Literature and Madness: Madness in the Baroque Theatre and the Theatre of Artaud

2021 ◽  
pp. 026327642110327
Author(s):  
Michel Foucault
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Literary Convention ◽  
The 1960S

This article has been translated into English by Nancy Luxon and published with permission. Michel Foucault, La littérature et la folie [La folie dans le théâtre baroque et le théâtre d'Artaud], in Folie, langage, littéature, eds. H.-P. Fruchaud, D. Lorenzini, & J. Revel, pp. 89–109 © Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, Paris, 2019. www.vrin.fr Requests for re-use of La littéature et la folie [La folie dans le théâtre baroque et le théâtre d'Artaud] should be directed to Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, Paris. Literature and madness dominate Michel Foucault’s early writings in the 1960s, and indeed much of his career. In this text, Foucault considers the relation between madness, language, and silence; the difficult frontier between language and literary convention; and the experience of madness within language. He moves from a meditation on madness, to a rare commentary on theatre, stagecraft, and Artaud, and finishes by considering literature’s capacity for rupture. ‘Literature and Madness’ is a translation of a text written by Foucault in the 1960s, and recently published in Folie, langage, littérature, ed. Henri-Paul Fruchaud, Daniele Lorenzini and Judith Revel (Paris: Vrin, 2019, 89–109). This version includes a translator’s introduction by Nancy Luxon and was given a distinct subtitle to distinguish it from a similar lecture with the same title in that volume.

Formative Influences

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary Radner ◽  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Film Analysis ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Christian Metz ◽  
The Way

In this section of the interview, Bellour describes how he began to engage in film analysis in the 1960s, beginning with a sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, with the aim of establishing the way it worked as a “text.” He proceeds to describe his personal encounters with major figures like Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, and his friendship with Christian Metz, suggesting how his interchanges with them helped to shape his own thinking, and how it diverged from theirs.

scholarly journals Práticas matemáticas inscritas em cadernos escolares: o caso das fraçõesMathematical practices inscribed in school notebooks: the case of fractions

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 751-788
Author(s):  
Francine Fragoso de Miranda Silva ◽  
Cláudia Regina Flores ◽  
Rosilene Beatriz Machado
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
History Of Mathematics ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Santa Catarina ◽  
Mathematical Practices ◽  
New Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

ResumoEste artigo tem por objetivo identificar e analisar práticas matemáticas inscritas em cadernos escolares de uma escola mista estadual do município de Antônio Carlos (SC), nas décadas de 1930 e 1940, com enfoque dado para as frações. São utilizadas as teorizações de Michel Foucault para nortear os preceitos teórico-metodológicos. Os resultados da pesquisa indicam práticas matemáticas desenvolvidas nessa escola obedecendo aos programas oficiais catarinenses da época, com soluções rápidas e sucintas e voltadas às tarefas de seu cotidiano. Também se observam que elas estão inseridas num contexto histórico, compreendido entre a Reforma Francisco Campos, de 1931, e o início do Movimento da Matemática Moderna, nos anos de 1960, no qual a fração recebe uma nova abordagem, distanciando-se da relação entre número e medida e aproximando-se da noção de parte-todo.Palavras-chave: Práticas matemáticas, Cadernos escolares, Frações, História da educação matemática.AbstractThis article aims to identify and analyze mathematical practices registered in school notebooks of a mixed state school in the city of Antônio Carlos (SC), in the 1930s and 1940s, focused on fractions. Michel Foucault's theorizations are used to guide theoretical and methodological precepts. The results of the research show mathematical practices developed in these schools obeying the Santa Catarina official programs of the time, with quick and succinct solutions and focused on their daily tasks. It is also observed that they are inserted in a historical context, between the Francisco Campos Reform, of 1931, and the beginning of the Modern Mathematics Movement, in the 1960s, in which the fraction receives a new approach, moving away from the relationship between number and measure and approaching the notion of part-whole.Keywords: Mathematical practices, School notebooks, Fractions, History of mathematics education.ResumenEste artículo tiene como objetivo identificar y analizar las prácticas matemáticas registradas en los cuadernos escolares de una escuela estatal mixta en la ciudad de Antônio Carlos (SC), en la década de 1930 y 1940, con un enfoque en las fracciones. Las teorizaciones de Michel Foucault se utilizan para guiar los preceptos teóricos y metodológicos. Los resultados de la investigación muestran prácticas matemáticas desarrolladas en estas escuelas que obedecen los programas oficiales de Santa Catarina de la época, con soluciones rápidas y sucintas y centradas en sus tareas diarias. También se observa que se insertan en un contexto histórico, entre la Reforma Francisco Campos, de 1931, y el comienzo del Movimiento de Matemáticas Modernas, en la década de 1960, en el que la fracción recibe un nuevo enfoque, alejándose de la relación entre numerar y medir y acercándose a la noción de parte-todo.Palabras clave: Prácticas matemáticas, Cuadernos escolares, Fracciones, Historia de la educación matemática

