Orbis Litterarum 61:6 429442, 2006

Printed in Singapore. All rights reserved

Sartre and Foucault on Bataille and Blanchot

Hans van Stralen, Free University of Amsterdam/University of Utrecht

In 1966, Sartre and Foucault conduct a debate that initiates a shift

of convention in the French intellectual scene. From a Marxist
point of view, Sartre feels that Foucault ignores the historical laws
and the subsequent social developments. Foucault on his part
considers Sartres theory to be a failed eort at fixating reality in a
coordinating framework, seen from the point of humanistic
morals. The controversy becomes more insightful when the literary
views of both thinkers are subjected to closer study. Sartre sees the
literary work as a vehicle for opinions and, especially after 1945, he
thinks that the author should accomplish social change by means
of literature. Foucault, on the other hand, sees the literary text as a
place where genuine speech reveals itself and which is essentially
unfinished. Both philosophers have written about Bataille and
Blanchot and these writings also show their deviating viewpoints.
Sartre sees them from an ethical angle and he is negative about
their impossible transgression. After all, this status cannot be
described without abandoning it. Foucault, on the contrary, has
enormous admiration for this project, because it is about a search
for new paths after the death of God.1

I. Introduction
In 1966 Jean-Paul Sartre (19051980) and Michel Foucault (19261984),
who in France at that moment fostered diering views on philosophy, had
a brief but fierce collision. Sartre, of course, can be linked to existentialism,
although in the sixties Marxism duly inspires his thinking. With his
Critique de la raison dialectique (1960) he distances himself fundamentally
from his philosophy of the forties. Ever since the publication of this study
he pleads for a vision on existential estrangement that is motivated by
historical research. By then he no longer interprets this situation as the
consequence of the individual refusal to accept absolute freedom. In 1960
Sartre replaces the mauvaise foi the negation of the mobility of
consciousness which was mentioned so often in Letre et le neant (1943),

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by Marxist-inspired notes by means of which he attempts to understand

estrangement as a social phenomenon. At the time of the conflict Foucault
was not as active a philosopher as Sartre had been, but he had already
published a number of impressive works. Although, like Sartre, he had his
roots in phenomenology and also clearly harbours leftist sympathies, his
anity with structuralism and his archaeological-genealogical method are
far removed from Sartres thinking.
In this essay I would like to shed some light on the nature and the
content of the controversy between Sartre and Foucault in the sixties and
to represent the confrontation between the two thinkers as a shift in
conventions within the French intellectual climate. Thereby I shall
especially focus on their view of literature. By means of their interpretations of two writers, Bataille and Blanchot, I shall demonstrate how their
literary criteria dier.

II. The confrontation

The confrontation between Sartre and Foucault in 1966 was rather shortlived. After Sartre opened the attack on his colleague, he hardly bothered
to react to the latters criticism. In fact, as Contat and Rybalka correctly
claim, the dierence of opinion between Sartre and Foucault was hardly
reconcilable and further debate appeared pointless (Contat & Rybalka
1970, 434).
Sartres criticism of Foucault is based on the idea that the latter ignores
the laws in history and the social movements resulting from them and
actually adheres to a sort of neo-positivism, a method in which the
distanced description of phenomena occupies a central position.2 However,
Sartre begins his remarks with the assertion that Foucaults method is not,
as the latter claims, of an archaeological nature but of a geological one.
Sartre claims that Foucault only shows the historical layers beneath the
present soil. This geological method, Sartre says, does not show us the
historical transitions between the epistemes found by Foucault, while they
are clearly linked to material circumstances and to certain production
relationships.3 Foucault, according to Sartre, considered history too much
as an elusive and obscure phenomenon and accused whoever tried to
impose rigid structures on history of dogmatism. Furthermore Sartre
criticizes Foucaults anity with structuralism. He does see the advantages

