ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a notion of interpretation that Foucault attributes to Western Renaissance thought, the idea that the interpretation of the world is a matter of making things speak although people are the only ones who speak for things. It focuses on certain central issues in aesthetics, Foucault's account of artistic origin in particular. Like madness, like ventriloquism, literature for Foucault is also a domain of excluded language, self-referential, an illocutionary act where the self is doubled and connected to 'the void that expands within it'. The chapter presents that something like this idea resonates throughout Foucault's work. Most explicitly, however, in his The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault attempts to articulate a certain confluence of what people see and what they hear, of seeing, hearing and speaking. Foucault's panoramic genealogies include his selection of practices characterized by spoken discourse that he considers eccentric, excessive, peripheral, displaced or muted.
