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 Collected here, these previously unpublished texts reveal a Foucault who undertakes an analysis of language and experience detached from their historical constraints.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.

Michel Foucault (1926–84) 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.

A Note on the Text
Introduction by Judith Revel

Lectures and Writings on Madness, Language, and Literature
1. Madness and Civilization
2. Madness and Civilization (Presentation Given at the Club Tahar Haddad, Tunis, April 1967)
3. Madness and Society
4. Literature and Madness (Madness in Baroque Theater and the Theater of Artaud)
5. Literature and Madness (Madness in the Work of Raymond Roussel)
6. Phenomenological Experience: Experience in Bataille
7. The New Methods of Literary Analysis
8. Literary Analysis
9. Structuralism and Literary Analysis (Presentation Given at the Club Tahar Haddad, Tunis, February 4, 1967)
10. [The Extralinguistic and Literature]
11. Literary Analysis and Structuralism
12. Bouvard and Pécuchet: The Two Temptations
13. The Search for the Absolute

Notes
Index