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431

of this method, but nevertheless he feels that a strictly structuralist

approach to language reduces this phenomenon to something lifeless.
Language, after all, is used by people and according to him, structuralism
does not do justice to this practice. In a reaction to the structuralists and to
Foucault, Sartre emphasizes that man is capable of understanding and
therefore of altering the structures surrounding him. In his view, the same
goes for the network called history. In that sense one can say that Sartre,
unlike Foucault, does not wish to understand history as a desordre
rationnel but as a reality mobilized by the class struggle (Pingaud 1966,
90).
Shortly after Sartres criticism of Foucault, the latter reacts through an
interview in the magazine La Quinzaine Litteraire (Foucault 1968a).4
Foucault commences his argument with the assertion that the era of the
great philosophical systems is over, that is to say: that form of philosophy
in which, in a speculative manner, an overview of man and the reality
surrounding him is presented.5 The rift between this philosophy and
modern thinking, in which philosophers concentrate on subsectors of
reality, is situated by Foucault around 19501955, the moment when
Sartre also stops his speculative philosophy. Foucault refers to a tradition
starting with Hegel and ending with Sartre, which he understands as an
enterprise of totalization. Opposed to this old idea that man was to be
master of himself and the surrounding reality and also capable of
formulating essentials about this, Foucault emphasizes the structures
which mainly remain sub-conscious in human knowledge.6 The favoured
existentialist idea that man can master his situation and is therefore free, is
thus negated. Foucault favours a procedure of diagnosis, ultimately
focused on the present, of the subconscious structures in the history of
scientific thinking. In contrast to Sartre, he does not wish to see this history
as a whole of coherent processes knowable by means of the ratio. He is
more interested in subsectors and thereby accentuates the importance of
focused specialists. According to Foucault, there is no question of turning
ones back on the course of history within modern philosophical thought
as Sartre had suggested. He explicitly wishes to investigate historical
reality, but not with the help of the Marxist model favoured by Sartre.
Shortly after the collision between Sartre and Foucault other intellectuals react to the assertions of these philosophers in well-known French
newspapers and magazines. While the reactions in magazines such as Le

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Figaro and Le Nouvel Observateur remain rather superficial, Les Temps

Modernes publishes a substantial essay by Sylvie le Bon in 1967. Even
apart from the contents of her essay, she is evidently a philosopher who
opts for Sartre. In the first place her text appears in this magazine founded
by Sartre in 1945, and second, in 1965 she takes care of a new edition of his
criticism of Husserls thinking about the Ego La transcendance de lego
which first appeared in 1936. Le Bons criticism is entirely in line with
Sartres attack on Foucault: Foucault takes the long-term structural
dynamics out of history due to the fact that he observes this movement
with a strictly positivist view. In the investigation of the subconscious
processes beneath the scientific enterprise Foucault forgets, according to
Le Bon, to look for factors which actually make epistemes possible; these
paradigmatic structures, after all, do not come out of the blue. In other
words: Foucault is caught in the strictly descriptive level and with his
value-free method he is unable to understand the movements in historical
reality. Due to the absence of an investigation into the links in their
succession, the three great epistemes which Foucault diagnoses since the
Renaissance (analogous thinking, representation by analysis and empirical
reduction/transcendent knowledge) demonstrate much similarity with the
method of the meanwhile outdated Ideengeschichte. Le Bon asserts that
Foucault forgets that a system only really becomes a system as a result of
the fact that it entertains internal connections with previous systems. This
coherence, however, Foucault is unable to explain with the model he uses;
therefore Le Bon believes that his philosophy is surrounded by an aura of
an elusive truth.

