"The Politics of Literature in Michel Foucault: Veridiction, Fiction and Desire"

Authors

Azucena G. Blanco, University of Granada, SpainFollow

Abstract

This article is based on two hypotheses. The first is that in the later Foucault we would find a reformulation of the status that literature had occupied in his work and the development of a politics of literature (already developed in “Sujetos irregulares: ficción y política en el Sade de Michel Foucault”). The second considers that fiction and desire are inseparably joined, which leads me to analyse the logic of Sade as logic of desire in the lectures that Foucault gave on the author at the University of Buffalo (1970). A reading of both aspects together needs to be undertaken so that we can understand, on the one hand, Foucault’s work on the institutional character of literature with which he aimed to pull literature out of its political impasse. Methodologically, this focus enables us to understand how literature occupied a central-marginal place in his work. On the other hand, we need to understand his work on the genealogy of the “subject of desire” and of the alternative forms of subjectivity, and how it is in dialogue with the former aspect. I conclude that his politics of literature is associated with the concept of “bad literature” and with an aesthetics of self as politics of desire/duty. This paper is therefore also a proposal for the interpretation of the role that literature plays in one of the central questions: the definition of the subject as interrelation in late Foucault.

Recommended Citation

Blanco, Azucena G. ""The Politics of Literature in Michel Foucault: Veridiction, Fiction and Desire"." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 20.4 (2018): <https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.3353>

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