ABSTRACT
The introduction to The Birth of the Clinic has even become a classic of literary theory: it is there that Michel Foucault distinguishes his methodology from “commentary” which was one of the mainstays of French criticism. The groundlessness of Being in the world can only be conceived of as itself linguistic: the “strange existence” of signs provides a sense of the strangeness of existence rather than vice versa. It follows that to analyze this strangeness or “madness” one must analyze linguistic structures, especially those of what Foucault calls “fiction.” In Roussel’s most widely translated and read works, the novels Impressions of Africa and Locus Solus, relations between the visible and the sayable intersect and entwine one another in movements Foucault calls “the labyrinth” and “metamorphosis.”.