III. Sartres poetical views

Sartres aesthetics are clearly supported by his philosophical insights. First
his view of the imaginary is of importance, namely as the power to
establish the absent as present. This power is the central axis behind the
work of art, including the literary work. The maker creates a non-existent
reality, after all, and the recipient in turn does not understand the text as a
part of concrete reality. A second philosophical principle in Sartres
thinking about art is that of intentionality. He understands this phenomenon globally as formulated by phenomenology. Sartre asserts that the
work of art is intentionally loaded, i.e. transmits a view of the author in

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433

whatever way possible. Here, too, lies the core of his well-known
commitment concept: the writer opts for a certain reality, especially as
he neglects other possibilities (cf. the concept of neantisation). The third
philosophical principle which plays a role in Sartres aesthetics is his view
of language, as expounded in Letre et le neant (1943). Sartre says in this
philosophical work that, by making use of language by means of the
principle of neantisation, people assign classifications to reality. After all,
ordering mainly rests on the principle of exclusion, the negation of other
possibilities.
In Sartres literary criticism we can observe a shift from an approach
inspired by phenomenology before the Second World War to a markedly
ethically focused attitude afterwards. Simply put, at the end of the thirties,
he advanced the premiss: does the text to be criticized harmonize with the
premisses of phenomenology? Thus a writer can claim for instance that
Napoleon died in the battle of Newport in 754, but questions for which
Husserl and his circle had laid down rules may not be ignored by the
author. From this frame of reference Sartre reproaches Francois Mauriac
for using the procedure of the omniscient narrator, while, according to
him, this stylistic device cannot be brought into line with the limitations of
intentional consciousness. He claimed that Mauriac wanted to exhibit the
vision of God, an all-encompassing overview of man and the cosmos,
while in fact he should have given shape to his limitations, his explicit
choices at the narratological level. The concept of commitment and his
criterion with regard to the interpretation of literary texts does the writer
contribute to thinking about a more righteous society? typify Sartres
aesthetics more prominently from 1945 onwards. Sartre in Quest-ce que la
litterature? (1948) enunciates the notion that it is the task of the critic to
discuss the world of ideas of the writer more clearly.
In spite of being widely known, Sartres aesthetics has had little eect on
other writers. The post-war writing generation did not react favourably to
the appeal to the responsibility of the writer. These authors rather wanted
to experiment and to remain aloof from all sorts of moral prescriptions.
After all, during the years 1940 to 1945 people had felt more than enough
pressure. Soon resistance springs up in France against Sartres commitment concept, especially in the essays of A. Robbe-Grillet. He and others
accentuate more heavily the fact that the writer is in the very first place an
artist of language and not a politician. In a later phase, in post-war France

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writers foregrounded the impossibility of communication and the unknowableness of reality; think of the work of Ionesco and Beckett.

IV. Foucaults view of literature

Foucaults position can best be charted by expounding his reaction to a
number of philosophical positions known to him. Most of all he
distances himself from existentialism, which was dominant in France
until the fifties. He sees the doctrine of Sartre and his circle rather in
terms of a humanistic moral that is theoretically grounded in Sartres
philosophy.
The thought that mankind is not as Sartre says absolutely free, but
proves to be bound to structures that continually elude him, brings
Foucault especially at the beginning of his philosophical career close to
the premisses of structuralism. His notion that mankind continually
overestimates his cognitive faculty, as well as his preference to investigate
subsectors of the philosophical field and the connections between them, is
also in line with structuralism, which became very popular in France
thanks to the work of Levi-Strauss. However, the thought that structuralism presupposes a priori systematics and regularity, makes Foucault
distance himself partially from this method. After all, in his texts he
emphasizes the principle of discontinuity.
In fact it is exclusively Martin Heidegger (18891976) who retains tenure
in Foucaults development. The love for this German thinker is probably
based on the latters self-willed way of approaching problems. After all,
Heidegger wandered outside every current systematics and attempted just
like Foucault to come to a new understanding of reality, among other
means by profound analyses of philosophical pronouncements. Nevertheless the Heideggerian notion of a truth which was said to be hidden behind
phenomena is completely foreign to Foucault. So there is no question of a
clear method in Foucaults work. In that sense he shows more relationship
with the thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche (18441900) who tried to perform
a deconstruction of traditional values and norms. In a later phase of his
thinking, Foucault adopts the genealogical method from Nietzsche, i.e. he
attempts to put fixed notions in perspective by analysing their origin and to
point out the factors coincidence and social interest in the making of
these convictions. Moreover, after 1968 Foucault places greater emphasis

