ABSTRACT
It was Madness and Civilization that drew the attention of literary critics to Foucault’s work. At the end of an interview published in April 1964, Roland Barthes was able to point to “the spirit of ‘vertigo’” with which “Michel Foucault has begun to speak of the Reason/Unreason couple” as “ultimately the essential subject of all theoretical work on literature” (Barthes 1981, 33). Of course, the literary dimension of Foucault’s work was maintained even in the seemingly very non-literary field of his history of medicine. The introduction to The Birth of the Clinic has even become a classic of literary theory: it is there that Foucault distinguishes his methodology from “commentary” which (as “exegesis”) was one of the mainstays of French criticism. When, however, Foucault comes to deal with literature head-on, as he does between 1962 and 1964 especially, he works within a paradigm rather different from, though connected to, that of his early work. The central moment of this literary phase of his career appears in his book on Raymond Roussel, in French plainly entitled Raymond Roussel-but translated into English as Death and the Labyrinth.
