Inside Higher Ed: The Afterlife of the Mind

On Michel Foucault's posthumous publications, including LANGUAGE, MADNESS, AND DESIRE.

Language, Madness, and Desire by Michel Foucault.“Don’t pull the Max Brod trick on me,” Michel Foucault is said to have admonished friends. The philosopher and historian did Kafka one better by including a blunt, categorical line in his will: “No posthumous publications.”

Be that as it may, in late spring the University of Minnesota Press issued Language, Madness, and Desire: On Literature, avolume of short texts by Foucault originally published in France two years ago and translated by Robert Bonnono. The same press and translator also turned the surviving pages of an autobiographical interview from 1968 into a little book with big margins called Speech Begins After Death. The title is kind of meta, since Foucault, like Kafka, seems to be having an unusually wordy afterlife.

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Published in: Inside Higher Ed
By: Scott McLemee