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435

on a social-political commitment with social developments. He especially

focuses on the influence of bio-technology on the individual.
Foucaults views on literature have appeared in stray publications. His
essays on literary text show much anity with the Heideggerian approach
to texts, that is to say: they are extremely vague and possess an esoteric
undertone. Often literary texts are considered to be a form of procrastination of death, an endless delay of the ultimate limitation. Sometimes
Foucault also sees literature as a place where veritable speech is expressed.
Occasionally he also writes about literature in terms of silence in which the
Unending Word may come to expression. Foucault asserts that literature
shows something unreadable, because it describes both reality and
indicates a movement directed at infinitude.
Foucault situates the coming into being of literature in the strict sense in
the eighteenth century, especially in the work of the Marquis de Sade and
the writers of the so-called Gothic Novel. Here for the first time a literature
emerges that explores all possible limitations and a discourse arises that is
thrown back upon itself, reflects on itself, in other words becomes
autonomous. At that point literary texts emerge that revolve around death,
the mirror, duplication and the endless hither and thither movement of
words. Foucault thinks that literature especially in the eighteenth century
is able to escape the epistemes of its time and in that sense can play a
liberating role.7
Within the literature of the twentieth century, Foucault prefers the work
of Roussel, Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot, the work of the Nouveauxromanciers (A. Robbe-Grillet, C. Simon and N. Sarraute, for instance) and
the essays of the Nouvelle Critique (R. Barthes and J. P. Ricardou for
example). In the works of these writers he supports the wish to oset
language against the visible. In the texts of the Nouveaux-romanciers
Foucault appreciates the notion that literature cannot adequately represent reality; events cannot actually be repeated, because language is more
limited than the reality it describes. Moreover Foucault appreciates the
way in which their texts perform the incoherence of reality by means of the
presentation of coincidence and experiments. Foucault and the Nouveauxromanciers emphasize the idea that literature is not the product of an
autonomous individual. After all, the author does not master the whole of
possible meanings that his text can generate. He is no longer the ultimate
referent and centre of meaning of his text.

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Foucault does not consider the interpretation of literary text as a search

for the hidden meaning of the text as is done within the hermeneutic
tradition. According to him, the thought of an ultimate meaning leads only
to endless regression to an ever more elusive truth. Moreover, there is in
fact nothing to interpret, as the text as an autonomous entity is entirely
present to itself. Foucault thinks that our knowledge of the text need not
be considered as unclear. Therefore interpretation should not primarily be
focused on the clarification of the text. Rather he wants to understand the
interpretative process as an act of writing which, together with the literary
text, forms one whole, i.e. as a second language which adds nothing to the
literary text but attempts to form a unity with its object. The emphasis in
this method focuses on the readers auto-reflexive processes.

V. Bataille and Blanchot

In 1943 Sartre devotes an essay to Blanchots Aminadab and to Batailles
Lexperience interieure. He considers both authors as writers who occupy
themselves with the fantastic, the separation between reality and impossibility, though conceived on the literary and the philosophical levels
respectively. According to Sartre, both thematize the fantastic, in order to
depict for the reader an inhuman view of mankind, i.e. the estranged
status of the modern individual. In both cases, however, Sartre rejects the
view from outside of the world or human nature as an impossibility: man is
not capable of an all-encompassing, distanced view, set apart from the
individual situation. In that respect Sartre closely follows the position
Foucault would later occupy. He abandons Husserls epistemological
point of view and concurs with the premisses of existential phenomenology, as worded by Merleau-Ponty, among others: Le plus grand
enseignement de la reduction est limpossibilite dune reduction comple`te
Si nous etions lesprit absolu, la reduction ne serait pas problematique
(Merleau-Ponty 1987, viiiix).
In Batailles work, Sartre appreciates the new style that the former
introduces within the established genre of the essay. On the other hand, he
also sees obvious parallels with tradition as given shape by Pascal and
Nietzsche. Sartre reproaches Bataille for an exhibitionistic attitude and an
excessive urge for confession, tendencies which, according to Sartre, clearly
indicate that Bataille is an ex-Christian. He considers Batailles linguistic