Weaponised Aesthetics and Dystopian Modernism: Cut-ups, Playbacks, Pick-ups and the ‘Limits of Control’ from Burroughs to Deleuze

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 555-584
Author(s):  
S. E. Gontarski
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Surveillance Culture ◽  
Thought Control ◽  
Commercial Media ◽  
Literary Figure ◽  
Creative Force ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The 1960S

American outlier writer William S. Burroughs was a creative force – an homme de lettres in his own right, yes, but as a cultural theorist as well, particularly his anticipation of what we now regularly call ‘a society of control’ or ‘a surveillance culture’, and, moreover, as a textual embodiment as well. That is, Burroughs was as much a media theorist and performance artist as he was a traditional literary figure, what we generally call a writer, or novelist, although he lauded those latter categories. Through such multimodality he offered critiques of a ‘control society’ and of ‘thought control’ by a media that strips us of volition. In his lectures on Michel Foucault delivered at the Université de Paris VIII in the 1980s, Gilles Deleuze detailed Burroughs's influence on both philosophers with his critique of our ‘control societies’, a term they adopted from him. These critiques of what Burroughs calls ‘thought control’ were and currently remain inseparable from his emergence as a performance artist, such embodiment of his art readily available amid our own image-obsessed electronic revolution. That is, the products of this period are currently being recirculated through commercial media outlets and through multiple open access formats to suggest – to confirm – that the artist whom many another ‘outsider’ has called ‘the Priest’ and who saw himself as a ‘cosmonaut of inner space’ and ‘a technician of consciousness’, this dystopic modernist author, visionary science fiction writer, and aesthetic weapons maker was one of the major media artists, social critics, cultural theorists and literary figures not only of his but of our ‘postpersonal’ time. Michel Foucault closes The Order of Things by imagining a time when ‘man will be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’. The closing image was crafted some fifteen years before Foucault met Burroughs in New York in 1975, but in the 1960s Burroughs, too, was already imagining and theorising the disappearing author and a post-human, media-dominated world. Such lines of thought suggest parallel (but independent) trajectories that Deleuze will see as bridging philosopher and artist if not philosophy and art.

Dominant Positions: John Coltrane, Michel Foucault, and the Politics of Representation

2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracey Nicholls
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Complex Analysis ◽  
Blind Spot ◽  
Free Jazz ◽  
Rhetorical Question ◽  
John Coltrane ◽  
Social Positioning ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
The 1960S

In a 1979 essay on the principles of a contemporary movement in literature, écriture, Michel Foucault quotes approvingly a rhetorical question posed by minimalist author Samuel Beckett: “what does it matter who is speaking?” (“What Is an Author?” 205). My purpose in this paper is to argue that endorsing such critical-theoretical inattention to speakers’ identities actually promotes some of the abuses of power that Foucault and the theorists he has inspired most object to. Notably, inattention to identity forecloses analysis of the speaker’s position within the discourse and, in so doing, permits both the continued dominance of socially-legitimated points of view and continued marginalization of social commentaries and critiques that oppose themselves to these dominant threads of discourse. My critique of this curious blind-spot in Foucault’s theorizing is worked out through an analysis of critical attention to John Coltrane’s ‘free jazz’ experimentations of the 1960s. One of the central points I am concerned to make in discussing Coltrane is that how artistic projects are represented depends at least in part upon the willingness of critics to take notice of issues of identity and social positioning (both their own, and that of the artists they evaluate). I choose to engage with evaluations of Coltrane, specifically, because there are certain features of his relation to his audience and his critics that demand of us an especially nuanced and complex analysis of the power jazz journalism can exert.

scholarly journals Towards an archaeology of invented and imaginary landscapes

1997 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-4
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Carrying Capacity ◽  
Human Geography ◽  
Western World ◽  
Human Adaptation ◽  
Present Epoch ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Land Scape

Landscape is a theme with a long standing in archaeology. But whereas archaeologists in the 1960s analyzed the carrying capacity of the environment in order to measure human adaptation, since the 1990s landscapes are increasingly being ‘read’ for understanding how people related to the land. The shift in perspective is clearly a substantial one which does not merely demonstrate a development of archaeological thought: as related developments in human geography and anthropology show, it is rooted in a wider current in the Western world of rethinking fundamental notions such as ‘nature’, ‘culture’ and ‘society’. The concept of ‘land-scape’ or perhaps more generally that of ‘space’ also fits in this series, as was argued by among others Michel Foucault, who claimed that ‘the present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space’ (Foucault 1986, 22).

