From Publishers Weekly
"In the first of this book's two dense essays, Foucault links the neutral space of Blanchot's fiction to a line of thought extending from de Sade to Artaud, Nietzsche and Bataille. . . . In the second essay, Blanchot mines Foucault's excavation of the social practices underpinning prisons, the courts and the medical establishment," reported PW . Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Book Description
In these essays two of the most important French thinkers of our time reflect on each other's work. In so doing, Maurice Blanchot the novelist/essayist and Michel Foucault the philosopher develop a new perspective on the relationship between subjectivity, fiction, and the will to truth. The two texts present meditations on writing, language, and representation which question the status of the author/subject and explore the notion of a "neutral" voice that arises from the realm of the "outside."

Maurice Blanchot is the author, in English translation, of The Gaze of Orpheus, Death Sentence, The Madness of the Day, and Thomas the Obscure. Michel Foucault is the author of Madness and Civilization, The Order of Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality.

Jeffrey Mehlman, author of A Structural Study of Autobiography: Proust, Sartre, Lvi-Strauss, and Revolution and Repetition: Marx-Hugo-Balzac, is Professor of French at Boston University. Brian Massumi is the translator of A Thousand Plateaux by Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari and cotranslator of Jean-Franois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition.


Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In these essays two of the most important French thinkers of our time reflect on each other's work. In so doing, Maurice Blanchot the novelist/essayist and Michel Foucault the philosopher develop a new perspective on the relationship between subjectivity, fiction, and the will to truth. The two texts present meditations on writing, language, and representation which question the status of the author/subject and explore the notion of a "neutral" voice that arises from the realm of the "outside."

Maurice Blanchot is the author, in English translation, of The Gaze of Orpheus, Death Sentence, The Madness of the Day, and Thomas the Obscure. Michel Foucault is the author of Madness and Civilization, The Order of Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality.

Jeffrey Mehlman, author of A Structural Study of Autobiography: Proust, Sartre, Levi-Strauss, and Revolution and Repetition: Marx-Hugo-Balzac, is Professor of French at Boston University. Brian Massumi is the translator of A Thousand Plateaux by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and cotranslator of Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition.

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