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437

scepticism and the subsequent attempt to wander outside all established

channels of communication even worse. Although Bataille claims that he
falls into a trance through a loss of self and says that he thus enters upon a
new reality, Sartre is of the opinion that Batailles striving is in fact
doomed to end in a solipsistic fiasco. He describes this failure as follows:
Bataille wants to lose himself in order to observe with the eyes of someone
else his so-called experience interieure. This enterprise leads nowhere,
because Bataille himself initiated this process and also actually remains the
key figure behind it the moment he says he understands himself from the
outside. Although, in his essay on Bataille, Sartre does not explicitly
mention the impossibility of the simultaneous operation of pre-reflexive
and reflexive consciousness, this phenomenological principle is actually
recognizable here. Sartre claims in Letre et le neant, and also in La
transcendance de lego, that simply put one cannot simultaneously
observe a tree and be (fully) conscious that one is observing this tree. In
Batailles case Sartre in fact holds this example up to his colleague: one
cannot undergo an inner experience and at the same time describe this
sensation, because from that moment onwards one is no longer participating in it. With the help of phenomenology, Sartre attempts to make
clear that Bataille can never understand his own Nature/Essence, as he,
like everyone else, is situated in the middle and inevitably remains bound
to his Lebenswelt. Batailles striving can also be understood from Sartres
concept of the desir detre, the attempt to be thing and consciousness at the
same time. In Letre et le neant Sartre sees this striving as one of the most
fundamental forms of bad faith: man pursues the rest and the solidity of
the thing and at the same time he wants to retain the freedom and the
mobility linked to consciousness. But mankind, as Sartre asserts, is at all
times irrevocably free; even in the negation of this given in the self-opted
reification this freedom is manifest after all, this time as flight.
In Blanchots work, Sartre appreciates the tendency to transgression,
i.e. the attempt to sound out the limitations of human reality by means
of descriptions of the fantastic. According to Sartre, the eect of such an
enterprise is the realization that the reader comes to experience man as a
riddle. Therefore, the reader should adopt an imaginary attitude here
too, otherwise the reality of Aminadab will elude him completely. But
Sartre asks Blanchot, too, the question whether his plan is feasible. He
therefore has serious doubts about the means used by Blanchot. An

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objective regard interieur is, after all, not in store for mankind including
the writer.
In 1963, Foucault devotes an essay to Bataille and in 1966 an essay to
the work of Blanchot. In both writers he appreciates the tendency to
surpass by means of impure speech and pure silence, the limitations of the
human including the discursive. Their discursive constructions, according to Foucault, are focused on the borderline of life and death and present
this very human striving as an impossibility. Nevertheless he considers
this set-up of great value.
Remarkable in Foucaults essay is the fact that Sartres well-known
essay (1943) is not mentioned once. Obviously Foucault wants to tread in
the footsteps of Heidegger and, just like the German philosopher, to
operate separately from any canonical framework. Foucault opens his
analysis with the thesis that in Batailles work the great topic in the history
of the last 150 years has been thematized: the death of God. This event has
left deep traces in Western culture, especially in the form of continually
setting up limitations and the simultaneous desire to transgress those
limitations by means of excessive behaviour. For this tendency to
transgression which Bataille indeed undertakes himself, he is given due
praise, especially at those points where he abandons the current sacrosanct
discourse of philosophy. The death of God, however, in spite of all human
transformations of this event, has left an ontological emptiness in its wake,
says Foucault. In Batailles work, this hiatus is elaborated in two ways.
First, the void after the death of God becomes manifest in the place that
sexuality has come to occupy in our culture since the nineteenth century.8
Especially the scandalous and violent side of the erotic language in
Batailles texts makes visible the lack of power, connected to Gods death.
Second, Bataille introduces in his philosophy a way of thinking that is
focused on the totality instead of on the limitations, on transgression
instead of contradiction.
Blanchot, too, is admired for his wish to transgress. According to
Foucault, transgression already dreads features in the works of the
Marquis de Sade and Holderlin. The language of these authors apart
from all the self-reflexive and autonomous aspects also has a realityexceeding nature, in the sense that they present a subject matter that
attempts to escape from the laws of the reigning ideology. Blanchot, too,
tries to escape from this forceful order by producing texts that present

