Michel Foucault: Literature and the Arts: A Report from the Colloquium at Cerisy-la-Salle, June 23-30, 2001

Michel Foucault was multiplied at Cerisy. However, this magisterial place is not the reason, since this effect stems more generally from the posthumous reception of his work. This has inevitably grown in nearly twenty years. Its volume and weight, henceforth vast and heavy, distance us from Foucault, and, perhaps more strangely, bring us closer to him. How does this come about?

Foucault is never exactly where we expect him. The power of his language undermines and compromises the constancy of his thought and his being by linking them to other thoughts, other beings. And despite numerous rapports with writers, painters, musicians, and philosophers, concretized in texts, interviews, demonstrations, etc., the virtual horizon of his encounters seems endless. Since his death, his oeuvre has continued to be unfolded by unpublished connections, sometimes untimely, which often are born and exist only at the moment of their expression. Thus Foucault becomes a sort of cross-roads constantly traversed by thinkers and artists, a perpetually moving nerve center that opens aesthetic and intellectual experiences into countless interpretations. This is what was experienced at Cerisy in June 2001.