Ebook: Understanding Foucault, understanding modernism

Cover; Half Title; Series; Title; Copyright; Contents; Series Preface; Abbreviations; Epigraph; Introduction: Foucault's Modernisms; What of the Enlightenment? The modern questionand the Frankfurt School; Foucault's questions; An unrecognized precursor: Fenollosa; The fiction-making of history, the epic of critique; The obligation to write: From modern literatureand the hermeneutic of self; Conclusion; Notes; Part One Conceptualizing Foucault; 1 The Origin of Parresia in Foucault's Thinking: Truth and Freedom in the History of Madness.;Michel Foucault remains to this day a thinker who stands unchallenged as one of the most important of the 20th century. Among the characteristics that have made him influential is his insistent blurring of the border separating philosophy and literature and art, carried out on the basis of his confronting the problem of modernism, which he characterizes as a permanent task. To that end, even his most explicitly historical or strictly epistemological and methodological enquiries, which on their surface would seem not to have anything to do with literature, are full of allusions to modernist writers and artists like Mallarme, Baudelaire, Artaud, Klee, Borges, Broch-sometimes fleetingly, sometimes more extensively, as is the case with Foucault's life-long devotion to Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot, and de Sade. Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism shows, on the one hand, that literature and the arts play a fundamental structural role in Foucault's works, while, on the other hand, it shifts to the foreground what it presumes to be motivating Foucault: the interrogation of the problem of modernism.