Foucault’s Critique of the Human Sciences in the 1950s: Between Psychology and Philosophy

2020 ◽  
pp. 026327642095082
Author(s):  
Elisabetta Basso
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S

This paper is based on the archives of Michel Foucault collected (since 2013) at the manuscripts department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Our investigation focuses in particular on the documents of the 1950s, in order to study the role of the reflection on anthropology and phenomenology at the beginning of Foucault’s philosophical path. This archival material allows us to discover the tremendous work that is at the basis of the relatively few works that Foucault published in the 1950s. The access to the 1950s documents enables us at last to investigate the reasons for the seemingly sharp break that divides these works from the works published by Foucault in the 1960s and the 1970s, in which emerges the archaeological refusal of phenomenology and anthropology, as well as the strong criticism against any form of psychopathological discourse.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Dennis Duncan
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Jacques Lacan ◽  
Intellectual Networks ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

The Introduction outlines the argument of the book, giving some examples of the Oulipo’s close ties with philosophy such as voting to invite Michel Foucault to one of their meetings, and a surprising anecdote about Jacques Lacan as a dinner guest. It also gives a flavour of what the group’s meetings are like – lively, clever, slightly chaotic – by quoting a passage from some early minutes. It then goes on to provide an account of the Oulipo’s formation and subsequent expansion in the 1960s and 1970s, and to introduce the group’s members. It considers their backgrounds, noting that the group was formed not merely of writers, but of mathematicians, academics, Pataphysicians, and philosophers. Several had been associated with the Surrealists; a number, too, had been involved in the underground publishing movement during the war. These biographies, I argue, are important: they demonstrate that the Oulipo was, from the start, connected to wider intellectual networks – not insular, but rather a workshop in which a multiplicity of voices with varying interests and experiences were brought to bear.

scholarly journals Foucault and Althusser: Epistemological Differences with Political Effects

2013 ◽  
pp. 134-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Ryder
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Effects ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Marxist Tradition

Michel Foucault was at times critical of the Marxist tradition, and at other times more sympathetic.  After his dismissal of Marx in The Order of Things, he conceded the existence of a more compelling, non-humanist version of this discourse.  Louis Althusser’s innovations are crucial for the existence of this second Marxism.  While consideration of the relation between Foucault and Althusser varies between those who emphasize relations between State and capital, and conversely those who inscribe Marxist considerations into a micro-political account, the distinction between the two thinkers takes place earlier in the development of their respective outlooks.  Foucault initially emphasized Marxism as an anthropological eschatology; he revises this argument, commending the possibility of an epistemological mutation of history inherent in Marx’s thought.  I locate crucial distinctions between Foucault and Althusser in the early work of the 1960s as inflecting relations in the seemingly more proximate work of the 1970s.  In this approach, we can better examine Foucault’s non-Marxist contentions in order to consider the reciprocal distinctions and contributions between these two forms of anti-humanism, providing the necessary groundwork for debates regarding the nature of subjectivity, the State, and revolution.

The Genesis and Internal Dynamics of El Salvador's People's Revolutionary Army, 1970–1976

2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (01) ◽  
pp. 102-129
Author(s):  
ALBERTO MARTÍN ÁLVAREZ ◽  
EUDALD CORTINA ORERO
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
El Salvador ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Internal Dynamics ◽  
Internal Coherence ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractUsing interviews with former militants and previously unpublished documents, this article traces the genesis and internal dynamics of the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (People's Revolutionary Army, ERP) in El Salvador during the early years of its existence (1970–6). This period was marked by the inability of the ERP to maintain internal coherence or any consensus on revolutionary strategy, which led to a series of splits and internal fights over control of the organisation. The evidence marshalled in this case study sheds new light on the origins of the armed Salvadorean Left and thus contributes to a wider understanding of the processes of formation and internal dynamics of armed left-wing groups that emerged from the 1960s onwards in Latin America.

Improving x-ray map resolution with image restoration techniques

1996 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 598-599
Author(s):  
Richard B. Mott ◽  
John J. Friel ◽  
Charles G. Waldman
Keyword(s):  
Image Restoration ◽  
Hubble Space Telescope ◽  
Extensive Literature ◽  
Small Object ◽  
X Rays ◽  
X Ray ◽  
Mapping Parameters ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Map Resolution

X-rays are emitted from a relatively large volume in bulk samples, limiting the smallest features which are visible in X-ray maps. Beam spreading also hampers attempts to make geometric measurements of features based on their boundaries in X-ray maps. This has prompted recent interest in using low voltages, and consequently mapping L or M lines, in order to minimize the blurring of the maps.An alternative strategy draws on the extensive work in image restoration (deblurring) developed in space science and astronomy since the 1960s. A recent example is the restoration of images from the Hubble Space Telescope prior to its new optics. Extensive literature exists on the theory of image restoration. The simplest case and its correspondence with X-ray mapping parameters is shown in Figures 1 and 2.Using pixels much smaller than the X-ray volume, a small object of differing composition from the matrix generates a broad, low response. This shape corresponds to the point spread function (PSF). The observed X-ray map can be modeled as an “ideal” map, with an X-ray volume of zero, convolved with the PSF. Figure 2a shows the 1-dimensional case of a line profile across a thin layer. Figure 2b shows an idealized noise-free profile which is then convolved with the PSF to give the blurred profile of Figure 2c.

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