Catherine M Soussloff - Foucault on the Arts and Letters: Perspectives for the 21st Century

Foucault on the Arts and Letters

Global Aesthetic Research

Series Editor: Joseph J. Tanke, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Hawaii

The Global Aesthetic Research series publishes cutting-edge research in the field of aesthetics. It contains books that explore the principles at work in our encounters with art and nature that interrogate the foundations of artistic, literary, and cultural criticism, and that articulate the theory of the disciplines central concepts.

Titles in the Series

Early Modern Aesthetics by J. Colin McQuillan.

Foucault on the Arts and Letters: Perspectives for the 21st Century edited by Catherine M. Soussloff.

Foucault on the Arts and Letters

Perspectives for the 21st Century

Edited by
Catherine M. Soussloff

London New York

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Selection and editorial matter Catherine M. Soussloff 2016

Copyright in individual chapters is held by the respective chapter authors.

All rights reserved . No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: HB 978-1-7834-8573-4

PB 978-1-7834-8574-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

ISBN 978-1-78348-573-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-78348-574-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-78348-575-8 (electronic)

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

For my dear daughter Genya in France

Contents

Catherine M. Soussloff

Dana Arnold

Anton Lee

Sophie Berrebi

Frdric Pouillaude

Brandon Konoval

Sima Godfrey

Marisa C. Snchez

Arianna Sforzini

Catherine M. Soussloff

Ilka Kressner

Andrew Ballantyne

Frdric Gros

Translated by Sima Godfrey

This book began as a conference jointly sponsored by the Institut dtudes Avances de Paris (IEA) and the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies (PWIAS), University of British Columbia, held in Paris on June 1213, 2014. I remain extremely grateful to Gretty Mirdal, director, and Simon Luck, scientific coordinator, at the IEA for their enthusiastic intellectual and financial support of this project and for the generous hospitality offered to all the participants in the conference in Paris. The IEA location and its professional staff allowed all of the conference presenters and attendees to experience in the best circumstances the vital exchange of research and ideas that has resulted in this book and other projects. I thank Janis Sarra, director at the PWIAS, for her unwavering support of this conference and for her mentorship during my tenure as a distinguished scholar in residence, when my research for this project began. While in Paris, the Embassy of Canada provided important connections for this conference and book, especially through the knowledgeable and kind offices of Catherine Bdard, director, Centre Culturel Canadien, and Jacques-Henri Gagnon, head of communications and academic relations.

Taking a series of academic conference papers, no matter how innovative, and additional commissioned essays to the state of completion required for publication with a scholarly press requires a great deal of time and support from a number of people and institutions. I thank the editors at Rowman and Littlefield International for their faith in this project and Joseph Tanke for including the book in his series Global Aesthetic Research. Without the editorial acumen of Greg Gibson, the conference management of Victoria Lam, and the administrative support of Andrea Tuele at the University of British Columbia, this project could not have come to fruition. Last-minute and much-needed research support for the publication of this book was provided by the Faculty of Arts, University of British Columbia, where Matthew Evenden, associate dean of research and graduate studies, was extremely helpful.

With a bibliography on the scale of that presented by the writings and thought of Michel Foucault, I am more than usually indebted to scholars in many countries, most especially Canada, France, the United States, and Great Britain. I have been fortunate to have the friendship and intellectual collaboration of a number of colleagues, not least the original conference participants and the subsequent contributors to this book, from whom I have learned a great deal and upon whose expertise I have depended. Although not able to participate in the conference, Arnold Davidson was essential in helping me to formulate the reasons for the necessity of further work on Foucaults thinking about painting, in particular, and about the arts and letters, in general. Like all readers of Foucault, I also am indebted to Arnold Davidson for his many publications on the philosopher and for his continuing interest in this project. The authors of the chapters in this book have all been essential to the intellectual shape of the book as a whole, and I thank them for their patience with my commentaries on their work throughout the long editing process. Although Ed Dimendberg, Franoise Gaillard, Tai Smith, and Elisabetta Villari do not have chapters in this book, their participation in the conference deserves mention here. My PhD student Anton Lee is always enormously helpful concerning every detail of the Foucault corpus of writings on the arts. Dana Arnold and Sima Godfrey have been especially important in aiding me in the formulation of the issues central to a book on Foucault and the arts and letters. Additionally, I cannot thank Sima Godfrey enough for her expertise in French translation and bibliography throughout the course of this project. She co-chaired the IEA conference proceedings and was an important link for me to the French academic world. I thank the following people for sharing their learning and friendship over the time that I worked through the complex issues involved in this book: Karen Bassi, Susanna Braund, Margaret Brose, Dana Claxton, Hubert Damisch, Derek Gregory, Michael Kelly, Michelle LeBaron, Adam Morton, Keith Moxey, Michael Roth, James Rubin, John Tagg, Teri Wehn-Damisch, and Hayden White.

Finally, it is with much sadness that I wish to acknowledge the recent passing of Michael Sheringham, who was an essential participant and interlocutor at the IEA conference on Foucault and the arts and letters, and whose many contributions to the field of French literary studies and theory have been important for all of us.

Catherine M. Soussloff

methodological means. Research into Foucaults philosophy and the arts and letters requires a suspension of the usual expectations of how to read an oeuvre, in favor of close visual and textual analyses attuned to often overlooked ruptures and dissonances in the discursive field.