Hans Van Stralen - Sartre, Foucault, Bataille, Blanchot

Sartre and Foucault on Bataille and BlanchotHans van Stralen, Free University of Amsterdam/University of Utrecht

In 1966, Sartre and Foucault conduct a debate that initiates a shiftof convention in the French intellectual scene. From a Marxistpoint of view, Sartre feels that Foucault ignores the historical lawsand the subsequent social developments. Foucault on his partconsiders Sartres theory to be a failed effort at fixating reality in acoordinating framework, seen from the point of humanisticmorals. The controversy becomes more insightful when the literaryviews of both thinkers are subjected to closer study. Sartre sees theliterary work as a vehicle for opinions and, especially after 1945, hethinks that the author should accomplish social change by meansof literature. Foucault, on the other hand, sees the literary text as aplace where genuine speech reveals itself and which is essentiallyunfinished. Both philosophers have written about Bataille andBlanchot and these writings also show their deviating viewpoints.Sartre sees them from an ethical angle and he is negative abouttheir impossible transgression. After all, this status cannot bedescribed without abandoning it. Foucault, on the contrary, hasenormous admiration for this project, because it is about a searchfor 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 differing 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),

Orbis Litterarum 61:6 429442, 2006Printed in Singapore. All rights reserved

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

affinity 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 interpreta-

tions of two writers, Bataille and Blanchot, I shall demonstrate how their

literary criteria differ.

II. The confrontation

The confrontation between Sartre and Foucault in 1966 was rather short-

lived. 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 difference 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 affinity with structuralism. He does see the advantages

430 Hans van Stralen

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 intellec-

tuals react to the assertions of these philosophers in well-known French

newspapers and magazines. While the reactions in magazines such as Le

431Sartre and Foucault on Bataille and Blanchot

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 phenom-

enon globally as formulated by phenomenology. Sartre asserts that the

work of art is intentionally loaded, i.e. transmits a view of the author in


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 effect 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 commit-

ment 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


writers foregrounded the impossibility of communication and the un-

knowableness 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 structur-

alism 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. Neverthe-

less 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


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 affinity 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 procrasti-

nation 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 Nouveaux-

romanciers (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 offset

language against the visible. In the texts of the Nouveaux-romanciers

Foucault appreciates the notion that literature cannot adequately repre-

sent 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 Nouveaux-

romanciers 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.


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 impos-

sibility, 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 phenomeno-

logy, as worded by Merleau-Ponty, among others: Le plus grand

enseignement de la reduction est limpossibilite dune reduction complete

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


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 partici-

pating 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 effect 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


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, accord-

ing 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 reality-

exceeding 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


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, 530ff.). The effect is a

supremely speaking text which eludes the repressive order by the

presentation of unclear events. Blanchots language, according to Fou-

cault, 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 differences 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 efforts 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 effort to

imitate this intention. In that sense he also opposes the transgressions in

the work of Bataille and Blanchot.


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 co-

operative: 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 effort 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 difference between Sartre and Foucault thus lies in their

different judgements of the tendency to transgress. Both agree only on the

omniscient narrator, even though their motivations differ. 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 BrillenburgWurth for her remarks on an earlier version of this essay.

2. Sartre considers Foucault, the editors of the cultural magazine Tel Quel, the writersof the Nouveau Roman, and the structuralists Lacan and Althusser as a coherentgroup, because they decide not to reflect on historical processes. This representa-tion of events has evoked much criticism, not only in Foucault, but also in thegroup around Tel Quel (Sollers 1967). Sollers objects to Sartres signalling a rela-tionship within a heterogeneous company, simply because its members do notadhere to the principles of Marxism. Moreover he rejects Sartres way of inter-preting, which was focused too little on the text. Finally Sollers rejects Sartres


limited view of language; he considered it too strictly instrumentalist and materi-alistic.

3. An episteme can be described as the total set of relations that unite, at a givenperiod, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences,and possibly formalized systems (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, 18). The notionepisteme shows much correspondence with the concept of paradigm, as formulatedby Thomas Kuhn, although the former notion refers exclusively to the humanities,the second to the natural sciences only.

4. In a reaction in the following instalment of La Quinzaine Litteraire (Foucault1968b) Foucault is very upset about the fact that the interview has been pub-lished, because he said he had given no permission for publication. Furthermorehe wants to modify the negative image he gave of Sartre; Foucault now claimsto praise highly the enormous work Sartre produced as a philosopher.

5. Closely connected to this assertion is Foucaults idea that the writer is no longer awriter-jurist who stands above the parties in order to be able to proclaim theuniversal dictates of reason (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, 202). Foucault feels thatthe modern intellectual should rather come to insights through the articulation ofproblems.

6. The term sub-conscious within Foucaults philosophy should not be understood inthe Freudian sense. Several times, after all, he objects to the principles of psycho-analysis, especially when this method presupposes a hidden truth. The psychoana-lytical interpretation of literary texts, according to Foucault, suffers from theobsession of identity and repetition. Thus in an essay about an interpretation ofHolderlinswork, he criticizes the psychoanalytical premisses that the spacewhich thefather left for this poet, is the same space as the space Schiller occupied for him, in animaginary sense (Foucault 1962, 201). Moreover Foucault heckles the Freudiannotion that sexual lifewas to represent the intimate, hidden core of human reality. Theterm sub-conscious, in short, should be taken very literally, namely as insightsremaining hidden because of the limitations of the individual. Foucault attempts tomake visible a history of science by the description of rules of which people were notconscious in a certain historical phase, but which did dominate scientific practice.

7. Foucault considers Don Quixote as such a text, because here for the first time sincethe Renaissance the search for mirror images is mocked. Moreover I feel that herealso lies a fundamental problem in Foucaults philosophy: how can the authorbreak with established epistemes when they are in principle unknowable to con-temporaries?

8. Foucault rejects the notion that speaking about sexuality was suppressed in thenineteenth century. This so-called repression hypothesis, according to him, fails toappreciate the fact that the psychoanalytic discourse was indeed a way to bringsexual matters extensively into the limelight. Instead of suppressing this talk, oneshould, according to Foucault, rather think in terms of canalization of this desirewithin the discursive frames that psychoanalysis indicated.

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Hans van Stralen. Born 1954. PhD, University of Utrecht. Lecturer in comparativeliterature at the Free University of Amsterdam and the University of Utrecht. Authorof essays on the role of consciousness in modernist literature, existentialist literatureand Choices and Conflicts: Essays on Literature and Existentialism (Peter Lang, 2005).


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Hans Van Stralen - Sartre, Foucault, Bataille, Blanchot