Scheer Reading for week 4

Extract from Scheer (1997) ‘The madness of the oeuvre: Artaud and Foucault’ in Foucault the Legacy. QUT Press. 1997. Clare O’Farrell ed. pp169-181.

1. Foucault's folie

In Foucault's original preface to Histoire de la folie à l'age classique, he characterises la folie for the first time as "Rien d'autre sans doute que l'absence d'oeuvre".(HF v) La folie: madness, but also a word covering a range of meanings from slight eccentricity to clinical insanity. It is here situated in a relation to oeuvre: work, product, work of art, body of work. Histoire de la folie is, at least in part, the history of this relation and its formulation in this phrase which, in its different modalities, moves through Foucault's various histoires de la folie clearing a space in which la folie can be conceptualised without confining it.

The history begins, appropriately, after the book itself when Henri Gouhier, the head of the jury which in May 1961 heard Foucault's defence of his doctoral thesis Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'age classique, which comprised the text of the first of the three different French publications of this work, said that he didn't understand what Foucault meant by defining la folie as l'absence d'oeuvre. Foucault's detailed replies can be read in his essays Le Non du père of 1962 and La Folie, l'absence d'oeuvre of 1964. In these texts Foucault demarcates the series of historical discontinuities that established the necessity of the link between the oeuvre and an understanding of the place of madness. Yet later, in the revised preface to the 1972 edition of Histoire de la folie, Foucault attempts to play down the significance of his phrase as a formulation given "un peu a l'aveugle" (somewhat unwittingly or blindly). (HF 8) Shoshana Felman has noted that in the French translation of Hegel's Encyclopoedia, the entry under "la folie" says that "blindness is the distinctive characteristic of madness". Perhaps in this later preface to his book we are reading Foucault's ironic acknowledgement that defining madness is itself a mad gesture, though not quite an acknowlegement that, as Derrida characterises it, his entire project in Histoire de la folie is mad.

In Derrida's notorious encounter with this text the phrase is "une note de base" (a fundamental motif)(C 83 tr.54) in Foucault's book. This is perhaps because he recognises its centrality to the problematical project of a history of madness and also perhaps because a certain interpretation of it neatly fits his arguments since if the absence of the oeuvre signifies "the lack of any conventionally determined structure", syntactical, narratological, aesthetic etc. "it implies that madness is both de jure and de facto excluded from Descartes' text, and from Foucault's writing about madness, both of which are inevitably bound up with 'Reason in general'."

It is a phrase which thereby threatens to conceptually undermine Foucault's entire project simply because it is a formulation of madness, a gesture of confinement. Yet the foreclosure of the project would depend on an epistemologically closed position, an absolute determination, of which this phrase constitutes only a possible and, as I will argue, inverse embodiment. It is not a blithe positivistic gesture but a negative lyrical framing which, however, with respect to at least one of its subjects, ironically serves to exclude a project which it had been the work of the book (Histoire de la folie) to re-insert into history. This 'fundamental motif' of the book reappears at its end as the structuring principle of a certain radical discursive practice, linking the themes of Histoire de la folie with the work of one of its central figures: Antonin Artaud.

Derrida's assertion of the fundamental importance of this phrase to Foucault's book is given some justification in the original preface to the 1961 publication of Histoire de la folie in which Foucault links the absence of the oeuvre to the possiblity of history itself and therefore to the production of Foucault's own oeuvre, "." (the great oeuvre of the history of the world is ineradicably accompanied by an absence of the oeuvre).(HF vi) This is based on Foucault's earlier assertion that "." (the relation of reason to unreason constitutes for Western culture one of the dimensions of its originality, it went with it well before Jerome Bosch, and will long survive Nietzsche and Artaud." (HF iii) This is the first mention of Artaud in the book and one in which he is introduced as an index of the density of the relation of reason to unreason, their proximity as well as their historical incommensurability. With Nietzsche, the name of Artaud becomes a marker in the passage of Western history which should have never appeared if his madness had silenced him as effectively as Foucault and Derrida tell us.

