This article posits that in Foucault’s later work we find not a forgetting of literature, but a reformulation of the role that literature had come to occupy in his work, and that, in this later work, there is a trace of the texts on literary thought that he wrote from the 1960s to the mid-1970s. Drawing upon Foucault’s later work, I reconsider the key question: What relationship does literature, as literature, have with the political dimension of discourses? This necessarily goes (...) hand-in-hand with the classic question concerning the truth of literature: How does literature tell the truth? (shrink)

Madness, Language, Literature (2019) brings together a series of unpublished works on literature that belong to Michel Foucault’s first stage of production. This article focuses on those works that express a concept of madness as social partition or outside, and also on those that elucidate the concept of the ‘extralinguistic’ of literature. The combined reading of these texts sheds light on a concept of the extralinguistic outside of literature that enables Foucault to overcome a concept of ontological outside and, therefore, (...) using literature, think on this discourse’s historical possibilities of resistance. As a result of this new reading, I analyse some fundamental aspects of this early Foucault. First, his development of a politics of literary form in the 1960s. Second, I propose that Foucault’s studies on literature in the 1960s were a kind of laboratory in which he was already raising some questions concerning his political history of truth. And, lastly, I examine the capacity of literature to make visible a part of reality that remains hidden (the excluded), the processes by which literature creates (language’s mechanism of self-representation), the possible forms of subjectivation that the fiction of every episteme allows (what Foucault calls verisimilitude), and the formulation of novel forms of being (that he later developed as aesthetics of existence). (shrink)