By Hollman Lozano
Michel Foucault As I Imagine Him
Maurice Blanchot
Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside
Michel Foucault
Zone Books
English and french
New York, 2000
112 p.
The book begins with describing how the
only time that Blanchot met Foucault was during the upheavals of May 68, but as
several biographical reports and Foucault himself indicated, he was not in France during that period. The
inaccurate biographic detail creates a hesitation about the kind of book one is
reading. Is it a biographical account of how Blanchot thought that he had meet
Foucault, or how he imagines having meet Foucault? Would the interpretation of
Foucault’s oeuvre, also be taking the same liberties of memory and free
association? If his interpretation of the oeuvre is going to deviate so
significantly from the text then one needs to be more attentive to what he is
saying and what may be his intentions. But contrary to the preventions stated
above, Blanchot renders a fair and easily accessible text to Foucault.
One of the interesting features of the book
is that it lacks an interpretative predisposition. It’s aim seems to be no
other than to explain Foucault as Blanchot imagines him to be, but beyond the
uncertainty that the imagination of an author may provide upon the
interpretation of another, it is fair to say that Blanchot’s rendering of
Foucault is fair and in good faith. For instance, Blanchot mentions the
peculiar juncture at which Foucault’s work is situated in relation to
structuralism. One of the issues that Blanchot addresses is the way in which
the first part of Foucault’s work were influenced by Althusser, Canguilhem and
how he even praises both Levy Strauss and Lacan in the Order of Things.
Although Blanchot does argue that the text in which
Foucault is much more closer to structuralism is in the Birth of the Clinic and that ties out with an un-translated
interview that appeared in Dits Ecrits Vol 1 in which he argues that his
intention was to take the central tenets of structuralism to places where they
have not yet be taken.
But once he moves away from the influence of
structuralism and gets closer to Nietzsche, books like the History of Madness make their way into much more discernible and
recognizable voice of Foucault, who instead of looking and the ways in which
certain epistemes emerge in
determined historical periods is going look for the discontinuities through
which those epistemes emerge.
After
the discontinuities and to a certain extent part and parcel of certain blend of
structuralism Foucault turns to the question of subjectivity but from an
ethical perspective and Blanchot manages to make the transition as if it was
the obvious move to make, something that several readers of Foucault have been
unable to come to term with.
