The abstract below is a good example of the type of work that we’re seeking for this volume: it summarizes its subject’s thought, provides an intellectual history referencing recent scholarship, and historicizes its subject in the process, finally explaining the importance of this figure to the development of literary theory. The final essay should also argue a thesis arising from the engagement of its central figure with his historical context.
Richard A. Garner | Abstract
Interpretation: Theory: History
Foucault in His Historical Context
This essay proposes to present Foucault’s thought not only based on the received delineation of his work into three periods—-archaeological, genealogical, and ethical—-but also on the historical contexts that shaped the transition from one period to the next, paying particular attention to both important debates with other schools of thought and the evolving place of literature in his work.
The section on the archaeological period begins by treating the History of Madness in three contexts: first, Foucault’s personal experience with mental illness, including his youth, his degree in Psychopathology from the University of Paris, and his time assisting doctors at St. Anne’s psychiatric hospital; second, the methodological affinities of this early work with structuralism, its critique of phenomenology and existentialism, as well as the polemic with Derrida; and third, the galvanizing effect his work had on the anti-psychiatry movement of the time. The discussion of this period continues with a summary of the methodology Foucault developed in The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge, with a focus on its theoretical stakes and how it continues to underpin Foucault’s work up through the final books on sexuality.
The section on the genealogical period treats Discipline & Punish in the context of the uprisings of May 1968 and Foucault’s ambivalent involvement with those events, as well as the beginnings of his intellectual association with Deleuze and their mutual participation in prison activism via the GIP (Le Groupe d’information sur les prisons). Analysis of the first volume of The History of Sexuality builds upon Didier Eribon’s recent work contextualizing Foucault’s work and its relationship to gay liberation movements of the period, in addition to demonstrating how it critiques Wilhelm Reich’s and Herbert Marcuse’s influential works on sexual repression and social liberation and Guy Hocquenghem’s Deleuze-inspired text Homosexual Desire. Finally, it attempts to clarify the stakes of the increasingly-central critique of psychoanalysis, especially in the context of the French penal system’s heavy reliance on the authority of psychiatric categories and expertise at the time.
The section on the ethical period deals with the last two volumes of Foucault’s history of sexuality, The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, as well as the influential interviews of the 1980s. It pays particular attention to two facets of this work: first, the evolution of queer theory from Foucault’s work on sexuality, as well as its influence on gay activist groups such as ACT-UP; second, the conception of ethics as aesthetics that Foucault derives from his research on Greek and Roman sexual ethics, ideas whose influence has grown with the publication of the Collège de France seminars. Foucault’s final thoughts on ethics and aesthetics is also used as a lens through which to retroactively read the importance of literature and art in his thought, which is prominent from the first pages of his work on madness and only grows as he writes several important essays on literature in his archaeological period, such as “Language to Infinity,” “A Preface to Transgression,” and “The Thought of the Outside.”
A final section concludes the essay by sketching the major strands of influence Foucault’s thought has had on literary criticism. His discussion of the author function, and the manner in which it differs from Roland Barthes’s critique thereof, serves as an entry point into the radical French literary criticism which emerges apropos May ’68. The section then shifts its focus to the American scene and Foucault’s pivotal influence on the methods of the New Historicists as well as the canonical critiques of the New Americanists, approaches which remain central to literary study to this day.
