Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology

The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Volume II

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by Michel Foucault,

Edited by James Faubion

New Press

Due/Published August 1999, 488 pages, paper

ISBN 1565845587

The second in a series of three volumes that will bring Foucault's Dits et écrits to English speaking readers. The pieces in Volume II survey Foucault's diverse and sustained address of the historical forms and interplay of passion, experience, and truth. They include commentaries on the work of de Sade, Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Roussel, and Boulez; along with his reflections on the historical constitution, historical diagnostics, and the aesthetic and critical imagination.

Table of Contents

Part One: Aesthetics
The Father's "No"
Speaking and Seeing in Raymond Roussel
So Cruel a Knowledge
A Preface to Transgression
Language to Infinity
Afterword to The Temptation of Saint Anthony
The Prose of Actaeon
Behind the Fable
The Thought of the Outside
A Swimmer Between Two World
Different Spaces
This Is Not a Pipe
What Is an Author?
Sade, Sergeant of Sex
The Gray Mornings of Tolerance
The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse and the Everyday Worms
The Imagination of the Nineteenth Century
Pierre Boulez, Passing Through the Screen

Part Two: Methodology and Epistemology
Philosophy and Psychology
The ORder of Things
Nietzsche, Freud, Marx
On the Ways of Writing History
On the Archeology of the Sciences: Response to the Epistemology Circle
Madness and Society
Theatrum Philosophicum

Review

This is the second and eagerly-awaited volume of The New Press's impressive translations of the works of Foucault. Volume 1, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth is a collection of Foucault's famous course summaries from the Collége de France. The second volume is organized around Foucault's analysis of the historical forms and interplay of passion, experience, and truth. Selections include Foucault's analysis of literature and art including the works of Roussel, the Surrealists, Bataille, and Blanchot. Many contend that Foucault's literary criticism has been relatively ignored in recent years and these writings serve as an excellent reintroduction to Foucault's interest in literature's ability to express feeling and experience.

James Faubion writes, "For Foucault fiction has multiple and heterogeneous purposes. Among other things, it can be a means of intellectually and emotionally deferring the writer's encounter with his or her own finitude...Its presence fills, or seeks to fill, a horrible expressive vacuum."

Foucault's art criticism included in this volume ranges from a look at Pierre Boulez to his famous work on Magritte, "This is Not a Pipe." The collection also includes Foucault's reflections on the constitution of the aesthetic and the critical imagination. The writings include the obscure more famous works of Foucault, including: "A Preface to Transgression," "Language to Infinity," "A Swimmer Between Two Worlds,""What is an Author," "The Order of Things," "Nietzsche, Freud, Marx," "Madness and Society," and "Foucault," (an extraordinary article where Foucault, under a pseudonym, talks about his own work).

To read about the third volume in the essential writings, Power