A Literatura na arqueologia do saber de Michel Foucault: Friedrich Hölderlin e a experiência trágica da loucura

Abstract

At the time of his archaeological investigations, the relationship between madness and literature assumed a significant role in the thought of Michel Foucault (1926–1984). In the Classical Era, madness ceased to be understood as a tragic experience, bearing knowledge inaccessible to reason, as it was in the Renaissance, and began to be understood, initially, from the concept of unreason, and, later, from the notion of mental illness. However, asylum confinement was not capable of depriving it of this original dimension, which resurfaced, at the beginning of the 19th century, in the work of Sade and Hölderlin, and, later, in Nietzsche and Artaud. In fact, the present research project aims to analyze the experience of madness in its tragic dimension specifically in the literary language of Hölderlin and will do so through the interpretation of Foucault’s articles about literature and Hölderlin’s Empedocles. We propose to do so given the recent interest in this archaeological phase, which is evident in recent publications dedicated to this “first” Foucault. Furthermore, considering that the reception of his thought has favored his courses taught at the Collège de France, our research seeks to highlight the importance of this first phase of the philosophy developed by Foucault, especially regarding the relationship between madness and literature, since we assume that such a connection has fundamental importance for the establishment of his archaeological analyses.