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In these two essays, two of the most important French thinkers of our time reflect on each other's work. In so doing, novelist/essayist Maurice Blanchot and philosopher Michel Foucault develop a new perspective on the relationship between subjectivity, fiction, and the will to truth. The two texts present reflections on writing, language, and representation that question the status of the author/subject and explore the notion of a "neutral" voice that arises from the realm of the "outside." This book is crucial not only to an understanding of these two thinkers, but also to any overview of recent French thought.

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Publishers Weekly Review

``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 . (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

This slim volume contains two articles written by each of the thinkers in the book's title about the other. The book makes no mention of an editor (although the translators are identified), thus there is no one to tell us in a foreword or introduction when these two texts were written or to situate them for us in the pattern of recent French philosophical criticism. We do know, however, that the French originals were published in 1986, which means that in the case of Foucault (who died in 1984) this is a posthumous text. To Blanchot, Foucault is a major thinker who pursued ``the aspirations of structuralism'' even while it was ``in its death throes.'' His great contribution is that he seems to have eliminated the subject from history, or at least relegated it to a minor place. To Foucault, Blanchot is important because in his novels and criticism he has searched for ``a language from which the subject is excluded.'' In each case, the author's procedure is to devote several hundred words or so to each of the subject's books, indicating major areas of concern along the way. These terribly serious and abstruse exercises in mutual admiration will probably be of interest to the happy few who are already initiated into these particular modes of discourse. The uninitiated reader, who might well see them as leftover icons of a fad that has already peaked, is left with the haunting question: for what audience have these texts been translated?-D. O'Connell, University of Illinois at Chicago

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Michel Foucault was born on October 15, 1926, in Poitiers, France, and was educated at the Sorbonne, in Paris. He taught at colleges all across Europe, including the Universities of Lill, Uppsala, Hamburg, and Warsaw, before returning to France. There he taught at the University of Paris and the College of France, where he served as the chairman of History of Systems of Thought until his death.

Regarded as one of the great French thinkers of the twentieth century, Foucault's interest was in the human sciences, areas such as psychiatry, language, literature, and intellectual history. He made significant contributions not just to the fields themselves, but to the way these areas are studied, and is particularly known for his work on the development of twentieth-century attitudes toward knowledge, sexuality, illness, and madness.

Foucault's initial study of these subjects used an archaeological method, which involved sifting through seemingly unrelated scholarly minutia of a certain time period in order to reconstruct, analyze, and classify the age according to the types of knowledge that were possible during that time. This approach was used in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, for which Foucault received a medal from France's Center of Scientific Research in 1961, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, and The Archaeology of Knowledge.

Foucault also wrote Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison, a study of the ways that society's views of crime and punishment have developed, and The History of Sexuality, which was intended to be a six-volume series. Before he could begin the final two volumes, however, Foucault died of a neurological disorder in 1984.

(Bowker Author Biography)