Politics of outside and event. Michel Foucault’s unpublished works on literature

Abstract

By the end of September 2019, Folie, langage, littèrature (Vrin, 2019) is published, in addition to Foucault’s collection of unpublished texts on literature that appeared in 2013 under the title La gran extranjera (The Great Foreigner). This new volume presents unpublished texts in which the editors, Judith Revel tells us, have selected texts that make the canonical reading of Foucault interested in literature uncomfortable. And, indeed, the selection is especially interesting for the scholars of their work because it places their break with an escapist concept of literature around 1967. Particularly interesting is the text «L’extralinguistique et la littérature», in which Foucault proposes an analysis of the different ways in which the extralinguistic, as outside the work, relates to it and vice versa. On the basis of this proposal, our aim is to analyse a politics of literary form that Foucault proposes from a performative negativity.