Description

---

Newly published lectures by Foucault on madness, literature, and structuralism.
 
Perceiving an enigmatic relationship between madness, language, and literature, French philosopher Michel Foucault developed ideas during the 1960s that are less explicit in his later, more well-known writings. Collected here, these previously unpublished texts reveal a Foucault who undertakes an analysis of language and experience detached from their historical constraints. Three issues predominate: the experience of madness across societies; madness and language in Artaud, Roussel, and Baroque theater; and structuralist literary criticism. Not only do these texts pursue concepts unique to this period such as the “extra-linguistic,” but they also reveal a far more complex relationship between structuralism and Foucault than has typically been acknowledged.

About the Author

---

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French philosopher and historian who held the Chair of the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France. His many books in English include The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality, and “Discourse and Truth” and “Parrēsia,” the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press. 

Henri-Paul Fruchaud is an editor of Michel Foucault’s posthumous works.

Daniele Lorenzini is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.

Judith Revel is professor of contemporary philosophy at Paris Nanterre University.

Robert Bononno is a freelance translator who lives in New York.

Praise For…

---

"Lest these familiar Foucauldian themes leave readers feeling there is nothing new here, Judith Revel’s nuanced, judicious introduction highlights 'four differences' in apparent contrast to Foucault as he has been received."
— Choice

“Reverberations from the forceful impact of Foucault’s thought were first felt by Anglophone readers in the mid-1960s almost entirely through his writings on madness and literature. This new volume gathers several previously unpublished or untranslated texts from this decade on these very themes. Readers will be delighted to revisit or perhaps even indulge for the very first time those ideas and analyses with which Foucault forever shook the future of philosophy."
— Colin Koopman, University of Oregon

“The essays collected in this book are as urgent today as they were fifty years ago: provocative, generative, and timely. Each is a bridge connecting Foucault’s histories of the modern subject to different fields of inquiry, from literature to structuralism to the philosophy of J. L. Austin. Anyone interested in literary theory, early modern history, or continental philosophy and its relation to the analytic tradition will find these essays by turns revelatory and inspiring.”
— Richard Neer, University of Chicago