To write like a surgeon

Full title: Speech Begins after Death

Author: Michel Foucault, Philippe Artières

Genre: Non fiction, interview
Attributes: 96 pages, hardcover
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press (2013)
On the scale of Zero to One: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

In 1968, Michel Foucault participated in a series of private interviews with Claude Bonnefoy (also known for having conducted a series of interviews with Eugene Ionesco). There were ten conversations in total, all intended for publication. For some reason, though, the planned publication did not happen. What’s more, the interviews with Bonnefoy passed unnoticed for a very long time, so most of them were gradually lost. The script of the first of these interviews was discovered fairly lately. Although it appears to end abruptly, the script was interesting enough to make it into a volume on its own. This is how Speech Begins After Death came about, with a twenty-page introduction by Philippe Artières, who clarifies a few important things about Foucault’s relationship with interviews, lectures, rallies, and other forms of public speech.

A few topics form the flesh of this thin but dense volume, in which Foucault displayed himself as a relaxed, casual at times, uninhibited interviewee. What really stands out, though, is the theme of writing. This interview, which Artières defines as “Foucault putting himself in danger,” marks an interesting point in the career of the philosopher-speaker: his employment of “autobiographical speech.” Indeed, Foucault talks extensively about his childhood and the medical discourse in which he was raised, as the son of a surgeon. The memory of his upbringing offers him the opportunity to talk about his later development as a writer with the words and logic of a medic:

“The physician listens, but does so to cut through the speech of the other and reach the silent truth of the body. The physician doesn’t speak, he acts, that is, he feels, he intervenes. The surgeon discovers the lesion in the sleeping body, opens the body and sews it back up again, he operates; all this is done in silence, the absolute reduction of words. The only words he utters are those few words of diagnosis and therapy.”

Writing, to Foucault, is like clinical analysis, or like dissection.
Source: Dentistry and Medicine

One doesn't need to know much about Foucault to realize that right here, in this definition of the medical profession, lies the very essence of his career as a writer. He says it upfront: the silence of physicians, doubled by that of writers, generates a unified silence, from which writing rises like a necessity, like an “obligation,” and, at the same time, like a dissection.

“I've transformed the scalpel into a pen. I've gone from the efficacy of healing to the inefficacy of free speech; for the scar on the body I've substituted graffiti on paper; for the ineradicability of the scar I've substituted the perfectly eradicable and expungeable sign of writing. Maybe I should go further. For me the sheet of paper may be the body of the other.”

From beyond his texts, Foucault almost always requires to be quoted through long passages, like the ones above, because there is, behind his words, a desire and a lack: the desire to find out for himself what he might be able to say on a given topic, and the lack of a clear trajectory. Surprising as it may seem, the latter is not a shortcoming of his philosophy, but the actual principle that puts things in motion. Through this interview, as through his oeuvre, Foucault is attempting to satisfy the desire and overcome the lack; and he does so through a convincing theory of writing (convincing because so very personal). To him, as the interview makes apparent, writing is a tool used in the much more complex process of reflection.

“When I begin to write an essay or a book, or anything, I don’t really know where it’s going to lead or where it’ll end up or what I’m going to show. I only discover what I have to show in the actual movement of writing, as if writing specifically meant diagnosing what I had wanted to say at the very moment I began to write.”

Through this exploratory writing Foucault learned, made light, discerned the atmosphere of things. And this is the reason why he didn't consider himself a systemic philosopher, but rather a scalpel-wielding surgeon, a muted-yet-eloquent diagnoser; one who took every task as a new beginning, every word as a new operation.

A quotable collection of wonders

Full title: For the Time Being

Author: Annie Dillard

Genre: Non fiction
Attributes: 222 pages, hard cover
Publisher: Vintage Books (2010)
On the scale of Zero to One: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

With Annie Dillard one learns how to wonder. She sees things in a light that must have been the light of their very beginning, the light of metaphors; as when she contemplates the excavation site for the unearthing of Emperor Qin’s terracotta army:

“We can see a half-dug horse, whose lower jaw dips into the ground as if the planet were a feed bag.”

Beautiful. Quotable. Memorable.

A book of travels, that’s what For the Time Being is supposed to be. And it is that. It is that and much more. Travels through poetry and philosophy, at the end of which we realize there’s only one thing we've really seen: the human species. Us, as we appear on earth in the short span between birth and death; us, through the statistics we make, through the mystical ecstasies that elate us, our poetical aberrations, our philosophies, our biological deformities and cultural imperfections. Us, the most fragile and at, the same time, perhaps the most promising creatures on earth.

Almost every time she quotes numbers (from sources rarely mentioned; but who cares, really?), Dillard gives the impression of an accountant keeping the books of the universe. Her numbers are always astonishing. They read like arguments that leave no room for retaliation. They hurt while enlightening; or is it the other way round?

“In our galaxy, the Milky Way, there are four hundred billion suns – give or take 50 percent – or sixty-nine suns for each person alive.”

This “give or take 50 percent” is a stroke of genius. Four hundred billion or two hundred billion (or to put it differently, 200,000,000,000 or 400,000,000,000) are, to the mind of an inhabitant of a one-sun universe, the true test of imagination. A test at which, if I’m not wrong, we fail. Who can imagine such calamities? Who can count to such a length? Who can cope with so much?

Precisely the point.

We will also wonder how slowly but surely sand and debris cover us all.
Source: National Geographic

But the shock of numbers isn't everything the book delivers. One falls in love with the way things are described, as in the case of the horse image quoted above. Of course, there’s more where that description came from. Like, for instance, this one, where we stand in a maternity ward and watch babies receiving their first baths:

“This is where they wash the newborns like dishes. A nurse, one or another, spends most of her eight-hour shift standing here at the sink.
Different nurses bring newborns, one after another, and line them down the counter to the sink’s left. The newborns wear flannel blankets. Knit hats the size of teacups keep sliding up their wet heads. Their faces run the spectrum from lavender through purple and red to ping and beige.”

Then, once she’s made poetry of our coming-about, she moves smoothly, gently, irrevocably to the other part of us: our going-away. Here’s one quote about it, borrowed by Dillard from Juan Rulfo, the Mexican writer. It stands to highlight one technical aspect of the book: the use of crude, unrefined, often uninterpreted quotes. In the novel Pedro Páramo, Rulfo makes a dead woman speak to her dead son thus:

“Just think about pleasant things, because we’re going to be buried for a long time.”

And thus death leaks into the text like rain finding its way into a room through the eaves of a water-proof house. It finds its way into the Chinese terracotta army, into Hasidic literature, into the theological-paleontological writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, into the fragility of those babies washed like dishes, into the natural history of clouds, into stories about sand and dirt. Death infiltrates every aspect of the book the way birth infiltrates it as well. So much so that nothing is truly dead, but everything is fully alive.

The volume is an intricate system, where texts speak to each other, in a networked mesh of images, concepts, colours, and flavours. Reading through these networks brings readers the pleasure of seeing diagrams unfolding. Most importantly, though, it turns everything into a huge quotable thing. It makes fans of the readers. All of them, one hopes.