It is here in what Foucault calls "ce simple problème d'élocution" (this simple problem of elocution) (ibid) this intransmissibility of madness in language that we read his desire to produce an oeuvre which must remain absent, for there is no language with which to " (bring to the surface of the language of reason a division and a debate which must necessarily remain below, since this language only makes sense above and beyond them).(ibid) There is no language for the experience of la folie for it would have to be "." (sufficiently open to allow the decisive words by which the truth of la folie and reason are constituted for us to inscribe themselves there without betrayal). (ibid) The dream of madness in which the ratio wakes to find itself unharmed but none the wiser is one which continually interrupts Foucault's work, just as it haunted both Descartes' and Derrida's.

Foucault's rhythmical reiteration of the impossibility of the very book which follows this preface would seem to be a kind of textual abreacting by which responses to its propositions are anticipated and included within those propositions themselves. This strategy is, as has already been noted, everywhere evident in Artaud's oeuvre. It is his dominant stylistic method which Foucault also employs to short-circuit critical receptions based on the critique of a given position. All positions in Foucault and Artaud are contingent and polemical. Foucault's call for a new language also echoes an Artaudian theme, the repudiation of consensually determined limits, just as this language of an impossible absent book recalls his own description of Artaud's work. But before examining the deployment of Artaud's work in Histoire de la folie it may be instructive to return to Gouhier's question to ask what does Foucault mean by this phrase and why is it that Foucault links madness and the work with such insistence and therefore why, apart from the obvious contextual determinants, is the madness of Artaud invoked and not simply his life or that aspect of his experience which was irreducible to a discussion of his work?

Firstly, for the sake of clarity, the possible interpretations of "la folie... is the absence of the oeuvre" could be listed as follows:
1) that la folie and the oeuvre are de jure incommensurate or at least mutually exclusive. The thrust of Foucault's arguments is to make it impossible to determine whether or not this incommensurability also persists de facto. However the possibility that this is the case is not entirely repudiated.
2) the potential of la folie in general to dissolve the structures upon which the concept of the oeuvre is founded, since its objects are transitory, endlessly metamorphose and actively erode meaning.
3) that therefore a so called 'mad' writer or artist is in general not capable of a systematic and structured work based on "institutionalised rationalism" and that such a work would remain absent with respect to a given mad writer or artist's production seen as the site of continual displacement of processes rather than the manufacture of products.
4) that this incapacity also designates an experience utterly beyond the parameters of the oeuvre which is irrelevant to la folie as a limit experience.
5) Foucault may have had in mind certain such experiences where no works were produced at all. For example, the case of his one time friend at the Ecole Normale Superièure, Jacques Martin who suffered from severe depression and despite a brilliant mind left behind no recognised oeuvre when he suicided in 1963. The biographer David Macey says that Martin the 'philosophe sans oeuvre' represented for Foucault, as well as for Althusser another friend of Martin's, "the mirror of what they could have become. Foucault never spoke of Jacques Martin in print, but, like Althusser, he may have borrowed something from him. From 1961 onwards he would define madness as l'absence d'oeuvre."
6) As well as problematising empirical madness Foucault's aim is to expand the concept of the oeuvre and to indicate that, as with madness, the work of art is essentially and radically transgressive. Its characteristic trait is rupture, of boundaries, limits, frames. But he also asserts the role of the frame in determining what this limit is that the work must infract. This is why he insists that all achieved works are predicated on those which are unachieved. In short he is asserting the ineluctablility of aesthetic judgments in the practice of determining the status of the oeuvre.
7) Artaud is Foucault's model for these questions largely because Artaud's work repeatedly raises them as its dominant themes.

It is precisely this radical testing of the limits of the oeuvre that Artaud poses throughout his work. In his countless letters, essays and manifestoes as well as his art works with their cigarette burns in the paper, Artaud explores the space which cuts the work off from itself and its 'other', and seeks, in part, to exhume their primordial unity. However although Artaud's oeuvre corresponds to everything that Foucault wants to say about the resistance of la folie and the work to closure, Foucault's treatment of that oeuvre opens his work in Histoire de la folie to the kinds of critique that it seeks everywhere to head off. Affirmed then denied and misplaced, the oeuvre of Artaud is abolished and reinvented by Foucault to indicate both the precariousness of its existence in the world and the incisiveness of its protest against that world as well as, more generally, to show that at the heart of the very notion of the oeuvre is the always potential non-oeuvre which it is the task of that madness of language, without ground or limit, to bring into being.