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439

themselves as autonomous, that is to say: without a subject matter that

remains in control of the narrative. This impression is especially created in
the disruption of narrative lines and the presentation of impossibilities.
Foucault understands these dark spots under the heading of the principle
of lattirance/la negligence (Foucault 1966, 530.). The eect is a
supremely speaking text which eludes the repressive order by the
presentation of unclear events. Blanchots language, according to Foucault, is able to keep secrets hidden and thereby refuses to join the reigning
epistemes.

VI. Epilogue
Although in the philosophical work of Sartre and Foucault the inheritance
of Heideggers philosophy is clearly visible, the dierences between their
approach to literature are enormous. Sartre applies the principle of
intentionality in order to search for the hidden meanings of the writer and
thereby assumes a meaning-giving subject which can reproduce its
intentions more or less unproblematically in discursive systems. Foucault,
on the other hand, focuses first of all on the discourse of the text and
thereby poses the writer as an individual who constantly evades the signs
created by himself. Foucaults rejection of the unlimited rational knowing
which has evolved since the Enlightenment is related to this. He clearly
connects the work of art with the secret of reality which surrounds man.
Like Heidegger, Foucault often gives us the impression that language
precedes the individual and lets him bear witness to a truth that partly
eludes him or remains sub-conscious to him.
Both philosophers appreciate the narrative means employed by the
writers they discuss. However, Sartre especially shows his ethical side when
he wonders as he does in all his criticisms for what moral purpose these
techniques have been deployed. Sartre feels that in literature the point is
not the description but the demonstration of certain ideas. In that way he
can appreciate the eorts of Bataille and Blanchot to make estrangement
visible, while thus questioning their tendency to position themselves
outside the human domain. To Sartre, this transgression is granted only to
God and in his analyses of the desir detre he mercilessly rejects the eort to
imitate this intention. In that sense he also opposes the transgressions in
the work of Bataille and Blanchot.

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In the eyes of Foucault, Sartres interpretation is of a traditionally

