This *writing of the self* does not coincide with an *obligation of truth* that runs the risk of going on forever exhaustingly and without a real *care of the self*. Then, in Greece and Rome, we had journal entries, notes of quotations, soul searching, and correspondences, treatises, in a relationship with friends and teachers. But here we are beyond literature. It is 1981–1982 and these are the lectures on *L'herméneutique du sujet*, where Foucault reflects on a possible *new ethical site* that has, in fact, been possible A site, where man can transform himself, test himself, can take *care of himself* without being a subject who wants to know the truth, without establishing differences and placing *outside* and inside a madhouse, a prison, at the margin of society, those who have a different *sense* of things that does not coincide with the *order of the discourse* of power.

## **4. Conclusions**

This brief reconstruction of the important and complex themes of madness and literature in the philosophy of Michel Foucault shows that, in Foucault's analysis, they are neighboring territories. Both of them lay outside the prevailing *order of discourse*, experiencing the *non-sense* of the words that they pronounce, enunciate, and live. Finally, each plays its own game. Or, to better explain, if those who create literature may perhaps want to *play* with words, those who are put in a madhouse do not play anymore. Probably, they really are ill, but it can also happen that they have been labeled *anormaux* by those who have the power to do it and, then, reduced to silence and forbidden to *wander* (Nietzsche) the streets of the cities and the towns, or the country, that were once their home. Both madness and literature are *dehors*/*outside*. They are exposed to an *outside*, which is the outside that they live, because they found themselves excluded from the games – left *out* of them – or

*Between Madness and Literature by Michel Foucault from a Philosophical Point of View… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.100358*

chose to keep *away* from them. Next to these two *outsides*, are the many *outsides* of the discourses of Power and of those who purport to tell the truth, which are *outsides* to those who pronounce and those who promulgate them, and to whoever is left outside of this network of power from which they have been excluded.

Let us repeat it once again: madness and literature occupy neighboring territories in Michel Foucault's philosophy and it is not right to overlap them. The madness of Nietzsche and van Gogh, the suicide of Roussel are painful. They are not a game, but real illnesses, or, in one case, the outcome of a possible form of depression. They must be clearly separated from the pages, or the paintings, which each of the three has, respectively, put together. Before falling ill or taking his life, Nietzsche, van Gogh, and Roussel, experienced philosophy, painting, and literature and their possible *non-senses.* The two different *outsides* that we have attempted to outline in Foucault's works go together in their lives, but only in succession. Foucault urges us to listen to and read their words, to look at some paintings, because *another world is possible*, whereas the one in which we live is made of discourses that purport to tell the truth for everyone. These *true discourses*, taken to their extreme consequences, can go into *infinity*, until they twist on themselves in the experiences of Nazism, the lagers, the atomic bombs released on two harmless Japanese cities. Here too, no one plays anymore, but reduces to death and silence those who do not believe their truth, their discourses, some *orders of discourse* imposed by a Power that, in history, coincides with an *event*, which corresponds with a *roll of the dice* that cannot be calculated in advance and that can appear again under new guises, which are themselves sudden and immeasurable, just as terrible, *mad*, *outside* our scope and the scope of our life.