hermeneutical nature. It is about a search for hidden meanings, which is no
longer acceptable to the author of Les mots et les choses. His critical
readings of the work of Bataille and Blanchot may rather be called cooperative: unlike Sartre, Foucault does not stand outside the text; on the
contrary, he tries to think along with the texts. The silence, so hated by
Sartre in his Quest-ce que la litterature? and his distaste for the
unwillingness to communicate in the literary work (see his essay on
Camuss Letranger) is in fact welcomed by Foucault as an expression of
human limitations. Foucaults admiration for Batailles eort to step
outside the traditional philosophical discourse should be seen in the same
light. While Sartre, in his criticisms, sees this purpose as a terrorist deed, an
attack on communication, Foucault judges this tendency as a justified
onslaught on the prevailing ideology, i.e. the liberal-humanistic world
view.
The crucial dierence between Sartre and Foucault thus lies in their
dierent judgements of the tendency to transgress. Both agree only on the
omniscient narrator, even though their motivations dier. To Sartre, this
procedure points to the (impossible) desire to function as God, while
Foucault feels that the author hereby creates the impression that he can
oversee reality. Foucault appreciates texts that are dissociated from the
desire to appropriate reality and have thereby become more or less without
intent. These literary works do not pose themselves opposite reality, do not
discuss fragmented reality, but organically form a part of it. This idea is
unpalatable to Sartre: the notion of a text without intent is, of course, not
only objectionable, but in fact unthinkable within his aesthetics.
NOTES
1. I would like to thank Anne Myrth Iken for her translation and Kiene Brillenburg
Wurth for her remarks on an earlier version of this essay.
2. Sartre considers Foucault, the editors of the cultural magazine Tel Quel, the writers
of the Nouveau Roman, and the structuralists Lacan and Althusser as a coherent
group, because they decide not to reflect on historical processes. This representation of events has evoked much criticism, not only in Foucault, but also in the
group around Tel Quel (Sollers 1967). Sollers objects to Sartres signalling a relationship within a heterogeneous company, simply because its members do not
adhere to the principles of Marxism. Moreover he rejects Sartres way of interpreting, which was focused too little on the text. Finally Sollers rejects Sartres

Sartre and Foucault on Bataille and Blanchot

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

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limited view of language; he considered it too strictly instrumentalist and materialistic.

An episteme can be described as the total set of relations that unite, at a given
period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences,
and possibly formalized systems (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, 18). The notion
episteme shows much correspondence with the concept of paradigm, as formulated
by Thomas Kuhn, although the former notion refers exclusively to the humanities,
the second to the natural sciences only.
In a reaction in the following instalment of La Quinzaine Litteraire (Foucault
1968b) Foucault is very upset about the fact that the interview has been published, because he said he had given no permission for publication. Furthermore
he wants to modify the negative image he gave of Sartre; Foucault now claims
to praise highly the enormous work Sartre produced as a philosopher.
Closely connected to this assertion is Foucaults idea that the writer is no longer a
writer-jurist who stands above the parties in order to be able to proclaim the
universal dictates of reason (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, 202). Foucault feels that
the modern intellectual should rather come to insights through the articulation of
problems.
The term sub-conscious within Foucaults philosophy should not be understood in
the Freudian sense. Several times, after all, he objects to the principles of psychoanalysis, especially when this method presupposes a hidden truth. The psychoanalytical interpretation of literary texts, according to Foucault, suers from the
obsession of identity and repetition. Thus in an essay about an interpretation of
Holderlins work, he criticizes the psychoanalytical premisses that the space which the
father left for this poet, is the same space as the space Schiller occupied for him, in an
imaginary sense (Foucault 1962, 201). Moreover Foucault heckles the Freudian
notion that sexual life was to represent the intimate, hidden core of human reality. The
term sub-conscious, in short, should be taken very literally, namely as insights
remaining hidden because of the limitations of the individual. Foucault attempts to
make visible a history of science by the description of rules of which people were not
conscious in a certain historical phase, but which did dominate scientific practice.
Foucault considers Don Quixote as such a text, because here for the first time since
the Renaissance the search for mirror images is mocked. Moreover I feel that here
also lies a fundamental problem in Foucaults philosophy: how can the author
break with established epistemes when they are in principle unknowable to contemporaries?
Foucault rejects the notion that speaking about sexuality was suppressed in the
nineteenth century. This so-called repression hypothesis, according to him, fails to
appreciate the fact that the psychoanalytic discourse was indeed a way to bring
sexual matters extensively into the limelight. Instead of suppressing this talk, one
should, according to Foucault, rather think in terms of canalization of this desire
within the discursive frames that psychoanalysis indicated.
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Hans van Stralen. Born 1954. PhD, University of Utrecht. Lecturer in comparative
literature at the Free University of Amsterdam and the University of Utrecht. Author
of essays on the role of consciousness in modernist literature, existentialist literature
and Choices and Conflicts: Essays on Literature and Existentialism (Peter Lang, 2005).